Scottish-born, Copenhagen-based producer, composer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist Clarissa Connelly has announced her debut album on Warp Records, World of Work, to be released on April 12. With this announcement, she shares a new single from the album ‘An Embroidery’, with a playful music video. ‘An Embroidery’ is an image of growth, building one sonic element at a time to reach a great cacophony. Within this cacophony, Connelly brings together incongruous sounds of clanging church bells with heavy distorted bass guitars, a patchwork quilt of her evolving sound. The single is perfectly exemplary of Connelly’s penchant for bringing together the ancient with the modern. Clarissa Connelly says on the new release: “‘An Embroidery’ was one of the first songs I wrote for World of Work. It truly is about gathering all the threads and making an embroidery; making an album.”
Georgia Gets By, the project of New Zealand’s Georgia Nott (BROODS), shares a video for ‘When All You Can Manage Is A Sigh,’ a gorgeous and quietly devastating new single. “I wrote this song for a friend a few years ago while they were navigating a divorce. There are those moments where thinking can’t balance out the feelings. You can rationalize all you want but you are still there, holding that enormous heavy sensation that no words can describe,” Georgia explains. “There, on the other side of falling in love, looking around at empty space and wondering whether you can bear to try it all again. This song is a parting gift of some sorts; something to fill the emptiness for a couple of minutes. As Imogen Heap says ‘there is beauty in the breakdown’.”
Gustaf, the Brooklyn no wave / post-punk band announced their debut album last month and now they are back with a double single and video for ‘Here Hair / Hard Hair.’ The first is a brooding, slow-motion growl peppered by birdsong and stabbed by pinpricks of guitar, while its chaser, ‘Hard Hair,’ is 45-second outburst of energy, invective and regret. The songs were produced and mixed by Erin Tonkon with initial production from Carlos Hernandez. Its accompanying video directed by the band’s own Lydia Gammill, features the band wigged out among heart shaped hair brushes and roses.
Manchester’s finest alt-punks The Empty Page just released a gritty new video, calling out the ‘Cock of the Fifth Year’. “Cock of the fifth year is what we called the biggest jock types when I was in high school. Cocky, brash loud and overly confident. Puffed up and swaggering and often quite intimidating. I liked the name for a song and wrote it initially about a cartoonish bloke who unselfconsciously uses up all the space available and makes others feel shoved out of the way. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of blokes like that I encounter when walking around my home city of Manchester. Swaggering, mouthy bellends who can be pretty intimidating when you’re a woman just trying to get from A to B. I was thinking about the idea that being a big deal in high school is the peak of some people’s lives. I hated school with a passion and my own life has got better and better as my school days have receded in the rearview. Seems a weird flex now to have been a big deal in high school,” says Kel, singer/guitarist/songwriter of The Empty Page. [via Loud Women]
Babehoven will return with a new album this spring. The New York-based duo of Maya Bon and Ryan Albert have announced Water’s Here In You, out April 26 via Double Double Whammy. This week sees the release of a new song called ‘Birdseye,’ following the previously released album track ‘Chariot.’ Seemingly aware of the blandness that runs through most modern indie rock, ‘Birdseye’ opts for something more ambitious and strikes a balance between melancholic and soaring, jangley and ornate. The music video, directed by Ash Kron, makes a comforting blanket out of the threads of whimsy in the song, depicting Bon as a balloon-aided bird flapping across the coast and taking advantage of the nice weather to do some human-watching. [via The FADER]
Last year, Saya Gray shared her Qwerty EP. Now, the art-pop musician announced its sequel, Qwerty II, and shared the hallucinatory single ‘AA BOUQUET FOR YOUR 180 FACE’ with a video directed by Jennifer Cheng. “180 face is my bass moment off of qwerty ii EP,” she said in a statement. “it’s about a spooky moody boy with a 180 face.” Qwerty II was made in isolation in 2023, and Gray describes it as “a collection of ideas and collages stuck together as the ying to the yang of the first half.” [via Stereogum]
The new visuals for Fever Ray‘s ‘Shiver’ come from frequent collaborator Martin Falck; Main, the trollish office drone Dreijer has portrayed in this era of visuals, falls from the sky to a red planet. They’re healed by a buff doctor, played by none other than International Fitness and Bodybuilding Federation pro bodybuilder Irene Andersen, whose office also doubles as a BDSM chamber. Some light physiotherapy ensues. The new clip was inspired by the Lovers of Valdero, a pair of Stone Age skeletons that were buried for millennia in an intimate embrace. “We fantasized about what might have happened to these two skeletons,” Dreijer says. “Were they so in love they had their mouths and noses too close to each other, or couldn’t stop kissing so they died of carbon monoxide poisoning? Or did a dinosaur kill them, and they died in fear holding each other? Was it a volcano, and they were protecting themselves from the lava burning their flesh? Maybe they weren’t in love at all; perhaps they were lifelong enemies facing their final struggle strangling each other? We felt there was a beautiful story there about the struggles of falling in love and the vulnerability you might feel being ‘examined’ by your love interest who wants to make sure you really are the one they can trust and form a relationship with, that will last for eternity.” [via The FADER]
Tierra Whack has dropped ’27 CLUB,’ the latest preview of her new album, WORLD WIDE WHACK. A reference to the infamous 27 Club of celebrities who died at the age of 27 — including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Kurt Cobain — the new single was produced by Whack’s frequent collaborator J Melodic and ProdbyBRIANNA. The track dives deep into Whack’s mental health, as she sings about losing touch with family and friends while embodying the pain of coming up against seemingly insurmountable obstacles. After explicitly mentioning thoughts of suicide, Whack sings, “Like a glass full but I’m empty/ Said, ‘I’m broken, can you fix me?’/ If I’m dreamin,’ you should pinch me/ Got a gun to the head, don’t tempt me.” Addressing the song in an Instagram post, Whack wrote, “I was in a dark place for a long time, and no one knew. I found my way out and made a choice to keep living. I wanna be completely transparent with my ‘whackos’ because I’m human just like you and we all have rough days. The key is to keep going! Be kind… you never know what someone else is going through. For the longest time, I felt like I didn’t belong, but now I know that I do, and my hope is for other people to know that, too.” [via Consequence]
Toronto-born, Los Angeles-based alternative artist Abby Sage sustains her musical momentum with an introspective new single, ‘Soak.’ This radiant track offers another peek into her creative process while heightening the anticipation for the release of her forthcoming debut album, The Rot, out March 1 via Nettwerk. Embellished with delicate vocals and complemented by upbeat guitar strums, ‘Soak’ strikes a sonic balance between melodic buoyancy and industrial undertones. Introduced by a simple drum beat, the song gradually reaches its climax in a lively and sparkling chorus. This sweeping alternative-pop track is a testament to self discovery, and an exploration of the liberation found in triviality. “‘Soak’ is the acceptance and surrender to complete unimportance.” Sage says. “It’s recognizing how insignificant everything is and how small I am. It’s celebratory in a way because there is something so beautiful and freeing about letting go of ego and self importance. It frees up a lot of space.” Regarding the video, she continues, “I wanted to focus on the ‘giving in’ aspect of that first so the set was designed to feel chaotic and crowded with the masks and the wind blowing while I struggle to let go. Later in the video, the optical illusion of the puppet ‘carrying’ me around is that manifestation of my surrender and embrace of my insignificance.” [via Broadway World]
