Every week, Consequence’s Songs of the Week roundup spotlights high quality new tracks from the final seven days and analyzes notable releases. Discover our new favorites and extra on our Prime Songs playlist, and for different nice songs from rising artists, try our New Sounds playlist. This week, spiral into the entrancing new FKA twigs.
Avant-garde dance-electronica artist FKA twigs has developed a popularity for fearlessness. Her discography is characterised by some significantly experimental pockets, however together with her newest LP, Eusexua, twigs performs with pop stardom in a extra easy approach than ever earlier than. Pockets of the album recall Madonna; others sign the melodic consolation of figures like Sarah McLachlan, a comparability that will’ve felt like a head-scratcher previous to this challenge. She successfully balances monumental membership bangers with a way of vulnerability; as our personal Paolo Ragusa put it, she’s crying within the membership.
However Eusexua proves that the embrace of pop themes fits twigs, even when she by no means totally settles right into a restrictive style bracket. All through the album, she offsets gentler, extra easy moments with deliberately sharp edges, by no means fairly letting the listener settle. It’s a device employed right here on “Lady Feels Good;” as soon as we’re lulled in by the entrancing beat and totally charmed by the pulsing refrain calling us to the dance ground, issues disintegrate for only a second because the overlay of synths change into atonal and off-beat. As quickly because the impact seems, although, it’s gone — and that sense of security so briefly established is gone, too.
Lyrically, the thesis of the music is easy, however essential, lifting a mirror to this concept of by no means fairly with the ability to settle. “When a lady feels good, it makes the world go ’spherical/ When the night time feels younger, you recognize she feels fairly,” she sings. “Flip your love up loud to maintain the satan down,” she implores, as a result of seizing pleasure and indulging in pleasure can exist as worthy acts of resistance.
Nevertheless it’s these moments the place the musicality is off-kilter that function a reminder that escapism shouldn’t be the place the story ends. “Lady Feels Good” is a name to energy as a lot as it’s a request; particularly, twigs is urging for the needs of girls to be centered, accompanied by the promise that this motion would effectively and actually make the world a greater place. There’s freedom to be discovered on the dance ground, which might then be delivered out to the world in droves.
Earthly delights, the catharsis of a short dance with a stranger, and above all, assurance of our personal autonomy — that’s what actually makes a lady really feel good.
— Mary Siroky
Affiliate Editor
Cardboard — “Wouldn’t Let You Understand”
“Wouldn’t Let You Understand,” the third-ever single from London act Cardboard, faucets into the identical stressed, dirty indie rock that made bands like early Arctic Monkeys so thrilling. The tune carries with it a sure urgency, like in the event that they don’t get all these snare hits and guitar licks in throughout the two-minute runtime one thing horrible may occur. On the identical time, “Wouldn’t Let You Understand” is pure, unadulterated enjoyable — a profitable combo for a punked-up indie band. — J. Krueger
Cheekface — “Development Sux”
America’s ever-prolific native band Cheekface are again as soon as once more with one other wryly cheeky (ha!) indie rock tune that spits within the face of private progress. Overtop a bouncy baseline and an nearly indie sleaze-esque sequenced beat (which the band urges you to not maintain towards them), vocalist/guitarist Greg Katz sings strains like, “For those who’ve at all times hated me, not that a lot has modified” and, “So why not let me be your soy boy.” In different phrases, it’s extraordinarily Cheekface, and thank god for that. — Jonah Krueger