Listen: Who’s Having The Greatest Time? — Low Island

Appearing here in the form of a live recording, Low Island’s Who’s Having The Greatest Time? has been the song I’ve had most stuck in my head this week. It barrels in with an anxiety-fuelled repeated synth stab and clipped drums, a vocal delivered with a certain sardonic style that seems to ask, “Are we actually having a great time, or just trying to convince ourselves we are?”

I’ve been feeling a little nostalgic of late for 00s-through-early-2010s electronic music. What happened to the experimentation, attitude and excitement of Electroclash, French Touch, Ghostly International and Italians Do It Better? Whilst some of these things arguably all still exist, there doesn’t seem to be the same energy pulsating around our electronic music as there once was.

Who’s Having The Greatest Time? manages to push my nostalgic buttons — recalling those sounds that seem to have been left behind. Ironically, Low Island evoke those sounds by feeling like they still believe in the future. The deadpan vocal feels like Matthew Dear at his Black City-era peak, with Caribou’s Dan Snaith on production duties. The song bubbles with discontent, the sort of constructive frustration on display on LCD Soundsystem’s Get Innocuous!

Check out Who’s Having The Greatest Time? below, and look for Low Island’s debut album If You Could Have It All Again when it drops via Emotional Interference on April 16th.

Listen: Just Chemistry — Dance Lessons

Following on from SMABTO and New Job, Just Chemistry is the latest single from London-based and female-fronted trio Dance Lessons.

Just Chemistry floats upon a loose percussive bed, with vocalist Ann’s statuesque vocal performance elevating the sound to some sort of earthy-disco. The song feels unfussy in parts, yet boasts a sophisticated yet relatively unfussy sound — there are layers, but each sound still commands its own space.

Among all of this sophisticated and understated pop is a saxophone. I love a bit of saxophone, but it can be overpowering. Not so here, where it embellishes and enhances what is here, without overwhelming it. In fact, it lends the track a level of expensive sophistication that contrasts to the easy accessibility on show elsewhere.

Describing the song, Ann says:

“Just Chemistry is about the over-complication of our relationships. It’s about the things that are left unsaid in-between the awkward text messages and conversations, and how the absence of knowing can be misinterpreted as doubt. Last year was a difficult one. For a long time, I felt at the mercy of my emotions. I doubted where things were going. I lived in the future and found it hard to commit to the present. But these moments of not knowing can be equally thrilling and beautiful. And that’s what the song is about: finding beauty in the unspoken. In most cases, it’s chemistry that makes us fall in love. Things end, all is temporary. Let’s not go to war with one another over it.”

Just Chemistry exhibits the humanity and complexity I believe the song is shooting for, and yet it also points to a natural and universal simplicity that exists in all our relationships, and in music itself. Check it out below:

Watch: Sorry I Am — Del Water Gap

Originally a duo, musician S Holden Jaffe started Del Water Gap with Maggie Rogers when he was a student at NYU. As a solo artist, he has amassed a following and millions of streams on Spotify as well as featuring on Maggie Rogers’ 2020 album Notes from the Archive: Recordings 2011-2016.

Sorry I Am represents Jaffe’s debut release for Mom + Pop Music, and it comes with a brooding video filmed in the Californian desert.

The song itself shimmers with a dream-like intensity and a heartfelt urgency. Jaffe’s confessional vocals gradually surrounded in the kind of increasingly complex instrumentation that feels like the emotional clouds that exist in my mind. Every so often you identify a small kernel of emotion, but the more you focus on that emotion, the more it grows. That’s what Sorry I Am feels like — a person whose emotional experience expands from the periphery into an overwhelming, insistent and overwhelming wall of feeling.

Check out Sorry I Am below:

Listen: I Don’t Wanna Be Alone — Bjorn Rydhog

Malmö–based Swedish musician Bjorn Rydhog first unveiled his music two years ago with the release of his debut EP, There’s A Light In Everything. Since the release of that EP, his focus has been on creating uplifting music to soundtrack everyday lives.

Here on I Don’t Want To Be Alone, Rydhog takes inspiration from M83 and The Weeknd, creating a sound that blends crisp modern lines with a retro cinematic sound. The use of a broken beat gives the song a sense of movement and life that appeals to me. The vocal melody itself is somewhat sombre and introspective, but that rhythm grants the piece a more hopeful feel. The repeated line of “I don’t wanna be alone again” is somehow transformed from a something that could have been filled with passive longing into something much more actively chosen: I choose not to be alone any more.

Having worked on the song together with producer Johan Sigerud (JRSS) and co-writer Olof Gråhamn, Bjorn describes the inspiration behind the song:

“I Don’t Wanna Be Alone shows an electronic direction I’m currently exploring. The tracks of the song were recorded separately at our different homes. I guess the creation process, as well as the theme of the song, reflect the distant and lonely, but also creative times we currently live in.”

Check out I Don’t Wanna Be Alone below:

Premiere: Sun Hands — SANTO + the PPL

This one’s a trip.

Talking about his experience of being an aspiring young musician, SANTO has a way of delivering stories with a sense of wistful romance. Putting us in the shoes of someone confronted with the kinds of opportunities they just don’t know how to respond to, he starts:

“I was in Washington Square Park with my songwriting partner and best friend, busking, playing Beatles songs when a woman and some dudes in leather jackets and sunglasses walked up. She told us she liked our sound, our voices, and she wanted us to perform at her ‘fashion event.’ We were stoned, 16 years old, and had no idea what she was talking about. She gave us a card and walked away. We realized we were just talking with Blondie and she was talking about NYC Fashion Week.”

Kicked out from Selena Gomez’s degassing room, pursued by Disney and then seeing their music video shared by Wiz Khalifa, our artist subsequently moved to Nashville as a part-time studio assistant and farmhand. Yep, farmhand. Road trips, encounters with Ben Folds and Steven Tyler and transcendental experiences in the Grand Canyon follow. Eventually, our artist settles in Utah. It is here that SANTO fully emerges.

Deliberately eclectic in terms of influences, SANTO + the PPL channel their sound from rock, grunge, and pop but also jazz and hip-hop. What struck me with Sun Hands is its dizzy lethargy, evoking the feeling of being a little too hot and too high to move… Warm days spent too comfortable to actually achieve much beyond existing. Jazzy keys twinkle as the lyrics tell the tale of the tug-of-war between mental distraction and presence:

“Sun Hands is inspired by these walks and adventures around Pittsburgh getting lost with my girlfriend and my dog on these backroads, and side streets. I’m distracted, or I'm caught up in my head, I'm venting to her about something and she grabs my hands, and that warmth from her hands in the sun… the way the light comes through the trees and illuminates the city… it brings me back.”

Sun Hands’ production conveys a beautiful sense of chaos and texture, but also place. I can feel the myriad of thoughts, the cacophony of distractions. But I also sense the warmth of another, and the feel of the sun. Nothing emphasises the importance of being present quite like the realisation that we only get this moment with this person once.

Check out Sun Hands below, or find it on Spotify and Apple Music. For the latest news, check out SANTO + the PPL's official site.

SANTO + the PPL · SUN HANDS