i think i better follow you around

Papercuts announced their new album, “Past Life Regression”, out April 1st via Slumberland.

TRACKLIST:

1. Lodger
2. Sinister Smile
3. Fade Out
4. I Want My Jacket Back
5. My Sympathies
6. The Strange Boys
7. Palm Sunday
8. Hypnotist
9. Remarry
10. Comb In Your Hair

The first single/video off the new album is for “I Want My Jacket Back” which was directed by David Enos. Jason Quever / Papercuts said this about the song: “It started out as a bit of absurdist fun, as I was feeling at my wits’ end during the end of the US election cycle. I was thinking about someone I met in LA who seemed to believe every absurd conspiracy theory they heard, even some that seemed to contradict each other. At the same time, I was for the first time considering leaving the US. I felt robbed of a sense of security and faith in humanity, and was missing a sense of normalcy. It may have been an illusion in the first place, but a pleasant one.”

With the release of “I Want My Jacket Back” he also shared the B-Side for it, “The Strange Boys”, for which he said: “I pictured a Twilight Zone style black and white story about a group of teens that communicate with a supernatural entity. Later I realized it’s probably an analogy about what happens to the spirit upon death. Anyhow, it shows off what real mellotron flutes sound like when you abuse the pitch knob.”

He only has 2 dates scheduled to play this year so far:. 02/10 Los Angeles, CA – Gold Diggers w/ Massage.
02/26 San Francisco, CA – Bottom of the Hill w/ Chime School.

Geese released their debut album “Projector” via Partisan / PIAS.

TRACKLIST:

1. Rain Dance
2. Low Era
3. Fantasies / Survival
4. First World Warrior
5. Disco
6. Projector
7. Exploding House
8. Bottle
9. Opportunity Is Knocking

I’m anticipation of the debut album they released a few singles, and the first one was “Disco”, for which they said: “Disco” was our first big step forward as a band. It’s a very urgent and restless song, which was indicative of all our headspaces at the time. “Disco” has a lot of organized chaos at its core; the music, the lyrics, and even the way we recorded it all speak to a sort of manic energy we were all working through. It’s a song that sounds like it’s perpetually on the verge of collapse — and yet it always manages to keep itself together. There’s a bit of chaos in all of our songs, or a sense that they could explode at any moment. “Disco” represents that the most for us: the little bit of chaos each of us carry and bring to our music.”

They followed up “Disco” with the really really good “Low Era”. This is what they shared about it: “We had been trying to get everything to sound super heavy, creepy crawly, and complicated, really because that’s all we knew how to do. Four-on-the-floor songs like “Low Era” had felt a little like poison to us for a while, until we consciously tried to challenge ourselves to write something more danceable. Once we stopped enforcing certain boundaries, it ended up working out without us expecting it to, and even ushered in this psychedelic 3-D element that ends up appearing throughout the album. We like the idea of confusing the listener a little, and trying to make every song a counteraction to the last, pinballing between catchy and complicated, fast and slow. “Low Era” is one end of that spectrum, and ultimately broadened the scope of songs we thought we could make.”

The 3rd single from the debut album was the title track of their album “Projector”. For it, this is what frontman Cameron Winter shared: The opening riff on “Projector” was the first thing we ever wrote for the record. When the song was finished, it became a jumping off point for the rest of the album. We liked it because it was something decidedly different from the music we had been writing up to that point. Though we didn’t know it then, it’s fitting that “Projector” became the title track on the record; it’s the song that ushered in the album’s sound.

This album was made when the band members were just 17, they’re 19 now, and they are off touring in support of their album across Europe then they’ll do a Spring tour across the USofA, they will be playing the Casbah on 3/23, and finish their tour in their hometown of NYC by playing the Bowery Ballroom. After that they will head off as the supporting band of Spoon’s tour.

Mop Buckets have shared the video for their song “Happy” off their upcoming self titled EP out via Order 05 Records.

TRACKLIST:                                                    

1. Happy
2. Scroll
3. Drink I Am Drinking
4. Love Song
5. Making The Charts
6. Little Fucker

The animated video for “Happy” was created by Eric Allan Livingston / First Church Of The Void. The great thing about the video is you get to decide which is better, the video or the song. Also, the song as we found out is not a cover of the one by the same title as Pharrell Williams, BUT, it is much much better.

Mop Buckets is a Los Angeles quartet of underground scene veterans Michael Crain (Dead Cross/Retox/Cunts/Festival of Dead Deer), Ryan McGuffin (Niis/Rinse/Okie Dokie), Mathew Cronk (Qui/Cunts), and Kevin Avery (Retox/Cunts/Field Day/Planet B).

Jenny Hval has announced the release of her new album “Classic Objects” out March 11th via 4AD.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Year Of Love”
02 “American Coffee”
03 “Classic Objects”
04 “Cemetery Of Splendour”
05 “Year Of Sky”
06 “Jupiter”
07 “Freedom”
08 “The Revolution Will Not Be Owned”

The new single is “Year Of Love”, which is the album’s opening track, the video for it was directed by Jenny Hval, Jenny Berger and Annie Bielski.

The three elaborate on the video: “A sense of loss and joy intertwines in a world of disconnected rooms.  The artist inhabits these rooms.  She is frozen in time, space, and mid-vowel.  She is aware of her immediate surroundings.  She is aware that there is more beyond what she can see.  A version of her exists in a compressed, compromised, and objectified state.  She is sitting in a room, in a house, in a neighbourhood, in the art industry.”.

Thundercat shared a new song, “Satellite”, that’s part of the soundtrack for the final season of “Insecure”.

TRACKLIST.

1. Get It Girl” – Saweetie
2. “Snoring” – They.
3. “Seein Ya” – Jesse Boykins III, Duckwrth, Ambré, ESTA, Mack Keane
4. “50 Lem Hunnits” – Akeem Ali, 27Delly, Jorge Amadeus
5. “Time Off” – B.K. Habermehl
6. “Fun” – Nnena
7. “What’s the Use” – Josh Levi
8. “Satellite” – Thundercat ft. Louis Cole & Genevieve Artadi
9. “Mad Bitches” – Mikhala Jené ft. Ro James
10. “Glock Peaceful” – Mereba
11. “Pipe Dreams” – TeaMarrr
12. “Fantasy” – Amindi, 27Delly, Kiah Victoria, Ace Henderson

“Satellite” has Thundercat collaborating with Genevive Artadi and labelmate Louis Cole.

Miles Francis announced the release of their new album “Good Man” coming out March 4th.

About the new single “Let Me Cry” Miles Francis had this to say: “Everyone starts from the same place, regardless of gender. As children, we let our emotions go, uninhibited and in touch with our vulnerabilities. As we age, we go through a ‘boxing in’ by family or society – unless we can break out.”

The one shot video for the single “Let Me Cry” was totally improvised and directed by Charles Billot.

The album was produced by Francis and recorded in their longtime studio which is located in the basement of the Greenwich Village building they grew up in. They added: “I grew up with boy-band posters from floor to ceiling in my bedroom, and that music very much dominated my life when I was young,” they point out. “Later on I studied Afrobeat music and started playing with different groups in that world, which helped me to get to a place where I could be totally free in my musical expression. When I’m in my studio, it feels like being completely free of the outside world, free of gender, free of everything except me. I feel like I’m finally figuring out how to take that freedom beyond my musical expression and bring it into every aspect of my life. Now I want to share that feeling with everybody.”

Francis’ experiences during the project helped them come out as non-binary, resulting in works of gorgeous paradox: nuanced explorations of masculinity and all its trappings, presented in a sound that’s joyfully unfettered. No tour dates have yet been announced for the USofA (or Tijuana).

Daniel Rossen has shared the first single, “Shadow In The Frame”, from what will be his forthcoming album, “You Belong There” out April 8th via Warp.

TRACKLIST:
01 “It’s A Passage”
02 “Shadow In The Frame”
03 “You Belong There”
04 “Unpeopled Space”
05 “Celia”
06 “Tangle”
07 “I’ll Wait For Your Visit”
08 “Keeper And Kin”
09 “The Last One”
10 “Repeat The Pattern”

The lead single “Shadow In The Frame” is here. And it has everything that we cared and loved about a Daniel Rossen song, the chamber music and the guitar and the chill inducing trembling vocals and the arrangements and more…

In a press release Daniel Rossen said: “My hope was to make a set of songs with a deeper connection to my actual life and with a longer view of music history. I’m not sure that’s what happened, but it’s what I was thinking about. Finishing this album was a major challenge but it has given me a new sense of possibility. I’m hoping I can hang on to that feeling long enough to keep making music and sharing it. Given the constraints of the pandemic i recorded these songs mostly on my own and played most of the instruments, including some that I’m not so familiar with. My old bandmate Christopher Bear played drums throughout. Amber Wyman played bassoon on a couple songs. Jeremy Barnes added some santur to another, and John Dietrich played the electric guitar on the title track. The album was mixed by myself, Peter Larkin, and Noah Georgeson depending on the song. It was mastered by Heba Kadry.”

Rossen will be on tour this Spring / Summer and he will be playing the Casbah June 9th.

Loop will be releasing their first album in 32 years with “Sonancy” coming out March 11th.

Tracklist:
1. Interference
2. Eolian
3. Supra
4. Penumbra I
5. Isochrone
6. Halo
7. Fermion
8. Penumbra II
9. Axion
10. Aurora

The first single released is for the song “Halo” which video was directed by Ben Unwin.

Robert Hampson said of the new album: “Style wise, it’s incredibly different, going back to thinking about guitars and guitar sounds. Obviously you have to take into consideration things like percussive elements such as drums, which I haven’t been using in my other projects; but this is the mind set that makes up Loop. I started writing songs that were much more immediate, tighter, dare I say more aggressive – although not aggressive in the old Loop way, but with a spikiness. It needed to sound more modern. With Sonancy I also wanted to take a post-punk sound, spin it on its head and mix it with a psych influence. A total gumbo. Which has always been Loop, this mash up of spicy rhythms.”

“I formed Loop, I’m the sole original member, I’ll just carry on, but the current Loop line-up has been pretty stable for the last six or seven years. We have Wayne [Maskel, drums] and Hugo [Morgan, bass] from The Heads, who a lot of people know, a fantastic rhythm section, and Dan [Boyd] on second guitar, who offered us his services. I was very anti-guitar for a long time. You hear progressively through the Main period the guitar fading away. I just felt that it didn’t have any place in what I was sonically trying to do and I didn’t miss it at all. Now, having a guitar in my hands doesn’t bother me anymore as long as I can do something useful with it; and working with the current line-up we have, it’s very enjoyable indeed. Long may it reign.”

No tour dates have been announced yet. It’s been 8 years since we’ve seen them live and we’re hoping we can see them soon again.

Placebo share “Try Better Next Time” from the band’s forthcoming album, Never Let Me Go out March 25th, via Rise Records.

Tracklisting:

1. Forever Chemicals
2. Beautiful James
3. Hugz
4. Happy Birthday In The Sky
5. The Prodigal
6. Surrounded By Spies
7. Try Better Next Time
8. Sad White Reggae
9. Twin Demons
10. Chemtrails
11. This Is What You Wanted
12. Went Missing
13. Fix Yourself

“Try Better Next Time” further opens up what we know about Never Let Me Go’s frank and honest depiction of our modern times. Where opening single “Beautiful James” revealed a stern commentary on the proliferation of ignorant opinions, and follow-up track “Surrounded By Spies” spun themes of tech-saturation, “Try Better Next Time” – the album’s poignant centrepiece – can be easy to mistake as an apocalyptic vision of the future. Instead, we find the band focusing less on endings and more on new beginnings. It’s an anthem for the end of a world that we know – not the end of it completely – and a celebration of the possibility of what might come next, whether humanity has a seat at the table or not.

When Brian Molko considers how we might “grow fins, go back in the water” it is proposed with the greater good in mind. It is the setting aside of ego in the face of eco-disaster, in recognition of all that mankind has done to the planet. The world keeps turning whether under the influence of humanity or not. Commenting, he says: “It is not the end of the world, only the end of humanity, a distinction that in our overblown hubris we are unable to detect. Mother Nature has grown extremely weary of us. Try Better Next Time.”

Tour dates have been announced and they’re only for European and UK dates for October thru December 2022.