![]() The band’s bright, funky, guitar-driven and synth-streaked pop takes on bold new dimensions on the double album, with string arrangements by Owen Pallett introducing a sense of sweeping drama and intensity. Recorded at Paris’ renowned La Frette Studio, produced by Parcels and mixed by James Ford of Simian Mobile Disco, Day/Night is an ambitious, sprawling second effort, featuring 19 total tracks spread across two distinct discs, Day and Night. Such is life for Australian dance-pop five-piece Parcels, who’ve pulled out all the stops on the follow-up to their self-titled 2018 debut. When the likes of Daft Punk are producing your debut single, you’re doing something right. With their sophomore album, Nation of Language solidify themselves as mainstays of ’20s synth-pop music. ![]() They extend themselves, influenced partly by krautrock, rather than sticking entirely with the new wave sound of their debut, but also remain impressively sonically consistent. Nation of Language don’t just keep doing more of the same on A Way Forward, though they totally could have gotten away with that. And now, thanks to the unexpected (but totally deserved) success of their first album, we’re being graced with A Way Forward, a carefully constructed and emotionally resonant sophomore effort. Like many bands, Ian Devaney, Aidan Noel and Michael Sue-Poi struggled financially, until Noel and Devaney got married and asked their loved ones to fund their album as a wedding present. We almost didn’t get to hear Brooklyn band Nation of Language’s stunning 2020 debut Introduction, Presence. MUNYA’s first full-length is as pretty and bright as the celestial bodies themselves, its silken synth-pop splashed with psych and funk touches that lend it an effervescent energy. Those things give me hope.” That starry-eyed perspective radiates through the record, which Boivin wrote, self-produced and self-recorded in her apartment during the pandemic, and titled after Georges Méliès’ essential silent film Le Voyage dans la Lune. I love thinking that we’re not alone in this big strange universe. Her debut album was inspired by her loves of both music and the great unknown: “I love space. Like an astronaut setting foot on another world, MUNYA-i.e., Québécois producer, singer/songwriter and performer Josie Boivin-achieves a lifelong dream with the release of Voyage to Mars via Luminelle Recordings (Magdalena Bay, Helena Deland). Public Storage is a fascinating listen, and Vu is perfectly poised to deliver her message. Vincent and Japanese Breakfast (good company to keep!), Vu has moved from her bedroom-pop roots into the crevices of guitar feedback, eerie synths and indie-rock fundamentals for a collection of songs that still capture the wistful teenage days of love and heartache, performance and habit. Although it’s easy to box her in with artists such as St. For Vu, it meant expanding her vision even further to create Public Storage, her breathtaking debut album. As many can attest, three years carries a lot of change. Hana Vu is simply bursting with talent at such a young age, having released her stunning debut EP in 2018 at only 17 years old. Yet the songs are tightly constructed, full of smart wordplay, vivid imagery and characters who are largely sympathetic. Queens of the Summer Hotel is not an upbeat album, to say the least. There’s plenty to work with here: Mann examines mental health from different angles, on tracks by turns mordant, biting, distressing and deeply sad. ![]() “It’s both sort of fascinating and gratifying to realize that people’s behavior has an internal logic, like classifying it as symptoms more than personality traits,” she once said in an interview. She has spent a big chunk of her solo career exploring themes of mental illness-the phrase was even the title of her Grammy-winning 2017 album-and she’s been frank about her own mental health struggles. ![]() Mann has long been intrigued by trying to unravel the knots of impulses and seeming contradictions that make up our psyches. Rather than shelve what she had been working on, Mann compiled the songs into Queens of the Summer Hotel, her 10th studio album. Find your complete weekend listening list below.Īimee Mann had been writing songs over the past few years for a stage adaptation of Girl, Interrupted, a memoir by Susanna Kaysen about her stay in a psychiatric hospital in the late ’60s, when the pandemic put the project on hold. November’s first and fullest New Music Friday features many of our most-anticipated releases of the month, including the long-awaited sophomore album from Lindsey Jordan’s Snail Mail, Los Angeles singer/songwriter Hana Vu’s impressive debut, and the follow-up to Nation of Language’s acclaimed Introduction, Presence. 2021 is already on the wane, but there are miles (read: many must-hear albums) to go before it sleeps (read: ends). ![]()
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