Category: Tracks

Whiskey Roller Coaster is the first single from Jacob Thomas Jr.’s upcoming album “Electric Sex” which comes out in February next year, a rock-infused, alt-country journey that finds Thomas reflecting on his favorite vice. Thomas describes this first single as “That moment when you wake up hungover and tell yourself that you won’t drink again. Then five o’clock rolls around and a little voice inside your head says ‘what’s one beer and a shot going to hurt?’ Somehow five o’clock turns into 3am, the bars are closing, and you’re too drunk to drive so you just sleep in your car behind the bar and you repeat that cycle for like… 10 years. Well, that’s ‘Whiskey Roller Coaster.’” Don’t drink whiskey on an actual roller coaster either would be our advice.

In The Living Room is the new single to be released from ‘Post Meridiem’, the third album by the Vancouver based artist Jasper Sloan Yip. Produced by John Raham (Dan Mangan, Frazey Ford, Dralms), the album in Yip’s words “[continues] the pattern of my previous releases – it’s a self-portrait. Or rather, a series of vignettes that, when considered together, give a sense of the whole. It is reflective by design, a distorted recollection of one’s own life created with the hope that listeners will see some part of themselves somewhere in the hazy patch-work narrative put before them.” Er, something about a duvet?

The Room is the lead single from London based duo Ferris & Sylvester’s forthcoming EP “Made In Streatham” which follows the release of their debut EP “The Yellow Line” earlier this year, the greatest “& Sylvester” pairing since Tweety Pie made that Sylvester’s life a living hell in the 1940s.  The EP saw the duo top Rolling Stone’s ’10 New Artists You Need To Know’ list, while also receiving praise from The Independent (which does still exist ethereally). If you live in or around London town, why not catch them live at The Spiritual Bar, Camden where they’re doing a three-week residency from October 5th – 19th.

This is a nice way to start a wet Monday morning. Amelia White’s new album “Rhythm of the Rain” which we recently described as “East Nashville’s finest at the top of her game” is out in the UK on October 27th and she’s shared with us the title track from that record, telling AUK: “This song came to me in my month-long tour of the UK in July of 2016. I was based in a small attic room of a promoter and friend. By day I listened to the news from the U.S. via the BBC – the great divide in our country, the racial tensions, and the salacious ramp up to the election were all quite disturbing – playing music always turned the pain into something good, and crawling up into that room late at night and falling asleep to the peaceful sound of the rain on the skylight was a tonic to me.” Had Amelia known the way the rest of the year was going to work out she might have needed a gin with that tonic.

Honeywater is the new single from London-based psych folk outfit The Hanging Stars, taken from their forthcoming second album “Songs From Somewhere Else” due next year.  Taking cues from both sides of the Atlantic, the quartet mainline the dying embers of the early 70s psychedelic folk and cosmic country scenes, transforming them into an absolutely lovely piece of music, with echoes of Gram Parsons and Big Star which opens with a mesmerising steel guitar riff and ends somewhere else entirely. Plus water would be a lot less boring if it tasted of honey.

We mentioned Tegan And Sara’s star-studded “The Con X: Covers” album a couple of weeks back which is due later this month, and today the duo has plonked Ryan Adams’ version of “Back In Your Head” online which is catchy, rocky and as full of energy as anything you might expect from Adams when he’s having one of his more wired days.

Dream Giant is the alter ego of London based musician and producer Harry Dean, whose debut album “A Different Light” will be released on 17th November by Paisley Parade Records. It will be preceded by the release of the single Every Song which we’re premiering today here on AUK, an uplifting track with big choruses – a bit more poppy than we usually go for but we’re a sucker for bold boy/girl vocal harmonies. The closely intertwining voices in the final verse are loaded with both yearning and hope: ‘There’s a darkness – no denying, but we’ll try’ which could be the theme for this year’s Conservative Party conference.

Swedish folkericana duo First Aid Kit have released a new single taken from their forthcoming as yes untitled album which they talked to Paste about: “We went to Los Angeles last spring and spent five weeks there writing. It was a tough time for the both of us. We were in this beautiful, sunny place but mostly felt sad and lonely. ‘It’s a Shame’ is a song about the emptiness and desperation you feel after a relationship has come to an end, how you will go to great lengths just to numb the pain and feel less lonely.”

If there’s a prize going for the deepest, growliest, vocal, then Louis Brennan is in the running for it. His vocal is responsible for giving a well full of gravitas to the London-based Dubliner’s new single Bit Part Actor. It’s a modern folk song that revels in a familiar world weariness “I watched the narrative fade right off the page / I watched my friends grow up and grow apart, grow cynical with age” which then crystallises into an anguishing personal insight “on Sunday morning 27th July / I woke up from a nightmare and I wanted so to die / I saw every opportunity that ever passed me by / There in your cold blue eyes”.