Cola – the project of former Ought members Tim Darcy and Ben Stidworthy and US Girls/The Weather Station drummer Evan Cartwright – have released a new single, ‘Keys Down If You Stay’. It marks the band’s first new music since their 2022 debut Deep in View. Check it out below.
“Evan woke from a dream one morning: the three of us jamming with the memory of this exact drum part still etched in his mind,” Darcy explained in a press release. “That was how this one started… ‘Keys Down If You Stay’ has already become a live staple for us so we were thrilled to finally lay it down earlier this year. Our friend OK Pederson created the brilliant video for the track, a piercing and funny take on Cost Of Living.”
Dua Lipa has joined the cast of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. She’ll be playing a mermaid version of the doll, as confirmed by character posters that have just been released. The cast for the movie also includes Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Issa Rae, Simu Liu, Emma Mackey, Michael Cera, Helen Mirren, Will Ferrell, Kate McKinnon, and more.
Back in 2021, Dua Lipa revealed she was set to make her acting debut in Matthew Vaughn’s spy thriller Argyle, which does not yet have a release date but is expected to come out this year. Last year, she joined Young Though on Calvin Harris’ song ‘Potion’.
Albert Hammond Jr. has announced a new album, Melodies on Hiatus, which arrives on June 23. Spanning 19 tracks, it follows the Strokes guitarist’s 2018 LP Francis Trouble. Lead single ‘100-99’, which features GoldLink, comes paired with a music video directed by Angela Ricciardi and Silken Weinberg. Check it out below.
“I grew up listening to 90s hip-hop, and I would always gravitate towards the melodic hooks in the songs I heard on the radio, specifically anything Dr. Dre was producing or rapping on,” Hammond Jr. said of the new track. “Years later, I noticed myself pulling from the style of those melodic lines in my guitar work, even though it wasn’t obvious to anyone else as I was so directly associated with being in a rock band. ‘100-99’ was something I’ve wanted to do for some time—work with a rapper over a beat and guitar part I wrote—and it’s really exciting that I was able to do it with GoldLink.”
In a joint statement about the video, Ricciardi and Weinberg shared: “When we first met with Albert, it was clear we were all on the same page: we wanted to have fun and we wanted to experiment with simple concepts that tell a deeper story. The album is 19 tracks, it’s sprawling but interconnected in a special kind of way, and we wanted to maintain that visually as well. The five videos we made for Melodies on Hiatus take place in a series of rooms all within one larger space, different scenes that string together one very long night. Throughout the entire process, Albert was so open and kind, he trusted us, and it cultivated a really pure, almost psychedelic environment.”
Melodies on Hiatus Cover Artwork:
Melodies on Hiatus Tracklist:
1. 100-99 [feat. GoldLink]
2. Downtown Fred
3. Old Man
4. Darlin’
5. Thoughtful Distress [feat. Matt Helders & Steve Stevens]
6. Libertude
7. Memo of Hate
8. Home Again
9. I Got You
10. Caught by Night
11. Dead Air
12. One Chance
13. Remember feat. Rainsford
14. 818
15. Fast Kitten
16. I’d Never Leave
17. Never Stop
18. False Alarm
19. Alright Tomorrow [feat. Rainsford]
Beach Fossils have shared a new track, ‘Dare Me’, lifted from their upcoming album Bunny. It arrives alongside an accompanying video directed by Kevin Clark, who also helmed the visual for the lead single ‘Don’t Fade Away’. Watch and listen below.
“‘Dare Me’ is a song about conflict, friendship and the intoxication of new love,” frontman Dustin Payseur explained in a statement. “Willing to let yourself be stupid, vulnerable, pissed off and forgiving.”
Trevor Powers has previewed his upcoming Youth Lagoon album, Heaven Is a Junkyard, with a new single called ‘Prizefighter’. Check it out via the accompanying video below.
Powers shared the following statement about the new song:
4 years ago, I started writing a song about brothers. I grew up with 3 of them, so our house was doomsday but with more sugar cereal. Our love was strong and so was our barbarity. It was real joy — the kind you didn’t have to look for cuz it smacked you in the face or pushed you off the bed into a file cabinet. Beyond that, we were homeschooled. 4 fuckin’ weirdos home all day who adored each other and hated each other and played baseball everyday in the backyard and threw rocks at each other’s heads and laughed ’till we threw up. Our bond is forever. That song I started those years ago meant too much to me to finish. I was scared of it. Scared of not making it great… so I tabled it.
A couple weeks before leaving to make the record, I went through some old voice memos while watching a VHS of ‘Drugstore Cowboy.’ I listened to that 30-second sketch called ‘Prizefighter.’ It was like an angel fell from the sky to tell me how to finish it. “Don’t make it great,” she said. “Make it true.” I finished the song in 2 days.
Heaven Is a Junkyard arrives June 9 via Fat Possum. Youth Lagoon announced the LP with the single ‘Idaho Alien’.
“‘Days Go By’ is the first song I wrote for this album, kind of,” Horn explained in a statement. “I began thrumming its two notes, repeating its refrain, ‘days go by / they don’t have time,’ the summer in Austin before I moved to Virginia. This song feels a bit like a bridge between two lives. It spans time, place. I’m glad it was slow to come (‘distance is a gift / not chosen’). And now that I’ve written ‘spans time,’ all I’m thinking of is Buffalo 66…”
Lucinda Williams has announced her next album, Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart. It’s due out June 30 (via Highway 20 Records/Thirty Tigers), and the first single, ‘New York Comeback’, features Patti Scialfa and Bruce Springsteen on backing vocals. Williams co-wrote the song with her husband, Tom Overby, and Jesse Malin. Listen to it and find the album cover and tracklist below.
Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart was produced by Williams, Overby, and Ray Kennedy, who also engineered the record. Angel Olsen, Margo Price, Jeremy Ivey, Jesse Malin, Buddy Miller, and Tommy Stinson also provided backing vocals.
On April 25, Williams will release her memoir Don’t Tell Anybody The Secrets I Told You. Her last album, Good Souls Better Angels, arrived in 2020. In November of that year, Williams suffered a stroke that partially impaired the left side of her body.
Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart Cover Artwork:
Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart Tracklist:
1. Let’s Get The Band Back Together
2. New York Comeback
3. Last Call For The Truth
4. Jukebox
5. Stolen Moments
6. Rock N Roll Heart
7. This Is Not My Town
8. Hum’s Liquor
9. Where The Song Will Find Me
10. Never Gonna Fade Away
Tomato Flower have released a new single called ‘Destroyer’. It follows the Baltimore quartet’s 2022 EPs Gold Arc and Construction. Check it out below, alongside an accompanying video directed by the band’s Austyn Wohlers.
“‘Destroyer’ came out all at once in a period of sleeplessness and turmoil and then was sharpened through collaboration,” singer/guitarist Jamison Murphy explained in a statement. “It’s about seeing shadow people, but there’s a reversal, and the speaker becomes possessed, becomes the destroyer.”
Shirley Collins has announced a new album, Archangel Hill, which is due for release on May 26 via Domino. The first single to be lifted from the record is ‘High and Away’, which features lyrics by collaborator Pip Barnes. Listen to it below.
Talking about the origins of the song, Barnes explained in a statement: “There is a passage in Shirley’s book ‘America Over The Water’ where she relays a conversation with the Arkansas singer Almeda Riddle in 1959. It begins: ‘She told of the tricks a tornado can play’ and goes on to give four or five examples. Whenever I heard Shirley read this, I would note that alliterative and rhythmic first line of the passage, and the vividness of the images of a tornado’s doings, and say to myself, ‘There’s a song here, it’s almost written itself.’ I wrote the words, but with no strong idea of a tune for it, other than that it seemed to suggest itself into ¾ time. Shirley obliged with a tune of her own devising, and Ian with its arrangement.”
Collins’ last album, Heart’s Ease, came out in 2020.
Archangel Hill Cover Artwork:
Archangel Hill Tracklist:
1. Fare Thee Well My Dearest Dear
2. Lost In A Wood
3. The Captain With The Whiskers
4. June Apple
5. The Golden Glove
6. High And Away
7. Oakham Poachers
8. Hares On The Mountain
9. Hand And Heart
10. The Bonny Labouring Boy
11. Swaggering Boney
12. How Far Is It To Bethlehem?
13. Archangel Hill
This Is the Kit have announced a new album titled Careful of Your Keepers. Produced by Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals, the follow-up to 2020’s Off Off On will arrive June 9 via Rough Trade. On the lead single ‘Inside Outside’, out today, singer-songwriter Kate Stables is joined by her band of Rozi Plain (on bass and vocals), guitarist Neil Smith, and drummer Jamie Whitby-Coles, with a horn quartet arrangement by Jesse Vernon. Check out its Hannah Owen-directed video below, and scroll down for the album cover and tracklist.
Discussing the song’s lyrics, Stables reflected in a press release:
What makes things happen? How much choice do we have? Electricity and chemistry that is out of our control? Chewing. Choosing. Internal forces or external ones? Do we just behave the way people expect us to behave?
Or do they pre-empt what’s happening? Before it’s happened? Because they can see it in us before we know it ourselves? Big change that has been brewing for longer than we realise. Were we just ignoring it? Was it so deeply buried? Or did we see it all along but chose to ignore it? How much does anything change? Or is it just the way we see it that changes?
Of the new LP, she added: “The album was nearly called Goodbye Bite. And in a way it still is. I went for Careful of Your Keepers in the end. It’s one of my favourite songs on the album, a song that for me holds the general feeling of the album as a whole. The fragility of things. Of situations. Of relationships. Of humans. What we do to look after each other and ourselves. The passing of time and what that does to us, and how we live our lives going forward.”
Careful of Your Keepers Cover Artwork:
Careful of Your Keepers Tracklist:
1. Goodbye Bite
2. Inside Outside
3. Take You To Sleep
4. More Change
5. This is When The Sky Gets Big
6. Scabby Head and Legs
7. Careful of Your Keepers
8. Doomed Or More Doomed
9. Stuck in a Room
10. Dibs
