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No time for a fancy intro here. We’ve got new music to hear! <\/p>\n
Humbird, \u201cFebruary\u201d<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n The shortest, bleakest month of the year is behind us now, but Siri Undlin\u2019s placid, housebound perspective still resonates. Catching snowflakes on your tongue, scouring your fridge for food, hoping your man is OK on the road\u2014these are winter universals. And there\u2019ll be a February next year too, you know.\u00a0<\/p>\n Lazerbeak, \u201cSnowed In\u201d<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Uh oh, this is really threatening to become a late-winter playlist, isn\u2019t it? The versatile Doomtree producer has completed his quartet of seasonal EPs with For Storms<\/em>, and the lead track is evocative as its title, with a sweet, wordless chorale its most distinctive feature. As always with Lazerbeak\u2019s instrumental, there\u2019s too much going on to call it ambient, and I mean that as a compliment.<\/p>\n Miloe, \u201cHilove26\u201d<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n \u201cI made this two days ago,\u201d Bobby Kabeya wrote when he posted this track on Bandcamp last Friday, and you\u2019ve gotta love the internet for that. I can hear why he was eager to get it out there: This is dense, pretty stuff, with vocals and acoustic guitar chopped into serviceable bits over a beat I’ll generalize just a bit to call “trap soukous.” And it builds up to some genuinely grand synths.<\/p>\n Runo Plum, \u201cButterflies\u201d<\/strong><\/a> <\/p>\n Last year\u2019s Picked to Click silver medalist<\/a> offers a hushed and melodic track from her EP Bloom Again<\/em>, due in May. \u201cSulking, milking, shivering\/I think part of me loves the pain\u201d is more self-psychologizing insight than you get from a lot of sad girls. A (Mazzy) star is born.<\/p>\n D\u2019Allen White feat. Medium Zach, \u201cChange for the Better\u201d<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n South Minneapolis MC teams up with superbusy south Minneapolis superproducer, who provides an expansive feel, with a sprinkling keyboard cut and a climatic cymbal pattern. No kid, White still sounds hungry\u2014for change in particular. Like he says, \u201cI don\u2019t need nothing else.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Afroman, “Randy Walters Is a Son of a Bitch”<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n ICYMI, Joseph Foreman, better known as Afroman, won a defamation suit last week brought by several Adams County, Ohio, cops who were sad that he’d mocked them in song.\u00a0They deserved it (and by “it” I mean the mockery and the resulting sadness). In 2022, those same cops trashed Foreman’s home as part of a kidnapping and drug investigation and found zilch. Foreman fought back against this home invasion with satirical videos using security-camera footage and some straight-up bangers.<\/p>\n I appreciate the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”-jacking “Batteram Hymn of the Police Whistle Blower” (“My proof’s on the in-ter-net”). But this is the one. With its haywire voice box and shoulder-shifting bass, the track is like Zapp gone wild. And lyrically\u2014well, the next best thing to ending qualified immunity is being able to write a song about how you fucked a cop’s wife. Also, no shade to any Randys (Randies?) out there, but \u201cRandy Walters\u201d is a cop name if I ever heard one.<\/p>\n The Femcels, \u201cPlease Don\u2019t Stab Yourself (Like Elliott Smith)\u201d<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n We live in strange times, where two silly British girls who claim they don\u2019t get laid and make Wet Leg sound like FKA Twigs joined forces to create\u2026 a Bran Van 3000 record? Of the three parenthetically titled songs on their loopy debut, I Have to Get Hotter<\/em>, <\/em>I rank this just ahead of \u201cYou\u2019re Gay And You\u2019re In Love With Me (Please Let Me Touch Your Boobs)\u201d over \u201cNo One Will Fuck Me When I Wear Two Different Shoes (One Jordan, One Gucci Flip Flop).\u201d Rowan Miles and Gabriella Turton start by taking a date to the fish shop and telling him it\u2019s an aquarium and end by singing the praises of JavaScript. On a scale from one to 100 I rate this a solid 89 gecs. Bonus fun: When you search for this song on YouTube it offers you the suicide hotline number.\u00a0<\/p>\n Horse Lords, \u201cBrain of the Firm\u201d<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n The jittery Baltimore experimentalists are back, and they\u2019re no longer purely instrumental. Nina Guo and Evelyn Saylor now contribute abstract vocal sounds to the mix. Adding a bass clarinetist and a trombonist on top of that is the avant-garde equivalent of tossing a juggler a couple extra chainsaws. Is this a rhythm shift midway? Like you even have to ask. There\u2019s a new album, Demand to Be Taken To Heaven Alive!<\/em>, due in June, and they\u2019re coming to the Cedar in July.<\/a><\/p>\n Mitski, \u201cWhere\u2019s My Phone?\u201d<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Ms. Miyawaki really is shaping up to be the Emily Dickinson of indie on her latest, Nothing’s Going to Happen to Me<\/em>, though as always we have to take her unreliably narrative word for it that under her pretty, brilliant, well-heeled exterior is a cruel, morbid, unruly monster. \u201cI just want my mind to be a clear glass\/Clear glass with nothing in my head,\u201d she sings, but she’ll settle for BLEEPing a hole into tomorrow all night long, as she boasts with comically censored carnality.<\/p>\nNon-Local Picks<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Full playlist here<\/em><\/a><\/h5>\n