Stream: Made Of Mine - Gold Fir

Made Of Mine is a slinky piece of UK Garage influenced basement dance music that tugs on my 90s nostalgia but brings it right up to date. If you’ve ever lost it to Storm Queen you will likely appreciate the raw, soulful sound Gold Fir creates here.

Vocals come from Ms Ray and she appropriately channels UK R&B and Garage with a lyric that speaks to feelings of control, sexuality and breaking rules in a relationship. It’s a straight-forward, honest and sassy.

Stream: In My Head - Rynn

Rynn is Ohio-based singer-songwriter Kathryn Kempthorne and she has been experimenting with electronic music ever since she purchased her first synthesiser at the age of 14. Having scored over eight million Spotify streams with the song Islands from her debut EP Nightfires, Rynn is set to make waves when she unveils her second EP in the coming months.

In My Head, taken from the forthcoming EP, is a song about trying to understand a previous relationship - looking at the reality of the experience and what went wrong, rather than just focusing on the romanticised version that tends to get stuck in our memory.

On In My Head Rynn’s vocals alternate between higher pitched, high stakes emotion and the reassured and determined central line of “It’s all in my head”. She rattles off the compromises that existed in her relationship, as if to remind herself they existed. With layered synths and vocal harmonies, Rynn has created a piece of music that feels beautifully vulnerable.

Stream: Bonnie & Clyde - LightHouse

Following up on their wonderful single Nebula, LA duo LightHouse are back taking inspiration from another duo with new single Bonnie & Clyde.

Depicting the titular criminal pair, the song actually draws from the recent Aaron Sorkin directorial debut, Molly’s Game, about the infamous poker game runner Molly Bloom. The song describes the feeling we get as the audience, drawn in by the success we see on the screen and left feeling compelled to keep watching her every move.

Combining a wild jazz funk section and soft vocal harmonies, LightHouse have once again created a track that feels experimental and unique yet is catchy and accessible.

Given our shared love of bank heist films, as a synth-pop duo, it was inevitable that we write ourselves into a song about partners in crime. On the surface, Bonnie & Clyde is yet another dynamic duo story, but like any good criminals, much of the mystery to the track is that we never know the exact details of their crime. A feminine edge, largely inspired by the film, “Molly’s Game” (2017), focuses on the quintessential “Bonnie” character in the chorus. As an audience, we are seduced by her successes - having no choice but to follow her “everywhere she goes.”

Video: Thick Skin - Mines Falls

Brothers Carson and Erik Lund began working together as Mines Falls following a series of events - the collapse of a relationship, the passing of a best friend, the inheritance of an upright piano. Together they now make beautifully introspective-sounding deconstructed piano ballads, like this one...

Much of the recording for Thick Skin’s video was captured at the Lund’s house in Hollywood, which was also their base for recording Mines Falls’ debut album Nepenthe. The house is clearly doused in symbolism - reflecting the brothers’ move to the west coast, the coming and going of various roommates, the general history of the building. Here they attempt to capture the melancholic ambiance of the place whilst juxtaposing it’s sense of the pedestrian to the alien landscapes the brothers find surrounding their new home city. Carson and Erik cite home and transience as being two of the core themes of their album, so it makes sense for them to focus on those here.

Thick Skin starts with a gently swirling melody, vocals flowing like a stream of consciousness, hands grasping for meaning but struggling to find tangible meaning. Something about the floor giving out, text messages and radios - it feels both decidedly normal and bizarrely otherworldly. Thick gradually disintergrates, distortion and chaos consuming all. It’s a beautiful piece of music and and fitting video.

Stream: Something About Your Love - Phony Ppl

Something About Your Love is the new single from Brooklyn quartet Phony Ppl and it is has a kind of cosmic funk beauty to it that I can’t get enough of.

The song describes the experience of a relationship that isn’t working, and yet is somehow impossible to leave. As described by frontman Elbee Thrie, “It’s a song about staying in a relationship you know is poisonous”.

The instrumentation on display on this track is simply incredible - from the opening moments it has a wonderfully liquid feel, a little syrupy like Prince, but it really comes into its own at two-minutes-forty when the guitar solo manages to elevate this to another stratosphere. Phony Ppl have spent time touring with Erykah Badu and The Roots and there is a real OkayPlayer vibe to this - only OkayPlayer and The Roots if they became obsessed with undiscovered Prince records.

Just occasionally I hear a record so damn perfect that I can’t believe it didn’t already exist. Something About Your Love is one of those records... Look out for the forthcoming album mō’zā-ik, due on 19 October.