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…
Jon Hopkins is one of those exploratory beat makers whose uplifting ambient-techno could silence those critics who claim emotionally-satisfying can only arise from a human hand. The Brian Eno collaborator’s Mercury-nominated LP Immunity was as organic and soulful as it was machine-crafted, and now via this tender hook-up with Tanzania-born singer Lulu James, he breathes yet more human vulnerability into the album’s lead-out track We Disappear.
The late John Peel once surprisingly hailed Suffolk market town Bury St Edmunds the “New Seattle”, owing to its thriving DIY music scene. United by their love for Bjork, Savages, bad films and cottage-industry ethics, indie-punk trio Horse Party have emerged from the area boasting a drinking-booze-in-a-church initiation, self-produced fanzine, Shut The Fuck Up, and debut single Inbetween. A prickly wave of early-Sonic Youth riffs and vocals that sound like one of Kevin Sheilds’ musings, it lives and breathe their hometown’s iconoclastic modus operandi.
Melancholy-pop duo Wye Oak recorded their latest album Shriek on opposite sides of America, but nevertheless their latest single Glory belies the pair’s distance with its intimate and immediate throb. Sidelining their folk-rock aestheics for a more slickly produced, synth-freighted sound, Wye Oak will have dancefloors breaking down in tears at the drop of a hat with this.
All-female four piece Rouge don’t get you on the edge of your seat, rather the Edge Of The Bed, as the title of their latest single implies as the the track stings and excites with its lustily deployed blues riffs.
Welsh power-pop trio Kutosis are gearing up to release a follow up to their acclaimed debut Fanatical Love with new album Dream It Away (out 2 June). Created with Palma Violets, Yuck and Veronica Falls producer Rory Atwell (), the album is poised to crackle like those aforementioned outfits’s output, as evidenced by the fuzz-smothered, hook-laden Crystal Beach.
