Y:Chromatics’s music has been in god damn everything from Drive to Bates Motel to Riverdale, so I figured the band’s appearance would be a little overkill in the Twin Peaks premiere (and maybe a too on-the-nose, considering how much singer Ruth Radelet’s singing owes to the original Bang Bang Club star Julee Cruise.) But “Shadow” is perfect: a pretty, slow-burning disco song designed for David Lynch. —Hazel Cills Y:Dan Snaith, also known as Caribou, brings back his project Daphni with the minimalist “Face to Face,” a funky dance track driven by a great, rubbery, bassline that makes you wait a few minutes before really getting into a good groove. —HC
N: A country-pop single by a rising Noah Cyrus that sounds like just one banjo string away from being a Mumford & Sons song. Let’s hope it doesn’t take over this summer. —HC
Y: Amber Mark, “Monsoon”— This wildly talented 20-year-old musician mines jazz, soul, R&B, house music, and other forms for incredibly evocative music, and her alto is just so thrillingly rich. In this video for “Monsoon,” she shared clips of a trip to Rajasthan with her mother—who passed away last year, and about whom much of her music is about. Amber Mark should and probably will be a star. —Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
Y: Lion Babe, “Hit the Ceiling” – Lion Babe (singer Jillian Hervey, who just happens to be Vanessa Williams’s daughter, and record producer Lucas Goodman) are accomplished in their own right, but between the melodic similarities to “20 Feet Tall” and Hervey’s lightly nasal, curdled delivery, I can’t not hear Erykah Badu when I listen to this. I mean that as a compliment. —Rich JuzwiakN: Sia featuring Labrinth, “To Be Human” – “To be human is to love,” claim Sia and Labrinth in this single from the Wonder Woman soundtrack. The execution here proves that over-singing treacle, though, is not divine. —RJ Y: Bottin featuring Lavinia Claws, “YAML” – We’re now two decades into overt references of Italo disco’s icy heyday. But if highly synthesized bangers like Bottin and Lavinia Claws’s recent “YAML” are a dime a dozen, keep heaping it on me by the gross. I just love this stuff. When the vocals drop out and the track breathes its arpeggiated breaths (like at the 1:40 mark), “YAML” becomes utterly transcendent. —RJ
Y: Jlin, “Carbon 7 (161)” – Yes to all of this—each and every 1/16th note of the song and micro gesture of the highly interpretive dancer in its video. Jlin’s recent full-length twisting and pulling of the footwork genre of dance music, Black Origami, is one of the most acclaimed electronic albums of 2017 (and has a really fascinating back story). If you haven’t gotten into it yet, here is your notice. —RJ Y: Opus III, “It’s a Fine Day (Burt Fox Remix)” – It’s never a bad day to get into Opus III’s pop-rave classic from 1992, “It’s a Fine Day,” and this Eastern-seaboard-club (it’s somewhere between Jersey, Baltimore, and Miami) sounding re-rub will give you all the excuse you need. This one appears on Jubilee’s Magic City III compilation, which comes highly recommended. —RJ
Y: Manga Saint Hilare & Lewi B, Outbursts from the Outskirts—I’m still ingesting this fuego grime album, which I learned about when Wiley (the Godfather) tweeted about it. While the London genre seems veering more and more towards a pop mainstream—the beloved MC Stormzy, for instance, has collaborated with Ed Sheeran and just released a verse on Little Mix’s “Power”—this has a back-to-basics feel that reminds us why we first took to grime in the early 2000s; it’s ice-cold, cutting and concise and makes me wanna punch the air a bunch. —JES
