Sorting through the week’s new singles and songs that have surfaced online over the last seven days, Jamie Skey (@jamie_skey) presents five songs you need to hear this week…
Bristol-by-way-of-Paris psychedelic folk explorers This Is The Kit – lead by seductive British songwriter Kate Stables – have a sizeable fan club including the likes of Sharon Van Etten, Iron & Wine, Guy Garvey and The National. Indeed the latter’s magic-weaving guitarist Aaron Dessner steered production of the band’s latest LP Bashed Out. The first proper single to be taken from it, Silver John is a delicately spun ballad about “the things we grab at in times of panic”. Coincidentally, the tune is a warm comforting blanket spun from starry glockenspiel, Stable’s disarming vocals and quietly powerful melodies.
Despite their widespread critical acclaim and a Mercury Prize nomination for their debut album Twice Born Men, British prig-pop oddballs Sweet Billy Pilgrim remain a relatively well kept rock secret. Coloma Blues is the closer on the band’s forthcoming third album, Motorcade Amnesiacs, and its spellbinding confluence of heavenly harmonies and intricately woven guitar stitchery ought to finally place the band on the mainstream’s radar this year.
Dreamy pop quartet Beach Baby were formed in the musically rich halls of south-east London’s Goldsmiths University, but could just as easily hail from the rarefied landscapes of Scandanavia, such is their gauzy, sun-blushed way with a pop song. Ladybird points at a long, lush summer ahead.
Team Morale consists of two 22-year-old friends from Kent who couldn’t settle on a specific sound, so decided to throw together all their influences (soul, ambient, world music, psychedelia…) and see what would happened. In this instance, the result was Ubuntu, a pebble-smooth fusion of spectral, clipped vocals, needling guitar and a frantic Oud solo.
“Love is not the answer to everything,” woundedly croons Swiss singer-songwriter Sophie Hunger on this fretful yet euphoric anti-romance anthem, a breakable heart pendant.
