Is viral marketing killing new music?

Last week on The Voice, a contestant turned up who said he was Jessie J's biggest fan. "I've been following her," said Lem Knights, "for about eight years."

Eight Years! I'm sure most people thought this was a mistake... Jessie's only been irritating our eardrums for, what, 24 months? But no. Lem first found the pre-fame Jessie Cornish on her YouTube channel, warbling away in her bedroom. She's been posting updates for years - announcing her record deal, previewing new material, and experimenting with eyelash technology.


This is increasingly the way new acts surface - Nina Nesbitt, Ed Sheeran and Gabrielle Aplin all built up loyal fanbases through home videos before going pro. It's great marketing... as long as it works.

Look at Azealia Banks. The loud-mouth NYC rapper has been releasing what feels like a track a fortnight for the last 18 months. Her approach to quality control is as consistent as her management, which seems to change with the frequency of a traffic light. And so fatigue has set in, even amongst the most easily-excitable music blogs.

If Azealia had put an album out after the extraordinary 212 hit radio last January, it would have gone gold in a week. Now, we've all moved on to Taylor Swift.

Azealia Banks - 212

The thing is, music websites and PR teams love this constant stream of "content" because it makes them feel they're doing something: Here's a shoddy remix! The album artwork will be revealed on Thursday! We're having a Google Hangout... whatever the fuck that is!

Personally, I think all this pre-amble deadens the senses. This week, I wavered over buying Charli XCX's debut album because I'd already heard 75% of the songs on a mixtape or an EP or a free download. When I finally succumbed, I discovered that even her slightest, sketchiest songs work better in context. True Romance is genuinely great: A quirky, rhythmic pop symphony.

As Becca Nicholson said in The Guardian: "By not rushing out an album until now... [Charli] seems to have found the time to iron out the creases that made her seem like one of a dozen similar acts." But by showing us her naked baby photos along the way, she's lost the opportunity to burst onto the scene fully-formed, as a bona fide pop star.

You could argue that this only matters to people (like me) who hoover up blog posts, buzz tracks and viral videos. But those people are the same ones who choose what you hear on the radio. Has Charli XCX's elephantine gestation cost her daytime exposure on Radio One? Quite possibly.

Charli XCX - Nuclear Seasons


Of course it's tempting for artists to release new songs the minute they're finished (all that instant adulation on Twitter!) but I prefer the stealth approach... Because if no-one had praised Jessie J's vocal acrobatics, would she have made the jump from talented bedroom vocalist to "ambulance siren doing scat jazz"?

I like to think not.

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New from Polica & Bon Iver: Tiff

Another busy week - we're moving house on Friday (*touches wood vigorously*) - so apologies for sporadic breaks in the blog stream. Anyway, this caught my ear during the process of putting my life into cardboard boxes: A new single from Minneapolis spook-pop outfit Poliça, whose debut album Give You The Ghost was my go-to late night record last year.

They specialise in slippery melodies and curveball soundscapes - making them something of an acquired taste. But if you swim in their waters long enough, you'll eventually be pulled under by the musical current.

Tiff is the name of their new song and, with their big bag of sonic tricks left relatively unplundered, it's a good, straightforward introduction to the band's sound. Justin Vernon from Bon Iver pops up to duet with Channy Leaneagh (that's her above). And the lyrics, helpfully posted on their Twitter account yesterday, are beautifully elliptical.

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See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang, Yeah. City All Over! Go Ape Crazy

Yipes! Basement Jaxx have suddenly appeared out of nowhere with a new single. Back 2 the Wild premiered tonight on Annie Mac's Radio One show and, while it's not Red Alert or Romeo, it's a huge shot of adrenaline for the moribund UK dance scene. Shouty, noisy and totally over-the-top, it's everything a Basement Jaxx single should be.

According to the official Soundcloud page, Back 2 The Wild is "a superheavyweight groove that's still catchy as hell, incorporating roaring lions, tribal horns recorded in Kenya and vocals by two Korean Seoul* Sisters Miss Emma Lee & Baby Chay". Pitchfork reckons this is a one-off, but the label says the band have a "batch of brand new material". So there you go.

Eother way, welcome back Felix and that other dude. It's lucky you got this out two days before the Daft Punk single, or you'd have been sunk.



* Do you see what they did there?

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A*M*E follows up 100% and five other songs you may have missed

Good afternoon, Friday. Here's this week's round-up of songs you may have missed. Think of it as a tiny weekend playlist, or a brief radio programme with a skip button. Enjoy!

1) A*M*E - Heartless / 100% Skreamix
18-year-old pop princess Aminata Kabba, otherwise known as A*M*E, is currently at number one with Need U (100%) - and deservedly so. Her next solo single is called Heartless, and although the final radio mix has yet to be officially revealed, it doesn't really sound any different to the demo which has been circulating for a while. Think David Guetta and Sia covering Nicki Minaj's Starships and you get the idea. Something's missing right at the end - the climax doesn't quite... well, climax - but it's a decent summer singalong.



Meanwhile, if you haven't already bought 100%, you absolutely have to check out this 80s-tastic remix, which could be mistaken for a lost Control-era Janet Jackson track. It is seriously that good.





2) Thunderbird Gerard - Trouble
Gerard wasn't one of the better-known Thunderbirds. He mostly did the admin on Tracy Island - making sure they didn't run out of staples and teabags. But he's also an up-and-coming US rap artist, based in Berlin, who's been dubbed "the Kerouac of Hip-Hop" (because he's On The Road a lot - groan). "Interesting" naming conventions aside, his latest single Trouble is superb: A lolloping, irresistible piano groove, that's refreshingly low on bombast.




3) Rdgrngld - Million Fans
That's pronounced Red, Green, Gold. Another band harking back to the days of old-skool hip-hop, this makes me want to dig out all my old Jurassic Five albums and have a block party. The band hail from Washington DC, and they managed to get Dave Grohl to play all the drum loops on their debut album... But not this track, which uses an authentically dusty breakbeat sample. One to watch at this summer's festivals.




4) Paramore - Still Into You
"Interesting" fact: I can totally ace Paramore's Misery Business on Guitar Hero. Five stars every time, even on expert level wearing a blindfold, after half a bottle of port, with all my finger glued together so I have to play the notes with my eyelashes. I'll prove it to you one day.

Will I ever be as good at their new single Still Into You? Who knows, but one can live in hope. Hayley told the BBC the song was "a big love anthem". I say it's a bubbly punk-pop track that wouldn't sound out of place at the end of a pre-rehab Lindsay Lohan film. The video, by the way, is inspired by the fantastical technicolor photographs of British artist Tim Walker. You can read more about those on the New Yorker site.




5) The National - Don't Swallow The Cap
What exactly do you want from The National? Swirling atmospherics? Swelling strings? Heart-tugging vocals? An overwhelming sense of loneliness and anxiety? Then you're in luck! Don't Swallow The Cap, the second song to be released from their eagerly-anticipated new album Trouble Will Find Me. It's one of those songs that's totally miserable, but whose inherent beauty ends up making you feel at peace with the world. Lovely stuff.




6) CHVRCHES - Game Of Thrones
"Should we cover the Game of Thrones theme song?" asked CHVRCHES on their Twitter feed last Sunday. "I kinda feel like we should. I might be on my own here tho". Less than 24 hours later, this appeared on YouTube. I love how Lauren starts singing along 30" into the song - and how their arrangement basically turns the song into the theme from Knightmare.

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Demi Lovato needs medical attention

Something is going terribly wrong with our pop stars' healthcare. First Olly Murs started singing about his heart murmur, now Demi Lovato thinks she's having a full-blown myocardial infarction. Someone page Gloria Estefan, we need a house call from Dr Beat (or, depending on how you feel about Olly, Conrad Murray).

LOLs aside, it's been a month since Demi premiered her new single, Heart Attack, and it's still an absolute belter. So what if it's identikit production line pop, it's one of those songs, like Britney's Toxic or Katy Perry's Firework, that breaks free of genre constraints and becomes something special.

The video has just "dropped". Sadly, Demi does not perform the entire track hooked up to a machine that goes ping, but I think it's assured that Heart Attack will defibrilate her career in the UK.

Demi Lovato - Heart Attack

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Rock corner: Queens Of The Stone Age

If its riffs you're after, you can always count on Josh Homme to lob a few in your direction like primed cluster bombs of SOLID ROCK.

The auspices weren't good, though. Pre-publicity for the sixth Queens Of The Stone Age album, ...Like Clockwork, touted collaborations with Scissor Sister Jake Shears and aging wig afficionado Elton John. But the presence of Foo Fighter frontman, Nirvana sticksmith and all-round awesome dude Dave Grohl on drums suggested things hadn't gone totally awry.

Grohl, of course, took percussion duties on QOTSA's biggest (and best) album to date, 2002's Songs For The Deaf - where his ludicrous fills were so perfectly married to the songs they became hooks in their own right.

A similar approach seems to have been applied to ...Like Clockwork, which Grohl describes as "insane".

"With Queens of the Stone Age, like, there were no boundaries," he told Radio 1 last year. "I’ll do something so completely ridiculous, I'll just be, like, 'There's no way that that Josh is going to let me do that,' and he'll say, 'Do that for forty-five seconds, over and over again' and that's become, like, part of the song. That's the way they work."

The first results are below: A song called My God Is The Sun, which rips through about 84 different ideas in three minutes, and contains the immortal line: "I don't know what time it was. I don't wear a watch." Genius.

Queens Of The Stone Age - My God Is The Sun

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