Debby Friday has shared a new remix of her GOOD LUCK track ‘HOT LOVE’, courtesy of the electronic music duo Boy Harsher. Listen to it below.
GOOD LUCK, Friday’s debut full-length, arrived last month via Sub Pop. The album’s accompanying short film, co-directed by Friday and Nathan De Paz Habib, premieres tomorrow, April 28.
Check out our Artist Spotlight interview with Debby Friday.
Most visuals vanish as quickly as they arrive. We’ve all seen ads that dazzle but don’t move us and short films that look stunning but feel hollow. For Viktor Skogqvist, that’s not enough.
“I want the images to feel lived-in,” he says. “Like you’re stepping into someone else’s memory.”
Raised in Falun, Sweden, Skogqvist began filming friends skating down streets with a borrowed VHS camera. That early instinct to capture the emotional undercurrent of movement and light has since evolved into a cinematographic voice that’s earned attention at Sundance, SXSW, and in campaigns for brands like Adidas and Elkjøp.
There’s a quiet discipline to how Skogqvist works. He listens more than he imposes. “It’s never about flashy visuals,” he explains. “It’s about atmosphere. What does the story need from the light? ”
On Urban Miner, a campaign for Elkjøp that mixed live action with 3D-animated Minecraft characters, Viktor had to walk the tightrope between technical integration and tonal authenticity. The result? A campaign that won the Grand Prix at Gullblyanten, Norway’s top advertising award, and still feels surprisingly human for something built on pixels.
“We had kids on set reacting to stand-in props, basically cardboard boxes, and still needing to sell that they were face-to-face with a Minecraft villager.”
“Even when dealing with CGI, the emotional tone has to be right. You want it to feel seamless, like both worlds belong in the same breath.”
The short film Flex might be Skogqvist’s most personal-feeling work to date. Directed by Babybaby (Josefin Malmén & David Strindberg), it follows a bodybuilder’s internal conflict, rendered in surreal visuals and shot with a gritty 16mm look.
The film’s layered visuals, floating mini bodybuilders, jagged lightning bolts, and warped mirrors echo the protagonist’s fractured self-image without ever overwhelming the emotional tone.
During one shoot, Viktor adjusted the lighting mid-take to catch the glint of uncertainty in the actor’s eye. “That shimmer,” he says, “it says more than dialogue ever could.”
Flex was selected for Sundance, SXSW, and the Atlanta Film Festival and later earned a Vimeo Staff Pick. But accolades aside, what makes it memorable is that balance of surrealism and truth, the lighting, rhythm, and composition echoing the character’s inner state.
Viktor didn’t go to film school. Instead, he learned by doing, first shooting for a Swedish snowboard magazine, then traveling the world with a 16mm camera, chasing storms and sunrises.
“It wasn’t glamorous,” he laughs. “Just a lot of cold toes and batteries dying in the snow. But it taught me to read light, to adapt. You learn quickly what matters in a frame.”
This DIY ethic still defines his approach. Whether on commercial sets or narrative shoots, he’s not the cinematographer who just shows up to light the scene. He’s involved from the first conversation to the final delivery, thinking about tone, narrative flow, and the emotional arc.
One standout moment was the Audio Pro anniversary commercial he shot with director Mats Udd. There were no product shots, almost no dialogue, just mood, memory, and texture.
“That one’s about sound, but it’s about silence. You had to feel the absence of noise.”
The gamble paid off: the piece won Sweden’s Guldägget Silver Egg and the Roy Awards’ Silver for Best Cinematography. But what Viktor remembers isn’t the trophies; it’s the restraint. “Sometimes the strongest image is the one that doesn’t shout.”
Skogqvist’s long-standing creative partnerships, especially with directors like Babybaby, reflect his belief in trust and evolution. “When you build something over time, you can take risks. You understand each other’s shorthand. You get braver.”
He hopes to DP a feature film in ten years. He imagines something restrained but powerful, a visual meditation on memory, time, or emotional silence, where the atmosphere speaks louder than the dialogue. But for now, he’s content chasing those small, perfect alignments, the quiet moments where everything just clicks in the frame.
“You know it when you feel it,” he says. “And hopefully, so does the audience.”
Lina Östberg is a Stockholm-based writer and film culture journalist with a background in visual arts and a soft spot for 16mm. Her work explores the intersection of emotion, image, and narrative in contemporary cinema. She’s written for Indie Scene, Nordic Frames, and The Light Lab.
Foyer Red have shared another single from their upcoming debut LP, Yarn the Hours Away. ‘Pocket’, which follows early cuts ‘Etc’, ‘Plumbers Unite!’, and ‘Gorgeous’, arrives with an accompanying video directed by Dewey Pileggi. Check it out below.
“This song was by all means a wild card for the album,” singer Elana Riordan explained in a statement. “We’d played around with pieces of the song for a while and would sometimes wordlessly revert to them during practices, but we had put the pieces aside until very organically finishing the instrumentation about a week before we went into the studio. I had no words for the song, just an idea about the main part’s melody and the vocals. As we were tracking our songs in the first few days of recording, I was glued to my notebook, thinking aloud with the rest of the band, and then later spilling out silly phrases about time travel, capitalism and our existence/evolution as a species.”
Yarn the Hours Away arrives May 19 via Carpark Records.
Amanda Shires has announced Loving You, a collaborative record with the late Bobbie Nelson. The album, out June 23 via Silver Knife/ATO, was at Arlyn Studios in Austin, Texas with producer Lawrence Rothman. To accompany the announcement, Shires has shared a cover of George and Ira Gershwin’s classic ‘Summertime’, featuring Nelson’s brother Willie. Check it out below.
“I first saw Bobbie playing when I was 16 or so at some festival somewhere in Texas where I grew up,” Shires said in a press release. “I saw her perform many times over the years and always admired the way she played so effortlessly and with so much strength and confidence. She radiated music. Much of my path seemed possible because I saw a woman working and making a career of music at a young age, and that woman was Bobbie Nelson.”
Loving You Cover Artwork:
Loving You Tracklist:
1. Waltz Across Texas
2. Always on My Mind
3. Old Fashioned Love
4. Summertime [feat. Willie Nelson]
5. Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground
6. Dream a Little Dream of Me
7. Tempted and Tried
8. La Paloma
9. Loving You
10. Over the Rainbow
The Australian four-piece Girl and Girl have announced their signing to Sub Pop with a new single called ‘All I See’. The track comes paired with a music video co-directed by Tayla Lauren and Joel Tronoff. Check it out below.
“Lyrics came last for ‘All I See,’ about 3 years after the track, and when I finally sat down and wrote them, I was pretty anxious about whether I had them right or not,” frontpersonKai James explained in a statement. “A new Mylie Cyrus track played on the radio that afternoon, she too, was singing about houses burning down, and I took that as confirmation. So I thanked Mylie Cyrus and her great new track ‘Flowers’ and never looked back.”
Horse Jumper of Love have announced a new mini-album called Heartbreak Rules. The collection features eight new songs, two reimagined tracks from the band’s third LP, last year’s Natural Part, and a cover of the Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘Luna’. Listen to the lead single and title track below.
“When you pour a drink from one cup to another sometimes you spill a bunch on the table and you have less in the new cup,” vocalist/guitarist Dimitri Giannopoulos said in a statement about ‘Heartbreak Rules’. “I was thinking about the heart being like that in transitional times of life. You lose something from your past self. I was feeling a little heartbroken for the past and missing how things used to be.”
Ahead of the release of their new album Euphoric Recall on Friday, Braids have dropped one more single, ‘Lucky Star’. It follows previous cuts ‘Retriever’, ‘Evolution’, and ‘Apple’. Check it out below.
Discussing the new track, the band’s Raphaelle Standell-Preston said in a statement:
‘Lucky Star’ came together in pieces over a long span of time,” said the band’s guitarist, singer and lyricist, Raphaelle Standell-Preston. “Its inception began on a very cold winter night after having taken some months off from writing… it’s not the easiest to write music during Montreal’s unforgiving winter. We sat down in our studio, with the space heater on high, and plugged the mic in and turned the speakers on. Taylor showed me a beautiful synth loop he had been working on, the lyrics and melody poured out of me quickly, it was one of those first take moments, as are most of the takes on Euphoric Recall. I put the mic down and asked Taylor to close the project, I didn’t want to listen back. We packed up, satisfied that we had put something down on the page and walked through the snow back to our homes. When spring came we opened up the project again. The winter blues had come and gone, and Montreal was feeling electric with having survived another winter. ‘Lucky Star’ started in the dark and ended in the light. It reminds me of all the different moments we move through as individuals. Nothing is ever linear.
Four Tet has released a new single called ‘Three Drums’. It marks his first new music since headlining the main stage at Coachella with Skrillex and Fred again.. Listen to the eight-minute track below.
Last year, Kieran Hebden shared the Four Tet tracks ‘Mango Feedback’ and ‘Watersynth’. He recently shared ‘Baby again’, a collaborative single with Skrillex and Fred again.., and remixed Everything But the Girl’s ‘Nothing Left to Lose’.
Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit have released ‘Cast Iron Skillet’, the latest single from their forthcoming LP Weathervanes. It follows previous offerings ‘Death Wish’ and ‘Middle of the Morning’. “If we romanticize the past, we can’t really learn from it,” Isbell said of the track. Check it out below.
Weathervanes is due for release on June 9 via Southeastern Records/Thirty Tigers.
“Just remember: Pleasure is a right!” Jessie Ware shouts on the title track of her new album, which could just as well have served as the tagline for 2020’s revelatory What’s Your Pleasure? The “just remember” is as important as the declaration itself: That! Feels Good! is an emphatic reminder to hold onto the ethos she embraced on that album, part of a wave of pop records firmly rooted in the euphoric possibilities of dance music – a happy coincidence when people most needed it. When the album begins with a chorus of voices breathily intoning its title (including fellow divas Kylie Minogue and Róisín Murphy, who recorded her bit from an airport toilet), it sounds both like an exhilarating introduction and a reaffirmation. Joined by frequent collaborator James Ford as well as producer Stuart Price, whose résumé includes work with everyone from Madonna to Dua Lipa, Ware manages to inhabit that same space without it coming off as a retread. If there’s remembering to be done, she ensures that – like pleasure, and yearning, and movement – it all happens through the body rather than just in the mind.
There’s another declaration on ‘That! Feels Good!’ that Ware, as a celebrated singer-songwriter, is perhaps even more intent on channeling: “Freedom is a sound.” It’s fair to say that What’s Your Pleasure? resurrected her career, but it felt more like she was liberating rather than reinventing herself by returning to her early sound. If there was an element of risk to it, Ware avoids making its follow-up sound too safe by simultaneously doubling down and loosening things up. Part of the freshness comes from the fact that this time, she was able to feed off the energy of a live audience reacting breathlessly to her new songs, which I got to witness during her marvelous set at Primavera Sound 2022. Her decision to explore disco was, in her own words, “purely selfish,” and on That! Feels Good! she not only steps deeper into the dancefloor but a little further outside of herself. “You can come with all your friends, bring everyone,” she beckons on ‘Beautiful People’. You get the sense the party could be taking place anywhere, yet the infectious urgency is all but lost.
The grooves are so absurdly, impeccably good that they seem to warrant a frivolousness Ware is more than happy to deliver. Songs like ‘Free Yourself’ and ‘Pearls’ are the kind of pop gems that would make the trashiest album shine, and it’s true that That! Feels Good! is frontloaded with some of its catchiest singles. But rather than dipping in quality, it almost allows her to get more flirty and ridiculous as the album progresses. The giddy sensuality of ‘Freak Me Now’ is irresistible, as is the cheekily instructive ‘Shake the Bottle’, and the two songs complement each other perfectly even as they draw from different musical reference points. The record closes with ‘These Lips’, whose sultriness is smooth and suggestive in a way that’s more reminiscent of What’s Your Pleasure? There’s enough proof here that if Ware decides to combine more styles rather than commit to a single lane, she could keep pulling it off with confidence.
For the same reasons, it feels like Ware is able to tap into a kind of emotionality that was a bit more measured on What’s Your Pleasure? While the new record gives off the impression the singer is joyously living through others as well as herself, those intertwined needs – to escape and connect – now have deeper grounding. ‘Hello Love’ is a sumptuous ballad that spins a classic pop trope – “What you doing round here, I didn’t expect to see you/ I got both hands up, it feels so good to see you” – into more of a metaphor about getting back in touch with a part of yourself that’s been hidden away for some time. That! Feels Good! surprises and stretches itself out like that. “I work all night/ I do my thing/ Just killing time/ Need a friend,” she sings on the immaculate ‘Begin Again’, her voice reaching higher for the big questions: “Is this my life?/ Beginning or end?/ Can I start again?/ Can we start again?” It sounds more and more like an invitation than an existential conundrum, and with all that new light pouring in, you’d be a fool not to give it a chance.
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