The 5 Best Songs We Heard This Week: Sexwitch, Julia Holter

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It’s the last week of August, so it’s the last week before the music industry returns from sunning itself on the beach and gets down to the serious business of trying to sell records again. In the meantime, though, enjoy this lot!

Sexwitch — “Helelyos”

The band name might be cheesy, but everything else about Sexwitch — a collaboration between Bat For Lashes’ Natasha Khan, producer Dan Carey, and members of excellent British neo-kosmische types TOY — is great… especially this song, which like all the other tracks on the group’s self-titled debut EP is an adaptation of a traditional song, with lyrics reworked by Khan.

Julia Holter — “Sea Calls Me Home”

The instinctive reaction to hearing the material from Julia Holter’s new album Have You In My Wilderness is “Oh, it’s so different!” — but it’s surprisingly difficult to pin down exactly why this feels different to Holter’s previous work. As much as anything, it’s a matter of feeling — this feels more immediate and breezy than the songs off Ekstasis or the wonderful Loud City Song, without losing any of those albums’ enchanting depths.

Le1f — “Koi”

Ubiquitous PC Music producer doesn’t get a “Feat.” credit on this track, but he doesn’t really need one — his production style is instantly recognizable, and his candy-coated sounds mesh here well with Brooklyn rapper and Flavorwire favorite Le1f’s vocals. This new video, directed by Simon Ward, captures the mood nicely, placing Le1f on a beach and surrounding him with larger-than-life (and mildly terrifying) fish.

Nirvana — “E Coli”

The sound of the bottom of the barrel being scraped is never a particularly pleasant one, but nevertheless, there’s something historically fascinating about hearing the previously unreleased Nirvana material that continues to surface, more than two decades after Kurt Cobain’s death. This sounds more like a studio jam session than anything — but wouldn’t you have loved to see Nirvana jam at the studio?

Petite Noir — “MDR”

Grease-referencing, genre-destroying synthpop from South Africa? Yes please.