SZA – ‘SATURN’
“There’s got to be more / been here before,” sings SZA on her intensely self-aware new single. If 2022 album ‘SOS’ was full of pent up realisations and self-destructive emotions, the tender ‘Saturn’ finds the alt-R&B star asking how she could “break this pattern” from the purgatory of heartache. The singer’s sleek vocals swell with emotion alongside hazed, twinkling tones that simmer under the emotional weight of SZA’s vulnerable confessions.
LUCY ROSE – ‘WHATEVER YOU WANT’
Becoming a new mum brings a wave of fresh perspective on the things that really matter. For the English singer-songwriter, that feeling was heightened after suffering rare pregnancy induced osteoporosis. Her hushed new single emerges from that time with a simple realisation that “you can be whatever you want”. Delivered like both a lullaby to her son and a mantra of encouragement to herself, her gentle vocals glide amongst muted piano keys and patiently intensifying backing instrumentals.
BAT FOR LASHES – ‘THE DREAM OF DELPHI’
Natasha Khan’s sixth studio album has been described as “part pagan invocation, part celestial synth epic”, and her dreamy title track is a fitting introduction into that intriguing world. Her ethereal voice is a transportive vessel, soaring atop a cinematic score that transitions to a hip-hop inflected beat, signalling the way down a winding path that’s sure to reveal new spells with each song.
LOLA YOUNG – ‘INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS’
The London singer-songwriter isn’t one to mince her words. Fearlessly adept at belting her innermost dialogue, her new track sees Young flipping the switch and speaking back to her intrusive thoughts. “Hey there, intrusive thoughts / You don’t make sense at all / Wish you would go away with some paracetamol,” she hums, with just a sparse guitar riff to pad the series of revealing realisations.
BODEGA – ‘CITY IS TAKEN’
The New York City art-pop punks’ new single stomps and rumbles with defiant resistance. Inspired by singer Nikki Belfiglio’s experience of moving to the Big Apple, the stubborn track wrestles with the gentrification that’s changing their city, where the artist realised her own “visual presence became an unwitting symbol of destruction; the antithesis of everything I sought to create”. It’s a gritty, gripping conceptual building block for new album ‘Our Brand Could Be Yr Life’, which tackles the corporate mentality of the underground scene.
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