Avec Sans are Alice and Jack, and they’re one of our favourite newish bands. We first got into them last year and like a lot of the best pop things ever they make smart, straightforward electronic pop with proper choruses, good lyrics and a lady (that’s Alice) doing the singing. They’re a bit like a two-person version of CHVRCHES with better songs.

‘The Sans’ have just premiered their new video, for a tune called ‘Hold On’, over on Notion and now here it is on Popjustice.

“‘Hold On”s weightless synth-pop is clear-cut in its intentions: to captivate and intrigue with equal measure,” say Notion. “What’s more, it succeeds stunningly.” Very true, and very useful too because it means we don’t have to faff around figuring out how to discuss the song and can, instead, spend the time embedding other examples of Avec Sans’ amazingness.

LIKE THIS ONE. (Which is called ‘The Answer’.)

AND THIS ONE. (Which is called ‘Heartbreak Hi’, quite a good name for a pop song when you think about it.) (By which we mean it’s a play on rubbish 90s TV series Heartbreak High but also works in the context of the song’s “hello heartbreak, hi” lyrics.)

AND THIS ONE. (Which is a cover of a Bon Iver song but let’s just gloss over that for the time being.)

So to sum up, what you have just head are four very good songs from a very promising new act. Would you like to hear some more? They have a SoundCloud where you can download some stuff. And a Facebook where you can also download some stuff. And a Twitter where they mainly just plug stuff they’re doing but not to worry.

It is, and let’s not beat around the bush here, a complete racket.

We suppose you could say this is more ‘Icona Rock’ than ‘Icona Pop’ ahahahaha.

(You can get a download at www.spinwires.com if you like.)

We don’t feature video teasers that much because, frankly, everyone’s far too busy for that sort of thing, but here’s one that flags up the forthcoming release of a song we really like – ‘Pouring Rain’ by a chap named David Stewart.

We first featured David just over a year ago when he had a song called ‘Lay Down On The Bonnet’; his music had been sent our way by Example, and Example knew about it because David was the guitarist in his touring band. Over the intervening months David’s given his sound a bit of a shake-up and it’s all quite smart and shimmery with a big pop chorus and hints of the sort of thing you would probably have heard if, in the mid-to-late-80s, you’d turned on a US radio station and spun the dial until something amazing popped up.

Anyway here’s the afore-mentioned teaser, you don’t hear the whole song but you get the general idea.

The full video’s appearing sooner rather than later and the single’s out later in the year. There might one day be further info over at Sundreamcity.com but for the time being it’s just an email address and a picture of some palm trees. Still, everyone likes a palm tree, right?

Details are pretty sketchy but, basically:

• It’s a video for ‘U Should Know Better’.
• That’s ‘U Should Know Better’ as in the one off ‘Body Talk Pt 2′, which came out three years ago. (?!)
• Don’t get excited about this being a video that cleverly leads into the unveiling of a new album campaign because we asked about that and there’s no new Robyn album due this year. :(
• But apparently it exists now because “the treatment is so good, it’ll make sense once you see it. It’s a really fun video, lots of juxtaposition and things not being quite what they seem”.

But what can we actually deduce from this one frame?

Let’s have a look.

1. Criminal intent?

FBI Agent Robyn Sanseverino was a character in various episodes of The Sopranos. She was played by actress Karen Young, who also appeared in Jaws: The Revenge. Is Robyn a shark?

2. Neneh of dem?

Both these Neneh Cherry posters are from around 1989. Is this video set in the late-80s? Is Robyn hinting at a new musical direction? Is the ‘Raw Like Sushi’ sealife reference yet another clue that Robyn could in fact be a shark?

3. Cushion burn girl?

Two red cushions and a stuffed monkey. Or, as we know them in the UK, Scouting For Girls.

4. In my eyes (and mouth)?

This red picture is a face of some sort. Does Robyn have a face? (Yes.)

5. Who’s that girl?

It’s probably Robyn, let’s be honest.

6. Electric?

This is an old-fashioned Mac from many years ago. But not as many years ago as Neneh Cherry. Is the room in which ‘Robyn’ finds herself somehow existing in two different temporal realities?

Hang on – enhance.

Pan right and pull back. Stop. Enhance 34-36.

Wait a minute. Enhance 15-23.

Give us a hard copy right there.

How pointless does The Voice have to be before someone takes it off air?

Let’s have a look at three different elements of this show’s completely useless existence.

Pointless Thing 1: It doesn’t launch stars

The idea that this show is somehow ‘giving the people what they want’ in the face of crash-bang-wallop Simon Cowell-type shows falls flat when you consider what little impact any its stars have made on the charts. Last year’s winner missing the Top 100 with her album is just the tip of the iceberg.

We suspect a lot of this is down to Universal, who have the questionable pleasure of releasing music by The Voice’s contestants, knowing full well that they’ve been dealt a real sack of shit with this one, and therefore holding back on putting too much effort into marketing the artists. But still, if they thought there was a superstar here, they’d pull out all the stops.

And yes, obviously, there’s always a disconnect between the people who watch a telly show and the people who then buy records, but there would surely need to be some sort of breakout star to make this show in some way relevant?

Perhaps this is the problem with a show whose whole premise is that star quality is irrelevant.

But at least it’s good TV, right? At least people are watching.

Pointless Thing 2: People aren’t watching

You’d think the lowest ratings ever would be a pretty good reason to have a good look at this show’s future. But no. It’s full steam ahead with the third season. We get that the BBC has a different set of priorities when you compare it to ITV, but this is the sort of show that is supposed to get decent viewing figures, and it’s just not working.

Has there ever been ‘event television’ so easy to completely ignore as The Voice? Even when Big Brother moved to Channel 5 and most of the tabloids and celebrity mags stopped writing about it you still felt that you might be missing out on something, even if it was something small, when you didn’t watch it. And if you were interested in popular culture you felt, a bit, as if even though the show itself might not have been essential viewing any more, it was still important to at least stick your toe in every now and again, because some of the people who were on the show would probably be popping up on panel shows in the coming months.

But The Voice is so easy not to watch. Think about the chatter during the week, in the media, across playgrounds, in close proximity to office water coolers. There is none. It’s as if this programme is not actually happening.

Even when it’s on TV, you look at Twitter and the most you’re likely to see is people taking the piss out of the coaches. Nobody seems bothered who wins or who loses. Nobody is engaging with this show. They’re shouting over the top of it. It is not part of people’s lives.

Pointless Thing 3: Even the singer from The Script has now finally admitted that the entire premise of the show, the one thing that supposedly separates it from other similar shows, is 95% bollocks

At least this show doesn’t rely on sob stories, right? Well not really. But the coaches, at least they’re not scripted, right? Oh dear. And at least, unlike The X Factor, the show is structured so that the best artist will win, right? Er…

Well it gets better/worse. Today, the singer from The Script is in The Sun saying these words:

“There are some amazing singers on the show. But although they have a great skill, that’s the tip of the iceberg. It’s about how well-rounded they are. We only get to sing for about 5% of our careers. The rest of it is how you conduct yourself, your plans.”

So it’s not ‘all about the voice’.

It’s 5% about the voice.

Well done everyone.

‘Ghosts’ is an ambitious, intricate and elegant album that always seemed to exist in its own world, but the melodies draped across each track are frequently as big, infectious and expertly crafted as anything you’d find in the Top 10 in 2007, 2013 or any of the years in between.

Nobody ever really needs an excuse to listen to an album as incredible as this but if you’re looking for one today it’s Siobhan’s birthday.

You can listen to the whole album in the Spotify playlist below; we’ve put ‘Medevac’ at the start because it’s the best song on the album and that’s how tracklists should work, right?

Right.

What an album.

This was the winner.

Quite good, right? Well done, Olly Farrell.

And some of the other entries included…

Tegan & Sara by Abbey:

Tegan & Sara by ‘Matt’:

Tegan & Sara by Mike:

Tegan & Sara by Ed:

Tegan & Sara by Lily:

Tegan & Sara by Malcolm:

And finally, Tegan & Sara by Will:

We’re pretty sure we made the right decision with Olly’s entry.

Any clues in her single artwork?

Any clues on her website?

Any clues AT ALL in her Instagram-effected-to-buggery video?

Come on there must be something?

Anything at ALL??

SOMEONE MUST KNOW?!!

It’s not every day we get excited about a new girlband – it’s more like every two to three days – but new RCA four-piece Neon Jungle are just a little bit special.

They are (left to right in the picture above) Jess, Asami, Shereen and Amira, they’re from various parts of the UK, and the experience of being in a room with them feels a bit like what people always used to bang on about when they described being taken hostage by the Spice Girls. In a nutshell, they are ‘quite a handful’ but also ‘quite good’.

You may recognise them from the ‘Here’s your next favourite girlband’ post we published in April, which included this Vine of the band performing at a Sony pissup.

That chap in the red cap doesn’t look very impressed, does he? Well that chap in the red cap is a fuckwit because Neon Jungle are AMAZING X100, and their first single, ‘Trouble’, is one of the smartest and most unusual debut singles in recent girlband history.

It’s written and produced by two Popjustice favourites Anita Blay (ie CocknBullKid) and Ben Berry (ie Fear Of Tigers) and like the recent Big Song from Megan & Liz it’s not exactly unlike Icona Pop’s ‘I Love It’. (We think a lot of songs this year will use that tune as a jumping-off point.) But rather than being a cupcakes-and-rainbows version of ‘I Love it’ softened up for a major label girlband, the lyrics, production and overall hysteria of the tune feel even harder. It’s fresh and fiercely electronic without being ‘EDM’, with a chorus of “I don’t look for trouble but trouble looks for me, and it’s been waiting around corners since I was 17″. It’s basically mental.

• There’s rapping!
• There’s shouting!
• There’s swearing!
• There’s banging!

Here’s another clip of them doing it live, at last month’s Future Hits Live event.

“Hey hey” indeed.

Want to see Neon Jungle moving around a bit more? Here they are in the studio.

The best thing about Neon Jungle is that they don’t feel like the sort of band who’ve been invented as an easy copy of something that’s already in the charts, but nor do they seem like  a straightforward reaction against what’s out there.

Obviously they’re stage-managed to a certain degree – the best girlbands always are – and ‘Trouble’ is about as subtle as Christopher Maloney in a spraytan booth when it comes to positioning them as the sort of girlband your parents might be a bit iffy about, but being with them and listening to their music and seeing them dick around on Twitter and Instagram it all feels quite instinctive and spontaneous, meaning that the band feels fun and reckless in a way Little Mix never will.

ALSO: There’s no endless dicking around with ‘limited releases’ and ‘buzz singles’ and all that sort of endless balls-free, fence-sitting tastemaking shit that bands like WooWoos or Kitchen Party or whatever they’re calling themselves today get bogged down with. Just a day one, straight-out-of-the-traps, like-it-or-fuck-off pop banger.

Basically we love this band and their music is really good. THE END.

Further reading

» Neon Jungle on Soundcloud (there’s nothing there yet)
» Neon Jungle’s official site (there’s nothing there yet)
» Neon Jungle’s Twitter
» Neon Jungle on YouTube (there’s nothing there yet)
» Neon Jungle on Facebook (there’s nothing there yet)
» Jess on Twitter
» Asami on Twitter
» Shereen on Twitter
» Amira on Twitter

Here’s a picture Dermot O’Leary tweeted earlier today. It’s a picture of four of this year’s X Factor judges. But we all know that nothing about The X Factor is ever released without having gone through a million layers of scrutiny from the show’s publicists, and that nothing ‘accidental’ really ever is an accident. So what’s going on in this photo – and what does it really mean?

1. Apples.

LOTS OF APPLES. This is the year of apples on The X Factor. What does it mean? Will there be an ‘apple week’ in the live finals? Think of the running order!

Or maybe it’s a bluff, like Big Brother’s recent ‘Eye Lie’. Perhaps there will be no apples at all. But why exclude apples, when they now accept managed artists and contestants who play guitar? Are apples the last taboo?

2. Hair

Sharon’s hair is both REDDISH and UP – as opposed to BLONDEISH and DOWN – signifying that she is starting the series as that ‘no-nonsense straight-talking opinionated’ (rude) hellraiser that we all know and, well, that we all know. Naturally this haircut will dramatically change during the live shows following a vote-off in which Sharon is required to make a difficult decision that goes down extremely badly with viewers. By the following Saturday, she’ll be soft and lovely.

3. Taking sides

It’s Louis and Sharon vs Gary and Nicole, as Dermot watches on…

4. Red carpets

During the Battle of Trafalgar, Lord Nelson insisted that the decks of HMS Victory were painted red, so that the crew wouldn’t notice all the blood that was being shed. We’d expect that something similar has happened here.

5. TV fakery

There’s nothing in those mugs, they’re just props. The undiluted gin in Nicole’s glass is real, though.

6. That’s it

That’s it.