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Diamond Jubilee
This may be the greatest radio station you’ve ever come across. Unless it’s multiple stations talking over each other, in and out of range. Sounds arrive in strange combinations; nothing is quite exactly the way you remember. Did that classic rock band really have a synth player, and why did they pick a patch that sounds like a mosquito buzzing through a cheap distortion pedal? And those eerie harmonies swirling at the outskirts of that last-dance ballad by some 1960s girl group whose name ends in -elles or -ettes. Did they hire a few heartbroken ghosts who were hanging around the studio as backing vocalists? Or are these fragments of other songs, other signals, surfacing like distant headlights over a hill, then disappearing once more?
Don’t Forget Me
Eight years ago when a viral video thrust Maggie Rogers into the spotlight, she quickly went from NYU music student to public figure, garnering the type of cult following where the lines between artist and therapist start to blur. Since then, she has made efforts to slow things down. “I started to realize that there was this functional misalignment with the work that I had trained to do and the work that I was being asked to perform,” she told The New Yorker, explaining her decision to enroll in Harvard Divinity School in 2022. “I was put in this unconventional ministerial position without having undergone any of the training.” If strangers were going to look to her for guidance, her thinking went, then the best she could do would be to rise to the occasion.
Ramona
Ramona, the third album from Melbourne belter Grace Cummings, feels at first like a possible masterpiece, a new apogee in the pantheon of tormented soul. Across its 11 allusion-rich character studies and screeds of lovelorn retribution, Cummings renders every moment with unmitigated emotional intensity, as though every feeling were the last one that would ever matter. Hear her grow, for instance, from long-faced tenderness at the start of “A Precious Thing” to an operatic mercenary howling about love. “But it’s nothing I care about,” she roars like Diamanda Galás on a Disney ride designed by Dante. Or witness the cracks in her voice as she surges beyond an Amy Winehouse coo during “Something Going ’Round,” testaments to the self-doubt ingrained in this opening love letter. Built by a band that has clearly studied the Wrecking Crew’s glories, and gilded with strings and harp, Ramona holds a singular and mighty voice in a spectacularly grand frame, not unlike Rufus Wainwright’s Want One or Weyes Blood’s Titanic Rising.
Watch Dua Lipa’s Video for New Song “Illusion”
Dua Lipa has released the latest single from her highly-anticipated third album, Radical Optimism. “Illusion” arrives with a Tanu Muino–directed music video shot at the Piscina Municipal de Montjuïc in Barcelona. Watch Lipa perform at the luxe pool amid dancers, high divers, and synchronized swimmers below.
Forest Swords Announces North American Tour Dates, Shares New Songs: Listen
Forest Swords has announced a series of North American concerts. The British electronic music producer born Matthew Barnes will perform in Brooklyn, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Calgary in June. See Forest Swords’ schedule below. Barnes released the comeback Forest Swords album Bolted last year. He’s following the...
Drake Dropped From Astroworld Lawsuits
Drake has been dismissed from the civil lawsuits filed against him, Travis Scott, and many others in the wake of the 2021 Astroworld tragedy, TMZ and Houston’s KPRC 2 reports. Stanton “Larry” Stein, an attorney for Drake, offered no comment when reached by Pitchfork. The Harris County,...
Maggie Rogers Adds Fall 2024 Tour Dates
Maggie Rogers has announced the second part of her Don’t Forget Me Tour. The second leg takes place in October and November. See all of Rogers’ tour dates below. Tickets to a handful of Rogers’ shows are available exclusively in-person at box offices. She explained in a press statement:
Vampire Weekend and Amber Coffman Cover Grateful Dead’s “Peggy-O”: Watch
Vampire Weekend took over the SiriusXMU channel this past weekend to celebrate the release of their new album, Only God Was Above Us. The band hung out in the SiriusXM studio to record interview segments and a stripped-down live session, during which the group covered Grateful Dead’s “Peggy-O” with help from Amber Coffman and violinist Ray Suen. Vampire Weekend also played acoustic renditions of their new songs. Watch their take on “Peggy-O” below.
Taylor Swift Songs Return to TikTok Despite Label’s Feud With Platform
Earlier this year, Universal Music Group (UMG) and its publishing arm, Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG), pulled their songs from TikTok amid a licensing dispute with the app. The removal meant that music from Drake, Lana Del Rey, Ariana Grande, and many others could not be used with videos on TikTok.
Andrew Bird Announces Jazz Trio Album, Shares New Videos: Watch
Andrew Bird has announced a new album of jazz standards. The full-length, Sunday Morning Put-On, is the debut release from the Andrew Bird Trio, featuring Bird, drummer Ted Poor, and bassist Alan Hampton. See the group’s performances of “I Fall in Love Too Easily” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” below. Scroll down for Bird’s upcoming tour dates.
Low’s Alan Sparhawk Promises Solo Album This Fall in New Yorker Interview
Low’s Alan Sparhawk will release an album under his own name—and his first full-length since the death, in 2022, of his wife and bandmate Mimi Parker—this fall, according to a profile in The New Yorker. The record is set to be titled White Roses, My God. Sparhawk said it would draw on experiments with improvised guitar, pitch-shifted vocals, and a preset synthesizer clocked to a drum machine. “I was messing with this rigid stuff,” he told interviewer Justin Taylor. “There were moments where it would quickly become very visceral, very spontaneous. You’ve created the structure for it to happen and come through you, but you’re trusting the universe about what is going to come in.”
Ice Spice to Make Acting Debut in Spike Lee’s New Movie High and Low
Spike Lee will introduce Ice Spice, the actor, in his new movie High and Low, Variety reports. Adapted from the Akira Kurosawa classic, the A24 and Apple Original Films production has already begun filming, Apple noted yesterday. Denzel Washington stars in the movie, resuming the ongoing partnership with Lee that started in 1990 with Mo’ Better Blues. This will be their first film together since 2006’s Inside Man.
Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace
Shabaka Hutchings’ tenor saxophone shows up exactly once on this album. Around 10 minutes before the LP ends, he summons the fierce momentum and sandpapery grit that have powered beloved bands like Sons of Kemet, the Comet Is Coming, and Shabaka and the Ancestors, and helped to make him one of the most celebrated jazz musicians of the past decade. As is usually the case when Shabaka—now billed by first name only—picks up what he has called the “big, loud, shiny horn,” the solo is thrilling. But this brief, incendiary statement carries a special weight in the wake of Shabaka’s announcement—made on New Year’s Day 2023 and clarified that summer—that he would be taking an indefinite hiatus from the tenor and his groups that feature that instrument.
Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal
There’s something distinctly Texan about Adam Wiltzie’s music. With the late Brian McBride, the drone titan co-founded Stars of the Lid in 1993, releasing seven albums of ambient music as wispy and ethereal as a desert mirage. Though he’s lived in Belgium for nearly 25 years, he continues to produce music that suggests both the nearly incomprehensible vastness of the American West and the dread secrets it seems to contain. His new album Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal sounds somewhere between a Western soundtrack and an emanation from an underground gas-mining operation, with tails of reverb from electric guitars bleeding into miasmas of strings and horns. Perhaps it’s time to think of Wiltzie in the tradition of European artists—the Wim Wenders of Paris, Texas, the Daft Punk of Electroma—fascinated with America’s enormity in contrast to the compact continent across the pond.
Mister Cee, New York Radio DJ and Notorious B.I.G. Producer, Dies at 57
Calvin LeBrun, the New York radio DJ best known as Mister Cee, has died, the hip-hop station Hot 97 reports, citing his family. A cause of death has not been revealed. Mister Cee was 57 years old. Mister Cee grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and, in 1988, he took part...
Amen Dunes Announces Tour Dates, Shares New “Round the World” Video: Watch
Amen Dunes has released another single from his new album. The new song, “Round the World,” follows Death Jokes’ “Purple Land” and “Boys,” and it comes with a video directed by Steven Brahms (the director behind the “Believe” and “Miki Dora” visuals). Watch the video below.
Aerosmith Reschedule Farewell Tour for Fall 2024
Last year, Aerosmith began a farewell tour that they had to call off after just three shows due to frontman Steven Tyler’s damaged vocal cords and fractured larynx. The band has now announced the rescheduled dates for the Peace Out Tour. The journey begins anew in September. See Aerosmith’s tour dates below.
The Bug and KMRU Announce Album, Share New Song “Differ”: Listen
Kevin Richard Martin, aka the Bug, has joined forces with Joseph Kamaru, aka KMRU, for a new album as KRM & KMRU. The electronic musicians will release Disconnect, via Phantom Limb, on June 14, and you can listen to the single “Differ” below. In press materials, Martin said...
New Alan Vega Album Insurrection Announced
Insurrection, a new collection of previously unreleased material by late Suicide co-founder Alan Vega, has been announced. The 11-song LP lands May 31 via In the Red, and it includes lead single “Mercy,” which is out today. The song arrives with a music video directed by the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Douglas Hart, starring models Mateen Ismail and Helena Gawrzyalska. Check it out below.
Portishead’s Beth Gibbons Shares Interactive Video for New Song “Reaching Out”: Watch
Portishead’s Beth Gibbons has shared a new song, “Reaching Out,” from her forthcoming, debut solo album Lives Outgrown. It comes with a Weirdcore-directed video in which Gibbons hurtles through digital outer-space. In the interactive version, viewers can drag the cursor to spin the perspective, creating “a sense of trying to reach each other in impossible ways,” a press release explains. Check that out on the song’s website, and watch the static video below.
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