This week’s New Music playlist is a genre-hopscotching dose of greatness, featuring long-awaited new tracks from Sabrosa Purr, Gold Panda, Flowers and more. In our quest to widen the taste spectrum, we’ve tag-teamed a collaborative effort with our Crave UK brethren to bring you the best new songs hitting the streams this week.
Check out this week’s dose of new tracks below, with accompanying info. As always, keep up with our weekly new music finds as they arrive by subscribing to the Crave New Music Playlist on Spotify.
Sabrosa Purr – ‘Hard-Eyed Lions’
Sabrosa Purr is one of those bands that seems only to exist if you believe hard enough. I first caught the SP bug back in 2009, stumbling across one of their CDs through a friend of a friend. The spark of excitement caught fire, and as momentum began to build… Sabrosa Purr disappeared back into the woodwork. But band nucleus Will Love has been active all the while, crafting what would become the next evolution in the band’s sound. Our patience and faith have been rewarded brilliantly in “Hard-Eyed Lions,” a pulsing electronic thrust of psychedelic excellence that dances a line between erotic and ominous. It’s fucking delicious, and we can’t wait for the band – with a new live lineup and, presumably, a new album – to hit the stage again.
– Johnny Firecloud, Crave Music Editor
Spring King – ‘Rectifier’
Manchester four-piece Spring King, best known for being responsible for Beats Radio’s sole exciting moment when DJ Zane Lowe decided to kick off the Apple Music show with the band’s track ‘City,’ are back with new single ‘Rectifier’ that, in my estimation, is their best work yet.
With drummer/lead singer Tarek Musa’s vocals coated in reverb, ‘Rectifier’ is a chaotic descent into the world of a band just hitting their stride. With 2015 being noted as their breakthrough year, this track suggests that 2016 won’t see them showing any signs of slowing down.
– Paul Tamburro, UK Editor
The Heavy – ‘Turn Up’
The Heavy return with fourth album Hurt & The Merciless this April, and their new single “Turn Up” is exactly the soul-blast dance throwdown we’ve been waiting for. Capturing the frenetic energy of their live performance, “Turn Up” sets the bar hellishly high for the new record – but something tells us we’ve got nothing to worry about.
– Johnny Firecloud, Crave Music Editor
Guerilla Toss – ‘Grass Shack’
Guerilla Toss returns with their wild and wonderful new LP Eraser Stargazer next month by way of DFA Records, inspired by the Grateful Dead and meditation, interestingly enough. “Grass Shack” feels like Siouxsie and the Banshees got lost in a funk funhouse, and that’s a damn good thing.
“There’s a distinct difference between falling asleep to the TV blaring in the background or to just an open window,” says says vocalist Kassie Carlson. “Both drown out the silence and certain patterns can be used like counting sheep. A particular type of meditation, called a body scan, is is something I do a lot. It is the act of assessing every part of your body to bring yourself back to reality. In this way, lacking want and need; just being in the now. Next, starting to assess everything around you. After a few minutes, you’re like “Oh right, I’m just a girl in the world” and there’s no reason to spiral and stress out so hard. The grass shack is just swaying.”
– Johnny Firecloud, Crave Music Editor
Flowers – ‘Pull My Arm’
Led by the otherworldly voice of vocalist Rachel Kenedy, London-based band Flowers’ latest single ‘Pull My Arm’, the first taken from their sophomore LP Everybody’s Dying to Meet You, is filled with the kind of vitality necessary to lift the UK up out of the doldrums during this particularly cold February.
Hearkening back to 2010 when every major music outlet in Britain was inexplicably riding the waves of a surf revival – despite our seasides offering little more than tepid oceans and the frequent splash of rain – Flowers achieves what The Drums failed to do in providing energetic pop not characterised by droning whines and insincere lyricism (you’re from Brooklyn, boys – where the fuck were you gonna go surfing?) Kenedy’s captivating and graceful vocals carry the tune, juxtaposed wonderfully by Kevin Ayers’ scuzzy guitar riffs.
– Paul Tamburro, UK Editor
Gold Panda – ‘Time Eater’
Gold Panda returns with Good Luck and Do Your Best on May 27 via City Slang, the hotly anticipated follow-up to 2013’s Half of Where You Live. He recorded the album at home and mixed it in Luke Abbott’s studio. While the record was mostly influenced by a pair of trips to Japan in 2014, the album’s title was inspired by a cab ride: “…As we got out, the Japanese taxi driver’s parting words to us as we left, were ‘good luck and do your best.’”
“I went over twice. Once in April, once in October, and they’re the best times to visit because the weather is calm – it’s not too hot or too cold,” Derwin says. “The album was recorded at home in Chelmsford, but I had that visual inspiration or documentation from Japan. So it was a look-back. If you go in those months, Japan has this light that we don’t get here. It’s hard to explain. You know how LA has this dusk feeling? – that orange light that makes the place glow, and the neon signs? Well, Japan has this… at certain times of the year, it has this filter on stuff.” We’re looking forward to hearing more of the results.
– Johnny Firecloud, Crave Music Editor
