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.
Franz Ferdinand, ‘Audacious’
With all this talk lately of the return of indie sleaze, let’s not forget the good guys of the aughts, the ones who took us out and made us dance with Michael and thoughtfully delivered all the right thoughts, right words, and right action. Come on down, Franz Ferdinand. We’ve missed ya. The Scottish indie luminaries from the world’s last party decade return with a theatrical new single called “Audacious,” and its got a nice little ’70s glam rock glow to it. The feel-good joint will be featured on the band’s forthcoming studio album, The Human Fear, out January 10 via Domino. “Making this record was one of the most life-affirming experiences I’ve had, but it’s called The Human Fear,” says Alex Kapranos. “Fear reminds you that you’re alive.”
Skinner, ‘Tell My Ma’
Maybe it’s that late-summer fade. Maybe 2024’s potency has dried up. Or maybe the real shit is happening elsewhere just out of public view. But it’s been a minute since a new track has made us want to run through a fucking wall, which is why we’re grateful for Skinner, the Irish no wave provocateur who unleashed powderkeg single “Tell My Ma” to set a breakneck tone for forthcoming October disco-noise EP Geek Love. “Tell My Ma” is 86 seconds of primal, fidgety explosiveness, finding Dublin-based multi-instrumentalist, singer, and producer Aaron Corcoran taking a tattered page from the New York scene of the late-’70s and early-’80s and filtering it through the Irish experience. It slashes and thrashes with raw fury and doesn’t give itself any chance of overstaying its welcome, instead escaping down a mental alleyway before a collected breath can be taken.
The Murder Capital, ‘Can’t Pretend To Know’
Last year, way back in frigid January, The Murder Capital released breakout album Gigi’s Recovery, a weathered and scarred record of gritty wisdom that exposed a raw underbelly of Irish post-punk. With the album still in heavy rotation from here to Dublin, James McGovern and the boys have now clocked in on 2024 with “Can’t Pretend To Know,” an incendiary crack of the whip that further illuminates the group’s neon grayscale sound. Recorded in Los Angeles with producer John Congelton (St Vincent, Angel Olsen, Sharon Van Etten), “Can’t Pretend To Know” twists and aches through it’s sub-three-minute runtime with a primal urgency. There’s clarity in the back-alley sound of The Murder Capital that places it in a different lane than the band’s peers, and that mood swirls here with a captivating type of tension that is never guaranteed to experience a forgiving release.
Nerina Pallot, ‘High Time’
We all have an Emily Salvi in our lives. For Nerina Pallot, her Emily Salvi was a listener, the name changed to protect the anonymous, who reached out one day and revealed that the English singer-songwriter and producer’s music was a guiding light through some dark days. It provided the catalyst and inspiration for Pallot’s forthcoming eighth studio album, A Psalm for Emily Salvi, out November 1, swirling around a heightened theme of the importance of perseverance, connection, and vulnerability. Further illuminating this sonic compass is enchanting new single “High Time,” a lively flirtation with a weathered slice of Americana that expands nicely around the darker edges. The striking track allows us to joyride alongside Pallot as she slides classic Fleetwood Mac into the car cassette deck and cruises through inspiration both past and present to help shape her new future.
The Cure, ‘Alone’
There’s no greater joy than hearing a song knowing it’ll stick with us for a while, and that’s the feeling we have as The Cure return to our hearts, minds, and playlists with stirring single “Alone.” The gorgeous new track begins a new era for Robert Smith and the gang, and its our first spiritual listening experience for forthcoming album Songs of a Lost World, due out November 1. “Alone” sets a complex and engaging tone for The Cure’s 14 studio album and first in 16 years, feeling like an integral part of the new record, serving as its lead invitation. Smith confirms that sentiment: “It’s the track that unlocked the record; as soon as we had that piece of music recorded I knew it was the opening song, and I felt the whole album come into focus. I had been struggling to find the right opening line for the right opening song for a while, working with the simple idea of ‘being alone’, always in the back of my mind this nagging feeling that I already knew what the opening line should be… as soon as we finished recording I remembered the poem Dregs by the English poet Ernest Dowson… and that was the moment when I knew the song — and the album — were real.”