Big month for music! Our headphones have not known peace. Phoebe Bridgers is back (gasp), Sophia Stel just dropped a DIY emotional ballad, Arca has been doing whatever it is Arca does to the human nervous system, Tama Gucci is yearning, Charli xcx is horny, and Ryan Hemsworth resurfaced after what felt like several geological eras. So here is a slightly unhinged record of everything else we’ve been playing to death this month — plus a few late-July releases that we have decided are August releases because we say so.
Sophia Stel has had a very good, very strange six months and her new single “Now I’ve Got A Lot You Know” feels like the perfect little window into it — a tender love song about having so much to be grateful for that you almost don’t know what to do with it. “I love you a lot, and I’ll tell you just so you know / you’re the best thing I’ve got, and I’ve got a lot, you know,” she sings, before informing us that she knows theres no God but, if there were one, he’d love you too. Why is that such a sweet thing to say?
Sophia has quickly gone from making music in a makeshift studio beneath the now-shuttered Paradise club in Vancouver to opening for Lorde and walking for Ann Demeulemeester. The self-edited video documents the past six months of her life on tour, giving the whole thing the feeling of scrolling through someone’s camera roll while they’re snowballing into fame. It’s this diaristic quality that keeps pulling us back in. Sophia writes as if you’re reading a diary of profound Girl thoughts, and she makes piercing your soul sound incredibly simple – but that is exactly what it’s not.
Arca — the mother, the humanoid diva, the siren, the cyborg — may have technically dropped her ninth album on the very last day of July, but honestly, we’ve been listening to it all August, so it counts. XXXXX has already taken up a slightly inexplicable residence in our ears and bodies, sweetly short-circuiting our brains with Arca’s mesmerising, often gloriously challenging experimentalism. We’re listening to “Fxck”, where Arca spray-paints bloody imagery across a warehouse before crawling through it, emerging covered in the same crimson mess and screaming: you wanted dramatic, you got dramatic. You wanted theatrics, you got theatrics. Thank you for delivering us what we want, Arca. Rihanna please take note.
Charli xcx told us “something horny is coming” and dropped “Wink Wink”. It’s is the third taste of her post-brat and post-wuthering heights album Music, Fashion, Film, and it might be our favourite kind of Charli: pretending to be innocent while making it extremely obvious that she is not. It starts with something about cream and strawberries “And maybe I fucked your dad / Just kidding, I’m only saying that for effect”, then goes into “I used to jump on trampolines with no underwear on / And now I basically just wear trousers”, something the late 20s early thirties among us can understand a bit too well. The video, by longtime collaborator Aidan Zamiri, Charli reads smut and masturbates, rolls around in the mud looking filthy and hot, then soapily cleans the windows of her greenhouse — all while telling us she’s “not a bad girl anymore, wink wink”. The only appropriate response is just Kris Jenners “you’re doing amazing sweetie”!
SLAYYYTER sings about having a very specific kind of bad day in “brand new chanel$” — the type of day where you find out the girl your boyfriend told you not to worry about was, in fact, worth worrying about. As you do in her shoes, you turn betrayal into a high-gloss pop anthem, and release a self-directed video with it too. She’s dropped into the desert like a nomadic pop empress, complete with a portable pink bedroom, an entire dress-up drawer’s worth of looks, rolling on the bleachers, splayed in confetti and a shooting range, before firing off a ton of fireworks. It’s camp, it’s maximalist, it’s relatable, and it gets in your head easily. As for what happened at the shooting range? We’re not asking.
Ryan Hemsworth is finally back, and our favourite producer has clearly been collecting musical whiplash. “One Step”, the first taste of his forthcoming album Numbskull, throws Southern rap, crunchy ’90s UK rave, hardcore and punk into the blender and adds in a verse by Sarah Tudzin of Illuminati Hotties. Exactly the kind of collaboration Hemsworth says he was after this time around — wild cards only. Hemsworth has been one of the main producers on our radars since 2014, when Snow in Newark genuinely changed the trajectory of many a teenage brain. That combination of post-trap, xylophone melodies and indie melancholia hit a very specific nerve. Eight years away from the album format later, he’s returned sounding less interested in easing us back in than throwing us directly into the deep end. If “One Step” is anything to go by, Numbskull is shaping up to be a gloriously unhinged collision of trip-hop, electroclash, hyperpop and rave. Consider us warned — and very much at the edge of our seats, biting our nails for the new album.
Nikki Nair has made us feel things we didn’t know bass frequencies could make us feel. The Sick Dimension, his first EP for dh2, is four tracks of future funk, wonky house and full-throttle sound design. “Default Mode” is an incredible track, fizzing with bass, warped textures and enough low-end to rearrange your face. The accompanying videos, made by visionary Lola Dement Myers, are unmistakably pale, precise and deeply satisfying, turning mundane kitchen tasks into strange little exercises in order and repetition. In “Default Mode”, hands methodically sort popcorn kernels into neat little rosters, only to take them away and begin again. In “One Hundred”, candies are unwrapped and laid naked across a silver tray, arranged by colour into immaculate grids before being shuffled and sorted once more while the bass gets progressively louder. Satisfying is an understatement. Watching these meticulous rituals unfold alongside Nair’s Repetitive, obsessive, precise and slightly absurd production is incredible: the videos feel like the perfect visual metaphor for his music. Nair is doing what he does best: creating your new favourite bass-face soundtrack.
Nemzzz is on one. Fresh off “GEEKIN” going absolutely everywhere, the 22-year-old Manchester rapper is back with “4AM”, another punchy number with a crazy beat to back it. “I’ve been ghosting you cos I’m working” may have taken over TikTok, but apparently Nemzzz has no intention of clocking off anytime soon. The black-and-white video keeps things suitably stripped back while Nemzzz does what he does best: flexing, smoking, throwing money around and looking completely unbothered. Born Nemiah Emmanuel Simms and raised in Gorton, Greater Manchester, Nemzzz has come a long way. At just 22, he’s already earned a seat at the top table of British rap alongside Dave and Central Cee, out-streamed some of his idols and been credited with helping create an entirely new sound. But he doesn’t seem particularly interested in the victory lap. There’s work to be done. And apparently, that work happens at 4AM. “It’s not easy being young and rich.” We’ll take his word for it.
Tama Gucci has bottled the exact feeling of getting overdressed for a house party because you heard he was going to be there. “Hot Night” is a sultry little electronic summer banger about flirting, waiting, smoking outside and hoping someone — but not just anybody — across the room will finally make a move. Produced by fUnlistenable, it pulls together Tama’s glossy hyperpop and R&B instincts with the queer rave energy of his South Florida upbringing, all wrapped around those deliciously sultry vocals. “I came to this house party cause I heard that you were gonna be there” immediately gives us a little party 4 u déjà vu — and honestly, we can always use more songs about being embarrassingly, deliciously invested in someone who may or may not even know you’re there. “Or are you just gonna stand there?” he asks repeatedly, and tbh, we’re getting impatient too. Where Charli’s version spirals into full emotional catastrophe, Tama’s feels like its sunnier, sexier cousin: still urgent, still a little delusional, but with the night ahead of you and plenty of time to make something happen. Sexy, restless and just messy enough — exactly how a house party should be. As Tama himself puts it: “My idea of a perfect summer night: hot, boys, a good outfit, and a house party, all in one song.” Fair enough!!!
Overmono have proved that two brothers, a few synthesizers and a crash cymbal baked in an oven are all you need to make one of the most exciting dance records of the year. “Even Angels Ghost”, featuring Kindora, is a particularly gorgeous moment from Pure Devotion, their most ambitious project yet — all warm, slightly wonky electronics wrapped around Kindora’s ridiculously good vocals. She glides over the track with the kind of melody that made us immediately think of Destiny’s Child, which, as it turns out, was not a conscious reference — just a very welcome coincidence. Overmono themselves are huge fans, and describe Kindora as “the most incredible person” and someone who “should be a global household name”. We agree. Until then, we’ll be listening to “Even Angels Ghost” and pretending we’ve discovered her first.
Nia Archives is asking some pretty important questions: “Go To Bed?” she asks, before immediately answering herself: “I doubt it.” Fair enough. There is still that strange hour when the club has emptied but the night itself has not quite accepted that it is over, when you are somehow still dancing although there is almost nobody left to dance with, when everything feels both terribly real and completely imagined. “Don’t mind me if I never come down” might as well be the unofficial motto of this song, which finds Nia somewhere between the last hours of a rave and the first signs of morning, The video follows her into this peculiar after-hours space: shot entirely on an iPhone, in stark black and white, she wanders through an empty club, turning left, then left again, then left again, and somehow finding herself back where she began. There’s something particularly lovely about the track’s acoustic section, where Nia’s vocals and guitar suddenly give the song an almost indie sensibility before the jungle takes over again.
John Glacier is pretty, she knows she is pretty, and she would quite like to be paid for it. “Bond Girl” is the first taste of her forthcoming album Lack of Joy is Death, swapping some of her usual ambient haze for a clubbier beat, with Glacier gliding through the track like she has somewhere extremely important to be — probably Vogue, probably another country, possibly both.
“Pay me for a picture ’cause I’m pretty like a bond girl,” she says, and there is something wonderfully matter-of-fact about it. The song glides along on a clubby beat, Glacier talking about flying around, talking to Vogue, being sometimes icy and sometimes sweet, while the video, directed by Léa Ceheivi, lets her fully indulge her 007 fantasies. She counts money in sterile, space-age environments, pays for mysterious things in large amounts of cash, wanders through parking lots in an impossibly chic pink get-up paired with a Kentucky Derby hat — and, naturally, ends up killing someone. Just another day at the office.
Words by Pykel van Latum
