FEATURE:
Fast Out of the Gates
IN THIS PHOTO: Kara Jackson/PHOTO CREDIT: Lawrence Agyei for The New Yorker
Five Incredible 2023 Debut Albums
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AS we are half-way through 2023…
IN THIS PHOTO: Blondshell (Sabrina Teitelbaum)/PHOTO CREDIT: Jonathan Weiner for NME
I wanted to put out a few features that collates the best work so far. I have done features regarding albums and singles. There have been some incredible debut albums released this year. The debut is one of the hardest releases, as you need to get attention right away - though it can take artists a few albums to really hit their peak. However, there are those debut albums that are instantly magnificent! It sort of takes a bit of the pressure off when it comes to a follow-up. This year has been a good one when it comes to new artists, but we have also seen some brilliant debut albums. I want to focus on five that you need to know about. These are artists/bands who have put out debuts that are going to stand the test of time. I don’t think it will be a case of eyes being on them to see if they can top the debut. Instead, it will be the excitement of hearing new music from incredible artists who hit the ground running! Below are five tremendous albums from this year. They are all…
IN THIS PHOTO: The Waeve (Graham Coxon and Rose Elinor Dougall)/PHOTO CREDIT: Steve Gullick
AMAZING opening statements!
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Blondshell – Blondshell
Release Date: 7th April
Producer: Yves Rothman
Label: Partisan
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/blondshell/blondshell
Standout Tracks: Olympus/Sepsis/Tarmac
Review:
“That lead single – “Olympus” – introduced the foundations of the project’s songwriting: diaristic confession, caustic lyricism, and 90s alt-rock hooks in the vein of bands like Hole. Since that first single, she’s quickly become an exciting rising star on the indie scene, releasing a series of tracks all leading up to her debut self-titled record. Those who have been listening likely know the contours of the record going in, especially since five of its nine tracks have already been released as singles. Still, it’s a testament to the songwriting on display that Teitelbaum largely delivers on the hyped promise of her debut.
The album opens in explosive fashion with the grunge-tinged edges of “Veronica Mars”, which quickly builds from a tense, thrumming opening into a searing guitar-laden finale. Those quiet-loud builds that once were a staple of alt-rock radio come out in full force throughout the record, delivering captivating bursts of angst, anger, and longing on tracks like “Kiss City” and “Tarmac”. Meanwhile, other tracks find Teitelbaum crafting tightly written pop-rock gems. “Sepsis” and “Salad” layer on the sharp hooks and biting lyrics in equal measure, while the sun-dappled sheen of “Joiner” makes for a gentler sonic detour, full of crystalline beauty.
The record feels thoroughly steeped in these 90s influences, evoking Gen X’s generational touchstones like Live Through This and Exile in Guyville. However, Teitelbaum avoids sounding like a mere imitator. She isn’t simply trying on an aesthetic but instead finding where her songwriting voice lies. Before Blondshell, Teitelbaum had been building momentum under the moniker Baum, leaning far more heavily into the indie pop zeitgeist of the pre-pandemic years. In contrast, the songs on Blondshell came together during the lockdown era, when Teitelbaum had the chance to retreat inward, reconnect with her musical roots, and make the music she truly wanted to hear.
If there is a single throughline that connects Baum and Blondshell, it is Teitelbaum’s talent for searing and brutally honest lyrics. As an album, Blondshell is relentlessly confessional, full of moments of unflinching self-examination and withering fury. Through much of the album, Teitelbaum is angry – at herself, at her partners, at patriarchy, and at men writ large. She leads the listener through a dense maze of complicated emotions, exorcising her hurt, fear, and anger in songs that feel like a glimpse into the thoughts that keep her up at night.
She sneers on “Sepsis”, “He wears a front-facing cap / The sex is almost always bad / I don’t care cause I’m in love / I don’t know him well enough / What am I projecting / He’s gonna start infecting my life / It’ll hit all at once / Like sepsis.” Elsewhere, “Sober Together” reflects on watching someone you love get pulled back into addiction, while “Kiss City” deals with the desire to be desired, finding witty poetry in Teitelbaum’s longing (“Kiss city / I think my kink is when you tell me that you think I'm pretty”). Finally, the record closes with the shimmering balladry of “Dangerous,” encapsulating the record’s themes in a final confession: “And it’s so dangerous forming an attachment to something / Now that every time I love it might pull the rug out / And I know when I leave the house / Anything can take me down.”
As Teitelbaum has described, Blondshell was written in the midst of a particularly painful and chaotic era for her. Songwriting acted as her lifeline, and years later she was left with Blondshell, the album she has said she always wanted to make. More than any sing-along chorus, that personal touch and sense of relentless honesty are what shine through most on the record. It is the sound of an artist finally getting to let loose and say the things that have stayed locked up inside for too long. In turn, Teitelbaum offers an exciting introduction to a talented songwriter and a thoroughly rewarding debut” – The Line of Best Fit
Key Cut: Veronica Mars
The Waeve – The Waeve
Release Date: 3rd February
Producers: Graham Coxon/Rose Elinor Dougall (The Waeve)/James Ford
Label: Transgressive
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/the-waeve/the-waeve
Standout Tracks: Can I Call You/Kill Me Again/All Along
Review:
“’The WAEVE’, this self-titled debut from the pairing of Blur guitarist Graham Coxon and journeywoman songwriter Rose Elinor Dougall is a curious collection of contrasts. Most notably, that between the protagonists’ own voices; Rose’s a strong, smooth and often deep one with an almost RP accent; Graham’s his signature twang, faltering and vulnerable. The rough and the smooth rub up against each other - the squall of Graham’s guitar juxtaposed against slick brass, soaring strings or - in the case of ‘Undine’ - appearing just as the lyrical content threatens to veer into soppy territory. A contrast between Graham’s perceived persona - spiky, contrary, a man who refused to participate once Blur’s exploration of pop culture’s depths went too far - and the lyrics he’s boldly presenting here (“Find the right dream / Taking a chance on forever”). That said, the duo know when to complement each other, too: ‘Drowning’ makes like its title, its layered cacophony creating aural overwhelm. And the clear highlight, ‘Someone Up There’, revels in its convergence: whirring guitars, a punkish bassline and an ‘ooh ooh ooh’ chorus refrain of “You’ve lost your power / It’s all gone sour.” Cinematic in scope, often luscious in its arrangements, it’s a singular gem” – DIY
Key Cut: Drowning
RAYE - My 21st Century Blues
Release Date: 3rd February
Producers: Rachel Keen (RAYE)/Mike Sabath/Punctual/BloodPop/Di Genius
Label: Human Re Sources
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/raye/my-21st-century-blues
Standout Tracks: Hard Out Here./Black Mascara./Body Dysmorphia.
Review:
“RAYE closes her debut album by thanking her nearest and dearest. Celebrating the friends, family and collaborators who supported the making of the record, she explains on ‘Fin’: “I’ve waited seven years for this moment, and finally ‘My 21st Century Blues’ is now out forever.”
It also marks the culmination of the arduous battle the 25-year-old has faced to release her first full-length album. After releasing her debut EP ‘Welcome To The Winter’ in 2014, RAYE penned a deal with Polydor the same year aged 17. Since then, there have been further solo releases (including several EPs and 2020 mini-album ‘Euphoric Sad Songs’), collaborations with chart-dominating dance whizzes (Jax Jones, David Guetta, Disclosure) and co-writes for the likes of Beyoncé and Mabel. Yet RAYE’s own debut album failed to materialise, and, by June 2021, she’d had enough. “I have been on a FOUR-ALBUM RECORD DEAL since 2014! And [I] haven’t been allowed to put out one album,” she tweeted. “I’m done being a polite pop star. I want to make my album now, please that is all I want.” Three weeks later, she got her wish: “Today, I am speaking to you as an independent artist,” she told her Twitter followers.
Since then, RAYE has been releasing music that feels unapologetically her own. There’s the electrifying, affirmative ‘Hard Out Here’, which sees the singer take aim at the patriarchal music industry: “All the white men CEOs, fuck your privilege / Get your pink chubby hands off my mouth, fuck you think this is?” The euphoric ‘Black Mascara’, meanwhile, demonstrates RAYE’s knack for penning floor-filling dance hits, albeit by switching things up from her previous club anthems by coupling darker, bubbling beats with devastating lyrics (“I’m here now fucked up, thinking this why I’m out here sinking in these dark nights“).
The album’s real triumph, though, is the trip-hop-influenced, 070 Shake-featuring ‘Escapism’. The slinky single first dropped in October before gradually climbing the charts, hitting the summit last month to give RAYE her first UK Number One single. “As tough as it’s been, in the darkest of times, it’s the ultimate validation,” she told NME of the victory.
The rest of ‘My 21st Century Blues’ follows suit from these lead singles. Gritty, honest lyrics, delivered by RAYE’s gorgeous voice, are paired with weird and wonderful genre-spanning instrumentals. ‘Oscar Winning Tears’ is a searing takedown of a crumbling, toxic relationship that’s built upon swooning strings and cinematic piano licks that support its creator’s powerhouse voice. The stripped-back ‘Mary Jane’ transports you to a jazzy speakeasy through its biting guitar riffs and subtle rhythm section, while the funk-laced ‘Worth It’ could be a lost Silk Sonic track. The brass-heavy ‘The Thrill Is Gone’ is an excellent modern soul offering, its lush instrumental arrangements evoking Amy Winehouse’s ‘Back To Black’.
Lyrically, RAYE doesn’t pull any punches. ‘Environmental Anxiety’, which borrows spaced-out production tricks from Coldplay, sees her sing: “Come on kids, it’s time to vote / Boris Johnson’s sniffing coke / All the children are depressed / Not the future we had hoped.” ‘Body Dysmorphia’ tackles her own difficult relationship with her body, while ballad ‘Ice Cream Man’ is a brutally honest account of an abuse of power where RAYE recounts her experience of sexual assault at the hands of a producer: “And I was 7, was 21, was 17, and was 11 / It took a while to understand what my consent means.”
RAYE recently said that such bold and brave declarations wouldn’t have been released had she still been signed to a major label. Granted her creative independence, though, the hard-fought ‘My 21st Century Blues’ is unequivocally RAYE from start to finish” – DIY
Key Cut: The Thrill Is Gone.
Kara Jackson - Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?
Release Date: 14th April
Producers: Kara Jackson/Kaina Castillo/Sen Morimoto/Nnamdi Ogbonnaya
Label: September Recordings
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/kara-jackson/why-does-the-earth-give-us-people-to-love
Standout Tracks: no fun/party /therapy/why does the earth give us people to love?
Review:
“Although she began collecting awards for her poetry as a teen, including being named National Youth Poet Laureate in 2019, Chicagoland's Kara Jackson is far from a writer who dabbles in music. She started piano lessons as early as age five, has referred to singing as her first love, and released her debut singer/songwriter EP within weeks of the laureate designation. Even though the EP, a spare acoustic-guitar outing, garnered positive attention for its blunt observations and turns of phrase as well as Jackson's husky, authoritative voice, it may have done little to prepare the music world for the stark theatricality and poignancy of her first album, Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? Parts Daniel Johnston and avant-cabaret show, it demands attention from the opening clatter of a cassette recorder and ensuing dinked-out piano and spoke-sung rhymes of the one-minute "recognized." ("Some people roll dice...Some people look nice...Some people snort lines...Some people tell lies to be recognized.") In an almost sharp contrast but for its continuation of the album's unrelenting starkness, the episodic "no fun/party" adds intermittent swooping strings and ghostly synths to its opening section's broken guitar chords. It then changes tempo, mode, and mood for a mournful B section that interrupts with thoughts like "Every person that I've dated/Tells me I'm intimidating" with a sinking melody. When the more tuneful A part returns, additional instruments, multi-tracked vocals, and effects are used sparingly for spacey, sometimes startling emphasis rather than band-like accompaniment. From there, the album's unpredictability is another defining trait. As Jackson continues in similar fashion through songs with titles like "dickhead blues," "therapy," and "rat" (featuring Ohmme's Macie Stewart on violin), she continues to reveal intimate details of her own struggles while painting memorable scenes and characters. Appearing relatively late in the track list, the showstopping title track was reportedly the first song Jackson wrote for the album, after a mentor received an identical cancer diagnosis to a friend who had recently died. Alongside the nearly hour-long record's most haunting melody, it begins with the eternal question, "Why does the earth give us people to love, then take them away out of reach?" In true theatric fashion, the album closes with a reprise (of "recognized") and a brief parting song, "liquor," whose mocking, rising-and-falling tune considers self-medicating after being discarded for someone deemed better looking” – AllMusic
Key Cut: pawnshop
boygenius – the record
Release Date: 31st March
Producers: boygenius/Catherine Marks
Label: Interscope
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/boygenius/the-record-5
Standout Tracks: $20/Cool About It/Leonard Cohen
Review:
“With You Without Them” is a kitchen hymn sung under soft morning light; it is a song about history, inheritance, and in that spirit carries on with the swooning folk harmonies last heard on the EP’s closer, “Ketchum, ID.” Dacus, Baker, and Bridgers express gratitude to the preceding generations who shaped the people they love—their father, their father’s mother—and ask to take part in this lineage, sharing storylines until they and their intimates become a kind of family too. “Give me everything you’ve got/I’ll take what I can get,” the trio sings a capella, then reciprocates the request: “I’ll give everything I’ve got/Please take what I can give.” The first four tracks of The Record were written independently, and “With You Without Them” is so evidently by Dacus, a ditty she’d sing while washing dishes; it shares a bloodline with her Historian cut “Pillar of Truth.” Here and elsewhere, her voice provides a warm and sturdy foundation, cradling the others’ like a well-loved rocking chair.
Being a touring musician might mean only a brief layover at home, and so the next song drags you out the front door into the Sprinter, Converse laces untied. Led by Baker, the rabble-rousing idealist who was railing against George W. Bush as a 10-year-old, “$20” is a madcap adventure that invokes the spirit of a famous Vietnam protest photo as it tells a story of youthful recklessness. The Tennessee singer taps into her past as a hardcore frontwoman, fulfilling her wish for More Sick Riffs; she also activates a combustive, daredevil streak in her bandmates, who ditch the refined patience of their EP to scream like hell. Later on, the three trade verses on the headbanging “Satanist,” in which they play adrift kids scrounging for shady ecstasy and trying on renegade poses. “Will you be an anarchist with me?/Sleep in cars and kill the bourgeoisie,” Bridgers sings—then a minute later unleashes wails that sound both like the victim trapped in a burning building and the fire engine racing to the rescue.
Banter flies while Baker is at the wheel, and at other parts of the ride, it’s like the passengers have lapsed quietly into their own thoughts. Guided by the cashmere fog of Bridgers’ voice, “Revolution 0” and “Emily I’m Sorry” exist less within the Boygenius milieu than the rippling, snow-lined headspace of Punisher; the other band members seem only to enter in the form of graceful backing harmonies. Bridgers alludes to real-life incidents whose details remain obscured, former lovers who occupy an uncertain position in her life. The backdrop to the hushed, crumbling apologia “Emily I’m Sorry” seems to be a defamation lawsuit that strained an already-fraught relationship; Bridgers’ mind wanders to apocryphal wastelands, to Montreal, as she entreats the person she loves to forgive her for going astray. “I’m 27 and I don’t know who I am,” she confesses.
The closer you get to somebody, the more you can fail them, and The Record recoils with the humiliating reminder of our own insufficiency: Surely, we imagine, they can do better than us. On the skydiving country-pop song “Not Strong Enough,” the trio offers a rejoinder to Sheryl Crow as they profess to lack the toughness, the solidity, to be what another person needs: “I tried, I can’t/Stop staring at the ceiling fan.” It’s a cowardly and relatable strategy, preemptively curbing disappointment by shrinking away. Elsewhere, they wonder whether distance would have been better in the first place. The Simon & Garfunkel redux and album highlight “Cool About It” explores the anxious, conciliatory phase after a breakup when you emerge from a relationship into a wilderness of pleasantries and deceptions. Friendliness is its own agony: “Wishing you were kind enough to be cruel about it,” Baker sings.
To be wounded, actually and acutely: this is the price of real intimacy. And real intimacy is what you find on The Record, the melding of what’s yours and mine—a favorite Joan Didion quote, songs by Iron & Wine and the Cure, passages from Ecclesiastes—until what’s left is something greater than the sum. Reimagining the EP standout “Me & My Dog” from a new and wiser vantage point, the album closer “Letter to an Old Poet” is, in one sense, an account of Bridgers moving on from a terrible crush. But it’s also subtle testament to the influence of our friends as we carry on in life. The song alludes to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, a Dacus staple, as it seems to actualize a wish in one of her best-known lyrics: “In five years I hope the songs feel like covers/Dedicated to new lovers.” As we evolve into new versions of ourselves, our friends accompany us into the unknown, bearing witness to and taking part in our transformations. They may hurt us sometimes, but it’s worth it; in the end, better than anything is being understood” – Pitchfork
Key Cut: Without You Without Them