Kevin Cole

Bonobo's Simon Green is fascinated by the landscapes of Death Valley, "because it’s so alien compared to where I’m from. From being in the UK… well all the places I’ve lived have had quite lush landscapes. And this is Martian… I’m trying to get amongst it as much as I can." That sense of nature is present in Green’s music; the sounds he uses tend to come from acoustic sources and he steers clear of digitally created noise, preferring to craft his own sounds to add a human warmth. "It’s sort of montage, what I do," he explains, "it’s taking bits of sound and re-contextualising it and putting things together from two different places and seeing how they fit together. So you end up with this patchwork of stuff that I’ve recorded." bit.ly

Ólafur Arnalds recently shared with listeners, "Hey everyone, Last year Bonobo and I spent a couple of days in the studio, after traveling and camping together in the Icelandic highlands, with no intention other than to spend some quality time with music. 'Loom' is one of the songs that came from those sessions and as time passed, and I started writing the rest of the album, I kept coming back to it. The serene energy of the song is perfectly encapsulated in Neel's beautiful video — a true testament to getting lost in the moment, as we did." Check out that gorgeous video here; it'll make you ache so hard to slip those travel shoes on again: bit.ly

Toronto-based WS's Tamara Lindeman wrote of this song, "Trying to capture something of the slipping feeling I think we all feel, the feeling of dread, even in beautiful moments, even when you’re a little drunk on a sea cliff watching the sun go down while seabirds fly around you; that slipping feeling is still there, that feeling of dread, of knowing that everything you see is in peril. ​I feel like I spend half my life working on trying to stay positive. My whole generation does. "But if you spend any time at all reading about the climate situation circa now, positivity and lightness are not fully available to you anymore; you have to find new ways to exist and to see, even just to watch the sunset. I tried to make the band just go crazy on this one, and they did. This is one where the music really makes me see the place in my mind; the flute and the guitar chasing each other, wheeling around like birds, the drums cliff like in their straightness; I love the band on this one.​" bit.ly

A faster, firmer and more boisterous record, Comeback Kid confused some listeners: is this, they wondered, a new Sharon Van Etten? It’s a question also raised by the second note on the album’s opening track: bowling off toward somewhere brighter and more hopeful, a prefigurement of the songs to follow, which are punchier and more immediate. Van Etten attributes some of this new musical vim to a reaction to writing Dieckmann’s score, a guitar-led and spacious work designed to be something akin to Ry Cooder’s soundtrack for Paris, Texas. "Whenever I got to a frustrating point in the writing process where I felt like I was banging my head against the wall, I would just put down the guitar and play anything else to clear my head, like a palate cleanse," she recalls. She found she gravitated towards unfamiliar sounds and instruments, towards synthesisers and keyboards, particularly the Jupiter-4 synth owned by her studiomate, the actor Michael Cera. "And that’s how I started a lot of these songs, with a drone and a beat and I would sing over it. Just so I could clear my head." However the new energy of these songs also owes much to the impact of parenthood: the structured routine of nap times and feeding, the sense of days being shorter and more precious. "Before I had so much time and I was living for myself. Everything was open-ended and there was still a lot unresolved, but now I just feel like I have to finish. And I kind of like that it’s about being an adult and making choices and being decisive." bit.ly

Upon releasing this album, Jessica Dobson posted on Instagram, "Well, the tears are already flowin today. I barely slept last night because I knew that this album, comprised of humbling lows & mangled beauty, tremendous time & effort, stalled timelines, relentless hope & a new kind of boldness & vulnerability… was coming out. And here it is. Impossible Weight is yours now. "This album became an album after two 'failed' attempts to record it. It became an album when I was at my lowest & wasn’t sure how to move forward. It became an album when I started writing songs again after a hiatus & Peter came downstairs after hearing a few and said, 'You are going to produce this record.' I instantly started crying. "It felt impossible... as I was still searching for the vocabulary for this album and trying to find my voice again as a songwriter. Although I didn’t feel ready, I knew he was right. I needed to step into a new realm, one that existed wholly outside of the burdensome expectations I had put on myself. "This became an album when we started making plans with Andy Park who would become my co-producer & right hand partner when it came to sharpening the songs & making sure we didn’t sabotage ourselves in the studio with too many takes and overthought decisions. I felt a freedom & a joy that we hadn’t experienced before throughout the recording process. Much of the album was recorded in the same live room, together. In real time, I could see everyones talents, greatly elevated, and wonderfully alive. Peter, Gary and Elliot, I love you. I love what we went through together. I love every iota of sound that you contributed to this album. SHIIIT I’m crying again!"

A successful fiction writer, The Kills' Jamie Hince shares his frustration in writing lyrics, and co-writing with Alison Mosshart: "Yeah, I mean, she writes a lot more than me. She's really prolific with writing. It all just comes out of her. It tortures me. I don't find it easy at all. And the problem with trying to write for rock & roll meter when you write words is it's just so limiting. You can't write like when you're writing yourself with your head in the clouds and it all comes out and you're just writing to write and you read it back and have no idea where it came from. With lyrics you have to be concerned that the timing is right and the inflection and all that. Alison can do that. But on the new record, it's pretty half and half. There were six by me and five by her. More than anything, we just sort of want The Kills to be of one heart. It's a lot more difficult. I think that happens as you get older. You lose that naïveté about 'I'm gonna grow my hair to scare the teacher away' or whatever that old Mott the Hoople lyric is. When you're a teenager it's really important to be naïve like in 'Suicide Sally & Johnny Guitar', but as you become older it becomes a lot harder. And I always want to write about things that are personal to me, things that make me vulnerable because it's always so exciting when you can pull that off. But now I don't really want to share my personal life, so it's even more tortuous. It's just this constant paradox." bit.ly

"[This song is] essentially about a crush that turns into a really impersonal obsession. It doesn’t have anything to do with the other person anymore, and it feels really lonely. A crush is this thing you’ve created that feels very selfish in a lot of ways, because you’re not really thinking of the other person as a person. It’s more this idea of what they’re going to do for you, what you can do for them. It hasn’t happened yet, it’s unrequited, so it’s just this buzzing thing. But it’s still love, it’s still care. That can be very confusing. "When I was writing it, I was thinking about when you’re young and closeted, and you fall in love with somebody and that feels really warm and exciting, but also in combination with that you’re not supposed to love that person. When you’re queer, you’re taught that who you want to have sex with is the shameful part of you, and that’s before you’ve even done it yet. It’s just this weird combination—this feels like love, this feels like what I want and what feels natural, but then there’s this mix of shame and fear. I don’t feel like I’ve ever really fully shaken that combo." bit.ly

The Nigerian-French artist reveals, "'Caroline' is an exercise in people watching and seeing situations unfold without context. It’s an exploration of how something once full of healthy passion can dissolve in an instant.” Her new album, "Collapsed in Sunbeams," is set for release on January 29th. In the meantime, Watch the lyric video for this song: www.nme.com Arlo Parks will be performing live from the Rough Trade East stage on Thursday, January 21st. And! Live at 5pm tonight, watch her perform live online from the Rough Trade East stage; tickets still available here: bit.ly

Still sounding so gloriously Foalsy, this album was produced by James Ford, known for his work with Simian Mobile Disco, The Last Shadow Puppets and Arctic Monkeys amongst others. According to frontman Yannis Philippakis, it is slated to be their loudest and heaviest record to date. "He brought more of a focus onto the craft and songwriting, a classic kind of songwriting, which was the most alien thing for us," says Philippakis. "There was still time in the studio to get weird, but it allowed us more time for experimentation. He was very stabilizing. He kept the morale good. We have a tendency to let things get dark in the studio. He came into the room to keep the pH at the right acidity." "The greatest power as a musician is all the moments you don't know about, what it's been party to," he continues. "Moments when someone's listening on a morning commute, or a 15-year-old is mowing his grandma's lawn for a buck. Just someone who's finding solace in your music. All the intangible moments that you'll never know about. That's the deeper connection. Even though I can't be privy to those moments, I know our music's connected to the unknowable masses out there. And that's what's beautiful about music, the power for it to commune with people in their most intimate moments." bit.ly

Originally from Bulgaria, Hayes & Y moved to London in the hope of building on their success in their home country. Having supported the likes of Kasabian and The Subways, this band gained a reputation for itself, and garnered past sponsorship deals from H&M and Heineken. "Three of us were classmates from high-school and we started to play instruments at the same time. Our passion for music and desire to express ourselves through our own songs have always been our driving force. Together we learned to play and actually be in a group. In 2014 we decided to take things more seriously and put a lot more effort into the group." As for the name? "We had a long discussion about the name of the band and wrote hundreds of names before choosing this one – there’s not a special story behind it. We wanted to have a unique and recognizable name." bit.ly

Drive Time's Sunset Song of the Night! Originally written by George Harrison, this is one of his best-known compositions for the Beatles. He wrote the song in early 1969 at the country house of his friend Eric Clapton, where Harrison had chosen to play truant for the day to avoid attending a meeting at the Beatles' Apple Corps organisation. The lyrics reflect his relief at the arrival of spring and the temporary respite he was experiencing from the band's business affairs. As of September 2019, it was the most streamed Beatles song on Spotify globally, with over 350 million plays. bit.ly In 1970, Richie Havens released Alarm Clock on his own record label, Stormy Forest,, which included "Here Comes the Sun." This was Havens's first album to reach Billboard's Top 30 Chart. bit.ly

As Days Get Dark is Arab Strap's first full-length LP in 16 years, seventh studio album, and first on Mogwai's label, Rock Action. Aidan Moffat describes it thusly: "It’s about hopelessness and darkness. But in a fun way." "This album feels like its own new thing to me,” he continues. “It’s definitely Arab Strap, but an older and wiser one, and quite probably a better one." If you haven't seen their entirely Hallowe'en appropriate video for "Turning of our Bones," don't miss out. Warning: NOT kid friendly! bit.ly

"Vitamin C" is a song by the krautrock band on their 1972 album Ege Bamyasi. Considering its short length and relatively standard song structure, it is one of the band's more conventional songs. It was featured in Samuel Fuller's German television Tatort production Tote Taube in der Beethovenstraße (Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street) in 1973, and then also released as a single with the B-side "I'm So Green". In 1997, an 8-minute version of the song, remixed by U.N.K.L.E., was featured on Can's double remix album, Sacrilege. ttps://bit.ly/3o7ShPB

Of this track, A. Savage shares, "If I remember correctly, it would have been recorded at Seaside Lounge in Brooklyn, during the fall of 2013. We were working there with our pal Jonathan Schenke, who had recorded Light Up Gold, but this time in a studio rather than a practice space. We’d have been recording material for Tally All the Things That You Broke and Sunbathing Animal. "Editing the sequence for a record is often a tough process, and when it’s over it’s typically such a relief that I’ll purge it from my memory entirely. And now I’m listening to 'Hey Bug' these seven years later and thinking what a cool song it is. That period was a frenzy of writing and I know it’s not the only unreleased song from that session. So here you are, our lone musical contribution in the year 2020: 'Hey Bug' (recorded 2013)" bit.ly

Black Pumas performed this glorious rendition of "Colors" for President Joe Biden's Inauguration Ceremony yesterday at Austin City Limits Live at The Moody Theater. Breathe in... exhale. Rinse and repeat. Good things ahead: bit.ly

With a release date of February 5th, 2021, this album was recorded with Andy Savours (My Bloody Valentine) during the early part of this 2020 and then finished at the end of the nationwide lock-down. "We wanted it to sound exactly how we love to sound live," says saxophonist Lewis Evans. "This is basically representative of our first 18 months," continues frontman Isaac Wood. Indeed the band found they had to stop themselves running too far ahead in order to document this album in a way that felt as truthful as possible. "We see this as being a stop in the road," explains Isaac. "I've always been interested in a really honest portrayal of what a band is and what they've been working on. I think it's really nice if people can see an artist like: this was them in the early days, this was their next phase and that they're quite clear and honest about genuine progression as people and musicians." blackcountrynewroad.bandcamp.com

The band chose acclaimed English engineer Andy Johns to produce the Marquee Moon on account of his work on such early-’70s classics as Mott The Hoople’s Brain Capers and Goat’s Head Soup by The Rolling Stones. However, according to an insightful and neck-deep interview conducted with Lloyd by Scottish author Damien Love for Uncut, a lifestyle clash with Johns and Television produced studio tension from the outset. "Andy is a real child of rock ’n’ roll," Lloyd tells Love. "He was used to being with people who are also rock ’n’ roll, and you can imagine whatever that means in the 1970s. He was used to people who didn’t mind taking it very slack in the studio. You know: you’ve got a 2 o’clock start, and the engineer shows up at 4.30, and the guitarist shows up at 5 and the singer rolls in at midnight. But Television were not like that. We were punctual. And serious." "He’d say things like, 'Is this a Velvet Underground trip? What kind of trip is this?'" Verlaine recalled told writer and renowned New York avant-garde musician Alan Licht for the liner notes to Rhino’s 2004 expanded edition of Marquee Moon. "And I’d say, 'I don’t know; it’s just two guitars, bass and drums. It’s like every band you’ve ever done.' "So he said, 'O.K., I’ll come back after Christmas.' So he came back and all of a sudden he totally loved the record. He said, 'Jesus, this is great.'" bit.ly

Jockstrap are Georgia Ellery, jazz violinist, and Taylor Skye, who's studying electronic music, both of whom met as current students at London’s prestigious Guildhall School of Music & Drama. As for the name, "It’s memorable, it’s crude, my mum hated it," muses Ellery. Quiet, well-spoken, and appearing even younger than the fourth-year university students they are, Ellery and Skye don’t immediately seem like the types to shock mums. Ellery writes sweeping ballads inspired by Elton John and Paul Simon, and then Skye injects them with distorted production. The best Jockstrap songs make you wonder whether to laugh or cry. Take their most recent single, "Acid," where laser noises and plinky piano rub up against lush strings that sound stripped from a black-and-white melodrama. Against this uncanny backdrop, Ellery offers an unsettling query: "But what if you were to kill me off, or worse, yourself?" Both Skye and Ellery grew up far from the city. Ellery was raised in coastal Cornwall, on the southwestern tip of the UK. Her mum, a music therapist, encouraged her to learn the violin from the age of 5, and Ellery remembers adoring romantic composers like Tchaikovsky and Brahms in her youth. At 14, things took a left turn when she got into house music and started attending weekend-long Cornish "barn raves." bit.ly

The word "bitte" is a German word for "please," and "orca" is another name for a killer whale. Frontman David Longstreth states that he liked the way the words sound together. Longstreth notes that the music contained within the album "felt very [much] about colors, and their interaction," and that the music was written with the notion of the band, as a whole, in mind. Commenting on the notion of "genre," Ed Droste of Grizzly Bear discussed Bitte Orca: "Someone was asking me about what I was listening to and I was saying, 'Oh, Dirty Projectors, I love the new album,' and they were like, 'Well what kind of music is it?' and I just stopped dead in my tracks and literally didn't know how to describe it. At first I was embarrassed because I didn't know how to describe it, but then I was like, this is what's so amazing about a lot of music now. There are so many different things and there's so much going on and Bitte Orca is so distinctly Dirty Projectors that I didn't even know how to begin to describe what genre it is, you know? What would one categorize it as? So I find it hard lately to label things as indie or pop or folk or give it some sort of categorization." bit.ly

With Jacob Collier on backup vodals, SZA first teased the song on July 15, 2020, via her Instagram stories. "Good Days" was originally featured at the tail end of the music video for "Hit Different," released in September 2020; leading people to think it would serve as a B-side to the single. On October 21, 2020, SZA explained that the song was "in clearance" for release. A week before release, she confirmed the track to come out before 2021. The song was eventually released as a surprise drop on Christmas Day 2020. Upon release, the singer revealed that she started writing the song during a session on Carter Lang's birthday and "finished it randomly recently." bit.ly

"Feeling Good" (also known as "Feelin' Good") is a song written by English composers Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse for the musical The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd. It was first performed on stage in 1964 by Cy Grant on the UK tour and by Gilbert Price in 1965 with the original Broadway cast. In the show, Price's character is asked to compete against the show's hero "Cocky"; but, as "Cocky" and his master "Sir" argue over the rules of the game, "the Negro" reaches the centre of the stage and "wins," singing the song at his moment of triumph. It was described as a "booming song of emancipation," and a Billboard review said it was "the kind of robust number that should have strong appeal." The original cast recording of the show, featuring Price's version of the song, was released by RCA Victor in early 1965, before the show reached New York. bit.ly

Colin Greenwood shares, "The 'kkkurrghh' from 'Packt Like Sardines,' that's from Thom's laptop. We just compressed messed-up loops." Thom Yorke reveals, "We used Autotuner on Amnesiac twice. On 'Packt Like Sardines,' I wasn't particularly out of tune, but if you really turn up the Autotuner so it's dead in pitch, it makes it go slightly..." he makes a nasal, depersonalised sound. "There's also this trick you can do, which we did on both 'Packt' and 'Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors', where you give the machine a key and then you just talk into it. It desperately tries to search for the music in your speech, and produces notes at random. If you've assigned it a key, you've got music." bit.ly

Mods' Jason Williamson describes this track as "the sound of the central heating and the dying smells of Sunday dinner in a house on an estate in 1982. Concrete, dinted garages, nicotine. Where beauty mainly exists in small cracks on the shell of your imagination." The song also comes with a music video directed by Ben Wheatley and features Billy Nomates on vocal duties alongside Williamson. bit.ly Watch the video here: bit.ly

Spillage Village is an Atlanta-based collective consisting of EarthGang, JID, Hollywood JB, Jurdan Bryant, Mereba, 6lack, and Benji. The album incorporates elements of soul, funk, contemporary R&B, gospel, neo soul, folk, and jazz. Concepts explored in the album include religion, spirituality, apocalypticism, love, African-American culture, and social activism. In March 2020, JID rented the Spillage Village studio house in Atlanta to record his third solo album, with the members of the group expected make appearances. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the studio became a safe place to be stationary, as they decided to record the collective instead. Each group member lived in the studio home for more than two months due to self-quarantine rules in Atlanta, with the exception of 6lack who was in Los Angeles and participated remotely, and Mereba who was present at the studio but returned home after the album was complete. EarthGang wrote on social media about the album's recording sessions, saying "the quarantine has made it happen." In April, Olu said in an interview "the first couple of weeks everybody was together and you can just feel the vibes." WowGr8 also elaborated saying "every time we do one of these projects we become progressively busier as artists and we’re all over the world. When we first started conceptualizing this project, we didn’t know how possible it would be because we didn’t know if everybody would have time. It’s like the universe gave us time because we were talking about it." Mereba stated that the album's creation developed from a natural camaraderie of pushing each other as a group. bit.ly

"I was stuck in a rut thinking about some really dark things that had happened in the past and wrote this song almost as an acceptance of it," shares Winter - who is also one half of London duo Pregoblin. "The chorus ‘press play’ is about distracting yourself from a reality that you might not want to be in. "The lyrics came as a loop, repeating over and over like the action of pressing play to escape reality," she continues of how her new single came to life. "It felt like it explained everything to me. I think I was trying to channel some kind of persona that would have been helpful to me back then." bit.ly

“Policy Of Truth” became one of three US hit singles from the album Violator for the British band, which at that time included Gore, Dave Gahan, Andrew Fletcher and Alan Wilder. That worldwide success was part of the goal, as lead singer Gahan told Under The Radar magazine in a 2009 interview. “What really drove me was, first of all, to prove to you and everybody else that we were a force to be reckoned with,” Gahan says of that era. “That we were important and had just as much right to be here as your U2s or whoever were the critics darlings at the time. I think we always felt we were somehow slighted in that way. When we were making Violator, even though we had no idea what the success of that album was going to be after we released it, there was definitely a feeling of breaking new ground.” bit.ly

As acts of rebellion go, Ela Minus’s is an intimate yet powerful one. On her debut album, the Colombia-born, Brooklyn-based artist makes personal-is-political statements amid alternately soothing and rousing electronic soundscapes, all of which she crafted alone in her apartment using analogue equipment. Having started her musical life as a drummer in a punk band named Ratón Pérez, Minus turned to electronic music after attending Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she became immersed in improvisational jazz and techno raves. That’s where she fell in love with machines, inspired by Kraftwerk and early Daft Punk. She later became a synthesiser builder, and set about the self-imposed challenge of making Acts of Rebellion without using a single computer-generated sound. bit.ly

Brooklyn-based frontman Ian Devaney shares with Stereogum, "'Deliver Me From Wondering Why' is a bit of an exploration, rooted in a desire for something repetitious and a bit spacey — something that would make you really want to zone out or go for a long drive on the highway. (Ideally not at the same time.) We worked on it with Nick Millhiser (Holy Ghost!) and it was just a really fun exercise in letting the track carry us wherever it was going to go. The backbone of the steady synth arpeggios and rhythms just leads endlessly forward and lets the mind wander around it." bit.ly

The song's lyrics were written by Jones alone, while she, along with Kookoo Baya and Dana Manno, are credited as its composers. Its instrumental part was originally recorded in 1980 during the Warm Leatherette sessions; however, it did not make the album as Chris Blackwell found its sound not fitting in the rest of the material. The song sparked some controversy for its suggestive lyrics as these figuratively describe sexual intercourse and fellatio, prompting some radio stations in the United States to refuse to broadcast it. bit.ly

This brand spankin' new album was inspired by the relationship between astronomer Carl Sagan and producer Ann Druyan, whose photo is on the album’s cover. They worked on the PBS series Cosmos together and their relationship was immortalized in NASA’s Voyager Golden Record. "The conceptual heart of things is really important to me," the Avalanches’ Robbie Chater said in a press release. "I can’t just be blindly creative, I need to find a feeling and a deeply personal place that gives me the energy to start making a record and a story to share. Wildflower changed so much over 16 years, whereas with this album, we knew what it was about right at the beginning, and then we did it, and it’s done." bit.ly

This track is about how, “In the search for your true calling in life, it’s easy to try so many things that you end up confused,” Dry Cleaning said in a statement. “It can lead to an enormous build-up of frustration. You may fantasise about exacting revenge upon your real or imagined enemies. Ephemeral things and small-scale escapist experiences can provide some relief!” Check out the very cool, very eerie video for the track here: bit.ly

From what Rolling Stone regards the #1 Greatest Emo Album of all time, Leor Galil writes, "In the early Nineties, Seattle was synonymous with grunge, but Sunny Day Real Estate didn't bother reading the memo. Formed by a trio of hardcore lifers in 1992 the group found their secret weapon in Jeremy Enigk, an 18-year-old with a supernatural falsetto. Channeling the Dischord catalog's melodic ferocity and U2's arena spirituality, SDRE mapped out Diary during a series of lengthy jam sessions. Recorded after their first national tour in 1993, Diary captures the vague inner-turmoil of Enigk's lyrics and propels those turbulent emotions to the heavens. In the ensuing years hundreds of bands have tried to replicate the magic of 'In Circles' and 'Seven,' though few albums had the same tectonic effect." bit.ly

Julien Baker recently shared in a press release: "A few years ago I started collecting travel ephemera again with a loose idea of making a piece of art with it. I had been touring pretty consistently since 2015 and had been traveling so much that items like plane tickets and hotel keycards didn't have much novelty anymore. So I saved all my travel stuff and made a little collage of a house and a van out of it. I wanted to incorporate it into the record and when we were brainstorming ideas for videos we came across Joe Baughman and really liked his work so we reached out with the idea of making a stop-motion video that had similar aesthetic qualities as the house I built did. I don't know why I have the impulse to write songs or make tiny sculptures out of plane tickets. But here it is anyway: a bunch of things I've collected and carried with me that I've re-organized into a new shape." Joe Baughman revealed of the video: "Even after having spent 600 hours immersed in 'Hardline' and having listened to it thousands of times, I am still moved by it. It was a fun and ambitious challenge creating something that could accompany such a compelling song. The style of the set design, inspired by a sculpture that Julien created, was especially fun to work in. I loved sifting through magazines, maps, and newspapers from the ’60s and ’70s and finding the right colors, shapes, and quotes to cover almost every surface in the video." bit.ly

The band debuted the song during a concert at Point Éphémère in Paris, France on March 28, 2018. Getting the recording of the song exactly right was important to the band, and they later re-recorded it at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California. Written by Adrianne Lenker, the song's lyrics uses negation to describe something, with Lenker repeating the use of "not" or "nor" at the beginning of each line. Bob Boilen of NPR described the song's subject as "the inability to describe what that something is, only to be able to explain what it is not." The second half of the song is instrumental and features a guitar solo played by Lenker. bit.ly