5 songs you should hear this week - w/e 9th March

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:

Nakhane – Interloper
Nakhane is an openly gay singer, writer and actor, who was born in Alice, and raised in Port Elizabeth. His 2014 debut album, Brave Confusion, won a South African Award for Best Alternative Album. And last year, to neatly demonstrate his polymath credentials, he picked up the Best Actor Award at the Durban International Film Festival for his starring role in The Wound. Nakhane spent three years writing this gospel-influenced track, which brings the vocal delivery of David McAlmont to mind. It “first started out as a Pornography-era Cure homage. Then it morphed into a slow, acoustic Iron & Wine thing” before Nakhane and his producer Ben Christophers (Bat For Lashes) decided to make it “a stomp and a romp - something that one could spin around to.” His second LP You Will Not Die is out on 16 March.

TT – Love Leaks
While the Warpaint rhythm section have been working with another TT (Wednesday’s wonderful guest Tracey Thorne), the band’s lead vocalist and guitarist Theresa Wayman has been working on some solo material. This is the first taste of her upcoming album, Love Laws (due out next month) on which she plays bass, guitar and synth and programmes the drum beats. It reflects upon themes like motherhood, the ups and downs of romance, and the loneliness of touring. This particular track falls into the middle subject category, with TT brooding beautifully over fading love.

Jon Hopkins – Emerald Rush
This track’s taken from Jon’s newly announced album Singularity, his first solo effort since 2013’s breakthrough Immunity (though he has been busy collaborating with the likes of Brian Eno and King Creosote in the interim). Apparently the album will begin and end on the same note and will explore “the dissonance between dystopian urbanity and the green forest…a journey that returns to where it began – from the opening note of foreboding to the final sound of acceptance.” All that analysis aside, it’s a typically restrained and sophisticated banger, with understated vocals, that slowly increase your euphoric response to the track just over 2 minutes in. It’s accompanied by a firefly-filled animated video, which we would thoroughly recommend you view, whilst listening.

Kathryn Joseph – Tell My Lover
After a musical career based largely around small gigs in her native Aberdeen, Kathryn put out her debut album Bones You Have Thrown Me And Blood I’ve Spilled in 2015, and won the Scottish Album of the Year Award (SAY) - beating bigger beasts like Belle and Sebastian and Young Fathers to the prize. Tell My Lover is her first single since signing to Mogwai’s Rock Action Records. And an album will follow in the summer, as well a performance at London’s Royal Festival Hall, as part of Robert Smith’s Meltdown Festival.

serpentwithfeet – Bless Ur Heart
We closed the week with a beautiful and emotional track from Josiah Wise – AKA serpentwithfeet – who was a Pentecostal choir boy in Baltimore, studied classical vocal techniques at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and spent some time in the city’s neo-soul scene, before heading to New York to find his (serpent) feet, make music his career, and release his first EP. He has since collaborated with Björk (she told us how much she liked Josiah, when she spoke to us last year), and is set to release his debut full-length (called soil) in June.

You can hear all the tracks via the Just Added Playlist

Discover more new music with 6 Music Recommends

<<Last week