Editor’s Note: Anyone who says there isn’t good music coming out these days — and quite literally, every day — simply isn’t paying attention. Vanyaland’s new compilation feature The V List highlights the best in new music over the past month, pulling together the sounds that have soundtracked the website in recent weeks from our wide-ranging series of features. It’s all the stuff we’re bumping here at Vanyaland HQ, one new bop at a time.
The Last Dinner Party, ‘Burn Alive’
We’ve made no secret of our deep love for The Last Dinner Party, first serving you the iconic “Nothing Matters” way back in May of last year. The theatrical glam comet has risen to remarkable heights ever since, quickly earning the global praise destined from the very start. But we were equally thrilled to see that stunning debut single slotted down deep as Track 11 on this month’s Prelude to Ecstasy album, suggesting there was plenty more brilliance to discover (admit it: any other band would have “Nothing Matters” placed between Tracks 2 and 4). Our fave of the new bunch is “Burn Alive,” a gothic, intense sonic seduction that sounds as impactful as recent-era Suede. This magnetic band can do no wrong, and their March 24 show at Royale is a must-attend event in Boston. Wear your finest.
Alfie Templeman, ‘Eyes Wide Shut’
It seems like we’ve been hyping his jams for forever now, but it’s important to remember that Alfie Templeman only turned 21 years old just last month. The London musician has always been ahead of the game, returned with another smooth banger in a funk-led dance floor seducer called “Eyes Wide Shut.” Easy comparisons to Prince’s ’80s catalog, Beck’s dance fever, and “Fame”-era Bowie jump out of the speakers, but Templeman is quick to make “Eyes Wide Shut” entirely his. Its infectious euphoria should make a gray Monday in February feel like a sweaty Friday in July. And that’s pretty much what we need right about meow. “Musically, ‘Eyes’ was the first song I wrote for my upcoming album,” Templeman says. “I knew I wanted to make big, weird pop songs. At the time I was rinsing Prince and Talking Heads a lot, lots of crazy staccato synth textures and nutty bass lines.”
Pearl Jam, ‘Dark Matter’
There have been rumblings over the past few months that the new album from Pearl Jam could be one of the defining records of 2024. And while it’s not unusual for a band and everyone around them to declare the new stuff some of their best work ever, there was a growing buzz in music circles that this could actually be the case with Dark Matter, Pearl Jam’s 12th studio album, out April 19 via Monkeywrench and Republic. The title track does nothing to squash the above sentiment. “Dark Matter,” the single, is a curt, stomp-along, shout-about-it guitar-rock track that recalls some of the band’s earlier work. It has a snarl to it, and it sounds huge. “In 2023, the band retreated to Shangri-La Studios in Malibu where they simply plugged in and played under the watch of producer Andrew Watt,” reads a news post on pearljam.com. “Writing and recording in a burst of inspiration, Dark Matter was born in just three weeks. As a result, Dark Matter channels the shared spirit of a group of lifelong creative confidants and brothers in one room playing as if their very lives depended on it.”
DIIV, ‘Brown Paper Bag’
Last fall we were pleasantly surprised to see DIIV open Depeche Mode’s Boston show on Halloween, and secretly hoped it meant more of the Brooklyn band in 2024. Turns out we didn’t have to wait too long, as Zachary Cole Smith and the boys serve up new album Frog in Boiling Water, four years in the making, on May 24, and it’s framed by an expansive, slow-burning lead single titled “Brown Paper Bag.” The deliberate post-‘gaze track channels lyrical themes of dejection and angst into something sonically beautiful and warm. “The way we see it, it’s both a pop song and a sludgy song, a country song and a shoegaze song, a dreamy song and a decidedly ’90s ‘rock’ song,” the band writes on Insta. “While the rest of the record focuses on the larger external world, this one dwells on a specific internal experience of living in it: What does this world feel like sometimes? Ever feel like a brown paper bag?”
Hinds, ‘Coffee’
It’s wild to think that’s its been four long years since Hinds blessed us with new music, dating back to the pandemic summer of 2020 when the Madrid band released the aptly-named and still wonderful The Prettiest Curse (lead track “Good Bad Times” remains forever unfuckwithable). Hinds are operating as a duo now, back to the original combo of co-vocalists and co-guitarists Carlotta Cosials and Ana Perrote, and marking the return is a buoyant and bratty single called “Coffee” that reminds us why we fell in love with the band in the first place. “’Coffee’ is a sincericide, screaming the nasty truth as loud as you can with no shame,” the band declares. “It’s about admitting to all the things you’re not supposed to like or doing all the things you’re not meant to do. It’s a lot of fun when you can be fully honest and shut that little voice in your head that tells you what you should or shouldn’t do.” Welcome back.