Lucky Number Music

Sydney-based three-piece Middle Kids today release their latest single “Highlands”, which showcases everything that has made them such a formidable force in recent years. The band take the bare-bones of indie-rock (guitar, bass, drums) and elevate their songs with an astonishing and euphoric vocal performance, scorching production and an incomparable pop-sensibility. The result is a song which grabs the listener from the opening bars and doesn’t let go for a thrilling three-and-a-half minutes.

“Highlands” is the band’s second song to be produced by Jonathan Gilmore, who is renowned for his work with The 1975 and Beabadoobee (amongst others). The song follows their recent single “Bootleg Firecracker” which weaved together intricate acoustic melodies and unconventional drum production which set it apart from their previous repertoire and ushered in a new era for the band.

The new single is accompanied by an extraordinary video directed by Toby Morris who took the band to shoot in the New South Wales highlands surrounding Jindabyne. The spectacular beauty of the region is offset by stunt driving, helicopters, horses, motorcycles and the Southern Hemisphere’s largest car-wrecking yard. The visual feast matches the ferocious immediacy of the song.

Lead singer and songwriter Hannah Joy said of the song: “Since I was young, I’ve had this yearning to be free. In this song I used an image of the ‘highlands’ as a euphoric place where I have the space to be me, and you have the space to be you. Part of the imagery comes from my Scottish heritage, which my grandmother was always so proud of. I recorded some big slow piano chords which Tim mangled into the atmospheric hits in the intro.

When we finished the song with Jon Gilmore in the UK, he thought it was important that the song felt punky, like a bunch of teenagers practising in their garage. So, there are these 2 energies fighting it out – the constricted energy of the domestic space and the wide open energy of the highlands. We have a friend who calls this kind of music ‘yearncore’. It’s that impatient energy that says, ‘I can’t keep waiting, I need a change’.”

Today, Samantha Urbani has announced that her long-awaited debut album Showing Up will be released on 22nd September, and shares lead single “One Day At A Time“.

Showing Up finds the former Friends-frontwoman pouring a decade of experimentation and personal growth into the sort of irresistibly loose-limbed, retro-leaning alt-pop that has always been her specialty. Co-produced by Urbani with Nick Weiss (aka Nightfeelings) the album is in keeping with Urbani’s predilection for spontaneity, with an organic approach to collaboration and contributions from close friends including Eric Cross, John Carroll Kirby, Shane Mckillop, Rostam Batmanglij, Molly Lewis and Sasha Desree, as well as Sade’s right-hand man Stuart Matthewman.

Sonically, the album captures a wide range of vintage influences, from Jam & Lewis to Tom Tom Club, halcyon 80s Madonna, 90s R&B to celestial disco and grooved out guitar-pop. Urbani’s innate ability to hit the sweet spot between heady pop melodies and unfettered experimentation makes ‘Showing Up’ such a compelling collection, whilst also encapsulating universal themes for both the head and the heart.

Lead single “One Day At A Time”, with shades of Rapture-era Blondie meets LCD Soundsystem, finds Urbani declaring “I’m immune to guitars, I’m immune to cool” over louche slap bass and sliding, Talking Heads-esque synths.

Samantha says about the single: “Ok, ok. I am the tough guy and I am dead serious. I am an advocate, a protector, and an activist. I’m also a total crusher and yolo’er and I take the sweet risks and I justify it all to myself even when I know I myself am being the idiot. This is basically the cutie goofer song about wanting the player and drawing it out. Kissing you FEELS vital to my survival! I know its NOT! It’s just a FEELING! BUT THATS A BIG FEELING! THATS A HUGE LONGING! THATS A LONG ACHING! Urgh, can’t we just ween it off little by little? Once a week act in love? Fuck it up one day at a time? Not fuck it up all at once?”

The track’s fantastical music video, created by Urbani alongside VFX Artists and Animators Leon Knight and Corrinne James, features cameos from Samantha’s close friends Georgia Jagger (angel/devil), Avery Tucker (cameras), Chloe Saavedra (drums), Isis Cahuas (raspberry beret), Yony Leyser (phones) and Nick Robinson (motorcycle). Watch it now, below.

Today, New York pop savants Charly Bliss are back with “You Don’t Even Know Me Anymore“, their first new music since 2019’s critically acclaimed album Young Enough, and its subsequent Supermoon EP. The track, produced by Jake Luppen of Hippo Campus and Caleb Wright, ushers in a new, more playful era for the band.

“I moved to Australia and felt a million miles away from who I had been in New York. Like I had been reborn happy, carefree, and slightly less pale,” explains lead singer Eva Hendricks. “I was convinced that I had totally bypassed the ‘wherever you go, there you are’ thing. Lexapro also helped. I think this song is a farewell to how sad and tortured I felt during the Young Enough album cycle. It’s like the ‘fuck it!’ that you earn after burning your entire life down and starting over. Sam sent me the track and it felt exactly as joyous and silly and giddy as I felt inside. It came together quickly and set the tone for a new CB era.”

Samantha Urbani may be best known as founding and fronting her own band Friends, the Brooklyn-based indie darlings, who were known for bridging their DIY roots into the mainstream, and also for collaborating with renowned music project Blood Orange, but she is about to cut her own unique swathe through the music landscape all over again.

2017’s debut solo EP Policies of Power and 2019’s single “Made in Love“, have provided tantalising tasters of what to expect from her solo material, but with new full single “More Than a Feeling”, which is the first single from Samantha’s forthcoming debut album, Urbani will now cement her position as unparalleled pop contrarian bar none.

“In music it’s natural to share love and connections with other people in music, and whether to collaborate or not is a complicated question. I wrote the vocal to something an ex was playing, just in my head. It became this weird solo conversation, a one sided collaboration. It sat on the back burner, but the emotion remained timeless enough to come back to. Years later I was falling in love, which was a cool and safe place to be, finishing a song about the opposite. I brought Molly Lewis into the studio to whistle, which sounds like an old western soundtrack for the tough guy who’s got no choice, and is really the tenderest of all” explains Samantha.

The track was written, recorded and co-produced with Nick Weiss (aka Nightfeelings) and features all-star ethereal whistling from Molly Lewis. Sonically Samantha’s music captures a wide range of vintage influences, from Janet Jackson to Tom Tom Club, halcyon 80s Madonna, 90s R&B to glossy disco and grooved out guitar-pop, her poetic lyricism and signature throwback production puts her in the league of pop’s greatest.

The accompanying music video, which Samantha directed, explores the liminality of unrequited love. She wanders through the neon wasteland of LA’s Hollywood Boulevard before embarking on a motorcycle ride with a helmeted man, never truly connecting with her masked driver or finding a place to settle down. Samantha says:

“My references for this video are pretty succinct. Toni Braxton’s “Unbreak my Heart” and Celine Dion “It’s all coming back to me now” – both 90s vids that had a huge impact on me, with boyfriends who die in motorcycle crashes. The video is a rescue fantasy – motorcycle guy is a modern day knight in shining armour- heroic but inhuman, totally protected with walls that cannot be broken thru. So, it’s the antagonist who I can’t seem to reach even when they’re right in front of me. A tragic figure of toxic masculine fragility/emotional unavailability. All of the motorcycle guy sequences are meant to be questioned whether it’s real or imagined. Like I’m waiting to be rescued and fantasizing knowing I’m on my own“.

Dream Wife release their electrifying third album, Social Lubrication, this Friday, June 9th and today unveil the final single, the disco-leaning title track. “Social Lubrication” serves as a rally against the patriarchy as they call out unsolicited advice and gendered violence. “Exhausted. Done with being polite, done with sugar coating, placating, and pandering to patriarchal bullshit. Wanting to just exist, in this body without being pigeon-holed or judged for the bodies we exist in. Do the job well. Show up. Not play other people games. You can’t fix something rotten to the core – we need revolution not reform,” note the band on the track.

The single is out alongside a self-made music video with influences spanning from their album art to the Yellow Jackets opening sequence. Watch now below.