The planets aligned!
No, literally. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter all formed a line across the sky last week for the first time in a decade.
What a nice way for the Universe to mark our 19th New Music Monday…
Frokedal – The Sign
We at Kettle are big fans of Frokedal. Her previous single, ‘Kid’, has already featured in New Music Monday for it’s melancholic rainy-day vibes. With the run up to her debut album, Hold On Dreamer, approaching, she’s released another teaser, ‘The Sign’.
Straight from the initial drum fill, it’s clear that this is a song with more ‘ooph’ than her previous offering. Rather than a rainy montage, the hopeful lyrics and upbeat tempo make it more a song for the opening credits of something probably by Richard Curtis – understatedly cheery with plenty of room for Hugh Grant to speak over the top.
Overall, this is another strong offering from an artist so unknown she’s still yet to have a Wikipedia page (though that will definitely change soon).
Aurora – Conqueror
Speaking of ‘ooph’, here’s another artist who’s turning up the onomatopoeia.
You might remember Aurora as the artist who provided last Christmas’ now annual supermarket-advert-stripped-back-piano-cover, following Tom Odell and his penguin to sing an Oasis song for an old man on the moon.
‘Conqueror’ is far from stripped back; the song is packed out with thudding percussion and shimming synths, providing a wall of sound to accompany her, no longer lonely, piano.
We’ve featured a lot of promising Norwegian artists on New Music Monday; Gold Celeste, Slutface, not to mention Frokedal too; and Aurora could quite possibly be the most promising of them all.
Yuck – Hearts In Motion
Continuing the theme of bands I really like returning in 2016 (see Yeasayer, Explosions In The Sky, LCD Soundsystem), here’s another band who are really, really good.
Yuck are lo-fi band from London who combine cheery melodies with as much fuzzy distortion as is physically possible to fit into three minutes of pop song. Their self-titled debut album, released in 2011, was true to this description, creating almost a shoe-gaze version of Weezer’s green album.
Five years on from their debut, and three years on from their slightly less impressive second album, they’re back with new material.
‘Hearts In Motion’ has all the warm, fuzzy trademarks of a Yuck track, just with a new found anthemic Brit-pop edge. Their new album, Stranger Things, is released at the end of February; if this track is anything to go by, it could quite definitely be going on our ever growing list of albums to be excited by this year.
Billie Marten – Bird
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roFV6eoG3ao align:center]We’ve been recommending Billie Marten for a while now but as she’s currently fresh from a set at Radio 1’s Future Festival, we thought we’d recommend her some more.
‘Bird’ is an endlessly graceful song, floating along as if like a bird effortlessly to the rhythm of Billie’s piano.
With the backing of Hugh Stephens and Annie Mac, this is an artist who’s going to be huge in the coming year – and rightly so, this song’s been bobbing around since November and I’m still virtually lost for words by it.
What do you think of our picks this week? Let us know in the comments below!
