The Los Angeles electro-pop duo Magdalena Bay’s sophomore album Imaginal Disk arrives in August, and a new single ‘Image’ is out now. In typical Magdalena Bay fashion, ‘Image’ feels both futuristic and nostalgic. It begins as a mellower, vaporwave-meets-pop diva jam, until a delightfully blown-out bass crashes into the final chorus. Its psychedelic music video features the members of Magdalena Bay in a waiting room, where singer Mica Tenenbaum is about to get an “imaginal disk” upgrade installed in her forehead: “Ooh, so hot/ Meet your brand new image,” she sings as she dances with a couple of “disk sales entities.” It’s real kooky and fun, and you can check it out below. [via Stereogum]

Irish artist EFÉ has released a new single, ‘2000SEVEN’. The Dublin-based artist, whose real name is Anita Ikharo, co-directed the accompanying video with Wiktoria Weintritt, embracing a nostalgic ’90s aesthetic with Japanese film-inspired colour palettes. The video showcases EFÉ and her band performing in various eclectic rooms, centred around a cosy bedroom setting. EFÉ explains the origins of the track: “2000SEVEN Was kinda a rocky version one of my first songs ‘seven’ except this one feels new and could’ve came out in the early 00s hence the name change. It’s also the way me and my band play it live so it was only right we had a recorded version for people to hear. It was a song I wrote when I was like 19, and about how you get closer to someone especially when times kinda get hard and a bad experience can bring people together.” Discussing the video’s inspiration, EFÉ adds: “The 2000SEVEN video was heavily inspired by Cibo Matto’s live performance on a short lived cable programme in 1996. I loved just how cool it was and the live setting of a bedroom was so awesome and refreshing to me and kinda a recurring setting in my music videos. I also love the aesthetic of bedrooms and decorated rooms so it felt very fitting. Me and Wiktoria Weintritt directed it together and it was an insane experience that took very long to finish. But when we finally got the finished video, we were so happy and it’s definitely my favourite music video I’ve made!” [via Dork]

Mothica has unveiled her latest track ‘Mirage’, a preview of her upcoming visual album KISSING DEATH. Set for release on August 23 through her own imprint Heavy Heart Records in partnership with Rise Records, with each of its 12 tracks accompanied by interconnected music videos. Discussing the track, she says: “At one point, this record was taking a classic western inspired direction but I cut most of those songs. I love slide guitar, old church bells, and that spaghetti western influence you’d hear in a Tarantino movie. But being from Oklahoma, I always stayed away from country adjacent sounds because it’s all I ever heard on the radio. “I heard about this idea in therapy I wanted to write about. People imagine achieving their goals will bring them happiness, like this still image in their mind of ‘once I get this, i’ll be happy forever’. But emotions aren’t permanent, it could just be a mirage of water in the desert. So this is my spin on western imagery as a Mothica song. The fans heard a snippet and nicknamed it my yeehaw-thica song.” Elaborating on the album’s concept, Mothica explains: “I decided to make Death a love interest in a dark rom-com-style tale. Throughout the visuals, I’m seen in a therapist’s office explaining this complicated relationship as if describing a scorned lover. The music videos will be like ‘flashbacks’ of what I’m telling my therapist. On the first single ‘DOOMED,’ we go back in time to an angsty teenage version of me. This is my first brush with the Grim Reaper and I doodle pictures of him in my diary surrounded by hearts. Flash forward, I’m shown performing at a dive bar, clubbing, engulfed in self-destruction. He stalks me, and eventually even proposes marriage, and I leave him at the altar and run away. It ends with me and Death in couples therapy. I wanted the music to feel cinematic, like the soundtrack of a movie.” [via Dork]

Australian Eora/Sydney-based multi-disciplinary artist Annie Hamilton has dropped her latest single and accompanying music video, ‘Slut Era’—a defiant anthem that boldly confronts and challenges patriarchal conventions, embodying themes of empowerment and rebellion. Following her recent single ‘Talk’ and critically acclaimed 2022 debut solo album, the future is here but it kinda feels like the past, ‘Slut Era’ continues Hamilton’s exploration of the complexities and obstacles faced by women in the music industry and beyond. The track, described by Hamilton as an “industrial-feminine-rage-pop song,” deftly blends chaotic societal critiques with playful defiance, capturing the paradoxical nature of gendered expectations. “‘Slut Era’ is “an expression of the feeling of being bombarded with impossible patriarchal and societal standards,” she explains. The chorus encapsulates the absurdity of these expectations: “gotta be shareable! vulnerable! f*ckable! relatable! dinner-on-a-plateable! burn-her-at-the-stakeable! – we literally cannot win! The song serves as a commentary on the Madonna/whore complex, the inescapable pressures of social media, and the inherent biases that women and femme-identifying individuals face.” [via Under the Radar]

One of the most compelling groups on the scene since the early 2010s, Rubblebucket, the art-pop project of Kalmia Traver and Alex Toth, is sharing a psychedelic new single, sure to make your hips move. The duo release perhaps the funkiest song they’ve ever made, ‘Rattlesnake’, along with its music video. The band loosely adapted a poem lead singer Kalmia wrote called “Time For the Rattlesnake” from her zine poetry book “Year of The Banana”, capturing it in a funky-disco-smash song form. “A few years before I wrote the rattlesnake poem, my mom and I were on a 30-mile bike ride… Just off the path we spotted a massive rattlesnake lounging in the dappled forest sunlight. It was my first time ever seeing one and my instinct was to stop and get a good look. My mom’s instinct was to get the hell out of there, and we laughed later about this dynamic,” Traver remembers. “The beauty of it took my breath away. But I later ruminated about how even when I am faced with the most breathtaking of our planet’s offerings, it can still be very hard to be present, focused & relaxed because of the chronic anxiety from which I suffer.” Though the tune opens with the neurotic “I don’t want to analyze you but…”, it unveils itself as one character pushing another to self-examine; for Rubblebucket, therapy takes the form of a dance party.

Abbie Ozard has released her new single ‘monsters’. The track arrives ahead of her debut album everything still worries me, set to drop on July 25 via House Anxiety. She explains: “Me and Hugo wrote this after talking about our past relationships and how chaotic and crazy they can be when you’re younger, how you see a side of yourself that you didn’t know you had. It’s hilarious looking back, we put a super satirical twist on situations in the past that were actually quite dark.” Ozard began teasing her debut LP last year with singles ‘days like these’ and ‘i don’t know happiness without you’. She officially announced the album in April with ‘anything for you’, followed by Pixey collaboration ‘miss american dream’. [via Dork]

Luna Li has unveiled her latest single ‘Golden Hour’. It’s the newest offering from her forthcoming album When a Thought Grows Wings, set for release on August 23 via In Real Life/AWAL. The track showcases Li’s introspective songwriting, blending dreamy piano melodies with her mesmerising vocals and exploring themes of nostalgia and vulnerability, capturing the delicate experience of opening up to new love. Reflecting on the track, she shares, “I wanted this song to feel soft and sensual, while also peeking into a psychedelic world. Golden Hour tells the story of an afternoon I spent with someone a couple of years ago in a meadow sitting six feet apart, drenched in rain water and uncertainty, but having a wonderful time experiencing a slow descent into love.” The accompanying music video, directed by Issac Roberts, draws inspiration from the surrealist aesthetics of 1920s cinema, visually representing the yearning and nostalgia associated with romantic love. [via Dork]

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Leicester-born, London-based Shivani Day releases her debut single, ‘Rhetoric’ via FAMM. Laying fresh roots into untouched soil, ‘Rhetoric’ was co-produced by Shivani and close collaborator Minas who weave traditional South Asian musical forms into textured elements of Electronica and R&B. Having discovered her moral compass at an early age, the creative process encouraged Shivani to re-visit early memories to inspire themes of identity, equality and integrity. The Erea Ferreiro(Ojerime, Odeal) directed video resembles ‘Rhetoric’ according to Shivani’s vision – and her initial mood board – with subtle nods to her heritage, from styling details to a mesmerising snake which is an integral symbol in Indian mythology. Dedicated to conquering her self-inflicted limitations, Shivani intends to let her carefully curated soundscape speak for her inner thoughts.

Directed by Maegan Houang, Mitski‘s ‘Star’ video feels timeless, and like a modern film by famed Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi boiled down to its most abstract elements. “Unlike the more narrative/concept driven videos Mitski and I have done together in the past, I wanted this video to encapsulate the impressionistic circularity we all experience. Our lives oscillate between light and dark repeating itself in an endless cycle where nothing is permanent. The best moments are fleeting, but so are the bad,” states Houang. The ‘Star’ video was filmed on a small pond overnight in summer 2023 and presents Mitski performing on a boat in real water amongst painted pieces of wood, creating the illusion of mountains in the background and eliciting what Houang describes as “an otherworldly, atmospheric feeling” to perfectly match the song. Mitski and Houang have a history of collaborating.

Glaswegian alternative indie-pop artist Zoe Graham shares new single ‘Evilin’ – a brass-backed journey of confusion created by a person who’s no good for you. Guitars curdle with plush synths and tautly machined drums, as Zoe draws influence from Kate Bush (she shares a knack for catch-you-off-guard choruses with the ‘80s icon), St Vincent (Daddy’s Home was a regular backing sound during writing sessions), and Beck (“he’s very free as a songwriter; everything’s thought through, but it’s not painstaking”). She leans on David Bowie’s advice not to stay grounded in your deep pool of ideas, but rather to push up and off, and let your toes just brush the floor from time to time. “’Evilin’ is a battle cry” says Zoe. “It reads like a reenactment of how it feels to be purposely confused. Evilin is a channeller of emotional exhaustion. Someone you feel like you depend on and feel scared of all at once. Someone you will put before yourself, and not in a fun way. She isn’t good for you, but there’s something about her you wish you could be more of yourself, a determined independence, relentlessness but a lack of empathy.” The track is accompanied by a video starring Evilin (played by Zoe’s mum, Annette Staines), a cook and 70s star who becomes trapped in her own television show. “Imagine if Fanny Cradock and Killing Eve’s Villanelle were forced into a room together to make a prim and proper cooking show. What would that look like? How would the chaos ensue? How would these two ferocious women work with each other? Well, I knew I was going to be involved, but the only way I was really ever going to create such drama, such stylish feist, was to call my mother and ask her to star in my music video.” said Zoe. “Watching your own mother smash up cakes and jelly soundtracked to my new single, using rolling pins and spatulas as props was utterly wild. It may have been the strangest day of 2024 so far.”

The Brooklyn-born, LA-based singer Zsela has spent the early years of this decade popping up all over the cooler corners of the music industry. Her debut album Big For You, coming this June via Mexican Summer, includes contributions from Marc Ribot, Nick Hakim, Casey MQ, and Jasper Marsalis (Slauson Malone 1), and Zsela’s co-produced it with Daniel Aged and Gabe Wax, who’ve worked with names like Frank Ocean and Soccer Mommy. Zsela teased the album last month with the release of the fizzy, funky, sophisticated synth track ‘Fire Excape.’ Now, along with the proper announcement, comes opening track ‘Lily Of The Nile.’ It’s a slow-burn art-pop song that makes abundant use of Zsela’s low bellow, and it arrives with a video directed by Chester Raj Anand. A statement from Zsela: “It was important for me to stay open in this process, finding the truth of what the songs want to be. That meant breaking them down and building them back up again and again, not being precious and trying to listen… At the heart, it touches on the causal versus intentional dance we play between being “full of you” and “full for you” — the complexity and magnitude of the space we take and fill up for love.” [via Stereogum]

Hayley Mary has returned with a new single and a music video ‘One Last Drag’, which is a pop song about glorifying self-awareness. The song is co-written and co-produced by Hayley’s husband who also happens to be the DMA’s guitarist, Johnny Took. They happened to write the song in a hotel room! The song is also co-produced by the producer of The Jezabels’, Lachlan Mitchell. “I was sitting on the balcony with a wine, borderline chain-smoking, knowing that I would be regretting the cigarettes in the morning but unable to stop. He started looping a guitar intro that he was working on for Gwen Stefani and I just started writing a poem to it in my head. I asked him if I could record it so I wouldn’t forget it, and those draft vocals ended up being the final vocals you hear in the verses.” explains Hayley Mary. The song is a dark post-punk banger that talks about cigarettes and addiction. The cigarette in the song portrays anything that looks or feels good at the moment, but eventually ruins one’s life. It talks about how addiction is harmful to everyone. “I fell for the excitement, the promise of relief, of sexy malaise when real life was too high definition. In recent years, however, I’ve become aware of the potential emptiness of that promise as well,” says Hayley. [via Music Feeds]

Grab your roller skates, baby, Bonnie McKee has news. She’s ramping up to release a new album and trying to steal your man (but only musically and jokingly). In her latest single, ‘Jenny’s Got a Boyfriend,’ she gets campy, sassy and dancey as she falls for your boyfriend in a gender-swapped take on the ’80s hit ‘Jessie’s Girl.’ “I’ve always wanted to write a song that had someone’s name in it like ‘Jessie’s Girl’ or ‘Hey Mickey’ or ‘Billie Jean,’ McKee tells PAPER. “I had this experience because I had a friend who had a boyfriend who was just such a flirt. He was incredibly hot and he knew it. He was always giving me the wrong idea. Not just me, me and all of the girlfriends in the group. We were all convinced that he had a secret crush on all of us. Nothing ever happened. He was such a rake, I guess is what they call him, and I wrote a song about it. Then me and my girlfriends would bop around in the car to it.” The visuals for ‘Jenny’s Got a Boyfriend,’ are a neon, retro, skating-rink fantasy. “I’ve always wanted to do a skating music video, I can skate but I’m not like amazing,” she says. “I’ve always been obsessed with Boogie Nights and Xanadu. I love the ’70s and ’80s roller skating style — the whole aesthetic of that. The song feels like a roller Boogie moment.” In the video, McKee’s part of a “love triangle between Jenny and Jenny’s boyfriend” as they all work together at the rink. “I needed to have some story I could tell that made sense,” she says. “So it seemed like a workplace romance made the most sense. I just put us in little uniforms, and we were in the roller rink after hours. And things get spicy. I love that.” [via PAPER]

Bristol-based artist Emily Perry – AKA Pem has announced her forthcoming EP, cloud work, alongside the new single, ‘grips’. On the new single, Pem says: “A song about wanting to hold on tightly to other people to escape and “forget” everything else for a while. It is inspired by my favourite song ‘Forget About’ by Sybille Baier.” cloud work is a collection of five songs that Pem wrote during an intensely challenging chapter in her life. Full of references to water, sky, flight, memory, and birds, these are the metaphors and symbols that helped her work through the grief of losing her father last year. She says, “the process of creating cloud work enabled me to find beauty, meaning and comfort in a very difficult time.” [via Line Of Best Fit]

Softcult share a final preview of their blissful EP with ‘One Of The Pack,’ a fuzzy inclusionary anthem that depicts their idea of Heaven as one that champions ALL women. Mercedes and Phoenix explain: “When we wrote this song, we wanted to celebrate women supporting women, and of course that includes POC and transgender women. It’s sad that that’s something that I feel I need to specify and include in a statement like this, but the truth is there are some TERFs out there trying to exclude certain communities from feminism and even the term ‘woman.’ We pride ourselves on being intersectional feminists, even introducing riot grrrl feminism and activism to the shoegaze community in our own way, and we want anyone listening to our music to know that POC, trans women, and non-binary people will always be a welcome and crucial part of our grrrl gang. This song is hopefully one you can sing to your best friend to let them know; ‘I know you have to deal with a lot of bullshit from other people, but I will always be here for you. I see you, I’ll support you, and I love you.’”

This is already an iconic Eurovision collaboration: Aiko (Czechia 2024) and TEYA (Austria 2023, as part of Teya and Salena) have released a song together. In the song ‘Hunger’, Aiko and TEYA sing about the experience of feeling like you need to have a certain body to fit in with societal standards. For women in particular, they address the pressure to appeal to the male gaze. With this powerful message, they show that women are taught from an early age to eat less so they can fit in, seeing their bodies as the enemy, hence the title ‘Hunger’. In the video, you can see them walk on treadmills, emphasising this point as well. It is a great song with an important message, and yet it is catchy at the same time! Aiko and TEYA did a great job by combining their songwriting skills. [via ESCXTRA]

In November 2022, Christine And The Queens released Redcar les adorables étoiles, which was followed by PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE in June 2023. Now, the French musician is back with a new song called ‘rentrez chez moi.’ ‘rentrez chez moi’ was written, composed, and produced by Chris. The music video was directed by Sasha Mongin, produced by Premier Cri, and shot in Paris and Hanches. [via Stereogum]

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Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Bonnie McKee has dropped a new music video for ‘Hot City’ directed by Joe DeSantis and Bonnie Mckee. The song was released as the second single from her upcoming sophomore album Hot City last month, following ‘SLAY’. It was written by Bonnie McKee, Kelly Sheehan, Jroc and Oliver Goldstein. Produced by Oligee. She wrote the song in 2011, but the track was never released due to leaving her label Epic Records at that time. This time, she re-recored the song for the new album. Bonnie McKee said of the video, “The ‘Hot City’ music video is every bit the bright and highly stylized 80’s fever dream I envisioned it to be all those years ago, and I’m elated to finally let it live!’ Bonnie McKee said of the song, “I wrote ‘Hot City’ in Miami 2011, at the height of the golden age of sparkly maximalist pop music. I was carefree, riding the high of co-writing my first global hits on the Teenage Dream album, and finally catching my stride after years of barely getting by as a struggling songwriter. I was at the top of my songwriting game, and always felt like this song was some of my best work, but my label deal fell apart and it never saw the light of day. With the recent resurgence of nostalgia for 2010’s pop, (and a lot of encouragement from my fans!) I decided to crack open the vault and re-record all my old masters of the era, and it’s been extremely gratifying bringing the visuals to life.” She continued, “I always wanted to write a song about an imaginary destination a la ‘Funky Town,’ ‘Paradise City’ or ‘Electric Avenue,’ because I feel like it’s an evergreen theme-escaping to paradise-that people can bop to 50 years from now.” She added, “As a kid I was fascinated by the movie trope of “repressed nerd” gone wild. From Michelle Pfeiffer’s transformation from insecure Selina Kyle to kick ass Catwoman in Batman Returns, to virginal Sandra D’s leather jacket ‘Tell me about it, stud’ moment in Grease, there was a thrill and a danger to a woman embracing her sexuality that I found exhilarating. I purposefully didn’t cast a love interest in this video because for me, it was never the male gaze that resulted from these bad girl makeovers that excited me, it was the power and confidence they exuded in their uninhibited state. My hope is that ‘Hot City’ can allow the listener to escape to a place where they can leave their troubles behind and embrace their inner vixen!” [via pmstudio]

In July, Pittsburgh’s Code Orange announced plans to follow their 2020 album Underneath with a new album called The Above, coming at the end of September. The hardcore/metal experimenters launched their new era with a single, ‘Take Shape,’ which features the one and only Billy Corgan. Now, Code Orange are circling back with a new single and video (directed by the band’s visual/audio collective NOWHERE2RUN), ‘Mirror,’ which features Reba Meyers on lead vocal. “This song has a special place in my heart,” Meyers says. “To me, it’s the climax of this style of my writing in this band thus far. Take a look in the mirror, are you bored?” Jami Morgan adds: “‘Mirror’ is NOWHERE2RUN’s first foray into full music video production from conception all the way to the final edit. It’s fitting that we took on a song that is dynamically disparate from anything Code Orange has ever done. It’s a little softer, a little more lush, and led by a powerful performance from Reba. It’s another important piece of the puzzle that is The Above.” [via Stereogum]

Meet UCHE YARA, the gifted 20-year-old multi-instrumentalist, producer and songwriter who grew up in Austria and is now based in Berlin. Despite not even releasing one song, UCHE YARA has stunned audiences across Europe in recent months with her confident and powerful performances, going straight from her high school final exams to playing over 40 shows with her 4-piece band, which have included Wilderness, The Great Escape, MELT and opening with Bilderbuch for the Rolling Stones. The sound is almost indescribable, melding an incredibly wide range of genres from psychedelic rock, tango and R&B with remarkably wide-ranging vocals to create a truly mesmerising sound that unbelievably is all the work of one person. UCHE YARA releases her long-awaited debut single and video ‘www she hot’, a tour de force of a track that is a real statement of intent from this talented young artist. Written as UCHE YARA’s love song to Mother Earth, it ironically highlights all the beautiful and ugly things that keep on happening on our planet and affect us all. “It was never my plan to write about this topic” explains UCHE YARA on the creation of the track, “yet it seems that subconsciously something must have been preoccupying me after all. From the beginning, it was clear to me that I wanted to write a feel-good song that is simply fun to play live and unites me with the audience. I fully produced and recorded the song in my first shared flat in Berlin. I couldn’t really sing at the time because I had a bad flu…probably that’s the reason why I was playing around with my vocals so much. Initially, I wanted to write a track that unites the live-audience and me and would be equally fun on both sides. So here it is, have fun <3”

Nessa Barrett has teamed up with producer Whethan for a new single, ‘sick of myself’. The track follows on from Nessa’s recent slot at Reading & Leeds, as well as her EP hell is teenage girl. Whethan says of the collab: “’sick of myself’ is the perfect collaboration between Nessa and I’s sound and I’m excited to play this one out at upcoming shows.” “So excited to be releasing this collab with Whethan,” Nessa adds. “He’s such a talented, cool artist. I hope everyone loves this song as much as we do.” [via Dork]

Baby Queen – AKA Bella Latham – shares her new single, ‘Quarter Life Crisis’, which arrives in the lead up to the release of her eagerly awaited debut album of the same name. ‘Quarter Life Crisis’, stemmed from a conversation Latham had with her cousin’s girlfriend. “I felt like I had so much responsibility, but I still felt like a child. I was talking about how I felt, and she said the phrase, quarter life crisis.” Baby Queen looked up the phrase and felt validated: “People have this experience where you’re looking both forward and back. It’s the realisation that actually, you can’t fuck around anymore. Fucking around finally comes to an end.” So, in songwriter Max Wolfgang’s flat, the pair wrote the song together. It has, what Bella calls, “a creepy nursery rhyme vibe”, both catchy and foreboding. “I feel like my mind is 25-sided / I’ll let you know if I ever survive this,” she sings prophetically. [via Line Of Best Fit]

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Speaking about the LP – due in the autumn – Bonnie says: “Some things will haunt you. And this album was one of them. “I locked it away for a decade thinking nobody wanted it, but that little voice inside me kept singing. And against literally everyone in the industry’s advice, I said fuck it – I’m putting it out. For you guys, for myself.” [via Retropop]

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