Lucky Number Music

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.

Sydney-based three-piece Middle Kids (Tim Fitz, Hannah Joy and Harry Day) are about to enter a new chapter in their career with the release today of their latest single, “Bootleg Firecracker“.

In 2022, the band made an impulsive decision to decamp to Eastbourne, UK in order to spend an intense six weeks with renowned producer Jonathan Gilmore (The 1975). The goal was to transform their lo-fi demos into something fresh, dynamic, and innovative, and to collaborate with a producer who could push the boundaries of a traditional rock band format to its sonic limit while still maintaining the essence of classic pop songwriting.

“Bootleg Firecracker” is the first taste of new music from those intense sessions. The song features beautiful fingerpicked acoustic loops, coupled with an edgy, loping drum groove, unlike anything we’ve heard in the band’s previous work. Lead singer Hannah Joy’s honest lyrics explore the concept of the titular ‘bootleg’ firecracker, an explosive yet beautiful force that also carries with it the risk of causing harm. The result is a warm, delicate, and contemporary sound that showcases the band’s creative evolution.

Joy describes “Bootleg Firecracker” as “a song about the power, magic, and risk of intimacy…It started out as an up-tempo chorus about dancing, but Tim (Fitz – co-producer and bassist) slowed it down, and we came up with this idea of the bootleg firecracker. Fireworks can be dangerous and risky, but there’s something about their explosion of light and heat that brings people together in celebration. I think love is like that.”

The track also includes an artistic contribution from Middle Kids’ fans, who submitted audio recordings of their own fireworks celebrations which are seamlessly woven into the outro of the song. The explosive theme crosses over into the official video which was directed by Toby Morris and features firework programming by the company used for Sydney’s legendary NYE celebrations.

Today, Dream Wife take on capitalism and faux-activism with the latest single from their new album Social Lubrication. Titled “Who Do You Wanna Be?”, the track is “about running on the capitalist treadmill and falling face first on the pavement. Hollow slogans, social media activism without action, leftist infighting, monetising feminism, ‘girl boss’, all soul crushing nonsense. Capitalism consumes everything. We should tear down the unreachable anxiety filled idea of perfectionism and move from hyper individualised narrative to collective action to create hopeful, rebellious, collective, systems of care. This is a call to arms for change.”

The single releases alongside a performance video filmed in an abandoned leisure centre pool in East London, watch below now.