Listen: Debbie Downer by Francesca Everly

The new single from British artist Francesca Everly sits right on the edge of my sonic taste. Debbie Downer is ultimately a slice of high attitude pop music, but there is an energy and authenticity to this it that I couldn’t resist.

Created in response to a feeling of being misunderstood and overly sensitive, Francesca’s song describes the experience of feeling like you need to bottle up your emotions out of a fear of being judged for them. Debbie Downer is a subsequent emotional release, as she decides to let it all go anyway. Against a wall of guitars, Everly frustratedly cries, ‘Fuck’s sake, give me a break!’, and the result is cathartic for anyone who has ever felt like they are made to feel abnormal for their emotional response to a situation.

I’ve always been a sucker for the loud-quiet-loud thing, and Everly uses it to great effect here. Opening with gentle acoustic guitars and hurt sounding vocals, Debbie Downer transforms into a rowdy and assertive anthem. In the song’s finale, we get a return to its hushed opening in the form of a bridge that briefly feels introspective. It leads to a sense that Francesca has b een unshackled, however, as she shakes off the introspection, hitting the run into the song’s chorus in a brief a cappella solo. It is the kind of perfect little moment you can only really get in a pop record.

Based in London, Italiane-born musician Everly produces indie pop and, as demonstrated here, has a penchant for ‘unfiltered lyrics for your late-night overthinking sessions’. Debbie Downer follows on from her debut EP, This Heart Like I’ve Never Felt It. Check out the new single below:

Listen: Along With Mine by I Wish I Was A Punk Band

Something about Along With Mine, the new single from I Wish I Was A Punk Band, reminds me of Jack Antonoff and the Bleachers. Sure, it is there in the spacious synths and snappy drum machines, but it is also there in the clear-eyed vocals laid down by Phil Hamilton, whose project I Wish I Was A Punk Band is.

Where this most evokes Antonoff’s band, however, is in the vibes. There is something of the dream-like coming-of-age feeling of John Hughes, shot through a soft gauzy 80s filter, that is shared with much of Antonoff’s work. And, just like Bleachers, this is the sound of the idea of a rock band, disassembled and reassembled, with the benefit of hindsight. It is the sound of garage-y rock with Bruce Springsteen heart, tuned for modern sensibilities.

All of which might sound cynical, but it really doesn’t feel it. Along With Mine has bags of heart, and you can’t help but feel a sense of the hope I Wish I Was A Punk Band are channeling here. It culminates in a desire for more, growing from somewhere inside you, and an unwillingness to settle.

The gutsy feels are there as Hamilton gently promises, ‘Fuck it, we can take it slow… Tell me where you wanna go’, before quietly pleading that place isn’t just home. It is in the shouted BVs, as they chorus the song’s title, and the slammed refrain of notes as the song hits its final chorus, and the general slow-building distortion that the whole thing rides, like growing excitement.

Overall, Hamilton has made something that conjures just a little magic.

Listen: New School by UFO Hawaii

UFO Hawaii might just be the most apt band name I have heard in a while. Actually hailing from Berlin, Germany, UFO Hawaii nonetheless channels a laid back aesthetic full of a lazy, humid Hawaiian warmth. This is shot through, however, with a disorientated and paranoid otherworldliness.

Against slowly looping drums, guitars weave their way around keys, sliding past us like we are enclosed within our own flying saucer. Lyrics flow, deadpan in their delivery, like a stream of consciousness. These are snapshots of scenes and thoughts, but their delivery is surprisingly vivid, with moments, like ‘I've had enough of standin’ here in line, Central Park bridge, waiting for that bitch’. Who is ‘that bitch’, and what is meant by the similarly evocative line ‘a new economy is hitting my veins’? An addiction of a more financial nature, perhaps, but it is hard to know, and perhaps that is the point.

Overall, UFO Hawaii’s New School is a weird, disorientated piece of dream pop that refuses to submit to any desire for clarity or specific meaning, and instead embraces you in its weird grip. It is a woozy experience, and yet a reassuringly peaceful one.

Listen: Lose The Feeling by Jake Back x Nextlife

Jake Back appeared on BlackPlastic.co.uk last summer with the dubby, dark cacophony that was his disco infused workout, Lemme Tell You. Here some 14-months later, Back has teamed up with Nextlife to produce something quite different. Where Lemme Tell You was all about creating a feeling to get lost in, and potentially find connection through, new single Lose The Feeling is a more cerebral affair.

Opening with layered percussion and pillowy synth tones, the instrumentation falls back for a vocal that gently marinades in its own uncertainty. As the lyrics carefully lays out the individual components of a heart that is at the mid-point of breaking, depicting a growing sense of unease and uncertainty. Even if they reach an eruption, relationships never end in one moment, but through a series of small adjustments in how the participants view their futures. It’s this slow-moving demise through misalignment that Lose The Feeling so beautifully captures.

Much of the atmosphere Jake Back and Nextlife create here comes from the growing interplay between the vocals and instrumentation. As the song builds towards its central question, the lyrics are gradually wrapped up in abstract vocal harmonies and layered synths. Left sounding genuinely alone, the song ends with that question, ‘When did we both lose that feeling?’, to which there can be no satisfying answer.

The soft electronic mourning on display on Lose The Feeling reminds me of a song I haven’t revisited in years — 2011’s What I’ve Lost by Benoit & Sergio. Sung to a potential love interest, the magic of What I’ve Lost is how much it is about the hurt the past can still conjure in us. Both Benoit & Sergio, and Jack Back & Nextlife, have captured and bottled the sort of emotional experience that ultimate shapes who we become, for better or worse.

Watch: Soho House Valet by Gatlin

The new single from Florida-born musician Gatlin opens with the kind of piano refrain that Radiohead built their song Codex around. The sound hints at an emotional depth but wrapped in a kind of aloofness, the glassy sound evoking the sense of your ennui getting squeegeed off the windscreen of life. You don’t have the time to stop and unpack your emotional baggage because you’ll just end up missing your damn flight.

This is all an appropriate feeling for a song that is entirely concerned with those moments where you do, ultimately, unpack your shit. Gatlin’s piano playing might be trying to keep things moving along, but her vocal isn’t having any of it. She refuses to be silenced, describing how she is trying her best, but ultimately feels struck by a confrontation with her father ‘in front of a Soho House valet’. Gatlin goes on to acknowledge, ‘it would be more tragic if it didn’t sound so LA’. Side-note: the fact a Soho House, a kind of hipster institution born out of central London’s historic and tightly packed streets, has a valet anywhere sounds ridiculous to my ears. Perhaps that is half the point. So LA, in multiple ways.

Regardless, Gatlin briefly acknowledges , potentially, her father may have had a point, before apologising for the general discomfort caused by describing her emotional drama to us all. In an age where we are all often processing our own (sometimes self-inflicted) trauma, I think this is a common experience — back to my analogy, we are unpacking our baggage on the side of the road, causing the passing traffic so slow down and make room. It is difficult to know whether it is the self-processing here that is helping, or just the act of unveilling our deepest anxieties that enables us to move on. And with that, Gatlin’s depressed-yet-hauntingly-beautiful vocal is gradually accompanied by additional instrumentation — the reassurance of a burden shared, as a guitar, bass and eventually drums join her, carrying her emotional weight to a place where she can let it all go.

The heaviness described and depicted through Soho House Valet stems from Gatlin’s experience of being the eldest sibling, something her forthcoming debut album focuses on. Describing the song, Gatlin says:

‘I wrote Soho House Valet after my parents had come to visit my sister and I in Los Angeles and my father and I got in a fight right outside of the Soho House in Downtown LA. It was one of the most vulnerable things I’ve ever written. As the eldest daughter, I’ve always felt like I had to be strong and never burden anyone…but digging through stuff I never expected to share and then sharing this song anyway started a healing process.’

Soho House Valet is out now, and Gatlin’s debut album, The Eldest Daughtet, is due on 3 October via Dualtone Records.