This edition, we bring you bluesy guitar, unforgettable obsessions, soulful singing, and conversations with ones past selves.
Listen to the full playlist right here:
Pterocat – “Anti”
“Anti,” the newest single from Atlanta based Pterocat, opens with slow, serious percussion. It is soon joined by gorgeous harmonization which arrests the listener. The singing, which is a mix of Portuguese and English, is fast and rhythmic – almost like a prayer, and the words roll away faster than you can catch them. The track sits not only between languages but across genre’s, effortlessly mixing dream pop and jazz to produce an almost psychedelic effect.
Lyrically, the track is a meditation on the tendency to self criticize, and to tend towards perfectionism. No matter what art form you practice, the conversation this track opens with ever-present inner critic is sure to soothe you.
Michellar – “Cant get you out of my mind”
The rhythm of “Can’t Get You Out of My Mind” is one of its most disorienting and deliberate features. The track shifts between frenetic and slow, the bass line surfacing and receding unpredictably, the percussion rising and falling. Lyrically, “Can’t Get You Out of My Mind” sits in the territory of obsessive, recurring thought. The repeated refrain functions the way such thoughts actually do, embedding itself in the listener’s mind through a certain kind of eerie repetition. A guitar solo emerges late in the track, brief and expressive, before the song fades without resolution — a structural choice that mirrors the lyric’s honest admission that no resolution has been reached. The singing is low and haunting, speeding up and slowing down alongside the melody.
Carl Krausnick – “Important Questions”
“Important questions” opens with a gentle melody, strummed slowly on guitar. Not long after, a low, bluesy voice joins in, singing sadly
yet hopefully — “Is it still important to you/ To have an exit strategy?”
Krausnick plays nearly every instrument himself, and the track was written and recorded largely in a single sitting – that spontaneity lives in the vocal delivery, loose and unguarded in all the right places. Tyler Nuffer’s pedal steel is the emotional centrepiece, carrying an ache that opens the song up at precisely the right moments. The arrangement builds slowly, arriving at a distortion-filled finale that lands with a lot of weight. Lyrically, the song is a conversation across time – the speaker examining different versions of himself, asking the questions that only hindsight makes possible.
