THE PLAYLIST

Ibeyi/ Away Away

Ibeyi, the duo of Cuban-French twins Naomi and Lisa-Kaindé Díaz, have teased their sophomore LP earlier this year with Lost In My Mind. They now return with Away Away, an uplifting mid-tempo jam that features empowering lines like “I don’t give up/I feel the pain/But I’m alive” and concludes with a Yoruba chant for the Orisha Aggayu, the orisha of volcanoes and ferryman believed to help people cross the river, all the while teaching them the importance of being strong, steady and levelheaded.

Portugal. The Man (feat Zoe Manville & Rakim)/ So Young

So Young is the second single taken from Portugal. The Man’s just released eighth studio LP Woodstock. The track follows lead cut Feel It Still and finds John Gourley and his crew getting into a soft-rock mode with help from guest vocalists Zoe Manville and Rakim. “I don’t need to make amends/But I’m done going undercover,” Gourley croons, harmonising with Manville as the horns kick in. “One day the world may end/But there’s still plenty to discover/’Till then I’ll just pretend I don’t need another lover.”

Animal Husbandry/ In Trouble For Good London-based Animal Husbandry has previously charmed us with his debut single The Good Times Are Killing Me and he’s set out to do the same with its follow-up In Trouble For Good. Built on an elastic bassline and skittering hi-hats, the five-and-a-half-minute song offers a brooding rumination on escapism inspired by the singer’s “heady trip to the tropics where [he] sat drinking rum out of a coconut with a beautiful woman”. “I say we stay in trouble for good/Just like we said we would,” he intimates to the lady in question, his tone both pleading and accusatory, matching the sullen sax-dominated outro.

Placebo/ Life’s What You Make It

UK alt rockers Placebo have just dropped a thought-provoking short film accompanying their new single, a cover of Talk Talk’s 1985 art-rock classic Life’s What You Make It. Lifted from their six-track EP of the same name, the song is set to the visual capturing the residents of Agbogbloshie, Ghana, living amid a massive e-waste dump. Timely and universally relevant, this cover further attests to the band’s knack for putting their signature alt-rock edge on beloved classics from Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill to Pixies’ Where Is My Mind.

Zola Jesus/ Exhumed

Nika Roza Danilova, the American singersongwriter behind Zola Jesus, emerges from a period of loss and personal traumas with new cut Exhumed. Edging towards the industrial territory of her earlier releases, the track is fittingly dark and filled to the brim with menacing atmospherics, glitchy percussive beats and ominous string stabs. It’s noise-goth of the highest order if there ever was one. Zola Jesus’ forthcoming studio album Okovi (Slavic for “Shackles”) is slated for release in September, three years after 2014’s Taiga.