It’s Friday, which means we are contemplating the weekend ahead and also, as ever, rounding up the best songs we’ve heard this week. This week we continued our burgeoning bromance with Majical Cloudz, reveled in the Suicide-y sounds of the new Dirty Beaches, started crossing fingers that the latest Tricky new dawn won’t prove to be a false one, luxuriated in beautiful ambient music from Mark McGuire and Eluvium, done questionable drugs with Pet Shop Boys… and plenty more! You can do all these things, too, for absolutely no money by clicking through, so we suggest you get to it ASAP.
Majical Cloudz — “Bugs Don’t Buzz” The second single from our favorite album of the month, and one that exemplifies pretty much everything we love about Majical Cloudz. Devon Welsh has some interesting things to say about the song on Tumblr, too.
Dirty Beaches — “Casino Lisboa” Meanwhile, if this is anything to go by, the new Dirty Beaches record is definitely gonna be worth hearing. This track is a lot more muscular than the atmospheric guitar music Alex Zhang Hungtai has made in the past — it sounds more like Suicide than anything, built around an ominous, cyclical bass loop and lots of distorted shouting.
Tricky — “Tribal Drums” As our recent May album roundup pointed out, the world has been fooled too many times by the prospect of a Tricky renaissance to get too excited about this, but still, everything we’ve heard so far of False Idols sounds pretty great. Including this.
Mark McGuire — “In Search of the Miraculous” Emeralds are dead and buried, but happily, Mark McGuire hasn’t wasted any time releasing new music — this is taken from his upcoming solo album Along the Way, and it’s a gorgeous wash of instrumental color and light. If the rest of the album is anywhere near this good, we can’t wait to hear it.
Eluvium feat. Ira Kaplan — “Happiness” In a similar vein, this closing track from Eluvium’s standout new album Nightmare Ending sounds like exactly that — the first gentle inklings of the sun coming up after a long, sleepless night. It comes with a delicate vocal from Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan
Clams Casino feat. Doom — “Bookfiends” A characteristically dense, atmospheric beat, accompanied by a quietly reflective set of verses from the man formerly known as MF DOOM. Round of applause.
Animal Collective — “New Town Burnout” (Shabazz Palaces remix) Centipede Hz was generally underwhelming, but its attendant remix EP promises to be rather more interesting — if this is anything to judge by, anyway. Avant-garde Seattle hip hop types (and Flavorwire faves) Shabazz Palaces transform “New Town Burnout” into a dark, brooding thing, also furnishing it with a couple of their own verses for good measure.
Shams — “She Wanted to Watch” Not Not Fun offshoot 100% Silk seems to have an endless supply of warm, immersive neo-house music. This track from producer and anti-“Christian house music” activist Shams is the first single from his upcoming EP Piano Cloud, which is out on 5/21.
Kim Deal — “Hot Shot” Kim Deal has released a new track from her ongoing singles series, and it’s pretty great in a Mountain Battles-y, lo-fi kind of way. Stereogum are opining that the “hot shot” of the title is a Drano-laced heroin hit (cf. the grisly fate of Bobby C in Infinite Jest); they may well be right, but this song is still catchy as hell.
Pet Shop Boys — “Electric” Well, who’d have thought it? This is actually all kinds of awesome in a filthily latter-day disco kind of way. Welcome back!