- Words Darcy Culverhouse
Press play on the latest edition of NOTION NOW, the playlist featuring the freshest tracks you need to hear.
If this morning didn’t already belong to the pop girls, it does now. Sabrina Carpenter has dropped her seventh album, Man’s Best Friend, and the standout single ‘Tears’ comes with a video that’s pure chaos. Her car crashes, she stumbles into a haunted house, piano keys play themselves, drag queens pull her onstage, it’s filmed in fuzzy VHS, there’s choreo, and by the end she stabs her boyfriend with a stiletto. The man-hating era is in full swing.
Dev Hynes brings a different kind of drama. Back as Blood Orange, his fifth album, Essex Honey, is grief-stricken and dreamlike. ‘Vivid Light’ strips things down to piano chords, woozy funk and even a mystical flute interlude that feels lifted from a fairytale.
Ireland is making noise, too. CMAT leans into country-rock heartbreak with EURO-COUNTRY’s tear-stained ‘When A Good Man Cries’. Elsewhere, KETTAMA heads straight for the club, teasing his debut album Archangel with ‘Sort It Out’: a frenetic hard house beast that features techno duo Clouds.
Manchester’s Interplanetary Criminal links up with Irish rapper Travy on the wobbling drill-meets-UKG cut ‘Fón Póca’. Josh Baker slows things down with the groovy tech house rhythms of ‘Leave A Message’. And Ashnikko is back in full feral mode with boy-hater anthem ‘Sticky Fingers’, lifted from her upcoming album, Smoochies.
To round things out, chaos reigns. Nova Twins crash through with their most godlike riffs yet on ‘Glory’. Westside Gunn and MIKE floats over the ghostly haze of ‘BLOW HENDRY’. And NYC disruptors Geese soundtrack the end of the world with a groove that almost sounds too fun for the apocalypse.
Tap into the full NOTION NOW playlist below: