Never Coming Home
By Hilltop Hoods featuring Six60
Warning: This week’s playlist starts off at the gym, heads to the club, then winds up at home, lying on the couch, slightly glum. First up is this collaboration between the veteran Australian hip-hop outfit and NZ market leader Six60 on a pumped-up track that for some, could save a lot of money on personal trainers. There’s an MMA-themed video, which is apt for a song on which the voice of Six60’s Matiu Walters is definitely supplying the right hook. – Russell Baillie
Duog Dala
by Estère, Fancy Fingers, Winyo
Cameroonian-Kiwi producer-songwriter Estère is now based in London, using it as a base to tour to Africa and work on a series of Afro House singles in the lead-up to an eventual album. This infectious head-nodder is the first, a collaboration with Kenyan vocalists Fancy Fingers and Winyo and employing a new bit of kit, an “Orchid” chord-generating synthesizer developed by Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker. The track was recorded during invite-only London studio sessions held by the keyboard’s makers. Good use of a junket, that. – Russell Baillie
I’m Lucy Lawless
by Alphabethead
Producer, turntable artist and former member of The Unseeing Hand and Bad Taste, David Morrison is also a busy collaborator (Death and the Maiden, left-field jazz groups, Home Brew).
Here, with a sample of the Xena actress saying, “I’m Lucy Lawless”, scratchy beats and disruptive sounds he shares the first hints of his debut electronica album My Name is David (after six previous albums as Alphabethead) due later in the year. – Graham Reid
Together
by David Guetta, Hypaton, Bonnie Tyler
Primed for ecstatic moments in his Ibiza mega-club, this dancefloor thumper doesn’t have much individual character beyond the very obvious beat. The most remarkable thing about it is that Bonnie Tyler re-recorded her vocal for Total Eclipse of the Heart to be sampled. If that’s true then the 74-year-old has still got it, 43 years on from that hit. – Graham Reid
Heatstroke
by Aidan Fine, Yamikani
Another wacky gem by Fine, the Auckland pop magpie showing a production style that makes a virtue of how many ideas he can pack into one song. In this case, that includes a cameo vocal from London-based singer Yamikani and an infectiously busy bassline. – Russell Baillie
Mangetout
by Wet Leg
Wet Leg’s sophomore album Moisturizer is just out and following the previous singles Catch These Fists and Davina McCall, Mangetout is another punchy, rudely funny, kiss-off blast of British indie from the Grammy wining band fronted by the irrepressible Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers. Altogether now: “Good God, she took a break/ Made a mistake/ when she met Trevor….” – Russell Baillie
Hold On You
by merci, mercy
Written some years ago apparently, but this cleverly constructed and thoroughly enjoyable song about sensual yearning – and reservations about the popular boy in question -- sounds like it’s mining much earlier traditions of New Wave, synth pop and with a keyboard part out of the early 1970s. It’s more concise pop from Australian teenager Mercedes Thorne which suggests her Don’t Take It To Heart debut album (out August 29) after a bunch of interesting singles is going to be well worth hearing. – Graham Reid
All Night All Day
by Big Thief
This New York-based Grammy-nominated alt-folk outfit fronted by Adrianne Lenker (whose solo album last year Bright Future is worth finding) have worked very diverse territory from folksy Velvet Underground and stoner folk-rock to Dylanesque digressions and folk-pop. Always worth hearing, and this with an enticing and lazy vocal by Lenker, lyrics about the ambiguities of love and gently rolling rhythm is another tasty advance notice of the new album Double Infinity due September 5. – Graham Reid
Myths
by Rhian Sheehan and Arli Liberman
Not your standard “single”, this latest example of the hook-up between two of this country’s most successful soundtrack composers (who also worked in what we might call “rock culture”) is a wrap-around piece of post-rock which wouldn’t go amiss in an Alien soundtrack. Sheehan describes it as “plunging into the heart of the sun, an immersive descent into its searing intensity and boundless energy” and we wouldn’t argue with that. It’s a big sound and the opening track on their forthcoming album Traces due September 12. Check their previous Sentio and Immaru for similar but different cinematic atmospherics. – Graham Reid
Eternal
by Eydis Evensen and Ari Bragi Karason
And another from our Not Your Standard Single department, this by Icelandic pianist and post-classical composer Evensen which was written in depths of their winter. So there’s a heavy melancholy and loneliness in the trumpet sound of Karason (Iceland’s fastest man over 100 metres, incidentally). Romantic gloom from endless nights and another single from her forthcoming Oceanic Mirror album (October 10) which will be a meditative rather than cheery affair we’re guessing. – Graham Reid
Ysaÿe, Sonata for Solo Violin, Op.27, No.2 ‘Jacques Thibaud’, Mvt 1: ‘Obsession’.
By Hilary Hahn, violin
It’s an outrageous swipe, the opening to Eugène Ysaÿe’s Sonata No.2 for Solo Violin. At least he admits it: the first movement is subtitled ‘Obsession’, and he’s referring not to an amour but to Bach, whose Prelude to Partita No.3 the Frenchman is quoting. But where Bach’s straight lines and mathematical precision deconstruct what music can do if you push it to its natural limits, Ysaÿe – a great violinist, who dedicated his sonata to Jacques Thibaud, another great violinist – is pushing the instrument as far as it will go. Show off. – Richard Betts
