Brand New Music
Snail Mail | Lush
With Lush Lindsey Jordan has officially move away from her bedroom rock roots and embraced a personal, melodic more candid approach to her songwriting. Even under the weight of more media attention and the expectation that comes with greater critical acclaim, Jordan’s group has delivered more rawness, more authenticity and more magnetizem while boasting an enhances maturity and musicality. There is a instant familiarity with this record where in 10-tracks Jordan parallels the catharsis and plan-spoken nature of her contemporaries Soccer Mommy and Julien Baker.
Kanye West, Kid Cudi | Kids See Ghosts
It’s not a great sign when the label screws up the track names on release. Regardless, today we have the 3rd installment of Kanye’s G.O.O.D music 5-piece epic. The collaboration between the master and protoge has produced only a scant 7 tracks, but it’s with this brevity that we see Cudi’s chance to control a bit of an inferno. There’s a few bumps in the road from a first listen, but overall the beauty of this record, the talk of the burns and scars, shines through from beginning to end.
serpentwithfeet | soil
The cliche of the love song is flat, sometimes even a burden to listen to. There’s generalizations about sexual power dynamics and practices. This continues today as a superfluous universalism that is more oppressive than we even realize. This is where the New York-based serpentwithfeet (born Josiah Wise) jumps into the deep end and adds his own bewitching mechanisms. Offering 11-tracks of chemical, elemental, revelatory soul dedicated love songs, we see this art form transform at a truly personal level that separates his songwriting from the rest of the horde. There’s a true multidimensionality at the heart of this record. Growing up as a gay black man in a deeply religious family more than likely forced a younger version to develop a fractured identity, but on this record he acknowledges these cultural contradictions with a clarity of conscious of a mature artist.
Lykke Li | so sad so sexy
There’s quite a mix of musical direction this time around from Lykke Li. There’s pleanty of hip-hop influence early on, a few dance tracks thrown in, the odd charming introspective ballad, and pop elements remain pervasive throughout. In hitting so many different beats the record is a little disjointed but even more so, it displays a growth, both personally and professionally, where Li again proves that there’s no such thing as ‘boring’ in her vocabulary.
Also out today
Kadhja Bonet | Childqueen
Lilly Allen | No Shame
Jorja Smith | Lost & Found
