I LOVE THIS PLAYLIST

This week I present you with what I think is a very snazzy playlist of new releases. There’s jazz, there’s re-imagined traditional Celtic music, frenzied vocals, chords I adore and Madonna being nostalgic. A playlist to love!

Other music things

• When I was making my favourite albums of the year (so far) list, I re-listened to the latest Olivia Rodrigo album and was taken aback by how many songs sound like other songs. Now, it is totally normal for songs to resemble each other, use the same chords etc, this has been true forever, (think about La Bamba - Twist and Shout and Like a Rolling Stone), but for four songs on one album to sound really similar to four other, mostly more recently released, songs . . . It did make me fear that all the things you read about how we’re writing less exploratory and interesting music (at least in the mainstream) are true. I still think the album has moments of surprise and I still really like it, and Olivia Rodrigo, but perhaps we need more than a handful of producers and song writers running the show and some more fabulous and unexpected song writing collaborations. . . I’ve put the songs that stood out into comparison videos for you . . .

• I’m reading Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist atm, a book that is full of absolutely sinister pieces of information about streaming. (“Apple Music, Amazon, these aren’t our competitors. Our only competitor is silence.” etc) Highly recommend!

• I don’t actually want to tell you about these because there’s a limited number being sold, but did you in your whole life ever see better headphones? Here they are if you want to race me / buy them as a gift for me when they go on sale.

This is such a wonderful arrangement of Sidney Bechet’s Blue Horizon, an even more slinkified version of the after hours, clink of a martini glass, smokey jazz classic. Henry Solomon, a jazz musician and all round handsome man who can pull off both the tousled hair of an obscure folk artist and the peroxided blonde hair of a man who will probably never call you back, recently released Solo Woodwind, his first solo recording since 2021, consisting of 9 compositions / arrangements. Perhaps you recognise him from Haim’s Summer Girl music video!

What’s going on in Australia with these totally hypnotic wonderful female solo artists?

Catalan composer, vocalist and pianist, Marina Herlop, has just announced her new album Dja Dja , which she describes as "a giant sudoku". She’s always been a surprising artist and this first release, Jaque, is full of wild and layered vocals that create a kind of studied frenzy.

It is a great, great thing for all of our lives that there is a new Bullion album coming in September. This first single has all that slightly nervous warmth we’re used to from one of the more interesting producers working at the moment.

Nashville-based R.A.P. Ferreira teams up with two Los Angeles talents - nahhphet and Rhys Langston, over a classic boom-bap beat from God.Damn.Chan. It's a protest song calling for the safe return of LA rapper, Frankie Jax No Mad, aka Nairobi-born Baraka Njenga, who was detained by ICE last month and is in the process of self-deporting to Kenya. They say:

“This is our record of the emotional and psychological as we witness our friend and colleague be dehumanized and uprooted from his home. . . poetry is how poets speak to other poets and it is our sincere effort to summon forth our own to support our own.”

The best chorus of the week goes to The Big Moon, on this synthy, explosive song, the first release since front-woman, Juliette Jackson, was diagnosed with a cyst inside the eardrum, which has to be removed with surgery. She permanently lost most of the hearing on one side and to help her through it, decided to write songs for an imaginary time, one or two years in the future, when she hoped she would be healed and happy again.

I just love the chords this song opens with, they are immensely satisfying, and while it’s a much used progression, this bouncy song from South Korean band,Silica Gel, manages to sound both treacly sweet, slightly abrasive and absolutely new.

Nothing has brought me more pleasure recently than turning this up really loudly and seeing how long it takes for me (or anyone else in my house) to just start doing something truly indecent to the Irish dance form. Aside from the actual music (there’s a whole EP) there’s a lot to be delighted by here: the fact that Tadhg Griffin’s artist name is SexyTadhg, the fact that the EP is called SlutTrad, and the fact that something rooted in Irish traditional music can sound so absolutely fresh and giddy.

Obviously the Madonna album is out and I’m still waiting for someone to write the piece/review of it. I have feelings I cannot yet confidently articulate because I haven’t finished listening to all 8 million hours of Yasi Salek’s Bandsplain epic on Madonna, which is fantastic if you want to try and put this album in context and just in general understand the shapeshifting monolith that is Madonna. This album finds her reuniting with Stuart Price, her primary collaborator on her last triumph, Confessions on a Dance Floor, and taking us through a sort of dance floor litany, on an album that instead of pushing forward, reflects on her past.

This week’s new music paylists as well as the full playlists containing every single new release I listened to this week are behind the paywall.