melodic

Maya Lane concluded 2023 on a high note after completing her inaugural tour as a guest with Far From Saints, a new band featuring Kelly Jones of Stereophonics. Building on the positive momentum from her tour experience, Maya Lane is diving headfirst into 2024 with the release of her latest single, ‘Bump Into Me.’ The track showcases Lane’s evolution as an artist, blending brighter pop elements and raw live band sonic textures into the fabric of her bohemian singer-songwriter sound. The song, which delves into the…

Prada, a gimmicky but effective dance remix of D-Block Europe’s Ferrari Horses, has bounced around the Top 10 since last summer. It’s a show of the south London duo’s confidence in their status as the most successful UK rap group ever (nine Top 20 albums or mixtapes and 28 Top 40 singles in just five years) that Prada is neither copied nor included on Rolling Stone. Instead, tracks such as Eagle, Lady in Hermes and I Need It Now reassert their predilection for spare, almost soporific numbness, with more gleaming melodies…

The 20-minute release features three newly released songs, including a collaboration with James Blake, set against visual representations of the rapper's tortured internal battles The Melodic Blue, the debut studio album from Baby Keem, has spanned more than three years of the young rapper’s career. Its earliest single arrived in 2020, with the record itself following a full year later. Keem stretched the release into 2022 with the release of a deluxe edition that brought its total track listing…

The creation myth of the Smiths is well-known: inspired by a South Bank Show documentary about the songwriting partnership Leiber and Stoller, Johnny Marr turns up unannounced on Morrissey’s doorstep, meets with the singer’s approval after being invited to pick a record to play and choosing the Marvelettes’ 1966 B-side Paper Boy, returns the following day, when the pair immediately write both The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Suffer Little Children, their extraordinary meditation on the Moors murders: immediate evidence…

The languages included in this study. The font of each language's name is scaled proportionally to that language's sample size. Credit: Current Biology (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2023.03.067 Your native language could impact your musical ability. A global study that compared the melodic and rhythmic abilities of almost half a million people speaking 54 different languages found that tonal speakers are better able to discern…

Having made their debut as a combined force last year with four club-ready releases—“Here To Stay”, “Starlight”, “Disconnect”, and “Looking In The Sky”—the Scenarios collective and its rotating cast of members are back to make good on the promise of that debut EP with the release of a new single, “Side By Side”.Stepping up for this instrumental cut are four of the team, Emanuel Satie, Maga, Sean Doron and Tim Engelhardt. Although sticking to the outfit’s trademark deep and melodic house sound, this time they’ve delved…

Louis Culture is a 24-year-old rapper, producer and DJ from south London. His 2020 debut project, Smile Soundsystem, journeyed seamlessly through several genres, including garage, breakbeat and house, and illustrated his ability to shift musically in a way that felt fresh.His latest project, When Life Presents Obstacle, affirms an endearing and versatile talent, rapping in a melodic London accent. There’s something unadulterated about the EP: accomplished without being too shiny. The piano-rich 7AM featuring Bawo, with…

When Esbjörn Svensson made his UK debut at the 1999 Swedish Jazz Extravaganza festival, the then-34-year-old pianist/composer’s jubilant fusions of Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, Keith Jarrett and his own playful muse showed exactly why his reputation had begun to spread beyond Sweden. Within three years the pianist and his open-minded Esbjörn Svensson Trio were touring the world, finding a new contemporary audience by merging classic jazz, catchy themes, intricate improv, classical music and rock-crescendo drama.The…

Baby Keem closes out the week with new music.The 22-year-old rapper just blessed fans with the deluxe version of The Melodic Blue, his debut studio album that arrived more than a year ago. It adds seven songs, bringing the run-time to 80 minutes. “Bank Account” features Lil Uzi Vert, while “Killstreaks” has Don Toliver and PinkPantheress.Keem announced the updated edition on social media Thursday, just hours before it hit streaming services. Though the pgLang artist didn’t share any details on what he had in store, his…

Whose emotions are these, anyway? Cass McCombs’s 10th album is an easy, rolling record that grapples with inner complexity, telling stories about musicians and soldiers, lovers and seekers. Even as this seasoned US singer-songwriter butts up against philosophical quandaries or quotes from Sufism, he never loses track of the everyday. When he isn’t making singular records, McCombs has worked in demolition and crashed on couches; his is a landscape of fast-food restaurants and karaoke machines, where vans break down, people…