NPR Music - All Songs Considered: Wet Leg, Vince Staples, Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien

Episode Date: June 2, 2026

The best new tracks of the week include a raging, dance floor remix of Wet Leg’s “Catch These Fists,” a touch of vintage soul from rapper Vince Staples, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien and more.NPR Music’s Tom Huizenga joins host Robin Hilton.A good review helps! So, leave us one on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And tell a friend to listen!Questions, comments, suggestions or feedback of any kind always welcome: [e-mail]  Featured artists and songs:(00:00) Intro(01:03) Wet Leg(07:05) Katia & Marielle Labèque(15:23) Balming Tiger(22:42) Wild Up(31:00) Vince Staples(36:06) Ed O’BrienSee pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This episode of All Songs Considered comes to you from the NPR Music Podcast. We've got new shows, new episodes of all songs considered in this feed. Every Tuesday, you'll also find new episodes of Alt Latino, that program every Wednesday. And then, of course, New Music Friday. That's every Friday. Stands to reason. Wow. NPR Music also home to Tom Heisinga.

Hey, Tom. Hey, Robin. Tom, you're our classical music editor. But your tastes run pretty broad. broader than that. I think of you as one of NPR Music's secret weapons. Mm, thank you. Which is why I always love hanging out and just hearing what you're listening to and loving, because you always turn me on to something amazing. That's what we're doing on this episode,

on this week's show. We're sharing our picks for the best new songs out now. Do you have something you want to kick us off with, or should I get us going, or what do you want to do? I think, why don't you get us going? I mean, this is your show, bro. kind of my deal here. That's right. Well, how about I start off with a new cut from the band Wet Leg? I know you love Wet Leg. It's actually a remix, I should say.

It's a remix of a song that they put out last year called Catch These Fists from their album, Moisturizer, came out last year. One of the best cuts from that record, I thought. Love it. I don't normally buy into the whole remix game. It's artists usually just trying to extend the life cycle. of an album with deluxe versions, remixes. And so many of the remixes I hear, I just don't think they add that much to it.

It's like they just put a disco beat behind it or something. But man, this new one from Wetleg really gets it, I think. It's done by FDC DJs, and FDC is otherwise known as Fontaines, D.C., the Irish rock band. When they do remix projects, they go by FDC DJs. Anyway, their remix of Catch These Fists, I think it hits so hard and lands perfectly. So the original version, it rocks pretty hard, but it's more playful than this.

And I think there are a lot of things I like about this remix, but this one kind of rages. Well, this brings wet leg right into the club. Exactly. Yeah, and that's the thing. So this song, the original song, was inspired by a night out, Rianne Teesdale. the lead singer says that she was out with friends trying to dance and some guy was hitting on her and, you know, wouldn't leave her alone. And so it feels appropriate to take this to the dance floor like that, but in kind of a ragey anger, you're getting it all out. Right.

And what remains from the original, too, is the attitude. I just love the attitude. It's part tongue and cheek, but it's part like, don't mess with me. because the refrain is, I don't want your love, I just want to fight. So the guy's trying to hit on her in the club or whatever,

and of course she says, I just want to dance with my friends, but it turns, there's some place where it turns a corner where it's almost like, okay, bringing on stupid dude, I'll take you on. Yeah, I mean, catch these fists.

That attitude still stays, but you're right in the middle of, like, sweaty dance people in the club, which I love. Yeah, I agree completely. And this deluxe version, it's more than remixes. It's pretty generous deluxe version. There are some live recordings.

There's some stuff that wasn't available on streaming services before, and there's at least one demo cut on it. It is all out on July 10th. So it is the deluxe version of Moisturizer, that album from Wet Leg. And that song again was the FDC DJ's remix of Catch These Fists. So one question for you, Robin, is the... All of the songs remixed by the same people? Oh, no, no, yeah, they're different ones.

There's like a remix by Horse Girl. Yeah, there are several different remixes. I'm going to have to check that now. Yeah, for sure. Okay, here's a track that'll make a big juxtaposition. It's by the sister piano duet, Katia and Mariel Lebec, these French sisters, who've been playing the piano across from each other for 55 years or so, and they have a new record called 55, more on that later.

but let's just roll the music see if you can guess the composer. That's Katian Mario Lebec from their upcoming album called 55 with a two piano arrangement of music by... Philip Glass. Philip Glass, that's right.

If this isn't Philip Glass, then I don't know this piece, but I assumed it had to be him. Right. It's called the somnambulist, and it's from Phillips... Gosh, what do you call this thing? It's an opera-slash dance piece called Les Enfants Terrible, and it's adapted from the work of Jean Cocteau,

the French, whatever you call it, avant-garde, polymath, whatever. A person that Philip Glass is kind of obsessed with for a while, he wrote a trilogy of things based on Cocteau's work, including the opera Beauty and the Beast. And the characters in this opera dance thing are like these two kids who are so caught up in their own imagination that they don't know what's real and what's a game. Somehow resonates today.

It's perfect. It's perfect. An uncle who is very close to me passed away over the weekend. Oh, I'm sorry. And thank you. Yeah, he lived a very long, he was 93 years old. He lived a really amazing long life. But I think that was sort of playing on my mind as I listened to this because there's this great moment,

a third or half of the way through where the pianos are kind of chasing each other and they're ones in one channel, one's on sort of the left side and one's on the right side. Those da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, you know, as the notes are. And it felt to me like youth and age

chasing after each other. I could picture them sort of personified, sort of running around outside in a field or something, and they're butterflies, and it's a beautiful day, And it just felt very, very playful. And old age is chasing youth or vice versa. And then it has that sort of resolution at the end that's sort of melancholy. Yeah, with a little bit of syncopation.

Yeah, just at the end there. There's a little pickup at the end, which I really like, well, that's a really wonderful image. Robin, you're getting all deep on me here. Yeah, well, that really hit me. You saw me. I started getting teary-eyed listening to that. It's really beautiful. And, of course, I love Philip Glass.

And your piano. I picked that one for you. Thank you so much. Yeah, that was really wonderful. It's got that typical Philip Glass stuff that a lot of us who like his music are enamored of, just these repeating oscillations that slowly change. And then you've got melodies that are kind of soaring over top of those. And then right, halfway through this piece or so, then you get these cascades of arpeggios that go up and down,

which is, you know, really great. So it's sisters Katia and Mariel Lebec. They have been sitting across pianos from each other in a recording studio for over five decades. They're releasing this triple disc set called 55. It's 55 tracks celebrating 55 years of recording together. Wow. And it's not just some slap together retrospective or compilation. Almost half of the tracks on the new set are brand new recordings made for this project.

A lot of them are of women. which is really cool. And another really cool thing about the set is that it contains Katian Mariel's very first recording from 1969, which was kind of how they got their start because the composer Olivier Messien heard them practicing one of his pieces at the Paris Conservatoire and said, Hey, I like what I hear and he ended up supervising their recording of his piece called Visions of the Amen. So that track from 1969 is on the set. And it just epitomizes what would become their calling card, like this amazing precision, finishing each other's musical sentences,

but yet a lot of warmth in there and they're playing. So it's a great set. And it's coming out next week, Friday. All right, Tom, I think you're going to absolutely love this next thing that I want to play. And I bet you don't know it. Do you know Balming Tiger, the band Balming Tiger? No. I know Tiger Balm that we rub.

on your after a workout. Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, this is not that. Balming Tiger. This is a band from Korea. It's a very big group. There's like close to a dozen people in this band. And I think when you say band from Korea,

people immediately think, K-pop. This could not be further from K-pop. I actually don't even know what you would call the music that they make. It's something in the world of psychedelic rock with a very global vibe to it. They just put out a new album called

gongbu and the song I want to play from it is called home that awesome I don't know that is so cool that is really good you're right I really do love it I just love how it starts out with the with the voices and then that big drum resonance and it's almost like a giant tyco or something yeah it's a big it's a big drum at least they're making it sound like a big drum And it's funky. It's got a lot of attitude. A little bit of almost like talking heads with late 60s psych rock or desert blues even. Yeah.

And you know what song oddly came to mind for me during the middle of it was The Clash's Magnificent Seven. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's not a reference I thought to me. Yeah. I don't know. But, well, speaking of reference points, yeah, keep going. What do you think that they were listening to? You know, what are their influences?

Well, yeah. I think they're all pretty young. know a whole lot about the band. I do know that this is a concept album, that there's, there is a story behind it. Gongbu is the name of the album. It is a fictional research facility where scientists record people's dreams and study them. I'm liking that. Yeah, but honestly, I don't think you really need to know what they're saying or speak the language to appreciate the vibe that they've got going on in this. It is a, it is a very global. global sound, but as you say, the grooves are so deep, those group vocals, the big group vocals,

that's what you get when you get a dozen people together in a band. Right. And then the more solo vocals have a little bit of a tinge of a flow or a rap to them. Yeah, yeah. No, there's all different kinds of musical universes colliding on this. This album, Gongbu, I think there's a very good chance it's going to be, certainly in my top 10, if not even like top five albums of the year, I think, come December. So what does the rest of it sound like? Anything like this track? You know, it gets pretty wild at times.

This is one of the more, I'd really call it almost conventional tracks on it. Some of the stuff is more sound collage-based, lots of found sounds that sort of bubble up in the middle of the recordings. Sometimes it's stuff that you can't even, you're not even sure what you're hearing, right? It's like you can't even identify what the sounds are and they all get kind of swirled together in these sonic collages. very organic sounding, very homemade. And yes, we've pointed out some reference points or some influences, perhaps, but what I really like about this,

like right off the bat, it just sounded fresh. It sounded like nothing you're hearing anywhere else. So the album, again, is called Gongbu, G-O-N-G-B-U-G-U-G-U-G-U-B-U-B-U-G-B-Rung-Bu from Balming Tiger, and that just came out. Well, Robin, I think we should test drive this next track. It's from an album to be released June 19th. by the LA-based music collective called Wild Up. And Christopher, Christopher Roundtree, the director, gave a special permission to play this track.

So thank you, Chris. For the past five years, Wild Up, this collective has been devoted to a single composer, the late Julius Eastman, who died far too young at age 49 in 1990. And the latest album is Volume 5. It focuses on the single 30-minute work titled Gaye. gorilla, that's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A. What I love about Eastman's music and how Wild Up interprets this is the idea of freedom. Freedom to be who you want to be. Freedom to put your own stamp on the music.

And let's just hear this excerpt. It's from the very end of the piece. And I want you to listen to how the musical lines go up and up in pitch. They stop and go back down. they repeat and go up again. But the musicians are doing this all at different times. So the effect of this just keeps the music floating higher and higher and higher. It's this simple concept, but the result is just ecstasy.

It's like you're just rising slowly up into the heavens. It's amazing. What a great companion piece to the Philip Glass you played earlier. It's almost like this is a story that is continuing. If age and youth are chasing after each other in the field and the Philip Glass Cut and this, you've transitioned into the next realm, like you're at stage two or whatever on this journey. The way it soars is just glorious. Shimmers and shakes and quakes and then it settles down at the end.

That was the closing section of Gay Guerrilla, the music written in 1979 by Julius Eastman and performed there. by Wild Up, the group from Los Angeles. And Eastman said that, you know, the music could be played, how does he put it, by any number of similar instruments. And it's not like there have been a lot of performances of this because his music is just going through a phase of resurgence. But it has been performed most commonly with four pianos. And that until now, we're in.

Yeah, I mean, there were definitely two pianos in that at least, because I could hear them on kind of playing off. of each other in each year, but very much like what I think of as like American Systems music, like Terry Riley. Steve Reich. Steve Reich, definitely. That pulse that somehow just gets more magical and wondrous, the more you listen to it, and the longer it goes on, instead of becoming monotonous or whatever.

It's just, it's really gorgeous. And this is a great way to end, you know, half-hour work where you're just, you reach, this climax point and then it just starts evaporating. Yeah. Maybe you should say something about who Julius Eastman is for people who don't know his work. Well, I think he was something of a musical misfit. In the 1970s, he was proudly gay and proudly black. He wrote music that was really ahead of its time, I think, and often misunderstood.

He had a brief period of a little bit of celebrity, actually. He was kind of a bad boy in a way, but he also became homeless at one point. He was tossed out of his Greenwich Village apartment along, we assume, with a lot of manuscripts that have never been recovered. Oh, wow. He died in a Buffalo hospital, and it wasn't until eight months later that anybody really figured it out in the music world. And Kyle Gann wrote his obit for the village voice. So a very misunderstood person who thanks a lot to Wildup, the group that we did. just heard has really, they've been reviving many of his pieces. Actually, Wildup came to the

Tiny Desk and played a portion of one of his pieces, so you can check that out. You know, and I was talking about freedom earlier, and Chris Roundtree, the head of Wildup, says Eastman is a composer who gives an immense amount of power to the individual over the system. And so that is just music that invites personal interpretation. And that's why I just love this version for a 20-piece orchestra. So we got to hear this before it's even out. So remind us what album it's from and when it is coming. It is the band is called Wildup. The album is called Julius Eastman, Volume 5, Gay Gorilla. And it's out on the 19th of June. So one of the albums coming up that I'm most excited about is from the rapper and singer, and I should also say actor and comedian, Vince Staples. Vince Staples. He's got a new album coming out. This week, actually, it's called Cry Baby.

There have only been a couple of singles so far leading up to the album coming out, but I have been totally blown away by what I've heard. The one that I want to play from it is called White Flag. What do you think? I mean, that thumping bass is such a sly groove to this whole thing. Very, very classic, kind of very old school, like Motown. Retro soul. And when it started right out, it sounds like the zombies.

Oh. Time of the season. Oh, yeah. Yeah. What's your name? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Totally hear that.

I don't know. I love the way he is his sort of half-wrapped, half-sung, just that flow of it, the way it moves through those grooves. I love this. And he's got a very velvet-smooth voice, especially in this track, which is really effective. Because what he's singing about is some pretty. serious stuff. There's a weariness to it. You know, it's very moody. It's very overcast. Even as he's talking about wanting to make peace with the world, he still gets these digs in, you know, particularly about racism and systemic racism. And, you know, why the cops treat

me like a UFO? Yeah, like I'm sitting in a UFO. Right. Yeah. Which these are themes that he has talked about and written about a lot over the course of his career. But this whole vibe just just feels a little different for him. And I just think he's making some of the most arresting and interesting and original and compelling music in the world of hip hop and rap of any artist right now. I've kind of put him in that same group of Earl's sweatshirt or like, I know you love Frank Ocean, you know, more like R&B, Tyler the Creator, you know. He's really, I don't know, he's always challenging himself. Yeah. And there's a certain supreme confidence here that he's able to go back and touch on some retro sounds and stuff like that, but still make the song completely his own.

Yeah. Again, what I've heard so far, I think, is pretty incredible. I can't wait to hear the whole thing when it comes out on June 5th. I would not be surprised if this album ends up being in the running for album of the year for a lot of people. Again, it's called Crybaby from Vince Staples. But Tom, I know you've got one more that you want to play. I do have one more.

And I think that you actually know this song, Robin. Radiohead's guitarist and vocalist Ed O'Brien. Ah. And one of Estonia's top composers and a fave of mine, Tonu Korvitz. And the song is called Blue Marfo, the title track from the album released just two weeks ago. So it's kind of a mix of dreamy Radiohead-like sounds and introspections. And then Corvitz is really warm, flowing string arrangements. It just sounds so marvelous.

And Phil Selway is the drummer here. Well, I'm really glad you picked this because this is an album that I've been kind of circling ever since I knew it was coming. And I have loved everything that I've heard from it. I do know this track, and it's beautiful and transcendent. And yeah, I love it. What really gets me is the string arrangements. And they remind me just ever so slightly of the beautiful arrangements for Nick Drake's Riverman. Of course, that was for a smaller group of strings.

But Corvitz is a wonderful composer for the voice, for choral and solo singing. And so I think that feeds into why these arrangements are really so very, very lyrical. Oh, and something I almost forgot. There's a new video about the album coming out today. Oh, like a little documentary of kind of the making. It is. It's like this little 15-minute video where Ed O'Brien talks about his dark night of the soul, like a bout with depression that influenced.

and inspired the record, and he said he went off and lived in whales for a while and kind of healed among nature. And so there's a lot of beautiful photography of him by rivers and streams. And some different tracks from the album are woven into the piece. It's pretty cool. So again, Blue Morpho, the title cut from Ed O'Brien. We'll go out on this. Tom, always a great hang. Thanks, as always.

Oh, thanks for having me. I always love spinning records with you, Robin. And you're listening to All Songs Considered from NPRM. music.