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...

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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!

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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.

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Kelis returns - and the rest of #NewMusicFriday: 17 March 2017

Here we go again...

1) TCTS - Do It Like Me (ft Kelis & Sage The Gemini)
This is an absolute monster. Kelis, as usual, turns everything she touches to gold.




2) Clean Bandit ft Zara Larsson - Symphony
Speaking of Kelis, this lifts the lyrical conceit of her 2010 song ("before you, my whole life was acapella, now a symphony's the only thing to sing") and runs with it. Being Clean Bandit, there are plenty of symphonic strings to hammer the metaphor home.

Not destined to dominate the charts like Rockabye, but a barnstorming pop song nonetheless.




3) Feist - Pleasure
"I was raw and so were the takes," says Feist of her new album, Pleasure. "Our desire was to record that state without guile or go-to's and to pin the songs down with conviction and our straight up human bodies."

It cetainly comes across in this single - which is simultaneously scratchy, lo-fi and utterly thrilling. Like all the best songs, it starts as a lullaby and ends like a riot.




4) Tinashe - Flame
Things haven't really taken off for Kentucky's Tinashe Jorgenson Kachingwe so far - but this song deserves an audience. "Tell me that you've still got a flame for me and we can let it burn," she trills over a discarded Carly Rae Jepsen beat. Recommended.




5) Kasabian - You're In Love With A Psycho
This made me do a big, affectionate chuckle on the tube this morning. The lyrics are deliberately preposterous ("I'm like the taste of macaroni on a seafood stick"???) but it's nice to have Kasabian back.




6) Pond - The Weather
If Kasabian have you in the mood for a bit of psych-rock, this dreamy, kaleidoscopic track from Perth's Pond fits the bill nicely. It will not surprise you to learn it was produced by Tame Impala's Kevin Parker.




7) Mura Masa ft Charli XCX - 1 Night
Neither artist's greatest moment, but a perfectly serviceable indie-pop jam for Side B of your latest mixtape.




8) Fenne Lily - What's Good?
Self-taught songstress Fenne Lily impresses on this achingly beautiful ballad: "Tell me why good things die," she pleads, her vocals quivering over a lonely, plucked guitar. "Stay the night - because I need this more than I knew. More than I'd like to". Heartbreaking.





9) Machine Gun Kelly feat G-Eazy and Kehlani - Good Life
As mindless and insubstantial as the film it soundtracks (Fate of the Furious), this will undoubtedly be a huge hit.




10) Linkin Park - Battle Symphony
I'm still mystified by Linkin Park's attempt to become OneRepublic. I mean, they do it well - but to what end?

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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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The best and worst of New Music Friday: Stormzy, Imagine Dragons, Hailee Steinfeld

Here we go again... New Music Friday has rolled around, with its usual cornucopia of delights and disappointments. Here's a selection:

1) Stormzy - Big For Your Boots
The first single from Stormzy's long-awaited debut album Gang Signs & Prayer, this contains this amazing couplet: "I was in the O2 singing my lungs out / Rudeboy, you're never too big for Adele."




2) Zara Larsson ft Ty Dolla Sign - So Good
Zara's urban-pop anthem was technically out last week, but now she's done a video to go with it. So here you are.




3) Imagine Dragons - Believer
Weirdly, this comes from the advert for Nintendo's new Switch console - but it's still a pretty heartfelt song, with Dan Reynolds explaining it depicts his "realisation that the emotional pain I faced the last few years actually helped me progress to this healthier mental space". Whatever, the new Zelda game looks amazing.



4) Liv Dawson - Searching
A solid, soulful, house track produced by Disclosure. Liv is just 18 and hails from Shepperton, fact fans.





5) Muna - I Know A Place
A powerful and timely video about acceptance and tolerance.
NB: Muna's excellent debut album is out today, and you should buy it.




6) Brooke Candy ft Sia - Living Out Loud
Sia's formula is starting to wear thin - you could set a watch by the arrival of her choruses. But her writing is still more electrifying than 99% of her peers. Basically, if you like Sia you will like this and if you don't like Sia you will don't like it.





7) Salen - Heartbreak Diet
"I used to dream of dying so you would cry at my funeral," sings Ellie Kamio on this infectious pop-hop jam. The London trio are rapidly becoming ones to watch.






8) Digital Farm Animals ft Hailee Steinfeld - Digital Love
A totally abhorrent Chainsmokers rip-off with some of the worst lyrics ever committed to tape. "I swipe right, cause I see just what I like / It's called Digital Love."

Shame on you, Digital Farm Animals. Shame on you all.

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New Music Friday: Five of the best

New Music Friday... Sounds exciting, doesn't it? But it's the middle of summer and the release schedules are looking a little thin, so you can probably give it a miss. EXCEPT, of course, for these songs. Which are all at least a 6/10.

1) Jason Derulo - Kiss The Sky
Jason Derulo never met a bandwagon he didn't like, so here he is with his Uptown Funk rip-off tribute. It's from a greatest hits album, if you can believe such a thing exists.




2) Nao - In The Morning
Nao's debut album is out today, which is good news for anyone who likes woozy, murky R&B. This song, a staple of her live set for over a year, starts like a million other gloomy pop songs but stick around for the climax. OMG.




3) Offaiah - Trouble
Just a great, upbeat dance track, straight out of Argentina. It's been creeping up the dance charts since May - but gets its official release today.




4) JoJo - Fuck Apologies (feat Wiz Khalifa)
Former America's Most Talented Kids contestant JoJo proves she's all grown up by swearing unnecessarily on what is otherwise a perfectly-serviceable pop song.





5) Skott - Wolf
Lorde-endorsed, dreamy Scandanavian pop.

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