Portland’s Jessica Boudreaux — known as the creative force behind indie-punk band Summer Cannibals (Tiny Engines, Kill Rock Stars) — has released her brand new I Think My Heart Loves to Break EP. She also shared the final single from the collection, ‘Loves to Break.’ Backed by rolling bass and infectious electronic elements, the noir-pop track details the cycle of being drawn to someone despite persistent heartbreak. The punk energy that defined Summer Cannibals still resonates in a form of direct intent, as she contemplates surrender, asking: “Wonder if I drop it all, I’ll stop hitting the same old fucking walls.” But in place of the massive distorted guitars, the song’s intensity comes from a careful and considered orchestration of sounds flowing over a steady beat and allowing Boudreaux’s signature vocals to shine.
Last month, Stella Donnelly announced her sophomore album Flood. So far we’ve heard lead single ‘Lungs,’ and today she’s back with the title track. “This song feels like a sad little adventure,” Donnelly said in a statement. “I wrote it in the dark depths of a Melbourne winter lockdown where it had been raining for consecutive weeks. Everyone around me was falling into their own version of depression at different times. It felt like a flood of trauma yet at the same time, we were given an opportunity of time to work through stuff that weʼd been distracting ourselves with for so long prior to the pandemic.” ‘Flood’ also comes with a video directed by Donnelly, Nick McKk, and Grace Goodwin. “This clip is pure ridiculous play, like going to your grandparents’ house where you and your cousins would get up to the most elaborate film projects,” Donnelly said. “We always ran around the house making home movies that tried to re-enact other films and much like this clip here, they always ended in some sort of minor catastrophe. With this video for ʻFloodʼ we have made a very feeble attempt at recreating the legendary OK GO video clip for ʻHere it Goes Againʼ and we failed gloriously.” [via Stereogum]
With her debut album Doomed set for release on September 21, Jesse Jo Stark is sharing new single ‘Modern Love’. “’modern love’ is a song that came in a moment, out in the world watching a new kind of love happen all around me,” she explains. “Something in my guts told me we’ve crept away from the pure love I have always wanted. People making friends as accessories. climbing people like ladders. It made me feel like a stranger in my own body.” [via DIY]
First Aid Kit have returned with their first piece of original music since 2019. The Swedish sister duo share their single ‘Angel,’ along with an accompanying music video. Lyrically, ‘Angel’ seems to document a relationship on the brink of collapse, as First Aid Kit square up their narrator’s anxieties with their love interest’s hostility: “What has that fear ever done for me but hold me back?/ What has jealousy and hate ever done for you but remind you of what you think you lack?” Klara Söderberg sings in the first verse over a fingerpicked guitar. Then, in the bombastic chorus, the sisters stand their ground by listing their demands: “Give me love and give me compassion/ Self-forgiveness and give me some passion/ I love you even though you can’t love me,” they sing in their trademark harmony. Watch the Mats Udd-directed music video for ‘Angel’ above. [via Consequence]
With the first single. ‘Anything But Time’, from their new EP, Beach Baby, Baby, Nick & June float in a glittering fog of trilling synthesizers, gentle beat and drum pulses and vibrating organ sounds. Embedded in dark reverb guitars, the bitter-sweet paired voices of Suzie-Lou Kraft and Nick Wolf lead the way through euphorically orchestrated restraint and meditative ramifications of thought. Where parallels were once drawn to artists like Bon Iver, Damien Rice, and Angus & Julia Stone, now also Beach House, Mazzy Star, and Lana Del Rey, peer through the reverb-veil. “The song was written really fast, very stream-of-consciousness, really really fast. It’s a brief song, with simple sounds, in fact just an old Casio keyboard and a drum machine, with lots of ideas in it. We don’t do too much talking about the lyrics so people can interpret them in their own way. Besides, sometimes even we don’t know one hundred percent what they mean.“ The band shot the accompanying video in an old hotel in Berlin, a late 19th-century tenement house that was once home to silent movie star Asta Nielsen. “We have watched many classics of film history and all time favorites in Pandemic – maybe that’s why the overall concept of the EP has a cinematic touch. With these impressions absorbed, we quickly had a firm idea of what the video should look like. The Hotel Funk in Berlin, as an already stunning location, was adapted even more to our wishes by Lillie Ceben, who was responsible for the set design, and Jeanette Friedrich then captured them and shortened them to two minutes thirty – which was really hard with such beautiful material. I believe that with Maja Bons as the actress, we have found the one person who can make this video fun from head to toe.“
Crawlers have shared a new video for ‘Fuck Me (I Didn’t Know How To Say)’. The recently-dropped track follows the band’s absolute mega-hit ‘Come Over (Again)’. Speaking about the song, Crawler’s Holly says: “‘Fuck Me (I Didn’t Know How To Say)’ is a song that’s very personal to us as a band. The song covers two ideas behind sex. First the trauma and disgust after sexual assault, and then the idea of how at the time of writing it I haven’t felt loved and only used for my body and for sex rather than the love I really wanted at the time.” [via Dork]
Alt-pop iconoclast Layke has released her new single and music video, ‘XOXO,’ the latest offering from her forthcoming EP, Frequency, out July 29. Co-written with multi-platinum Grammy-nominated producer, songwriter, and artist Adrian Gurvitz (Andra Day, The Bodyguard Soundtrack, Stevie Wonder) and Transviolet’s Sarah McTaggart, the dance-club bop celebrates Layke’s journey of finding her voice within the LGBTQIA+ community and is a love letter to those who have embraced and supported her along the way. ‘XOXO’ is accompanied by a neon-clad music video that welcomes viewers into Layke’s vivid, candy-coated world featuring a diverse group of dancers meant to mirror the dazzling celebration of acceptance associated with Pride month. “It’s really an ode to the LGBTQIA+ community. This song makes you wanna move, makes you wanna dance,” Layke shares about the track. “It paints a vivid picture with lyrics like ‘prisms dripping light,’ ‘shining neon bright,’ and ‘we make the sun come out at night.’ It’s a true reflection of how enigmatic and beautiful each part of the community is.” Speaking about the music video, she adds, “It opens with a fierce choreo moment to welcome you into a vivid pastel neon rainbow candy coated world of all things fun. You’ll see familiar faces from my previous video, ‘No One Can Stop Us,’ who each represent a different aspect of the amazingly diverse queer community. We wanted to really highlight the brightness and love of Pride month and encourage everyone to keep that energy and Pride going 24/7 365. This is my dance love letter to the queer community!”
JUNO Award winning indie-rock juggernauts MONOWHALES return with another powerhouse release ‘StuckintheMiddle’. The Toronto based band, made up of vocalist Sally Shaar, guitarist Zach Zanardo and drummer Jordan Circosta, let rip a tiddle wave of catharsis on this explosive track exploring lead singer Sally’s complex relationship with self-identity. Through the unrelenting guitars and thumping drums, Sally screams out her spite, angst, and rage in hopes of growing self-aware enough to set herself free. In a statement about the single, Sally explained “Every day is a constant struggle, pushed and pulled around by my past, present and future. The deep seeded trauma from my upbringing can be so easily triggered it becomes unwelcomed habitual mannerisms, which I despise. Apparent and invisible expectations, instilled within me since the day I was born, are placed on every action I take. Do I choose to be a sweet, good girl, or an unapologetic rebel? It’s suffocating. ‘StuckintheMiddle’ is the caged-up embodiment of this unsteady confusion. At a certain point all this pressure starts to feel like a shaken-up bottle poised to explode. Singing the chorus, I feel like I am standing in the middle of a room screaming “What the fuck do you want from me?”. Accompanying the release is the new music video. The gruelling shoot sees Sally desperately fight against her restrains, set to the sterile setting of a classic 50s kitchen depicting what is expected of a woman in her position. “Those real (and heavy) chains were hooked to my arms for the entire shoot with folks on constantly pulling at them to get my real reaction of what it felt like to be pulled and dragged around. By the end the video, everything around me starts to crumble but I remain helpless no matter where I try to go. I had to pull up the deepest darkest places in my head to show this and by the end of this shoot I was physically and emotionally drained.”
Bay Area trio Rainbow Girls are currently on tour with revered singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco with upcoming California shows in Solana Beach and Los Angeles. In celebration of the appearances, they have released a new single, ‘Compassion to the Nth Degree,’ and an accompanying music video. The track is off a forthcoming full-length album of which few additional details have been revealed. Of the song, the group shares, “If you don’t like protest songs, you’ll love this. In a last-ditch effort to wrench up compassion for those we don’t see eye-to-eye with, we turn to love. This song names a kind of love previously undefined: love for the bigot, love for the thief, love for the destroyer. Infinite compassion. Only light can illuminate the darkness, so this is a sweet little love song for all the sh**heads out there.” Of making the music video, they add, “We made this video in our living room. We moved all our furniture outside, spent days taping aluminum foil to big pieces of plywood and hanging tinsel curtains. We bought gaudy cakes and donuts and covered them in glitter. We commissioned a custom eggplant emoji piñata from a woman in Oregon because we wanted a metaphor so blatant that even Party City couldn’t help us. We hired our dear friend Sam Chase to take a risk, take a test, and make this video with us (he also has a cameo in the video as our Donut Sommelier). We wanted to create a liminal zone lacking substance. A sugar-coated wonderland reflecting the vapid distractions and bulging vanity we were seeing all over social media, despite the very alarming reality of the world falling apart in every conceivable way. The thing is, we set out to make something airbrushed and fluffy and stupid in order to ridicule an internet culture that can be all of those things, and in doing so had the most fun ever filming a video. We got to makeout with glitter lollipops and roll around in cotton candy clouds- what’s not to love?????” [via Grateful Web]
A brilliant songwriting mind with a smooth, provocative voice, jena keating is turning heads with her new song, ‘Nobody Can Have Me’. The London-based Irish artist is an exciting creative who loves to explore genres which she chooses to align with, unafraid to break the mold. While her music could be considered alternative R&B, it also holds space for so many other musical genres such as jazz, rap, and pop. Her creative talents put her in a unique space that puts her a cut above. ‘Nobody Can Have Me’ is a personal song for jena, who describes the song by saying that it “encapsulates the painful detachment from a love not capable of lasting that long but did. It stores a solid truth that nobody ever will ‘have’ wholefully me, but it comes from a source deeply burrowed in fear. It is misfortune, longing, resentments. It holds the process of healing while also grasping the sound of no more.” [via Wordplay Mag]
Jessie Reyez is done putting up with a ‘Fraud’ in her first new solo music since the release of her debut album Before Love Came to Kill Us. Reyez makes her directorial debut in the single’s accompanying video alongside co-director Emma Higgins. The vivid clip features Reyez and a group of women who paint the walls red with blood while dealing with a couple of devilish men. They soon find themselves in a lush setting, where flowers bloom, making their own kind of Garden of Eden, free from the evil. “‘Oh, you’re such a fucking fraud,” she sings, calling out the betrayal. “Your lies they go on and on and on.” She laments the lack of loyalty and the pain of loving somebody who doesn’t love you back. [via Rolling Stone]
