I’m sitting here listening to a ghost rise from my speakers while my body responds physically to the familiar sound of distortion pedals; with every whine of guitar, an old tremor of hormonal angst climbs up the ribcage to my heart while my arms slowly and rigidly begin crossing themselves. Before I know it, 15-year-old me is huffing and puffing at the door, and she’s back with a vengeance. I spent my teens like a lot of isolated kids do, scribbling in my journal, rolling my eyes at anything that moved and crushing on boys and girls who looked straight through me. The only method of keeping the unpalatable world at bay was the pair of headphones secured tightly around my ears blasting the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, BRMC and The Killers on heavy rotation. That is to say, in a time before kids my age had any sense of self beyond malaise and wretchedness, we had early 2000s indie. 

“Impossible Weight,” the title track off of Deep Sea Diver’s forthcoming October album, embodies that era. It’s The White Stripes meets Sleater-Kinney, meets a cool glass of water with a cruel and jagged lip, meets a hole I want to crawl into headfirst, partly because of nostalgia, and partly because I'm so glad you can still find it somewhere. Frontwoman Jessica Dobson’s vocals prick like needles alongside the jaunty four-on-the-floor drumline. They dance through the verses, pushing the sound up and out towards the epic. A meek wail of guitar is layered in and around the chorus right before Our Lady Sharon Van Etten enters, her steady rich voice ringing out and grounding us against the bouncing instrumentals. The two singers move together in harmony before the music strips down once more, this time to only Van Etten’s low murmur—then the layers build back up again into a thunderous bridge. There’s something about the way that she draws out the last vowel in the line, “So I’ll just let you down now,” that creeps me out and electrifies me at the same time. Kind of like looking back at how formative music from a certain timeframe can be to a generation, how it accompanied us during that period and therefore shaped us as well. Yes, it’s true time (and therapy) heals all, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t run to preorder the LP from my local record shop immediately after listening. Photo by Matt Wignall.

Sometimes music is glowing proof that the universe strings the future to our present in ways we won’t learn for years to come—or, sometimes, for more than a decade. Such is the case for me with filous and The Kooks’ sun-soaked summer collaboration, “Hey Love.” Thirteen summers ago, in 2007, you could find me sunbathing in the often underestimated, blistering Midwestern heat on the back patio of my parents’ house. I snapped a CD into my red Sony Walkman, lamenting about whatever then-world-shattering-now-trivial heartbreak I was going through—and my song of choice? One that would echo the feeling reeling in my melancholy teenage heart: “Naïve” by The Kooks, who remain one of my favorite bands to this day. Fast forward to 2015, add in a few more heartbreaks and zoom out, and you would see an aerial view of myself and my now-fiancé on a sweltering July day, sipping iced coffees on our first date; it was a learning of fate, the feeling of meeting someone you feel you already know—a coming home. I say my favorite band is The Kooks and my fiancé, brightly smiling, says “no way, mine too!” Jump once again to 2018, and I am watching filous open for Mat Kearney; entranced by his uniquely smooth and electronic sonic palette. On the train ride home, I save all of his recent collaborations to my Spotify library. Less than a year later, my fiancé and I would finally see The Kooks together in concert. At the fusion of all of these memories is the happily shimmering made-for-summer anthem “Hey Love.” I was working on wedding planning the day I saw filous and The Kooks had collaborated and released this track, and I couldn’t play it fast enough. filous seamlessly supplements The Kooks’ trademark acoustic rock-pop strumming with gentle violin swells, slight tinges of distortion, and electronic clapping percussion. It was as if The Kooks’ frontman Luke Pritchard was singing this string of memories back to me: “It took a lot to find you / All the circles we've ever spun / And all the records when we sing along / The moments frozen, one by one.” Now, as we prepare for our wedding this autumn, in the stressful atmosphere of a worldwide pandemic, the warmth of “Hey Love” made me realize the universe is surely stringing us somewhere beautiful that we’ve yet to think about. As the song rings out (“I know where I’m going / I no longer need to run”), I smile, ready to face it all.

Arlo Parks is a poet as much as she is a musician, and this comes across profoundly in her new single, “Hurt,” in which she tells the story of a boy named Charlie with a “heart so soft it hurt to beat.” From the start, which kicks off with an up-tempo drumbeat, Parks shows listeners accustomed to her more gradual, muted introductions that she is not one to be predicted. The drumbeat carries throughout, with horns swelling behind the song’s chorus, until a break in the middle of the song, where Parks delivers spoken word over a bassline.  

From “watching Twin Peaks,” to “dreaming of a house with red carnations by the windows,” Parks uses detailed imagery to paint the vivid picture of someone whose anguish and longing we can all, on some level, relate to: the feeling that it would be better to hurt than to not feel anything at all. “Hurt” is energetic, taut and brimming with empathy and optimism. 

A clean electric guitar, simply plucked chords and the sleepy sweetness of Angel Olsen’s gorgeous vocals unfolding in waves around us. These are the pieces that make up ‘Waving, Smiling,’ a delicate track off of Olsen’s new LP. The record is appropriately titled Whole New Mess—it seems to be describing everyone’s current state of existence. Indeed, Olsen’s vulnerability and open-eyed candid songwriting is easy to get lost in as we spend more and more days at home. “All my fears, cried out all of those years,” she sings with grace, “Look out my window, the sun is shining.” She’s right of course, we know she is, the sun has risen again today. We dive into her voice, wrapped in the softest of reverbs as she hits a high note and reaches the peak of the tune. “I’m waving, smiling, [...] alive and dying,” she sings to us. So are we, Angel. So are we. Photo by Kylie Coutts.

Sometimes songs come along that feel so familiar it’s almost as if I wrote them in a past life. When I first heard Joshua Speers’s newest single “Other People,” I listened to it on repeat trying to identify why, “I live in other people’s homes / doing dishes writing other people’s songs / I cover my ears from other people’s moans / but never me” put a lump in my throat each time. It starts with soft reverb-laden guitar and Speers’s sweet and warm voice before building gradually to a soaring second chorus. Speers has a knack for writing songs that feel universal yet personal, which he showcased brilliantly in his first EP, and continues to do so with his newest offering. The production is measured but noticeable—giving the folk-rock track a nice pop polish. It reminded me of a poem I wrote back when I was subletting a friend’s room in an unfamiliar city: 

The window faces a brick wall
I get one beam of sunlight a day
From 10 to 11
Sometimes shorter
I lay on the floor
My eyes in it
Getting my daily recommended 30 minutes
Of vitamin D
Maybe I will go outside
Maybe I will sit amongst my things
Scattered in and around his
I live in a puzzle of
What is mine and what is not
Constantly shifting
Organizing
Tucking in and away
Myself and my things
I am learning to take up space
Make noise
Stop apologizing for just being
Bit by bit I let myself be seen
Heard
Felt
As I sit in the sunlight
Building up energy

In this cover of Willie Nelson's iconic road trip tune, First Aid Kit inject their classic folk forbearance and dual harmonies into their version of "On the Road Again." Paired with a video montage containing footage of different memories and milestones they've experienced on tour, this jubilant and expressive tune about loving the open road is brought to different levels of nostalgic sweetness. In its best moments, this compilation of memories presents a posture of hope. It's as if First Aid Kit and their crew are saying, "We'll be back, doing our favorite things, just wait a little while longer." It's nice to see them smiling, hopping in pools, playing massive festival shows and just enjoying things we used to take for granted. It gives the viewer a sense of expectation that, in weeks and months to come, as the world slowly re-opens its doors, we'll approach every experience with a little more appreciation and reverence. This thought reminds me of this line from On Friendship by Kahlil Gibran:

"When you part from your friend, you grieve not;
For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain."

First Aid Kit have always handled their covers with care (see their incredible rendition of Simon & Garfunkel's "America"). Their version of "On the Road Again" is joyful and beautifully done. Watch their video and let us know what you think!

For their first collaboration, “CUT EM IN” finds genre-bender Anderson .Paak and rap mogul Rick Ross living for luxury. Following the release of his protest song "Lockdown," "CUT EM IN" takes on a more lighthearted approach as .Paak jokes about his accountant giving him a breakdown of his finances: "'The good news is you made a lot...The bad news is you spent more.'" The track grazes new era rapcore with its catchy guitar riff, with .Paak leaning more into hip hop than he did on Ventura, his latest full-length release. Underneath its showmanship, the song asserts the importance of loyalty to your roots and looking out for your friends who looked out for you on the come up. “You know the ones that lend a hand and wanna see you win,” .Paak explains, “When you come up on a lick, make sure you cut ’em in.” And according to Ross, staying grounded also includes looking out for yourself: “Sometimes you need to know your worth…Meditate, hydrate / Protect my energy before engagement.” The song will be featured on the Madden 21 soundtrack, which EA announced will be celebrating "the artists rising up to chase the throne.”