Just look at that photo. That's a proper pop star in the making, right there. Stylish, insouciant, poised. It only adds to the sense of excitement and expectation around soul newcomer Jones.
According to the press release, Jones was "raised in east London by her soul-loving mum on Stevie and Luther" and "at an early age [she] began to turn her most private diary entries into songs, and her small shows for family members became tentative open mic sessions."
Her silky, sumptuous Indulge is one of the year's sexiest seduction songs. And now she's unveiled the first taste of her debut album, New Skin, which is due out in Spring 2016.
Produced by XO, Hoops sounds like The xx after they discovered their inner Sade. Sublime.
These Walls is perhaps the most straightforward song on Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly - with a sort of swinging, southern hip-hop vibe that'll sound familiar to legions of Outkast fans.
But, as you might expect, the lyrics are more complex than appearances suggest. Kendrick starts off with the familiar rap trope of bragging about his sexual prowess (the walls of the title are the walls of a vagina - eugh). Things turn darker in the second verse, where Kendrick reveals his partner's husband is in prison - literally behind walls. In the third section, the rapper talks about the walls of his inner conscience, and how his actions haunt him. Sadly, a fourth verse about dry wall construction was deleted for length.
The video illustrates the thought-provoking storyline in a rather vulgar fashion - at one point Kendrick's sexy dancing is so vigorous he bursts through the walls of his neighbour's house, with hilarious results.
So, two big names in the "alt pop" game have released new videos this week. One is waifish electro pixie Grimes, whose gossamer-thin melodies and hypnotic, polychromatic arrangements have won her fans from Rihanna to Lena Dunham. The other is shapeshifting Danish songstress MØ, riding high off the success of Lean On, her global smash collaboration with Major Lazer.
Both songs are pristine examples of gusty, cutting-edge, outsider pop. But the videos - which are ostensibly similar - have polar opposite effects on me. Each is heavily-stylised, with the singers and their friends dancing through surreal dreamscapes. The costumes and scenarios mix high fashion and dark nightmares. In Kamikaze, MØ is pictured atop a throne made of golden car tyres in a derelict Ukrainian high rise; In Flesh Without Blood, Grimes, dressed as Marie Antoinette, spends half of her video bleeding to death on a tennis court.
The difference is small, but crucial. MØ looks like she's posing for a shoot in iD, the video aggressively screaming, "this is cool and if you watch it you will be cool too." Grimes, on the other hand, lets a smile play across her face throughout the whole thing, in a way that says, "everyone is welcome at this party, but could you please wear a powdered wig 'for the lols?'"
You might disagree (maybe you really, really want to be cool - who am I to judge?) So watch below and make your own mind up.
I've always had a soft spot for the gonzo rock "stylings" of Weezer, and their ninth album, last year's Everything Will Be Alright in the End, was something of a return to form.
So it's good to hear the band continue their latest purple patch with a new single Thank God For Girls (that's the ridicu-brilliant artwork above). It's crunchy, compact and completely crackers, as Rivers Cuomo takes a swipe at songs like Jay-Z's Girls or Bruce Springsteen's Girls In Their Summer Clothes, and the way they objectify women at the same time as (supposedly) eulogising them.
In other words, it's a list song taken to the extreme, with unhinged brags like: "She's so big / She's so strong / She's so energetic in her sweaty overalls."
The lyric video is just as strange, drawing inspiration from the lyric: "When you come home / She will be waiting there for you / With a fire in her eyes / And a big fat canoli to shove in your mouth."
NB: People who can't watch MasterChef when Greg Wallace shovels a greasy lump of meat into his face would do well to avoid the following Youtube player.
What's amazing / brilliant about the new Adele campaign is how the anticipation seems to match that of the new Star Wars. Every tidbit and jpeg is pored over by proper newspapers and websites, looking for clues, details and indications about the star's new album. When was the last time that really happened? I remember it when Michael Jackson's Dangerous came out. Oasis's Be Here Now got a documentary on the BBC. And (in Ireland at least) there were midnight openings when U2 unexpectedly released Zooropa in the middle of the tour of the same name. But those were all 20 years ago... Not even Gaga or Beyonce can match the cross-generational appeal of Miss Adkins.
But the furore surrounding Adele's third album is as anachronistic as the sales figures for her last one. 21 shifted an astonishing 30 million copies in an era when everyone wants their music free with their Weetabix. I doubt 25 can come close to that. For one thing, physical sales have declined even further in the intervening five years. Secondly, it's no coincidence that all of the albums I mention above were panned (although Dangerous and Zooropa are better than their reputation suggests).
Either way, it's great to have a proper event in pop music that's not a sexually-explicit video or Nicki Minaj being slightly mean or a song about Taylor Swift's ex-boyfriend or a combination of all three. Adele's record will be about the music and now, finally, we have some music to hear.
Hello (sadly, not a cover of this song, or this one, or this one) premiered on Vimeo show this morning. An apology to an abandoned lover, it starts off with the same mournful piano arrangement as Someone Like You but when it takes off, boy, does it take off.
It sounds great. It sounds like this.
PS: Someone really needs to take the pruning shears to that phone box.
Sneaking in just before ADELE DAY, Florence + The Machine releases the sixth (and presumably final) instalment of her melodramatic "The Odyssey" - an interlinked video project for her album How Big How Blue How Beautiful.
Accompanying the album's best track, Delilah, the new chapter finds the singer wandering around a freaky motel, replete with religious imagery, enthusiastic writhing and - as in many of the previous clips - Florence being pushed, pulled and manhandled by the human manifestations of her demons.
And, with that, the baton is passed from one ginger titan of British music to another.
