Julien Baker has unveiled her highly-anticipated new album Little Oblivions. Stream it below via Apple Music and Spotify. As she did on her first album, 2015’s Sprained Ankle, and the 2017 follow-up, Turn Out the Lights, Baker wrote, performed, and produced every track. The biggest difference this time around might be Baker herself. In 2018, she formed boygenius with Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers, and their powerful self-titled debut introduced each artist to new fans and fresh approaches to songwriting. Still, despite everything good that’s come from her career, Baker lived through a “really difficult year,” and she sees Little Oblivions as a “pretty pessimistic record.” As she explained in an interview with Consequence of Sound on Kyle Meredith with…, “I wrote this record over...
Andrew Bird and Jimbo Mathus wish blessings on Los Angeles’ homeless population on their new song “Poor Lost Souls”. The former Squirrel Nut Zippers bandmates have remained friends since parting ways in the ’90s, and Bird even joined SNZ for “Train on Fire” from their 2020 album Lost Songs of Doc Souchon. Now, the two songwriters are fulfilling a longtime ambition and collaborating on an album, These 13, which contains a baker’s dozen of folksy new tracks. The latest, “Poor Lost Souls”, takes place in LA, where, as the lyrics have it, you can “Look down and see the stars/ Look up and see the gold/ Look around and see these poor lost souls.” Mathus keeps up a steady groove of guitar, while Bird adds fiddle accents. The song highlights the absurdity of abundance surrounding need, w...
21-year-old songwriter Meskerem Mees drew international attention with her first single “Joe”, and now she’s proving she’s a talent to watch with her new song “Seasons Shift”. Mees enchants from the moment she opens her mouth, with an ethereal voice and cosmopolitan accent (she’s Belgian with Ethiopian roots). Alongside her friend the cellist Febe Lazou, she crafts gentle music out of turbulent emotions. “Seasons Shift” is more about a variable person than the changing weather, with lyrics that track differences over time. She sings of someone who “got serious in December/ Lonely in July, though you wouldn’t tell me why/ It might have been easier just to call me but you preferred to cry.” At first she seems to be sketching out a failed relationship, but as the song progresses, her co...
Song of the Week breaks down and talks about the song we just can’t get out of our head each week. Find these songs and more on our Spotify Top Songs playlist. For our favorite new songs from emerging artists, check out our Spotify New Sounds playlist. Take a deep breath … we have a sane president, a history-making veep, and “Individual-1” banned from Twitter … exhale. That’s not to say that life is all good or that all the problems we face as a nation are suddenly solved. No, it takes a lot of work to undo a four-year con job. That said, it won’t hurt if we take a measly two minutes and sixteen seconds out of our stressful, cooped-up lives to relax and, in the parlance of my time, take a chill pill with, well, chillpill. For those unfamiliar, chillpill is the name of the 15-year collabora...
Rising Australian songwriter Indigo Sparke has unveiled the new song “Everything Everything”. Alongside an intimate music video, she’s also announced her signing with Sacred Bones Records to release her debut album Echo, out January 29th. As with all the songs on Echo, “Everything Everything” was produced by Andrew Sarlo and Adrianne Lenker of Big Thief. Over a gentle guitar with occasional piano accents, Sparke sings in an ethereal soprano, which she later undercuts with a section of spoken word. “Everything,” she says, “Everything, everything, everything is dying.” In a statement, Sparke explained how the song came together, writing, “I wrote this song not long after coming back from a magical castle in Italy where a group of us had been making music and soaking in the golden honey days....
Hiss Golden Messenger are back with their first new song since 2019, “Sanctuary”. Written and produced by bandleader M.C. Taylor, “Sanctuary” isn’t exactly a political track, though it does engage with the national mood. “Feeling bad, feeling blue,” Taylor begins, “Can’t get out of my own mind/ but I know how to sing about it.” There’s a tension in the song between uplifting music and lyrical pessimism. At the chorus, backup singers join Taylor, and you might mistake the song for a sunny anthem if you didn’t listen to the words: “You want good news/ You want sanctuary/ But when you try to get real/ They break you on the wheel.” In a statement, Taylor explained how the song came together and paid homage to John Prine, writing, “Over the past year, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we ...
Although they share a name with the Ohio city, Toledo are a band from Brooklyn. The duo of Daniel Alvarez and Jordan Dunn-Pilz are in the midst of rolling out an EP called Jockeys of Love, and today they’re giving fans a preview with a song called “Dog Has Its Day”. The track follows October’s “Challenger” and December’s “It’s Alive!”, which serve as a solid representation of the sounds that Toledo’s music straddles: brisk, slightly surfy dream-pop and crisp, tranquil indie-folk. “Dog Has Its Day” retains the prettiness of the former, but musically it leans closer to the latter sensibility. Over a mellow yet steady groove, Alvarez and Dunn-Pilz stack a whispery falsetto over a mesmerizing acoustic guitar lick and let that ride for a while. Eventually, some beautifully congealed harmonies e...
The Mountain Goats made a Friday night appearance on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert to perform their song “Get Famous”. The track was included on the second of two albums they released in 2020, Getting Into Knives. Like all late night performances these days, the set was recorded remotely in a studio and submitted to the program. In addition to frontman John Darnielle and his three core bandmates — Peter Hughes, Jon Wurster, and Matt Douglas — the group was joined by two additional saxophone players to fill out the blaring woodwinds in this upbeat anthem. Back when the band released “Get Famous” as a single in September, Darnielle opened up about how fulfilling it was to create: “If I told you all how much fun we had making this one you wouldn’t even believe me, but we hope it comes th...
Julia Jacklin is marking the holidays with the cracked new Christmas song “baby jesus is nobody’s baby now”. 2020 has been long and tumultuous, and for the residents of six continents it might be easy to forget that Australia began the year on fire. But down in Oz, where the holiday season overlaps with the dead of summer, it’s impossible to forget the bushfires that caused over $100 billion in damage alongside unfathomable ecological harm. Jacklin’s latest single imagines how a certain infant of legend might have fared in the Land Down Under. “She lost the baby,” Jacklin begins, “The house nearly burned down/ Baby Jesus is nobody’s baby now.” But her ambitions are larger — and more humorous — than just reliving a nationwide trauma. After all, ’tis the season for awkward family dinners and...
After Maggie Rogers went viral for her original song “Alaska” in 2016, she settled in to indie pop fame rather seamlessly. All the music that she wrote before entering the public eye, however, hasn’t gotten the credit it deserves. That’s why Rogers has announced she’s releasing Notes from the Archive:… Please click the link below to read the full article. Maggie Rogers to Release Notes from the Archive: Recordings 2011 – 2016 Nina Corcoran You Deserve to Make Money Even When you are looking for Dates Online. So we reimagined what a dating should be. It begins with giving you back power. Get to meet Beautiful people, chat and make money in the process. Earn rewards by chatting, sharing photos, blogging and help give users back their fair share of I...
Sesame Street is back with its 51st (!) season, and this week’s episode features a wholesome performance by Maggie Rogers. The indie-folk songwriter sings a nocturnal anthem called “It’s Nighttime” while she shows off all the cool critters and astronomical wonders that come out when the sun goes down. The… Please click the link below to read the full article. Maggie Rogers Sings “It’s Nighttime” on Sesame Street: Watch Eli Enis You Deserve to Make Money Even When you are looking for Dates Online. So we reimagined what a dating should be. It begins with giving you back power. Get to meet Beautiful people, chat and make money in the process. Earn rewards by chatting, sharing photos, blogging and help give users back their fair share of Interne...
This past August saw the release of Samia’s debut album, The Baby. In continued support of that LP, a new cover version of the single “Waverly” has been shared, as well as an official music video. Anjimile is the mastermind behind today’s fresh take on “Waverly”. A fellow rising musician… Please click the link below to read the full article. Anjimile Delicately Covers Samia’s “Waverly”: Stream Lake Schatz You Deserve to Make Money Even When you are looking for Dates Online. So we reimagined what a dating should be. It begins with giving you back power. Get to meet Beautiful people, chat and make money in the process. Earn rewards by chatting, sharing photos, blogging and help give users back their fair share of Internet revenue.