Listen: Play Fair — Dolly Ave

Dolly Ave’s new single Play Fair moves with a certain tenderness. It quivers with the desire to gently disengage from someone whose feelings you care about, a tenderness that exists despite the fact another person no longer represents your future. The vocal itself surfaces a series of questions and requests of an ex-lover, the song’s title seemingly an instruction Dolly herself, as much as the song’s subject.

Originally written in Chicago, Play Fair ended up sitting untouched and unfinished for a year. Initially unable to finish the song, it was only in California with producer Ciayo’s decision to incorporate hip hop elements that it evolved into what we hear now. The slow, brooding percussion and bass give the song a cautious atmosphere that struck me as suiting the song’s subject.

Dolly creates music that focuses on personal subject matters whilst leveraging a sound that blends pop, R&B, soul and electronic. Play Fair follows on from her debut single Birds and a collaboration with rapper Charlie Curtis-Beard that trended on TikTok this year. She is currently preparing to release her debut EP, Sleep.

Listen: You — Tal Simon

You arrives in a flurry of piano keys, vocal samples and skipping rhythms, channeling the rave-like beach-combing sounds of Jamie xx, Caribou and DJ Koze. The first 45 seconds evoke the rapidly accelerating feel of a take-off, soon to be complimented by the weightlessness of flight. Singer/actress Sojourner Brown’s vocals flit in between synths and beats, with the whole thing feeling less like a singular structure than a collection of objects floating in space at the same time.

Channeling the sounds Tal grew up listening to whilst visiting family in London, on You he gives us an all too brief experience of what it feels like to just exist within the music… Literally, inside it. There is a flow-state like purity to what the 21-year-old Brooklyn producer has achieved here. Like a magpie, he takes what he needs from various forms of dance music — UK Garage, dubstep, house, dream pop — and puts us inside the resulting collage, free to wonder at all those sounds.

The inspiration for Simon’s music has come from the same loneliness and boredom many of us have experienced through quarantine. Rather than just sit with it, Tal spent his time revisiting disposable photos he had taken over the past five years and channeled that inspiration into something nostalgic but hopeful. Some of those disposable images have now been given new life as the photography artwork for his debut EP,Reworks. The release sees the producer take some of his favourite b-side releases, remixing and reworking them to creating something new, looking back to help us contextualise the future, in much the same way as those photos.

Check out You below, and listen to the full Reworks EP on Soundcloud here.

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:

https://instagram.com/wearedancelessons dancetodancelessons@gmail.com Written by Dance Lessons Produced by Ann Mixed by Andrew Maurey

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: