Indie

Lancaster, U.K. psych-punk pranksters The Lovely Eggs return on Feb. 23 with their most ambitous album yet, the Dave Fridmann-produced This Is Eggland. Here, they make us a playlist of escapist, space-bound anthems that reinforce the album’s underlying theme——that Britain is rotting to the yolk. “For the last couple of years, it seems like the world has gone fucking mad. On one side of the planet, weve got a bigoted, racist misogynist as president of the most powerful country in the world, and on the other side weve got a little island tearing itself away from Europe to ‘make Britain great again.’ Its division, its separatism, its xenophobia on a global scale. We are eating each other alive, drowning in a sea of capitalism where families who dont have two half-pennies to rub together have got a fucking black Range Rover parked outside their two-up/two-down house on HP. Everyone is competing to live like millionaires. Range Rovers on terraced streets. Council estate girls with Gucci handbags. Pan-fucking-Dora. The middle class are choking on Prosecco. The constant need for more. We are the dog chewing on its bloody arse stump. It is absolutely insane. We feel like we are aliens living on a strange ridiculous planet. So weve made a playlist themed around outer space. These days, this is where feel most at home. Away from it all. On our own Planet Oeuf."——Holly Ross and David Blackwell, a.k.a. The Lovely Eggs

For all his antics, gags, and occasional pantslessness, Mac DeMarco has always been a sensitive soul. Of course, this isn’t news to anyone who’s ventured past his wild-goofball stage persona and dived into the dreamily intimate and playfully askew pop songs that fill all of the Canuck’s releases. DeMarco’s first full-length album in three years, This Old Dog, may be his richest and smoothest to date, showcasing his growing love for vintage synths and his increasing skill in using them to enhance the shine and shimmer of his deceptively casual melodies.The candor he displays in many new songs—in which he reflects on a fraught relationship with his father—is one element that evokes his ‘70s singer/songwriter heroes, a pantheon that includes James Taylor, Paul Simon, and Harry Nilsson. Yet the music’s effervescence and spirit of playfulness demonstrate his deep devotion to mavericks like Jonathan Richman and Yellow Magic Orchestra just as clearly. All the while, he inches closer to his long-stated ambition to make an album as strong as his favorites, with Neil Young’s Harvest and John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band as a couple he often cites.Any way you slice it, This Old Dog is a shockingly mature effort for a guy who remains famous for interrupting a gig to stick a drumstick up his butt. Several key Mac tracks show how he got here, along with songs by the icons who inspired him and some from friends and collaborators like Ariel Pink and Walter TV.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Phil Spector may be a homicidal madman with a skyscraping afro, yet he also is responsible for creating one of pop’s most iconic production styles: the wall of sound. Simple in effect yet complex in process, it entails the deliciously gratuitous spilling and layering of instruments (forget doubling — think tripling) until no single one is distinguishable from any other. The results are titanic, textural, and stunningly atmospheric pop songs that feel as though they’ve been bestowed upon mere mortals by the angels. Critics tend to believe that Spector’s wall reached it highest point on (Ike and) Tina Turner’s 1966 masterwork River Deep — Mountain High, but don’t overlook Dion’s Born to Be With You from 1975; in my opinion, its majestic power is unrivalled. Spector inspired a slew of badasses throughout the ’60s and ’70s. In addition to Beach Boy genius Brian Wilson and a young Bruce Springsteen on Born to Run, soul visionaries Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield erected their own unique walls of sound from the lushest of strings.Like Spector, these artists worked with large ensembles. The same cannot be said of The Byrds, Pink Floyd, and the minimalism-inspired Velvet Underground. Instead of leaning heavily on orchestral instrumentation, these mid-’60s pioneers built walls of sound, oftentimes spacey and reverb-drenched, from the distortion, fuzz, and feedback generally associated with rock-based instrumentation. Though it took several decades for their innovations to coalesce into an identifiable aesthetic, they certainly have influenced a great deal of the shoegaze, noise pop, and dream pop outfits to have emerged since the late ’80s. My Bloody Valentine’s absolutely hulking Loveless record, from 1991, has to be the modern era’s most startling expression of wall of sound tactics, though The Jesus and Mary Chain’s buzzing Psychocandy isn’t far behind. My personal favorite is The Flaming Lips’ Clouds Taste Metallic, which is like the perfect meeting point between Syd Barrett-era Floyd and The Beach Boys at their most psychedelic.

Its possible you havent heard of Matt Holubowski just yet, but this French-Canadian folk artist is making some pretty big waves alongside some artists you might recognize: like The Cures Robert Smith asking him to play Meltdown Fest and Ben Folds bringing him out on his last tour. This self-proclaimed "young man making old music" utilizes the classic guitar-and-voice combo that lends itself to singer-songwriter gold reached by his heroes Leonard Cohen, Elliott Smith and Andrew Bird, and will be releasing his debut LP Solitudes in the US at the end of August.As he prepares to make a splash in the US, though, Holubowski is first being celebrated in his hometown of Montreal at Osheaga, so we asked him to in turn celebrate his hometown with us by putting together a Montreal/ Quebec-centric playlists.Says Matt: "Montréal has got something unique about its musicality. It was partly born out of a deep divide that over time has become its greatest strength, language, one which has permeated the musical scene over the years, but also through its cultural cross between good ol’ Americana and European flavour.Some of these songs and artists have had a great impact on my own writing, and I’ve since had the pleasure and privilege to rub shoulders and collaborate with a couple of them.There’s a certain mysterious vibe and energy to all of these, and I don’t know if the commonality lies in their being Montrealers/Quebecers, or if they just happen to fall within my own palette, but in any case, these are all great for a dreamy voyage into our new old city."Listen above or go right here.

Matt Sharp recently resurfaced with the first piece of new music in three years from his art-pop outfit The Rentals. "Elon Musk Is Making Me Sad" is the lead single from The Rentals upcoming fourth album, which Sharp is working on with Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Flaming Lips producer Dave Fridmann, and a backing choir hes christened The Gentle Assassins. But for his Dowsers playlist, Sharp steps out of The Rentals usual synth-smeared sound world to indulge a more private obsession:"Each song on this playlist is taken from a much larger playlist of my favorite old soul songs. The music has often served as the backdrop and soundtrack to many a hot night at my place in L.A., while having a few friends over to throw one-pound bags of corn, 30 feet in the air, into a six-inch diameter circle."—Matt Sharp

He’s best known as the singer and fleet-fingered acoustic strummer for Bay Area indie-folk favorites The Dodos, but with his new project FAN, Meric Long ventures into the realm of experimental synth-pop. FAN recently released its first single (“Fire” b/w “Disappear”), with a full-length on the way via Polyvinyl; to whet your appetite, he’s compiled this Dowsers playlist of the post-punk icons, jazz legends, and videogame themes that inspired it.

In the 10 years that have passed since Annie Clark first emerged from the Texas woodworks as St. Vincent, her very essence has seemed to undergo a radical transformation. Though such evolution is natural for any artist over the course of a lifetime, it feels especially befitting for a performer such as Clark, whose work has always tugged at the tensions between constructed, elegant beauty and the well of animalistic chaos simmering underneath. She’s gone from a charming, low-key indie starlet to a full-blown art-pop maven, and looking back upon her marvelous catalog now, we can start to see how the hints at what St. Vincent would become were secretly hidden in plain sight all along.From her very first album, Marry Me, Annie Clark seemed to decorate her songs with a Disney-like sense of fantasy and wonder, constructing the kind of delicate, baroque pop that seemed as if it could’ve come out of a doll house. But her guitar work suggested something more contorted, tearing forth from her songs like the chestburster from Alien, and making it clear that despite how fragile her musical creations seemed to be, Clark was concealing something that absolutely needed to be freed.As she continued to release albums like the gossamer Actor and the surreal Strange Mercy, her penchant for discordant riffs, extraterrestrial synth effects, and danceable grooves only grew stronger, but it was her meeting with David Byrne that truly signalled a major shift in her approach. After collaborating together on the funky, horn-laden Love This Giant album, Clark took a little piece of Byrne with her, and her follow-up self-titled release saw her constructing an entirely new persona whose artifice and coldness came with some of the most hard-hitting rhythms she had constructed yet. Having completed the journey from a twee curiosity into a living, Bowie-esque art-celebrity installation, her latest material sees her embracing pop music more than ever before, without losing her taste for folding the provocative into the seemingly innocent.It seems that as time has gone on, Clark has become more and more comfortable with the violent undertones that even her earliest work had motioned towards, urging movement and release over quiet appreciation. With her latest album, MASSEDUCTION, coming down the pipeline, we took the opportunity to take stock of how far Annie Clark has come, and to ready ourselves for whichever version of St. Vincent will emerge from the chrysalis next.

Toronto trio Metz recently dropped their third slab of post-hardcore heaviness and garage-punk pummel, Strange Peace, on Sub Pop Records. For his Dowsers playlist, singer/guitarist Alex Edkins has crafted “a love letter to T.O. and The Hammer”—a.k.a. Toronto and the nearby city of Hamilton, both of which are located along the curved Southern Ontario shoreline known as The Golden Horseshoe. The playlist features “a smattering my hometown favs new and old.”

Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser weren’t so obviously ahead of the curve when the duo’s debut album as MGMT arrived 11 years ago. Maybe that’s because their wild, baffling, possibly culturally insensitive hipster-shaman look on the cover of Oracular Spectacular seemed more suggestive of the “spectacle” component of their cryptic title rather than a reference to the Oracle of Delphi or any other seers of ancient times.Nevertheless, few could’ve known how prescient they turned out to be when it came to heralding the dippy, woozy aesthetic of so much music from this past decade. Likewise, recent singles like the mesmerizing, darkly witty “When You Die” (from their upcoming fourth album, Little Dark Age) arrive into a rather more crowded field of freaky, dreamy pop oddballs than either of them could’ve anticipated back when “Electric Feel” was everywhere in 2007. With equally ubiquitous early singles like “Time to Pretend,” the duo crafted a canny merger of elements that felt modern and retro at once. Along with fellow travelers like Ariel Pink, MGMT popularized a lo-fi take on psychedelia that soon begat terms like “chillwave” and “hypnagogic pop.” Yet they were also remarkably astute about their music’s potential chart appeal——perhaps more so than they would’ve liked, seeing as VanWyngarden and Goldwasser would famously retreat from the spotlight and dive into more willfully obtuse sounds for 2010’s Congratulations and 2013’s MGMT, the pair’s subsequent and far less commercially successful albums.As the original articles were content to return to the fringes, many more artists would come to frolic in the Day-Glo-colored playground they built with Oracular Spectacular. Some——like Foster the People, Passion Pit, and fun.——would have fewer reservations about using these previously subterranean strategies and textures to create ear candy with mass appeal. The likes of Portugal. The Man, Two Door Cinema Club, and Neon Indian felt just as free to get their respective electric feels on. Meanwhile, Tame Impala, Temples, and other retro-renegades would continue their own MGMT-like exercises in temporal displacement, jumbling together ‘60s, ‘80s, and ‘00s aesthetics to create psych-pop that belonged to no age in particular. And there’s been no lack of shimmering, sun-kissed pop slathered in vintage synths and analog effects thanks to Mac DeMarco, who collaborated with VanWyngarden on some thus-far unreleased recordings in 2016. Indeed, there may be a whole new generation of MGMT devotees judging by the off-kilter yet eminently catchy sounds favored by teenage sensations like Cuco, Superorganism, and Cosmo Pyke.So were those two luridly attired loons on the cover of Oracular Spectacular looking into the future all along? It’s impossible to say, but this playlist featuring the many inhabitants of MGMT’s musical universe might’ve made them the envy of Nostradamus.

Whats This Playlist All About?: The psych-pop duo gives us no context beyond the title, so we can only presume this mix of old, obscure tracks is somehow linked to their recent single "When You Die," a barbed and bitter psychedelic journey into permanent darkness.What You Get: An organ- and synth-infused distillation of MGMTs own dark, sardonic fascination with death. Youll float through ancient worlds with buzzing, blipping sounds from minimalist mastermind Terry Riley, Arabic pop star Ahmed Fakroun, and Nigerian electric-organ virtuoso Mamman Sani, then make pit stops through retro-futuristic realms dominated by doomy 80s synth bands.Greatest Discovery: This playlist is full of fascinating finds, but lets go with XEX, an 80s band from New Jersey doing icy, androgynous synth-pop long before the likes of Ladytron could even hold a synth. According to their Bandcamp page, the group could not afford to release their 1981 album xex:change, and thus it sat in obscurity for over three decades.Is This an Appropriate Soundtrack for Your Funeral? Absolutely. Its dark, sometimes nightmarish, and may have your more metaphysically minded loved ones feel like theyre escaping their bodies right alongside you.