All posts tagged: Playlist

‘Beyoncé’s Crazy in Love makes you move your body’: Gloria Gaynor’s honest playlist | Music

‘Beyoncé’s Crazy in Love makes you move your body’: Gloria Gaynor’s honest playlist | Music

The first song I fell in love withI grew up in Newark, New Jersey, with five brothers and one sister, so there was always music in the house. I remember my mom singing Willow Weep for Me when I was five or six. There was something about the sadness in it that really moved me. The first single I boughtI heard Why Do Fools Fall in Love by Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers on the radio and bought it from a local record store. I was singing in the hallway of our building when a neighbour leaned over and asked: “Gloria, was that you singing?” She thought it was the radio. That was the moment I decided I was going to be a singer. The song I do at karaokeI’ve only done karaoke once – about 20 years ago, for my birthday. Someone dared me to get up and sing I Will Survive as if I were drunk. I thought: if you’re going to do it, you might as well commit. So I did – …

Add to playlist: the wild club-pop of Zara Larsson cowriter Helena Gao and the week’s best new tracks | Music

Add to playlist: the wild club-pop of Zara Larsson cowriter Helena Gao and the week’s best new tracks | Music

From Aarhus, DenmarkRecommended if you like Caroline Polachek, Zara Larsson, GrimesUp next Debut project coming later this year You could hardly make a better professional songwriting debut than co-writing nine 10ths of a moment-defining album – namely Zara Larsson’s Midnight Sun – then getting a Grammy nod for it. It’s an enviable springboard for the relaunch of Helena Gao’s solo career. Over the past few years, the Chinese-Danish artist has released a handful of singles and EPs – standout God’s Favourite split the difference between NewJeans and R&B, and comes with an excellent Sims-referencing video – but her new music feels like a real flourishing, sidelining her older sweetness for a freakier braid of heavy bass, stuttering trance and a pitch-bending falsetto to rival that of Caroline Polachek, singing in English and Mandarin. You can trace her evolution in tracks released just a few years apart. When Gao put out Pretty Please in 2023, the glittering, new-agey rhapsody was laced with innuendo: “I’m a bit of a prude,” she said, conscious of her parents hearing …

Add to playlist: the sweet plunderphonics of Quiet Light and the week’s best new tracks | Music

Add to playlist: the sweet plunderphonics of Quiet Light and the week’s best new tracks | Music

From Boston, via TexasRecommended if you like Grace Ives, Porter Robinson, GrimesUp next Touring EU/UK in November Riya Mahesh has perfected her own sweet, whimsical brand of plunderphonics; her seventh project as Quiet Light in six years, this year’s Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2, sounds a little as if it’s been chopped together from samples of Mahesh’s own memory. On Berlin, she sings to a wayward love interest over a moony breakbeat and IDM glitches, as a spoken-word part – what sounds to me like a recording of a lecture – floats in the background. Star100 starts all whispers and garbled laughter, before ceding space to Mahesh’s multitracked harmonies. Sometimes, Mahesh will suddenly deliver a wildly catchy chorus, something she clearly has an aptitude for – check Dealerz, her collab with Danish band A Good Year. Mahesh’s music is avowedly feminine in its tone; she seems to advocate for sample-heavy music, as a form, as a perfect way to deconstruct and reconstruct fantasies and memories. True to that idea, Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2 is …

Apple Shares WWDC26 Wallpaper, Playlist, ‘Get Ready’ Video, and More

Apple Shares WWDC26 Wallpaper, Playlist, ‘Get Ready’ Video, and More

In addition to teasing WWDC 2026 with a new tagline today, Apple has shared a wallpaper, playlist, and a “Get Ready” video ahead of the event. iPhone, iPad, and Mac versions of the wallpaper are available to download on Apple’s website. The wallpaper features a dark color scheme with a glowing Apple logo, which likely hints at Siri’s rumored new design coming with iOS 27. The wallpaper page has a “Glow all out” tagline, which adds to the “All systems glow” and “Coming bright up” taglines that Apple previously shared. A new “WWDC26 Hello” playlist is available on Apple Music, with more playlists to follow throughout the weeklong developers conference. WWDC 2026 kicks off with Apple’s keynote on Monday, June 8 at 10 a.m. Pacific Time. The company is set to unveil iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, tvOS 27, and visionOS 27 on that day, and the conference will run through Friday, June 12, with hundreds of developer sessions to be shared online. The keynote will be streamed live on the Apple …

‘I don’t listen to indie music any more’: Ed O’Brien’s honest playlist | Radiohead

‘I don’t listen to indie music any more’: Ed O’Brien’s honest playlist | Radiohead

The first single I boughtAlly’s Tartan Army, the 1978 Scottish World Cup song, because England hadn’t qualified. I loved that Scottish team – Alan Rough, Martin Buchan, Gordon McQueen, Kenny Dalglish – and the 10-year-old me got completely swept up in World Cup fever. The first song I fell in love withWhen I was 17, I fell in love with a girl called Mary, who was this huge Smiths fan. I bought Hatful of Hollow so I could serenade her with William, It Was Really Nothing. I don’t think she adored me quite as much as she adored the Smiths. The song I do at karaokeI was celebrating my 29th birthday in Japan while doing promo for OK Computer. The head of Toshiba EMI, Mr Inagawa took us to a karaoke bar. By 1am, we were wearing prosthetic animal heads, and Mr Inagawa was in floods of tears as Thom sung My Way. I love karaoke when people are so inebriated, they’re like: “I fucking love you, let’s do Copacabana for the third time.” The …

Add to playlist: the whimsy and warped electronics of duo Ear and the week’s best new tracks | Music

Add to playlist: the whimsy and warped electronics of duo Ear and the week’s best new tracks | Music

From Hudson valley, New York, and LondonRecommended if you like the Books, Leila, Worldpeace DMTUp next Rumspringa released 29 May Jonah Paz and Yaelle Avtan recorded their first ever track as Ear on an iPhone in the Bard College library. That song, Nerves, pits their murmuring voices against weightless strings and barely perceptible drums. Just as it seems poised to float away altogether, the track is suddenly overtaken by a blaring bass synth that cleaves the first act’s aching plea into an emotionally fraught, black-lit banger. The Hudson valley/London duo are sometimes lumped in under the loose banner of “laptop twee” alongside a host of younger artists who also balance whimsy with warped electronics. Like Bassvictim, Worldpeace DMT and the Femcels, Ear pad out the emotional immediacy of lo-fi rock with found audio chaos and wide-ranging genre collage. Nostalgia is a major ingredient but the band’s appeal is by no means reducible to it. After drawing from the DNA of 00s pop with their first album, last year’s The Most Dear and the Future, Paz …

Add to playlist: the virtuoso prog-metal-folk of Brazil’s Papangu and the week’s best new tracks | Music

Add to playlist: the virtuoso prog-metal-folk of Brazil’s Papangu and the week’s best new tracks | Music

From João Pessoa, BrazilRecommended if you like Hermeto Pascoal, Mr Bungle, King CrimsonUp next Celestial album released 7 August, touring the UK and Europe from 15 August Thanks in part to its famed music department at the local Federal University of Paraíba, João Pessoa – the easternmost city in South America – is a hotbed of artists playing different folk styles from all over the continent. Papangu sound like all of them at the same time. The five-piece blend a long list of genres: bossa nova, the circle-dance song ciranda and forró, with its dry-tuned accordion and pulsing rhythm section, plus the more ubiquitous progressive rock and extreme metal. The band’s virtuoso chops and intensity keep their songs from buckling under the weight of those ideas, from the hurried drums to the mountains of synthesisers and pianos. For their upcoming third album, Celestial, the band recorded everything live in just nine days and refused to use any kind of computer in order to make a statement against AI music. After all, what program designed to …

Add to playlist: the disaster-baiting jazz-rock brinkmanship of Taupe and the week’s best new tracks | Music

Add to playlist: the disaster-baiting jazz-rock brinkmanship of Taupe and the week’s best new tracks | Music

From Glasgow, ScotlandRecommended if you like Horse Lords, Melt-Banana, abrasive saxophoneUp next Album out now, touring the UK and Ireland from June Taupe’s lawless mix of “not jazz”, sludgy rock and homemade electronics hits like a shock of cold water to the face. The Glasgow-based trio are a formidable live band: thunderously loud, crushingly tight, quick to surrender all control and trust-fall their way through wild improvisations. Their third album, Waxing | Waning, out now on Prague’s Minority Records, finally captures that power, as well as the band’s oddball humour and free-flowing imagination. Single Lemonade Tycoon (a nod to the early-2000s lemonade stall video game) opens with stilted, comedic flurries of squawking sax and tip-toeing percussion before finding its groove – as well as ragged electric guitar with the heft of an industrial power tool. Sharp, smart and often brutal, Taupe make light work of heavy noise, as well as the complex musicianship that underpins their sound. Guitarist Mike Parr-Burman and saxophonist Jamie Stockbridge met studying music at Newcastle University and, like drummer Alex Palmer, …

‘I became a New Order groupie’: Tim Burgess’s honest playlist | Music

‘I became a New Order groupie’: Tim Burgess’s honest playlist | Music

The first single I boughtI remember seeking out Long Haired Lover from Liverpool by Little Jimmy Osmond when I was six. I bought it from Rumbelows on Northwich High Street – it sold washing machines, TVs, blenders and the Top 40 7-inch singles at the back. The song I inexplicably know every lyric toI’ve long been obsessed by Steve Ignorant from Crass. I’ve had various stalls at record markets over the years, and at one, this guy came up and said: “Do you really know the lyrics to all Crass songs?” He tried to catch me out by singing Do They Owe Us a Living?, but I knew them from start to finish. The first song I fell in love withI heard My Girl by Madness at Anne’s Cake Shop when I was 12 or 13. The romantic cascading piano stuck in my mind almost as much as the fantastic cream cakes. The song I can no longer listen toI go through phases of getting tired of things, after listening to them too many times …

Add to playlist: the beautifully dazed, countrified indie-rock of Tracey Nelson and the week’s best new tracks | Music

Add to playlist: the beautifully dazed, countrified indie-rock of Tracey Nelson and the week’s best new tracks | Music

From New York City, New YorkRecommended if you like The Clean, This is Lorelei, The FeeliesUp next Debut album Hercules out 10 July Tracey Nelson’s self-titled 2025 debut EP was one of the year’s best lesser-heard gems: Five tracks of sparkling, winsome indie-rock that recalled classic antipodean jangle bands the Clean, Twerps and Dick Diver. Tracks such as New Years Flowers and Just Shoot Me Now suggested that Austin Noll – the NYC-based singer-songwriter behind the project – was a classicist with a keen sense for bright melodies and self-deprecating one-liners. This July, Noll will release Hercules, his first full-length, on Perennial, an imprint of the beloved Olympia, Washington label K Records, which in recent years has released great LPs by garage rockers Sharp Pins and the amorphous Los Angeles band Dummy. Co-produced by the North Carolina musicians MJ Lenderman and Colin Miller – and performed by a murderers row that includes Lenderman and Miller alongside Landon George, Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman, Xandy Chelmis, Ethan Baechtold and former Hotline TNT guitarist Jack Kraus – Hercules amps …