Shibashi ft Aoife Power
All the Lights
A “renowned globetrotting dance pioneer” with zero Google footprint, a two-month-old Twitter account with 15 followers and a backstory about being conceived at the Rio carnival? There’s something very Relaxed Muscle (Wiki them) about Shibashi’s Gigi Monterro, but nothing suspect about a debut single where glitter-flinging Chvrches hooks meet house beats and tropical Two Door Cinema Club basslines. Shh! We’ve said too much.
The Vaccines
Back in Love City
On a rush of free global publicity, the Vaxx return with a disco-flecked jab engineered to lodge a dance-rock microchip in your brainstem. Set in a lawless metropolis of surreptitious sex and regret, it won’t alter your musical DNA but you will line up for a second.
Doja Cat ft Ariana Grande
I Don’t Do Drugs
Once it was the entire massed history of rock’n’roll decadence versus Zammo from Grange Hill. Now Doja Cat and Ariana, in hallucinogenic R&B style, are putting “just say no” at the heart of pop culture, addicted to chasing romantic highs on this itchy-armed Planet Her cut. Not that love, of course, can’t also leave you slumped weeping in the gutter outside a specialist clinic.
Goat
Queen of the Underground
Sporting not just full-face wooden masks but entire pagan PPE, Sweden’s secretive voodoo collective appear to have been self-isolated in 1968 for the past five years, judging by this comeback squall of fire-and-brimstone psych rock, Hendrix soloing and zoned-out Nico chanting. Highlight: a flautist frolics briefly beneath the blood moon, until ceremonially disembowelled with a guitar string to appease the prog god Tüll.
Damon Albarn
The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows
Rocking the haircut of a post-mauling Joe Exotic, Damon Albarn is clearly ravaged by the modern world. With lyrics from John Clare’s grief-stricken 19th-century poem Love and Memory set against limpid strings, a gorgeous melody and the atmospherics of gin-numbed isolation, let’s just agree to let this song sum up the entire pandemic.
