Bringing you a spookily good mixtape this October with tracks from largely new or new-to-us artists, all of whom we’re really excited about, starting off with Leila Gharib’s Sequoyah Tiger of Verona, Italy, an artist whose debut full-length on favorite Morr Music shows her trekking back and forth between experimental vocal-forward pop and stripped-down retro-weird electronic music of the best kind. We’d highly recommend giving the just-released album, Parabolabandit, a listen through. Following that, we’ve got a known favorite and top contender for album-of-the-year, SZA, with one of her poppier songs, “Prom” (PS—check out her site if you haven’t already; pretty awesome interactive concept). Then we’re featuring a slew of artists and tracks we discovered recently, largely through random Soundcloud exploration, including the excellent Melbourne-born, Stockholm-based electronic artist VILDE (née Thomas Vilde); Amsterdam’s duo Cut_; beautifully sombre electronic pop from England’s Art School Girlfriend; and the polar opposite—upbeat, R+B-tinged pop from Seattle trio The Flavr Blue.
Bordeaux, France’s Pendentif return with their trademark laid-back lounge pop; then we’ve got some great, rolling, breezy pop from Milwaukee’s GGOOLLDD, a hooky track from the all-too-aptly-named Los Angeles duo Smoke Season, and an awesome song from Melbourne duo ALTA that’s almost entirely percussion and vox. Seriously, the scene in Melbourne is insane lately.
While we’re on the topic of insanity, the new full-length from Norwegian musical child prodigy and ex-doom metal band member Hanne Hukkelberg is testing the limits of both what our sane minds can comprehend and how much we can enjoy music—it’s truly a magical album and another top contender this year. We follow a favorite track of Hukkelberg’s with a favorite from the (rightly) highly lauded French-Cuban musical duo Ibeyi, written after a 16-year-old Lisa-Kaindé of the duo was wrongfully arrested by the French police.
Ending the mixtape, we’ve got a really lovely new song we can’t stop listening to from Bristol-based Elder Island, a beautiful and poppier track from Icelandic/NYC-based composer and musician Úlfur, and, to finish things out, a slightly psychedelic, math-y track from Leeds band The Golden Age of TV.
Enjoy and, as always, support the bands you like here and local record stores alike—they all keep life beautiful.
