YELLE – Romeo
With their North American tour set to kick off this month, French dance-pop duo Yelle is ready to make a huge return to the live circuit. Harkening back to the days of their smash hit album Safari Disco Club, Yelle is returning to their roots with their latest offering “Romeo.”
The track perfectly embodies the quirky and scintillating nature of Yelle’s unique and unmistakable style, and their global appeal is plainly evident. The duo use thick synths and sultry beats to create a dance-pop anthem perfectly suited for high-energy club settings.
The video accompanying “Romeo” is a nostalgic yet stylish visual expression for this bouncy synth-pop banger. The band’s frontwoman and namesake Yelle has amassed a massive following thanks to her magnetic personality and voice.. Yelle’s Club Party Tour kicks off next week and includes three sold-out Shows at Brooklyn’s Rough Trade, with the duo set to drop new album next year.
Read the rest of this article at Dancing Astronaut
Girlhood – Bad Decisions
Girlhood are firmly on the path to greatness. Meeting at the end of 2015, Christian Pinchbeck and Tessa Cavanna linked up after their separate musical projects came to an end. Bonding over the music they listened to growing up, Pinchbeck and Cavanna decided to join forces and Girlhood was born.
Bursting onto the scene last year with “My Boy”, the pair take influences from late 80s hip-hop, blending nostalgic rhythms with modern twists and topping it all off with Cavanna’s breathtaking vocals.
Now back with their latest banger, “Bad Decisions” is a hypnotising track showing off Cavanna’s stunningly soulful voice over a piano-lead backing. Super chilled and effortlessly charming, it’s a stellar addition to their already impressive discography. Talking on the track, the band say: “Bad decisions are often made with the best intentions, glasses smash and plans get broke. You can stick things back together or you can walk away from the pieces.”
Read the rest of this article at Wonderland
Tree House – Nonsense
Tree House is the current iteration of Will Fortna’s ongoing imaginative queries.
An American-born but London-based talent, his eclectic pop naiveties seem to sit somewhere between Arthur Russell and Hot Chip.
New EP ‘Into The Ocean’ is out now, and it’s a curious return, both hopelessly infectious and oddly unknowable.
Clash is able to premiere new song ‘Nonsense’, and it pits those gently revolving chords of electric piano against that sighing delivery.
Apparently built around elements of Fela Kuti’s music, it feels dappled with the first rays of the morning sun.
Tree House explains: “I started writing it in the morning, and the lyrics are addressed to the morning itself. Every day we unconsciously reconfigure ourselves to the systems that we live within – be they market capitalism, party politics, or alienated urban life.”
“These absurd impersonal systems tend to hem us in and limit our humanity, but it’s important to remember that these things are contingent. I guess this song is just a recognition of that and an attempt to temporarily extricate myself from those complacencies.”
Read the rest of this article at Clash
Charlotte Gainsbourg – Deadly Valentine
Where “Rest”, the beautiful, recently-released title track of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s new album, was a slow and contemplative song, her newest single “Deadly Valentine” looks outward – its wedding vow lyrics and dramatic strings soar atop a chugging disco rhythm and Moroder-esque electronic bassline. Its video comes directed by Gainsbourg herself and co-stars Blood Orange musician Dev Hynes (the two previously worked together on Emile Haynie’s “A Kiss Goodbye”, also featuring Sampha).
“Each video (for Rest) came from personal, resonating ideas,” Gainsbourg says of the visual, which follows a lifelong romantic partnership (with a somewhat macabre twist). “This song mixes wedding vows with an offbeat tone, so I wanted to express the idea of a lifetime engagement. A couple running to church, from childhood to old age, a lifetime path. I asked my friend, Dev Hynes, if he would accept to play my partner, and he very graciously did. It was fun finding his younger and older selves! For my part, I had all I needed at home (with their consent of course!) I nearly asked my mother but in the end, didn’t dare…”
Rest is Gainsbourg’s fourth album and her first since 2010. The album features collaborations with Paul McCartney, Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, Connan Mockasin, and Owen Pallett. Both “Rest” and “Deadly Valentine” are set to appear on a 12” EP, released via Rough Trade on September 29.
Read the rest of this article at Dazed
Chela – Bad Habit
Chela is a punk. As a teenager in Melbourne, Australia, Chelsea Wheatley (as her mama calls her) did what anyone else with a couple of friends and a cheap bass does all over the world: she started a three-chord punk band. It’s not only formative, but crucial, in expressing everything you possibly can with a limited palette, but as loud as possible. The thing is, you never stop being a punk, even when you start making pop music.
With just a handful of singles under the Chela moniker since 2012, she has demonstrated a keen taste for ’80s electro-pop that digs into a rainbow hook, but hits the earth hard. That’s why you’ll find “Romanticise” and “Zero” on the taste-making French dance music/fashion label Kitsuné. But with her new single, “Bad Habit,” premiering here with a video filmed at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and strikingly choreographed by Chela herself, there’s blood on the dance floor.
“Again, again, again,” she deadpans in the opening lines, reliving past failings between syncopated handclaps that lunge with Chela’s bass, her first instrument. Where Chela once blew the chorus wide open with a big hook, “Bad Habit” opts for something more muted, and punctuates couplets like “Beat ’til I drop, I admit it’s my fault / Hang me up and, let me have it” with a literal (and choreographed) slap.
“‘Bad Habit’ was written in half a day, almost as fast as the human error that inspired it,” Chela tells NPR. “‘I’m not a god, turns out I’m flesh and blood’ — people make mistakes sometimes. Constant reminders that we are not always as virtuous as we seek to be. In this song I am calling myself out and pleading for punishment. Perhaps the most personal piece of work I have yet delivered, and indeed selfishly created for therapeutic reasons. I only hope others can use it, too, for I know we’ve all been there.”
Chela now lives in L.A. and produced the song with Chris Zane, who has worked on records by Passion Pit and Les Savy Fav. But Zane’s also produced records for, perhaps most tellingly, Holy Ghost!, a product of the DFA school of dance: house music set on a punk edge and shoved into the pit. “Bad Habit” has some of that DFA DNA, but slithers and strikes like classic Shakira. Chela’s “Bad Habit” is a complex and desperate piece of pop music, and really I can’t wait to hear more from her.
Read the rest of this article at NPR
