Archives: September 2019

“You unbuttoned your shirt, and I looked at your heart,” Brigitte Naggar intones at the start of her new Common Holly song, followed by a stunning silence that feels much longer than three seconds. When the music finally resumes, she continues: “Then you showed me your lungs, yeah you pulled them apart.” It’s a captivating introduction, and the mesmerizing quality extends throughout the song’s two minute runtime. “Measured” is a great title for this one.

This is the third advance single from When I say to you Black Lightning, Common Holly’s second album and first for Barsuk. (That’s her US label home; the album is actually coming out on five different labels across the Earth’s various regions. It’s a whole ordeal.) Previously Naggar shared “Central Booking” and “Joshua Snakes.”

READ MORE + Check out all her upcoming tour dates via Stereogum!

Using their music to narrate shared experiences and chronicle important social narratives, Avant Garden-signed Chiiild continue to curate introspective, unconventional R&B melodies on their sophomore release “Back To Life”. Collaborating with Zimbabwean artist, poet and activist Shungudzo, their vocals melt together effortlessly across a dreamy soundboard of soft, soulful rhythms and scattered drum beats.

“Chiiild and I wrote ’Back To Life’ on the day we met,” she explains. “We really bonded over being African artists who want to use music to tell stories about diversity, ask questions about humanity, and unify people over shared personal experiences. All of these themes are embedded in the lyrics of our song, and Chiiild’s music really compliments it, being so uniquely genre-bending yet still somehow reminiscent of something you’ve heard, or felt, before.”

The new track from the Emotional Oranges tour-mates follows up this summer’s “Count Me Out”. The celestial string instrumentation is euphoric, soaring over the track like a restorative power as the artists defy the natural order with their creative collaborations. After all, as Shungudzo adds, the track is a fantasy that “life is just practice and somehow in the future, we can get a second shot at this”. –> Read More Via The Line Of Best Fit!

Metronomy have announced details of a brand new studio album, ‘Metronomy Forever’, and a new video and tour to go along with it. The band’s sixth record, Metronomy Forever, is out NOW via Because Music. The band is here in NYC at the end of the month at Rough Trade for a show, and then touring Extensively in Europe in Nov!

“When you’re making music and you enter a world where you have achieved some sort of celebrity no matter how large or small you start to think about yourself in terms of legacy and what you’re going to leave behind,” says Joe Mount.

DIY caught up with the frontman earlier in 2019, to talk about the surprise breakthrough and enduring influence of their 2008 record ‘Nights Out’. – READ MORE VIA DIY MAG

G & D’s new album Black Love and War is out now, and getting a TON of critical love! Check out the review of their new album on Pitchfork HERE, and via the New York Times Playlist where they feature the song “Peace Peace” below.

“Welcome to the world, son/Now run,” Dudley Perkins announces over a wobbly, clicketyclack beat produced by Georgia Anne Muldrow, the other half of G&D (and his life partner). “Police got a gun/A fight night after night, day after day.” It’s bleak at the outset, but by the end of the track a sense of hope and vision has prevailed, thanks to the wry realness of Perkins’s rapping and the sun-sprinkled buoyancy of Muldrow’s voice. “Peace Peace” comes from “Black Love & War,” G&D’s just-released second album. – Read More Via New York Times

The duo of Hana Elion and JJ Mitchell, known as Overcoats, has music pointing to a newish direction. Their new single is called “The Fool” and it’s rougher around the edges. To celebrate their new-found bestpainrelievers, they shave each other’s heads in this fun new video. – VIA NPR MUSIC

Four times a year, we round up a list of albums that the Pitchfork staff is looking forward to in the upcoming season. These 30 releases, by everyone from Angel Olsen to Octo Octa to FKA twigs, are either officially scheduled to come out between this Friday, September 6 and the end of October, or are likely to arrive at some point over the course of the next three months. (Please note that release dates may change.) Here are 30 albums—listed in chronological order—worth waiting for this fall. – Read More Via Pitchfork