The best and worst of new music Friday: 24 February 2017

A vintage week if you like Coldplay and songs that go Wzrrp-worp. Not so much if you're into anything else at all. Sort it out, "the music industry".

Anyway, here's a rundown of the week's best new ones. And the Coldplay one, too.

1) Billie Eilish - Bellyache
Why put all the big artists at the top, when someone new could do with a leg up? California's Billie Eilish recently signed to Interscope, and has a great acousti-pop sound that'll appeal to fans of Ellie Goulding and Aurora.

She wrote her first song at the age of four, about falling into a black hole and being happy to be there. Her new single, Bellyache, finds her plotting revenge on her boyfriend for an undisclosed transgression. It's fair to say things don't go well for him: "Where's my mind? Maybe it's in the gutter, where I left my lover".





2) Calvin Harris ft Frank Ocean and Migos - Slide
Ladies and gentlemen, we are living in a post-chorus environment.





3) Zedd ft Alessia Cara - Stay
"Alessia and I first met at rehearsals for the HALO Awards, where Alessia, Daya and I performed together," writes Zedd. "I've loved her songs before but realised that she's an unbelievable talent when we started rehearsing together, so I asked her if she was interested in making music with me."

The answer was a resounding OF COURSE I DO and the result is the best of this week's onslaught of producer+vocalist collabs.




4) The Chainsmokers ft Coldplay - Something Just Like This
The title is clunky, the beats are generic, the melody is pedestrian. No-one is doing their best work here (except, perhaps, the team that animated the lyric video).




5) Lana Del Rey - Love
Already covered extensively on the blog, this is very much business as usual while managing to be one of Lana's strongest-ever singles.




6) Ed Sheeran ft Stormzy - Shape Of You
One of the highlights of Wednesday's Brit Awards, this collaboration got an official release today as part of a Ed Sheeran remix package. The guy has sold nearly 2 million singles over the last seven weeks. What does he think this is, 1994?




7) Thundercat ft Kendrick Lamar - Walk On By
Thundercat played bass on most of Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly album. Now the rapper repays the favour by adding a typically virtuoso verse to this melancholy R&B track. At the time of writing, its only got 2,000 views on YouTube. It deserves 100 times that.




8) The 1975 - By Your Side
A vocoderised cover of the Sade classic (Grammy-nominated for best vocal performance in 2002, but beaten by Nelly Furtado's I'm, Like, A Bird). Released in aid of War Child, this one of those rare charity singles that doesn't sound like it was knocked off in an afternoon.




9) Powers - Heavy
Powers are pop heavyweights Mike Del Rio and Crist Ru, whose credits include Kylie and Selena Gomez. They've just served up this calorific slice of pop that's equal parts Rocksteady-era No Doubt and Lady Gaga on a good day. Nice work.




2,000,002) Jason Derulo, Nicki Minaj and Ty Dolla Sign - Swalla
A song about cum.

Sorry about that last one, but I refuse to suffer alone. Sometimes I wonder what did we do to deserve Jason Derulo? Whatever it was, I'm sorry and we won't do it again.

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Alessia Cara finally follows up Here

Here - Alessia Cara's true-life tale of a terrible night out - was one of the most captivating singles of last year. For some reason, it faltered at number 28 in the UK despite giving the Canadian star a number five hit in the US. But then, chart positions don't really matter any more because the music industry is irreparably broken.

Over in the States, though, Here's slow-burning success (it took 25 weeks to crack the top five) meant the follow-up was put on the back burner for months. Now, finally, there's a video for Wild Things, an exuberant call to arms for a generation of outsiders.

It sees the singer running about town with her friends, causing all sorts of PG-rated trouble and generally looking like the cast of Degrassi Junior High. "To me, Where The Wild Things Are is a place that exists in our minds," theorises Alessia in a spoken-word intro. "It's a place of liberty and shamelessness. It can take a split second or a lifetime to find it, but once you do, you’ll be free."

To be honest, my ears took a while to adjust Alessia Cara being upbeat - shouldn't she be moping around a car park like a Canadian version of Lorde? But I shed my preconceptions, Wild Things turned out to be a classy, polished pop song with a insidiously catchy chorus.

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Jack Garratt does strange things to Justin Timberlake in the Live Lounge

Congratulations to Jack Garratt and his big ginger beard, who are officially the Sound of 2016, as you can discover over here.

To celebrate his not-at-all-inevitable win, Jack popped into Radio 1's Live Lounge to play his new single Worry (it's very good), followed by a cover of Justin Timberlake's Senorita mixed with Craig David's 7 Days.

Yes, Really.

It turns out that Garratt has a bit of a man-crush on Justin Timberlake (don't we all), telling Radio 1: "He is one of the main reasons I went into performing as a kid. Listening to Justified and watching him do incredible shows, he ignited something in me about performing great music live on stage."

I wonder what JT would make of this?


The runner-up for this year's prize was compact Canadian chanteuse Alessia Cara. She did the business yesterday with an impeccable version of her "wallflower's anthem" Here, followed by a sweet, guitar-led rendition Hotline Bling, originally by her fellow Ontarian Drake. But you knew that already.

Watch below.




I had the pleasure of interviewing Alessia for my proper job - we talked about Sesame Street and Taylor Swift amongst other things. Read it here, along with reams of other Sound of 2016 coverage.

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Discopop Directory: Top 10 singles of 2015

Usually, my Top 10 is a breeze to compile. I look at the songs I listened to most then write them down in order. This year, there were dozens all clustered around the same score - either evidence of a very good year or a totally banal one.

I will say this, though - the Top Five completely took me by surprise. I'd been preparing to write about Kanye's All Day, The Weeknd's Can't Feel My Face and Missy Elliot's WTF (Where They From?) in this list. In the end, they fell just short of the countdown - which proves something, although I'm at a loss to explain what it might be.

10) Demi Lovato - Cool For The Summer
The year's best Katy Perry song in a year where Katy Perry released no songs. Rip-roaring vocals and a terrific guitar riff from the "Sexy! No No No" schools of rock. Could have done without the gratuitous - and grammatically awkward - swear word in verse two.




9) Alessia Cara - Here
An "anti-party anthem"; a "loner anthem"; an "anthem for introverts". The critics' were united - this wasn't just a song about socially awkward teenagers, it was a rallying cry for like-minded souls. Never mind that Alessia Cara is the least introverted pop star this side of Lady Gaga. She just didn't like this one party. Still, with lyrics and melody this good, who's scoring points?




8) Lianne La Havas - What You Don't Do
A simple, sublime love song. "Those three little words are overused," she sings, before smiling: "You don't need to show it - I already know it." Gorgeous.




7) Major Lazer ft MØ - Lean On
It's great to see that a left-field, obtuse pop song like this can still have a global impact - even after it's turned down by Rihanna. Lean On needed a few listens to "bed in", but once I'd fallen under the spell of the lilting rhythm and MØ's unflinchingly positive lyrics (essentially a hipster re-write of the Neighbours theme tune) there was no turning back.




6) Disclosure ft Lorde - Magnets
This slinky story of boyfriend theft is the absolute highlight of Disclosure's ho-hum second album - and here's why. "Lorde was involved with every aspect of the song as opposed to just doing the lyrics and melodies and then leaving the rest to us," Guy Lawrence told Spin. "It was like someone challenging us, someone saying, 'We can get that extra ten percent.'”




5) Janet Jackson - No Sleeep
Janet's six year hiatus gave her a clean slate with the prudish US public, and it didn't hurt that her comeback single was an understated masterpiece. Jam and Lewis's silky-smooth groove recalled That's The Way Love Goes while the lyric - about ruffling the bedsheets with her beau - proved Janet could still sing about sex without using words like "moist".




4) Carly Rae Jepsen - I Really Like You
A 21st Century update of I Should Be So Lucky, with added glitter cannons (courtesy of former Cardigans writer Peter Svennson). The video starred Tom Hanks, for some reason.




3) Little Mix - Black Magic
HEY!

Little Mix's venture into "proper" girlband territory (80s pastiche, Motown pastiche, Jason Derulo duet) hasn't been a resounding success - but this song gets everything right. Predictable yet surprising, it transcends the appropriation of Cyndi Lauper's Girls Just Wanna Have Fun to become the most likeable single of the year. Then the "falling in love" coda kicks in and you think to yourself, "why am I grinning?"




2) Kendrick Lamar - King Kunta
I was disappointed that The Weeknd's Michael Jackson rip-off tribute Can't Feel My Face didn't make the Top 10 - but at least this contains an allusion to Smooth Criminal. It is neither as incisive nor as powerful as Kendrick's other big hit of 2015 (Alright was adopted as the rallying cry of the Black Lives Matter movement) but King Kunta sounds much better at parties.




1) Carly Rae Jepsen - Your Type
Move over Sam so-called Smith, this is the saddest pop song of the year. I might be married with two children, but it transports me straight back to 1995 and being infatuated with someone who didn't know I existed. There's something in Carly's delivery - resigned, but hoping her pleas will make a difference - that breaks your heart in two, and then into smaller and smaller fragments with every chorus. It's not the most original or complex song on this list but I found myself singing it at top volume, by myself, in the car at midnight. And that, pop fans, is the ultimate seal of approval.

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One to watch: Alessia Cara

Isaac Haye's Ike's Rap II contains one of the most recognisable samples of all time - a querulous violin figure that underpins Portishead's Glory Box and Tricky's Hell Is Round The Corner.

So it takes a brave, or foolhardy, musician to recycle it for a new song. But that's exactly what Alessia Cara has done and, incredibly, she gets away with it.

Here puts Hayes' track to good use, matching its claustrophobia with a lyric about being trapped at an awful house party. She explained it to Fader like this.

'Here' is a song for all the antisocial, awkward, and miserable party-goers of the world. This one time I went to a party and while there, I realized how much I hated it, along with every other party I had ever gone to. We wrote about it the next day.

Aptly, the video attempts to re-create that abominable party, with many of the original guests making an appearance (presumably they hadn't listened to the lyrics very closely).

Listen below, as this Ontario teenager is definitely one to watch for the rest of the year. Having been discovered through YouTube covers of Justin Timberlake and Amy Winehouse, she's just signed to Def Jam and, I'm told, will be in the UK for Glastonbury next month.

Alessia Cara - Here

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