Listen: Waiting For Dawn by The Seshen

The Seshen are a Bay Area sextet, focused on creating sounds that blend R&B and indie. The sound here reminds me of the electronic stylings of husband-and-wife duo Sylvan Esso, both in tone and style.

Which is to say, The Seshen are crafting purposeful, distinctive pop music. Vocalist Lalin St. Juste provides an emotive focal point for the instrumentation that surrounds her, here in Waiting For Dawn. Layers of electronic melody combine with low slung bass tones and snappy drums to create a sound that feels stark and clean, whilst benefitting from a slight fuzziness at the edges.

Taken from their forthcoming album, Nowhere, Waiting For Dawn is an exploration of the “restlessness and tumultuous thoughts one experiences while grappling with grief and the aftermath of a significant life transition”. During times of shock and insomnia, sometimes the dawn of a new day is the only salve available. It’s a beautiful, distinctive song and I can’t wait to hear the rest of the record.

Listen: Elevator by Crewless

When asks what music I like, one of my go-to answers has long been “dance music made by rock bands, and rock music made by dance acts”. There is something in that overlap that appeals to me, and perhaps that predisposes me to like Crewless, who claim a very-loose musical backbone of “house music with punk guitars”.

As a group, it appears that Crewless enjoy toying with concepts. They have three vocalists, lending them a hard-to-pin down quality — a diverse palette, a collective energy, and a dynamic interplay. But they also like to create two versions of their songs. It may be that one of these will be more electronic, and dance floor orientated, whilst the other is more laid back.

And that technique is employed here, on Elevator. The “Going Up” version deals in angular guitars, crunchy distortion and loose-but-punchy percussion, a punk-funk aesthetic with a melt-in-the-middle in the chorus. In contrast, the “Going Down” version has a crisper, electronic feel to it, electronic drums providing a cool, polished aesthetic, against which sub-bass and glass-like vocals slide past. Both are special, distinctive, and atmospheric in their own way.

Check both versions of Elevator our, below:

Watch: What Are The Chances by Man Alive

Man Alive is the solo project of Mark Prendergast, of Dublin outfit Kodaline, and his new single is the kind of song that feels instantly recognisable. The opening guitar refrain invokes familiar melodies as Prendergast lays down a wistful, heartbroken vocal.

Rather than shelter in timidity, however, What Are The Chances is full-throated, the chorus arriving in a golden carriage built of piano chords and melodies that ratchet the emotional drama of those gentle guitars. The result is undeniably cinematic, and it would risk being derivative if it wasn’t for two things.

Firstly, through Prendergast’s lyricism. The artist weaves together universally emotive themes, from small details, like visiting the old haunts of a loved one, to the big thematic hook of wanting to start a relationship again, with his promise of being better.

Yet Prendergast contrasts these, almost like an unreliable narrator — the odd disconcerting line hanging over his earnest vocals like a trailing question mark. Chief among them is the admission that, “I know I burned your neighbourhood to the ground”, but there are other details — walking in the rain, smoke in his room, and ultimately the reflection that “I’d probably end up doing the same”. It’s the kind of love song that straddles epic romance, and something quite a bit darker.

The second reason What Are The Chances transcends its form, however, is just how deftly it is constructed. Unwilling to rest on its laurels, the song further ratchets the chorus on its second iteration. In addition to the piano, it introduces dramatic reverb-heavy percussion before giving way to a bridge that has Prendergast’s vocal ad-libbing its way into the sunset.

Describing the song for BlackPlastic.co.uk, Prendergast shares how it is very much rooted in personal experience:

“What Are The Chances is a song about being at fault for a break up happening, for being on the other side of it. There’s no way around it, I let someone down and it’s about that. In the past I’ve written more from the other perspective because that’s where I was at.”

I was a little blown away by What Are The Chances, a song that feels so familiar and yet so memorable all at once.

Listen: PseudoFriends by Gold Spectacles

Gold Spectacles are a London-based outfit with a polished-yet-DIY aesthetic who draw inspiration from artists as broad as Paul Simon, Lykke Li and Phoenix.

Having released their eponymous debut LP in 2019, Gold Spectacles have had a busy start to 2023, producing music with Mysie, SOFY, Johnny Stimson, and Viddy, and also releasing their EP, More Heart Than Sense (Pt. 1). PseudoFriends is the first song from follow-up EP, More Heart Than Sense (Pt. 2), and the source of both EPs’ titles.

PseudoFriends is a dive into the kind of connections that portray themselves as more meaningful than they are — superficial connections that can be mistaken for real friendship.

The song is built around a central bassline that vibrates with a kind of life, almost a growl, loose yet heavy feeling. Indeed, the band note this is where the song started:

“We’ve been sitting on this one for a little while. The bassline came first. We spent a few hours jamming to it before we had solidified the lyric. The rest then followed pretty quickly. We had just got off the phone to an old friend who had been really let down by her mates, and we wanted to write about this and the idea of not ever knowing who to put your trust in. Being burnt by who you think are dependable protagonists in your life is never fun. Don’t worry, they’re doing a lot better now!”

The magic in PseudoFriends, however, is in the details Gold Spectacles have created around it. Whilst there is an easy, freeform aesthetic here, it feels like every detail has been sweated over… the percussion, the interplay between the vocals, little guitar licks, and the touches of instrumentation all feel meticulously planned. It is this subtle attention to detail that shines, with the song having a lived-in feel to it, whilst benefitting from a highly produced, detailed aesthetic. Check it out below.

Listen: In The Way Or Disappear by DD Walker

I think that we all have a fondness for the music from a certain period in our lives. For me, the period where I felt most connected to and inspired by contemporary music was in the period of 2003 through to about 2010. Much of the music I felt attached to in that period informs the music I write about today.

Electroclash; the influence of post-punk, DFA, and LCD Soundsystem; Daft Punk’s second era; Cut Copy’s reimagining of Fleetwood Mac on In Ghost Colours; Phoenix’s technicolored Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix; Soulwax’s grungy take on dance music… All of these sounds tickle my pleasure senses when I hear echoes of them today, even as I recognise that they, themselves, were echoes of their own.

There is an artist from that same period, however, that I would classify as having produced the album I love the most that you (yes you) are least likely to have heard of. And that, dear reader, is the chaotically wonderful How About That?, by the relatively unknown Icelandic musician Gisli. The sound employed on that under-appreciated album is undoubtedly heavily indebted to Beck, with a dash of anti-folk, and yet Gisli took his sound in a more overtly accessible direction. His reward for that was, I sense, obscurity.

Still, How About That?, and songs like The Day It All Went Wrong and Mind Games, soundtracked a period of my life… Early days with my (now) wife, hanging with one of my best friends from school, in the early days that followed university, the course of life uncertain.

And so when I heard the gently strummed guitars and overdubbed vocals of DD Walker’s In The Way Or Disappear, I heard the echos of that period of my life. Walker embodies a similar aesthetic – grungy vulnerability meets a loose sense of creative experimentalism. The opening two-minutes plays gently, heartbroken as Walker unpacks a break-up, before a wall of guitars blows away the emotional cobwebs. It’s precisely the sort of thing Gisli would make, and I love it.

Describing the song, DD Walker talks about the urgent pace with which In The Way Or Disappear was written, which is abundantly clear in just how vital it sounds… This is the kind of song that violently comes out of someone, all at once:

“I wrote this in 15 minutes at 2 in the morning after a months-long low after this dramatic break-up. I was crashing in the room I made music in when I was growing up and just put together a little make-shift recording setup for 2 weeks back there. The nostalgia was palpable in that space and with this wish to be back with this person and how we were before it was a negative thing… I demoed a record’s worth of material in a couple (of) weeks, and this was the most direct and quick to finish.”

NYC-based producer DD Walker is currently working on the release of his forthcoming EP, Night At The Arcade. The EP was co-produced and mixed by Andrew Maury, who has previously worked with Post Malone, Shawn Mendes, and Ra Ra Riot. Check out In The Way Or Disappear below.