Allie Crow Buckley – Cowboy In London
With her album Utopian Fantasy coming this spring via Nettwerk, LA/London-based songwriter Allie Crow Buckley has unveiled the final single, ‘Cowboy in London’. A perfect introduction to Buckley’s psych-inflected folk rock style, the song exists as something both ethereal and emotive, transporting the listener with its rich and languid sound. “The song is a reflection on my years as a teen and being on my own in London for the first time,” she explains. “It was wonderful and terrifying, and I was totally enthralled.” But running through this carefree spirit is a certain wry humour too, as though calling to attention the naivety which sits at the heart of such a mood.
I could be a cowboy in London
Think I could play the part
‘Cause I’m kinda cheap
And I’m pretty tall
The song comes complete with a video directed by Buckley herself which you can watch below:
Utopian Fantasy will be released on the 19th May via Nettwerk and you can pre-order it now.
Angel Abaya – The Bubble
Next month, LA-based songwriter Angel Abaya will release debut album The Bubble on Earth Libraries. It’s a record which uses the image of its title to explore the various siloes we put ourselves in—be it relationships, friendship groups, identities or physical locations—and how such things can be both comforting and suffocating. As you might expect from a record dealing with conflicted states, the sound varies from bright to dark across its ten songs, and the title track encapsulates the mood. An upbeat pop song carried by Abaya’s soulful and playful vocals, the tone walking the line between confident and confessional.
There are many queens walking circles round this gigantic planet
Not a lot get the credit in the bubble run by princes reciting
Hamlet
Woe is me to be or not to be is that the question
These ladies know what they want and they’ve got too much
time to teach you a lesson
Arthur Moon – 7 O’clock Clap
The moniker of Brooklyn‘s Lora-Faye Åshuvud, Arthur Moon is a project based around intuition and experimentation, as typfied by forthcoming album Chaos! Chaos! Chaos! Side B. Through a combo of pop and electronic styles, they weave sounds full of left-field surprises while always maintaining an overarching sense of control, playing at the boundary between intention and improvisation. “The idea I had was to make an album that was ‘coherently incoherent’,” as Åshuvud explains, capturing the logical diversity of an old-school mixtape. Single ‘7 O’clock Clap’ shows some of this spirit within its two-and-a-half minutes, its shifting moods and tempo evoking the ever-changing phenomenon of identity, and using those cast of ideas to shape what we might ultimately become.
Brother Language – Epley Maneuver
With an album pencilled for release sometime later this year, New York‘s Brother Language has unveiled the single ‘Epley Maneuver’ to give an indication as to what to expect from the record. A slow burning slice of indie rock inspired by a close family member’s diagnosis of vertigo, the song manages to evoke some of the condition’s dizzying force. Its hushed beginning eventually rising into a hefty crescendo, strummed acoustic guitar and a sense of negative space giving way to thumping drums and a scrawl of distorted guitar. Watch the video shot by Abigail Diess below:
‘Epley Maneuver’ is out now and available from the Brother Language Bandcamp page.
Corey Leiter – Lay It Down
After the shadowy tones of 2022 LP Fire Season, LA’s Corey Leiter has returned with brand new single ‘Lay It Down’ on Anxiety Blanket Records which turns to a more compassionate vibe. While living in Echo Park by the 101 Freeway, Leiter came to witness his neighbours living under the overpass, and the track looks to humanise those failed by the system and state while raising money for the Los Angeles Food Bank. Leiter says the song “seeks to feel like a warm hug from a friend,” offering a hand to those in need amid a country all too ready to pretend they do not exist.
Dorio – Lost These Days
Described as hanging “in the liminal space between upbeat orchestral pop and anonymous late-night lounge,” the music of Austin‘s Dorio (AKA Chad Doriocourt) offers a dreamy nocturnal sound indebted to Tokyo’s Shibuya-Kei movement. With new album Strawberry Dreams coming later this month on Earth Libraries, Doriocourt has unveiled new single, ‘Lost These Days’. Introducing the vocals of collaborator Rachel Rascoe, the song offers a typically vivid sound, with the easygoing retrofuturist vibe only accentuated by the clarity of Rascoe’s voice. “When the big night is here is late,” she sings with a tone somewhere between twee and sardonic, “Rest your heart rate, yeah the rush is great! / Legend in your own mind, if you write the lines.”
Hayden – Are We Good
“Are you worried about the past / coming back to you too fast,” asks Hayden Desser, AKA Hayden, on the title track of tenth album Are We Good. “Are you worried about the sea / and what’s going on underneath?” The final image is a pertinent one for an artist who has made a name blending melancholic emotion with a certain slacker rock charm. A sound which might appear untroubled on the surface yet is constantly roiling and drifting below. The new record, his first since 2015’s Hey Love, feels like the perfection of this style, landing in the centre of a Venn diagram consisting of Berman, Malkmus and Berninger. Watch the video for the single directed and edited by Desser himself below:
Are We Good is out now via Arts & Crafts and available from the Hayden Bandcamp page.
Lee Switzer-Woolf – Yucatán
Back in 2022 we wrote about ‘The Negative Twin’ from Lee Switzer-Woolf‘s Scientific Automatic Palmistry, a “sparse and haunting” track which carried “a stark urgency beneath its inky surface.” Switzer-Woolf has a new album Annihilation Signals coming next month and latest single ‘Yucatán’ gives an insight into what to expect. A song which again offers a shadowy atmosphere with a downward suck at its centre, drawing the listener down into a subterranean world this time overtly referenced in the lyrics.
Show me those underwater caves
I’m planning on swimming down
Until the light decays
To the crater that the asteroid made
I need to understand the violence
Of the clean break
Annihilation Signals is out on the 5th May and you can pre-order it now.
Life Coach – Monday Morning Revelations
Blending the sample and drum machine style of Casiotone For the Painfully Alone and Meursault with the cutting observational lyricism of Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton, Life Coach is the project of Glasgow-based poet and musician Jamie Cameron. New release ‘Monday Morning Revelations’ was penned during the imposed slowdown of the early pandemic, when Cameron took stock of contemporary lifestyles from that moment of surreal remove and found little to appreciate. What emerged is a song which rails against a society built towards efficiency and productivity at the expense of almost everything, as well as our habit of falling for the system’s false promises and playing its game despite ourselves. “Our holy present shrouded in denial is of little worth,” as Cameron says, “if all we seek is ourselves.”