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

I listened to those whopping great Spotify / Apple "new music" playlists so you don't have to. (You're welcome, etc.)

1) Halsey - Not Afraid Anymore
Halsey kickstarts an important linguistic debate: Should it be "anymore" or "any more"?





2) Loyle Carner - Damselfly
Reflective, jazzy, superb.





3) The Chainsmokers - Paris
Fearlessly exploring the law of diminishing returns, this single "rhymes" the words Paris and parents.





4) Declan McKenna - The Kids Don't Wanna Come Home
Snackable indie-pop, as featured on the blog earlier this week. The streaming version ends with a very odd studio outtake, in which Declan is harrassed by a kid who appears to have eaten two dozen Kinder eggs.




5) Verité - Phase Me Out
Like Tove Lo, without the swears.




6) Laura Marling - Wild Fire
God, I'm so middle aged.




7) Julia Michaels - Issues
As previously noted on "these pages", this is a fantastic pop single.




666) Ralph Felix and SDJM - The Heat (I Wanna Dance With Somebody)
An assault on music. An assault on Whitney Houston. An assault on common decency.

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Kiesza dances with Chewbacca, and nine other songs you may have missed

A semi-regular series, rounding up the most interesting and striking new songs, videos and remixes doing the rounds on the internet. This week's top 10 are:

1) Kiesza - Hideaway (live on the street)
This sequence, filmed live for the Jimmy Kimmel show, is a masterpiece of choreography - both in the dancing and the camerawork. I wonder if the Chewbacca moment was planned?




2) Nicki Minaj - Anaconda
Fans of buttocks rejoice. Not only has Nicki Minaj sampled Sir-Mix-A-Lot's Baby Got Back, but she has posed for the artwork in the popular supermodel pose: "doing a poo".



3) Sir-Mix-A-Lot - Baby Got Back (with the Seattle Symphony)
Speaking of Baby Got Back, here's a surprisingly funky orchestral version. Kudos to the bespectacled dancer. She's clearly been waiting for this moment all her life.



4) Katy Perry - This Is How We Do
Nice video, shame about the song.



5) Katy Perry - Roar (at the White House)
This, on the other hand, is lovely: A stripped-down, semi-acoustic version of Roar, performed during a Special Olympics reception at the White House.

"I love Katy Perry," said President Obama, introducing the pop star on stage. "She is just a wonderful person. I just met her mom, now I know why she's such a wonderful person."

Oh, get a room you two.



6) Tove Styrke - Even If I'm Loud... (White Sea Remix)
The jitterbug groove of Tove Styrke's comeback single is currently my default "blast the speakers" song in the car, but this remix throws the pop hooks into a cinematic abyss. Unsettling but wonderful.




7) Stevie Nicks - The Dealer
Not quite a new song from Stevie Nicks - this was originally written for Fleetwood Mac's Tusk album in 1979, and a demo version has surfaced on bootlegs for a number of years.

In fact, it was those bootlegs that inspired Nicks to polish off the song and re-record it with Dave Stewart (urgh) for a new album, 24 Karat Gold — Songs From the Vault, featuring a ton of "lost tracks" from her recording career.



8) Ben Howard - End Of The Affair
How do you announce your comeback after your debut won two Brits and a Mercury Prize nomination? Why, with a pensive eight-minute ballad that frequently lapses into complete silence, but ultimately climaxes with two minutes of howling muso nonsense.

Daytime radio gold.



9) Tkay Maidza - Uh-Huh
This technicolor jam from Adelaide's Tkay Maidza isn't the first rap track to reference Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - Fabolous got there first - but it is the best.



10) The Chainsmokers - Kanye (ft Sirens)
After the abomination cultural phenomenon that was #Selfie, The Chainsmokers are back with another zeitgeisty dance track.

This one, at least, has a neat lyrical conceit: "One day I’ll stand with a crown on my head like a god," sings the sweet-voiced Sirens. "I wanna be like Kanye".

Will be inescapable within a week.

That's plenty to be getting on with, I'm sure you'll agree. But if you're hungry for more - check out the links to the rest of this week's posts on the left hand side.

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Tove Lo is habit-forming

"I eat my dinner in my bathtub / Then I go to sex clubs."

How's that for the opening line? It comes from Habits, an extremely good but cruelly-overlooked single released last year by Swedish pop star and whiplash hairdo disaster zone Tove Lo.

Turns out I'm not the only one who thought it deserved more recognition. In fact, New York production crew The Chainsmokers are so keen for it to become a hit, they've done a massive Calvin Harris/SubFocus-style remix FOR ZERO PENCE.



Here's what they say: "We are MAJOR fans of Tove Lo. In fact we are certain she is going to be a massive name in music VERY soon. Habits is one of those unique blend of feelings, its gangster, sexy, relatable, and fun... In fact we aren't quite sure why its not on the same level as Lorde's Royals. So with that in mind, we set out to create a song that complimented the vocals and the subject of the song but brought it into the club arena."

They've done a pretty good job, I think you'll agree. 

And if you download it now, you can lord it over your friends when Tove Lo becomes properly famous in, let's say, July.

Tove Lo - Habits

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