For this latest installment of the Indie Playlist, we asked Independent staff and contributors to reflect on the idea of newness, especially as it relates to the season marked by the emergence of new life and the promise of warmer days ahead. What follows are songs to listen to on a rainy April afternoon while you’re watching the buds begin to blossom on the trees, walking along the beach on the first warm day of spring, or just waiting for the sun to chase away the last of winter’s chill. Listen along on Spotify at https://sptfy.com/NY7U.
‘Qaumajuapik,’ Riit
Strictly speaking, “qaumajuapik,” the lead single from Inuk musician Riit’s 2019 album ataataga, isn’t “new” music. But the song’s combination of electropop and throat singing is unlikely to be a familiar sound for most listeners. Riit is from Nunavut, Canada, an Arctic territory that belongs to the indigenous Inuit people. (“Inuk” is the singular form of “Inuit.”) In Inuit culture, throat singing is a unique form of musical expression: a competition where two women stand face to face and sing in deep, guttural, rhythmic sounds until one runs out of breath or loses the pace.
On “qaumajuapik,” Riit seamlessly combines these sounds with rumbling electronic beats. The throat singing serves as the song’s bass, while the echoing backbeat mirrors the rapid call-and-response quality of the vocals. Over this track, Riit’s crystal-clear voice croons about falling in love. “Quamajuapik” translates as “you are shining,” and the lyrics describe her feelings following a painful breakup. The magic of the song is that the emotions feel familiar despite how novel the sounds and language are to non-Inuit listeners. The joy, longing, and trepidation channel a feeling familiar to anyone who has fallen in love. —William von Herff
‘Cura,’ Empress Of
There was a point during this bleak winter that I became convinced my endocrine system had permanently closed shop: no dopamine or oxytocin for me! Last month, as the season began to change, Lorely Rodriguez released For Your Consideration, her fourth album as Empress Of. I felt my body flood with feeling again — particularly by the seventh track, “Cura.”
The chorus articulates the song’s intoxicating feel: “El ritmo a mí me” (“The rhythm heals me.”) This curative effect is achieved through the way Rodriguez transfigures her vocals into something more like percussion. Her voice becomes the aural equivalent of a defibrillator, shocking life back into you. As she repeats “Cura, cura, cura” — Spanish for “cure” — the word merges with the song’s thumping bass.
The bilingual verses find Rodriguez looking for a one-night stand to distract from a recent breakup. “Out on the town, looking for/ Another regret,” she sings. “Tears won’t do it for tonight/ Looking for someone to ride.” It’s a sign of talent when a musician can make bad sex sound this good. —Paul Sullivan
‘Zeitgeist,’ Babe Rainbow
A song’s meaning changes when you share it with someone as the tether that connects you reverberates with a new sound. Since spring is the time to crawl out of hibernation and reconnect with friends, I sent them “Zeitgeist,” the opening track of Australian band Babe Rainbow’s 2021 album Changing Colors.
“It sounds like the first step off the plane after a trip,” said my brother Simon. “The vision is still in your head, but it’s faded.” My friend Rebecca had a different take: “This song would be on Big Little Lies during a montage of Nicole Kidman committing a crime and then driving down a sunny beach highway.”
Other friends noticed elements of nostalgia in the instrumentation: “I’m thinking back to college house parties where local bands would play all night,” said Parker. The bubbling psychedelic pop feels warm in the pit of your stomach, like liquid sunshine: as my friend Caroline put it, it’s like “starting a relationship with someone after crushing on them for a while.”
Each of my listens is now inextricably layered with these takes as I follow my friend Tay’s lead and listen to the song with “windows down, warm air, gratitude on high, not thinking about anything but how good this moment feels right now.” —Aden Choate
‘Aguas de Marco,’ Cibo Matto
Even though the band Cibo Matto was at its most popular in the late 1990s, everything they’ve released feels like it belongs in a bright, bubbly future. Their 1997 cover of Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto’s 1976 classic “Aguas de Marco” is plucky and fun: if the title’s “waters of March” in the original is a deep, gurgling brook, then Cibo Matto’s is a sparkling stream.
The original song is a promise of the renewal that comes with the changing of the season, with its final verse translating as “And the riverbank talks of the waters of March/ It’s the end of all strain, it’s the joy in your heart.” The cover, which I discovered only this spring, embodies this lightness. It’s more playful and a little jazzier than the original. What a relief to sing this song as you drive down Bradford Street — to let the season pass, the weather warm, and the ocean turn from gray to blue. —Olivia Oldham
‘Hardly Ever Smile (Without You),’ Poison Girl Friend
I’ve become obsessed with the music of Japanese singer, composer, and DJ Noriko Sekiguchi, who performs as Poison Girl Friend, and thank the algorithm gods every day for landing her song “Hardly Ever Smile (Without You)” on my Spotify page. Born in Yokohama, Sekiguchi spent her childhood in Brazil listening to bossa nova and attending a French-language school where she learned chanson. A trip to London introduced her to British New Wave and techno-pop. A confluence of these global sounds emerged in her compositions.
“Hardly Ever Smile,” from her 1992 album Melting Moment, feels like the brainchild of dream pop and shoegaze. Downbeat drums, acoustic guitar, and plaintive violins mix in heavenly synthesis. (As a washed-up child violinist, I am somewhat predisposed to like any kind of modern music that features violins.) But it’s the mood Sekiguchi assembles with her sound that enlivens me most. The music video for “Hardly Ever Smile” focuses on Sekiguchi as she looks out the window of a fast-moving train and watches waves crash against rotting pilings. Listening to “Hardly Ever Smile” feels exactly like this, wherever you may be when you turn it on. —Sam Pollak
‘Classical,’ Vampire Weekend
A new album by Vampire Weekend is always cause for celebration, but I was especially happy to discover this month that Only God Was Above Us, their first release in five years, may be their finest yet. The album extends the band’s sonic palette with grittier textures, making it sound absolutely new while not entirely disconnected from the brightness of earlier songs like “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” and “Cousins.”
The band’s members have grown up a lot since they began performing as students at Columbia University nearly 20 years ago, and there’s been an increasing maturity in their music that reflects the passing of time. For me, no track on the new album encapsulates their merging of new and old better than “Classical.” Its expansive and infectious arrangement conceals lyrics expressing a hard-earned lesson about the way the world works: “I know that walls fall, shacks shake/ Bridges burn and bodies break/ It’s clear something’s gonna change,” sings Ezra Koenig. “And when it does, which classical remains?”
What’s old is new again, and what is new will eventually become old: the sweep of history perfectly expressed in smart, blissful pop. —John D’Addario
