Kwamie Liv – Pleasure This Pain feat. Angel Haze

Kwamie Liv has shared a new Angel Haze featuring track, ‘Pleasure This Pain’. Produced by frequent collaborator BABY DUKA, it will appear on Liv’s new project, which comes out later this year. Meanwhile, Angel Haze is gearing up to release a new thirteen track mixtape, ‘Back To The Woods’. It’s penciled in for release on the 14th September.

Danish newcomer Kwamie Liv hails from Copenhagen, and released her debut EP ‘Lost in the Girl’ last year. ‘Pleasure That Pain’ has the same cloud-skimming aesthetic as her breakthrough song ‘5am,’ but it trills and punches in unexpected places, slinking purposefully and pleading “can you love me despite the cracks” interchangeably. Angel Haze, meanwhile continues in blistering form off the back of ‘Babe Ruthless’ and new EP statement of intent ‘Impossible’.

Read the rest of this article at DIY Magazine

Dua Lipa apparently left home at the age of 15 to live with her friends (the London singer-songwriter is 19 now), and we can’t help but imagine that her life for the next few years was exactly like her debut video. “New Love” is like a rapid-fire montage of a 19-year-old’s camera roll, leaping from night bus angst to bubble-blowing in restaurants to bike rides and dancing in grocery stores. But while it’s hypnotic, the real draw is the smoky voice—that fans have come to love from her playful YouTube covers—anchoring it all.

The song, produced by Lana Del Rey and FKA Twigs collaborator Emile Hayne and Andrew Wyatt, clatters and sparkles like every good new love anthem should, but allows the space for Lipa’s vocal to hit where it hurts when she insists now I find it harder and harder to breathe. “‘New Love’ might sound like a classic tale of unrequited love,” Dua Lipa told The FADER over email. “A fool that continues to go down the path of heartbreak, in the knowledge that they are fighting a losing game. But at the time I was writing this song it was about finding my place in an industry that often seems to neither want nor need you. This is a song about facing the fear of losing the only thing that matters to you.”

Read the rest of this article at Fadar

ILoveMakonnen – Leave It There ( Produced By Sonny Digital )

Sonny Digital is partially responsible for some ofiLoveMakonnen‘s biggest hits, including “Tuesday” and “I Don’t Sell Molly No More,” so it’s exciting to the two working together once again. Their latest effort is a little more subdued than the previously mentioned club records. “Leave It There” is a ballad at heart, but Sonny provides some driving sub-bass that keeps the momentum up throughout.It’s not without it’s dynamics, however, as swirling synths come in-and-out, and drum programming goes from busy to tastefully restrained. The two seem to have a songwriting chemistry on a similar level to Mike WiLL and Future. Stick around ’til the end to hear Makonnen take the hook up a full octave and break through the established tension.

Read the rest of this article at HNHH

London musicmaker Georgia has unveiled the artwork for her debut eponymous album. It’s been designed by MMParis with a portrait taken by photographer Jamie Hawkesworth.

Simultaneously she’s also dropped new single-and-video combination, ‘Nothing Solutions’, in which she runs through vividly coloured, dense forest to the sounds of her own, glisteningly spiky and densely bristling breed of nocturnal electro-pop.

Read the rest of the article at the 405

Amateur Best is gearing up to release his second album ‘The Gleaners’ with a new track titled They Know.

Joe Flory’s new release is out October 2nd through Brille Records, serving as the follow-up to his 2013 debut album ‘No Thrills’.

The new track arrives after the bouncy and vibrant lead single Marzipan, with Joe Flory following suit with a glistening synth-pop number. Dictated by Flory’s falsetto-leaning vocals and moonlight keys, They Know transforms with a bustling tempo, adding a shuffling rhythm to the track’s evolution. Concluding with a trumpet outro, the brief and bright segment serves as the perfect ending to Flory’s ear for an energetic pop and dance crossover.

Read the rest of this article at Dummy

The Rise of the Punk Rock B-boy

I grew up on New York’s Lower East Side, so I can blame most of my early life on my immediate surroundings. I was raised in the 1970s, and it was a lawless place for most of that decade. My mom was a single mother and a school teacher, a bohemian product of 1950s NYC. She was extremely liberal and open-minded, a forward-thinking political activist and community organizer who valued music, art, culture. She was also a bit of a hippie.

I mention all of this as a preface to my story — the story of punk rock’s mutation into New York hardcore, and of the cultural exchange that transpired between punk and hip-hop for a very brief, poetic moment. It was one of the best examples of diametrically opposed counter cultures exchanging energies I ever witnessed. It was short, it was sweet, and it was beautiful.

I was too young to catch the first wave of N.Y.C. punk rock, but I saw the remnants walking the streets of my neighborhood — people like Joey Ramone and Cheetah Chrome. I remember my mom commenting on how cool these weird punk people looked. I thought they just looked weird and wondered how many times they got jacked by my Puerto Rock comrades in the hood.

Read the rest of the story at Cuepoint

The New Kings of Art Rock Are 2 Teenagers From Scotland

Man of Moon are a Scottish guitar/drum duo still in their teens, and they have just released the best debut single by a British band since “Ceremony” by New Order. “The Road” is revelatory, valedictory and soaring, an infinite surprise that morphs motorik, space rock, and high-end college-pop melancholia, all recorded with a discipline and presence usually absent from young guitar-based bands. From the evidence available, Man of Moon may not just be the band of the year, but possibly the band of the decade. That’s the lede. Here’s a little context: In rock and roll, reinventing the wheel is a very tricky thing. Plenty of artists excel, amaze and influence, but very, very few draw a line in the sand that says, “Here is something done in a way previously unimagined. Everything will be different now.” I’ll single out three groups who did this, who took the magnificently greasy post-Beatles chariot and made a true 160-degree turn into the unknown: the Ramones, the Velvet Underground, and Neu!.

Read the rest of the story at Observer

How the Weeknd Went From Broke in Canada to Sharing Stage With Taylor Swift

This is the summer of the Weeknd. Look around, the signs are everywhere: In July, the 25-year-old Canadian singer performed his absurdly catchy hit “Can’t Feel My Face” for 83,000 screaming Taylor Swift fans after she brought him out as a surprise guest at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. In August — by which time “Can’t Feel My Face” had shot to Number One on the charts — Stevie Wonder sang a few bars of the song at a concert in New York’s Central Park. Earlier this year, Katy Perry said his steamy single “Often” is her favorite song to have sex to. “I don’t know if I’m on top of the world,” says the Weeknd. “But I’m on top of my game, for sure.”

It’s past midnight in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach neighborhood, and he’s hiding in his trailer on a break from an all-night video shoot. Outside, curious passersby — some Russian-accented locals, some teenage superfans — crane their necks for a glimpse of him. “It’s hard to walk down the street now,” he says, fiddling with five or six pairs of sunglasses on the table in front of him. “But I worked for that.”

Read the rest of the story at Rollingstone