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.
Nala & DJ Ardalan, ‘Eyes Wide Shut’
Early in March, our inboxes hit a quick new beat through a propulsive indie dance tune called “Eyes Wide Shut. Here, the Miami and Los Angeles artist, DJ, and producer Nala teams with Iranian-born DJ Ardalan for a dance floor filler fit for a Friday fling under the strobe — and all the hedonism that seduces the shadows at the afterparty. It feels like the type of banger the blogs would have lost it for 15 years ago; someone get DiscoDust back in our lives. “After watching Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, I went into a studio session with Ardalan and decided to use the movies’ provocative themes to talk about casual hook up culture in nightlife,” says Nala. “Ardalan and I used a couple of different analog synthesizers to create the sonic elements of this track and found an obscure funk sample for the bass line!”
d4vd, ‘My House Is Not A Home’
This spring’s Boston Calling is poised to be a festival for discovery, as underneath the familiar headliners are a spectrum of exciting new artists many at the Harvard Athletic Complex may be hearing for the first time. Last year, it was The Beaches and Genesis Owusu that turned heads and solidified a permanent place on our collective playlists, and for 2024 it may be d4vd, the 18-year-old singer-songwriter who’s quickly becoming a household name. To fuel the ascent, d4vd released “My House Is Not a Home,” a tender and magnetic ballad about loneliness and a strained relationship that showcases how the artist straddles a fine line between genres in order to convey a unique sense of storytelling. “‘My House Is Not a Home’ is an introspective track about how I viewed my life after moving to Los Angeles – the themes of falling in love with the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time are explored throughout the song,” he says, “and how I navigate those situations are in the lyrics.” Put d4vd near the top of the growing list of must-see performances at Boston Calling in May.
Siouxie & The Skunks, ‘Sortoria’
We’ll admit that we don’t know too much about Siouxie & the Skunks beyond the rather peculiar moniker, but what we do know is this: The Italian art-punk band released new album Songs about Cuddles in March via Wild Honey Records, and with it comes a stomper of a serrated smoke dance in “Sartoria” that sounds like the greatest unknown post-punk song from 1983 that now costs a rent payment to own on first-pressing vinyl. “When we wrote ‘Sartoria’ we actually had a tailor’s shop,” the band writes on Insta. “It was the scene of rehearsals, concerts, a thousand hours of work and filming and a thousand cigarettes. It did not work. But then again the only way you can make a mistake is to mess something up. If nothing happens, we’re dead. And there is no greater luck than having the chance to do something.” Honestly, we’re not even sure this band is real, and that’s possibly the surest sign of something existing in this batshit 2024. Maybe Siouxie & the Skunks are here to save us, maybe Siouxie & the Skunks aren’t here at all, maybe this is simply the soundtrack playing inside the time machine we’ve all been waiting for.
Blondshell and Bully, ‘Docket’
Back on that mega-fest tip, we have officially entered Boston Calling artist anticipation season. Joining the growing list of must-see acts over Memorial Day weekend is Blondshell, the alternative rock project of Sabrina Teitelbaum that teamed with Bully’s Alicia Bognanno last month for an inspired new collaborative single called “Docket.” We first got on the Blondshell hype train back in late 2022, but last year’s breakout self-titled debut album brought Teitelbaum’s razor-sharp songwriting acumen and heavy melodies to widespread masses. Now as she prepares to headline The Blue Stage on the Sunday slate at Boston Calling, this new collab, a song all about risk-taking, has elevated our excitement levels. “For me this is a song about splitting off from yourself,” says Teitelbaum. “It’s about uncertainty when you’re in different environments all the time. In a way it’s about wanting to cope with distance and change but it’s also just a bit about being reckless.”
RIDE, ‘Monaco’
Just before the March wrapped up its sonic seduction, it delivered Interplay, the intriguing and expansive new album from RIDE. We excitedly hyped the first two singles from the record, which found the reformed shoegazers refreshed in familiar territory, but the real attention-grabber on the album is latest single “Monaco,” which finds RIDE exploring new sonic landscapes, venturing in early-’00s New Order and some classic and modern post-punk moods for a more electronic-leaning composition. The one-two punch of “Monaco” and enchanting album track “I Came to See the Wreck” is one of the year most exciting listens so far, and it’s clear that a few albums into this second life, the resurrected RIDE are making some of the best music of their career (and that’s saying something). Also, fun fact: Boston audiences got to hear “Monaco” before everyone else, too, as the band debuted it here in town back in February 2023.
(Unexpected) Bonus Track: Cock Sparrer, ‘Here We Stand’
We’ll admit it: We did not anticipate a new single from Cock Sparrer making a case for our evolving Best of 2024 lists. The anthemic and inspired “Here We Stand” finds the influential English punk and oi! band in dynamite form — after more than 50 years in the game! — with their first new music in over a decade. New album Hand On Heart arrives this week (April 5), and if the record’s first three singles are any indication (especially this lethal dose of classic street punk called “Here We Stand”), it has AOTY potential. All the young punks can learn a thing or two here.