This is our weekly recap of the best new songs released each week because Plato said that music gives soul to the universe and wings to the mind and we care deeply about your physical, mental, and spiritual well-being.
It’s also not a bad way to start the weekend. Here’s a Spotify playlist of the songs (with some substitutions for the ones that aren’t on Spotify yet) if that’s more your speed. Also, here’s our collected Spotify playlist of all the songs of the week we’ve had.
A general warning that many of these songs have explicit lyrics. Here they are, in no particular order:
1. Flume – Smoke & Retribution (Feat. Vince Staples & Kučka)
Flume released a deluxe edition of his self-titled debut back in 2013 pulling amazing features everywhere from Autre Ne Veut to Killer Mike. The Australian producer is planning to drop the follow-up, Skin, this March, just in time for you step on someone else’s toes to it at a festival this spring.
Smoke & Retribution is the third single, featuring two red-beam precise verses from Vince Staples, broken up by Kučka’s serene vocals. All this over this glitchy video-arcade-from-Tomorrowland dance music Flume is kind of known for producing. — MP
2. Suuns – Translate
The murky synths that kick off new Suuns’ track Translate could seem, at first, to be the standard Drive soundtrack synths we’ve heard a billion times since Ryan Gosling first put on that bloody jacket. But just wait … the synths aren’t the end all and be all of this song, and when that janky, off-kilter guitar riff comes charging in, it all starts to make sense. The synths and guitar bounce off each other, and you aren’t sure if this is krautrock or techno or alt or what, but it sounds fantastic. — NS
3. Lil Wayne – Cry Out (Amen)
The prolificacy of mid-00s Lil Wayne is the stuff of legend. It was like the man blacked out for four or five straight years, churning out music at a pace that was nowhere near sustainable. He was putting it out faster than it could be fine-tuned and properly packaged, so a good grip of the best tracks from that time circulate the Internet as low-quality loosies. Cry Out is such case, and on the 10th anniversary of its release, producer Streetrunner – of great skill with an MPC and apparently a big, big heart – mastered it and gave it away as a free download. — MP
4. Hans Island – Break Free
Google tells me Hans Island is a tiny uninhabited rock in the middle of the Kennedy Channel in Canada. You name your band Hans Island and you think the music would be similarly stark and barren, and yet here is Break Free, a lush, sweet, three minutes of pop. The song is about breaking free (duh,) and letting go, and when the hook hits, you’ll want to do just that. — NS
5. Earl Sweatshirt – Wind In My Sails
Earl Sweatshirt’s flow is something I can’t describe without pulling out literary crit speak I know I haven’t touched since high school. It’s like the ABABAB rhyme scheme of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven. Rhymes within rhymes on top of rhymes next to rhymes. Great use of enjambment. And over a heavily sampled Thomas East record courtesy of The Alchemist, it shines through. Kinda shabby, my momma told me to man up, it’s now Popeye with the anchor tats and the spinach, finna spazz on a [expletive] if I have to. — MP
6. The So So Glos – A.D.D. Life
The So So Glos gained notoriety as the ringleaders of a Brooklyn DIY punk scene centered at their space Shea Stadium, where they acted as house band and big brothers to a group of great acts that included Titus Andronicus. Their last album Blowout is one of the most underrated punk albums of the last half decade, and on their new song they don’t appear to have lost a step. A.D.D. Life is a bouncing ode to attention deficit, and a reminder about perspective: If you got friends living as crazily as you, it doesn’t seem so crazy. — NS
7. Yuck – Hearts In Motion
Yuck is a London band whose first two albums established them as real voices in the shoegaze scene. Their song Rubber is a perfect song, the best My Bloody Valentine song that was ever not written by My Bloody Valentine. For their new album, though, Yuck appears to be opening things up, easing back on the distortion and writing songs that are as much pop punk as anything. It’s an interesting change but one I sort of love, and Hearts in Motion is a perfect example of this progression. It sounds a little like Built to Spill, and if that doesn’t sell you on it, I don’t know what will. — NS
8. PJ Harvey – The Wheel
PJ Harvey has never written a bad song, I don’t think. Her latest, The Wheel, is a booming celebration of big sound, and the tone she gets from the saxophones in the raucous introduction is my favorite moment of 2016 music so far. Listen to that sax. This is what that instrument is supposed to sound like, and no indie act has captured it better, save perhaps Deerhunter with their mighty sax on Coronado. Sorry, Kenny G, you’re alright and all, but this is what this instrument is supposed to sound like. — NS
9. Young Thug – F Cancer (Feat. Quavo)
Young Thug celebrated Boosie Badazz successfully having a cancerous tumor removed from his kidney by teaming up with Quavo, donning pink scrubs and uncorking some outlandish moon language over bouncy Mike Will production. Quavo is fantastic and Thugger is predictably impeccable, in his own weird way: [expletive] cancer, shoutout to Boosie, I [expletive] your main [expletive], gave her the cooties.
Never, ever change Young Thug. And by that I mean never become predictable. — MP
10. Radamiz – Sumner
Radamiz is an MC from Brooklyn and on his latest, Sumner, he surveys New York and raps about his home. Unsurprisingly, what starts as a look around his apartment soon turns to anger, as he looks upon his surroundings, his community, the EBT card he name-checks in the hook … and you can’t help but think about the wealth always looming just on the other side of the bridge. The song ends in righteous fury: “It took a long damn time to feel important / So why the [expletive] you ruining my vibe right now?” — NS
