Marian Hill release hypnotic video for Down

Philadelphia duo Marian Hill have been bubbling under for a couple of years now - but they received a well-deserved shot in the arm when Apple picked one of their songs to soundtrack its first AirPod commercial.


After the advert premiered in America on 14 January, Nielsen Music recorded a major increase in downloads for Down - with its figures jumping from "negligible" to 101,000, sending it into the upper reaches of the Billboard Hot 100.

The song has now racked up 31 million Spotify plays - and the band are hoping to sustain their figures with the release of an eerie, hypnotic video - in which singer Samantha Gongol and producer Jeremy Lloyd plummet to the ground in an out-of-control elevator.

It's a perfect fit for the sparse, spooky electropop of the song. If you're a fan of AlunaGeorge, this will be firmly in your ballpark.

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Pharrell's new song is a Zane Lowe EXCLUSIVE (but Annie Mac has it too)

Maybe you've heard that Apple is launching a new music service, and that Zane Lowe is on it? You're forgiven if you haven't. They kept pretty quiet about it. But it really happened.

Zane presented (shouted) his first show today and the BIG EXCLUSIVE was Pharrell's new song, Freedom. It features the wide open gospel chords and gratuitous handclaps of Happy, but adopts a much more sombre tone. It's really, really good.

But Pharrell didn't get to be Pharrell by putting all his eggs in one basket (he keeps at least three eggs under his hat). He knew that, even though the world's media would tune in to Zane's show, nobody in the real world was paying the blindest bit of attention. So he let a real radio station have the single, too. And, with no small irony, he chose Zane's old stomping ground - Radio 1.

Even more ironic is that Apple - a company at the forefront of technology - hasn't worked out how to let users share it's content, so you can't hear Zane's first play. Nor can you see the video, or even listen to the song, outside Apple's walled-off app.

Whereas Radio 1 - a lumbering, ancient, publicly-funded broadcaster (also my employer) - bunged Pharrell's song up on the internet as soon as Annie Mac came off air.

So here it is in all its glory.


It's worth listening to the Pharrell interview that follows - just to hear him shut down Annie Mac's question about working with Adele.

Oh, and the song got a live outing at Glastonbury on Saturday, where it sounded like this.

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Apple: What you didn't know...

The space bar on Macs stops working after 1000 presses. After that you have to buy additional spaces through iTunes for 10p each.

Macs don't have an "on" switch... as you approach, they switch themselves on automatically if they judge you to be worthy.

The key combination APPLE+CTRL+BREAK will give your baby diabetes.

Using a Mac makes you 56% more attractive to film star Scarlett Johansson.

More of this nonsense at idiot toys

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