Hello world,
Here’s this week’s FP Picks update – we have banging new tunes for you fm Lambrini Girls, Skunk Anansie, Cloth & lots more. If you like what you hear please follow and share this playlist, it helps us keep doing our thing by getting the algorithms on our side. Also please support the artists featured in any way you can!
Until next week & Happy Easter!
Helen (Futureproof) x
Pulp – Spike Island
The anthemic lead single from Pulp’s first album in 24 years casts a wary eye over their peak 90s fame – but also suggests that performing is irresistible. Its main inspiration is not the band’s native Sheffield or Cocker’s meandering life through London, Paris or the Peak District, but a gig that has a special place in music history – The Stone Roses‘ almost legendary show at Spike Island. References to 1970s pop-culture arcana are, of course, very Pulp – and so are a lot of other things about Spike Island: the disco-influenced rhythm (decorated with the distinctive sound of syndrums), the brief spoken-word section, and the sense that complicated emotions lurk behind its anthemic chorus.
Lambrini Girls – No Homo
Brighton duo Lambrini Girls have dropped their defiant punk anthem No Homo, taken from their debut album Who Let The Dogs Out. They state: “We grow up learning that queerness is wrong, something to be hidden, denied, erased. This song is an ode to the struggles of internalized homophobia, the quiet shame, the unspoken guilt, the relentless push and pull between desire and self-rejection. It’s about the ways we police ourselves in a world that demands conformity. Supported by a radical insight on what really happens behind our closed bathroom doors, we want to flip the script on queer narratives. Joy over repression, pride over shame. Being Queer is fucking fun. Kiss your mates. God is Gay. No homo.” Highly infectious and another absolute banger!
Cloth – Pink Silence
Glasgow-based twin duo Cloth have announced their forthcoming album Pink Silence and we have the title track. “This idea of pink silence describes the early morning or later in the evening, when you get this sort of strange ethereal light in the sky. It can mean one of two things; something which feels blissfully serene or something charged with a real sense of foreboding. We loved the idea that something so natural, beautiful and all-pervasive could have such an intense duality to it,” the duo explains. The pair’s feather-light approach and intrinsic quiet drama remain fundamentals of the Cloth sound on Pink Silence. A daring rhythmic streak combined with the patience and restraint to let the space in their music do the talking persists and their exemplary guitar interplay is adorned with synth flourishes, undulating drone textures, and strings.
Man/Woman/Chainsaw – Adam & Steve
London-based six-piece Man/Woman/Chainsaw, described by Rolling Stone at SXSW as “a young band in the process of inventing something ecstatically new,” have shared new single Adam & Steve which marks a departure towards a more immediate and melodic sound for the band, featuring shared vocal duties between dual vocalists Billy Ward and Vera Leppänen. Lyrically, the track explores themes of longing and potential loss, contrasting with the band’s previously more raucous output. Of the track, the band’s Billy Ward states: “We wrote Adam & Steve last year, and it’s our own bittersweet take on the heart-on-sleeve love song. It comes from a place of wanting to find a little fairy tale escapism in modern romance.” Great songwriting on this highly infectious banger – love it!
Joy Crookes – I Know You’d Kill
Soul artist Joy Crookes has shared a sensual new single and states: “I Know You’d Kill is a song I wrote for my manager, Charlie, because I tripped balls at Glastonbury and believed someone in our team was bad news. I panicked so much I almost cried. In an effort to reassure me, she turns to me and goes “you know Nay (a friend of Joy’s) and I would kill for you”. My lack of sobriety, her presence and my trust in her made her look so literally shiny. I couldn’t even look at her because she was glittering.” Soulful but with a hint of darkness, the song neatly frames Joy Crookes’ maturity, and the multi-faceted nature of her musicality. We hear Joy’s back at Glastonbury this year – can’t wait to check out the show.
Sorry – Jetplane
South London’s Sorry have dropped their unapologetic new single Jetplane. The track features those familiar, distinctive vocals from Sorry’s frontperson Asha Lorenz, alongside a heavy bassline and vocal sample from Hot Freaks by Guided By Voices, adding some extra tension into the mix. The band told NME: “We have some ideas about the future, and me and Louis have been recording lots of other shit, both together and separately. I think we’re going to put some more stuff out quite quickly, but we’re also looking to make some more stripped-back [music], going back to how we worked before, producing it ourselves and getting a great mixer in or something.”
Matt Berninger – Bonnet Of Pins
The National‘s Matt Berninger has shared his solo single Bonnet Of Pins, taken from the upcoming LP Get Sunk. A press release says Get Sunk is “not necessarily an autobiographical album, the narrator is processing how he became himself. Berninger is an expert in what it feels like to lose all bravery, and Get Sunk points to an undulating reflection in the water. It’s about realizing that you are not yourself without a thousand others: parents, friends, siblings, spouses and exes, college roommates, childhood best friends, cousins, kids, and even strangers.” The track utilizes humor and bittersweet tones to help express how grief can still bring up joyous feelings. Berninger paints a picture of a woman reappearing in his life with visceral imagery in lyrics like “she sidewinders through the room to me” and “she’s still wearing her father’s feather jacket.”
Skunk Anansie – Lost and Found
Skunk Anansie have released their powerful new single Lost and Found, from forthcoming album The Painful Truth, along with a video that was written and directed by Skin: “We wanted to evoke the loneliness and desperation that can occur in a split second by one tiny mistake. Any of us at any time can lose the security built up over a lifetime whether it be via an accident, or a sudden twist of fate.” About the album as a whole, Skin asserted: “I don’t care that we were big in the ’90s. Creatively it’s irrelevant because in my rock bible the first commandment states, ‘If thy rest on them laurels thy shall wither up and die artistically, musically, mentally. And then financially.” What a hypnotic track – just stunning.
Lana Del Rey – Henry, come on
Lana Del Rey has shared her ethereal, country-tinged new single Henry, come on, taken from the upcoming album The Right Person Will Stay. The titular “Henry” is a lonesome cowboy who hangs his hat up on the wall, wears “soft leather, blue jeans,” and whose time has finally come to “go on and giddy up.” Lana Del Rey suggested to NME that the lyrics on the LP might be lighter than her more recent output. “I’ve maybe less to say in terms of any self-revealing things like on Tunnel or Blue Bannisters or Chemtrails Over The Country Club, and just more melodic,” she said. “Maybe more American Songbook style?” Another beautiful track from Lana Del Rey.
Patrick Wolf, Zola Jesus – Limbo
Patrick Wolf and Zola Jesus have teamed up on new single Limbo. It’s a clanging, operatic piano rager, and it sounds a bit like something that Elton John and Kate Bush might make together if they’d come up in the ’00s. Wolf states: “I first started imagining a limbo, or purgatory, to set a song in after seeing a painting “The Scapegoat” by William Holman Hunt in the Manchester Art Gallery. Years later on bleak lockdown weekly food drives to Bromley, and the arguments and tensions in a relationship that brewed in the claustrophobia of the car made me want to begin writing a duet about the realism of a couple cutting off each other’s sentences and debating whether to persist with or escape each other … It was only her voice I imagined to duet with me, and now I can’t imagine anyone else riding shotgun beside me on this our summer gothic road trip of a song.”
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