Listening Post #28

1. Charli XCX – Boys

It 2 minutes 42 seconds long, and the music video includes appearances from Ezra Koenig, Mark Ronson, Joe Jonas, Stormzy, Brendon Urie, Kaytranada, Will.i.am, Khalid, MNEK, Jack Antonoff, Diplo, Shaun Ross, Mac DeMarco, Chromeo, Vance Joy, Oliver Sykes, Ty Dolla $ign, Frank Carter, Flume, Tom Daley, Dan Smith, Rostam Batmanglij, Takahiro Moriuchi, G-Eazy, Charlie Puth, Riz Ahmed, Sage the Gemini, and many more. Too many men indeed. It’s deceptively brilliant pop music that might come across as overly simplistic at first, but is a nice reminder that Charli XCX is, quite frankly, a genius.

2. Gallant & Andra Day – Cruisin’

The latest instalment in Gallant’s In The Room series sees him collaborating with Andra Day on an upbeat and successfully ambitious D’Angelo cover. It takes a lot of balls to cover D’Angelo, but Gallant is phenomenal. What I really love about this cover is how fun it is – I have come to associate Gallant with melancholy soul, heavy and crafted. Cruisin’ has the feel good factor turned right the way up, and makes me even more excited to see what Gallant will do next.

3. Purity Ring – Asido

If you fed robots Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and a Twin Peaks boxset and asked them to make music, it would probably sound something like Purity Ring. The Canadian duo have released two albums of kind of creepy but weirdly sexy electronic fairy story music, and to celebrate five years since the release of their debut Shrines, they have given us Asido. It is apparently a standalone offering and will not feature on albums released in the future, but is characteristically haunting.

4. SG Lewis feat. Col3trane – Smart Aleck Kill

The new SG Lewis song swerves away from his signature style and towards deliciously well produced hype music. There’s less soul and swing – replaced instead with cut glass electronic beats and motifs. Don’t worry, it’s an exciting shift that Col3trane helps to delivers. It follows Lewis’s collaboration with the highly tipped Dave, and follows 2017’s trend towards production value and quality over vocals alone.

5. BadBadNotGood feat. Charlotte Day Wilson – In Your Eyes (Nosaj Thing Remix)

When I reviewed BadBadNotGood’s album IV last July, In Yours Eyes was one of my top picks. Unbeknownst to me it would turn out in the following year that I would return to IV often. The Nosaj Thing remix of In Your Eyes takes the very best elements of the original song (the whipping-cream-like vocals, and the song’s structure, and strips them back so purely that I honestly can’t decide which version I prefer.