Braids: Joni Montreal-based three-piece Braids is making some of the most intricate electronic pop we’ve heard: take “Joni” where Raphaelle Standell-Preston’s voice snaps and stretches, yelps and exhales—setting the pace for the ricochets of synth and drum hits. Braids releases a slower-paced music video to match, where Standell-Preston figures things out with a fictional partner while telling herself: “We don’t know where we are going …
After the wild success of their third album Multi-Love, New Zealand/American Unknown Mortal Orchestra has released a new track: “First World Problem.” The song (whose cover art is by Henrietta Harris) is everything we’ve come to expect from UMO—boppy, upbeat and with just a little modern-day anxiety in the lyrics.
On their first two albums, Portland-based Unknown Mortal Orchestra charmed fans with dirty low-fi tracks—poppy but unafraid to be thought-provoking—recorded out of a basement studio. Their third and latest effort, Multi-Love (out now via Jagjaguwar) was born in the same basement studio, but from the ashes of exhaustion, depression and too many drugs. Like a phoenix reborn in explosive sheen of disco and R&B and …
