Amber, who runs AMBii Sound, sent me one of her picks while we were preparing for the collab video we did on our socials and I had never heard it. Not the artist, not the song, nothing. That almost never happens to me anymore, which is a strange thing to admit for someone who writes about music, but there are also a lot of musicians out there doing amazing stuff and being able to be seen due to the internet.

The reason it almost never happens is that most of what reaches me now has already been sorted. Spotify knows what I click on. Instagram knows what I save. Everything arrives pre-approved, adjacent to something I already liked. It works, and it also means the surprises get filtered out somewhere upstream. A person recommending you something has none of that information. They just know what moved them and they think you might like it, and sometimes they are wrong, which is part of the appeal and also what makes it human.

So we chose four songs between us, two each, all somewhere between trip hop and dream pop. Talking through them was the best part. Not writing about them alone in a document, actually saying out loud why a song does something to you and having someone respond in real time, even though that is what I am doing right now, but you know what I mean.

Underwater Love, Smoke City
A London trio built around Nina Miranda, who was living in Brazil when they got signed. The track is built on rainforest field recordings, a Luiz Bonfá sample and a bit of James Brown.

Shiver, Trickpony
Two Perth club producers, Mike Midnight and Roza Terenzi, with Helsinki singer and designer Maria Korkeila — a haven from the club world, somewhere to slow down.

Coalesce, Now Always Fades
A new single from Melbourne-born producer Xavier Bacash, working under a new alias. Olive Kimoto sings on it, an LA musician best known for her work with Mark Van Hoen in Locust.

Moments, Noe Solange
A London producer, multi-instrumentalist and singer who works with melancholic synths and organic soundscapes. Stereofox named her a rising electronic artist to watch in 2025.

All four (and more) are in a playlist here

Amber posts recommendations like this constantly, so go and find her. Ask a person what they are listening to. It still beats the alternative.

Sol May knew how this song was going to be misread. She says so herself: people will see the title, file it next to every other artist mining childhood for material, and move on. There is a whole cultural appetite for that right now, the reaching back toward a period when being embarrassing was fine and nobody had learned to curate themselves yet.

“Child-like” is about being an adult and catching yourself running on the kid who got hurt on the way here, with the old narratives and old reflexes still in charge. She wrote it in her bedroom, in the middle of behaving in a way she was not proud of, and she calls it a self-critical song.

The first thing you hear in the video is her asking if you are ready for her. Then the neo-soul arrives; smooth drums, flutes worked into the arrangement, her voice sitting easily on top. Everything just works together and by that point you know exactly that you are in for a good time.

Her biography is genuinely impressive. Croatia and Slovenia first, studying singing, flute, piano and theatre. Then she went to Austria for classical opera. Then she dropped all of that and moved to Paris to study jazz.

Opera to jazz sounds like a hard left turn and I think it is actually the logical one, because jazz gives you room that opera never will. Opera is a form you serve. Jazz lets you move inside it. Someone who trained that long in the strictest possible discipline choosing the loosest one is not abandoning anything, she is going somewhere she can breathe. She plays small underground rooms in Paris now and serves coffee in the early hours.

She has said the song is a reaction against AI in art, against a black-and-white kind of perfection that leaves no room for mistakes or doubt, and the visuals are hand-drawn for that reason. For a song about imperfection, though, it comes out remarkably smooth and balanced. I love the production. It sounds great on headphones and just as good on speakers, and that versatility is a lot of why I keep going back to it. Her imperfection argument is really about a human deciding what goes where.

There is also a practical claim underneath the song, which she makes plainly: music is cheaper than therapy, and writing is how she gets through the moments she would rather avoid entirely. Her singles are named after people rather than feelings: last year’s “Tomboy,” this year’s “Child-like.” She works by taking on characters and titling the song after whoever is doing the talking, but she never hides behind them, and her own reaction to the material sits right in the middle of it. The two read as a pair to me. Both are versions of herself she is willing to name and then argue with, which is harder than it sounds.

Stay with it to the end. She recites her poetry after the music has stopped, as a closing act. It is one of the most impressive parts of the song.

I like this a lot. I am a big fan of neo-soul, and a song that speaks to the childish part of you while you are listening to it is a rare thing to pull off. Her catalogue is small so far, but I will be watching what she does next.

Most stories about downtown New York meeting Brazilian music run through David Byrne, an American finding tropicália in his thirties and bringing it back with him.

Arto Lindsay went the other way. He was raised in Brazil by missionary parents and came of age there during tropicália, so he turned up in NYC already holding what David Byrne wanted to import.

This one might be a deeper cut than the last few starter packs that I have published here, and that is sort of the point this time. Arto Lindsay was all over no wave, Brazilian pop and New York avant-garde, not really obscure but still not well known. Once you start getting into him, a lot comes loose.

His band DNA formed in 1977, named after a song by Mars, a no wave band. Lindsay had no formal training on guitar, and a critic invented the word “skronk” to describe what he played. When two original members left after the first booking, he and Robin Crutchfield recruited Ikue Mori in a hurry. She had just moved from Tokyo and had never played drums. She went on to spend four decades in experimental music.

Brian Eno put DNA on No New York in 1978, four tracks cut at Big Apple Studio. The band lasted until 1982. Lindsay started producing afterwards.

Arto Lindsay says plainly that he cannot play or program. As a producer, his method was to hire musicians, rehearse them hard and record fast. That is how he spent the nineties making records with legends like Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, Marisa Monte and Tom Zé.

Five songs to get you into Arto Lindsay, an unconventional pick, but a great one for a starter pack.

Egomaniac’s Kiss (DNA, No New York, 1978)

One of four DNA tracks Eno recorded for the compilation. I can describe it as noise blues, but you gotta check it out yourself.

Blonde Red Head (DNA, A Taste of DNA, 1981)

New York band Blonde Redhead took their name from this song 12 years later, so the chain of inspiration runs Mars to DNA to Blonde Redhead.

Umbabarauma (Ambitious Lovers, Lust, 1991)

A cover of Jorge Ben’s football anthem, played by Lindsay’s eighties duo Ambitious Lovers with keyboardist Peter Scherer. The same album has a track co-written with Veloso himself.

Erotic City (Mundo Civilizado, 1996)

Arto Lindsay covers Prince. The album was recorded partly at WR Studios in Salvador, partly in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

In the City That Reads (Invoke, 2002)

Made with Animal Collective, with Avey Tare and Panda Bear contributing ambient sound and percussion, seven years before Merriweather Post Pavilion.

Two songs ago, something in Rosa Vertov’s process shifted. “Questioning the Sky,” released last year, was the first track produced by Julia Szostek, who plays guitar and organ in the band. She describes it as evenings of careful work, which is a nice, unglamorous way to put it. “Seen It Land” is the second one she has shaped, and it suggests the first wasn’t a one-off experiment or curiosity.

There’s a specific thing that happens when the person arranging the sound also has to play in it, I feel like. Every decision gets made twice, once as a musician and once as the person deciding how that musician should be heard. The meticulous arrangement of the Polish band’s latest single is sonically palpable.

The guitar is what gets me first. It comes in hypnotic and circling, and it’s the thing that pulls you into the song before you’ve decided whether you’re staying. The drums are obviously running the show underneath, driving the whole thing forward while the guitar loops above them.

The band have been at this a decade. Kasia Dziąg on bass and organ, Zosia Jakubowska on drums, Szostek on guitar and organ, all three of them singing, something they name as a hallmark of what they do. They started as a schoolgirl band in Warsaw in 2015, released their first EP on tape through the Polish label Crunchy Human Children Records, and have since played across Europe and as far as Seoul. Ten years is long enough to know precisely what you sound like, which works as a good prerequisite for producing yourself.

I can hear three separate voices in the song, and they match so well that picking them apart is not really necessary. The line between them is blurred exactly the way the band describes it. What I like most is that the vocals never get underlined or pushed out front. They sit level with everything else, and yet the rhythm only feels finished once they arrive.

The band could have made this a song that explains itself. They’ve described what it’s reaching for: that stretch between recognising something and finding it strange, the disorientation of becoming unfamiliar to yourself, the small window before a loss can be named. Any of that could have been sung plainly over the top. Instead it stays inside the texture, which is a harder thing to pull off and a much better fit for a feeling that hasn’t resolved yet. The video, made with the Belarusian feminist collective Art Project Revolution, came out alongside the single.

The whole thing feels surreal. Witchy and dreamy, and the video is mesmerising in the same way, all of it slightly Alice in Wonderland.

That’s where Rosa Vertov are heading, and we will be there to follow.

Medieval mystics had a method for writing about God: say what he isn't, because nothing you say he is will be true enough. MK Charron, lead singer of the Brooklyn grunge-pop band Talon, reaches the same conclusion in a rehearsal space called Cheese City: “I can’t tell you who I am, I can only tell you who I’m not.” That line is the engine of “Britney Spears,” their new single, out July 31, and Charron has called the song the thesis statement of her life.

Drums first, then the bass line, then the guitar riff on top. A song about assembling a self, assembled in front of you.

The story in the lyrics is plain. A kid who loved Britney Spears, who studied the way she danced with the mic on her ear, grows up and gets talked into seriousness: first teaching, then corporate, each step feeling adult and professional and none of it feeling like her. The verses pile up the attempted selves, trading jobs, clothes, the way she walks and talks, trying soft and smart and cool and harsh, and every experiment ends at the same place: liking the person she already was.

Charron wrote “Britney Spears” on a Monday morning. She had just quit her corporate job for music, and she needed something to bring to rehearsal that night. She says it poured out in the time it took to drink her coffee.

And the title is doing something smarter than nostalgia about childhood. Britney is the way to measure: the last version of the future that little kid trusted before adulthood talked her out of it. The song’s best verse pushes it further, circling back to what Charron calls the original plot, the thing that’s always been there, and landing on an image I keep thinking about: the buried self as the thread in a piece of art. Pull it and the whole thing comes apart. The negation of the refrain turns out to be its own kind of answer. She can’t say who she is yet because she just started becoming it, and the not-knowing is the price of admission.

Charron delivers the verses in a deadpan, and then the refrain hits and everything gets louder. It’s the right dynamic for the words: the flat recitation of all those tried-on selves, then the one true thing in the song shouted over the top. And it’s dangerously catchy. I’ve caught myself mumbling “I can’t tell you who I am” while doing completely unrelated things, which I think is exactly why it works. The line is universal enough that anyone can wear it, and the honesty underneath carries through the whole song.

Talon themselves are four best friends from Brooklyn’s DIY scene: MK Charron on vocals, Mara Stolzenbach on guitar, Zena Spratley on bass and Lauren Kleiman on drums. The songs are genuinely collective, written as a group in that Cheese City rehearsal room, this one built in a single practice. Their catalog swings between sugary hooks and full-throttle noise, music they frame around the contradictions of queer life in post-pandemic Brooklyn: messy and joyful, chaotic and tender.

They cite Hole, The Breeders, Mannequin Pussy and Veruca Salt alongside the pop sound of No Doubt, and since their 2025 debut Codes they’ve been drifting punkier, toward the talk-rock of Amyl and the Sniffers and Dry Cleaning. “Britney Spears” opens that new chapter.

If the new chapter keeps producing thesis statements this catchy, Talon might be about to figure out exactly who they are.

Arthur Russell finished almost nothing. He walked around Manhattan late at night with a Walkman, playing his own mixes over and over, changing his mind. He recorded constantly for twenty years and released three albums in his lifetime.

He was born Charles Arthur Russell Jr. in 1951, in Oskaloosa, Iowa, son of a man who sold insurance and later became the town's mayor.

Russell left for San Francisco at 18 and got to New York around 1973. He died in April 1992, aged 40, of an AIDS-related illness. He was broke and mostly unknown. He left behind hundreds of unfinished tapes, and other people have been sorting through them ever since. A first collection came out in 1994. Two more in 2004, which is when people actually started listening. The documentary, Wild Combination, came in 2008.

Here are five songs that Arthur Russell produced, all of them showcasing him as a different musician.

The disco producer: Is It All Over My Face?

Russell fell for disco at the moment it meant liberation, especially for the queer New York he was part of. Is It All Over My Face? was released in 1980 under the name Loose Joints. He had another alias, Dinosaur L. These records still work well in a club, because Russell treated disco as serious music.

Steven Hall sang on this one. Remember that name.

The composer: Answers Me

From World of Echo, 1986. One of the three records he put out while alive.

Before New York he studied North Indian classical music at the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Francisco and lived in a Buddhist commune. He left the commune when it decided his cello belonged to everyone. In New York he was around Philip Glass, played behind Allen Ginsberg’s readings, worked at The Kitchen. On World of Echo it’s just his voice and his cello and a lot of echo.

The pop star: That’s Us/Wild Combination

Somewhere in there Russell also wanted to be on the radio. Ginsberg said his ambition was "Buddhist bubblegum," and this warm synth-pop song about love as a team of two, recorded in the mid-80s, could be seen as exactly that. Columbia's legendary John Hammond thought he had something, a little bit more potential maybe, but it never happened.

The perfectionist: A Little Lost

He remixed things for years. He re-recorded songs he had already recorded. Almost nothing got finished, and this one only came out in 1994, two years after he died, on Another Thought. Steven Hall sang backing vocals on it. Most of what people love about Arthur Russell now is unfinished work he never agreed to release.

The Iowa kid: Close My Eyes

Under all of it, it was always about a boy from the cornfields. Close My Eyes is a plain, gorgeous country-folk song that could have been written on a porch, calm and grounded. Of the five, this is the one I return to most.

Love Is Overtaking Me came largely from a scrapped record he made with Steven Hall, who records as Nirosta Steel and who put out My Skyscraper this year, forty years after he started it.

I'll be honest about my own way in. A friend recommended him to me, someone who's more of a music historian than I am, and at first I didn't know what to make of Arthur Russell at all. Disco here, a cello drone there, a country song from nowhere, it refused to resolve into one artist that I could describe and categorize.

Then, slowly, I grew into him, the way you grow into any music that doesn't explain itself. Now I hear him as an innovator, someone who treated all of it as one music decades before playlists made that normal, and I get why my friend handed him to me like something precious. Consider this me doing the same for you.

A while back I started this series with Blur’s 13, the record that first pulled me into everything stranger. I’m keeping the second entry in the 90s, because that decade did most of the foundational work on my taste, but this time I’m crossing the Atlantic. The band is Pavement, and the album is Wowee Zowee.

If you’ve been here a while, you might already recognize Pavement from my dreamy sounds post, where I put “Father to a Sister of Thought” on the list and called it Pavement at their most weightless. That song lives on Wowee Zowee, tucked in among seventeen others. Its gentlest, most beautiful moment is one room in a very large and peculiar house, if my metaphor tracks.

Some context. In 1994 Pavement released Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, an album with an actual radio hit on it, “Cut Your Hair,” the closest this scruffy California band from Stockton ever came to being famous. The follow-up came out of studios in Memphis and upstate New York in 1995, eighteen songs that sound like a band happily throwing away their shot at the big time. Critics were confused, fans felt let down, and it took years for people to turn around and start calling it a masterpiece.

I understand why it threw people, because it threw me too. I was expecting something different every time I entered the album, and it wasn’t like I was listening to it fully back in the day. I listened to different singles at different times.

It refuses to sit still. It opens with “We Dance,” soft and almost courtly, then lurches through country pedal steel on “Father to a Sister of Thought,” squalls of noise on “Half a Canyon” and “Fight This Generation,” one-minute throwaways, and lopsided singles.

What Wowee Zowee taught me is that an album doesn’t have to be tidy, or consistent, or even likable to be one of your favorites. The mess can be the point, and that is what is making Wowee Zowee charming in my eyes.

And then, decades after all of this, I finally got to see them in Bremen, on the reunion tour. I stood there hearing the songs that built my taste played live for the first time, a long way from 1995 California and from the 2010s teenager who first fell for them in order to be “cool.”

The room was older, the band was older, and I was somewhere else entirely in my own life. That was an experience that I will never forget.

What I love about dreamy sounds is that they use unconventionality to do something completely relatable: they push us out into our own dreams and thought processes. Music is the primary tool for that, as it should be, and somehow we end up somewhere else entirely, in another register of feeling.

For me, the key to that door has always been the rhythm, the drums or the synths, a certain kind of tempo you hear across the 80s in This Mortal Coil or Enya, and it’s a threshold German-Brazilian artist reaches for too. Her new single “Fading Faces” opens exactly that way. First comes a low bank of synths, building underneath. Then the drums land, heavier than that soft start led me to expect, and the two stack the tension up together until her voice enters, siren like and genuinely hypnotic. By the time the guitars arrive, I’m already gone.

De Oliveira is a fascinating figure to arrive at this way. She trained as a classical singer, then fell into acting, with roles in Babylon Berlin and Christian Petzold’s Undine (which, side note, I loved), before songwriting slowly took over. Her second album, Oceans of Time, was made with Dean Hurley, David Lynch’s longtime sound designer, and came out on Sacred Bones in 2022. There’s something fitting about that lineage. Her work behaves the way Lynch’s films do, familiar surfaces with something uncanny moving underneath.

“Fading Faces” is the lead single from her third album, The Lying Swans, out October 30 via and Cargo Records, and by her own account it’s the reason the album exists at all. It was the piece that began everything, produced by Randall Dunn in Iceland — Dunn has produced Anna von Hausswolff and Marissa Nadler, so this kind of layered, atmospheric writing is his territory.

The track lives on a tension I felt from the opening bars. On one side is the shimmer: Úlfur Hansson’s synths and segulharpa, an instrument that seems invented for exactly this music. On the other is the weight: Matt Chamberlain’s drums and Lennard Zander’s glam-inflected guitars. Those drums were the real surprise, hitting with far more force than the delicate intro promised. And her voice, threaded through the middle, is what makes the whole thing three-dimensional. It stops being a flat reverie and turns into a space you could walk into.

Lyrically, it’s a farewell conducted across water. She sings of calling from far away and reaching someone who no longer carries the name she’s calling, of a face once seen everywhere in dreams and now dissolving, of summoning the oceans of love to arise for one last act of devotion. The sea is the passage between an old wound and whatever comes after it. What gets me is the double motion in it: she numbs the hurt and opens her heart at once, leaves “violently” and is pulled into grace by the waves in the space of the same verse. It’s a breakup letter written as a sea ritual.

Her voice sits so well against that glam-rock weight, and the closest I can come to describing it is Elizabeth Fraser singing “Song to the Siren” for This Mortal Coil: the same ache, pitched somewhere between a person and something older and stranger. It’s a fitting ghost to call up, since that recording is a siren song too, and one David Lynch has loved for decades, which loops us right back to the Lynch thread running under de Oliveira’s whole world.

The video is hers too, and it strands her on a Brazilian beach of black cliffs and pink sand, half nymph and half shipwreck. It looks the way the song feels: gorgeous, lost, washed up on the edge of a dream.

I’m obsessed with it, and I already can’t wait to have it on vinyl. The Lying Swans arrives October 30. On this evidence, the date is definitely worth marking.

I love folk music. I really do. It feels refreshing and old-school at the same time, and more than any other genre it connects me to my roots and grounds me. Most of the time, it’s just a person and a few chords and even when it’s more, it still feels simple enough.

So for this one, five folk songs that live in that feeling and from different eras and understandings of folk.

My Garden — @ (pronounced “at”)

…are Victoria Rose and Stone Filipczak, who built their debut Mind Palace Music remotely during the 2020 lockdown, mailing each other voice notes over iMessage from two different cities. They call the result “hyperfolk,” acoustic songs threaded with digital texture, and “My Garden” closes the record. What gets me is how it slips physics into heartbreak, “just energy split in two, a broken fuse, nothing lasts forever.” It’s a breakup written as a law of nature, which somehow makes it sadder. Keep this one in mind for later in the list.

Oh Dear What Can the Matter Be — Terry Callier

Terry Callier is remembered mostly for jazz and soul, which makes this early recording a lovely surprise. It comes from his debut, The New Folk Sound of Terry Callier, cut in 1964 with just his voice, an acoustic guitar and a couple of basses. The song is an old traditional tune, and the refrain, “oh dear, what can the matter be,” has been sung to children for a couple of centuries. He slows it right down until that nursery-simple question turns into something adult.

World on a String — Jessica Pratt

Jessica Pratt writes folk songs that feel like they arrived from another decade by accident, a little worn, a little out of time. On “World on a String,” from her 2024 album Here in the Pitch, she sings “I want to be the sunlight of the century” in that trembling, close coo that could belong to 1968 as easily as now.

Diamond Day — Vashti Bunyan

The blueprint for a lot of this, @ included, who name her as a direct influence. Bunyan wrote the songs on Just Another Diamond Day during a horse-and-wagon journey through Scotland, and you can hear the open air in every one. “Just another life to live, just a word to say,” she offers, barely above a whisper, turning the smallest daily things into something close to prayer. The record sold next to nothing on release, and she quit music for thirty years, only for it to become one of the most beloved British folk albums ever made.

Gasoline - Buck Meek

Buck Meek plays guitar in Big Thief, and his solo songs carry the same warmth in a looser, more ramshackle form. This one has the strangest, sweetest line of the whole list, “maybe she’s a photon too, and we’ll pass through each other, tied in quantum.” That’s the second time on this list someone reaches for physics to talk about love, after @, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Folk keeps trying to explain the heart with whatever language is lying around, and sometimes that language is particle physics.

That’s the thread through all five: a voice, a guitar, and the confidence to leave the rest out. Which is exactly why folk still grounds me the way nothing else does, it’s brave in that way.

Brian Eno has probably been heard by more people than almost any musician alive, and most of them have no idea. He composed the Windows 95 startup sound, a few seconds of shimmer that played on hundreds of millions of computers, and that omnipresence suits him perfectly — I was too young to hear that live, but you can find it on YouTube still.

This is the third starter pack, and the chain from the last two holds on its own: John Cale produced Patti Smith’s debut, and Cale also made a whole album with Eno. More on that one at the end.

If you’ve been reading theneusound for a while, you know how much of this publication lives inside dreamy, drifting, atmospheric sound. Eno is a huge part of why that music exists as a place you can go. In 1978 he made Ambient 1: Music for Airports and gave the genre its name, writing in the liner notes that ambient music must be “as ignorable as it is interesting.”

Here’s where I’ll admit I disagree with him a little. Eno designed this music to be ignorable, and I’ve never once managed to ignore it. I sit down with Music for Airports the way I’d sit down with a film. And apparently I’m not alone: when the album was piped into LaGuardia Airport for a while, travellers complained it made them uneasy and sounded like funeral music. Music built to disappear into the background, tested in a real airport, and people couldn’t stop hearing it. Maybe my version is less dramatic, but I share the feeling with the travellers of LaGuardia. His music holds space. Not ignorable after all.

His route to the ambient music was strange and fast. Eno came out of art school into Roxy Music in the early 70s, playing synthesizer and tape machines while insisting he wasn’t really a musician. He left after two albums, made a run of brilliant, warped art-rock records of his own, and then drifted toward something slower and more spacious. Along the way he created Oblique Strategies with the painter Peter Schmidt, a deck of cards for stuck moments in the studio. Each card carries one instruction, “honor thy error as a hidden intention,” “use an old idea,” and when a session stalls, you draw one and do what it says, whether it makes sense or not. He brought the deck into Bowie’s Berlin sessions, where the band reportedly found it maddening, and he has been drawing from it for fifty years. It’s a machine for interrupting your own habits, which might be the most useful thing any artist can own.

Then there’s the production work. When Talking Heads made Remain in Light with him, there were no finished songs; the album was built up from looped one-chord grooves that Eno helped stack and sculpt into tracks, with him credited as a co-writer on the whole record. On Bowie’s Low, half the album became instrumentals soaked in his synth treatments. Records left his hands sounding like something the band couldn’t have made alone.

He’s in his late seventies now and still refusing to repeat himself. The 2024 documentary about him, Eno, was built with generative software so that every screening plays a different version of the film. There are said to be 52 quintillion possible cuts. I’ll be honest, I’m uneasy about generative software making something visual and sonic, especially in this era. But he’s the innovator here, and it would be more shocking to hear he wasn’t trying something.

So before this turns into a Brian Eno history lesson, here are five ways in, more or less in order.

“Needles in the Camel’s Eye”

Start with the glam years, right after Roxy Music. A wall of buzzing guitars and gleeful shouting. Proof that the ambient godfather began as a genuine rock weirdo, and it still sounds amazing.

“The Big Ship”

Three minutes of synths swelling like something enormous coming over the horizon, no words, no drums, just rise. The bridge between his rock records and everything after, and one of the most quietly emotional instrumentals I know.

“By This River”

The song I’d hand to anyone who thinks experimental music can’t be tender. Just piano, a little shimmer, and Eno singing softly about two people sitting by water. It sounds like a memory you’re not sure is yours.

“An Ending (Ascent)”

Written for footage of the moon landings, and it sounds like exactly that: weightlessness, awe, a slow float in gold light. If you want to understand why ambient music matters, this is the shortest possible argument.

“Spinning Away”

The promised Cale connection, and my personal favorite of the five. After decades of guesting on each other’s records, the two finally made a full album together at Eno’s studio in Suffolk, and this is its heart: ringing guitars, strings, Eno singing about an artist sketching the sky as the stars wheel past. Two of the strangest minds in music, and the result is pure joy.

The chain that runs through this whole series, Cale to Patti to Eno, closes right here, on the song I’d keep if I could only keep one.

spiritbug runs on tension. Underneath, the rhythm has the tight, forward push of post-punk, a pulse that keeps the song urgent and moving. On top, the guitars pull the other way, washing everything in reverb until the edges dissolve into shoegaze haze. The rhythm drives, the guitars blur, and the song lives in the gap between those two forces. Plenty of bands pick one side of that equation. grima’s whole sound is built on refusing to choose, and this single is the clearest expression of it yet.

The story behind it explains some of that energy. grima wrote the song weeks before flying to the States to play SXSW in Austin and New Colossus in New York, liked it enough to road-test an unfinished version throughout the tour, and still couldn’t close it back home in the studio in Germany. What finished it was a decision he had never made before: writing the lyrics in English. In his own telling, the new language was the missing piece. The song had its drive and its haze already in place and was waiting for the right voice to carry it.

That’s a riskier move than it might look. In shoegaze the voice sits low in the mix, so you’d think the language would barely matter, but the opposite is true: when the words are half-buried, all the weight falls on how they sound, the vowels, the phrasing, the way a line sits against the guitars. Switching languages in this genre means changing the actual fabric of the song, and a first attempt in a new tongue could easily come out stiff.

This doesn’t. You can hear how much weight the voice holds here, and how comfortably it carries it. There is a real melody at the center, sweet and a little wistful, and it keeps rising out of the reverb to catch you before slipping back under. It sounds free, like the switch loosened something in the writing. What’s left when the song ends is that melody, still circling.

He names his own company: DIIV, Beach Fossils, Slow Pulp, Momma. All four are audible in different corners, DIIV’s reverb-soaked pulse, Beach Fossils’ chiming ease, Slow Pulp’s fuzz and tenderness, Momma’s nineties-alt bite. He has earned the lineage on stage too, opening for the American shoegaze bands They Are Gutting a Body of Water and Glare, and after a 2025 run of European festivals like Reeperbahn and Liverpool Sound City, he carried the sound across to the American festivals this spring.

From here, grima says the music will move between English and Spanish, an unusual promise that turns language into part of his palette. On the evidence of “spiritbug,” where a change of tongue was enough to finish a song that touring couldn’t, that back-and-forth is exactly where the interesting things will happen.

For a while I wasn’t sure what to recommend for the next entry in theneusound listens. The first was dreamy songs, which was an easy place to start, since “dreamy” stretches to fit almost anything. Then I did 2026 bangers. I wanted this one to cut a little deeper.

Then I came across a cover of “The Art Teacher” on TikTok, my favorite Rufus Wainwright song, and it handed me the thread I’d been looking for. So here are five melancholic piano ballads or songs with piano in general, the kind that can leave you hopelessly romantic, hopelessly sad, or somehow unbelievably happy, sometimes inside the same three minutes.

The Art Teacher — Rufus Wainwright

From 2004’s “Want Two,” Wainwright sings as a student looking back on a crush on their art teacher, the one who took the class to the museum. The narrator grows up, marries a wealthy executive, and admits they never loved anyone the way they loved that teacher. For the current-day version of this feeling, see Cameron Winter below.

$0 — Cameron Winter

The Geese frontman’s 2024 solo debut “Heavy Metal” gave us this: a near seven-minute piano ballad sung in a world-weary baritone somewhere between Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits. It starts from feeling worthless, like a zero-dollar man, then climbs into an unhinged, string-swept finale where he keeps insisting God is real.

Shadowboxer — Fiona Apple

Apple was eighteen when “Tidal” came out in 1996, and this was the first single. A smoky, deliberate piano line under writing far older than her years: a relationship she knows is bad for her and circles anyway, bracing for the next hit and refusing to leave. A musical teaser of what is yet to come in Fiona Apple’s career.

Hope There’s Someone — ANOHNI (fka Antony and the Johnsons)

The opening track of “I Am a Bird Now,” the 2005 Mercury Prize winner. Piano and that trembling, unmistakable voice, builds into something almost too big to sit through. The fear at its center is simple and enormous: dying alone, with no one to hold you at the end.

The Magician — Andy Shauf

This song opens “The Party,” Shauf’s 2016 concept album set across one house party. It starts as a sparse piano sketch about feeling lost, then grew into pensive piano, his signature clarinet, and curling strings. Under the prettiness it’s about making your problems vanish instead of facing them.

KUSK, the project of the young Reykjavík producer Kolbrún Óskarsdóttir, has never sounded like just one thing. She won Iceland’s battle of the bands, Músíktilraunir, as a teenager and has been shifting shape ever since, making pop from her bedroom that refuses to settle into a single lane. On RAMMAR she reached for something bossa nova soft on "Sommar," and on RÍFAST, the collaborative record she made with Hrannar Máni Ólafsson, or Óviti, she turned sharp and restless, trading that warmth for a harder electronic sound.

You never quite know which KUSK is going to answer when you press play, which is a good part of the thrill.

Kolbrún taught herself to produce in GarageBand during the 2020 pandemic, and her very first release, “FLUGVÉLAR,” was already a collaboration with Óviti. The two of them share a studio and write, produce and play together while keeping their own solo careers, and at some point they turned that closeness into a duo, KUSK & Óviti, folding their separate songs into longer live sets. Together they moved together into dance, electronic, synthwave and drum and bass, and released the collaborative album “RÍFAST” through Reykjavík’s Sticky Records in 2025. “ÁRIÐ MITT?” comes out of that same venture into electronic music.

I should admit something before I go further. I don't speak Icelandic, so I can't tell you what she is singing about. What I can do is listen to the sound itself, which, when you strip everything else away, is the most elemental way to hear music at all. A song is a collection of sounds arranged to move you toward a feeling, a memory, a mood you cannot always name, and that machinery works whether or not you understand a single word. Coming to it without the language just puts me closer to that raw transaction. I get the emotion before I get the meaning, and sometimes the emotion is the more honest of the two.

In this case the sound matters even more. Óviti is the main producer here, so if you can't follow what KUSK is singing about, as I can't, then so much of what the song does to you is happening in the production itself.

So I went in with only that, and played "ÁRIÐ MITT?".

The track is built on synths, and it keeps growing, things stacking and rising until a song that started small is suddenly everywhere. It made me nostalgic before I could say for what, and when KUSK's vocals came in the feeling only sharpened. I spent the rest of the song chasing it, trying to name what I was missing and what this all reminded me of. Magdalena Bay is the closest I can get, or early MGMT, that way of using synths where the sound itself is doing the emotional work.

And after all that build, it settles somewhere quiet. It sounds like the song over the end credits of a film that never actually resolves. Nothing gets fixed, nobody arrives to save it, the story just ends and you walk out still holding the parts that didn’t. And somehow that’s okay. Not everything has to close properly for you to live through it. That not-knowing turned out to be the right way to hear this one. I couldn’t follow the words, so all I had was the shape of the feeling, the climb and then the soft landing, and it reached me anyway. If anything the language barrier made it land harder, because there was nothing to decode and nothing between me and the mood.

I only looked up the title afterward. “Árið mitt” means “my year.” I had no idea when I was listening, and yet it fits the feeling exactly, a song that sounds like the closing music for one chapter of a life, played without bitterness, finally ready to let it go.

And if you want to catch the duo live, KUSK & Óviti have a busy summer ahead in Iceland: the Warm Up Night for the Reykjavík Slut Walk on July 23, Innipúkinn Festival over the first weekend of August, and Kveldúlfur Festival on August 15.

I wanted this midyear list one to have no shared borders. The only rule was that no two records could sound like each other, and the only thing they have in common is that I kept coming back to all of them. I think I have managed to do it, but please let me know in the comments.

Nirosta Steel - MY SKYSCRAPER

Steven Hall was a friend and collaborator of Arthur Russell in the New York of the late seventies and eighties, and then he mostly disappeared from view. MY SKYSCRAPER collects around forty years of his recordings under the Nirosta Steel name, dug up and released in June by the tape label ULYSSA. Like Russell, Hall never treats a song as done. The album has two different mixes of “FIRST LOVE,” one stripped down, one full disco, and “ENGLISH PARTY” was apparently written for Madonna in the early eighties and never made it to her. I would start with “GO FOR THE NIGHT” and work outward.

π. Διονύσιος Ταμπάκης- Paradise Metal

Father Dionisios Tampakis is a 52-year-old Greek Orthodox priest in Nafplio who has been posting home recordings on YouTube since 2012. Heat Crimes and the Thessaloniki label elhellel put out Paradise Metal in April, and it became one of Bandcamp’s best-selling albums within weeks. The title is misleading. This is drone, closer to Earth or SUNN O))) than to any metal band, built from fretless electric guitar, and instruments such as ney, oud, and lyra, with Byzantine hymns running through it. He records everything alone at home. The tracklist mixes liturgical Greek with jokes, there is a song called “Techno in a Monastery.” Amazing.

Aldous Harding - Train on the Island

Harding is the rare songwriter whose songs get stranger the more attention you pay them, which is the opposite of how strangeness usually works. Her fifth album, made again with John Parish at Rockfield in Wales, runs ten songs in under forty minutes and has the texture of a dream you half remember at lunch: pedal steel, harp, H. Hawkline’s fingerprints throughout, and lyrics that behave like riddles with no prize for solving them. “If Lady Does It” repeats its phrases until they come loose from their meaning. Any explanation would only make the songs smaller.

Madonna - Confessions II

An album sequel is usually a legacy move, a way of borrowing against your own past. Stuart Price produces “Confessions” again, and the songs go places the 2005 album never had to: “Fragile” mourns her brother Christopher, “The Test” puts her and her daughter Lourdes on the same track over Arca’s production, and the closer “L.E.S.” walks the Lower East Side back when the rent was late and nobody knew her name yet. The dance floor is still the setting. The subject, this time, is everything she carried onto it.

Ibeyi - Offering

It is the Diaz twins’ first record on their own label after three with XL, and the independence shows in the pacing, twelve songs in twenty-nine minutes with nothing kept for sentimental reasons. “Moshpit” bends their sound toward post-industrial R&B, “Aset” returns to the drums, and through all of it run the Yoruba and Afro-Cuban traditions they were raised in, treated here as the ground the songs stand on rather than a theme to gesture at. Twin harmonies remain their unfair advantage. Nobody else’s second voice knows the first one this well. They tour Europe from November, Berlin and Amsterdam included.

Last time I wrote about John Cale, and the easiest way into Patti Smith runs straight through him. In 1975 Cale produced her debut “Horses,” which means the same person who scraped that unhinged viola across the Velvet Underground’s first album was in the room shaping the record I want to talk about now. There is a nice symmetry to that, two artists who refuse to sit still, finding each other at the start of one of the great runs in music.

What gets me about Patti Smith is the self-possession. She fronts a band like she is the only person in the room who gets to decide what happens next, and that kind of total ease in your own skin is rare enough that it still stops me cold every time I put her on.

You can read about her for years, the poetry, the downtown New York mythology, the famous friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, and still be completely unready for what it actually feels like to press play and hear a woman fill that much room without apologizing for an inch of it. “Horses” opens with the line “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine,” and the whole record carries that same charge. She is telling you how it is going to go, she refuses to be led into somewhere that she doesn’t want you to go.

The refusal is generous, and that is the part that gets me. Hearing someone be that free does something physical, loosens a knot you did not know you were holding. She makes it sound possible to be soft and furious in the same breath, to be a poet and a brawler, to read your strange private diary aloud over a loud guitar and dare anyone to flinch. For anyone who has ever made themselves smaller to be easier to look at, she is a standing argument for doing the exact opposite.

Even the cover of “Horses” does it. Mapplethorpe’s photograph of her in a white shirt with a jacket hooked over one shoulder, staring straight down the lens, was never posed to be admired. She looks back at you as an equal, possibly as someone she finds a little less interesting than herself, and fifty years later it still reads as a woman declining to be a picture. She has carried that stance for half a century now, all the way to a 79th birthday and a fiftieth-anniversary tour, and she has not softened it once.

If you are new to her, these four are the doorway. Walk through in whatever order you like, these are the classics.

“Gloria”

Start here, because everything I just said lives in the first thirty seconds. She takes an old garage-rock standard, plants that opening line on top of it, and turns a cover into a manifesto. This is the Cale-produced debut at full force, and it still sounds like someone kicking a door off its hinges and strolling through like they own the building.

“Because the Night”

Proof that the same nerve works on a love song. Bruce Springsteen wrote the music and handed it to her, and she filled it with her own words about wanting someone past all reason. It became her biggest hit, US Top 20, and she sings it as if surrender and demand were the same gesture.

“Dancing Barefoot”

The one I reach for when I want to borrow the feeling. It circles on a single hypnotic bassline and rises into something close to worship, a song about giving yourself over completely and refusing to be embarrassed by it. Pure transport.

“People Have the Power”

Written with her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, and still the song she ends her shows with. It is a plain, stubborn, deeply unfashionable belief that ordinary people can change things, sung with enough conviction that the cynic in you goes quiet for four minutes. Permission, one more time, to mean something out loud.

There is a small superstition built into the title of Sophie Blyth’s new single. A wishbone is the forked bone you dry out and snap with another person, each of you pulling until it breaks, the one left holding the larger piece supposedly granted whatever they wished for. It is a way of asking the universe for a sign. “Wishbone” is a song about the moment that machinery stops working, when you realise someone was never as good for you as you had decided, and that no sign or omen will ever organise the pain they left into something that makes sense.

Blyth writes from inside that confusion rather than looking back on it from safety. She describes the other person as “a catch in my throat, a song that I wish that I wrote,” and the line does a remarkable amount of work in very little space. It places longing and resentment in the same breath, the beloved as something that obstructs her, something she chokes on, and at the same time something she envies so completely she wishes she had authored it herself. To wish you had written the song is, here, to wish you had been the one to make the person who hurt you.

From there she moves into a subtler kind of helplessness, the experience of being remembered wrongly. Everything she once said now sits twisted in the mind of the person she is addressing, rearranged into a version of herself she can neither reach nor revise. It is a quietly devastating thing to write about, the way a story slips out of your hands the moment it lives in someone else’s memory. Being misremembered is its own particular grief, a continued existence as a person you never actually were.

That intimacy is matched by how the song was made. Blyth wrote, recorded, produced, mixed and mastered “Wishbone” alone, in her bedroom, and the absence of any distance between artist and listener suits material this private. There is no studio gloss laid over the vulnerable parts, nothing standing between her voice and the confession it carries. The accompanying video keeps the same unguarded quality, Blyth singing in an open field under full sun, an image that sits at a deliberate angle to the hurt in the words. There is something honest about grief that refuses to wait for bad weather.

Blyth names Joni Mitchell, Lizzy McAlpine and Ryan Beatty among her influences, and that lineage of confessional, carefully constructed folk is audible in how much weight she trusts a single image to carry. To my ear there is something of boygenius in it as well, in the way tenderness and a quiet sharpness are allowed to occupy the same line without softening one another. “Wishbone” is the work of a writer who already knows exactly what she is doing, and it makes a convincing case for getting to Sophie Blyth before the rest of the internet does.

I found “Swim and Sleep (Like a Shark)” on YouTube when I was fifteen, and I loved it for years before I had any idea what it was about.

I wasn’t looking for it. One video ended, the column of thumbnails waited down the side of the screen, and I fell through them until I landed on Unknown Mortal Orchestra. The song is woozy and lo-fi, like it reaches you through a wall. I played it over and over, the way you do at that age, when a single song can hold your whole attention because you haven’t yet learned to spread yourself thin.

Here is what I did not know at fifteen. Ruban Nielson wrote it in 2013, in the middle of a tour that was wearing him down to almost nothing, somewhere near the edge of his own health. The title is the wish underneath the whole song: to sink to the bottom and sleep the way a shark does, to fall all the way down and hide there until the end of time. It is a song about wanting to disappear, dressed up so gently that you can miss it completely. And I did miss it. I had no grief to lay against it yet, nothing to recognize, so I heard a beautiful sound and loved the outside of it.

The recording has not changed since. I have. I have spent the years between then and now collecting the exact things the song was made of, the tiredness that goes past tiredness, the days you would give anything to step out of, the strange comfort of imagining yourself somewhere quiet and dark and unreachable. Somewhere in there the song quietly turned legible. It had been saying the same thing the whole time. I just finally had the life to hear it.

This is the part I keep turning over. Some songs are letters that take years to arrive. They sit in your library meaning more than you can access, waiting for you to grow into them, and one ordinary afternoon you press play and the meaning is suddenly all the way open, as if it had been there in plain sight and you simply hadn’t lived the thing it was about yet.

But you only get to grow into a song once, and it costs you the first way you heard it. I can never again play “Swim and Sleep” and have it be only a lovely woozy noise from a YouTube rabbit hole. The fifteen-year-old who loved it without understanding it is gone, and she took her version of the song with her. What I have now is deeper and a little heavier, the song and its real subject at the same time, which is its own kind of trade.

Maybe that is what it means to keep a song for a decade. You let it mean more each year by becoming more yourself, until the thing you once floated on top of finally pulls you under. At fifteen I stayed on the surface of that song without knowing there was a bottom. It took me more than ten years to sink to where it had been pointing all along.

Most songs about the monsters inside us are escape stories. You name the thing, you fight it, you walk out free. From everything around “Monsters,” Leti’s new single seems to want to stay in the room with it instead.

The image at the center is the Bhavachakra, the Buddhist wheel of life, the one clutched in the teeth of a great demon. It maps the realms a soul turns through, the hell realm among them, and the whole logic of the picture is that the monster holding the wheel was never an enemy at the gates. It is the condition itself. Leti takes that and goes somewhere genuinely interesting with it. What if you stopped trying to climb out of the wheel and looked instead at the creature turning it?

The concept and the form seem designed to mirror each other. By her description the track is built on resampled, looping vocals, her own voice turned into rhythm, and a song that circles by design is the most honest possible shape for samsara, a cycle of return. The press notes call it both a mantra and a machine, which is a nice way to put the two things the wheel has always been at once: a spiritual cycle and a relentless mechanism.

On first listen the easiest reference is Radiohead, but Leti pulls that sensibility somewhere warmer and more melodic. Piano carries a lot of the track, which gives it a directness and a real songfulness underneath all the texture, and her voice is everywhere, leading rather than dissolving into the haze. It lands closest to a pop ballad that happens to be dressed in art-rock clothes, the experimental atmosphere and the immediate, hummable core holding each other up.

The lyrics move through that wheel in stages. It opens in a bright, almost heavenly register, incandescent realms and a pain painted a hundred times over, before the prechorus cracks it open with a quieter recognition: that everyone is fighting the same private creatures, and that getting lost in the maze is part of the path, not proof that you failed.

The part that interests me most is the second verse, where she stops resisting and admits something closer to attraction, an intimacy with her own sadness, and sings that her remedy is waiting for her down in the hell realm itself. That is a riskier idea than simply facing your demons. It suggests the descent is the cure, that you have to go all the way into the worst of it to come back holding anything real. From the way it moves, the chorus refuses to flatten that into triumph and lands more like a reckoning, a small and quiet act of courage.

For reference points she names Radiohead, Unloved and Björk, and the “Killing Eve” soundtrack as an inspiration. The Radiohead lineage is the one I hear most clearly, the same tense, cinematic atmosphere, though Leti is more openly melodic, more willing to let a song be a song. As the first taste of a coming album, the most promising thing here is the point of view, an artist who seems to have a real argument about what sadness is actually for, with the tunes to carry it.

When Charli XCX announced her new album, “Music, Fashion, Film,” I was genuinely happy to see John Cale on the cover, standing in for music next to Martin Scorsese for film and Marc Jacobs for fashion. Cale is hardly an unknown name, but I’ve always felt he gets talked about far less than the size of his fingerprint on modern music would suggest.

He started out as a founding member of The Velvet Underground alongside Lou Reed, and left after only two albums with them, the most famous being their 1967 debut “The Velvet Underground & Nico.” That record holds one of my favorite songs of all time, “The Black Angel’s Death Song.” And that screeching, droning scrape running underneath it, the sound that makes the whole thing feel like it’s coming apart at the seams, is Cale on electric viola.

That sound wasn’t an accident. Before the Velvets, Cale had played in La Monte Young’s drone experiments, music built on a single sustained note held until it warps your sense of time. He carried that avant-garde training into a rock band and bent it around Reed’s songs, and it’s a big part of why the Velvet Underground still sounds stranger than most things released in the decades since. He was the friction in the group, the thing that kept the pop songs from sitting still.

His influence only widened after he left. Cale went on to produce some of the most important debut records in rock: The Stooges’ first album in 1969, Patti Smith’s “Horses” in 1975, the early Modern Lovers recordings, Nico’s solo work. These are albums that entire genres were built on top of. Punk, art rock, the whole lineage of noisy, literate guitar music owes him a debt that rarely gets paid out loud.

Which is maybe why the cover felt like a small correction to me. Charli clearly knows exactly what he is; he featured on “House” from her Wuthering Heights soundtrack last year, and placing him beside Scorsese and Jacobs frames him as what he’s always been: one of the people who quietly set the terms for everything that came after.

If any of that makes you want to actually hear him instead of just reading about him, here’s where I’d start.

“Paris 1919”

The title track of what’s probably his most beautiful record. It sounds like sunlit baroque pop, all warm strings and piano, until you notice how uneasy the words underneath are.

“Fear Is a Man’s Best Friend”

Begins as a tender piano ballad and slowly loses its mind, ending with Cale shrieking the title over a rising wall of sound. Control and collapse in the same song.

“Big White Cloud”

From his solo debut “Vintage Violence,” made right after he left the Velvet Underground. The viola-scraper from “The Black Angel’s Death Song” turns around and writes something almost unbearably warm: soaring strings he arranged himself, his voice steady and certain. Proof of the range behind the noise.

"Long Way Out of Pain"

From John Cale’s album "MiXology (Volume 1)," made at 83. The drums are Tony Allen, the Nigerian inventor of Afrobeat, recorded before his death in 2020 and used here posthumously. The repetition turns hypnotic, his voice cracks with age, and the result is a working musician in his ninth decade still putting two things in a room that had never met.

The harp comes first, and it never really leaves. SIKADE builds “greedy heart,” her latest single, on a repeating harp figure that beats like a pulse under everything else, the literal heartbeat the title promises. Every other sound in the song gathers around it.

And the song does gather. Harp sounds and her soft vocals: they accumulate in layers, acoustic and synthetic pressed up against each other, the warmth of the harp rubbing against cold electronic grain, until the track feels almost overfull, reaching for more sound than it can comfortably hold. For a song called “greedy heart,” that hunger is the right shape. It wants everything, and it takes everything within reach.

The same appetite reaches the words. SIKADE mixes her voice like another instrument, set low and woven into the texture, so the song reaches you as feeling before it reaches you as language. What that texture carries is strikingly plain, though, and the words turn the title into something other than what it first suggests.

The greed in “greedy heart” turns out to mean something very specific. It is the greed of a heart that cannot be satisfied by simple, healthy things. She sings about wishing she loved them: riding a bike from town to town in summer, waking early with the light and sleeping when it gets dark, keeping a diary honest enough to face herself in. She wishes she loved all of it. She doesn’t. The refrain keeps circling back to the same verdict, that her heart is a stubborn one, a greedy one, a hollow one sometimes, and those three words do a lot of work together. The greed and the hollowness are the same wound: a heart that wants something it can’t name, and so can’t be filled by anything ordinary.

That is the ache underneath all the texture. The wanting in her voice was never vague, it was exact, a longing to be the kind of person for whom summer mornings and bike rides are enough. The arrangement then surrounds that small, almost embarrassed admission with everything it has, as if the music itself is trying to fill the hollow the lyrics describe.

That tension is where SIKADE tends to live, between close, confessional plainness and something more shrouded and mythic. “greedy heart” sets a very honest admission inside all that gauze and reverb, and the distance between how exposed the words are and how veiled they sound is exactly why it keeps calling you back.

And if you want to hear how all of it translates in a room, with harp, shruti-box, omnichord and synths, she plays ØYA Tirsdag and opens for Iben at John Dee, both in Norway.