This week's best new songs playlist features Jessie Ware’s piled-on disco-soul harmonies, Brown Horse’s lubed-up rock and roll, and more.
Jessie Ware has officially entered her goddess-in-a-lounge-act era, and “I Could Get Used to This” is when the curtain first opens. She’s back in a disco-soul lane, but the mood here is less sweat-slick dance floor and more secret-garden cabaret: fluttering strings, soft-focus flutes, a rhythm that sways rather than struts.
“Step into my secret garden,” she purrs, and the lyrics follow through on that invitation, folding self-possessed desire into something indulgent and almost ceremonial; “I’ll only do it if I want it” as both boundary and tease. The hook is pure silk, a little shameless in its repetition, which is exactly the point: Ware keeps turning “I could get used to this” over like a gemstone, testing the weight of real pleasure, real reciprocity, and deciding, with every key change and piled-on harmony, that she deserves all of it. It plays like the opening number of a larger, lavish show about romance, performance, and choosing delight on purpose; if this is the doorway into the new record, the world on the other side is going to be very hard to leave. —The new Brown Horse single’s got an immediate buy-in from vocalist Nyle Holihan: “I like the voices on the radio, I like the feeling of changing lanes.” That sounds good to me. If you missed out onin a few months. “Twisters” is a twangy ace in the hole with Neve Cariad singing backup—country guitars in bold lettering, whacked-out pickers each with a lead foot on their fuzz pedals. This is lubed-up rock and roll—road-worn riffage you can catch a fix from anytime. If you’re a Jason Molina fan you’re gonna dig a barroom blitz like this, because Brown Horse are rambling around in a strange, disarming grin. It’s a good pocket to be in, especially when Emma Tovell’s pedal steel starts crying. “I hope a whip of lightning cuts me right in two” means something to me. “Twisters” rules because it’s spilling out all over the place. —Otro: “Gloria” / “Downstairs Room, West Hollywood” / “Los Ángeles Sobre España ”, is billed as a collection of 21 vignettes composed as cues “for a cursed film” during “one clandestine night session” at a recording studio in peninsular Spain. The flick was destroyed in an explosion and sent Otro into a near-psychotic case of writer’s block. Hisare small-batch compositions shared three-ply at a time, and this most recent set totals out to 2.5 minutes of guitar voicings and backdrop noise experiments. At 63 seconds, “Gloria” is a shaky, finger-picked classical-guitar ballad with synths rattling and droning behind Otro’s next-room-over singing, dimming the chords until the song ends abruptly, purposefully. “Downstairs Room, West Hollywood” saunters in like somebody recorded a hotel bar entertainer on their phone and uploaded it online. It’s all quite ramshackle, to be honest, especially the 53-second guitar recital titled “Los Ángeles Sobre España .” But Otro’s playing is expressive, gradual. It’s a green light splashing into a dark room. Nighttime busyness that looks quiet from high above. Much of his fingerboard work sounds kinetic, even in briefness. —I love a well-done sample flip, and Munich producer Sam Goku does it on “x-plor09 .” Using the “I’m gonna shower you with love and affection” hook from The Supremes and The Temptations’ joint 1968 single “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me,” Eddie Kendricks’ warped and soulful falsetto arrives in the mix like a sweaty apparition. For seven minutes the house groove stays minimal but builds with blissful sustain. While splashes of Motown vocals cut in and out, Goku feathers inflections of glossy, pinprick synths into the track’s deep, loping bounce. “x-plor09” is a dance music performed at the root—a textured, easing glaze. —Sluice is back—and with a stellar first single, to boot. “Beadie” unfolds like a memory you can’t quite date, its slow, ambling groove gathers weight until distortion seeps in beneath Justin Morris’ voice like thawed ice water. He sings about dogs and shadows and TV cops, tracing the strange tenderness and mundane melancholy of trying again: “I used to move every spring / Now I don’t / I cried at the state fair honey bee tent / Hearing how they pick their queen / I got back on the SSRI.” It’s Sluice at its sneakiest, smuggling a whole crisis-of-faith-and-feeling into what initially plays like a slow, easy lope. By the time the distortion really muscles in underneath Morris’ croon, “Beadie” has quietly turned that low-stakes evening walk into something closer to a vow: winter’s long, the splinter’s still stuck, but he’s going to keep worrying it loose, one small, stubborn, beautifully ordinary moment at a time. The daily, dorky work of loving and being loved is suddenly the whole point. —
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