London’s jazz-pop futurists Dance Lessons have announced the release of their hotly anticipated debut album Beginners, a lush, emotionally-charged collection written across 2024 and 2025. With their signature blend of jazz, alternative-pop and electronic grooves, Beginners, out July 25th, is a bold statement from a band that’s only just beginning.
This week they have shared their new single, the beautifully expansive ‘Hurricane’. The track was written “following a friend’s messy, often beautiful, but turbulent relationship. It’s about people who don’t always get it right, perhaps what they’ve got is even a bit toxic, and yet somewhere in there, we keep going. And maybe if we only can survive each other, we become something else entirely in the process."
Dance Lessons - made up of Anne (vocals, songwriting, keys, production), Nat (guitars) and Tom (bass, backing vocals) - formed in 2020. Their debut singles dropped mid-pandemic to critical acclaim, and they’ve been carving their own lane ever since. The mission: blur the lines between jazz and pop while making bold, emotionally rich music with high-gloss production – thanks to Anne, the creative force behind the desk in a world where just 3% of charting producers are women.
Across its 10 tracks, Beginners explores “our constantly evolving relationships to each other.” The record’s sound is as expansive as its influences - from Kate Bush and Bowie to Solange and Róisín Murphy - and aims to “trick people who say they don’t like jazz into really digging it.”
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| Photo - Ilenia Triplett |
Baltimore's Worn Through have released their debut LP, Barely Real, today June 20. Worn Through is a band that feels like a late-night conversation with an old friend, someone you know who has been through the fire and has come out the other side wiser, somehow kinder. Raw and honest, they let you behind the curtain to hear what they’ve kept guarded for so long, revealing the sting of lost loves, regrets of tender recklessness and those small, fleeting moments that carry the weight of the world.
Each song sung like unmailed postcards scattered on a living room floor, telling stories with beautifully entangled melodies and hopeful, yet melancholy guitars; picked like a petal with sophisticated twang. Driven between dash-lines by a reliable rhythm section that flows down the dark interstate of infinite time. Each player protecting the delicate flame that may have once burned them, but now invites them to find and keep peace.
Comprised of former members of Tin Armor, Angel Du$t, Wild Honey and Saintseneca, these kindred spirits have lived a life of rock n’ roll, only to realize that the road is “a goddamn impossible way of life,” echoing the parting sentiment of the original Band. At some point without noticing, their impulsive, roaming days had reached the end of the line, allowing them now to handle with care the opportunity to begin again, together in Baltimore, Maryland.
Knowing that nothing lasts forever only frees the music in the moment that it’s played, creating an authentic indie, country rock sound that’s been inspired by many of those who have traveled before them. Worn Through has no choice but to embrace the uncertain magic of rock n’ roll, because it’s the only road they’ve ever known.
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| Photo - Alex Ilyadis |
MK Naomi is a Boston-based emo pop hallucination. Named for the covert CIA bioweapons program that ran from the 1950s-'70s, the quartet's effervescent riffs and '90s-washed hooks glow in the dark. Simply, the band says they're FFO the Ten Things I Hate About You soundtrack.
MK Naomi’s spirited debut EP, Dream Hiss, pierces through the haze of grief like a sharp knife through fog. Written in the wake of a multi-year stretch marked by loss, unrest, and heartbreak, the quartet of songs linger in the liminal space between collapse and regeneration, where healing isn’t linear and clarity comes in flickers. Dream Hiss releases digitally and to tape today June 20 via Sweet Cheetah Records. “Dream Hiss is a collection of songs centered around a theme of vulnerability,” says Andrea Neuenfeldt. “Some of them were written during a raw, isolated time during the height of Covid.
“Prior to that, I had a few years of my life that nearly did me in. I was underemployed and struggling to survive on my own in my early 20s, supporting someone I loved who became sick. I had a nervous breakdown and spent a year living with my friend’s parents in the suburbs, trying to make sense of my life.
“By the time the pandemic came fully into view, I thought I had found some clarity. But it turns out, I still had a lot to process. These songs came from that in-between space—the aftershock, the quiet reckoning, the feeling of trying to move forward while still haunted by what came before. “The EP title came to our drummer Ally Bull when she was watching one of her cats having a vivid encounter in her sleep, but for me, the title reflects the heavy experiences that seem ‘done’ but linger beyond our conscious reach.”
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