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Lucy Dacus announces Home Video, new album out June 25th on Matador.
Lucy Dacus announces her third album, Home Video, out June 25th on Matador, and releases lead single/video, Hot & Heavy, which she’ll perform tonight on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
The follow-up to 2018’s Historian and her 2016 debut No Burden, Home Video was built on Dacus’ interrogation of her coming-of-age years in Richmond, Virginia.
Many of the songs start the way a memoir might, and all of them have the compassion, humor, and honesty of the best autobiographical writing. These songs capture that specific moment in time growing up where emotions and relationships start becoming more complex. They capture the joys, the excitement, the confusion, and even the heartbreak of going through the process of discovering who you are and where people fit in your life and where you fit in theirs. Most importantly and mysteriously, this album displays Dacus’s ability to use the personal as portal into the universal.
While there’s a nostalgic tint to much of Dacus’ work, the obliquely told stories in past songs are depicted here with greater specificity. This was first presented in last month’s devastating single ‘Thumbs’, a fan favorite and elegant fantasy about the brutal murder of a close friend’s no-good father.
In new single ‘Hot & Heavy’, Dacus sings powerfully about blushing and diffidence. It’s the album’s opening track and it immediately sets the stage for Dacus’ feelings about rerooting in her hometown of Richmond, Virginia, following sudden acclaim. It created funhouse distortions of herself – people she didn’t know were looking at her like they knew her better than she knew herself.
“I thought I was writing ‘Hot & Heavy’ about an old friend, but I realized along the way that it was just about me outgrowing past versions of myself,” explains Dacus. “So much of life is submitting to change and saying goodbye even if you don’t want to. Now whenever I go to places that used to be significant to me, it feels like trespassing the past. I know that the teen version of me wouldn’t approve of me now, and that’s embarrassing and a little bit heartbreaking, even if I know intellectually that I like my life and who I am.”
The accompanying, self-directed video was shot in the historic Byrd Theatre in Richmond where Dacus often saw movies during her adolescent years.
“I knew I wanted to include some of the home video footage that my dad took of me while I was growing up. I wanted to visualize the moment when you first reflect on your childhood, which I think can also be the moment that childhood is over. For me, I feel like there was a hard switch when I started releasing music, when my identity went from being a personal project to something publicly observed and reflected. I asked my family (shoutout to my grandma) and some of my closest friends to be extras because they’re the people that knew me before that switch. I may have dropped out of film school, but I still love making movies and had a really fun time directing this one.”
In August 2019, after relentless touring then a month of silence, Dacus returned to Trace Horse Studio in Nashville with her loyal friends and collaborators Jacob Blizard, Collin Pastore, and Jake Finch to record Home Video. Dacus’s boygenius bandmates, Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker, contribute vocals on two songs. The resulting record—full of arrhythmic heartbeat percussion and backgrounds of water-warped pipe organ— was mixed by Shawn Everett and mastered by Bob Ludwig. Listeners may notice that the melodies here are lower and more contained than Dacus’ previous works, at times feeling as intimate as a whisper. The vulnerability of these songs, so often about the intense places where different sorts of love meet and warp, required this approach.
Home Video is a gorgeous example of the transformative power of vulnerability. Dacus’s voice, both audible and on the page, has a healer’s power to soothe and ground and reckon. This album not only propels Dacus forward as a songwriter, but also props her up as one of the most effective storytellers of her generation.
Erika de Casier Announces New Album Sensational Out 21 May 2021 Hear New Single ‘Polite’
Copenhagen-based songwriter and producer Erika de Casier has announced details of her second full-length studio album. Sensational, which includes recent singles No Butterflies, No Nothing and Drama will be released on 21 May 2021,
Today, she releases another preview from Sensational, the anti-bad boy tune Polite.
‘Polite’ was inspired by a nightmare date where her dining partner was rude to the waiter and only spoke about himself. Thinking she should walk out of the restaurant or confront his impoliteness, she sat there being nice. The song lays out what de Casier wishes she’d said to him if she could replay the scene: “You gotta have some manners if you wanna roll with me”. Also released today is the official video for ‘Polite’, directed by de Casier.
Sensational expands the universe of de Casier’s 2019 self-released debut album Essentials. Where Essentials dealt more with the infatuation stages of love, Sensational has more of an attitude, aiming to dismantle the stereotype of single women looking for love, tackling relationship dramas and the toxicity of dating. It was a chance to rewrite scenarios in ways that empowered her, fantasising about what could’ve been. Essentials was co-produced by de Casier and is a breath of fresh air to anyone with a passion for music in all its genres, as much influenced by Aaliyah and Janet Jackson as house, garage and techno. With hushed, pillow-soft vocals and production that references turn-of-the-millenium sounds, de Casier’s sound surveys the past while looking to the future.
Born in Portugal to Belgian and Cape Verdean parents and raised in Denmark, Erika de Casier initially made her mark as an ally of the Regelbau collective (home to Danish house acts DJ Sports, C.K and Central) before writing, co-producing and releasing debut album, Essentials, through her own Independent Jeep label. Her take on 90s/00s R&B became a slow-burn success story and Essentials graced Best of 2019 lists at Mixmag, Gorilla vs. Bear, FACT, Dummy, and Crack Magazine.
Rolling Stone ran a feature online yesterday where they remark it “Sounds Like: Taylor Swift for Club Kids” and “For Fans Of: Aaliyah, FKA Twigs, Everything But the Girl”.
New darkside album “spiral” out july 23 on matador records. Listen to “the limit”
On July 23, DARKSIDE will release its much-anticipated second full-length, Spiral, via Matador Records.
DARKSIDE is an American rock band formed in Providence, Rhode Island in 2011. The group consists of Chilean electronic musician & vocalist Nicolás Jaar and American multi-instrumentalist Dave Harrington. Jaar and Harrington first met while studying in Providence through their common friend and saxophonist Will Epstein. In the summer of 2011, they toured Europe and Australia in support of Jaar’s breakthrough debut album Space Is Only Noise.
Upon returning to Providence, they continued to write together, releasing their self-titled EP in 2012 and their critically acclaimed debut album Psychic on Matador Records in October 2013. The album was met with glowing reviews, including a 9.0 from Pitchfork and the New York Times calling it “the soundtrack to a lost David Lynch sci-fi movie.”
In the years that followed the Psychic tour in 2014, the musicians moved on parallel and occasionally intersecting paths. Jaar would release five albums under his name and two collections of club music as Against All Logic. Harrington worked as a producer and composer, releasing two albums with his Dave Harrington Group. During that time he also played some 300 shows in NYC and Brooklyn, becoming deeply entrenched with a wide-ranging community of improvisers and collaborators, performing and recording with Yuka Honda, Brian Chase, Ilhan Ersahin, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Joe Russo, Innov Gnawa, Angel Deradoorian, The Master Musicians of Jajouka, Nels Cline, and more.
In the summer of 2018, Harrington and Jaar rented a small house on Lenni-Lenape territory, which is present-day Flemington, New Jersey. The group spent a week there, making a song a day. While it would take another year and a half to complete their second album, six songs from the band’s new record Spiral were written and recorded during this initial session.
“From the beginning, DARKSIDE has been our jam band. Something we did on days off. When we reconvened, it was because we really couldn’t wait to jam together again,” says Jaar. Harrington echoes this, “It felt like it was time again,” he said. “We do things in this band that we would never do on our own. DARKSIDE is the third being in the room that just kind of occurs when we make music together.”
black midi Announce New Album, Cavalcade, Out May 28th on Rough Trade Watch Video for Lead Single, “John L”
black midi announce Cavalcade, their new album out May 28th on Rough Trade, and today offer its lead single/video, John L.
Album opener “John L,” has a massive sound, driven” by some gutsy Discipline-era King Crimson thrust, and energy wrought by the inclusion of Jerskin Fendrix on violin. The group tease the raging track to the point of nonexistence before leading it through caverns of reverb and gauzy snareskin landscapes, just for it to return, hitting hard as hell once more. The story painted is a jet black comedy about what happens to cult leaders when their followers turn on them. Its equally massive video was directed by choreographer Nina McNeely, known for her work on Rihanna’s “Sledgehammer” and Gaspar Noe’s Climax.
Cavalcade is a dynamic, hellacious, and inventive follow-up to 2019’s widely-praised Schlagenheim, “a labyrinth with hairpin-turn episodes and lyrics full of dourly corrosive observations” (New York Times, Best Albums of 2019). It scales beautiful new heights, pulling widely from a plethora of genres and influences, reaching ever upwards from an already lofty base of early achievements.
black midi — Geordie Greep (guitar, primary vocals), Cameron Picton (bass, vocals), and Morgan Simpson (drums) — picture Cavalcade as a line of larger than life figures, from a cult leader fallen on hard times and an ancient corpse found in a diamond mine to legendary cabaret singer Marlene Dietrich, strolling seductively past them. “When you’re listening, you can imagine all the characters form a sort of cavalcade. Each tells their story one by one and as each track ends they overtake you, replaced by the next in line,” comments Picton.
The groundwork for Cavalcade was laid in 2019 — musical sketches that had been brewing since the release of Schlagenheim began muscling their way into black midi set lists and finally became individual entities. But with this album, there was a “yearning” to be more considered and record something that was more harmonically interesting and challenging. “It’s easy to get wrapped up in the improvisation myth of divine intervention, that if a song doesn’t happen in the room naturally without it being guided by someone specifically, when we’re all just feeling the vibe, then it’s not proper and it’s not pure,” says Greep. “That’s kind of a dangerous thing because you end up never trying something different, or you just abandon an idea if it doesn’t work at first because you’re always waiting for that thing to arrive perfect.”
With this new approach in mind, half of Cavalcade was written by individual members at home and brought to the table in rehearsal. Simpson confirms it was to their advantage: “The experience this time round was completely the flipside to Schlagenheim. A lot of the material was really fresh but that was something that played into our hands and we relished it.”
After initially recording “John L” with producer Marta Salogni in London, the band found themselves in the aptly named Hellfire Studios, in the Dublin mountains, in summer 2020 under the eye of John ‘Spud’ Murphy. Geordie comments: “It worked really well with John. We wanted a natural, open sound combined with fourth wall breaks – for lack of a better expression. Do you know on record when you can hear the tape screeching, the things that make you aware that you’re listening to a recording? [With a lot of records] it feels like either you’re listening to the ECM, high-fidelity, 25 mic amazing sound or you have the lo-fi album full of crazy effects. And I thought, ‘Why not have an album where you combine the two?’ That was one of the main ideas going into it and John was very keen on that idea.”
With original band member guitarist/vocalist Matt Kwasniewski-Kelvin taking time away from the group to focus on his mental health, black midi chose to augment their sound on Cavalcade, rather than replicate it, with saxophonist Kaidi Akinnibi and keyboard player Seth Evans.
Following the release of Schlagenheim, The Times (UK) called black midi “the most exciting band of 2019.” They were featured on the cover of Exclaim Magazine as well as in the New York Times Magazine’s annual music issue, named a Rising artist by Pitchfork, Band to Watch by Stereogum and Artist You Need to Know by Rolling Stone. The New York Times, Pitchfork, Stereogum, SPIN Exclaim and beyond featured it in their best albums of 2019.
"Bills & Aches & Blues" Side 2
Today, the second instalment of tracks from the Bills & Aches & Blues compilation is available online. ‘Side 2’ comprises five tracks by Tune-Yards, Spencer., Helado Negro, Efterklang and Bing & Ruth respectively reworking The Breeders, Grimes, Deerhunter, Piano Magic and Pixies.
Bills & Aches & Blues, released on 2 April digitally, features 18 of the label’s current artists covering a song of their choosing from 4AD’s past: a creative experiment rooted in the spirit of collaboration and a snapshot of 4AD, 41 years after its inception.
The first 12 months’ profits from Bills & Aches & Blues will be donated to The Harmony Project, a Los Angeles-based after-school programme for children from communities and schools that lack equitable access to studying the arts or music.
