Back in February, Taylor Swift wrote for Elle about the importance of specificity in pop songs: “We like being confided in and hearing someone say, ‘This is what I went through’ as proof to us that we can get through our own struggles,” she declared. Strangely, then, the first songs from her forthcoming seventh album Lover didn’t really do that – ME! and You Need to Calm Down had anthemic, outward-facing intentions, celebrating weirdness and telling bigots to wind it in. But The Archer does: looking deeply inwards, it might be the most personal and self-lacerating song Swift has ever released. She sounds wearied by her self-professed immaturity (“I never grew up / It’s getting so old”) and self-defeatist tendencies (“I cut off my nose just to spite my face / Then I hate my reflection for years and years”), conflicted by her roles as predator and victim. It’s not a proper single – there’s no headline-grabbing video – and the production is low-key, just a blooming Chromatics-y synth glow that builds but never breaks, so it’s had a quieter reception than Lover’s first two singles. But it’s a small, sincere marvel. LS
Kano was one of the great breakthroughs of grime’s first wave with tracks like P’s and Q’s, and showed major ambition with albums that also straddled R&B, jungle and hip-hop. Like fellow originators Skepta and Wiley, he too had a fallow period – 2010 flop Method to the Madnesss – before hurtling back with renewed vigour, for 2016’s Made in the Manor, his best album yet. A pair of new tracks suggest the follow-up could be even better. A little like Strangers from his previous album, Trouble uses piano and sparse drums, giving Kano space to plead for an end to cyclical gang violence. “You ever seen a mother’s tears run down Gucci glasses?”, he asks, criticising both the violence itself and the peacocking consumerism that partly powers it in a single line. But he encourages rather than scolds, and gives short shrift to politicians who would do the latter: “These gunshots never reach your town”. The result is a moving, charismatic UK twist on the gospel rap of Kanye West and Chance the Rapper. BBT
There’s a great tradition of meta songs, the kind where musicians sing about an imagined song that becomes real through their writing. Norwegian pop experimentalist Jenny Hval is great at this sort of conceptual summoning – and somehow, in Ashes to Ashes, she doesn’t just make a dreamed song real, but turns it into a chilling meditation on mortality and the fragile boundaries between permanence and transience. A friend dreams about burying someone’s ashes then having a cigarette; Hval dreams about digging her own grave and it being like playing an instrument; about sexual fantasy as a form of suffocation. That would all be hard work if not for how light Ashes to Ashes is, a pulsing, clubbing pop gem that, like her theme, seems to hover between reality and reverie. LS
The production of Charli XCX and Christine and the Queens’ killer collaboration – courtesy of PC Music’s AG Cook, and someone called Ö – sounds like fists battering against a locked door, a frenzied plea for escape. Both Charli and Chris have talked about battling the closed-minded limitations of the industry; by coming together, they liberate each other and push pop further into the future. In Gone, they reject an indifferent, fickle scene (“pour me one more / watch the ice melt in my fist” might be Charli’s best lyric yet) and then forge their own private language. What does it mean to “keep when the water runs”? I don’t know, but it’s the kind of idiosyncratic linguistic quirk that pop magic is made from. That “keep” repeats and fragments through the rest of the song, a battering ram of persistence and self-possession that drives their liberation home (a feat made clearer in the superb video, where Chris frees Charli from bondage and they have a majestic dance-off on top of a car in the rain). LS
This startlingly beautiful 10-piece K-pop boyband is actually one of four subsets of an overall 21-member group, NCT, and while it’s easy to be cynical about the reasoning underpinning this setup – four lots of merch to flog to obsessive fans! – it’s much harder to resist the charms of new single Highway to Heaven. The English-language lyrics rather make you long for Korean, particularly the rapping (“Skrrt, pull up in the coupe, beep-beep”), but the spectacular chorus and soft-rock verses make this a kind of Boys of Summer 2019. Also of note in K-pop this month is Baekhyun, whose versatile voice winds jazzily through the snapping rap production on mini-album City Lights. BBT
Sam Smith and Max Martin bounce back from the precipice of irrelevance with this sublime “I’m not angry, just disappointed” club heartbreaker, all trap beats and dramatic bassy slurs. Smith’s lover is a liar who’s making him crazy. He swears he’ll leave, no longer able to recognise himself, but not entirely cheated of his optimism: “I’m hoping that my love will keep you up tonight,” he says, clinging on to the promise that there’s nobility in devotion. Critics have whispered about Sam Smith in the same breath as George Michael before, but this sophisticated, assured comeback is the first time he’s truly lived up to the comparison. LS
The standout from the latest Africa Express sessions in Johannesburg pairs Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner with Ugandan electro acholi star Otim Alpha, London producer Georgia and South African vocal harmony group Mahotella Queens. Georgia takes the vocal lead, singing with sweet determination about Hilda Tloubatla leaving her township to join the Mahotella Queens in 1960s Johannesburg, the city hustle and bustle reflected in Alpha’s darkly glittering, pumping production. LS
Anchored by a remarkable drummer, this seven-piece British post-punk band may only have released one song so far but are playing the kind of thrilling gigs it takes others months of touring to work up to. Their second release, the nine-minute Sunglasses, sets out their stall: skronky brass and a Tortoise-ish groove shift up a gear to hurtle into a wildly strident climax. Throughout, vocalist Isaac Wood has a series of vivid visions: a confrontation with privilege and conservatism brought on by his mum juicing watermelons in a Nutribullet; feeling invincible behind a pair of sunglasses on a crowded street; a lover telling him to “fuck me like you mean it” and screaming at him: “Leave Kanye out of this!” Funny, vivid and anthemic. BBT
One of the richest troves in the reissues market in recent years has been gospel music made in the middle of the 20th century. Numero Group’s exceptional three-part Good God! series, Honest Jon’s compilation Christians Catch Hell, Mississippi Records’ Life is a Problem and many others have excavated songs that burn with Christian fervour, the artists’ faith giving their music a certain keen feeling that secular music can never match. Next up is Luaka Bop’s The Time For Peace Is Now, released on 13 September, and this track from it is a truly valuable find: a lo-fi but full-bodied soul backing lifts the tearjerkingly beautiful chorus to the heavens. BBT
The church organ has become an instrument of endless fascination to a set of young, primarily female composers: Kara-Lis Coverdale, Ellen Arkbro, Sarah Davachi, Anna Von Hausswolff and others have all built their work around its stately ambient chords. Stockholm-based US composer Kali Malone has worked with all kinds of digital and analogue drones in the past but for new album The Sacrificial Code she solely uses a church organ, closely miked so as to remove any sense of the building it’s in, and “stripped of gestural adornments and spontaneous expressive impulse”. She uses this austerity to achieve transcendence, zooming into sound at an almost microscopic level: on Rose Wreath Crown (For CW) you can feel the waves of bass vibrating off each other. Her minimalist approach also means that when an emotive chord change arrives, it’s all the more gut-punching. BBT
