New Music Friday: Wake up, Fanny Andersen's back

Fanny Andersen made some waves a few years ago with a song called Kids then went rel­at­ively quiet for a couple of years, but her new release Wake Up is a really huge comeback single.

I spoke to Fanny on Zoom yesterday to find out what's been going on in her life, because the lyrics of Wake Up suggest the answer to that is 'quite a lot'. She said that she wrote the song during dark times; when the line "head's in a limbo" came to her she didn't know exactly what limbo meant, but after Googling it she realised it made total sense in terms of how she felt at that moment: somewhere between being alive and, well, not. An over­whelm­ing sense of nothingness. 

Fanny added that she wanted the song to sound upbeat because she knows most people don't listen to lyrics properly and she didn't want her friends to hear it and imme­di­ately phone her asking what was wrong. Which feeds into the "lying if I said I was fine" line — at the time Fanny was doing a lot of that, going out and getting smashed all the time ("not recom­men­ded") before she even­tu­ally con­fron­ted what was happening, stopped running from herself, "saw a shrink" and got back on top of things. 

There's an EP on its way; three tracks are in place with a fourth TBC, although she's written hundreds of songs so there's no shortage of options. If you're wondering why the Zoom chat has resulted in about one (1) direct quote that's because the con­ver­sa­tion didn't record properly and I will be taking no further questions on the matter at this time. 

Notes on this week's other new releases:

• Camden Cox's new one is a massive raveathon that goes off precisely when you want it to and to the precise degree that you need it to.
• The Shellback-produced Jonas Brothers / Karol G single is a nailed-on summer smash.
• The best song on the Charli XCX lockdown album is Enemy and that's the end of the matter. 
• HURTS RETURN today with Voices. The world's always better with new Hurts in it. (Also they've done some excellent social media teasing over the last week of so.) 
• Loryn released a couple of great singles last year and her first of 2020, No Lines, is pretty brilliant too. 
• The worst single of the week is the Alok remix of a Rolling Stones song (??) called Ghost Town. To be honest the mix is actually quite good but it is VERY TikTok-friendly and 2020's been bad enough already without The Rolling Stones going viral on TikTok.
• (If you really must insist on listening to music by people over the age of 35, give the new Sparks one a spin.)