Latest news with #indie
South China Morning Post
a day ago
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
What does AI band The Velvet Sundown's rise mean for the future of music?
While few expect The Velvet Sundown to start picking up Grammy awards in the near future with its bland indie ballads, there are some who are beginning to wonder. Advertisement In the space of just six weeks, the band has pumped out three albums containing 13 songs each and had close to 1.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify as of July 22. But The Velvet Sundown – or rather, its makers – do not hide behind the fact that it has been relying on artificial intelligence to do so. 'Not quite human. Not quite machine. The Velvet Sundown lives somewhere in between,' it says on the band's social media accounts and its Spotify site. It is said to be a band of four, but the members have not been seen in public so far. Images of the group have evidently been created by AI. Advertisement Music by The Velvet Sundown started making the rounds across streaming platforms in early June. Combining rock, country and folk elements, most of the songs are interchangeable, mellow and tame – as long as you ignore lines like 'March for peace, not for pride' in the group's most played song, 'Dust on the Wind'.
New York Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Is She Jazz? Is She Pop? She's Laufey, and She's a Phenomenon.
For Laufey, 2024 was a whirlwind year. 2025 may be even wilder. Last year, the indie singer-songwriter, who cannot be described without a flurry of hyphenated hybrids — Icelandic-Chinese, jazz-pop-classical, TikTok-trad — became a breakout star with a quirky pop style that draws equally from Taylor Swift and the romantic whimsy of midcentury musicals. She won a Grammy Award and attended the Met Gala in a rosé-colored princess gown and, in perhaps the ultimate orchestra-nerd Easter egg, a veil embroidered with a Bach fugue. In an interview this spring, as she prepared to release her third studio album, 'A Matter of Time,' Laufey, 26, was still practically glowing over those accomplishments. But seated at a control console at Electric Lady Studios in New York, where she recorded three of the album's 14 songs, she also cataloged the jitters and anxieties she felt being thrust into the machinery of fame. 'I wanted 2025 to be this year where I was less anxious,' she said, 'and instead of walking meekly onto the red carpets or meekly into relationships, I wanted to walk with confidence.' 'And I wanted to write a country song,' Laufey continued. She paused a beat. 'Country-ish,' she amended herself, and then pushed a button to play 'Clean Air' — a twangy starting-over ballad that she said was partly inspired by Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris's 'Trio' albums from the 1980s and '90s. In just a few years, Laufey — her name is properly pronounced with a vowel unfamiliar to most English speakers, but she answers to LAY-vay — has become a phenomenon almost without comparison in contemporary pop. Even in an age of scrambled genres, she stands out as a master code-switcher who cites inspiration from Prokofiev and Chet Baker yet has racked up more than five billion streams with concise, witty earworms that paint a glamorous wonderland shaded with the second guessings of a Gen Z diarist. Despite ruffling some feathers among the conservative gatekeepers of jazz, she has cultivated a vast fan base online and this fall will embark on her first arena tour, including two nights at Madison Square Garden. And she has big fans. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Men I Trust Adds Live Grit to Gorgeous, Shimmering Dreampop Songs at Brooklyn Tour Launch: Concert Review
Canadian indie outfit Men I Trust seems beamed down from the heavens to be a headphones band. Lead singer and guitarist Emmanuelle Proulx's gentle vocals float along over a textured dreampop sound built alongside guitarist Jessy Caron and keyboardist Dragos Chiriac. The lyrics about romance and longing fit both modes the band operates in: The airy studio versions of their material, and the group's popular 'Forever Live Sessions' releases, which find the musicians huddled together and playing live. How is the group's sound translated to a live-with-audience show? Men I Trust launched the Equus North American Tour at Brooklyn's Lena Horne Bandshell on Friday night, and it's clear the band has perfected a third branch of their sound: a dynamic, road-ready live act. 2025 has been a prolific year for the group, as it included the release of its fifth and sixth studio albums, 'Equus Asinus' in March and 'Equus Caballus' in May. While the former was a slight stylistic diversion, relying more on acoustic sounds and the tempos notched down, the latter continued the unhurried but bouncy rhythm section on many of their best-known compositions. Supplemented by longtime touring bandmates Eric Maillet on drums and mononymic bassist Alexis, Men I Trust opened a career-spanning set with the bright, synth-heavy new song 'To Ease You.' One thing that separates the band from dreampop peers is the surprisingly swinging rhythm section, in which a structured bassline dances around a steady drumbeat. This heartbeat allows for propulsion even when the vibe is demure, and the opening chug of 'To Ease You' set the tone that even with hushed melodies, the set would keep moving. Perhaps the group's biggest live strength is their steadfast commitment to play in the pocket, with parts that best serve the song. Besides a guitar solo or two, the arrangements are locked in, eschewing showboating to blend seamlessly with each other. Their sound flowed on tracks like fan favorite 'Tailwhip,' with Maillet's driving but tasteful drum line creating structure for Alexis' muted, funk-influenced bass, with Chiriac's siren-inspired synth interplaying with the two guitarists, laying down pedal-distorted riffs under Proulx's fragile, gorgeous vocal line. It's a tricky balance, but the band (and the hard-working sound experts at the venue) let every well-balanced note shine through. Hearing the group's work recontextualized live also allows some of their influences to shine through even brighter. The guitars of 'Where I Sit' recall quirky '80s bands like Oingo Boingo, where 'Carried Away' is made more muscular live and sounds like a deconstruction of a forgotten grunge anthem. 'Serenade of Water' finds the group approaching trip hop, with a searching guitar line run through an expressive pedal, while 'Seven' feels like it could be a b-side to Eagles' 'The Long Run,' with a lick and rolling rhythm straight out of 1979. Despite all of these dips into the rock music songbook, all of the jams are unmistakably Men I Trust, synthesizing these ideas in tasteful ways to nudge their sound, not break it. Ending their encore by pogoing through the upbeat tracks 'Worn Down' and 'Billie Toppy,' the dancing crowd showed the power of a band turning up their amps and going large. While many Men I Trust songs began in the privacy of hushed bedrooms or small studios, the ace songwriting and Proulx's soulful vocals can touch thousands in a crowd. Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
The Guardian
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Alex G: Headlights review – indie-rocker reins in the noise to reveal romantic soft rock
Alexander Giannascoli's nine-album back catalogue is the record of a great creative evolution. Starting with thin, wobbly Moldy Peaches-style anti-folk in his teenage years, the Pennsylvania native added lusher, twangier elements – Americana with a slacker twist – before introducing glitched beats, pitched-up vocals and copious vocoder. By 2022's God Save the Animals he had a zealous cult following and was pushing at the limits of what indie singer-songwriter fare could be, melding acoustic strumming and sweet melody with distortion that ranged from unsettlingly inhuman to downright demonic. On Headlights, his 10th album, Giannascoli, 32, reins in the warp and abrasion: the sonic invention remains, but it is deployed with increased subtlety. Exceptional opener June Guitar has chipmunk backing vocals and a surging organ riff that strongly recalls Centerfold by the J Geils Band; Beam Me Up is haunted by a mid-century sci-fi sound effect and Louisiana begins with a revving engine – yet all serve the timeless, melancholic soft-rock rather than overpowering it. It means the best bits of Headlights are not the (still highly enjoyable) off-kilter details, but the incidental shots of melody – the languid 'yeah, yeah, yeah' on Beam Me Up – and the crooked love song lyrics: on the shoegazey hyperpop-punk of Bounce Boy his heart is 'in braces'; on June Guitar he insists 'love ain't for the young'. The album peaks with the seemingly totally analogue Real Thing: a simply and addictively beautiful tune built around a pan flute and a witty riff on the titular romantic cliche. Giannascoli may have found a middle ground, but he's nowhere near the middle of the road.
Irish Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Friendship review: This twisted buddy-buddy movie is funny but not much fun
Friendship Director : Andrew DeYoung Cert : 15A Starring : Tim Robinson, Paul Rudd, Kate Mara, Jack Dylan Grazer, Rick Worthy, Whitmer Thomas, Daniel London, Eric Rahill Running Time : 1 hr 41 mins Tim Robinson, star of the cult sketch show I Think You Should Leave, moves satisfactorily into cinema with a comedy that sits just outside the buddy-buddy mainstream. How do we thus place it on the map? Well, it begins with Tami and Craig (Robinson and Kate Mara), a suburban couple, at a counselling session where she addresses her recovery from cancer and expresses her difficulty in achieving orgasm. Andrew DeYoung, in his debut as writer and director, is plainly skirting the realm of indie alienation. There is a suppressed fury in Robinson's performance – a whisper of bitter loneliness – that passes unexpected levels of stress on to the poor viewer. It's funny, but it's never exactly fun. The story properly kicks off when Craig, who is trying to sell his house, returns a wrongly delivered package to a new neighbour up the street. This turns out to be Austin, a handsome TV weatherman in the form of the ageless Paul Rudd. The two get chatting and end up forming an initially successful friendship. DeYoung's screenplay can't quite decide what we are to make of Austin. On their first night of boozing, he takes his neighbour on an illicit tour of an underground aqueduct that eventually leads them into the city hall. He plays in a punk band. The notion appears to be that he's an offbeat guy locked in a straightedge job. Yet the more the film goes on – and the more Craig takes on the persona of stalker – the less out-there Austin appears. Are we initially seeing the man that our anti-hero thought his neighbour to be? READ MORE At any rate, though loose in structure, Friendship offers a few minor masterpieces in the art of cringe. Robinson, like Adam Sandler in Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love, gives some impression of how the classic saddo of broad comedy – the Jerry Lewis, the Norman Wisdom – might appear in something like the real world: scary, demented, potentially threatening. His wide, gap-toothed grin is that of the killer clown. His tight face seems always on the point of bursting open in a mess of bloody tendons. We (if we are men) are invited to laugh at him while worrying that we're laughing at the worst, most pathetic aspects of our own personalities. Not a cheery sort of hilarity. In cinemas from July 18th
