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?

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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

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Chance The Rapper performs in an office

Of all the multifarious "live session" set-ups; NPR's Tiny Desk concerts are among my favourite. The artists are literally dragged into an office, propped up against a bookcase and made to perform amongst the print-outs and coffee mugs of a working radio station in Washington, DC.

Chance The Rapper just did his stint at the coalface, having played to 23,000 people at an outdoor theatre in Virginia the night before.

His performance was interrupted by an announcement on the building's tannoy, but he laughed it off and delivered a low-key, subtly moving performance of Juke Jam and the Stevie Wonder classic They Don't Know What I Know.

Watch the full thing below.

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Billie Eilish is a girl on fire

If you haven't heard of 15-year-old pop prodigy Billie Eilish yet, you're missing out.

The LA native has lit up my "most played" list this year with a handful of smart, dark pop songs, in which she fantasises about things like killing her boyfriend and burning his car. You know, typical teenage stuff.

Her new single, Watch, came out last Friday and it's packed with more Melodrama than Lorde's entire album. "Go ahead and watch my heart burn," she trills, "with the fire that you started in me".

Listen below.


If you want to know more about Billie, here's some highlights from her first forays into the media.

Billie wrote her first song when she was four. It was about falling into a black hole [Interview]

Her neighbour asked her to star in his homemade horror movies when she was six, which isn't creepy at all. [Vice]

For the last eight years, she's been a member of the fancypants Los Angeles Children's Chorus. [Teen Vogue]

As well as singing, Billie is a trained dancer, who used to practice 11 hours a week until "my hip decided to explode" last year. [WFN Music]

But don't worry, she can still do this:

fuck outta here

A post shared by billie eilish (@wherearetheavocados) on Jul 18, 2016 at 5:24pm PDT

Billie writes all her songs with her older brother Finneas. "Him and I get along really well, so it's perfect," she says, before basically admitting no-one else will put up with her. "I'm a super-particular person and I always have to have stuff my way." [Triple J]

Her breakthrough song was the lullaby-like Ocean Eyes, which Finneas wrote for his band, but gave to Billie when she needed a piece for her dance class. "We put it on SoundCloud with a free download link next to it so my dance teacher could access it," she says. "We had no intentions for it, really. But basically overnight a ton of people started hearing it and sharing it." [Teen Vogue]

The song has now had 1.96m streams on Soundcloud, winning her a record deal with Interscope and a slot on the 13 Reasons Why soundtrack. [Soundcloud]

Her best song to date is Bellyache, which she describes as "a flat-out a song about murder". [Ladygunn]

It probably goes without saying, but you shouldn't take the lyrics literally. "You don’t have to kill people to write a song about killing people," says Billie. "I'm not going to kill people." [Billboard]

In fact, the song has a deeper meaning. "Like, if you do something to impress somebody else or because your parents want you to or because whatever, you’re going to end up alone one day... with a bellyache." [Ones To Watch]

Her favourite colour is yellow, as she will explain to you at length. "I think of myself as yellow because I think a lot of people used to maybe doubt yellow or not like it because it’s one of those colors that people just sort of hate. Nobody likes it and it’s such a good colour! I don’t even know how to describe it. I just feel like I am yellow. I do and say what I want and I don't really care if people like it or not. That makes me yellow." [Popcrush]

So there you go: That is Billie Eilish "in a nutshell", if the nutshell was about 600 words of text on a stunningly popular music blog.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Listen to Lana Del Rey's North Korea song

Last month, while driving home from the Coachella Music Festival, Lana Del Rey stopped to write a song about her "complex feelings" after "spending the weekend dancing whilst watching tensions w North Korea mount."

It went. A little. Something. Like this:

A post shared by Lana Del Rey (@lanadelrey) on Apr 15, 2017 at 2:39am PDT

Last night, she released a finished version of the track which may or may not be taken from her fourth-coming album, Lust For Life. It's no great artistic leap forward but Lana is medically incapable of writing an uncatchy song.

Lyrically, she likens the loved-up atmosphere of Coachella to the "socially-conscious" (smashed off their tits) punters at Woodstock in 1969. The hope and optimism for humanity is still present, she suggests, but the world is still pretty awful.

Then Lana describes what she would give up (everything) in order to go to heaven and sit next to God, going: "WTF, God?"

It's better than my description makes it sound.


Oh, and if you'd like to squint at some handwritten lyrics while playing the above video, then you're in luck.

New song: Coachella- Woodstock in my mind https://t.co/I4JJ8CP2e6 pic.twitter.com/s8cplnW9QI

— Lana Del Rey (@LanaDelRey) May 15, 2017

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Video: Paramore - Told You So

Paramore's new album After Laughter - announced out of the blue a fortnight ago - is shaping up to be a cracker. Lead single Hard Times is the best pop song about utter misery since Dancing On My Own (the original, obvs), zigging and zagging all over the chart with its new wavey guitar riffs and staccato vocal chops.

The latest single, Told You So, picks up where that left off. OK, the chorus might not be as ridden with earworms but it's a solid B+.

It premiered earlier today on Beats 1, where lead singer Hayley Williams explained it had been a tricky song to write.

"That was one of the first pieces of music that Taylor [York - guitarist] sent me," she told Zane Lowe.

"I had a little thumb-drive, and I would just drive around listening to it, and especially back and forth from Taylor's house. And I would sing little rhythmic things to myself. They didn't make sense. There were no words. But this is one that really intimidated me because I was like, 'I have all these melody ideas because there's no so much melody going on and so much rhythm going on. It's so inspiring. But how am I going to fit what I feel into that?' It took a minute."

The video - which is a huge dollop of fun - was directed by drummer Zac Farro, basing it on the car journeys the band took to and from recording sessions last year.

"Zac noticed that my anxiety and overall state was just a lot more peaceful on those drives," Hayley Williams told The FADER, "and mentioned to me that it made him happy to see me rest for a moment. It means a lot that they conceptualised a video around a passing moment we had as friends."

Awwwww.

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Video: Billie Eilish - Bellyache

Billie Eilish is only 15 years old, but she's already a formidable talent. Just check out last year's debut single Ocean Eyes, an astonishingly assured piece of songwriting, in which she compares falling in love to plummeting off a cliff under "napalm skies".

Her new single, Bellyache, is even more striking. I'd call it a murder ballad, except it's not a ballad: It's a shadowy, brooding pop banger that fantasises about finishing off her lover and leaving his body to rot in the gutter. Less "psycho killer, q'uest que c'est", and more "Oui oui, je suis un psycho killer, et puis quoi?"

The video picks up after the gory bits, with Billie on the run from the law, dragging a trailer of her possessions behind her, and doing a victory dance in the desert like any normal murderer would.

But, as the singer told Vice, Bellyache is actually a song "about the concept of guilt.

"When you do things in the moment because you feel so strongly about them, in the end you're left with the decision you made.

"That line: 'I thought that I'd feel better, but now I gotta bellyache' is about how you kinda know that you're the worst but you don't care. It's about a psychopath who regrets being a psychopath but doesn't really care.

The song is pretty much perfect and the video is just as riveting. Billie Eilish is a star in the making.

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Perfect pop from Fickle Friends

Brighton band Fickle Friends are officially a good pop thing™. Formed in 2013, they almost instantly wrote a classic - Swim - all cascading guitar riffs and shimmering vocals from the memorably-monikered Natassja Shiner.

The song floated to the top of the Hype Machine charts, gaining over a million streams on Soundcloud and helping the band onto 23 festival bills, despite having no manager and no label. They've since signed to Polydor, which has an impeccable track record with pop artists, from Girls Aloud to Ellie Goulding via Take That and Haim.

Amazingly, they owe everything to Jamie Oliver - who liked the band so much, he forked out the cash for them to record Swim.

"He caught us at the beginning and that song helped us a lot. We love Jamie — he's great," Natassja told The Sun. (As someone who has eaten at Jamie's Italian approximately twice, I would like to claim 0.0000000000000000043% credit for the band's career.)

Anyway, fast forward to 2017 and the band are preparing to release their debut album. In time honoured tradition, they are issuing a single to promote it, and that single is called Hello Hello - which means it's twice as good as that Adele song.

If you like Dragonette or Metronomy or songs you can sing along to, then this will be right up your proverbial alley.


Fans of handwritten lyrics will appreciate this Instagram post the band shared last night.

A post shared by Fickle friends (@ficklefriendsuk) on Mar 8, 2017 at 5:01am PST

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Praise the Lorde

Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor (that's Lorde to you and me) is back with a new single, and it's something of a corker.

Called Green Light, it's slightly disorientating on your first listen - the shift from the sadballad verse to the house piano bridge to the arms-akimbo glitter cannon chorus is somewhat odd. But stick with it, you'll be honking your horn every time it comes on the radio.

I've written extensively about the song over on the BBC, so I won't bang on about it here any more. Here's the video. Don't try this at home, kids.

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Listen to Katy Perry's new single, Chained To The Rhythm

Here it is, starring a hungry hamster, the lyric video for Katy Perry's big comeback: Chained To The Rhythm. Built on a bed of bubbling bass and a muted, 80s piano, it's the very definition of a subtlebanger: More of a groove than a song. The chorus, in particular, sits on the tonic note - giving it a mantra-like quality. But it's stuck in my head after one listen, so that's something. An irresistible earmworm.

The track was produced by Max Martin and written by Sia - which is something of a surprise, since the bewigged Aussie superstar previously said she had clashed with Perry in the studio.

"She's also quite dominant, and she's extremely analytical," Sia told Rolling Stone last year. "I actually quit within the first hour of our first session. I was like, 'Can we be friends if this doesn't work? Like our whole songwriting dynamic?'

"And she was like, 'I love it. It's like a puzzle to me. It's like a crossword.' And I was like, 'But this is boring for me. The analysis is totally boring for me. It feels like the enemy of creativity.'

"It was so cool to be able to have that conversation on why we wrote in such entirely different ways. I'm glad I didn't give up on it because I actually did get a song out of it, and we also really had a laugh because we were able to be authentic."

Maybe this is that song?

Premiered on glitterball jukebox listening posts that Perry distributed around the globe earlier this week, it's now available to stream and download - and she'll give the premiere performance at this Sunday's Grammys.

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The new Charli XCX video will twist your brain grapes

Charli XCX features on the new single by Japanese production legend Yasutaka Nakata and, true to form, it's bloody weird.

To get you up to speed: Nakata is to J-pop what Grimes is to the western equivalent. He's scored eight number one albums in his home country, mostly with girl band Perfume, by splicing madcap synth tunes (think Sonic the Hedgehog soundtrack) with dizzying, chopped-up vocals. It's an acquired taste, to be sure, but much more palatable than the juvenile nonsense that permeates most J-pop.

His latest tune, Crazy Crazy, is even more accessible, thanks to Charli's peerless pop instincts input (the chorus, in particular, is a bubblegum masterpiece). Co-vocals come from Japanese model-turned-singer Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, who is one of Nakata's most prominent protégées.

The video is as bizarre as the tune is hyperactive, with the three musicians' faces pasted (badly) onto the bodies of nubile models, who perform the song in a practice studio.

"I hope everyone enjoys the weird world we created in this video!" Nakata told The Fader. "It presented a few challenges — it was very hard to perform only using my face, so I tried to vary my expressions as much as I could."

Watch it below. But fair warning: You may need to listen to Adele for an hour afterwards to unscramble your brain.

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New music: Syd - Body

Things you need to know about Syd and her excellent new single, Body,

• Her real name is Sydney Bennett, which sounds more like a janitor than a pop star.
  
• You might know her as "Syd Tha Kyd" - singer in Grammy-nominated neo-soul band The Internet.
  
• Her uncle co-wrote Shabba Ranks' Mr Loverman.
  
• She built a recording studio in her bedroom at the age of 14.
  
• Syd publicly came out in the video for Cocaine.
  
• She once shared potentially libellous views on Alicia Keys' sexuality with LA Weekly.
  
• Her solo material is fantastic.
  
• Like, really, really good.
  
• Syd told Zane Lowe she wants Body to be the "baby-making anthem of 2017"
  
• If you like Drake, Tinashe and Lana Del Rey, you'll like this.
  
• That's it for now.
  

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Young Thug has made the best video of 2017... by not showing up

I can't say I care much for the song, but Young Thug's video for Wyclef Jean is a stroke of accidental genius.

It was going to be a pretty conventional rap/trap promo clip - girls in bikinis, a performance by a poolside, you know the drill. But then Young Thug "forgot" to turn up. For 10 hours. And, when he eventually did arrive on set, he refused to get out of his car.

Rather than scrap the video, director Ryan Staake took the existing footage and created a "behind the scenes" music video, explaining the litany of disasters in a series of title cards. It's a bit like that documentary on the making of Apocalypse Now, only more deranged.

Amazingly, Young Thug approved this endeavour and it is now the official video for Wyclef Jean. Much to Ryan's surprise.

"I honestly had no idea that this thing was coming out until it came out," he told Rolling Stone. "I had a sense that, 'OK, I've delivered it, they've paid the final invoice, things seem good,' but based on the way things had gone, I wasn't ready to get my hopes up."

Watch the full clip below - then read the whole interview with Ryan. he deserves a medal, never mind an MTV moonman.

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Maggie Rogers astonished Pharrell ... now she'll astonish you, too

If you've seen it, you won't forget it: The moment a New York student played Pharrell a song and gasted his flabber.

Her name was Maggie Rogers and that viral video launched her career. Well, kind of... She'd already released two folk albums, which relied heavily on the much-maligned banjo. But her new music, inspired by a Damascene conversion to dance music, took those basic sounds and created something genuinely new and (crucially) great. That's what made Pharrell's ears prick up.


Rogers, as you can see above, found the whole experience excruciating. "I felt like I was showing my homework," she told the NME. "It was very uncomfortable listening to my music in front of my peers, then you add a camera crew and one of the most powerful music influencers. I pretty much picked a spot on the floor and stared at it. I didn’t really know what was happening or how excited he was until I saw the video... and I’ve only really seen it once. We’re not in touch; That was my whole interaction with him."

After the video went viral, Rogers worried she'd become known as "the Pharrell girl". To be brutally honest, that's going to be the case for the foreseeable future - but luckily she has the material to back it up.

Her second single, Dog Years, was further evidence of her ability to fuse memorable melodies with inventive production. The new one, On + Off, veers even further into pop territory. There's a hint of Sia in the chorus, but Sia wouldn't be able to resist smashing that hook over your head. Rogers is elusive... Every time you think you've got a grip on the song, it shakes you off and beckons you back for more.

It's devious. It's delicious. I can't resist.


On + Off is track three on Now That The Light Is Fading, Rogers' debut EP. It "drops" on 17th February.

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Janelle Monae samples the Jackson 5 on new song

Janelle Monae is just one of several artists contributing tracks to Baz Luhrmann's Netflix series The Get Down, which looks at the rise of hip-hop in inner city New York four decades ago (others on the soundtrack include Nas, Miguel and Michael Kiwanuka).

Her effort is a riff on the Jackson 5's epic 8-minute funk jam Hum Along and Dance, which is also featured in the show. She explained more to Beats 1:

"I don’t really do a lot of sampling, but they had the rights to the Jackson 5's Hum Along and Dance, so this was a sample I worked with Jeff Bhasker [Uptown Funk, All of the Lights, Run This Town]. Once we got in the studio together, we just picked parts that we loved and that’s how we made the music.

"So it was inspired by the Jackson 5, and I just basically put Janelle Monae on it, but I wanted to keep the essence of Jackson 5. Michael is one of my heroes. As I was recording this song, I was envisioning a world where color [she means "colour"] was not the root of... the center [she means "centre"] of attention. It wasn't about black and white, green and yellow, but we were all on the dance floor together living and breathing as one."

You can hear an excerpt of the song, as well as a pretty tedious interview, below.

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Tove Lo is cool for the summer

She's not the perfect one (she's never been) but she has her moments. And here's one of them...

Subtler and slinkier than the power-pop of her debut album, Tove Lo's new single is a revelation, as the former infatuation junkie keeps her distance from a hapless suitor.

"I'm a cool girl," she sings, "Ice cold, I roll my eyes at you."

Apparently the song, itself called Cool Girl, was triggered by Rosamund Pike going totally nuts in David Fincher's latest film.

"I got the first inspiration from the Gone Girl movie," she told Rolling Stone. "She's sitting there talking about: 'He wanted a cool girl, so I ate pizza. I drank beer. I made a size two. I didn't give a fuck that he checked out other women.

"I was thinking about it, and it's really true. Why do we try to be someone we're not to make someone love us? Would you want to fake yourself for the rest of your life? That's fucked up. Even though she's creepy, I kind of thought it was funny that it's just very common to see that."

Listen below:

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Banks returns with the warped and NSFW anthem I F--- WIth Myself

Banks - the queen of emo R&B - is back with a frankly disturbing new song, called Fuck With Myself. It premiered on Zane Lowe's show earlier today, swiftly followed by a creepy video from Philippa Price - the visual artist behind Rihanna's Brits performance.

It's... well, take a look.


I've watched that a couple of times now and a few moments really stick: the choke-hold, the tongue, the dismembered head, the careless application of make-up. But I'm still not really sure what to think about the song.

So I turned to the internet, to see if anyone could speak my brain. Turns out, they're all as confused as I am.

:: "Holy Shit" - Vice
:: "Ultra creepy" - DIY
:: "She's baaaaaack" - Idolator
:: "Demented-looking" - Fuse
:: "FKA Twigs meets American Horror Story" - Breaking More Waves
:: "Deeply fucking horrifying" - Baebel
:: "Very reassuring" Dots and Dashes
:: "Her best yet" - Sidewalk Hustle

So congratulations for creeping everyone out with the video. But what about the actual song?

It's heavy but minimal; with icy, stabbing synths underscoring Banks's brutal vocals. The hook ("I fuck with myself more than anyone else") is instantly indelible, but it's not exactly "sing it in the lift" material.

Perhaps people were underwhelmed - although I found the song improved when I stopped watching the video. In particular, I like the sentiments of strength and self-confidence from an artist whose previous songs have frequently touched on other people's ability to dictate her state of mind.

She explained the song's genesis on Zane Lowe's show earlier today.

"This was the last song I wrote on the record. I was completely drained. I didn't think I had any more in me, and I was planing on working on a song I had already finished.

"I was diving into my fear of what could I put out first - I've changed a lot, I've developed a lot and I guess I was just venting.

"My dear friend and collaborator Tim Anderson was in the studio with me. After I was done on my little rant, he was like, 'Do you want me to read you some of the statements you just said?'

"And then he said I'd said, 'I fuck with myself more than anybody else.' It just felt so perfect for that day and I needed it so bad. So that's how the song was birthed."

The song is out now, and a new Banks album follows in September.

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