New year, new you, right? Wrong. You’ve spent the past week essentially maintaining your increasingly sad status quo despite several drunken proclamations to do the opposite. We want to help you better yourself, and while many disagree, new music is one of the best ways to trick your brain into thinking you’re reinventing yourself. Here are five new songs hand-picked for you by the members of our staff that bothered to show up this week.
Saetia ‘Tendrils’
If you’ve walked near our office over the past couple of days, you’ve probably been concerned about all the muffled screams emanating from the windows. Normally, you’d be right to be alarmed. On this occasion, though, the blood-curdling sonic hellscape you heard was simply our staff’s joyous response to screamo legends Saetia releasing their first single in almost 30 decades.
Thursday ‘Taking Inventory Of A Frozen Lake’
It seems like it was just yesterday that most of us were sitting around wondering if Thursday would ever release new music again. Now, we can’t seem to take a breath without the beloved post-hardcore outfit hitting us with yet another epic masterpiece. ‘Taking Inventory Of A Frozen Lake’ finds the band sounding more urgent than ever, and comes with a suggestion that there is more to come.
Dick Valentine ‘Big Money Day’
If you found yourself at any number of early 2000s-themed dance parties on New Year’s Eve, there’s a good chance you heard Electric Six’s ‘Danger! High Voltage’ and thought to yourself ‘I wonder what happened to that weirdo band?’ Not only are they very much still active, but their lead singer Dick Valentine just released a new solo album. One of our writers called it an ‘Americana masterpiece’ which is really concerning for the state of modern Americana.
Slowlight ‘Pepe Silvia’
Scottish indie-rockers Slowlight are currently celebrating their tenth year as a band, and by the sound of their latest single ‘Pepe Silvia’ you’d think they just formed. It only took six months for your last band to sound like one that had given up entirely, so it’s impressive to hear such energy pouring out of a group with a full decade behind them. If you resolved to have more fun this year, start here.
Yawners ‘1 de enero’
Your DuoLingo Owl notifications have been getting increasingly threatening now that you’ve completely abandoned your resolution to finally learn Spanish. You should probably just delete the app, but you’re haunted by the bird’s eyes and are afraid you’ll be consumed by guilt. Maybe you just need a jumpstart in the form of Madrid’s Yawners. Their latest single ‘1 de enero’ (Duo will tell you that means January 1), is so fun you’ll be chomping at the bit to understand the lyrics.
Though it may be a new year, we know you have a tendency to live in the past. Might as well apply some revisionist history and pretend you were in the know last year as well. Click here to listen to every song we listened to in 2024 while we recover from our post-holiday coma and make this year’s playlist: