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Smerz release new track ‘remember’
Smerz share ‘Remember’, a hidden track from the physical version of their recently released debut album Believer.
Released digitally for the first time, the track is accompanied with a live performance video, taken from their 2020 Ultima Festival presentation of Believer, Smerz recently shared the full performance on Bandcamp and today share the clip for ‘Remember,’
‘Remember’ is a break-up ballad marked with the signature Smerz amalgam production. This time the duo combines R&B and hymn-like vocal iterations. The result is a beautiful song about carrying the memories of your past relationships with you into the future. It’s a perfect complement to the wider themes of Believer, which Resident Advisor raved is an “album about raw friendship, personal image and collective awareness.”
““Remember” is about remembering a past relationship. It’s about trying to carry your past with you into the future, to make it feel like it really happened. A life is arguably a collection of everything you’ve experienced, but sometimes it feels like the present drowns out everything that’s been. That could be a good thing, we’re not sure.” – Smerz
Beginning this week a limited edition songbook with lyrics and sheet music for Smerz’s album Believer will be available on the duo’s Bandcamp. The sheet music allows the listener to play along in ensembles or solo, carrying forward the classical tradition of distributing music as written notes. Believer is a musical prism where baroque music sparkles side by side with R&B elements, and with the songbook, the listener is invited even further into the dream world of Smerz.
“Our hope is that the songbook can be used both as a documentation and elaboration on Believer, but also as a generator for new music or at least new interpretations of the already existing music.” – Smerz
Released last month, Smerz’s debut album Believer gained critical acclaim from the likes of Pitchfork, The Sunday Times, PAPER Magazine, Gorilla vs Bear, Pop Matters, FADER and more. Previously known for their 2017 Okey and 2018 Have Fun EP’s, Smerz debut album Believer revealed a new auditory and visual world that has caught the attention of fans around the globe including Björk, who featured the duo on her Sonos radio show. Written, composed, and produced by Smerz, who is Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt, Believer is out now on XL Recordings.
Newly signed to 4AD, Lucinda Chua releases single "Until I Fall"
Lucinda Chua is a singer, songwriter, composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist based in South London. Primarily using her voice, a cello, and an array of effects units, Chua writes ambient pop songs that are intimate, atmospheric, and totally enchanting.
Newly signed to 4AD, she will release a second EP of solo work, Antidotes 2, on May 7th 7.
Today, Chua launches the EP’s opening track Until I Fall with an accompanying video directed by William Kennedy. She says, “for me, this song is about rebirth and finding the inner strength to rise.”
Born in London and raised in Milton Keynes, Chua has English, Malaysian and ancestral Chinese roots. Having learned music by ear from the age of three using the Suzuki method (whereby young children are taught music in the same way they would a native language), Chua regards music as a natural form of non-verbal self-expression.
Whilst studying photography at university in Nottingham, Chua took an elective course in music production and the resulting experimental tracks she created and uploaded online caught the attention of US label kranky.
Before long she was touring with Stars of the Lid as a cellist and string arranger and went on to release two albums with her first band Felix – all while barely into her 20s.
After Felix broke up, Chua spent a few years in London exploring the city’s creative scene and began experimenting with the cello. Those explorations became her 2019 debut EP Antidotes 1 which flitted between hushed songwriting and expansive textural soundscapes.
Chua self-released the EP during her time under NTS Radio’s ‘Work In Progress’ mentorship scheme, whilst simultaneously performing in FKA twigs’ live band for her Magdalene tour.
Earning praise from Pitchfork, The Guardian, Dazed and gal-dem, Antidotes 1 led to Chua performing one-person shows across the UK and Europe including Red Bull Music Festival London, MUTEK Barcelona, Tate Modern and Somerset House.
A sister release to Antidotes I, Antidotes 2 expands Chua’s unique sonic vocabulary, with subliminal textures that bleed into each other before fading away. If Antidotes 1 was Chua building the landscape and scenery for her music, then Antidotes 2 is her living within it Some of the songs were written during the same period whilst others, like EP opener ‘Until I Fall’, are brand new.
Antidotes 2 is out digitally on 7 May. A special vinyl edition of Antidotes will include both EPs and will be released on August 13th.
Gruff Rhys Shares New Track + Video “Can’t Carry On”
Gruff Rhys has released a new track Can’t Carry On and its accompanying video today, from his forthcoming album, Seeking New Gods, out May 21, 2021 via Rough Trade Records.
His seventh solo album, Seeking New Gods was recorded in the Mojave Desert, following a US tour and mixed in LA with superstar producer Mario C (Beastie Boys), with beautiful art direction by long-time Gruff collaborator Mark James, who also produced the inimitably Gruff Rhys video for “Can’t Carry On”. The video, which features Gruff climbing both the literal and metaphorical mountain, is a direct segue from the prior video for first single “Loan Your Loneliness”.
According to Gruff, “Can’t Carry On” is about “when reality catches up with delusion and the search for a guiding hand out of a heavy situation”.
Seeking New Gods started off as a biography of Mount Paektu, an active East Asian volcano. However, as Gruff wrote, he began to reflect on the inhuman timescale of the peak’s existence and the intimate features that have allowed mythologies to be built around it over centuries. Both the mountain and the songs became more and more personal to him as time went on.
Over the past decades, Gruff’s creative output has been nonstop and unparalleled. Part of it has always been about pushing the boundaries of how music is presented and performed, starting with quadrophonic sound system tours as part of Super Furry Animals. For this record, Gruff has partnered with the BBC’s R&D department to create an at-home, multi-device immersive listening experience for fans. It will be the first time the BBC has offered this technology for use with an album. Full details including fan listening events will be announced soon.
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”.
