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New Music Friday: It's Ava Max vs Floss in the Kings & Queens showdown

Notes on this week's new releases:

  • Dual-barnetted pop warbler Ava Max's new single Kings & Queens blends self-worth imagery with a reference to decap­it­a­tion and does so with all the subtlety of a tractor. Obviously, it's brilliant. We abso­lutely need popstars like this around. RedOne joins Cirkut on pro­duc­tion and you'd think between them they'd know that if drums drop out for a song's chorus the final chorus needs to have drums in but, on the other hand, LOOK AT THE ARTWORK.
  • From an artist with 27m monthly Spotify listeners to an artist with precisely zero: brand new artist Floss releases her debut single today and it's called, er, Kings & Queens. Floss sent her self-released, Lana-inspired track over a few weeks ago and I made a note to feature it on release day because it's something pretty special, right? In her email, Floss wrote: "My debut release is about two indi­vidu­als lifting each other up. When things are really great between them, they believe they can achieve anything. When I began to write this song what came to mind was Kings & Queens, all the strength and power of royalty, but no riches required.”
  • Melbourne-based artist Zoe A'dore isn't exactly rushing things — she's released one song a year for the last three years — but when those songs are as great as Innocent I think we'd all accept the quality over quantity approach.
  • This new Nimmo song is v good, well done Nimmo.
  • Fletcher's slow and steady rise to 4m monthly listeners is a very This Is How Things Work Now pop story: it's half a decade since her first release, yet she's still in 'emerging artist' territory, AND YET there's still a decent amount of momentum to what she's doing, par­tic­u­larly as the new single Forever feels like a real step up. She's playing at London's Shepherds Bush Empire at the end of this month. (Although, in all like­li­hood, she's not, but maybe see if you can make it to whenever the res­ched­uled date might be.)
  • Rita Ora is placed quite low on this week's playlist due solely to the abso­lutely cata­strophic typo­graphy on the How To Be Lonely artwork.
  • Liar Liar return this week. Their last song, Bad For Each Other, was on the Popjustice Big Hit Energy playlist for AGES, and new one Better Off is a worthy successor.
  • Shawn Wasabi: still brilliant.