Martha Skye Murphy has returned with new single called ‘Dogs’. Max Goulding mixed and engineered the track, which was self-produced. It comes paired with three music videos by Billy Howard Price, “to imitate Cerberus, the three-headed dog,” per a press release; two of them are available to watch exclusively via Muprhy’s website. Check out the new single below.
Last year, Martha Skye Murphy issued a new collaborative EP with Maxwell Sterling titled Distance on Ground. In 2021, she released the triptych Concrete.
“The song is about that feeling of being deep in the water when you feel the world cannot touch you anymore,” Chris said pf ‘A day in the water’ in a statement. “It’s behind the glass of your own melancholia but in that deep dive of vulnerability hopefully the light arrives. The light of honesty.”
Julie Byrne has released another song from her forthcoming album, The Greater Wings. ‘Moonless’, which follows previous offerings ‘Summer Glass’ and the title track, is the first song Byrne has ever written and performed on piano. Listen to it below.
“I remember walking through the dune systems on the ocean side of Culatra, the noises of the docks, the scent of tidal flats,” Byrne noted in a statement about ‘Moonless’. “The land itself, as a coastal formation, in a constant state of movement between erosion and growth.”
She added, “Something I love about being a songwriter, especially as a queer woman, is being able to have the last word in my work, becoming myself line by line. This is a breakup song, and it’s the first song I wrote on piano.”
The Greater Wings is due for release on July 7 via Ghostly.
Drab Majesty have announced a new EP, An Object in Motion, which drops on August 25 via Dais Records. To accompany the announcement, they’ve shared the new single ‘Vanity’, which features guest vocals from Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell. Check it out below.
“As a long time listener and devotee of Slowdive, a band that literally shaped my DNA as a listener and musician, it was truly humbling to have Rachel offer her iconic vocal stylings to this song,” the band’s Deb Demure said in a statement. “Her voice is a sonic treasure and unmistakable. I’m infinitely grateful to call her a friend and am still pinching myself wondering – how did we get here?”
Goswell added: “It’s no secret that I am a long time Drab Majesty fan so when Deb asked me some years ago now if I would be interested in collaborating it was an immediate yes. Honoured to give my voice to Vanity.”
An Object in Motion Cover Artwork:
An Object in Motion Tracklist:
1. Vanity [feat. Rachel Goswell]
2. Cape Perpetua
3. The Skin and the Glove
4. Yield to Force
King Krule has unveiled a new single, ‘Flimsier’, which opens his upcoming album Space Heavy. Archy Marshall debuted the track during his performance at Primavera Sound before it was circulated via exclusive flexi-discs sold at King Krule’s SHHH Tour earlier this year. Check out the studio version below, along with a visualizer created by Archy’s brother Jack Marshall.
Space Heavy, the follow-up to 2020’s Man Alive!, arrives on June 9. It includes the previously shared singles ‘Seaforth’ and ‘If Only It Was Warmth’.
Neon Indian’s Alan Palomo has announced his debut solo album under his given name. It’s called World of Hassle, and it’s due out September 15 via Mom+Pop. After giving us an early preview with the Mac DeMarco collaboration ‘Nudista Mundial ’89’, Palomo has unveiled a new single, ‘Stay-at-Home DJ’. It comes paired with a visual from the album’s art director, Robert Beatty. Check it out below.
“This is the song that started the whole conversation,” Palomo said of the new track in a statement. “My brother and I wrote it back in 2019 and performed it on the last Neon Indian tour. It signaled a change in direction I’d been looking for but had yet to really know what to do with. When things slowed down during the pandemic I dusted it off and from its uncontrollable outgrowth came World of Hassle.”
World of Hassle was originally conceived as a new Neon Indian album before Palomo decided to drop a political album concept, followed by the Neon Indian name, during quarantine. “The album evokes the 80s golden age of rock stars like Bryan Ferry and Sting leaving their own breakthrough projects to strike out as jazzy solo musicians,” according to press materials. “It’s parody, sure – of rock star ego trips, the mall-ification of America, and our own self-obsession, even on the brink of apocalypse – but it’s also dead serious, the sound of history repeating itself as the Doomsday Clock clicks past its Reagan-era maximum and nuclear anxiety comes back into style along with digital synthesizers and sax solos.”
The most recent Neon Indian album, Vega Intl. Night School, came out in 2015.
World of Hassle Cover Artwork:
World of Hassle Tracklist:
1. The Wailing Mall
2. Meutrière [feat. Flore Benguigui]
3. La Madrileña
4. Nudista Mundial ’89 [feat. Mac DeMarco]
5. The Return of Mickey Milan
6. Stay-at-Home DJ
7. Club People
8. Alibi for Petra
9. Nobody’s Woman
10. Is There Nightlife After Death?
11. Big Night of Heartache
12. The Island Years
13. Trouble in Mind
Happy Mondays members Shaun Ryder and Bez, Andy Bell of Ride, and drummer Zak Starkey (The Who, Oasis), have formed the new supergroup Mantra of the Cosmos. Their debut single, ‘Gorilla Guerilla’, arrives today alongside a music video directed by Shaun Ryder’s son Olli Ryder. Check it out below.
“It’s a pleasure to be part of Mantra of the Cosmos,” Bell said in a statement. “Four like-minded souls who get off on the same music.” Ryder added, “It’s a fucking blast, mate.”
After making their live debut over the weekend with a surprise show at London’s The Box, Mantra of the Cosmos are set to perform at Glastonbury later in the month.
L’Rain has returned with ‘New Year’s UnResolution’, her first new music since 2021’s Fatigue. The single was produced alongside Taja Cheek’s longtime collaborators Andrew Lappin and Ben Chapoteau-Katz. Listen to it below.
“The words of this song were written at different periods of time to give a sense of what it’s like to think through the trajectory of a relationship at different points of my life–right after a break up, and many moons later,” Cheek reflected in a statement. “I wonder: what is it like to feel like you’ve forgotten a part of yourself?; how does time pass differently at different moments in your life? (like molasses, like water, like air); how do you set new terms of engagement with someone you’ve interacted with in a very specific way for a long time?; how do you deal with the turmoil of stepping into a distant unknown after a period of fierce intimacy?”
Raboys have announced their next album, The Window. The follow-up to 2020’s Printer’s Devil arrives August 25 via Topshelf Records. Produced by Chris Walla at Hall of Justice Recording Studio in Seattle, the record includes the early single, ‘Black Earth, WI’, one of our songs of the week. New track ‘It’s Alive!’ captures “the overarching feeling of the world spinning on beneath you while you’re stuck in one place,” according to vocalist/guitarist Julia Steiner, and it comes with a John TerEick-directed video. Check it out below, and scroll down for the album artwork and tracklist.
The Window marks the first LP Ratboys have written collaboratively from start to finish, with bassist Sean Neumann and drummer Marcus Nuccio having joined the group as full-time members. “We spent 2020 demoing the songs, and spent 2021 practicing them,” Steiner said in a statement. “We practiced twice a week for six months, exploring the songs and developing them. Weʼd send early versions to Chris and heʼd give us notes. It went like that for weeks. It was such a dedicated and intentional process.”
Guitarist Dave Sagan added: “The language Chris uses when speaking about music comes from a very emotionally centered place, and thatʼs something that resonated with us. He would say things like, ʻThis cymbal hurts my feelings,ʼ or ʻThis song is like a cat.”
“It was such a disarming thing,” Neumann shared. “We didn’t get bogged down in technical terms, and he never placed pressure on us in that way. With Chris steering the ship, we were free to go off on little creative expeditions and come up with parts and ideas weʼd never imagined.”
The Window Cover Artwork:
The Window Tracklist:
1. Making Noise for the Ones You Love
2. Morning Zoo
3. Crossed that Line
4. It’s Alive!
5. No Way
6. The Window
7. Empty
8. Break
9. Black Earth, WI
10. I Want You (Fall 2010)
11. Bad Reaction
Astrud Gilberto, the Brazilian singer who helped popularize bossa nova around the world with her recording of ‘The Girl From Ipanema’, has died. The artist’s granddaughter, Sofia Gilberto, revealed the news on Instagram, writing, “I’m here to bring you the sad news that my grandmother became a star today, and is next to my grandfather João Gilberto. She was a pioneer and the best.” No cause of death has been reported. Gilberto was 83.
Gilberto was born Astrud Evangelina Weinert in the state of Bahia, the daughter of a German father and a Brazilian mother. She moved to Rio de Janeiro at an early age, and she married Brazilian guitarist João Gilberto in 1959, when she was 19. Although she grew up immersed in music, she had no professional musical experience until 1963, when she visited New York with her husband to record the album Getz/Gilbert with the American jazz saxophone player Stan Getz. Producer Creed Taylor wanted to record a few English vocals to maximize crossover potential, and Gilberto, whose father was a language professor, was fluent in several languages, including English. She delivered a hesitant, ethereal second verse in English, and when the song was re-edited without João’s Portuguese vocals in 1964, the single became an international hit, reaching the US Top 5 and winning the Grammy for Song of the Year.
In 1965, Gilberto released her debut record, The Astrud Gilberto Album, a collection of Brazillian standards recorded with jazz guitarist Antonio Carlos Jobim. Astrud and João divorced in the mid-1960s, and Gilberto moved to the United States. She went on to tour with Stan Getz and started to record her own compositions in the ’70s, laying down tracks in Portuguese, English, Spanish, Italian, French, German, and Japanese. Gilberto recorded 16 studio albums and two live LPs over the course of her career before retiring in 2002. She spent most of her later years advocating for animal rights.
“At the age of 22, she gave voice to the English version of Girl from Ipanema and gained international fame,” Sofia Gilberto continued. “The song, a bossa nova anthem, became the second most played in the world mainly because of her. I love and will love Astrud forever and she was the face and voice of bossa nova in most parts of the planet. Astrud will forever be in our hearts, and right now we have to celebrate Astrud.”
Paul Ricci, a New York-based guitarist who collaborated with Gilberto, also paid tribute on social media. “I just got word from [Gilberto’s] son Marcelo that we have lost Astrud Gilberto,” he wrote. “He asked for this to be posted. She was an important part of ALL that is Brazilian music in the world and she changed many lives with her energy. RIP from ‘the chief’, as she called me. Thanks AG.”
