Twenty-four songs this month because I couldn’t bear to cut any of these – some are just that good, others are important because of who recorded them, all are worth your time.
Radiohead – Burn the Witch. Yep, the boys are back, looking more like the killers in a Rob Zombie splatter film than like a post-rock band, but the lead track from A Moon-Shaped Pool is one of their best songs in years, maybe my favorite since Amnesiac. I didn’t find much of interest on the rest of the album, though, as Radiohead seems to favor atmospheric sounds that I find a bit soporific.
Wire – Numbered. It was a big month for new tunes from the old guard, with post-rock icons Wire releasing their fifteenth album, Nocturnal Koreans just as April ended. I found several tracks here worth including, but chose “Numbered” for its lyrical and stylistic callbacks to the band’s best-known song, “3 Girl Rhumba.”
CHVRCHES – Warning Call. Not necessarily their best work, but this song, from the soundtrack to a video game called Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, is a new CHVRCHES song and it would take a lot for me to exclude a new CHVRCHES song from a new music playlist.
Local Natives – Past Lives. To borrow a favorite malaprop of my daughter’s, I was “so-and-so” on Local Natives even through Hummingbird, although “Heavy Feet” did make my year-end list in 2014. “Past Lives” is just so much bigger and more ambitious than what I’ve heard from them before, and the music actually accentuates Kelcey Ayer’s vocals, as opposed to their sparser previous work that placed too much weight on his vocals and left them sounding whiny. I heard this song at least a half-dozen times before I realized it was under four minutes; it has the feel of a long, broad epic six-minute track.
The Stone Roses – All for One. The music is there, with a strong riff from John Squire, but Ian Brown’s lyrics are awfully tame for someone who never held his tongue before.
Glass Animals – Life Itself. Glass Animals do some seriously weird stuff with their percussion lines, often in a very good way (like “Pools”), but their songwriting takes a big step forward with this lead single from their upcoming second album, How to Be a Human Being.
Lucius – Almost Makes Me Wish for Rain. Another pop gem from the quintet’s second full-length album, this song has a summery, anthemic feel, and lyrics that seem like a rebuttal to a certain Garbage song.
Wolf Parade – Automatic. Never a big Wolf Parade fan but I’m including this song from their comeback EP because Nick Piecoro will cut me if I don’t.
The Faint – Young & Realistic. The Faint have always had some new-wave stylings, but this song could have opened for Blondie and Duran Duran in 1982.
The Big Pink – Hightimes. I doubt they’ll ever recapture the peak of “Dominos,” their first hit and a key sample in a Nicki Minaj song (the first time her name has ever appeared on this blog and I hope the last as well), but this has a similar feel and tempo, just without some of the bombast that made “Dominos” a sort of guilty fun.
Speedy Ortiz – Death Note. This track didn’t make SO’s 2015 album Foil Deer – it’ll appear instead on an upcoming EP called Foiled Again – but I think it’s my favorite song by the Massachusetts band yet. Those riffs are seriously heavy.
Leagues – Dance With Me. Leagues had a minor hit a couple of years ago, around when I started writing up music posts more regularly, with “Spotlight,” a very bright indie-pop that featured a solid contrast between the tension in the music behind the verses and the big peaks in the chorus. This is a little more straightforward, slower tempo but more in line with the rest of Leagues’ first album.
The Aces – Stuck. This is so much poppier than stuff I usually include on the list, but my daughter, who told me this morning that she liked the song on the radio (it was Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs”), absoutely loves it, and it’s very catchy. But I don’t understand how this all-girl quartet can keep the name when it already belongs to a popular blues band that existed for about two decades last century.
The Pass – Silent Treatment. This Louisville quartet is about to release its first album, Canyons, next Friday on indie label SonaBlast Records. This lead single is another straight-up synthpop song, perhaps a bit poppier than what I usually include here, but, hey, it’s finally summer, so forgive me for throwing some more sunshine on this month’s playlist.
Monica Heldal – Coulda Been Sound. This Norwegian singer-songwriter sounds sort of like an elf, or perhaps Kat Edmonson, over a track here that would have fit in perfectly on Ben Howard’s Every Kingdom album.
Drowners – Pick Up The Pace. Drowners had a couple of minor hits in 2013-14 with “Long Hair” and “Luv, hold me down,” and this song is in just the same vein, a bit of jangly indie-pop from a band named for a Suede song but clearly inspired by ’80s alternative sounds.
Wild Beasts – Get My Bang. Wild Beasts earned huge critical acclaim for their Mercury-Prize nominated 2014 album Present Tense, featuring the memorable line “Don’t confuse me with someone who gives a fuck.” This song, from their upcoming album Boy King, has a much stronger funk influence than anything on that last album, which I thought was a better academic record than a listening one.
Leapling – Alabaster Snow. If Death Cab for Cutie adopted some noise-rock effects on their guitars, you might get this song.
Elwell – Let the Rain Come In. Just hang with the dirge-like opening here – the song’s centerpiece is the part-folk, part-electronic chorus, a change of direction for Minneapolis guitarist Andy Elwell on his upcoming seventh album.
Everything Everything – To The Blade. This song isn’t new – the album, Get to Heaven, actually came out in 2015 in the UK, and was finally released in the US this February, but because of the gap in release dates and its unavailability last year on Spotify I never included anything after the lead single “Regret” on my playlists. The sprawling 18-song record doesn’t have the highs of the previous disc, Arc, and certainly could have used a little editing, but has several strong singles, including this one, which has this utterly frenetic chorus that recalls their most original work from their last two albums.
Thrice – Death From Above. Featuring friend of the dish Riley Breckenridge, Thrice just released their ninth full-length album, To Be Everywhere is to Be Nowhere, last week, and this is the third track from the record I’ve included on a playlist here because it’s all pretty fucking great. The vibe is remniscent of classic hardcore, but dialed down to a stoner tempo that gives the heavy riffs on the chorus more time to fill your ears.
Gone Is Gone – Violescent. This supergroup features members of Mastodon, Queens of the Stone Age, and At the Drive-In, with a sound that you might get if you threw all those groups in a blender. It’s more accessible and less heavy than Mastodon’s progressive metal sounds, a little quicker and richer than the stoner vibe of QotSA. The chorus is a hell of an earworm, too.
Death Angel – The Moth. I’ve got two tracks this month from 1980s thrash icons who’ve put out new records, the first from Death Angel, whose first album, The Ultra-Violence, was recorded while the band members were still teenagers. Their eighth album, The Evil Divide, came out last week, and the band’s core sound remains very true to their original Bay Area thrash roots.
Destruction – Under Attack. One of the pioneers of European thrash in the 1980s, Destruction has been recording pretty frequently (if without much notice) since 1998, and like Death Angel haven’t varied their sound much either: If you like classic thrash sounds, you’ll like most of their latest album, Under Attack, although I found it a mixed bag. The first half of the album is stronger than the back half, sticking to the formula that made Destruction one of the most important thrash acts of the 1980s, while the second half has some changes in direction that just don’t work (“Stand Up for What You Deliver” is cringeworthy) before they return to the formula in the closer “Thrash Attack.”