5 songs you should hear this week - w/e 8 December

Every day we play you a track that has just grabbed our attention. As soon as we hear it, we send it into the digital ether for you all to enjoy. Sometimes it's an exclusive, sometimes it's a favourite artist and, at other times, it'll be someone brand new. Here's this week's choice selection. Just click on the links to see the full Just Added playlist:

Bill Baird - Walking In A Straight Line
The lead song from the 8-track Straight Time EP which Bill Baird released on the 1st December. He’s given up whiskey, drugs, beef, pork, and staying out late, to navigate that straight line (quite literally, in the video, with a small Bill Baird-mask-wearing crew for company). But this newfound virtue comes with the hitch that he’s now “a boring prude”. Bill says Straight Time is the closing chapter to a dual album released in April and “if the songs on the proper release are the well-groomed child, these songs are the uncouth, bawdy, drunken uncle.” Fortunately, that uncle’s got both the tunes and a load of sunny slacker charm.

Alela Diane - Emigré
This will feature on the Portland singer’s album, Cusp, which is due out in February. Alela wrote the album during three weeks in a small cabin, deep within Oregon’s snowy woods. Alone for the first time since becoming a mother, she wrote Emigré to process the tragedy of the refugee crisis “through the lens of motherhood. It was written after I saw the photograph of three year old Aylan Kurdi washed up on the beach of Turkey. My own daughter was about his age at the time, and it hit close to home, as it did so many others.”

Andy Cooper – Get On That
This track is taken from Andy’s second album The Layered Effect which has been billed as a “testimony to the joys of hip hop then and now” and will be issued by Rocafort Records (an indy specialising in funk, soul, R&B, and Afrobeat) on 26th January. Continuing our run of North American adds, Andy hails from Long Beach, California. He’s earned his lyrical and production stripes after a twenty year stint with hip hop trio Ugly Duckling, then a couple more hanging out with The Allergies, before issuing last year’s solo LP Room To Breathe. This track’s for the party people. And we will be getting on that.

Tune-Yards – ABC 123
After beginning as a solo, Garage Band-produced project, the wonderful Tune-Yards are a fully-fledged duo featuring Merrill Garbus and long-time collaborator Nate Brenner (both of whom feature in this song’s stop-motion-filled video). Despite the pre-school title, lyrically things have gone a bit apocalyptic. Merril sings that she must be witness as “California’s burning down. Sitting in the middle of the sixth extinction.” But if you’re not minding Merril’s message too closely, you could find yourself swept along with the song and discreetly dancing.

Nicholas Jaar – A Coin In Nine Hands
We celebrated the approach of the weekend with something new from Nicholas Jaar. The Chilean DJ and producer has just issued a deluxe edition of his 2016 album Sirens, with three previously unreleased tracks, recorded at the same time. This moody beast is one of that tasty trio, saved from oblivion by Jaar’s change of heart. "This deluxe version of the record is what it should have been all along but I got scared of ‘Coin’ and decided against it at the last minute but then I started performing ‘Coin’ at every show… I couldn’t get it out of me… everything floats to the surface at some point.”

You can hear all the tracks via the Just Added Playlist

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