Like every June, our team hold a very serious – not so serious – committee meeting and pick their favourite tracks of the first semester. That way, you can go on holidays with a cool soundtrack. No need to thank us. You can find these 20 entries in alphabetical order below as well as in our Spotify and Apple Music playlists, which also contain some other great contenders that were released over the last six months.

Anika – “Change”
Bobbie Lovesong – “Organic Orange”
Burial – “Space Cadet”
Cabiria – “Abrigo de Sol”
Cassandra Jenkins – “Hard Drive”
Dawn Richard – “Boomerang”
Erika de Casier – “Polite”
Japanese Breakfast – “Be Sweet”
Jordana + Magdalena Bay – “Push Me Away”
Katy Kirby – “Portals”
Kero Kero Bonito – “Well Rested”
L’Rain – “Two Face”
Mette – “Petrified”
Mia Porter – “Pivot”
Mr Twin Sister – “Expressions”
Nana Yamato – “Do You Wanna”
Rachika Nayar – “The Trembling of Glass”
Slayyyter – “Clouds”
Theodora – “For One Heart”
Tirzah – “Tectonic”

The experimentalist brings out the slow motion vibe out of the original rendition, as she strips it down to its minimal electronic sounds. That’s why she decided to call her cover/remix the “dark” version of the perky single by Monáe. You can see below that she already validated the cover via a tweet.

Listen to Dawn Richard‘s cover of “PYNK” below.

Future R&B multi-talented icon D∆WN, aka Dawn Richard, has just offered the video treatment to her October’s Machinedrum-produced single “Stopwatch”. It was released earlier this year, in October, and was the follow up to her 2017’s amazing album “Redemption” which also features several productions from the American producer. Considering that it is snowing right now in Belgium, the colourful visuals of Mikhail Mehra are more than welcome. Watch D∆WN‘s video “Stopwatch” below.

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Keep it up with D∆WN via Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

I feel that for many artists, a breakup album is the time that they decide to strip back all their artsiness and embrace acoustic instruments. Picture Beck on “Sea Change”, he abandoned the weirdness and irony of “Odelay” or “Mellow Gold” for straightforward sincerity. It’s not an album I really like (I don’t know if I’ve ever made it the whole way through in one sitting). This is certainly not the case on Dirty Projectors‘ self-titled new album. No, Dirty Projectors‘ Dave Longstreth has been listening to Kanye – he even tells us as much on “Up In Hudson”. He has made a breakup album as unconventional as “808s and Heartbreak”. Dirty Projectors is certainly the same group, there are the heavy afro-pop influences and Longstreth‘s uncanny yelp on every track, but now the vocals are heavily manipulated and the instruments are mostly electronic. Projectors bears relation to “Bitte Orca” the way Yeezus does to “The College Dropout”. That is, it abandons any attempt to be organic or soulful and wallows in its own artificiality.

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Longstreth‘s breakup with Coffman is the subject matter of all of the lyrics here, really. In places it’s a bit much. The album literally starts with the sound of wedding bells that suddenly glitch and stop (it’s an audio metaphor!). This track, “Keep Your Name”, also has Longstreth announce “what I want from art is truth, what you want is fame” (the “you” here presumably being Coffman). This track also features some of the most interesting productions, with Longstreth‘s voice pitched-down over piano and electronic beats. My one issue with this track is in the bizarre pseudo-rapping that Longstreth embarks on in the second half of the song.

Dirty Projectors‘ new album demonstrates that Longstreth‘s ear for production and arrangements is simply flawless

“Up In Hudson” gives us an account of Longstreth and Coffman‘s meeting which can be slightly cringeworthy (and will probably be unlistenable for Coffman). Again, Longstreth‘s ear for production and arrangements is flawless. The song starts with an autotuned choir joined by a gorgeous brass section and eventually some African drumming. The album’s best, and most accessible, track is “Cool Your Heart”, a collaboration with the vastly underrated Dawn Richard (with lyrics written by Solange). The song probably sounds the closest to the band’s classic sound, even if it does add a fair amount of electronic glitches. Strangely, Richard here sounds a fair amount like Coffman did on “Get Free”, a song she sang for Major Lazer (perhaps it’s the slight Jamaican vibe).

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Ultimately, the production and arrangements manage to outshine the slightly gossipy intrigue of the lyrics. Longstreth‘s production and arranging skills have always been the band’s best asset, and his embrace of a wider electronic palette has only further aided this. On this album, you can hear that Longstreth loves Lil’ Wayne just as much as experimental orchestral music. A track like “Cool Your Heart” can be simultaneously hook-filled and avant-garde. Longstreth reminds us that in our modern world, these musics exist side-by-side. For many of us, having to choose between Beyoncé and jazz would be unthinkable. They are different musics for different situations. This album is really the sort of music that I wish more indie bands would make, but then I frequently care more about theory and postmodernism than songs and people.

On “Redemption“, R&B artist Dawn Richard (or sometimes D∆WN) does something similar with the kind of EDM-infused R&B that Rihanna and Calvin Harris perfected with “We Found Love”. As “Love Under The Lights”, the first proper track on the album, plays you can easily picture yourself in a student club where everyone is all dressed up and wasted off Jägerbombs. As the pitched-down vocal sings the song’s title we hear trancey synths straight out of the playbook of Chris Brown and Benny Benassi‘s “Beautiful People”.

However, after the massive EDM buildup we aren’t treated to a soaring chorus or a maximalist bass drop but a fairly restrained instrumental continuation of the song’s chords. By the standards of pop music, this would be a pretty big disappointment but this is characteristic of Richard‘s style. She both lovingly replicates dancefloor R&B and subverts it in an often surreal manner. The second half of the same song, for example, melts off into an instrumental that combines trance synths, a footwork beat, pitched-down vocals and African drumming. The music superficially resembles Harris and Rihanna‘s EDM/R&B hybrid the way that Warhol‘s soup tins resemble advertising. Warhol‘s soup tins are artistic for the way that they draw your intention to the image as an aesthetically enjoyable image in itself. Dawn Richard does the same thing with R&B, her music argues that there is artistic merit in these songs that we hear without aesthetically considering them. She clearly loves this kind of R&B the way Warhol loved that soup (reportedly eating it every day).

Like Andy Warhol, Dawn Richard‘s music on “Redemption” argues that there is artistic merit in the songs that we hear without aesthetically considering them.

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Dawn Richard was formerly a contestant in Diddy‘s reality show “Making The Band” and was a member of the pop-R&B group Danity Kane that followed from the show. Since then, she has worked with the producer Kingdom (of the Fade To Mind crew) and Machinedrum on this album. Like Warhol himself, she has moved from working in the ‘craft’ world of commercial product (Warhol worked as a commercial graphic designer) to working in the art world (or at least making quite weird music and getting a lot of love from music critics). In doing so, she seems to be drawing a similar point about the definable difference between the two – when The Weeknd is the biggest R&B singer in the world, is he still really making alt-R&B?

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One of the ways I think that Richard has managed to find an audience in music critics is due to her wonderful production. While on an album by Tinashe or The Weeknd the production is often very enjoyable, it generally allows the singer to take centre stage. With Richard‘s music, the beats jostle with her for attention as every few bars a different synth or sound gets your ear’s interest. We easily move from sounds borrowed from the dance music world and hip-hop/R&B but also get blues guitars in “Hey Nikki” and jazz fusion breaks in “LA”. Mostly, though, the album avoids neo-soul-esque “authenticity” – this isn’t about warm fretless bass sounds or live drum kits. The production on “Redemption” is beautifully computerized with Richard‘s voice manipulated in every available direction.

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The songwriting is remarkably solid throughout. “Renegades” is an obvious highlight as well as the aforementioned tracks “LA” and “Love Under The Lights”. Perhaps the second half flags a little with tracks like “Hey Nikki” being a bit less interesting. Really the album works very well as a single listening experience. It doesn’t have anything as obviously poppy as “Blackheart’s” “Phoenix” or anything as difficult-to-categorise as “Calypso” but it certainly provides an interesting playthrough as a whole.

There is a very high chance that Dawn Richard‘s music will come off as too pop for the art kids and too art for the pop kids. Richard‘s songs rarely have the same massive choruses as a Rihanna track might but there’s often just enough pop or EDM sheen to alienate someone who is unsure where they stand on the most popular side of R&B. Like Warhol, this is art that takes ‘pop’ as its target. In this way, it seems to be both pop and something else entirely.

This track is described as “a late night, downtempo jam that’s as heartbreaking as it is lovely” on the Soundcloud account and we couldn’t agree more since it sounds as a late crying in the pillow track with a sense of real fragility.

You can follow her over Facebook to know a bit more about her and especially to not miss the release of her EP

Bonus : D∆WN is currently number 25 in our last HC30 with the impressive track ” Not Above That”

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