The Friday Dispatch

On her latest record, Q: From Where Do Our Primal Instincts Originate? A: MTV!, Louisiana-born Portraits of Tracy (Tracy Amare) claws back her project from the debris of a major-label deal and turned a lifetime of influences into something entirely hers. Pulling from a palette so wide it manages to include everything from the Beach Boys to Tyler, The Creator to space-age lounge music, the project riffs liberally on an eclectic and colorful version of pop music history that she has now chosen to make her creative home in.

To dig into Portraits of Tracy’s true genesis is to dig up her first brush with pop culture obsession, which arrived through “what I had access to every day, and for me, growing up, that was video games and TV,” as she recalls now. “My cousins, they were all boys, so it was all boy games. They had the Tony Hawk [video games], all the classics. I played that shit nonstop and heard the music in those games. I released my debut album on May 16th just because of Lagwagon, ‘May 16,’ [from] Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. I am not kidding you, that’s one of my favorite songs of all time. I didn't care what my cousins felt about these songs. It was literally me sitting there and just being transported by them.”

That wide range of influences fed into Amare’s viral attempts to recreate the songs she loved, learning her own taste and voice through mimicry, eventually releasing her debut mixtape and album within a year during 2021, which she then followed up with a concept record, 2023’s Drive Home. A dense, narrative epic blending strains of rap, soul, and psychedelia into an hour-long radio drama, Amare’s last record served as a semi-fictional re-imagining of her own upbringing as a trans teenager coming to terms with her identity through a stand-in character named Junie. After a three-year hiatus, during which she was “signed to a major, and then everything went to hell,” in her words, Amare decided to scavenge through old demos or half-finished musical ideas she had “lying around” in order to refuel her creative juices ahead of her follow-up project. In other words, if Drive Home felt cathartic and personal in its musical thorniness, Q: From Where Do Our Primal Instincts Originate A: MTV! lets the light in by harkening back to the sounds that made her, mining the manic thrill of a fresh start following a long period of silence. - Elise Soutar

This week we have some heavy-hitters releasing again, with Charli xcx’s Music, Fashion, Film; Nick Hakim’s I Can See; Nia Archives’s Emotional Junglist; and The Strokes’ Reality Awaits. On the emerging side, A24’s latest signing girlsweetvoiced puts out her debut, Lovesweet; Portraits of Tracy returns from Hiatus with Q: From Where Do Our Primal Instincts Originate? A: MTV!; and London underground darlings Worldpeace DMT release Flowers Powers.

In the shadow of fjords and cruise ships, Akureyri – Iceland’s second city – hosts a festival that has spent fifteen years refusing to behave like an industry showcase. Mannfólkið breytist í slím, run by record label and arts collective MBS, charges nothing at the door and pays artists first. “Maybe it’s a bad business plan,” founder Jón Haukur Unnarsson tells Best Fit, but the free-entry model exists to prove musicians deserve wages and not just applause. Organiser Aldís Dagmar treats scale with suspicion, comparing MBS to a bonsai tree: “Trying not to grow too tall, but to have thicker branches, more flowers.”

Every pallet, plank and porta-potty on site is borrowed from local businesses, turned into seating, stages for shorter attendees, a dedicated safe space, even a beer stand kept safely away from the crowd. The lineup runs from breakbeat played aboard a moving public bus through to Icelandic metal newcomers Basilisk, Colombian cumbia from Conjunto Media Luna and glitch electronica. The festival aims to avoid becoming ‘Reykjavík-relocated’ for a weekend, explains, Vaccines bassist Árni Hjörvar, who also works with Iceland Music: “it opens up a nice dialogue.”

Performing as Krassofff, Kristína Rannveig Jóhannsdóttir weaves Icelandic and Pride flags into a set addressing bodily autonomy and a hardening political mood, insisting “we don’t have equality” despite Iceland’s reputation abroad. Reykjavík’s ronja, closing out the weekend with glitch electronica, describe a scene where “there’s not so much genre distinction,” while grunge quintet BKPM lament that “all the cool venues are going bankrupt” back home. Even Björk has slipped in quietly, unbothered, to watch in recent years.

Dropping at midnight every Thursday, follow our playlist for a taste of the best new music from rommulas, RIP Magic, Curiosity Shop, deed0t, Leah Cleaver, Azena, Noah Hill, and Murex.

“The Durutti Column have all these famous covert fans: Stewart Lee, Chris Morris, Max Richter, Richard Ayoade, John Frusciante from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Chris Martin from Coldplay, AG Cook, Caroline Polachek, loads of artists on the hyperpop scene. It’s great that Vini Reilly’s been able to harvest this recognition in his lifetime, but he keeps it all outside his door. He wants to remain unpolluted.” – Keir Stewart on The Durutti Column