ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
It's Friday, which means our friends at NPR Music are back with their weekly roundup of new music out today, and we've got some good ones. This week, we turn it over to NPR Music's Daoud Tyler-Ameen and Hazel Cills. They kick things off with a new album from Tinashe.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GETTING NO SLEEP")
TINASHE: (Singing) We ain't getting no sleep, no, no. We ain't getting no sleep, no, no.
HAZEL CILLS, BYLINE: The album is called "Quantum Baby," and this is the song "Getting No Sleep."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GETTING NO SLEEP")
TINASHE: (Singing) Early mornings come quick, yeah, yeah. Going to be calling in sick, yeah, yeah.
CILLS: This is Tinashe's seventh album, and it's kind of a collection of what she really does best, you know, this kind of, like, cool, sexy, slinky, R&B that's kind of, you know, indebted to artists like Aaliyah, but it's also indebted to her contemporaries like Kelela and FKA Twigs, you know, artists who are kind of, like, toeing the line between, like, classic R&B and more kind of avant garde electronica. So it's just, you know, she's been independent for a while now. And every time she puts out an album, it's very clearly on her own terms. So it's just another great collection of her kind of continuing her classic sound and what she does best.
DAOUD TYLER-AMEEN, BYLINE: The fact that "Nasty" is the last track on this feels telling to me.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "NASTY")
TINASHE: (Singing) Nasty. Is somebody going to match my freak?
TYLER-AMEEN: It feels like she maybe didn't expect that song to blow up in quite the way that it did and didn't necessarily have, like, a follow-up plan for it. But what can you do? I think a Tinashe album is the nice thing about them is they never ask too much of you. They're usually under 10 tracks. You know, they go easy on you in terms of your level of investment. You sort of get to choose how much you want to - how much freak you want to match, let's say.
CILLS: Yes, exactly. Yeah. There's many different flavors of freak on this album. I kind of wanted the nastiness to be the continuous thread through all of it. But I'll take what I can get.
TYLER-AMEEN: Well, that is "Quantum Baby" by Tinashe. I am going to take us to what is undoubtedly the biggest album of the week. It is Post Malone and the album "F-1 Trillion." Let's start off with "Guy For That," featuring Luke Combs.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GUY FOR THAT")
POST MALONE: (Singing) I got a guy to sight my rifle. My mama's new boyfriend re-binds Bibles.
TYLER-AMEEN: This is a full country turn, down to that truck-positive title. The features are, I mean, you've got Morgan Wallen, you've got Blake Shelton, Ms. Dolly Parton - and Luke Combs, of course, on this song. This is not some sudden swerve. He's been sort of keening in this direction for a while. We met Post Malone as "White Iverson," right? He had the corn rows and the sunglasses indoors and - "Beer Bongs And Bentleys." That was the name of an album but also sort of an invitation to a lifestyle. So here, now we've got the instrumentation. There's like mandolin and fiddle and banjo and pedal steel.
And he's got the tropes. You listen to this song. The first verse, he says, I got a guy designing my rifle. My mama's new boyfriend re-binds Bibles. Ricky down the road re-soles Red Wings. It's God, guns and gold, if you consider your favorite work boots equivalent to gold. But the conceit is that he's got a guy for everything except to, you know, bring his baby back, which is such a - I mean, he's very, very in tune with contemporary Nashville and the sort of axis of humor that it rotates around. It's almost enough that you could think of it as sort of like a post-modern joke about country songwriting, except I don't think it is. I think it's what he's really doing.
CILLS: It's sincere. And I always think of him as kind of, like, a vocalist first. I feel like people come to him for his presence as like a vocalist and his ability to jump on all these different songs and do all these different genres. But I still feel like this is a statement. This is like, country with a capital C. Like, this is not casual for you. This feels like a big move, like a left turn.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GUY FOR THAT")
LUKE COMBS: (Singing) Ain't got a guy for that.
TYLER-AMEEN: That is "F-1 Trillion" by Post Malone. Hazel, back to you.
CILLS: Yeah. There is a new album out today from the power pop band Charly Bliss. It's called "Forever." I really connected to a song on the album called "I Don't Know Anything."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I DON'T KNOW ANYTHING")
CHARLY BLISS: (Singing) When we got started, I dreamed of this place, staring up at the boys in their jeans on the stage. Now that we're here, I just feel sort of vacant. Come way too far to feel vaguely complacent.
CILLS: So something that I really like about this song and this album in general is, you know, Charly Bliss is a band, you know, that I really kind of feel like I've grown up with. You know, when they arrived in 2017 with their debut album "Guppy," they were just like this incredibly fun rock band that kind of made this blend of, like, bubble-gum-pop-infused rock music. It felt very, like, late '90s, early 2000s, like, reminded me of like Letters To Cleo, Veruca Salt, Dressy Bessy, those kinds of bands. And...
TYLER-AMEEN: I don't think I had heard the term bubble grunge before that...
CILLS: Before this group.
TYLER-AMEEN: Yeah.
CILLS: They originated a genre.
TYLER-AMEEN: Yeah.
CILLS: You know, this is their first album in five years, and it really - it very much contains that same sound, but it feels like an album made by a band that has gone through a significant amount of growth. And on this song, "I Don't Know Anything," she's kind of taking stock of her career and, like, what it means to be an artist and, like, this is something I've always wanted, and now that I'm here, do I really want this? And it just feels like a very adult track. It's a wildly fun record, but there are these moments of deep introspection and maturity that I just love to see in a band that I've, you know, followed throughout their career.
TYLER-AMEEN: Our next album today is by an artist who has never been afraid to put her neurosis front and center. Morgan Wade, the 29-year-old country singer-songwriter who named her major label debut "Reckless" returns today with a new album called "Obsessed." Let's listen to the song "Total Control."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TOTAL CONTROL")
MORGAN WADE: (Singing) And I can't get close enough to you. I might crush your bones with the power I feel running through.
TYLER-AMEEN: This is love songs in the language of codependency. The thing that I dig about it is that it sort of highlights the extreme, hyperbolic language that people use when they really are head over heels for somebody. Even if a relationship is, like, quote-unquote, "healthy," when you're in that honeymoon phase, I think, you know, people do use words like obsessed, and they do catch themselves thinking very compulsively. She's dancing on that thin line, which I think is a really fun provocation.
CILLS: There's something about her songwriting where I, like - it feels bruised.
TYLER-AMEEN: Yeah.
CILLS: She is just writing about wanting to be close to someone in a way that is, like, kind of frightening. But I love it. I'm so into it.
TYLER-AMEEN: Yeah. That's "Obsessed" by Morgan Wade. Just a couple more albums coming out today, in brief - "A Firmer Hand" by Hamish Hawk, "Long Way Home" by Ray LaMontagne, "Dirty Disco" by Nikka Costa, "Paradise State Of Mind" by Foster the People and Horse Jumper Of Love, a Boston Indian band who definitely knows their way around a gain knob, their new album is called "Disaster Trick."
SHAPIRO: That is Daoud Tyler-Ameen and Hazel Cills from NPR Music, and you can hear more in their full episode of New Music Friday from the podcast All Songs Considered. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
