Charly Bliss - You Don't Even Know Me Anymore

Sometimes, when you're really, really unhappy you just have to burn everything down and start all over again. As Charly Bliss' singer Eva Hendricks puts it in the press release accompanying this song: 

“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 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.”

Lydia Loveless - Toothache (Official Music Video)

The fantastically named Lydia Loveless comes across like Neko Case covering a Go-Go's song on this fast paced alt country track. In classic country style, it's a song about heartbreak, but rather than making use of the more standard motifs (The dog's dead, the bottle is half empty, she's gone...) 'Toothache' is operating within more complex, foul mouthed, self lacerating and self recriminating parameters. The incoming heartbreak is associated with the more prosaic headache, and toothache, which are also incoming. 

Romy - Loveher (Official Video)

Taken from the forthcoming album Mid Air, which is due out on the 8th September, 'Loveher' is an initially sparse slice of crystalline electro that builds and builds into a stylish slice of feverish piano driven pure dance. In contrast to yesterdays track, which was the sound of someone falling out of love, this is very much the blissed out opposite: It's the kind of song that could easily soundtrack the start of innumerable love affairs and relationships on various sweaty but glittering dance floors this summer.

Samantha Urbani - More Than a Feeling

Samantha Urbani may be better known for her membership of the Brooklyn outfit Friends but she has toyed with a solo career previously, with single releases in 2017 and 2019. New single 'More Than a Feeling' evokes that kind of giddy desperation and exasperation combined with heightened emotions and sensitivity that comes with unrequited love, with the video depicting a tense and restless Urbani on a night out, waiting for someone to arrive who never does.

It's a slick, effortlessly cool, very 2023 kind of track that oozes glamour, has a veneer of icy 80s synth pop and which, ultimately, deserves to be the soundtrack to everyone's summer.

Gazel - Unknowable

Gazel's debut album, Gazel's Book Of Souls, was released in late 2019. It came second only to the debut Self Esteem album in my Albums of the year list for 2019 and it was cruelly passed over for the Mercury Music prize shortlist in 2020. I mean, it's very possible that - being such a small release - neither artist nor label could afford the entry fee for the Mercury but, still, it was cruelly unacknowledged in it's brilliance, audacity, ambition of scale and sheer talent.

It's been a long wait for new material but, at last, Gazel has emerged from what she describes as a "Lengthy hibernation" and there is to be a new EP, Dark Earth, from which 'Unknowable' is the first track to be released. 'Unknowable' is based on "the folk song Nem Kaldi, a Turkish lament" and Gazel "played/programmed and recorded all the instruments on it"

You get the impression that the pandemic has been hard for her but, following a gig in Hackney on the 22nd June, she is definitely back.

I, Doris – HRT (Official Video)

'HRT' marks a welcome return for the Dorises, with a tune that slaps (as the young people say) and which feels very much in the vein of a more jaunty, tongue in cheek Poison Girls track (think 'Real Woman'. Seriously. Hunt for the video on YouTube.) As with the Poison Girls, there's a serious message here but it's one that's being delivered deftly with humour and the resulting song - and video - will do you much more good than a sackful of whispered adverts about anti-aging creams or books by celebrities who think they're the first people to have a menopause. Check it out.