Charli XCX - Boys

"NO BOYS WERE HARMED IN THE MAKING OF THIS VIDEO 💕” writes Charli XCX, below the YouTube clip for her new single, Boys. A clever attempt to subvert the male gaze, it's more eye-catching for the cast list than the direction - but the song is catchy as all heck.

In case you need help identifying the talent, here's a complete list:

Aminé	Jay Park	Shaun Ross
AG Cook	Jay Prince	Shokichi
Barns Courtney	Joe Jonas	Stormzy
Buddy	Joey Bada$$	The Fat Jew
Cameron Dallas	Kaytranada	The Vamps (Tristan & James)
Carl Barât (The Libertines)	Khalid	THEY
Charlie Puth	Laurie Vincent (Slaves)	Theo Hutchcraft (The Hurts)
Chromeo	Liam Fray (The Courteeners)	Tinie Tempah
Cobra Snake	Mac DeMarco	Tom Daley
Connor Franta	Mark Ronson	Tom Grennan
Dan Smith (Bastille)	Max Hershenow (MS MR)	Tommy Cash
Denzel Curry	Mic Lowry	Ty Dolla $ign
Di Casp (YouTuber)	MNEK	Vance Joy
Diplo	Oli Sykes (Bring Me The Horizon)	Ezra Koenig (Vampire Weekend)
DRAM	ONE OK ROCK	will.i.am
Fai Khadra	Poet	Wiz Khalifa
Flume	Portugal. The Man	Wstrn
Frank Carter	Prince & Jacob
Fred Macpherson (Spector)	Riz Ahmed & The Swet Shop Boys
G Eazy	Rostam Batmanglij (Vampire Weekend)
Jack Antonoff (Bleachers)	Sage The Gemini
Jack Guinness	Shamari Maurice

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Kesha's hot streak continues

All the evidence suggests that Kesha's comeback album, Rainbow, is going to be a triumph. After Praying and Woman, she's just posted a third song, Learn To Let Go, which has one of the best videos I've seen all year.

It's nice when people who've been dragged through the shit have good things happen to them, isn't it?

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FYI: The Mura Masa album is dead good

Mura Masa releases his self-titled debut album today and, as the headline above suggests, it's got more smashes than a bottle bank.

If you're not familiar with his ouevre, here's a potted biog: Mura Masa is 21-year-old Alex Crossan. He comes from Guernesy, and named himself after 16th-century Japanese swordsmith Muramasa Sengo. Being raised on a "small, isolated haven" halfway between Britain and France meant he wasn't swayed by prevailing music trends, and so he delved into the weird and wonderful delights of world music, which means his own productions are peppered with non-Western sounds like Trinidadian steel drums, African kalimbas and Indonesian gamelan gongs. It's trop-house with a genuine understanding of its roots.

More importantly, he makes dance music that's infused with genuine emotion, via collaborations with fellow outsiders Damon Albarn and Charli XCX.

Here's a sample of what you can expect.

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Kesha is a motherfudging woman

Last week, Kesha poured all the anguish and horror of the last five years into a (frankly stunning) new song called Praying. You can read about / listen to it here, should you desire.

With that out of her system (in song form, at least, the mental scars will be with her for life), she's free to make a gargantuan, ball-busting pop song. And here is that song.

Woman is powered by the same brass section who played on Amy Winehouse's Back To Black; and it shares some of that album's "don't give a fuck" attitude.

The lyrics are all pretty boilerplate "I'm a strong independent woman" stuff until Kesha gets the giggles in verse two and fluffs her lines. It's a brilliant, humanising moment - one in which the singer becomes three dimensional. She's not just a female warrior, she's self-aware, capable of levity. She's Just. Like. Us.

Whoever made the decision to include that outtake instead of the other, more polished, vocals Kesha undoubtedly recorded is a genius.

Incidentally, can you think of any other songs where the narrator breaks character? Michael Stipe does it in The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite. Janet Jackson has a giggle in Runaway. Any others???

UPDATE: According to Popjustice, this whole song was inspired by Donald Trump's "Grab them by the pussy comments."

"That made me so infuriated, as a hardcore feminist," said Kesha at a recent playback event I couldn't go to because I had to pick my children up from school.

"Ever since I was a kid and knew what a feminist was, I was a feminist. [I was] raised by a feminist. Once I heard that [comment] I was like, okay, well, I’m going to write this song about being a badass motherfucking woman who you don’t want to fuck with."

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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.

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Stop everything and watch this

Haim playing Selena Gomez's Bad Liar with a fork and a spoon, in Radio 1's Live Lounge, is the only video you need to watch today.


They also did a passable version of their own single, Want You Back, without the aid of kitchen utensils. If you have time for a second video, this is also a 10/10.

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Video: Sigrid - Plot Twist

Is anyone enjoying the business of becoming a pop star more than Sigrid is right now? If they are, I can't think of them...

Sigrid's glee at performing permeates her live shows (check out her Glastonbury appearance for proof) and that exuberance bursts out of the new video for Plot Twist, too.

"Plot Twist is about finally getting over someone," says the Norwegian teen star, via press release, "but we decided we wanted the focus [of the video] to be on me having a good time with my best friends.

"We filmed it in Bergen where I've lived for two years now, and it was the best day!"

A big round of applause to filmmakers Sigurd Fossen and William Glandberger, then. Capturing a natural performance in a pop video is notoriously difficult but they've managed to convey every Kilojoule of her kooky energy.


PS: Bonus points for putting the title of her song on her scarf.

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Dua Lipa colour co-ordinates her slumber parties, and so should you

The best new track on Dua Lipa's eponymous and epochal debut album is New Rules, a song about trying to keep your distance from a boyfriend who's bad for you. In the lyrics, Dua sets out four commandments to avoid falling back into his arms.

One, don't pick up the phone
You know he's only calling 'cause he's drunk and alone
Two, don't let him in
You'll have to kick him out again
Three, don't be his friend
You know you're gonna wake up in his bed in the morning
And if you're under him
You ain't getting over him

It's a quirky, and funny take on the break-up song, and now it's got the video it deserves; with Dua's girlfriends doling out the advice through the medium of a heavily-choreographed, colour-coded slumber party.

"These are the kind of rules you tell to your friends and they would tell to you," she told me at Glastonbury. "So, with the video, I wanted to show unity between women and girls.

"I think it really tells the story of women looking out for each other."

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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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Video - Haim: Want You Back

This is such a simple and brilliant video. If you've ever walked home from a night out, air-drumming to the song in your head (and who hasn't?) then this video will trigger a giddy rush of nostalgia.

As ever, Haim have their feet firmly planted in the centre of a venn diagram showing the overlap between dorky and cool.

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There's an obvious but amazing cameo in Sza's new video

One of the standout tracks on Sza's luscious new album, CTRL, is called Drew Barrymore. The lyrics don't reference the erstwhile star of ET and The Wedding Singer - but SZA was apparently inspired by watching the actress's seemingly endless stream of 1990s romcoms.

"I just imagine this being the soundtrack to one of those movies," she told an audience in New York last year. "Cue Freddie Prinze, Jr."

But Drew Barrymore (the song) has none of the breezy effervescence of those films, focusing instead on self-doubt and insecurities.

"I get so lonely, I forget what I'm worth," sings SZA. "I'm so ashamed of myself think I need therapy".

Nonetheless, Drew Barrymore (not the song) gave it her seal of approval, calling SZA "awesome" and praising the song's "lack of perfection" - especially the mention of "mom jeans".

She liked it so much, in fact, that she cameos in the video - released today and embedded above. She crops up around the 2'18" point; but the whole thing is worth watching. It's beautifully shot by Dave Myers, who recently made the Humble video for SZA's labelmate Kendrick Lamar.

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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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Selena Gomez goes full Eddie Murphy in the Bad Liar video

Bad Liar is a song about trying and failing to suppress your desires (specifically romantic desires, although it works equally well as an account of the emotions I encounter when passing a Krispy Kreme store).

So it makes sense that the video puts the lust in clusterfuck - as a schoolgirl catches her father flirting with her teacher, for whom she also holds a torch, while navigating her hastily-fracturing family life. It has the makings of a pretty good film... except Selena has opted to play all four main characters, with the unfortunate result that her "father" looks like a six-year-old in a trenchcoat. It's a distraction that spoils what could have been a clever, witty video.

Fortunately, the song is still a supple and slyly catchy pop gem.

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Video: Lana Del Rey - Lust For Life

Take a look at this new video. Is that? Could it be? Surely it isn't?

Yes. Yes it is. Lana Del Rey is smiling.

And look. She's doing it again.

What next? Will Lana make an upbeat tropical house track? Will she escape the vintage VHS tape she's been trapped inside, like Reese Witherspoon in Pleasantville? Will there be a fierce internal battle between Happy Lana and Sad Lana? If Happy Lana wins, is her career effectively over? Do we, as fans, want to suppress Happy Lana in order to maintain our supply of gauzy, fatalistic doom-pop? What does that make us? Are we complicit in her unhappiness? Is all art exploitation?

While I pitch this idea to Woody Allen as a film script, you can watch the video. The song remains superb.



Update: As soon as I posted this video on Twitter, ace music writer person Jamie Milton replied with this video.

Harsh, but funny.

@mrdiscopop @LanaDelRey https://t.co/Y7lQyiBoHt

— Jamie Milton (@jamiemilton_) May 22, 2017

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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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Miley Cyrus improves Malibu (but only slightly, because it was already pretty good)

On record, Miley Cyrus's new single, Malibu, is a cautious return to her country roots - but it's only the beat that stops it from going full Carrie Underwood, so this acoustic performance on US radio exposes the song's true nature.

And that is definitively not a negative comment. If anything, Miley's intimate declarations of contentedness sound even more genuine in this setting.


Isn't that nice? Even the moronic back announcement from the host can't spoil it.

On a side note, I was pleased to hear Miley had eschewed collaborators on her new album... especially after it was reported that hit singles now have an average of four and a half writers each.

Miley explained her decision to fly solo on another US radio show, 95.5 PLG LIVE.

"This is the first record I've written everything by myself, and that was important for me. I have a hard time co-creating because [other writers] don't really know what I've gone through. Don't know my life, don't know what it's taken to get here. I just feel I know myself the best."

Her argument is diluted slightly by the fact Malibu lists one other person on the credits - but it turns out Oren Yol is her producer, who just helped out here and there with the arrangement, so that's ok.

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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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Haim Time comes to SNL

Haim's new single Want You Back is the definition of a slow-burner. Its overlapping harmonies and stop-start structure take time to assimilate and appreciate. But there's no better catalyst to catchiness than seeing the band perform it. You rarely see a group enjoy the business of playing live quite this much; and this SNL appearance just pops off the screen.

Not sure what's going on with Dash's drums, though. The hi-hats seem cluttered and off-tempo - but he seems to be playing in time. Did someone accidentally run his mic through a reverb or delay effect? It's minor blemish but I found it distracting...

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Video: Honeyblood - Walking at Midnight

Scottish rockers Honeyblood have just released a video for Walking At Midnight, my favourite track from their audacious second album, Babes Never Die.

It's definitively a post-watershed sort of affair. Imagine Stephen King's Carrie set in a drag club, and you're basically there. It was directed by James Copeman and stars drag artist Virgin Xtravaganzah... a name I bet Richard Branson wishes he'd copyrighted in 1972.

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