Stream: For Your Love - Ariana And The Rose

Following on from her Retrograde EP earlier this year, and last year’s excellent Supercool, Ariana And The Rose is back with a new track in the form of For Your Love.

For Your Love is a dramatic slice of electronic pop that attempts to capture that feeling of being overwhelmingly in love. Ahead of Ariana’s New York Light And Space event, she describes her anticipation in unveiling the new song:

”I’m so excited to be sharing this song. The whole thing was written as a burst of energy, capturing that feeling when you're totally consumed by a new love. Releasing new music and having our immersive live music party light + space all be shared with the world at once is such an amazing way to be capping off the year"

Inspired by 80s and 90s club culture and seeking to create an interactive experience blurring the boundaries between artist and audience, the Light and Space comes to New York on 16 November having already run successfully in the UK. You can grab tickets here.

Stream: Steady On - Teen Ravine

I love this gorgeous dream-like track from Toronto duo Teen Ravine. Steady On is taken from their forthcoming debut album, due out before the end of the year.

The album explores physical and emotional alienation, with one member having recently exited a long-term relationship and the other spent a year confined to a dark room to recover from concussion. There is a bedroom-recorded feel to this, but it also draws of 70s west coast sounds, particularly as that guitar solo bursts through all of the dreamy haze.

Talking about the song the band had this lovely quote as inspiration:

"There’s a bridge over the Don River in Toronto and written above it is the phrase: “This river I step in is not the river I stand in”. You could drive over it a thousand times and miss it. But it’s a really beautiful thing…a subtle reminder that no matter how hard we try to resist it, nothing is permanent, everything is in flux."

Check out Steady On below.

Video: Glued - Elle Watson

Having previously appeared here last year with both Losing Any Sleep and the Clams Casino produced track Walls, Kent artist Elle Watson is back with a gorgeous new track and video in the form of Glued.

Teamed up with Clams Casino again, Glued reeks of money and class. Watson’s vocals soar against the economical backing work here - gently strummed instruments bask in all the space and reverb you could possibly want. The chorus is undeniably aiming at the mainstream, but with this much restraint it is hard to begrudge Watson the fame she seems set for.

The whole track has a thick, sticky feel to it - Watson singing about being glued together whilst the music itself feels viscus and tactile. No coincidence, says Watson:

“The inspiration for this song was probably triggered by aspects of Clams' original beat. From the start, the musical elements had a heavy, yet gooey vibe to it. It felt heavy and sticky somehow.”

Similarly the video, created by Photographer/Director Haris Nukem, is deep, sticky and close: A mess of bodies writhing to either get loose or get more stuck in.

I love how Glued perfectly captures that helpless feeling of being stuck on someone. It's the giddy feel of swooning uncontrollably. Check out the video below and the Soundcloud player further down.

Glued (Official Video) by Elle Watson on VEVO.

Stream: Cover Me - Lyves

Back with her second track in as many months, London-based musician Lyves has just unveiled Cover Me, her follow up to the impressive track Holding Back from last month.

Whilst both deal in Lyves’ trademark spacious and emotive soul, Cover Me forges a path into more electronic territory. The heavily trip-hop inspired piano and whiplash percussion style of Holding Back is absent and instead we have thick layers of gently distorted synths, complete with some subtle vinyl crackle. The press release still likens Cover Me to trip-hop, but this feels like to more future looking of the two tracks. And whilst both songs pack a strong emotional core, Cover Me is particularly brooding... I like them both equally.

Discussing the track Lyves, real name Francesca Bergami, says:

“I wrote ‘Cover Me’ around 3 years ago, but it ended up as a lost, unfinished demo until I came across it again by accident this year while writing in Devon. Hearing it after so long re-ignited how I first felt writing it and led me to finish the song. I feel the song speaks about the tug and pull in relationships - that internal conflict that can arise between wanting stability and security vs independence”.

Check out Cover Me below:

Stream: Waking Life - Sorcha Richardson

Brooklyn via Dublin musician Sorcha Richardson is back again with another slice of her beautifully introspective narrative-driven electronic pop.

Following on from the lovely 4AM, released earlier this summer, Waking Life is another heartbreakingly honest portrait of things not going to plan. Facing the realisation she can’t put a relationship back together that is already falling apart at the seams, Richardson instructs the subject “Please don’t waste your voice on us, if all you hear is white noise, yeah all you hear is white noise”.

Waking Life features Richardson’s typically layered and atmospheric production. It’s hard not to hear the tears and Dublin rain falling in the solid and un-showy beat, actual white noise and the muted melodies that gradually emerge over the duration of this song. Richardson sings about dying flowers and chips of flaking paint and faded colours and fingers wrapping around her beating heart like branches in a way that conjures every single detail in your mind.

Describing her inspiration, Richardson says

”Waking Life' is a song I started writing around my last birthday. There's something about birthdays that force you to pause and reflect on your life and take stock of where you're at. Sometimes that's a really fun and fulfilling thing to do but sometimes it can feel really shitty. I've spent a lot of my life saying to myself that 'by the time I'm X years old, I'll have overcome that fear, I'll have worked out all those issues, I'll have mended that relationship.' This song is about getting to a point in life and suddenly realizing that your reality falls way short of the dream you were holding onto in your head. It's about having no idea how to reconcile the discrepancies between the two, but also wondering how or why you thought it would be different.“

I can’t get enough of Sorcha Richardson. I just can’t.

Catch Sorcha on tour with Imelda May next month:

24/10: Limerick, UCH

25/10: Limerick, UCH

27/10: Sligo Live

28/10: Killarney, INEC

29/10: Cork, Opera House

31/10: Wexford, Speigeltent