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The Briefing

New Music Friday: Sälen's 'Heartbreak Diet', Ariana and John Legend warbling, and the songs in between

Nothing from Lorde, maybe next week

Song of the week:
Sälen — 'Heartbreak Diet'
Near the bottom of this week's playlist you'll find various artists — Phoebe Ryan, Galavant, Nabiha, Ea Kaya, and those are just the ones we've included — clinging to the pre­vail­ing sound of New Music Friday. You can under­stand why people are trying really hard to sound inverted-commas-relevant: there are careers and live­li­hoods at risk here. But still. In contrast Sälen's latest release finds them making fresh-sounding elec­tronic pop that's also relaxed, breezy and com­fort­able in its own space. The inter­est­ing thing here 1 is that if you listen back, that 'Diseasey' song Sälen released last May actually did have hints of a partially tropical, Spotify-friendly sound, but the band have moved further away from that with each release, while lots of other artists have drifted aimlessly in the opposite direction.

Wrong of the week:
Ariana Grande and John Legend — 'Beauty And The Beast'
Bad news everyone, we regret to inform you that this song has always been abso­lutely terrible and what it def­in­itely did not need in 2017 or in any other year was to be turned into an over­singing com­pet­i­tion with pro­duc­tion so bad that it's not just lift music, it's music you'd expect to find in the lifts at the factory where they make lifts.

Additional notes:

  • Sälen's song might benefit from being relaxed but the same cannot be said for Betty Who's latest tune 'Some Kinda Wonderful' which really pulls out all the stops but is quite a 'jolly romp' non­ethe­less.
  • Charli XCX's 'VIP mix' of 'After The Afterparty', featuring Raye, Rita Ora and Stefflon Don, really is quite something. We like the fact that you can literally hear the joins (at 1:10).
  • The Mosimann and Joe Cleere track, 'Never Let You Go', starts off unre­mark­ably, gets inter­est­ing at the 0:23 mark, then at 0:39 goes com­pletely off its tits.
  • Persistently spec­tac­u­lar singer song­writer Moto Boy has teamed up with Nina Out Of The Cardigans for a song that deserves a lot of attention. "I'm dead for seconds when I look at you" — what a lyric.
  • Muna's album is out today. It's a good album that is nice to listen to. It contains songs with begin­nings, middles and ends. There is singing on the album — but there are instru­ments too.

Subscribe to Popjustice's rotating New Music Friday Spotify playlist here

  1. Warning: this is not really very inter­est­ing↩

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