#SOTD: Unknown Mortal Orchestra - “Guilty Pleasures”

image credit: Juan Ortiz Arenas

There is always so enthralling about any Unknown Mortal Orchestra record and their latest, V, is no exception. I have yet to put my finger on it specifically that is responsible for it being so easy to make a happy home inside every second of their music, but every time I put on their records I never bail before completing a spin. I’ve been playing the fuuuuck out of this record. Definitely in my top 5 of 2023 so far, no brainer.“Guilty Pleasures” has been climbing the ranks of my favorite tracks on the record. It’s just so playfully cheeky. I can’t get enough of it.

Oh! oh! If you haven’t caught their set on Tiny Desk yet it is highly recommended!

Hope y’all had a lovely weekend. I know I sure did. 💖✨

#SOTD: The Kickdrums - “Everything’s Great”

Image courtesy of The Kickdrums

Happy Saturdayyyy. Hope it’s been a lovely day wherever you are. I guess you can say “Everything’s Great” over here. 🥰 No but really, it only feels right to include longtime SKOA fam The Kickdrums in this latest reboot. It’s been a pleasure getting to know Fitts over the years. I think one of the best parts of doing this work is the friendships you make along the way, and it’s been really cool to witness the way that we’ve both evolved creatively since we met at the beginning of this whole endeavor.

Just the other day while Fitts and I were catching up over text, I happened to randomly inquire about his reasoning for releasing an album with minimal singing or lyrics on his latest album, Zig Zags. It was such a unique creative choice for him given how intimately I’ve come to know and love his catalog (and frequently utilize his singing as a security blanket of sorts) that I couldn’t help but ask. Anyway come to find out he apparently didn’t feel terribly inspired to deliberately say anything but still wanted to offer up some vibes. And lemme emphasize here for one and all: they are immaculate!

anyway It’s a nice having a vibey little reminder out in the universe for the world to enjoy alongside me that sometimes you don’t have to have something groundbreaking to say and that sometimes you can just show up in your authenticity in the moment and still have such a gorgeous impact on people’s lives.

#SOTD Yung Bae - “Body Talk (feat. Mayer Hawthorne)”

Image courtesy of Instagram

Mmmmm it’s vibe o’clock on Friday, Finallyyyy. ✨💖🙏🏻

I knew the moment that I was aware that future funk producer Yung Bae was teaming up with longtime crooner cutie Mayer Hawthorne that it was gonna be a potent pairing, but i cannot emphasize enough just how much “Body Talk” is a bop that shouldn’t be allowed to stop.

word on the street is that Yung Bae should be dropping another track soon, too!

And!

AND!

Post by @yungbae

View on Threads

new album coming soon apparently, too!? Hell yeah 🤩

I hope we can agree on the following:

1. Groove Continental: Side A was precisely what we all needed last summer and the thought of more Yung Bae to help me get through the hottest summer on record is giving me life.

2. Mayer Hawthorne deserves to have more upbeat moments like this in his life. Love him to death as his laid back usual self, but this track made me really curious about the impactfulness of a possible production switch up for his next album when he’s ready for it.

3. Independence Day should never be allowed to be on a Tuesday ever again because my brain is still not convinced it’s Friday even if I’m able to type that it is.

#SOTD: Sum Bloke - “Fly”

image courtesy of Instagram

SHE BACK 🤩

It’s so wild. I had already planned on the SOTD reboot for today and then with Threads dropping last night it seems that music fam is all in happy spirits and feeling like the old twitter days when this site attracted the web sheriff at least weekly.

But here we are!

Speaking of old Twitter days, I cannot stress just how much I’ve missed doing SOTD. As much as I overcomplicated it for awhile there for no one else other than myself, it was always the highlight of my day. With all my time away I realize just how much happier I am when I devoting time on a daily basis to staying curious about what I can learn from baby bands I’ve yet to encounter and sharing my findings with both friends and future friends alike.

Speaking of friends and future friends, the kickoff track for the triumphant return of SOtD comes from Lee Cunningham, known to the cool kids as Sum Bloke. the Dallas house producer teamed up to release this track on fellow former Floridian turned Brooklynite, Lefti’s somewhat newly founded House label, Quincy Boy Records. “Fly” was featured on the label’s debut artist compilation, Friends & Family vol. 1, which was released in February 2022.

This will be your go-to track to groove your way to greatness. Seriously. I still have yet to figure out where the sample is from on this track, but there’s a lot of magic in it. To warmly and accurately quote it,

“It’s the year, kid.
You gotta just got for it.
Don’t think about what comes after or what came before.
You just gotta bend your knees, take a deep breath, and
JUMP.
And you might think, ‘What if I fall!?’
Well, what if you don’t?
What if I fly?”

Quincy Boy Records · Sum Bloke - Fly (Radio Edit)

Reminder: the SOTD playlist is always available for your listening pleasure in full (and ease of track acquisition) on Spotify and Apple Music.

[SONG OF THE DAY] CHILI PALMER - "S.I.T"

Something that I have been deeply missing since everything got turned upside down is singing along to music while I walk around the neighborhood if no one else is around. It’s something that I got in the habit of doing after I transitioned to city living and stopped owning a car aka the best place to sing your brains out to shit. In addition to everything feeling really heavy outside, singing with a mask on feels kinda weird.

Enter: CHILI PALMER: a new project from one of my favorite casually brilliant minds, David Gledhill (of SOULS notoriety), in collaboration with a man I’m still not convinced isn’t a literal angel sent to earth, Albert Gold. On Friday the London lads dropped, “S.I.T.”, the debut offering from their forthcoming debut self-titled EP which is slated for a November 13th release courtesy of Fierce Panda Records.

I had bumped it a few times since Friday, but something about strutting through Brooklyn yesterday and this hitting my ears though. I had this on repeat basically the whole walk home.

I will say this: belting the chorus through my mask evaporated basically every molecule of stress out of my body. I’m not exaggerating (or maybe I kind of am) when I say Albert’s voice might make your heart float out of your chest so BE CAREFUL. It’s the kind of vocal performance where I’m so convinced this dude was smiling the whole time he was singing this that I’d eat my headphones if you told me otherwise. David absolutely set him up to shine, too. This beat is just naaaassssstttyyyy in all of the right places. That bassline! Holy actual fuck.

It is impossible not to be feelin’ yourself to this, trust me. I desperately needed this, so I assume you do, too.

I want to make like a billion metaphors about how fucking well these two played off each other on this collaboration and THIS IS ONLY THE FIRST TASTE OF THE EP! Best believe your girl is about to do an electric slide into the DMs to hear the rest of this.

In the meantime, you can have a glance at the tracklisting below and smash that pre-order button because IT’S A PANDEMIC AND NO ONE IS TOURING AND THESE DUDES DESERVE ALL OF YOUR DOLLARS IF THEY MAKE YOU FEEL AS GOOD AS I DO RIGHT NOW TELLING YOU ABOUT THIS.

CHILI PALMER

Release Date: November 13, 2020

1.Intro
2. S.I.T.
3. L.U.C.
4. J.S.N.T.L.
5. A.O.M.L.
6. Unrequited

Pre-Order

[SONG OF THE DAY] Bob Moses - "Desire"

photo credit: Lucas.MK

Everyone’s favorite makeout music makers, Bob Moses, have returned with a brand new single and news of a new album that will be out next month! The album is called Desire and it’s a concept album surrounding the positives and pitfalls of humanity’s driving wants in the digital age we’re living in. “Desire can become quite destructive if you're not self-aware. With this record, we’re trying to be self-aware by looking at our own desires and reckoning with them,” explains keyboardist Jimmy Vallance. “Stories about desire are timeless: Icarus flying too close to the sun and ending up falling to his death…that idea inspired the falling man on the album cover. That symbolized to us how desire can lead to a downfall.”

The duo has chosen to share the title track of the album as their initial offering, which is a collaboration with Grammy-nominated ZHU and it is…well let’s just say it’s aptly named(😍). It’s definitely a slight pivot to their signature sound, but I appreciate that ZHU definitely urged a different kind of energy out of them. They also unveiled an interactive video for the track, further demonstrating the pleasure/pain sides of desire. I was going to share it below but I can’t shut the autoplay off so you can head here to check it out. The below standard version is equally as demonstrative of the concept they’re going for.

The idea for the followup to their sophomore album, Battle Lines, came while the duo were out on their last European club tour as their original two-piece setup. “It was great being back in that environment and feeling the communal energy,” recounts Vallance. Singer Tom Howie adds,“We wanted to make something that was continuously mixed, something that would take the listener on a journey and replicate that feeling we try to create when we’re playing our sets in a club. We’ve appreciated the worlds created in concept records from bands like Pink Floyd and Nine Inch Nails. We thought it would be interesting to combine that kind of songwriting with the flow of modern electronic music.”  

To celebrate the launch of Desire, Bob Moses will play a B2B livestream set with Blacklizt (a project by ZHU) as part of Insomniac’s Factory 93 “Secret Project Livestream”. That’s happening on Friday, July 17 at 4pm PT / 7pm ET HERE.

Desire is out on August 28th, 2020, courtesy of the fine folks at Domino.

Desire

Release Date: August 28, 2020

1. Love We Found

2. The Blame

3. Desire (Bob Moses & ZHU)

4. Hold Me Up

5. Outlier

6. Ordinary Day

Pre-Order

[SONG OF THE DAY] Aish Divine - "Common Questions"

image courtesy of Aish Divine

To witness all that is Aish Divine in the flesh is remarkable. It was sheer luck that I stuck around to check out his set at Piano’s last year during Mondo.NYC. It only took a few seconds after he first opened his mouth for me to be hooked and hopelessly devoted. For the next 20something minutes I was glued to his every move. It’s difficult to explain the sensation that washes over you when you share a room with someone that is there to be heard. To clarify, there is a difference between someone hoping to be heard and folks like him who somehow give you no other option but to hear them. As an immigrant, queer, person of color, Aish Divine is here to be heard. It is not a suggestion, it’s essentially command. He will be the first to tell you as he shared recently on Instagram, “I want to undo the injustice, the unfairness, the non-equality, and lack of visibility that I experienced. I will undo it with the rest of us.”

His latest track, “Common Questions”, is exemplary of his ethos. Taken from his forthcoming sophomore album, The Sex Issue, the track examines the world of online dating through a queer lens. From first blush, it’s easy to say that “Common Questions” is another song bemoaning hookup culture, but it’s more than just moving on from one warm body to the next as you may have heard previously from tracks from other queer artists like SAKIMA’s “Apps”. From his experience on dating apps, seeing things like, “no femmes", “no asians”, “muscle only”, etc. on dating profiles are the alarmingly normalized things that possible matches are just causally leaving on their profile. This is of course before being inundated with common questions about dick size, STI testing status (*which to be clear is not a bad thing to ask but not within the first 10 minutes of talking to someone*), and essentially just questions related to solely hooking up.

Meanwhile, as he notes in the song, “Ain’t got time for common questions / I just wanna man with intuition / who knows how to keep my attention / he’s a good fuck and tender affection”.

Oh honey, same same same same sameeeeee.

Not only is the song a fuckin bop that won’t stop, but the video is full of fabulous non-binary folks and was directed by a woman, as are all of the upcoming videos for The Sex Issues singles. It's a dance filled, intersectional view of queer, non-binary, South Asian, American street culture….and I can’t fucking get enough of it.

More details on The Sex Issue forthcoming. For now, get caught up on his debut album Mother, which was released earlier this year.

[SONG OF THE DAY] Pink Flamingo Rhythm Revue - "Diamond Man"

photo credit: Keegan Westervelt

If you haven’t already, you should get to know the solo project of Eric "Doc" Mendelsohn, Pink Flamingo Rhythm Revue. If the homey looks familiar it’s because he’s been making the rounds in the Brooklyn music scene at least since 2014 (he’s possibly best known as 1/2 of Ghost Beach). He’s also been hitting the road with Des Rocs as their bassist. This week he released his latest track, “Diamond Man”, on what is increasingly becoming my favorite local label: toucan sounds.

“Diamond Man” is a glitzy funktastic little nu disco number that is sure to make these scorching summer days more tolerable. Fair warning though: that guitar solo near the middle of the song might temporarily melt your face off if you’re not prepared. I suppose that’s there to make sure you know he is here to funk you up something fierce. If you’re like me and cant’t get enough of “Diamond Man”, a remix courtesy of LA’s Birdee will be dropping in a week-ish (7/17). That gives you plenty of time to also go back and get well acquainted with everything that Mendelsohn’s been releasing under PFRR for the past couple years. You could also check out Des Rocs or Ghost Beach if they weren’t previously on your radar. Blonde got a hell of a lot of love in my household when that dropped.

Pink Flamingo Rhythm Revue · Pink Flamingo Rhythm Revue - Diamond Man