Lana Del Rey gets busy with A$AP Rocky

Lana Del Rey has always had hip-hop elements in her songs, but she's never had a rap star contribute a verse... until now.

Yesterday, she unveiled two new songs: Summer Bummer and Groupie Love, both featuring A$AP Rocky (and on the former, Playboy Carti), and both continue the star's current hot streak.

Summer Bummer is, despite the bollock-awful title, my favourite of the pair. It starts off as a prototypical Lana Del Rey song, with barely-bothered lyrics like "hip-hop in the summer, babe... be my undercover lover, babe."

But then something interesting happens - after A$AP's verse (which he shares with Playboi Carti) the song starts to deconstruct, dissolving into digital noise, with Lana's haunting upper-register holler barely holding the song together.

Groupie Love is a more straightforward, string-drenched ballad, with a chorus that sticks like flypaper.


Speaking to Zane Lowe last night, Lana revealed she'd recorded a bunch of songs with A$AP Rocky but they're mostly just languishing in a cupboard somewhere.

"He travels a lot but sometimes he’s in town for a month and, when he is, I’ll come to the studio and hear what he’s working on and do background vocals on his tracks," said Lana.

"There probably are a lot of tracks somewhere that we’re both on over the years. We do 'em and forget em and if one's better than all of them, like this one, we try to put it out."

Lana then proceeded to FaceTime A$AP Rocky while he was on the toilet, which is a classy move.

Still, with these two tracks alongside Love and Lust For Life, her new album is shaping up to be one of the year's best releases. It's out next Friday on Polydor.

Tweet

Selena Gomez - Fetish

With Bad Liar finally climbing up the UK charts, Selena Gomez has decided to kill its momentum by releasing another single. Pop music, eh?

Anyway, Fetish is a worthy replacement. It doesn't have the quirky wordplay or musical slinkitude of its predecessor, but the chorus is a humdinger.

"You got a festoon for my love," sings La Gomez. "I push you out and you come right back."

"Don't see no point in blaming you," she continues. "If I were you I'd do me too."

The video, meanwhile, is fetishistic in its own way. A lingering, borderline intrusive, close-up of Gomez's lips, it also gives you an appreciation for the clinical excellence of American dentistry.

Tweet

Demi Lovato: Sorry Not Sorry

Here it is. Sorry Not Sorry: The song that Swish Swish aspired to be... A fierce riposte to [persons unknown] that rises above petty payback with a wry sense of wit.

"I'm on fire and I know that it burns," sings Demi Lovato in full-on foghorn mode. "It'd be nice of me to take it easy on you but... nah."

"A lot of people hear this song and they think it's about an ex-boyfriend," the singer told Amazon Music, "but it's actually a song about the haters."

Actually, I'd argue it's a song about realising that haters are simply acting out their own inadequacies, and learning to take pride in your own achievements. Which is a great lesson for us all, is it not?

Tweet

Liam Payne's new single is better than Liam Payne's last single

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call "damning with faint praise".

Get Low is a collaboration with pop alchemist Zedd, which accounts for the sudden uptick in quality. The German DJ's lightness-of-touch keeps the song afloat with a brisk and uncluttered production that'll drift out of a thousand car windows this weekend.

Lyrically, Get Low doesn't plumb the depths of Liam's hopelessly clumsy Strip That Down: A song about sex that makes Carry On Camping seem intellectually sophisticated. But it still contains the following stanza:

I like the way you take me there
I like the way you touch yourself
Don't hold back, I want that
When the water come down, I'ma get in that
Frankly, if I were Liam's missus, I'd rather go bowling.

Tweet

Brilliant new pop from Belgium

Now there's a headline I wasn't expecting to type - but isn't that the beauty of pop? You can suddenly and unexpectedly be swept off your feet by a song, regardless of who recorded it or where they live.

Felix Pallas are that band today: A quartet from Antwerp whose new single, Similarities, is a delicious dose of dusky pop. Throughout, the singer's sweltering falsetto tussles with surging synths, over a sinister lyric about being held prisoner as the "water's rising".

Produced by Chris Zane (Bat For Lashes, Passion Pit, Friendly Fires, Nelly Furtado, etc) the band have branded it "alien synth pop", which is as good a description as anything I can come up with.

HERE IT IS AND STUFF.

Tweet

Wolf Alice get gorgeous on Don't Delete The Kisses

After the incendiary, in-your-face comeback single Yuk Foo, Wolf Alice have spun on their heels and released a shimmering indie-pop song that's quite possibly their best single yet.

Don't Delete The Kisses is "the most synth-heavy tune we've made", the band told Beats 1 - and, sure enough, it sounds like it's been beamed in from the soundtrack to a lost John Hughes movie. Or, more accurately, a John Hughes script shot by Nicholas Winding Refn.

In the spoken-word verses, Ellie Rowsell plays a girl who can't strike up the courage to approach the object of her affections.

I'd like to get to know you
I'd like to take you out
We'd go to the Hail Mary
And afterwards make out
Instead I'm typing you a message
That I know I'll never send
Rewriting old excuses
Delete the kisses at the end

The chorus lets out all that frustrated energy with a cathartic cry of, "Me and you were meant to be in love!"

"I kind of wanted to make one of those head out the window on a long drive tunes," Ellie told Beats 1. "And I wanted to try my hand at like a hold-nothing-back love song. Those were my thoughts. But other than that I just kinda let it go where it wanted to go... I just think if you hold back it will sound worse won't it?"

It's really rather brilliant.


Don't Delete The Kisses comes from Wolf Alice's second album, Visions Of A Life, which is out in September.

The band revealed the (unbelievably creepy) artwork on Twitter last night as they set off on a month-long US tour.

That's a photo of Ellie's aunty Helen playing the classic game of 'dance round the horse's skull in your Sunday best' pic.twitter.com/QqoHLGsHM4

— wolf alice (@wolfalicemusic) July 5, 2017

Tweet

Haim's Little Of Your Love is a sweet pop gem

According to Haim, Little of Your Love song was written as a throwaway contribution to a film soundtrack - but they loved it so much they kept it for themselves. Which, as you'll hear above, was entirely the right decision.

Inspired by those burger joint pop jams of the 50s, with a nod to their love of Madonna's True Blue and a superb rock wig-out in the coda, the single is their most out-and-out pop moment since The Wire.

In other words, it's as magnificent and summery as a cold pint of cider, and should be a handclapping highlight of their Glastonbury set this weekend, where I fully intend to be bopping around like a fanboy.

Tweet

Coldplay, Demi Lovato and the rest of the best of new music Friday

Obviously the new Lorde album is the only new release you need today, but here's a few other tracks worth checking out once you get bored of it on Wednesday afternoon.

1) Coldplay - All I Can Think About Is You
Coldplay are uncharacteristically mellow and muffled in this love song, taken from their new Kaleidoscope EP. It's hardly Chris Martin's finest lyric (he compares himself to a shoe), but Guy Berryman's sinewy, agile bassline is worth the price of admission alone.




2) Jax Jones - Instruction (ft Demi Lovato & Steflon Don)
"If you're the supreme, then I'm Diana Ross," is the best worst lyric since Selena Gomez and "like the battle of Troy, there's nothing subtle here". But this song has such a massive grin plastered all over it's face that it's easy to forgive.

Musically, it's practically a carbon copy of Jax Jones' previous single, You Don't Know Me (especially in the rap-sung prechorus) but why tweak a perfect formula? A strong contender for song of the summer.




3) Arcade Fire - Creature Comfort
I admit, I was really prepared to hate this... After five albums of whining about modern things, Win Butler's "instinct that something isn't right with the human condition" is starting to look less like concern and more like misanthropy.

This song, a sort of electro nursery rhyme about suicide, contains what seems to be a particularly self-serving line about a girl who "filled up the bathtub and put on our first record". But towards the end of the song, Win clarified: "It's not painless. She was a friend of mine, a friend of mine" - and, all of a sudden, my own cyncism was punctured.

I thought Arcade Fire might have lost the power to move me. Turns out I was wrong.





4) George Ezra - Don't Matter Now
A distinctly odd comeback from George Ezra, he of the deep voice and the album inspired by a Eurorail ticket.

It's all mariachi horns and big, dopey backing vocals - as George recites a mantra about switching off from the big, bad world that Arcade Fire live in and having a nice old shindig at his place.

Maybe, given the horrors of the last month, this is just the song we need - like an Agadoo for the Trump era.




5) DJ Khaled - Wild Thoughts (ft Rihanna)
"I know you want to see me naked," sings Rihanna, in a video where she appears with her baps right out. How thoughtful of her to consider our desires in such a forthright manner. I wonder if her next song will also contain the line, "I know you'd like me to put them away once in a while and get on with the job of making incredible pop music."

Because make no mistake, this is not incredible pop music. Sure, it wears the clothes of incredible pop music - the beat from Busta Rhymes' Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See, and the guitar riff from Santana's Maria Maria - but the garments are as threadbare as Rihanna's blouse in the video.




6) Tove Styrke - Say My Name (acoustic)
Still an absolute tune.





7) Calvin Harris - Feels (ft Pharrell and Katy Perry)
This probably won't give Katy Perry the number one she so desperately needs right now, but Calvin's bouncy brand of diet funk is always welcome around here.





8) Hey Violet - Break My Heart
This actually came out two months ago, but Hey Violet's album was released today and contains at least five totally brilliant pop song; including one gallantly called Fuqboi.

The young band have quite an interesting back story: They were once a punk-rock project called Cherri Bomb, before they ditched their singer and signing to 5 Seconds of Summer's record label. There, they started working with Julian Bunetta, who co-wrote and produced all the good One Direction songs, and "went pop".

You can read more about the transformation on Stereogum, or just forget all that nonsense and enjoy the music. Bands are whatever you want them to be, and that's why pop music is great.




9) Jorja Smith - Teenage Fantasy
This was actually out last week, during one of my increasingly frequent lapses in blogging, but the video came out on Monday, giving me the perfect excuse to wang the song into this week's round-up.

Simply a perfect summer soul jam.




10) Dizzee Rascal - Space
As grime emerges as a full-blooded force, Dizzee comes back into the fold with this sparse and tough rap track.

"Can't find enough time to dine on rappers, all of these MCs are looking like tapas," he chides the competition. "Ain't no point in playin' it safe." Well, quite.

There you go, then. And now it is time to go back to the Lorde album. See you next week...

Tweet

Fickle Friends - Glue

Fickle Friends, a band whose name sounds like a pitch for a Channel 4 reality show, have spent the last two years releasing a succession of solid gold bangers.

Let's take a look at the evidence "to date":

Swim - A banger

Could Be Wrong - A banger

Cry Baby - A banger

Brooklyn - Sadbanger

Hello Hello - Grade A, Radio 1-playlisted enormobanger

The Brighton-based band, fronted by Natassja Shiner, have just released their latest effort - Glue - which is a pulse-quickening summer jam about snogging in public (and dragging your partner to the bedroom afterwards).

As you might have guessed, it's a corking pop song. And there are at least three choruses to contend with, so pace yourself as you listen.


At this rate, their debut album is going to be so banging it'll register on the Richter scale.

Tweet

Hey, you: The Killers are back and they are not messing about.

Except with this conch shell, for reasons unknown

It doesn't seem like five years since The Killers last released an album, possibly because Mr Brightside is still one of the UK's most-streamed songs of all time - but, yes, a cursory glance at Wikipedia confirms they've been on a self-imposed hiatus since 2012's Battle Born.

That all ends TODAY, with the premiere of their new single The Man. "It's pretty funky," Brandon Flowers told Annie Mac, who premiered the song earlier tonight. "Funkier than anything we've ever done before."

He's not wrong. The Man is a strutting peacock of a song, that delves deep into the new-wavey, 1980s references The Killers plundered so well on Hot Fuss - the choppy guitars of Talking Heads, the synth stylings of New Order, and the sugar rush choruses of imperial phase Duran Duran. There's even a nod to the late, great David Bowie ("Faaaaame!"), whose Hunky Dory Brandon once referred to as, "the most important record to me, ever."

But amidst that pile-up of influence, The Man is 100% The Killers and, in a way I couldn't have imagined, a stunning return to form. Judging by the lyrics, Brandon knows it:

I got gas in the tank
I got money in the bank
I got news for you baby
You're looking at the man."
Even though the chorus is almost 100% tongue-in-cheek (compared to, say, the hollow self-aggrandisement of DJ Khaled's The One), you can't deny he's got his swagger back*.

Amazing.


* Or is the lyric a thinly-vieled attack on the Trump administration? The references to fossil fuels, untold riches and deluded self-belief certainly fit... And there's a lyric about being "USDA certified lean", the USDA being the department of agriculture, which is facing some of the deepest cuts under the new president. The Killers have always had a Springsteen-esque impulse to represent blue collar America, so the lyric could easily be read in that context.

Tweet

New Wolf Alice: Yuk Foo

"See you down the moshpit, hehehehehehehehe" wrote Wolf Alice, as they uploaded this song to YouTube. And you can see why - this is a garment-rending primal scream of a record, aimed at every patronising comment and internet troll who made Ellie Rowsell's shit list over the last five years. The title, as you may have noticed, is a spoonerism.

"I guess it's just kind of an anthem of frustration," Ellie told Radio 1 who premiered (a heavily censored version of) the single earlier tonight.

"If anything annoys you, this is how I would imagine I would like to react, and probably can't."

You can the sweary mix of the single above, and the "radio edit" and interview below.

Tweet

Katy Perry, Liam Payne and Camilla Cabello: The best and worst of New Music Friday

A mixed bag this week. There's a lot of "third buzz track before the album" activity, with the drop in quality that implies. But some gems are hidden in the mix, so stick around.

Katy Perry ft Nicki Minaj - Swish Swish
Stoking the flames of the Katy Perry / Taylor Swift feud, this is a no-holds-barred diss track. Sample lyric: "Karma’s not a liar, she keeps receipts."

But like Bad Blood before it, the red mist has blinded Katy to her better pop instincts. This is a depressingly pedestrian house groove with neither the bark nor the bite promised by the premise.

It's left to Nicki Minaj to give us some perspective: "Silly rap beefs just give me more cheques".




Selena Gomez - Bad Liar
As previously discussed, this is perfect.





Muse - Dig Down
Which finally answers the question, "What if Muse sounded like Take That?" The answer, as it turns out, is bloody brilliant.





Liam Payne - Strip That Down
Just what we needed: A British Jason Derulo.




RAYE - The Line
I saw RAYE perform this acoustically the other day, and was really impressed. But the single is itchy and over-produced, which smothers the song. It's a strange treatment for a song that discusses the boredom of waiting in line for a club ("yeah, we look like sickness, barely moving inches").




Pumarosa - Lion's Den
A hugely ambitious, six-minute single from doom-laden indie quintent Pumarosa. Like a heavier version of Radiohead's Pyramid Song (which is a recommendation, in case you were wondering).






Danger Mouse ft Run The Jewels and Big Boi - Chase Me
Built around samples from the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion's Bellbottoms and taken from Edgar "Hot Fuzz" Wright's new film Baby Driver, this explodes out of the speakers like a molotov cocktail of awesome.




Royal Blood - Hook, Line & Sinker
A retreat to safe ground after James Bondian thrills of Lights Out. It probably "works better live".




Cigarettes After Sex - Each Time You Fall In Love
This woozy, hazy ballad about doomed love in LA sounds like an unholy union between St Etienne and Lana Del Rey.




Camilla Cabello - Crying In The Club
Interpolates Genie In A Bottle but otherwise sounds like a composite of every pop trope of the last five years. Disappointing, given the buzz about the former Fifth Harmony singer's supposedly flawless pop instincts.




Plan B - In The Name Of Man
"All the soap in the world won't wash away the blood that's on your hands." A song about the religious certitude that sent the UK and US into Iraq 14 years ago. It's safe to say Plan B is not a fan of Tony Blair.




Bebe Rexha ft Lil' Wayne - The Way I Are
"I'll never sing like Whitney but I still want to dance with somebody."

The week's best lyric squandered on the week's worst song.




Oh Wonder - Heavy
A real treat, this. Oh Wonder really flex their vocal muscles, darting around mushrooming synth lines that mirror the heart-bursting love-struck lyrics: "I could hold you endlessly," they swoon. "Stop the world, it's only you." Beautiful.

Well, that's quite enough of that. See you next week!

Tweet

Selena Gomez may be a bad liar, but she's a great pop star

There is so much to love about Selena Gomez's new song, Bad Liar: The way the lyrics trip over themselves like a lovestruck teenager; the brazen lift of Talking Heads' Psycho Killer; the borderline ridiculousness of the lyric: "like the battle of Troy, there's nothing subtle here."

Oh, and the post-chorus hook "all my feelings on fire, guess I'm a bad liar," is an early contender for pop moment of 2017.

Selena has never been a big belter in the vocal department but, like Janet Jackson before her, she's turned that into an asset. This subtle, sultry groove has an whispered intimacy that, say, Adele could never hope to achieve.

It's great to have her back.

Tweet

Plan B is back - but which Plan B?

When Radio 1 announced it's Big Weekend line-up last month, one name really stood out: Plan B, who had been given a headline slot five years after his last album, Ill Manors. Clearly, the station's head of music, Chris Price, had been played hear his new material; and walked away impressed. Very impressed.

Tonight, we got to hear why, when Ben Drew premiered a new song, In The Name Of Man on Mistajam's Radio 1 show. So which Plan B is it? The furious polemicist of Ill Manors, or the soul storyteller of Strickland Banks. In the end, it's a bit of both.

In The Name Of Man is a broiling, slow-motion scowl of a song; as the singer rails against fanatacism: "Hey man, what's the use? There's no talking to you when you think it's God's words that you preach," he sings. "Everything you love, you hurt."



"I wrote that a good few years ago, when we first invaded Iraq," he told Mistajam. "It was seeing the media footage of, sorry to take it really dark, but this song's about dead children. i don't see how we can ever excuse death or harm [to] long children. But we do. We say our armies are invading these countries for the greater good - but I don't think it's as black and white as that."

He promised the forthcoming video, which he directed himself, would also address the plight of immigrants, many of whom who die in their attempt to get to the shores of the UK. "I don't know when that is ever right, to allow that to happen to young people," he said.

So it's a sombre, excoriating comeback - but In The Name Of Man is pointedly not the first single.

"When I listen to this song, I don't necessarily think, Hey this is a radio hit'. I don't expect to get chart success with it. But it's not all about that Sometimes you've just got to come and say something to the world that sparks a conversation."

Either way, Plan B's voice is better than it's ever been, that beautiful Smokey Robinson tenor scarred with gravel and fury, while the music reminds me of Massive Attack's collaborations with Smokey Robinson.

Looks like Radio 1 made the right call.

Tweet

Katy Perry - Bon Appetit (Muna Remix)

Not so much a remix as an entirely new Muna song with Katy Perry on vocals.

10/10 everyone.

Tweet

Chance The Rapper x Kaytranada = 🔥?

Last September, Chance The Rapper told fans that he'd given his track They Say to Kaytranada for a tweak and a pinch, after which it'd be ready for release. That release, he said, was coming "soon".

This was news to Kaytranada who posted the following message to Twitter, presumably after being deluged with messages about the song.

i don't have the final version of "And They Say" so Leave Me Alone for now

— KAYTRANADA (@KAYTRANADA) September 26, 2016

Well, just eight short months later, the Canadian producer has finally gotten around to finishing whatever it was he was doing to the song - and it has premiered on Pharrell's OTHERtone program on Beats 1 Radio.

Was it worth the wait? Put it this way, you can see why it was left off the tracklisting for Chance's Grammy-nominated mixtape, Coloring Book. The central lyric is: "What they say? They say 'ner, ner, ner, n-ner, ner, ner, ne, ner.'" (although there's a great bit about cursing "like a chimney" in the verse).

Still, it's a slick, summery production with, in typical Chance fashion, a gospel choir towards the end. Back when singles had b-sides, this would have been hailed as a great b-side. Now, it's just another track that's appeared on the internet for some reason.

You can listen to a radio rip below, because 2017.

Tweet

Watch out, Courtney Barnett's about

Aussie alt-rocker Courtney Barnett has taken a break from recording her second album to gift us with a new song, How To Boil An Egg, which is actually not new at all, but eight years old.

"I used to perform this song at all the open mics when I was 21," she said. "It never got recorded, so for personal-posterity I updated it and made this version recently when I was bunkered up in the bush doin’ some demos for my next album. It's a songwriting experiment that doesn’t really belong anywhere else."

Based around a slack rockabilly riff, the song is further proof Barnett's innate lyrical abilities, painting a vivid picture of an artist on the skids. "All my clothes in milk crates, I don't sleep for days," she sings. "Ah, tell me, tell me, tell me / When's it gonna change?"

Tweet

The National are top of my #NewMusicFriday playlist

Here it is, then. My (almost) weekly trawl through the release schedule, in which gems are uncovered and turds are buried.

1) The National - The System Only Dreams In Total Darkness
Standing head and shoulders above everything else this week, The National's new single is a swirling vortex of indie curlicues, which builds to a brassy climax, where Matt Beringer declaims: "I can't explain it any other, any other way".

He's described it as "an abstract portrait of a weird time we’re in". I'm just calling it beautiful.




2) Miley Cyrus - Malibu
In which Miley says, "forget the tongue-wagging, boob-baring, perma-twerking controversy magnet, I am in fact an delicate and innocent country-pop crossover artist."

And, to be fair, it works.




3) Calvin Harris - Rollin' (ft Future and Khalid)
"Bubbling summery discofunk" seems to be the theme for Calvin's recently-announced fourth album Funk Wav Bounces Vol 1 (awful title). This latest single would sound great at any poolside party, which shows how far Calvin has come since he emerged as a pasty-skinned teenager from Dumfries.




4) Imagine Dragons - Whatever It Takes
There's something of the Ed Sheeran about the way Dan Reynolds rap-sings the verses of this song, but it rises above that comparison with a truly fist-pumping chorus.

The middle 8 contains a lot of lyrics about punctuation, for some reason.




5) Felix Jaehn - Hot2Touch (ft Hight, Alex Aiono)
A bit of disco fluff that merits inclusion for the lyric "my heart's like a broken cassette".




6) Harry Styles - From The Dining Table
Harry Styles debut album is out today - and I wrote about it at length on the BBC this morning. In brief, it's a stodgy 1970s rock album with a few moments of real beauty. The closing track is one of my favourites, featuring one of Styles' most delicate and heartbroken lyrics; and a beautiful string interlude in the middle.




7) DNCE ft Nicki Minaj - Kissing Strangers
This has been out for a while, but gets an entertaining new video today, so in it goes...




8) Sub Focus ft Alma - Don't You Feel It
A solid, if somewhat unremarkable, summer jam.




9) Now, Now - SGL
US radio station NPR described this as "a heart-throbbing pop song with a karaoke-bar blast radius", and who am I to argue?




10) Sigrid - Don't Kill My Vibe (Live on Later)
This is a bit of a cheat, because Sigrid's EP came out last week. But this Jools Holland performance is one of those "oh, I get it now" moments, where the singer's charisma bursts through the screen and brings the song vividly to life.

Which, it turns out, is exactly why she sparked a record label bidding war last year - and there's a fascinating account of how Island beat the competition to get her signature over on Music Business Worldwide.

And that's your lot. Not a vintage week, by all accounts. But don't forget the Paramore album is out today, which kind of makes up for everything else.

Tweet

The best and the rest of #NewMusicFriday

It's a fairly quiet week overall, but here are some songs that were released today (or maybe two days ago, depending on the stature of the artist and their willingness to adhere to record industry convention).

1) LCD Soundsystem - Call The Police
It's like NWA never happened.




2) Loote - High Without Your Love
Hailing from New York, Loote are Emma Lov and Jackson Foote (so you can see how they got that name). Their new single is reminiscent of The Chainsmokers, with all traces of douche removed. A lovely little pop song.




3) J Hus - Common Sense
Love, love, love this.




4) Niall Horan - Slow Hand
The Pointer Sisters' prayers have been answered.




5) Sigrid - Fake Friends
Norway's Sigrid Raabe only started writing songs four years ago, when her brother (also a musician) told her he needed a new track for a gig that was taking place 24 hours later. She's a quick learner, though. This caustic call out to two-faced friends is a hugely arresting piece of Scandipop.

FYI: Sigrid's debut EP is out today and you should buy it.




6) Emily Warren - Hurt By You
Emily Warren is The Chainsmokers' secret weapon - the voice behind some of their best hooks, and the writer behind several more. Her debut single is nothing like that, though - a slinky, soulful affair with a cunning twist in the chorus.




7) Hoops - Sun's Out
This is a song that appears to be a lost cassette demo by Echo and the Bunnymen, circa 1985 - but which turns out to be one of several shimmering indie gems on the debut EP by Indiana-based band Hoops. How queer.




8) Haim - Want You Back
Getting better with every listen...




9) TLC - Haters
Declaration of interest: I put £10 towards TLC's new album on Kickstarter, giving me a 0.003% stake in this song. Sounds a bit like Charli XCX at 33rpm, which is neither praise nor a criticism.




10) Halsey - Eyes Closed
Halsey manages to sound both menacing and drowsy at the same time on this track, a sort of "emos with synths" pop dirge. It came as no surprise to learn that The Weeknd was involved in some capacity.

And that's your lot. The Blondie album is out today, as well, and deserves a quick spin even if you have no recollection of Debbie Harry & co in their 1970s heyday.

Tweet

A few too many thoughts on Haim's comeback single, Want You Back

HAIM ARE BACK!

Which is a bit like when Haim came back last week, only this time they've brought along a proper single instead of an intense studio "jam".

So, what does Want You Back have in store? Well, first of all, it sounds irrefutably like Haim. There's no mistaking this for the new Katy Perry or something "featuring" Ellie Goulding. It's all stuttering funk and starlight harmonies - but for a sparse song, it's very busy and you'll need a few listens before your brain focuses on the actual song elements.

Admittedly, I first heard the song on a crappy radio while building a Hot Wheels track for my son - which is probably not the scenario the band intended, but which equally serves as a good litmus test. This is not an immediate, grab you by the balls, radio smash. But after sitting down and paying attention to the song on "proper" speakers and a set of headphones, I'm hooked.

For those of you who need more guidance before hitting the play button, I've made a list.

PRO: Copious use of handclaps
CON: Could do with more handclaps

PRO: Fluttering, Lindsey Buckingham-style arpeggio
CON: Too much Tusk, not enough Rumours

PRO: Este's funkatronic slap bass
CON: Being unable to see Este's bass-face on the audio stream

PRO: The lyric, "I'll take the fall and the fault in us"
CON: Actually, all the lyrics are pretty good

PRO: Impeccable, interlocking vocals
CON: Too "busy" for daytime radio?

PRO: Not a cover of the Jackson 5 song
CON: Not a cover of the Bananarama song

PRO: Sounds like eight songs at once
CON: Sounds like eight songs at once

Hope that clears everything up.

Tweet