Here is another track from Kanye West’s new album, Yeezus. “Black Skinhead” was premiered on Saturday Night Live this weekend.

Don’t feel bad if you’re left a little speechless after the show-stopping performance. Pounding drums, blinding, powerful messages and a cathartic, screaming Kanye can do that to you.

Here are the lyrics:

He also performed, for the first time, “New Slaves.”

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Is Kanye West’s follow up to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy called Yezus? According to some reports and Kim Kardashian, it is. Rap Up‘s report also confirms that the album will be sleazed June 18th, as expected.

This follows up last night’s incredible spectacle, in which Kanye premiered his new single “New Slaves,” literally on a global stage.

West is hitting the SNL stage later tonight.

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Kanye West, always the visionary, has debuted his new single “New Slave” via… video projections taking place around the world. The first projection was found on the corner of Bedford and North 7th in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, but Kanye’s website has shared a map with 65 other projections going on globally.

We can’t even begin to imagine what dude has in store for us when he hits SNL tomorrow night.

Watch “New Slaves” projected in Brooklyn for the first time below:

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After months of teasing, Johnny Jewel’s record label, Italians Do It Better, has finally released the soundtrack to your next dozen midnight drives, After Dark 2. A compilation worth waiting for, a rare beast in today’s playlist-heavy social media landscape, After Dark 2 comes six years behind the seminal After Dark (free download), and is packed with new music from bands steered by visionary producer Johnny Jewel, including Chromatics, Glass Candy, Desire and others. It’s out on iTunes now. Check out the tracklist and some streams below.

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by DREW MALMUTH

On Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers, Matt Berninger said that “if she knows you’re paper, she’ll know she has to burn you.”  His lyrics are filled with sentiments that can’t be ascribed to Berninger himself, yet, in light of how The National has progressed over the last decade, this line feels distinctly personal.  It neatly expresses the deep insecurity that comes with showing someone what kind of person you are.  Throughout their early output, The National seemingly struggled to play the exact music that they wanted to play, caught up in a balance of expectations, aspirations, and creative tendencies.  The National sounds like an entirely different band because in many ways it was.  Berninger wanted to be like Stephen Malkmus and the angst and anger of youth pervaded the sound.  When Alligator was released in 2005, bringing with it critical praise and a devoted fan base, no one could have predicted that that album would now be looked at as a classic embodiment of the band’s unpolished roots.  It was hard to know exactly what was coming.  Boxer was restrained and powerful in a way that made it seem as though this was the music the band had been hoping to make all along.  High Violet continued that trend.  Looking back, the Cherry Tree EP was the first indication of what was to come – a full-throated embrace of emotive melodies, morose lyricism, and pouring wine on fans.

Trouble Will Find Me may draw on some of the creativity of their early work, but it is firmly rooted in the sound that the band has so assuredly developed over the last two albums.  The members have said that this album is more complex and aggressive, suggesting a noticeable departure from High Violet.  But this characterization may say more about the members’ relationships to their music than it does about the album itself.  For most fans, Trouble Will Find Me will not sound like a departure at all.  The songs are still filled with swaying masses of melody, being drawn in and out of precise drumming and subtly crafted guitar lines by Matt Berninger’s impossibly deep growl.  There is a blend of anthemic numbers and gorgeous slow burners.  Wry, ingenious lyrics abound.  But the members of The National still find vast differences because they have formed a nuanced understanding of what they are trying to do.  For them, playing “I Should Live in Salt” in 7/8 or putting Sufjan Stevens’ drum machines on “I Need My Girl” is a drastic change in chemistry.  Like a mom knowing her child is stoned when no one else does, Trouble Will Find Me may feel more aggressive for The National because they have become increasingly in tune with and dedicated to their craft.  In this way, Trouble Will Find Me is not a surprising listen; it is an excellent album from a band that only gets better with age.

The album as a whole feels familiar but it is filled with unique moments that inevitably change character over time.  “I Should Live In Salt” doesn’t immediately feel like an opener, but the dramatic pauses caused by the time signature and the ethereal voices in the chorus slowly start to congeal into a sturdy entry point for the album.  “Demons” underlies its approachable melody with convoluted guitar and piano work and Berninger’s depressive lyrics (“When I walk into a room I do not light it up”) are ultimately smile-inducing (“Fuck”).  This focus on subtlety contributed to some of the more gorgeous songs on the album.  Effortlessly simple, “Slipped” follows one of Berninger’s many alter egos as her nostalgia and feelings of inadequacy unfold alongside the pulsating piano line.  There is a quiet moment after the first chorus that sets up a real heartbreaker: “I don’t need any help to be breakable, believe me.”  If you’re searching for pockets of emotional resonance, as most fans of The National are, that line is a good place to start.  Similarly, “This Is The Last Time” offers swirly moments of escapism, with the addition of a catchy melody and a hypnotic final minute.

Other tunes don’t have the immediacy of a “Mr. November,” but, after a week to absorb them, it is easy to imagine Matt kicking some lucky kid in the head during the breakdowns.  “Don’t Swallow the Cap” (maybe a reference to Tennessee Williams’ unfortunate demise) slowly builds into an anthemic ending, combining lush string arrangements with eery distortion and Bryan Davendorf’s cyclical drum work.   It’s an odd melding of styles – Davendorf drums like he’s in Can; the Dessner brothers play delicate, sly melodies; Matt sings with an intimate intensity – but it works, and I’m not sure it ever won’t.  “Sea of Love,” “Graceless,” and “Humiliation” follow in a similar pattern, but each has its own dimensions.  On “Humiliation” Matt sings “all the L.A women fall asleep while swimmin/ I got paid to fish ‘em out, then one day I lost the job/ and I cried a little/ I got fried a little/ and she laid her eyes on mine and said ‘babe, you’re better off’”  The bouncy absurdity of the lyrics play perfectly into the energy of the song, and it may be the most overtly hilarious image Berninger has created since dancing on a table with a cock in one’s hand.  It shows how much The National’s songs can hinge on the atmosphere created by the lyrics.  On moments of “Heavenfaced” and “Hard to Find” the vocals venture too close to an aging-arena-rock-star aesthetic and the songs lose some of the unfiltered character that makes them feel authentic.

But when Berninger strikes the right tone – and he usually does – his lyrics rank among the most clever being written today.  Bryce Dessner mentioned that Matt spends a lot of time reading John Cheever.  Cheever, a writer that builds deep emotional intensity from a seemingly mundane course of events, is in many ways a perfect point of comparison for Berninger’s writing.  The way central characters search desperately for significance but often end up where they began (“Demons”); the unsatisfying nature of love (“Sea of Love”); the feeling of pointlessness that so often accompanies being human (“Slipped”).  All these Cheever themes show up in the lyrics of Trouble Will Find Me; Cheever with his gin and suburban dysfunction and Berninger with his wine and apocalyptic imagery.  The difference is that where Cheever was generally unsatisfied with his work and spent a lot of his time drinking himself to near suicide, Matt feels privileged to be able to wallow in his own sadness.  He mentioned in an interview that when he thinks of a fun record he thinks of all that “dark, grim stuff.”  For him, “Sorrow” was a playful jaunt.  It is this embrace of emotion, in all its complexities, that has made The National the band that it is.

Alligator is in many ways The National’s most exciting album.  Its spastic, feverish tracks showed a knack for spirited songwriting that few albums have been able to match since.  Some may hope to find that band on Trouble Will Find Me.  They’ll be disappointed.  But what they’ll find instead is a collection of remarkable songs by a group of musicians that compliment one another as well as any group over the last decade.  The National are a product of their past experiences, and all the better for it.  [A-]

Find it at:

analog.am | amazon | emusic

Listen to it at iTunes

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Listen to the first single and title track from The Weeknd’s first official full-length album, Kiss Land. It’s a near-eight minute epic, complete with horror movie screams, chopped samples and Abel Tesfaye’s signature pleading-menacing vocal delivery. And that’s just the first half. Like Frank Ocean’s “Pyramids” last year, “Kiss Land” picks up in its confessional, drum machine-led second part. Stream it below:

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All weekend long, the Hangout Music Festival in Golf Shores, Alabama will be streaming key sets via MTV. Tune in for Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Kendrick Lamar, Passion Pit, Grizzly Bear, The Shins, Kings of Leon, Dirty Projectors, Holy Ghost!, Bloc Party, Stevie Wonder and more. The schedule is found below (all times EST). Watch it all go down here.

Friday, May 17th:
12:30 – Twin Sister
12:30 – Lance Herbstrong
01:30 – Lissie
01:30 – Twenty One Pilots
02:30 – The Breeders
02:30 – Ra Ra Riot
03:30 – Toots and the Maytals
03:30 – The Sheepdogs
04:45 – Jim James
04:45 – Afrojack
06:00 – Grizzly Bear
06:00 – Ryan Bingham
07:15 – Passion Pit
07:15 – Macklemore & Ryan Lewis
08:30 – The Shins
08:30 – Big Gigantic
10:00 – Kings of Leon

Saturday, May 18th:
12:30 – Delta Rae
12:30 – Brassft Punk
01:30 – Nicki Bluhm & The Gramblers
01:30 – The Werks
02:30 – Shovels & Rope
02:30 – Public Enemy
03:30 – Dirty Projectors
03:30 – Bright Light Social Hour
04:30 – Gov’t Mule
04:30 – Wolfgang Gartner
05:45 – The Roots
05:45 – Holy Ghost!
07:00 – The Black Crowes
07:00 – Kendrick Lamar
08:15 – Bassnectar
08:15 – Slightly Stoopid
09:45 – Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Sunday, May 19th:
12:30 – Zion I
01:15 – Best Coast
01:15 – The Revivalists
02:15 – Grouplove
02:15 – Baauer
03:15 – Galactic
03:15 – Moon Taxi
04:15 – Ellie Goulding
04:15 – Porter Robinson
05:15 – Imagine Dragons
05:15 – moe.
06:15 – Yeah Yeah Yeahs
06:15 – Steve Aoki
07:30 – Trey Anastasio Band
07:30 – Bloc Party
09:30 – Stevie Wonder

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Liars mark the beginning of their European/NYC tour with two songs that have an overwhelming sense of immediacy. I played it after finishing another spin of Random Access Memories, and the music almost felt suffocating–but in a positive way. Unlike the material on their recent WIXIW, the music was “not labored over or scrutinized,” but rather produced “on the fly.” Get into the moment with Liars below. Here are the mp3s. Plus tour dates.

Liars:

05/18 – New York, NY @ Temple of Dendur at The Metropolitan Musuem of Art
05/19 – Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Masonic Temple
05/23 – Reims, FR @ la Cartonnerie
05/24 – Dudingen, CH @ Bad Bon Kilbi Festival
05/25 – Barcelona, ES @ Primavera Sound
05/27 – Rome, IT @ Circolo Artisti
05/28 – Verona, IT @ Interzona
05/29 – Torino, IT @ Musica 90 Molodiciotto
05/30 – Marseille, FR @ Cabaret Aleatoire
06/01 – Porto, PT @ Optimus Primavera Sound
06/05 – Nantes, FR @ Stereolux
06/06 – Paris, FR @ Trabendo
06/09 – Manchester, UK @ Parklife Festival
06/13 – Barcelona, ES @ Sonar Festival
06/15 – Tel Aviv, IL @ Barby

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Another day, another creepily animated video from Queens of the Stone Age. This one’s for the previously heard “My God is the Sun.” You can check out four other post-apocalyptic videos honoring the band’s new album …Like Clockwork here.

…Like Clockwork is out June 4.

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As fans of Sleater-Kinney/Wild Flag, Portlandia and American Express, we think this is awesome.

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“QotSA are being so weird!” thus cried my editor as the video for “If I Had A Tail.” If you’re getting that kind of reaction, my instinct is to say you’re doing something correctly. After watching the video itself, I feel better about that instinctive reaction. It’s a visually engaging bit of grimey animation, and the song itself ain’t a bad jam either. Check it out below.

Their new album, …Like Clockwork, is out June 4.

If you haven’t been keeping up with QotSA’s creepy animated saga, here you go:

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While the pop culture media hasn’t quite had enough time to pass judgement on the new Daft Punk album (just kidding, here are 13 reviews that have been published already), we can probably all agree that the masked Frenchmen have definitely done a good thing in reintroducing the world to Giorgio Moroder. Here, the veteran Italian producer has composed an epic song for Google and some weird smartphone game they’ve created. It feels a lot bigger than it’s 3:57 runtime indicates, and makes me wish I lived in Spain so I could go to one of those multi-story discotecas and loe my mind to the likes of this. Get your four on the floor on below.

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Chlöe Howl only has three songs out, but they’re all really good and she has a major label (Sony) putting her on so, bam, here were are lstening to the latest remix of the brilliant-in-the-first-place “Rumour.” YACHT does this slinky rendition that comes off well, and if nothing else calls our attention back to Howl, who now has an EP out for free. Grab it off her site in exchange for an email.

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Brace yourself, Ye is back! Not that he was ever gone really, or anything other than a human being making music, as he tells us in the below video. It’s one of his more cogent rants that actually manages to stay on topic and evoke something of an emotional response. This blogger very nearly felt bad for him, but then I slipped back into a state of entertained indifference. He’s going on SNL this weekend with Ben Affleck, has a new album coming out in June (probably), and is playing Governor’s Ball in the not so distant future (June 9).

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Although it’s quite possible this piece of news means little to the near future of recorded music, we are hopeful that Frank Ocean and James Blake’s appearances at Drake’s fourth annual OVO Fest in Toronto means that the three have been in a studio together at some point. Let’s not forget that Drake has collaborated with almost all of the past OVO Fest performers (The Weeknd, Nicki Minaj, Rick Ross, Nas, Meek Mill, Snoop Dogg, J. Cole and even Stevie fucking Wonder).

Back to OVO Fest. The two-day bash is going down on August 4th and 5th at the Molson Canadian Amphitheater in Toronto. On August 4th, Frank Ocean and James Blake play, and on August 5th Drake hits the stage with some unnamed “special guests.” It’s worth noting that Drake’s new album, Nothing Was The Same is supposed to come out August 27, according to Drake’s Dad.

Check out the poster below:

Revisit Drake’s latest track, “Girls Love Beyoncé”:

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Known to most as the guy who sang that song with Rihanna, Mikky Ekko has nowhere to go but up. He recently shared this gorgeous “ruff demo” of a new track called “Disappear” onto his SoundCloud account. Give it a listen, or twelve, below:

Nowhere to go but up.

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Scottish indie rock band Franz Ferdinand, probably best known for their cover of LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends,” are returning on August 27 with a new album called Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action, the follow up to a quite solid 2009 album called Tonight. Check out the 10 song tracklist below, and also a mock-intense trailer for the album. Spoiler alert: you can see some Alex Kapranos boob.

Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action:

01 Right Action
02 Evil Eye
03 Love Illumination
04 Stand on the Horizon
05 Fresh Strawberries
06 Bullet
07 Treason! Animals.
08 The Universe Expanded
09 Brief Encounters
10 Goodbye Lovers & Friends

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News of a new Fuck Buttons album is just the latest in a series of hugely anticipated comebacks and follow-ups this year. With Soft Focus, the two-piece noise wizards follow-up 2009′s grand and glorious Tarot Sport. Like their last album, Soft Focus will feature seven new tracks with evocative titles like “Brainfreeze” and “Stalker.” Check out the album’s track listing below. The album is due out July 23 in the US and a day earlier in the UK.

Slow Focus:

01 Brainfreeze
02 Year of the Dog
03 The Red Wing
04 Sentients
05 Prince’s Prize
06 Stalker
07 Hidden XS

Get in the right headspace for new Fuck Buttons – revisit Tarot Sports’ “Surf Solar”:

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So we’ve all had well over 24 hours with the Important (capital I) new Daft Punk record, Random Access Memories. The album is one that is uncompromising in vision and full of strange left turns and maybe some moments of genuine transcendence. “Doin’ It Right” with Panda Bear is probably one of those moments.

Much like “Get Lucky,” with Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers, “Doin’ It Right” is a perfect example of the marriage of style and vision that Daft Punk has been trying to convey with their overwrought web series The Collaborators. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that all they had to do was play some music.

“If You Lose Your Way To-night / That’s How You Know The Ma-gic’s Right”

Random Access Memories is out May 21. Stream it here.

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Listen to The National’s triumphant follow-up to High Violet in its entirety over at iTunes. Trouble Will Find Me is out May 21.

STREAM: The National – Trouble Will Find Me

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by BEN BROCK WILKES

Creeping out from the quiet warbles and crinkles of the needle drop that begin Wampire’s debut, an archetypal pipe organ leaks notes of familiar darkness. A shadowed, Draculesque figure hunches in front of the haunted keys as metallic, baroque horror echoes off the walls. Buckling to an irresistible curiosity, we approach the figure, a pool of sweat collecting on our brow in the cool humidity of his dungeon hall. We reach the bench where the embodiment of our fears sits, just as he whisks around to greet us with a smooth bass lick, an assortment of ghoulish fellows, and a contemporary “Monster Mash” in Curiosity’s opener, “The Hearse.”

It’s hard to not have images of ballroom blitzes or Scooby-Doo chase scenes dance through your mind while listening to Wampire’s first release, Curiosity. The Portland, Oregon duo of Rocky Tinder and Eric Phipps—trio, if you include Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s bassist and the album’s producer Jacob Portrait—have crafted a record with a precise and distinct tone that is this silly, frantic nightmare. It is sinister at the same time that it is playful, fun and danceable at the same time that it is deeply confessional and at moments, depraved—as “Orchards” admits, “inside the old folks home, I can’t stop my laughter.” An absolute expertise in tonality is what was necessary to hollow out such a niche, and is what makes the LP so singular.

Clocking in at just over half an hour, Curiosity is fast-paced and concise, moving through its nine tracks without dwelling on any one hook long enough for the listener to recognize it as such—the one exception being “Outta Money’s” take on the Arcade Fire 2-chord epic. The opening track and the group’s exposé of style, “The Hearse” tromps through its gothy, new wave pop-rock with a guilty smirk, “nobody knows what I have done…if you were in my shoes, you’d do it too.” A pleasant surprise arrives with the ambient break halfway through the song—a faux pas for the first track on a pop LP maybe—but also a candid plug: hey, we have guts, from Portland’s latest in psychedelic.

Each song is stuffed with sound — there is, simply put, a lot going on and a lot to pay attention to in a short amount of time — despite catchy hooks and appropriated pop forms (i.e. the chord progression on “Trains,” that even Rolling Stone couldn’t keep its hands off of). What’s impressive is that every layer of noise is so articulate and finely honed that wherever your ear chooses to roam is a worthwhile endeavor. The lonesome, desert whistle on “Orchards” seems to better encapsulate the Western movie genre than John Wayne does. The tin flute effect that responds to the call of the offbeat guitar strums during the verses of “Spirit Forest” is as out-of-this-world as it is oddly organic. And the synth tones during the second half of “I Can’t See Why” conjure an image of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” on the moon. Even the smallest nuance like the güiro scrape that enters the percussion on “Trains” at 1:20 has been altered to sound like a croaking frog to match the mood of cinematic horror. The most remarkable moment of this recording fluidity is the subtle implosion on “Giants” at the 2:30 mark. Rarely is a half-time break pulled off so well, not to mention a 180-degree reversal in feel, from a driving, tension-filled beat to a spacious jazz groove.

Flawless transitions are endemic to the record, and necessary in order to cram this many ideas into an attention-deficit 32 minutes. It is as if Curiosity has taken a postmortem body, with krautrock blood and a heart of rhythm and blues, and resurrected it by stapling and gluing on pieces of our postmodern musical Diaspora. Wampire’s Frankenstein Rock has defibrillated Dick Dale surf rock on “Giants” and the “Hotel California” voiced chords on “Orchards” with the production savvy of post-dubstep (for example, the downtempo intro of “Magic Light”) and the tonality and spirit of Oregon psychedelic dance bedfellows Unknown Mortal Orchestra and STRFKR (the second half of “Magic Light”).

Whether by coincidence or some pulling of strings that surely resulted in a large amount of ribbing among the higher-ups, Vampire Weekend’s new record also came out this week. Though Wampire certainly has a lot left to prove, Curiosity busts down doors in the messy free-for-all that is indie rock on a similarly self-aware and intellectual plane to the way VW’s self-titled did five years ago. With a name like Wampire, an adaptation of Phipps’ nickname coined by goth friends in Germany, these guys obviously don’t take themselves too seriously — see their new video for “Orchards” for more; it features a character that resembles a splicing of the two main Scarers in Monsters, Inc. This light-hearted nature is ironic and refreshing when paired with dark music and rather serious nocturnal confession, “I give to you, you give to me, but I never seem to get what I need,” or “you could be the nighttime sky and see me lose my mind.” It is these oppositions of goofy, yet quite unsettling; sunny tunes, but lit by an amber moon; Kraftwerk cover B-sides released next to music with Motown flair, that makes the fact that “we can’t figure out which way to turn” work. Making and experiencing music is all about exploration and curiosity because “life is but a playground with kids running around.” Wampire makes that feeling accessible through a new avenue on Curiosity. [B+]

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Disclosure have given us enough super catchy singles this year don’t you think? No? One more? OK.

The Disclosure brothers’ debut album, Settle is out June 4th, and as you might already know, it includes awesome cuts like this one and guest appearances by AlunaGeorge, Jessie Ware, Jamie Woon and London Grammar. No, we’re not making this up.

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“You Took Your Time,” Mount Kimbie’s new single with the invaluable King Krule, is far from being the instant-crush pop song that “Made To Stray” is, but Krule’s forlorn performance is, like in anything he does, utterly captivating.

It carries the weight of some of The Streets’ earlier material. Both “Blinded by the Lights” and “Weak Become Heroes” come to mind. But again, it fails to deliver the instant satisfaction even those songs offer. After you listen to “You Took Your Time” a few times, though, you begin to feel like maybe things are better this way. You begin to notice that once you’ve been hypnotized by King Krule and Mount Kimbie’s melty canvas, the slightest deviation in the song’s percussive elements suddenly feel like the pop climax you’ve been waiting for.

Cold Spring Fault Less Youth is out May 27.

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Camera Obscura break off another piece from their upcoming album, Desire Lines, due out June 3rd on 4AD. “Fifth Line To The Throne,” while not a Game of Thrones geek out, is a swooning ballad that’s set to sweep you off your feet. Pardon the cliché, but it’s absolutely true. (Please pardon that cliché too.)

Camera Obscura are, with Desire Lines, following up their really great 2009 album My Maudlin Career, and if “Fifth Line” and “Do It Again” are anything to go by, this new album may be even better than their last.

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This one comes just a day after The Weeknd teased a new track called “John Carpenter.” Like the best Weeknd guest spots, we get a pure 90 seconds of Abel Tesfaye in his druggy wheelhouse. French Montana, a tourist in his own single if we’re being honest, does right by the reverb-drenched ambiance of “Gifted.” The best part is, of course, Tesfaye’s incredible hook:

I’m Gifted when I’m Faded / I’m Faded all the time / ’cause I know that’s when they love me / They love me when I’m high / When they love me I get money, I get money, I get money”

Although it’s more of a Weeknd song, “Gifted” will appear on French Montana’s upcoming LP, Pardon My French on May 21st. The Weeknd’s own Kiss Land is out later this year.

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