Essential Listening: This week’s best new music
Welcome back to Essential Listening, a place where we compile all the best new music of the week into the definitive tome of modern music: The Far Out Playlist.
What a week for new music. With no less than three albums all scoring at least four stars from our reviews, giving just one of them Album of the Week felt almost criminal. One did rise to the top: Julia Jacklin’s engrossing and emotionally wrought Pre Pleasure, a new classic that proves Jacklin is an artist worth fully obsessing over.
The Lounge Society and Ezra Furman both put their own respective best feet forward with their own full-length releases. The former pulled together a staggering debut LP with Tired of Liberty, filled to the brim with indie turns and satisfying melodies, while the latter gifted us with All Of Us Flames, an apocalyptic record of seismic proportions.
We got quite a few satisfying singles as well. Shout to Marcus Mumford for writing a new song that doesn’t actually suck in ‘Better Off High’. Crawlers also managed to bust out a solid new single in the form of the anthemic ‘I Don’t Want It’.
Still, only eight songs can find their way onto this list. Here are the best new songs from the week, compiled into The Far Out Playlist.
This week’s best new music, August 21st – August 27th:
The National – ‘Weird Goodbyes’ (ft. Bon Iver)
The National have released their new single ‘Weird Goodbyes’ featuring Bon Iver. The band have been airing the new track at live concerts for some time, having played it for the first time in Pamplona, Spain, in May. The two artists finally confirmed the collaboration last week.
More electronic than is normally expected from The National, Matt Berninger’s gravelly bass-baritone remains intact. It’s always a unique experience hearing Berninger’s voice scrape against the high falsetto of Bon Iver, but here they work in what has to be the saddest song that also seems at least slightly club-ready.
Oliver Sims – ‘GMT’ (Jamie xx Remix)
Producer and multi-instrumentalist Jamie xx has released a remix of Oliver Sim’s new single ‘GMT’. Hear the entrancing new track below. The two artists, who are long-running bandmates in The xx, have once again collaborated with Jamie xx’s impassioned remix of the original, which was released by Sim last month.
This brand new track marks Jamie xx’s first official remix in over five years. The reimagined electronic indie soundscape incorporates a sample of Brian Wilson‘s ‘Smile’ and features additional production from Floating Points. While the remix is new to some of us, Jamie xx has already debuted it during some of his recent DJ sets and live shows.
Botch – ‘One Twenty Two’
Earlier this year, it was announced that mathcore royalty Botch had signed to Sargent House with plans to reissue their back catalogue on vinyl. Naturally, this led to conjecture among fans, hopeful for a reunion. Today, we bring the exciting news that, indeed, Botch will rise again after 20 years of dormancy. The exciting revelation arrives in the form of a brand new single, ‘One Twenty Two’.
Where some bands rise from the dead to bring a mediocre scattering of long-lost ideas that fail to coalesce with a modern crowd, Botch have delivered a single here that makes us wonder if they ever left. The track seems to have picked up where the Washington group left off when they parted ways two decades ago. The band, now reaching their mid-to-late-40s, sounds just as fresh and energetic as they did in the 1990s. David Knudson’s heavy, pounding riffs come thick and fast, while Dave Verellen’s voice comes full of newfound rage worthy of our post-pandemic climate.
Tim Burgess – ‘Sure Enough’
Tim Burgess launched his new single ‘Sure Enough’ with a stop-motion animation video and a flower sniffing pose which tells you all you need to know about the sanguine sound of childhood that he captures with his typical indie stylings. Flowing along on an unfettered rhythm, it’s a track brimming with all the playground skipping reminiscence of Badly Drawn Boy.
With an upbeat rhythm and enough descending psychedelic touches to be deemed typically Burgess-esque, the song is a pleasant summer midday accompaniment. With a floweriness that is cut through with a story of adult introspection, the toe-tapping does enough to engage the old cranium too.
Palm – ‘Parable Lickers’
Last month, it was announced that the Philadelphia experimental group Palm had signed to Saddle Creek Records and that a new album, titled Nicks and Grazes, was on the way. Nicks and Grazes marks Palm’s first new studio album since 2018’s Rock Island and is due for release in October. Our first preview for the new album came in the form of ‘Feathers’, the elegantly industrial lead single. Now, we are delighted to draw your attention to ‘Parable Lickers’.
The characteristically experimental Palm sound is brought forth using an offbeat rhythm. They layer in an intriguing mixture of tropical sounds, courtesy of steel drums. Meanwhile, Eve Alpert and Kasra Kurt’s dreamy interweaving vocals transport the mind to some trippy Caribbean island. Certainly a track for you if you like to be tested by your music.
ALASKALASKA – ‘TV Dinners’
ALASKALASKA, comprised of Lucinda Duarte-Holman and Fraser Rieley, have shared a new single, ‘TV Dinners’, following up from ‘Growing Pains (Unni’s Song)’ and ‘Still Life’, in anticipation of their second full-length studio album Still Life. The track is a stream-of-consciousness poetic exploration of being able to enjoy the solitude of lockdown whilst airing the simultaneous guilt that arises from feeling like you are wasting away sitting in front of the television.
‘TV Dinners’ opens with a graceful nod to the starting tunes of the Windows operating systems of yore before a simple processed beat comes in, accompanied by a descending piano chord progression. The song manages to create a state of disarray and anxiety that comes as the product of being locked inside with not much to do apart from staring at the screen and thinking of days of freedom
Whitney – ‘County Lines’
Chicago indie rockers Whitney have a hell of a lot of material ready to go for their next LP, Spark. Even though the album has just twelve songs, we’ve already heard more than a full third of the upcoming release since the band released five songs so far. Not that I’m complaining: the more, the merrier from a band as awesomely catchy as Whitney.
Kicking off with a vocal/piano duet that lifts into another light-as-air ballad, ‘County Lines’ has synthesisers bleeps masquerading as string lines that hang around the edges of the composition while the band once again dives straight into heartbreak. Some jazzy trumpet gives the song’s bridge a woozy counterpoint, and by the time all the elements combine in the song’s final stretch, ‘County Lines’ lands with the kind of impact that eludes ‘Memory’.
Stella Donnelly – ‘Flood’
Australian indie queen Stella Donnelly has returned with her long-awaited second album, Flood. A marvellous record that sees her take a more cerebral artistic angle than her debut, she gets incisive across its nearly 40-minute run time, with flecks of her Australian contemporaries Courtney Barnett and Julia Jacklin wedged in alongside the more emotive flecks of Blur, Badly Drawn Boy and Stereolab, with the increased use of more varied instrumentation augmenting Donnelly’s talent to the next level, a more mature one that investigates the idiosyncracies of relationships with verve.
This writer means it when they say it, in terms of vocal style and observant lyrics, Donnelly is the Australian and much better version of Sleeper frontwoman Louise Wener, with her sincerity touching. There’s comedy and honesty here, and Donnelly is fast becoming a personal favourite.
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