Azealia Banks is horny (& other new videos)

It's a semi-tradition on Friday afternoons to round up the new releases I didn't have time to blog about during the week. So, without further delay, here's this week's selection, starting with...

1) Azealia Banks - Licorice
"She's a little firecracker," said Scissor Sisters' frontman Jake Shears when asked about working with Azealia recently. Maybe a better description would be "a handful" - she's sacked three managers since the start of the year.

Still, that doesn't dilute her music, which is as filthy and funky as always. Licorice is "a song about inter-racial dating," she told me last year. "People are scared to talk about it," she continued. "I feel like it’s maybe becoming less taboo, but it is a taboo among black women to desite white men, and vice versa".

The video, directed by celebrity photographer Rankin, totally ignores all of that and dresses Azaelia up as a sexy / deadly cowgirl.





2) Cheryl 'don't call me Cole' Cole - Under The Sun
If you're only downloading one song from Cheryl's new album on Sunday, make it this one. Or the Lana Del Rey one. Or Call My Name.

Tell you what - why not download the whole thing, delete the rubbish ones (hint: will.i.am), add Fight For This Love, Promise This and Parachute. Hey presto! A Cheryl album that scores 9/10 on the amaze-o-meter.




3) The Vaccines - No Hope
In which, apropos of nothin, Justin Young starts singing in a ridiculous Ay-mur-ee-kahn accent. Pop stars, eh?





4) Barbarossa - Butterfly Plague
A friend was rhapsodising to me about Barbarossa earlier this week. OK, it was his press officer, but it turns out she wasn't exaggerating. He's pretty darn good.

The name means "Red Beard" in Italian, and it belongs to James Mathé, a cohort of King Creosote, who records his music on a remote Scottish island. Butterfly Plague, which came out last month, is a very elegant, very human love song - and the video features Zawe Ashton, who you might know as Zod from Channel 4 comedy Fresh Meat.





5) Cleo Sol - Never The Right Time (Who Do You Love?)
You could be forgiven for thinking this is actually Amerie's 1 Thing in a cunning disguise. But it's not, it's the new single by Cleo Sol, a British (gasp) soul singer who insists that her hair should be "big and bad" at all times. Mind you, it wasn't her hairdo I was looking at in this video...

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