New Music Friday - September 22, 2017

Wonderful Wonderful is The Killers' fifth studio album and features the top 10 Alternative hit "The Man". Their 2017 show at Hyde Park in London sold out in record time. They are also performing in 2017 at ACL Fest, Voodoo Festival, and a UK tour before embarking on a North American tour in early 2018.

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Gemini marks Macklemore’s first solo project in 12 years, following two releases with producer Ryan Lewis including the multiple-GRAMMY award winning album The Heist and 2016's This Unruly Mess I’ve Made (featuring Platinum-certified single "Downtown"). Collectively Macklemore’s music videos have been viewed over 2 billion times and he is one of only two rappers to have a Diamond-certified single. The viral video for current hit single “Glorious” featuring Skylar Grey (and starring Macklemore’s 100 year old grandmother!) garnered over 30 million views in less than a month, while the video for “Marmalade” feat. Lil Yachty starring a Mini Macklemore and a Lil Lil Yachty was viewed over 11 million times in less than a week. “Glorious” continues to climb the charts, Top 40 radio, Billboard’s Hot 100, Spotify’s Global Top 50, racking up 2 million streams a day.

In the past year, the Seattle rapper released two solo songs “Wednesday Morning” and “Drug Dealer,” performed on Ellen and The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, was featured in an MTV special with President Obama about the opioid epidemic in America and was the first US citizen ever to participate in the Presidential Weekly Address.

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2017's ambitious full-length Emperor of Sand saw the progressive/sludge metal veterans delivering a heavy-hearted concept album about grief, and while Cold Dark Place's title would suggest an extension of that narrative, it's more of a loosely knit addendum that illuminates the latter outings' soul-searching proclivities by proxy.

Only the second proper EP from the band -- the songs on 2001's Lifesblood eventually made their way onto the 2006 compilation Call of the Mastodon -- three of Cold Dark Place's cuts ("North Side Star," "Blue Walsh," and the brooding, acoustic- and pedal steel guitar-heavy title track) were recorded during the sessions for 2014's Once More 'Round the Sun, and they reflect that LP's somber tone and predilection towards accessible hard rock songcraft. The one semi-outlier is the thunderous and almost affable "Toe to Toes" -- recorded during the making of Emperor of Sand -- which contrasts its nostalgia-driven tale of coming to terms with losing someone you love with meaty, Torche-esque major key riffage and copious earworm melodies.

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Cut Copy return with their first studio album in 4 years, Haiku From Zero. In the past decade, the GRAMMY Nominated band has become an international act, headlining massive sold-out tours and festivals including Coachella, Ultra, Lollapalooza, Primavera, Pitchfork and more. Their high-energy live show is matched by the beautiful complexity of their songs with nods to many genres cleverly combined to create indelible pop songs. This new album showcases a band in full command of their powers to move people both emotionally and physically.

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Since releasing their self-titled debut record in 2012, which The New Yorker called, “One of the year’s best albums…a punishing, noisy, exhilarating thing,” the Toronto-based 3-piece Metz have garnered international acclaim as one of the most electrifying and forceful live acts, touring widely and extensively, playing hundreds of shows each year around the world.

Now, Alex Edkins (guitar, vocals), along with Hayden Menzies (drums), and Chris Slorach (bass) are set to unleash their highly-anticipated third full-length album, Strange Peace, an emphatic but artful hammer swing to the status quo. "The best punk isn't an assault as much as it's a challenge — to what's normal, to what's comfortable, or simply to what's expected. Teetering on the edge of perpetual implosion,” NPR wrote in their glowing review of METZ’s 2015 second album, II. Strange Peace was recorded in Chicago, live off the floor to tape with Steve Albini. The result is a distinct artistic maturation into new and alarming territory, frantically pushing past where the band has gone before, while capturing the notorious intensity of their live show.

The trio continued to assemble the album (including home recordings, additional instrumentation) in their hometown, adding the finishing touches with longtime collaborator, engineer and mixer, Graham Walsh. Strange Peace isn’t merely a collection of eleven uninhibited and urgent songs. It’s also a kind of sonic venting, a truculent social commentary that bludgeons and provokes, excites and unsettles. With all the pleasurable tension and anxiety of a fever dream, Strange Peace is equal parts challenging and accessible.

It is this implausible balancing act, moving from one end of the musical spectrum to the other, that only a band of Metz’s power and capacity can maintain: discordant and melodic, powerful and controlled, meticulous and instinctive, subtle and complex, precise and reckless, wholehearted and merciless, brutal and optimistic, terrifying and fun.

“Their whiplash of distortion is made with precision, a contained chaos. But you would never talk about them like that. Because METZ are not something you study or analyze...they are something you feel: a transfer of energy, pure and simple.”
- Liisa Ladouceur, Exclaim!

In other words: to feel something, fiercely and intensely, but together, not alone.

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