A half dozen weekly fresh picks of tasty new music…

Macho Macho – New Inbetween

Fresh out of New Zealand, this four piece of melodically charged, fuzzy guitar rocking warriors sound like the perfect tonic for a music industry too focused on the carpet crawling, box ticking, soulless middle management wet dream that is the Brit Awards over the past week (good to read about Wet Leg winning though); forget all that poncing and posing, this is the kind of purest attitude that keeps music exciting going forward and who knows, maybe the next wave really is going to rise out of Australasia…

Kevin Morby – Like A Flower

From Morby’s new soundtrack album ‘Music From Montana Story’ is this new video to accompany the release. The film is described as “a neo-western that tells the story of two estranged siblings who return home to the family ranch they once knew and loved, confronting deep and bitter secrets in the process”. Needless to say, new music from this artist never disappoints and Kevin’s writing is predictably superb within a soundtrack context. He has also released new tour dates which include a visit to the UK in June…

Jack White – Icky Thump

2022’s two album releases, ‘Fear Of The Dawn’ and ‘Entering Heaven Alive’, were both stonking, glossy slabs of new music from White (the second of the two was my favourite, it just had a little more of that old time variety that Jack excels in) but still, as this recent live film proves, it remains a thrill whenever he rips into the White Stripes back catalogue…

Sunny War – No Reason

From Nashville and nicknamed Sunny as a child, she removed the final letter of her Ward surname and dived straight into the world of punk and outsider music before arriving at folky/Americana via her capacity for acoustic fingerpicking and a song writing facility harvested from real life, lived experience. Her fifth solo album is called ‘Anarchist Gospel’ and was written after a relationship ended as Sunny was alone in a dark place, marking time until the end of the pairs accommodation lease was expired. If you think that has resulted in a bleak album though you are way off, as heard in this recent live performance, the music composed is both soulful and rich in nuanced writing…

Sophiethehomie – Home Demo

My final pair of selections this week may stretch the term ‘new’ a bit but they fully deserve a share. This track by Florida artist Sophiethehomie has been around for a couple of years, originally available on the ‘Cabin Fever’ EP but it came to my attention last week on a radio show that said it is coming up for a re-release. Either way this is once-heard, forever hooked soul music with some intriguing little production quirks but above all, a pounding funk-drenched heartbeat of a sultry pulse that really grabs you by the ear lobes and holds on tight…

Ezra Collective – Where I’m Meant To Be (LP)

It happens every year, I have a list of my albums of the year then I play a record that I missed during those twelve months and it is instantly apparent that this should also have been in the running. And it is not as if I did not know how brilliant the Ezra Collective are, their jazz based melting pot of grooves and styles has thrilled aplenty in these current glory days of London jazz excitement but there you go, there are only so many hours in the day and this week was the first time I had listened to their most recent album. On this live session for Tiny Desk they played tracks from the record and yes, the rest of it really is as equally wonderous as this mouth watering taster suggests…