Some of our favorite high-energy tracks. Either suitable for a quick run, before going out or for a long drive home. Hope you enjoy!
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."
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.
This week, Hookworms release their long-awaited third album, Microshift (via Domino Records), which, for the Leeds, UK quintet, heralds a major shift from stormy psych-punk to radiant electro-rock. For his Dowsers playlist, the band’s guitarist JW shines a light on his favorite under-the-radar acts. “We’re about to go on tour with a short stint in mainland Europe as well as various UK dates over the next couple of months. Heres a playlist of bands were excited to play with on these dates. As part of the tour, were doing a couple of two-night residencies at The White Hotel in Salford and at our favourite venue and second home the Brudenell Social Club—were curating the line-up for both of these shows, so heres a collection of my favorite songs by those artists. Theres a bonus Virginia Wing track as theyre kindly supporting us on all UK dates—Merida and Chris from Virginia Wing both played on Microshift, too.”
In May 2017, Indiana’s foremost jangly dream-pop outfit, Hoops, released their first proper, studio-recorded album, Routines, after years of putting out music on lo-fi, limited-edition cassettes. Those early releases will be issued on November 10 through Fat Possum as Tapes #1-3 —and while the band were getting all misty-eyed over their home-recording roots, we got them to make us a mix of favorite songs they first encountered on cruddy bargain-bin cassettes.“This is a collection of songs that we really like, most of which we discovered from cassettes found at Goodwills and record shops around where we’re from. This is all stuff that we play in the van and at parties, basically, whenever we get the chance. It’s all pretty representative of where we draw the most influence from when it comes to our own music. We highly recommend these tracks, but also the deeper cuts that come from their respective albums. Cassettes for us have always been a really easy and fun way to discover, listen to, and even put out music over the years.”—Hoops
Though best known for their respective work with dream-pop deities Mazzy Star and My Bloody Valentine, Hope Sandoval and Colm O’Cíosóig have been collaborators in Sandoval’s other band—rootsy psych-soul ensemble The Warm Inventions—since 2001. On the heels of their recent EP, Son of a Lady, the duo have created a playlist for The Dowsers that they’ve named “Significants.” Let them explain: "This playlist is a fine example of all the different personalities that we surround ourselves with for happy and sad times."—Hope Sandoval and Colm O’CíosóigNote: the duo submitted their playlist to The Dowsers via YouTube, and it included a couple of film clips and live TV appearances that can’t be sourced on Spotify. The playlist above includes the original recorded versions of their song selections but, for the full sensory experience, check out their original YouTube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9XyMo8AghUqyjQOycYDzyp-0KYSmVLlw
The ’90s have never sounded better than they do right now—especially for modern-day indie rockers. There’s no shortage of bands banging around these days whose sound suggests formative phases spent soaking up vintage ’90s indie rock. Not that the neo-’90s sound is itself a new thing. As soon as the era was far enough away in the rearview mirror to allow for nostalgia to set in (i.e., the second half of the 2000s), there were already some young artists out there onboarding ’90s alt-rock influences. But more recently, there’s been a bumper crop of bands that betray a soft spot for a time when MTV still played music videos and streaming was just something that happened in a restroom. In this context, the literate, lo-fi approach of Pavement has emerged as a particularly strong strand of the ’90s indie tapestry, and it isn’t hard to hear echoes of their sound in the work of more recent arrivals like Kiwi jr. or Teenage Cool Kids. Cherry Glazerr frontwoman Clementine Creevy seems to have a feeling for the kind of big, dirty guitar riffs that made Pacific Northwestern bands the kings of the alt-rock heap once upon a time. The world-weary, wise-guy angularity of Car Seat Headrest can bring to mind the lurching, loose-limbed attack of Railroad Jerk. And laconic, storytelling types like Nap Eyes stand to prove that there’s still a bright future ahead for those who mourn the passing of Silver Jews main man David Berman. But perhaps the best thing about a face-off between the modern indie bands evoking ’90s forebears and the old-school artists themselves is the fact that in this kind of competition, everybody wins.
It may be that 2019 was the best year for ’90s metal since, well, 1999. Bands from the decade of Judgment Night re-emerged with new creative twists and tweaks: Tool stretched out into polyrhythmic madness, Korn bludgeoned with more extreme and raw despair, Slipknot added a new drummer (Max Weinberg’s kid!) who gave them a new groove, and Rammstein wrote an anti-fascism anthem that caused controversy in Germany (and hit No. 1 there too). Elsewhere, icons of the era returned in unique ways: Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor scored a superhero TV series, Primus’ Les Claypool teamed up with Sean Lennon for some quirky psych rock, and Faith No More’s Mike Patton made an avant-decadent LP with ’70s soundtrack king Jean-Claude Vannier. Finally, the soaring voice of Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington returned for a moment thanks to Lamb of God guitarist Mark Morton, who released a song they recorded together in 2017.
Taking a look at the playlists for my show on Boston’s WZBC might give the more seasoned college-radio listener a bit of déjà vu: They’re filled with bands like Versus, Team Dresch, and Sleater-Kinney, who were at the top of the CMJ charts back in the ’90s. But the records they released in 2019 turned out to be some of the year’s best rock. Versus, whose Ex Nihilo EP and Ex Voto full-length were part of a creative run for leader Richard Baluyut that also included a tour by his pre-Versus outfit Flower and his 2000s band +/-, put out a lot of beautifully thrashy rock; Team Dresch returned with all cylinders blazing and singers Jody Bleyle and Kaia Wilson wailing their hearts out on “Your Hands My Pockets”; and Sleater-Kinney confronted middle age head-on with their examination of finding one’s footing, The Center Won’t Hold.
Italian guitar heroes Uzeda—who have been putting out proggy, riff-heavy music for three-plus decades—released their first record in 13 years, the blistering Quocumque jerceris stabit; Imperial Teen, led by Faith No More multi-instrumentalist Roddy Bottum, kept the weird hooks coming with Now We Are Timeless; and high-concept Californians That Dog capped off a year of reissues with Old LP, their first album since 1997. Juliana Hatfield continued the creative tear she’s been on this decade with two albums: Weird, a collection of hooky, twisty songs that tackle alienation with searing wit, and Juliana Hatfield Sings the Police, her tribute record to the dubby New Wave chart heroes (in the spirit of the salute to Olivia Newton-John she released in 2018). And our playlist finishes with Mary Timony, formerly of the gnarled rockers Helium and currently part of the power trio Ex Hex, paying tribute to her former Autoclave bandmate Christina Billotte via an Ex Hex take on “What Kind of Monster Are You?,” one of the signature songs by Billotte’s ’90s triple threat Slant 6.
