Listen To The Five Best Songs This Week

Time to sink those teeth into some new music again; it’s our hand-picked selection of the best new tunes from the past seven days

We were honoured to premiere the new track by Danish duo Kill J, who have been a little off everyone’s radar for the last few months. “Bullet” is a cocksure return, propped as it is by a huge hip-hop backbone, piercing vocals and cool, loose-jawed synths. It’s got strut, confidence and enough measured downtime in the verses to give edge to its ultimately feral, pop outlook. The single is released on Chess Club Records on 7 April.

Label mate Oceaán hardly let us breathe between his last song “To Lose” and his short-but-sweet new track, “Turned Away”. Here, syncopated pops, clicks and clever synth trills are more centre place than “Oliver Cean’s” velvet, drowned-out vocals, which skim over buoyant polyrhythms. It’s another solid cut from the Manchester producer wunderkind, and we can’t wait for his debut EP.

“Cain”, the first 2014 offering from Londoner Cousin Marnie following last year’s debut EP, Is Sleeping, quite simply stopped us in our tracks. The marbled piano and angelic vocals at the opening hark to the Old Testament plains, before cries of “where’ve you been Cain/where’ve you been/where’s your brother?” are trodden on in the sand by pillars of booming, dark electro-pop. What a return.

Another act to jump on the ghost train of anonymity: Brooklyn’s M O T H E R. Strangely, where we have next-to-no information on these guys/person, debut track “Easy”, is so open and full of character you’d almost suffocate in its frolicking funk guitar, rosy synths, soulful smirks and puffed-up drums. Not only that, but it has an understated, though impossibly cool GUITAR SOLO at the end.

Finally, the biggest pop smack in the face this week came in the form of “For A Minute” by new London trio, M.O. Rupturing with brass shouts, primal percussion and sassy girl-group vocals, it’s as if we’ve been thrown back into Destiny Child’s early noughties’ grip with words like “independent” and “survivor” swirling in the ether. Willingly thrown back, might we add.

Listen to our selection of the week’s best new music below: