Intoxicating musical wisdom and charm meanders from pure euphoric vibrancy to intimate and honest contemplation. Tennessee songwriter and musician Ben Stephens delivers a sensational debut album this year, with the unrivalled complexity, skill and originality of a fiercely vulnerable Hello World, This Is The Inside Of My Mind.
Alt Pop
Heavily juxtaposed layers and moments let emotional integrity guide freely and with a certain intoxicating fire. Candi Carpenter fuses genres as per the changing stages of these storytelling songs, with the boldly evocative new EP Reincarnation.
Letting go of things that no longer serve you – from relationships to ambition, work, self-identity. Creative alt-pop songwriter Lily Franc delivers on both depth and design, with the subtle charm, genre diversity and lyrical brilliance of The Fitting Room.
Getting back to the roots of great music, the kind that we listen to in full – a song that moves us, in the quiet of solitude, in the depths of our own minds; not the sort that needs us to simply repost a short clip and hope for virality.
An ever-creative Oktavvia delivers one of her most distinct dark power-pop arrangements yet this season, with the darkness, the sweeping synths, the high-octane EDM backdrop, and the anthemic, empowering chorus, of I Decide.
Halen Lock is a published poet, songwriter, producer and artist, whose repertoire of songs is instantly alluring for its genre-free soundscapes and the evocative, honest and interesting melodic stories that accompany them.
Ultimately blending hip hop and RnB within a sweeping arrangement of synths, keys and modest rhythms, F.W.M is beautifully passionate, and close to euphoric as it builds, but there’s never a heavy drop – the song redirects us every time, towards something more mysterious, and again beautifully in tune with the excitement and uncertainty of the topic.
Dolce Wang quite cleverly intertwines melancholy and optimism throughout this album, a subtle sadness countered by a subtle level of excitement from one song to the next. This represents both the limitless and uncertain qualities of traveling really well, in my view.
The single emerges complete with a brand new accompanying video, and in short, the release is refreshingly indie-authentic; particularly amidst the current waves of automatically generated music elsewhere. Real music from real musicians, and great songwriting that draws you right in.
It’s a song about grief, in essence, and how it reshapes our relationships with those we have lost. The arrangement is as passionate as the lyrics, sometimes gentle and calming, at other times more urgent and uncertain.
Essentially carving out a lane that’s purely his own, Sean Waterman presents an art-noir take on modern pop and rock with this song, stylistically exercising the freedom and nuance of acts like Prince, building upon a clear sense of emotional depth, and letting that guide both the lyrical journey and the delivery of the song.
The uniquely angelic, falsetto and soulful vocals of Eli Purks return this summer with an expressive synth-pop and RnB crossover track, in the form of the evocative Feels Like Forever.