The latest Monday Morning Brew playlist features over two hours of music – a weekly perk of our Best Selling Substack Newsletter, recommended by the like of Colin Meloy of The Decemberists. If you’d like KLOF to start your week with a playlist1 (plus music recommendations and exclusives), sign-up here.
These are just a few of the highlights:
It opens to Lemoncello, the Dublin duo of Laura Quirke and Claire Kinsella, whose second album Perfect Place arrived on Friday last week (May 8th via Claddagh Records).
Robyn Hitchcock previews The Confuser, his forthcoming album out July 24th on Tiny Ghost Records. The first single, My Dead Astronaut, was recorded in Nashville with producer Brad Jones, and reunites Hitchcock with his old Soft Boys bandmate Kimberley Rew, alongside Jeremy Fetzer (electric guitar), Todd Bolden (bass) and Eric Slick (drums).
From Abigail Lapell’s newly released Shadow Child (out May 8th on Outside Music), we have Mockingbird, featuring guest vocals from Dana Sipos. Substack readers will also get to read an advance of our Off the Shelf feature with Abigail – a semi-regular feature in which we invite artists to pick ten objects from their homes that hold meaning — for their daily life, their musical practice, or the overlap between the two.
Then, a track from Nashville-born Maisy Owen’s remarkable debut Dark On A Sunny Day, released May 1st on Tompkins Square. It All Ends The Same closes the album in a darker place and yet pushes, without syrupy positivity, to find some comfort and rationale in a basic human truth.
Aldous Harding returns with the title track from her fifth album Train On The Island, out May 8th on 4AD. Co-produced once again with John Parish at Rockfield Studios in Monmouth, the album features pedal steel player Joe Harvey-Whyte, harpist Mali Llywelyn, drummer Sebastian Rochford and Huw Evans (H. Hawkline).
Josienne Clarke shares a new standalone single, Banks Of The Sweet Primroses — a solo recording of the traditional ballad, accompanied by a new video. It follows last October’s Far From Nowhere and March’s reimagining of Katie Cruel.
Shot during a stills session in the artist’s home, Banks of the Sweet Primroses caricatures the loneliness built into performance now, the endless labour of shaping a self for other people to receive. The video follows a performer caught between privacy and display, sincerity and legibility, trying to discover what version of herself can survive being framed at all. A circular frame appears again and again, holding the body in pieces, face, throat, hands, feet, suggesting both portraiture and entrapment. The humour is real, but so is the exhaustion. Beneath the quickness and makeshift charm is a simple sadness: that making the work is no longer enough, and that even the most intimate song must now pass through the machinery of visibility. What remains is a modest, defiant victory: a finished song, a delivered image, and the record of a person trying not to disappear inside the act of being seen.
Plus, a posthumous transmission from Lee “Scratch” Perry: To The Rescue, taken from Spatial, No Problem, his collaborative album with German electronic duo Mouse On Mars (Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma), out June 5th on Domino. Recorded over three days at Mouse On Mars’s Paraverse Studio in Berlin in December 2019, two years before Perry’s passing in August 2021, the album moves between krautrock, ambient, dub, jazz and New Orleans brass. Perry was clear it should not be just another reggae album, though the weight of that legacy is present in every track. As part of Barbican’s Project A Black Planet exhibition (5–13 June), The Pit will be transformed into an immersive environment presenting the album in spatial audio.
Closing this round-up is Zoh Amba with the title track for Eyes Full, the second preview from their Matador debut, out June 5th. The clip, directed by Grace Bader Conrad, finds Amba alongside album musicians Jim White on drums and Kevin Hyland on electric guitar.
Read the full post and get listen links to the playlist on Substack:
- The playlist can be streamed via Apple Music, Tidal, Spotify, Qobuz ↩︎