Abbie

“Happiness fucks you. Happiness is up, sadness is down, but one’s almost more destructive than the other. When you realize you can’t have one without the other, it’s possible to spend periods of happiness just waiting for that other wave.” ~ Mitski Miyawaki on the spirit of this album

Pale Saints began as a jangly indie pop band in 1987, influenced by Primal Scream's early sound. By the time they released their first EP, Barging Into the Presence of God (1989), the band went into a direction that displayed a mix of Ian Masters' choirboy-like vocals along with dark atmospheric and noisy pop tunes. Ashley Horner from Edsel Auctioneer briefly joined the band on guitar in the same year.The band was signed to 4AD Records after their first London show, by the label's chief Ivo Watts-Russell. Their first album, The Comforts of Madness, was produced by John Fryer and Gil Norton.and released in 1990, and reached the top 40 of the UK Albums Chart. bit.ly

Jim Reid on participating in the Lollapalooza tour of ’92, and why it was the worst time of his life: "It was pretty intense. We did do a lot of drugs and drank a lot. I got a drinking problem and I know William has. I haven’t had a drink in nine months. Lollapalooza was a ten-week tour and in the first few days, we realized it wasn’t for us. We realized we weren’t really going to have a good time. We tried to get off the tour. We asked if we could just leave the tour. They were basically saying we couldn’t or they’d sue us. We were stuck with it. The only way we could get through it was to get absolutely fucked up. We were on at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, which was partly the problem. We are kind of a nighttime band. It was really bad for your health, too, because I’d get incredibly drunk for the show and afterwards I’d collapse in my bunk then wake up at 8 in the evening and get drunk all over again. There was a drug aspect to it, as well. It got pretty mental on that tour."

Ellie Rowsell comments: “‘Bros’ is a sentimental tune to us, it’s grown and changed with us over the past couple of years, taking on different shapes and forms until it evolved into being this definitive album version. It’s an ode to childhood imagination and friendship and all the charm that comes with that. The live response to the song has been truly humbling.” www.nme.com/news/music/wolf-alice-40-1215056

Playing Barboza on September 28th! Experimenting with different techniques, Harriet Pilbeam, aka Hatchie, comments on the gradual expansions she’s taken and branching out to various sub-genres while still maintaining a steadfast sweet and poetic sound. “I feel like I’ve filled in a few more gaps between different types of songs I wanted to do,” as she carefully balances her initial strengths as a pop songstress on Keepsake, being aware to not alienate her original visions and audience. Defining her own trajectory, Hatchie maintains 100% of the say in the packaging of her records and merchandise. Initially with Keepsake, she played around with ideas involving actual keepsakes and memorabilia around her house and objects closest to her, but instead went with a happenstance choice of a promotional photo, distorting and affecting her physical features, that wasn’t planned for the album cover. “I really love the color scheme, I knew that I wanted [the album cover] to be green or blue." bit.ly

Enjoy the adorable video for this track here! www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKT-jmxALIQ

The abrasive post-punk trio comprised of LA DIY veterans, Sean Solomon, Pascal Stevenson, and Andrew MacKelvie, began nearly a decade after the three started playing music together. Solomon, Stevenson, and MacKelvie initially met as teenagers while growing up in the San Fernando Valley, and immediately developed a kinship through Los Angeles’s local music scene. The three began regularly frequenting DIY institutions like The Smell and Pehrspace, eventually selling out dozens of their own shows at both venues with their first few bands. Moaning’s conception came when Solomon sent Stevenson and MacKelvie the first demo for “Don’t Go,” setting the tone for the impulsive songwriting that would follow. The three fleshed out Solomon’s primitive recordings, adding in MacKelvie’s heavy syncopated drumming, and Stevenson’s melodic driving bass and synth parts, capturing each member’s personality in their sparse and fuzzed out tracks. moaning.bandcamp.com

Written by Debbie Harry and Nigel Harrison for the band's third studio album, Parallel Lines (1978), the song was inspired by one of Harry's ex-boyfriends who stalked her after their breakup. Harry explained: "I was actually stalked by a nutjob so it came out of a not-so-friendly personal event. But I tried to inject a little bit of levity into it to make it more lighthearted. I think in a way that's a normal kind of survival mechanism. You know, just shake it off, say one way or another, and get on with your life. Everyone can relate to that and I think that's the beauty of it." bit.ly

Of this album, Bleached's Jennifer Clavin reveals, “Writing these songs while sober became somewhat of a spiritual experience. I had to let go, trust in the process, and allow an energy beyond my control to be present.”

Girl Friday play Chop Suey on Thursday, Aug 1st in support of The Beths.

The L.A-based quartet, founded by bassist Libby Hsieh and guitarist Vera Ellen after they met at a UCLA house party a couple of years back, operates collectively, each member taking turns at the microphone and equal parts in songwriting; they’re all big personalities and big presences, but they find balance—and complement—in one another. There had been iterations of the band before, but none had truly clicked until drummer Virginia Pettis and guitarist Sierra Scott joined. This is the iteration of the band found on Girl Friday’s new EP, Fashion Conman; in four nimble tracks, these young women are able to fuse mod-pop a la the early Bangles with ‘90s alt-rock (“we all love Hole,” they say with enthusiasm), the urgency and tension of minimalist ‘70s post-punk, and contemporary observations, without sounding like pastiche. bit.ly

Fergus & Geronimo are an experimental rock band from Denton, Texas. The duo has a multi-genre approach to songwriting, with influences including soul, pop, proto-punk, garage rock and psychedelic pop. The band started in late 2008 when Jason Kelly and Andrew Savage were working on the Teenage Cool Kids album Foreign Lands, which Kelly was recording/mixing. The initial idea was to draw from such influences as Mothers of Invention and The Four Tops. Praise for recordings leaked on the internet helped garner attention early in the band's career. On recording, Savage and Kelly are the main performers, but are joined live by a rotating personnel of musicians. bit.ly

The Vancouver four-piece write feverish tunes at a frantic pace, delivering their post-punk songs in two-minute blasts of wiry riffs and indignant social critiques. Less than a year since they signed to Mint Records for 2018’s Seeing Green, they’re already back with a new full-length, as Club Nites was released on June 7.

The Flying Lizards were an experimental English new wave band, formed in 1976. They are best known for their deliberately eccentric cover version of Barrett Strong's "Money" featuring Deborah Evans-Stickland on lead vocals, which reached the UK and US record charts in 1979. The group disbanded in 1984. Formed and led by record producer David Cunningham, the group was a loose collective of avant-garde and free improvising musicians, such as David Toop and Steve Beresford as instrumentalists, with Deborah Evans-Stickland, Patti Palladin and Vivien Goldman as main vocalists. bit.ly

BB's Jared Tankel on this track: "'Old Engine Oil' is, to me, it's kind of a clear favorite and winner from the album. We put it first, so that says something and we're leading off our sets with it now. I think it just kind of sets the mood right for us. It's got the guitar-driven thrust to it. But it's a little bit different than some of 'Burnt Offerings' guitar licks. It's a little dirtier almost. But the horns are just super anthemic and strong, which I think is like reminiscent of [The Budos Band II] or even The Budos Band I." bit.ly

Alabama Shakes frontwoman Brittany Howard will issue her debut solo album, Jaime, via ATO Records on September 20. Howard unveiled the LP’s lead single, “History Repeats” and confirmed a fall tour of North America in support of the record. Brittany gave Jaime the same name of her sister, who passed away when both were teenagers. “The title is in memoriam, and she definitely did shape me as a human being,” said Brittany Howard. “But, the record is not about her. It’s about me. I’m pretty candid about myself and who I am and what I believe. Which is why I needed to do it on my own.” bit.ly

"Jungle Love" was initially written by Jesse Johnson, with later contributions by Morris Day. Prince, under the pseudonym Jamie Starr, wrote the lyrics and came up with the melody. It was co-produced by Morris Day and Prince using the name The Starr Company. Jesse Johnson demoed the song, likely in 1982 on a Tascam 8-track recorder in his Cedar Square West Apartment, playing guitar, bass guitar and keyboard (Oberheim OB-SX), over a Roland 808 Drum Machine beat. He presented it to Prince who then took it to flesh it out with Johnson and Morris Day. Jesse Johnson was initially included in the credits when submitted for copyright in May 1984, but after he left the band, his name was removed from the credits upon release. bit.ly

You may know Brittney Rand as half of the Vancouver duo Mu, along with Francesca Belcourt. We haven’t heard much from Mu lately, but the act made a splash a couple of years ago with its gauzy electro-dream sound... “songs of cotton-candy-cloud ethereality, with heaven-sent vocal harmonies and pillowy synths." The music Rand is making now as Cherrie Laurel, as heard on her new six-song EP A Furnace, a Fire, isn’t exactly worlds away from that aesthetic. It is, if anything, a more refined version of Mu’s ethereal synth music. It’s more immediate-sounding, darker, and more brooding. bit.ly

Josh Carter on the origins of this song: "We were digging around through some samples, and [producer] Ricky Reed had this old gospel record, so we chopped up the sample and wrote around it. I was going through my notebooks, and I had this one line, 'And this is nothing new. It’s just the same old blues.' Some kind of depressing drivel, and we turned it into a song."

“I wrote ‘Soulmate’ when I was in the studio and I was so depressed. I needed to write a song about who I wanted be so a year later when I’m rehearsing for Coachella I could say those words knowing, ‘That was the old me.’... These songs are for my big Black girls. Everyone can enjoy them, but I want to help us. This music is medicine and I’m trying to get it to my sisters. It’s so exciting to me to finally be at a level where I have exposure to my Black sisters, my big sisters, my Black trans sisters. It’s not about being poppin’. It’s not about being famous or fashion. It’s about being better and making sure that this world can hear us and respect us.” bit.ly

De Marco's childhood and family inform her genre-defying sound and politics. She was born in the Dominican Republic and spent her early years traveling in remote parts of the Amazonian rainforest and Dominican countryside, cataloguing indigenous sounds and rhythms with her parents, both renowned musicologists and musicians. As part of the resistance against the brutal dictatorship of Joaquín Balaguer, her parents performed a protest song in front of a large public gathering and had to immediately flee the country and were forced into exile where they relocated to Montreal until it was safe to return home. As an outspoken advocate of women's rights and human equality, Jarina's music is a unique blend of global consciousness and global rhythms. She simultaneously supports the message of resistance, while creating a colorful sound entirely her own. bit.ly

Bomba Estéreo was born in Bogotá, Colombia in 2005 as a pilot project led by the musician and audio-visual artist Simon Mejia with singer Li Saumet. Particularly noteworthy is the band’s embrace of champeta, a polyrhythmic style of dance music native to the descendants of African slaves on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. While the light-skinned Spanish-descended elites of Bogotá and Medellín have historically looked down on Afro-Colombian music, Bomba Estéreo has helped spark a renaissance of interest in the genre. Lest the band be accused of hipster fetishization, it incorporates the genre’s inheritors, too. Guitarist Julián Salazar now has a side project called Mitú, with Franklin Tejedor, a drummer from San Basilio de Palenque, a small town known as the cradle of Colombia’s Afro-Caribbean culture. The village was the first maroon (runaway slave) community in the Americas to be recognized by a colonial power. bit.ly

"I grew up loving the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender, and the music from that series actually inspired me to write music. There was a very minor character, who was this sort of musician, and his name was Chong. He was nomadic; a hippy. I used Chong the Nomad as a form name for a while, and then I just rolled with it. I kinda like how gender-neutral it is." bit.ly

"If I can be anything, it’s that person that someone can look at and be like, ‘I feel you’. How I feel about being queer and brown, is probably how a lot of the world is feeling. The world is feeling that. There’s so many people out there that are just like me and biracial, and queer. What I can do is provide that understanding, that connection, and that’s not what I’m striving to do, but it’s definitely something I’m trying to be a part of. That’s something I’m thinking about a lot lately, and figuring out how to explain that. Articulation is easiest when I’m writing. So, I’m really trying to articulate things that mean the most and one of the most important things to me is being queer and brown." bit.ly

Playing the Moore on December 11th, opening for Angel Olsen.

Of this song, Vagabon shares, "'Flood Hands' is a track I originally produced and arranged for a well-known pop-duo to have on their album. Knowing I was writing this song for musicians I admire, allowed me this relief from my writer’s block. I used this assignment as a chance to flex my production muscles and write something I wouldn't have written as a 'Vagabon' song a couple years ago. The result felt like a triumph for me in my progression as an artist and I just couldn't stand to part with the song by the time I was finished." bit.ly

The music video to accompany "Tessellate" was first released on YouTube on July 9, 2012; it was directed by Ben Newbury and is an artistic reworking of the famous painting The School of Athens by Raphael, using 21st century characters in a room similar to the painting's background (Panthéon, in Paris). To reinforce the connection, one of the characters at the very beginning of the clip is wearing a printed T-shirt of the painting. https://bit.ly/2JvD1d1 | www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg6BwvDcANg

The original members of the group were vocalist Esther Lybeert, keyboardist Frank Duchêne, bassist Alex Callier, and guitarist Raymond Geerts. Lybeert recorded several demos with the group; however, she backed out of the band on the day they were to sign their contract with Sony Music. The band then brought in Liesje Sadonius to record the album. Sadonius left Hooverphonic on amicable terms shortly after the release of A New Stereophonic Sound Spectacular. Kyoko Baertsoen, singer for fellow Belgian trip hop band Lunascape, filled in for Sadonius for three months of a European tour in 1997 before Geike Arnaert was made the permanent singer later that year. The band achieved international recognition through the inclusion of the Stereophonic track "2Wicky" on the soundtrack to Bernardo Bertolucci's 1996 film Stealing Beauty. "2Wicky" also appeared on the soundtracks of I Know What You Did Last Summer and Heights. The track's main riff is sampled from Isaac Hayes' recording of the 1960s hit "Walk On By." bit.ly

For “(Downtown) Dancing,” the three-person group—with vocalist Claire Evans and now including former touring member Rob “Bobby Birdman” Kieswetter—used machine learning tools like Google Magenta’s Music VAE model and NSynth hardware synthesizer to write the lyrics, compose the melodies, and assist with the sound design. bit.ly

“For us, we decided that every single song that we were going to create with this process had to be interpolated from existing melodies from our back catalog,” Evans said in the talk. “We hoped that this would result in songs that had that indefinable YACHT feeling, which we don’t know how to quantify and I don’t think the model can, either.” Converting their entire 82-song catalog into short MIDI segments—files that function as a sort of digital sheet music, readable by synthesizers and computers—the trio started with Magenta’s MusicVAE model to generate new melodies based on patterns found in the input data. Evans and her YACHT bandmates sculpted the raw output into proper songs, aiming to flesh out and refine the neural network’s idiosyncratic output without masking its involvement entirely. bit.ly “It was about really trying to create a sort of structure around this process that would keep us from being overwhelmed, and would also allow us to enact our will and our taste on top of all that,” Evans tells me after the conference. “There’s a lot of tools that can help you generate fragmentary things like melodies or text, but we’re not quite at a point now with machine learning where it can help us make structured pop songs.” bit.ly

On the title of the album, James Murphy revealed, "The title is just the thing we said a lot while making the record, in various contexts. For example, when we got the keys to the mansion in L.A. and we walked in there, we were just standing around, like, 'Where are we going to put the gear?' Because it’s a huge, crazy mansion with no furniture in it. What else do you say but, 'Well, I guess this is happening'? It kept coming up—and also in a very positive tone, like, 'Oh no, this is happening.' You know, when you’re being insistent. It’s just a phrase we kept using in various tones, so I thought using it completely tonelessly on the cover was a way of putting together three words that looked good in blue. Titles are relatively arbitrary to me; they take on meanings that aren’t really my meanings. Sound Of Silver was just, like, I made the studio silver, and I wanted the record to sound 'more silver.' The first one, I didn’t even bother, because I couldn’t come up with a good title. [Laughs.] This one just seemed like that was the thing that was said most often while making the record." bit.ly

"How does brokenness walk? Or move through the world?" Carrie Brownstein muses in a press release for this album. "We're always mixing the personal and the political, but on this record, despite obviously thinking so much about politics, we were really thinking about the person — ourselves or versions of ourselves or iterations of depression or loneliness — in the middle of the chaos."

Karen O and Brian Chase first met as students at Oberlin College in Ohio in the late 1990s, where Chase was a jazz student at the conservatory. Karen then transferred to New York University, and while in New York met Zinner in a local bar, where they formed an "instant connection." During this time they also shared a loft with future members of the band Metric. The two formed an acoustic duo called Unitard but soon decided to "shake things up a bit" by forming a "trashy, punky, grimy" band modeled after the art student, avant-punk bands Karen O was exposed to at Oberlin.[7] After the drummer they initially recruited bowed out, Chase joined the line-up. The band wrote a slew of songs at their first rehearsal and soon wound up supporting The Strokes and The White Stripes, earning a significant buzz for their arty and garage punk scene. In late 2001, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs released their self-titled debut EP, which they recorded with Boss Hog's Jerry Teel, on their own Shifty label. bit.ly

It’s hard not to read the Drums' downbeat outlook as a response to Adam Kessler's departure from the band (during their first U.S. tour, no less), and Portamento's sound reflects that change as well. The band’s overt ‘50s and ‘60s pop worship is largely sublimated in favor of post-punk and synth pop, with the notable exception of “What You Were,” a jangly number with a sax solo that recalls both ‘50s rock and the post-punk and new wave acts that resurrected that sound the first time around. bit.ly

Playing Neumos on November 1st!

“This whole record is me diving into myself and peeling back the skin further and further, exposing myself in quite a big way. It can be quite sexual. It’s blunt, but not offensive. It’s mischievous. We all have this lightness and darkness in us.” Hackman lifted the album’s title from a documentary about four-year-olds interacting with dementia patients in senior homes. At one point, two little girls confer about their experience there, with one musing on how it’s great to make “any human friend,” whether old or young. “When she said that it really touched a nerve in me,” says the London-based musician. “It’s that childlike view where we really accept people, are comfortable with their differences.” bit.ly

Produced by Jennifer Decilveo, Fake Sugar was released on June 16, 2017, through Virgin Records. The album's first single, "Fire", was released in April 2017. Incorporating influences from a wide array of genres, the album is regarded as Ditto's "embracement of her Southern roots." bit.ly

From the band's third studio album. Lightning Dust is Amber Webber and Joshua Wells, both of whom recently left Black Mountain to focus on this, and other, projects. Spectre is their recently-released fourth studio album; you can read more about it here, and enjoy their newest single, "Devoted To": www.stereogum.com/2048572/lightning-dust-devoted-to/premiere/

Webber's sister, Ashley, also performs as Ashley Shadow.

This was the only full-length release from the band before they broke up. This track was featured on the show "The L Word," Season 2, Episode 2. The album design was done by Mohammad Salemy. bit.ly

This Vancouver-based band will be performing at the WISE Hall on July 9th!

Lead singer Bella shares, “The song is written and sung from the perspective of someone who is in a romantic relationship with an alcoholic who is abusive to their partner. The title of the track represents the feeling of emotionally drowning in the abuse and feeling like there is no way to 'breathe' and there is no hope of surviving, and encapsulates the process of doing so.” bit.ly

Known professionally as Sir Babygirl, Kelsie Hogue is a pop singer, songwriter, and performer. Born in Palo Alto, California, and raised in New Hampshire, she studied drama at Boston University before moving back to New Hampshire, where she played in the Boston hardcore scene and developed the "Sir Babygirl" persona on Instagram. Her musical influences include hardcore, pop punk, as well as early-2000s pop artists such as Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. Hogue is drawn to the excesses and humor of pop music, but as a non-binary and bisexual person, wants to make pop that speaks to the queer experience, stating, "I always wanted to blur the lines, and challenge people to see that women and marginalized genders in music can have a fucking sense of humor and be taken seriously." bit.ly

The success of their debut album Full Circle by UK band, HÆLOS came not only because of their ability to refashion the classic 1990s trip-hop sound of Massive Attack, Portishead, and Tricky for a contemporary audience, but also in their ability to dig deep into core, universal themes like love, faith, and loss. To continue that journey would probably have seen the band repeat themselves - treading on all too familiar ground. Wisely on their second album, Any Random Kindness, the band have decided to focus their gaze outwards, addressing themes ranging from the destruction of the planet to the emptiness and loneliness of social media. Most notably, the band have also chosen to broaden their sound, merging more live instrumentation and analogue synths into their sound and in doing so finding new musical paths to explore. bit.ly

This song is about remembering some of the simple pleasures enjoyed as children that most no longer find the time for, such as spending the afternoon looking at the sky, watching the clouds take on shapes. bit.ly

Over the course of the year, British dance music heroes Underworld have been sharing weekly music, film, and text pieces as part of their multimedia DRIFT series. In May, they went on to announce that the project will culminate in the fall with the release of a new album called DRIFT SONGS. DRIFT SONGS, which will arrive on 10/25, “expands and enhances a selection of the recordings the duo have released since they began their audio/visual experiment in November 2018.” It will be released in CD and 2xLP formats plus a box set featuring all of the music, visuals, and text pieces from the series. Along with the announcement, Underworld have shared two new songs. They describe “Listen To Their No” as “just over five and a half minutes of superlative sunset techno; a lucid dream built around an insistent analogue riff and a rush of pure positivity,” while “Soniamode (Aditya Game Version)” is a new version of a track from DRIFT’s second installment featuring lyrics from writer Aditya Chakrabortty. bit.ly

The music video for the song has acquired widespread notice; directed by Alex Theurer and Charles Scott from Kelvin Optical, Inc., a division of J.J. Abrams' Bad Robot Productions. It features science fiction costumes and was filmed in Bryce Canyon National Park and the redwoods of California. The animation starting at (0:45) depicts both singers standing on a rock tower, which is Spider Rock in Canyon de Chelly located on the Navajo Nation in Arizona. https://bit.ly/2JiNk5r | www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPKAwJKGSDc

The song was featured in Eric Bana's 2009 documentary film Love The Beast. It was also used for Mike Mo Capaldi's segment in Fully Flared, a skateboarding video released by Lakai Limited Footwear in 2007. In the UK, the song was also featured in Top Gear's video montage/preview at the beginning of Series Ten, as well as in ITV's coverage of the UEFA Champions League in 2007/8. It has also featured on series 6 of Wheeler Dealers, a motoring programme on the Discovery Channel. In Italy, it was used as the main theme of the soccer's Sunday TV-show "Quelli Che Il Calcio" hosted by Victoria Cabello, from September 18, 2011 to May 19, 2013 on Rai 2. The song was jokingly referred to by Win Butler as "Yes Boats Yes" during their gig at the Hackney Empire on July 7, 2010. bit.ly

Both weird and Australian, Callinan occupies a peculiar tier of notoriety. He declines to give his age, though an educated guess puts him around 33. He grew up in the relatively affluent Northern Beaches outside Sydney, the son of Brendan Callinan, a former member of the Australian band the Radiators. Kirin’s not famous, exactly, but he’s not not famous either. He hasn’t deigned to write his own Wikipedia page, so he doesn’t have one. If he did, it might list his two solo albums, his old band Mercy Arms, his stint as Mark Ronson’s guitar player, his budding acting career, and his latest project, a soft-rocking new wave band called the Night Game. Its frontman is former Boys Like Girls singer Martin Johnson, now a pop songwriter partially responsible for, among other things, Avril Lavigne’s “Hello Kitty.” This year, with just one song officially released, the Night Game toured the U.S. with John Mayer. In Callinan’s orbit, the distinctions between talent, irony, and genuine bad taste bleed together until they’re indistinguishable. bit.ly

Produced by long-time collaborator Ed Buller, the album was released through Warner Music UK on January 22, 2016 to widespread critical acclaim. It was accompanied by a feature film, directed by Roger Sargent. During their 2016 tour the band performed from behind a screen on which Sargent's film was projected during the first half of their set. The album is considered by many critics to be the band's finest work since 1994's Dog Man Star. bit.ly

Speaking about the development between records, Clementine Creevy says: "With Apocalipstick, I was an over-confident teenager trying to solve the world’s problems. With Stuffed & Ready, I’m a much more weary and perhaps a more cynical woman who believes you need to figure your own self out first.” bit.ly

"Our first time playing this song was at the Great Escape in Brighton, which was kind of the catalyst for when things started happening for the band. Whilst jamming acoustically in a pub green room, Josh came up with what went on to be the chorus. The song was left on the shelf for a pretty long time before we worked on but after we added the bouncy to and fro between Eddie and Sean [Coyle Smith], the song started to take shape. The call-and-response vocals between Steen and [bassist] Josh [Finerty] represent the idea of being trapped in a relationship, almost feeling like you're talking to yourself in a way. This song went through a couple of instrumental incarnations before we settled on this one. When we recorded it, we also had all five of us doing vocals for the ending, which gave it the sort of schoolboy-choir, vaguely angelic finale that we were looking for. Incidentally, this track was also the first release on our new label, Dead Oceans." n.pr

Joe Talbot remembered the difficult phase of his life he was in when he wrote “Mercedes Marxist." "I was pissed off at what I was and where I was: I was sofa surfing on the weekends and spending the weeks looking after my mum. My life balance was way off and this song reflects just how useless I felt. It was me at my worst and without any buoyancy it became catharsis. It was the last splurge from Brutalism so we omitted it. I like it now.” bit.ly

Born Ahmed Abdullahi Gallab in London, England, Sinkane is a Sudanese-American musician who blends krautrock, prog rock, electronica, free jazz and funk rock with Sudanese pop, and is signed to City Slang Records. Born to college professors in London, he lived in Sudan, then moved to the US when he was five, and lived for some time in Ohio. Prior to embarking on his solo career, he worked with Eleanor Friedberger, Caribou, of Montreal, Born Ruffians, and Yeasayer as a session musician. Ahmed Gallab is the vocalist and music director of the Atomic Bomb! Band which plays the music of Nigerian funk musician William Onyeabor. The group includes David Byrne (of Talking Heads), Money Mark (of the Beastie Boys),[3] Damon Albarn (of Blur and Gorillaz), Dev Hynes (aka Blood Orange and Lightspeed Champion), Alexis Taylor (of Hot Chip), Charles Lloyd, Amadou and Mariam, Jamie Lidell, Pharoah Sanders, Joshua Redman, among many many others. bit.ly

KOKOKO! is a collective born in Kinshasa capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a creative collision of different artists which fused at a block party. It consists of musical instrument inventors from the Ngwaka neighbourhood, electronic producer débruit, Makara Bianko (aka the Lingwala devil) and his dancers bursting forth from the Lingwala neighbourhood. They’re best known for creating a contemporary aesthetic all their own by re-wiring and up-cycling materials such as metal, cans, engine parts and plastic containers found in Kinshasa’s streets into vital sculptural resonant dance music. Their distorted fast rhythms and spontaneous lo-fi electric sounds provide the chaotic soundtrack for the city's harsh yet abundantly creative realities.

It does not escape the notice of the Congolese people that the very resources which have fuelled much of the most prosperous countries industrial and technological progress, from slaves, rubber and diamonds to the coltan powering our smartphones and Kobalt for new electric batteries, are the root cause of their own country’s suffering. bit.ly

The Zambia-born, Botswana-raised rapper reveals the song has multiple layers. In particular, she highlights the value of the creative process regardless of commercial success. She notes, “It’s easy to get caught up in the constant chatter around you about how ‘you are not there yet,’ how you ‘might not make it.’ ‘Final Form’ is about expanding yourself and calling out any negativity towards that growth process. As an artist I now recognize my in-between stage; sometimes it drops and sometimes it rises, but I love that I get to level up each second. I might even final form tomorrow.” bit.ly

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Kweli grew up in a household in Park Slope. His mother, Brenda Greene, is an English professor at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York, and his father is an administrator at Adelphi University. His younger brother, Jamal Greene, is a professor of constitutional law at Columbia Law School, a graduate of Yale Law School, and former clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court. As a youth, he was drawn to Afrocentric rappers, such as De La Soul and other members of the Native Tongues Posse whom he had met in high school. Kweli was a student at Cheshire Academy, a boarding school in Connecticut. He was previously a student at Brooklyn Technical High School before being academically dismissed. He later studied experimental theater at New York University. bit.ly

“Sometimes I scroll through [my phone] and say, ‘Oh, what are these things I’ve just collected? And how can I apply them to this world?... I’m just starting to read Questlove’s book about creativity, and he says, like, ‘I don’t even know if I’m a creative person, because all I do is just look at the work of other people and get inspiration from them.’ That really resonated with me. I think part of being an artist is that consumption and marination part of it. I’m just trying to lean into that as much as possible, and not feel bad about how much I like being inspired by other people.” bit.ly

Jessy Lanza grew up playing piano and clarinet before going to Concordia University to study jazz. Before starting her career as a singer and music producer, she was a music teacher at school. In a review of her debut album, Pull My Hair Back, she was described by The Guardian as "the latest and possibly greatest of the new ethereal soul girls." bit.ly