Seamlessly blending elements of UK Jazz with emotive indie guitars and a raw, heartfelt vocal performance, Queen Colobus once again create genre-bending soundscapes that are brimming with honesty, polished production and pure vibes. Led by Welsh saxophonist and vocalist Beth Hopkins, Queen Colobus weave a sound that is both soothing and head-banging in equal measure. Their devastatingly honest lyrics and rage-filled riffs fuel their more-ish songs, and new single ‘Flare’ is no exception.

Talking about the single, Beth elaborates, “it was born out of a jam a few years back. The lyrics poured out as a feeling of being overwhelmed. Like drowning in a sea that hasn’t noticed. It developed into a kind of ABA form – we liked that the middle section felt like that extreme moment of overwhelm: drowning in the chaos”.

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Today they have shared their new single, the beautifully expansive ‘Hurricane’. The track was written “following a friend’s messy, often beautiful, but turbulent relationship. It’s about people who don’t always get it right, perhaps what they’ve got is even a bit toxic, and yet somewhere in there, we keep going. And maybe if we only can survive each other, we become something else entirely in the process.”

Dance Lessons – made up of Anne (vocals, songwriting, keys, production), Nat (guitars) and Tom (bass, backing vocals) – formed in 2020. Their debut singles dropped mid-pandemic to critical acclaim, and they’ve been carving their own lane ever since. The mission: blur the lines between jazz and pop while making bold, emotionally rich music with high-gloss production – thanks to Anne, the creative force behind the desk in a world where just 3% of charting producers are women.

Across its 10 tracks, Beginners explores “our constantly evolving relationships to each other.” The record’s sound is as expansive as its influences – from Kate Bush and Bowie to Solange and Róisín Murphy – and aims to “trick people who say they don’t like jazz into really digging it.”

The band’s unique sonic palette draws comparisons to SAULT, Jungle, Crazy P, Jai Paul, Kindness and Blood Orange, but the result is unmistakably their own. “We think our music blends anything and everything that we love and would want to hear ourselves.”

Beginners:

1. SMABTO
2. Hurricane
3. New Job
4. Insomnia
5. Just Chemistry
6. Plurality
7. I Like Lies
8. How Do You Know
9. Trauma Repair
10. Good Enough
11. Eat Your Loyalty

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Speaking about the single, they say: “‘Meet Me In The Middle’ is a song about feeling like a bad friend. It focuses on my struggle to be in two places at once and my hope that the closest people in my life still hold space for me in the moments when I can’t be present in our relationship. It speaks to the difficulty of balancing everything in life and still finding back to each other after a long period of silence.

“‘Meet Me In The Middle’ is me asking that my loved ones keep me in their mind when I don’t have the mental space to communicate, and an explanation that even when I am in a bad place, they are still a massive part of who I am and are always in my mind.

“It is written in the hopes that we figure it out together and meet somewhere in the middle.”

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