Artists

We could try to introduce Yung Heazy, but in a recent feature with Georgia Straight Vancouver, he sums himself up in a way thats too good to try to restate: "Hi my name is Jordan Heaney but I’m known on the internet as Yung Heazy. I write, record, produce, and perform music some would classify as “Bedroom Pop” or “Jizz-Jazz” on my Macbook in my parents basement. My first full length LP, Whenever You’re Around I Hate Everything Less, drops June 1st which is the same day Kanye and Father John Misty release their next records so I mean, that’s a lot of music to catch up on man. I also love mac and cheese."Heazy wrote lead single “Cuz You’re My Girl” as a Valentine gift for his girlfriend, and the song took off after his humble SoundCloud post was repositioned on alona chemerys music discovery YouTube channel. Now, celebrating his first full length and subsequent tour, we asked him to make us a playlist.Says Heazy, "Never has there been a more perfect compilation of the boppiest indie bangers picked painstakingly by the Heaziest of Yung. If you live on this fookin pigskin we call planet earth these tunes are for you."Listen above or go right here.

Psychedelic/folk/synthpop hybrid Well Well Well are asking the bigger questions. Namely "Is Here & Now always better than There & Then?" While the San Diego, CA band celebrates their dual EP release of Poptimism and Ships as well as a zine concept tour across their home state, were jumping down the rabbit hole with them on this hand-crafted playlist for The Dowsers. Says the band: "This playlist is a journey down the inspiration highway. Vocal harmonies, dance rhythms, clever lyrics and some of the finest production our ears have ever heard. You want to be a musician? This playlist is Step 3. Not quite for the amateur listener but not too deep down the musicians rabbit hole of hyper-complexity. If you carry a bit of rhythm with you, you will be rewarded. If you enjoy singing in your car or shower, you will also be rewarded. Let the music do what it was created to do. The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things seem strange."

Mary J. Blige burst on the scene in the early ‘90s as the “Queen of Hip-Hop Soul.” She sung beautifully over gritty breakbeats and traded rhymes with Grand Puba on the title track to 1992’s What’s The 411? In the decades since, Blige has collaborated with dozens of rappers, including hits by Ludacris and Common. And 1995’s “I’ll Be There For You/You’re All I Need To Get By” with Method Man stands as one of the most beloved duets by a rapper and an R&B singer of all time. And she’s even created a rapping alter ego, Brook Lynn, to flow on remixes of tracks by Cassidy and Busta Rhymes.

He may be one of R&B’s smoothest crossover stars of the last two decades, but Usher has always kept a foot in hip hop. Whether he’s collaborating with his mentors Diddy and Jermaine Dupri, making a political statement with Nas, or providing hooks for hits by Wale and DJ Khaled, Usher has often rubbed elbows with rap’s elite, even earning the nickname “Ursher” from Ludacris. Guest verses by Nicki Minaj and Rick Ross have powered his later hits, and Atlanta rappers like Jeezy and Young Thug have often turned up to help Usher represent his hometown. And hip-hop producers like Lil Jon, Just Blaze and Polow Da Don have provided the beats for some of his greatest songs. -- Al Shipley

Few filmmakers ever displayed as much savvy about music—or were so eager to show off their sheer love of it—than Jonathan Demme. The director, who passed away on April 26 at the age of 73 after a battle with cancer, established his impeccable and impressively diverse tastes long before indie-movie hotshots like Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson followed suit in the 1990s. Of course, he did that most prominently in his many music docs, a rich bounty that ranged from his epochal Talking Heads film Stop Making Sense (1984) through the sorely underrated Robyn Hitchcock curio Storefront Hitchcock (1998), his three lovely films on Neil Young, to one of his final projects, the JT Netflix spectacular Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids (2016).That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Demme’s music mania. The soundtracks of his early efforts were the handiwork of a deep fan—who else would’ve loaded up a road comedy like Melvin & Howard (1980) with Crazy Horse, Faron Young, Eddy Arnold, and the Sir Douglas Quintet? For Something Wild (1986), he lived up to the film’s title with a brilliant hodgepodge of killer salsa and dub reggae tracks along with the Fine Young Cannibals and the Feelies. Appearing on screen as a cover band playing a high school reunion, the latter group were one of many faves Demme actually used as actors, a tradition he’d continue with Chris Isaak in Married to the Mob (1988), his pal Hitchcock in The Manchurian Candidate (2004), and TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe in Rachel Getting Married (2008). Don’t forget the many music videos that bear Demme’s imprimatur, too, including “Streets of Philadelphia” by Bruce Springsteen—originally commissioned for his 1993 AIDS drama Philadelphia—and New Order’s haunting “The Perfect Kiss.”It’s no surprise that music often a played a major part in his characters’ lives, too. One such signature moment comes in Demme’s biggest hit, The Silence of the Lambs (1991), when actress Brooke Smith’s ill-fated character drives down the highway hollering along to Tom Petty’s “American Girl,” happily unaware of the nastiness that awaits when she stops to help ol’ Buffalo Bill. (Demme used songs by The Fall, Gang of Four, and Wires Colin Newman to enhance the horrors to come.) Demme evidently loved the Petty classic so much, he put it in the repertoire of Meryl Streep’s Chrissie Hynde-like rocker character in the 2015 comedy Ricki and the Flash. That’s why both versions deserve pride of place in this tribute to a man who may have loved music even more than he did movies.

Woolworms third album, Awe, is coming out on Mint Records on November 8th, 2019. To hype the first single, Hold the Bow, the band put together a playlist of music that inspired the song and the album. The playlist covers brand new local bands from Vancouver, pals that the band has met across North America on tour, Mint Records label-mates and heroes and serves as a glimpse into the bands world.

Hailing from New Orleans but residing in San Antonio, The Holy Knives ( comprised of brothers Kyle and Kody Valentine) mix rock aesthetics with desert psychedelics, resulting in their twangy and moody, Western and modern 2018 debut EP Ritual Bloom. To learn more about what influences their soundscape, Kyle and Kody made us a playlist exploring that very notion. Read about their selections below and go right here to listen.Says the band of their mix: "This collection of songs has been an undercurrent in both the writing of our EP Ritual Bloom and our forthcoming album. Each of these pieces holds a unique place in our ears’ hearts, and all of them in their own way had a place in shaping the emotions and soundscapes of the music we have been fortunate to create this year. Some of these songs accompanied us on the road, while others kept us inspired during our writing time. We hope that you can hear how these songs have played a part in making our music what it is, as well as discover something new to inspire you."

After over a decade together, Chilean duo Ives Sepúlveda and Manuel Parra explore the murky waters of psych rock with an increasingly open mind as The Holydrug Couple—and the deeper they dive, the more confident they sound. Their woozy landscapes echo the dreamy melancholia of Tame Impala or the nostalgic grooviness of Ariel Pink, but underneath it all is a foundation built on decades of left-field pop and electronic music. Their fifth studio album, 2018’s Hyper Super Mega, pushes some of those influences to the surface, and to help us navigate it all, the duo put together a complementary playlist—one that proves putting Ace of Base between Happy Mondays and Primal Scream makes total sense.Says Ives Sepúlveda of The Holydrug Couple: “The playlist is based around our album Hyper Super Mega. It surrounds some direct influences and some indirect influences that I noticed after finishing the album. Its music that I like, and it has influenced me sonically, lyrically, and compositionally. The name of the playlist—it has to be with the name of the album, mixed with Spanish words. ‘Lista’ means ‘playlist’ but also means ‘ready.’ ‘Meta’ is some sort of synonym of ‘hyper,’ and, you know, ‘mundo’ means ‘world.’”

Denizens of Düsseldorfs Salon des Amateurs have long known that Lena Willikens is one of the most spellbinding DJs working today, boasting crates deeper and stranger than just about any other selector out there. For an unusual collaboration between Resident Advisor and Sonos, Willikens hosted a home-listening session in which she dug through the deepest corners of her collection and talked about her picks; this playlist, originally published on Apple Music, covers the portion of her selection that currently exists on streaming services. Chances are, you wont have heard most of it—and chances are, most of itll flip your lid. Taking in Krautrock, dank ambient, Belgian avant-rock, Middle Eastern fusion, vintage synth experiments, coldwave revivalism, and more, its a seriously psychedelic selection—just the kind of thing to keep on hand if youre planning to spike the punch at your own dinner party.

Subscribe to the Spotify playlist here.Honeyblood, whose sophomore album Babes Never Die was released on FatCat, are the archetypal Scottish indie band: exquisitely simple songs, hooks so clever it’s absurd, and quirky charm out the wazoo. Nearly every great band — and there are many — that the Scots have given us share these four qualities, while at the same time carving out their own unique niche. Where Belle & Sebastian craft hushed chamber pop perfect for sad-eyed art school dropouts, The Jesus and Mary Chain smother teenage symphonies to god in walls of seething fuzz. Mogwai weave lush, undulating hypnotics rooted in post-rock, while CHVRCHES veer into synth-pop polished enough for big time chart action. On top of all this, Scotland has churned out some of the best jangle pop, twee, and noise pop this side of New Zealand. That first Primal Scream album, the one before Bobby Gillespie and crew discovered acid house and ecstasy, is beyond dreamy. Then there’s the Fire Engines, spazzy, Edinburgh-bred art punks from the early ’80s who were pivotal in establishing Scotland’s very first DIY scene.