NPR Music - New Music Friday: The best albums out June 7

Episode Date: June 7, 2024

NPR Music's Daoud Tyler-Ameen and Hazel Cills shepherd you through the many huge albums out today, including new records by Kaytranada, Charli XCX and so much more.Featured albums:- Kaytranada, 'Timeless'- Charli XCX, 'brat'- Pedro the Lion, 'Santa Cruz'Other notable albums:- Tems, Born in the Wild- Angelica Garcia, 'Gemelo'- Alisa Amador, 'Multitudes'- Peggy Gou, 'I Hear You'- Marina Allen, 'Eight Pointed Star'To see the entire list of June 7 releases and stream our New Music Friday playlists, visit nprmusic.org.See 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

A quick note before the show, this podcast contains explicit language. I got to my metro stop and there was a padlock on the gate. I was like, well, that can't be good. That's so dramatic. A padlock. Yeah. Well, I was just like, who were they trying to keep out? Isn't me?

Who are they trying to keep in? Well. The question you should be asking yourself. Yeah. Maybe there's chuds in there. Or I was thinking like zombies or something. I don't know, man. The shuttle bus situation was one of those days where just the bus shelter is a terrarium, like a greenhouse, just like...

Sounds nice. Creating life in the moist corners of like my backpack. I mean, I love public transport, so... Yeah, no, I'm a fan. I mean, really, like, that's been the biggest casualty to me of hybridized work is that all of the epiphanies that I used to have on public transport while listening to whatever was in my headphones. Yeah. Or like, not just epiphanies, but really good people spotting. I mean, I still go into the office bit, so I'm on the train a bit. And I feel like the things that you see on your commute can really change you.

I've had moments like that. Somebody drew me on the train once. Okay. That's so romantic. Okay, Amali. I was like 25, too. Like, I was right in the spot for that. And I just, like, I thought about it forever and ever. I remember asking that person's...

name before they got off and just thinking like, wow, what a, what a New York moment. This was when I lived in New York. And then five, six years later, my uncle visited town from California. He said, I'm going to meet up with an old friend of mine, like from the old neighborhood when I was growing up in the Bronx, and he's going to bring his daughter. And he brought his daughter, and it was the woman who drew me on the train. What? It was the craziest thing. This does not, I would, this is like a store. A fairy tale. This is like, like, to the Magi coincidence. Yeah.

That's beautiful. I wish I could say anything like fun or interesting happened after that. We just kind of shook hands in one of our separate ways, but I don't know. That drawing is not in the Met now? It's not. If it is, I haven't been notified. You're like, where's my check? Anyway, hey everybody. It's New Music Friday from NPR Music. Here to talk about some of the best and most discussion-worthy album's coming out today,

June 7th, 2024. I'm NPR Music Editor Diyud Tyler Ramin. And I'm NPR music editor, Hazel Sills. And today, we are bringing you the latest from the living personification of the purple devil emoji, Charlie XX, as well as the latest in a series of mini memoir records by one of my old faves, Pedro the Lion. But first, folks, I am ready to dance. And you might be two in a minute. Hazel, who do we have in the number one slot? Yes, today there is a new album out by the producer Kay Trinada. It's called Timeless, and this song is titled Pressure.

Kay Trinada is the Montreal-Rays, Los Angeles-based producer and DJ. This is his third studio album, and it's really him kind of delivering what he does best. It's like this incredible, continuous mix, retroactive. inspired dance music that pulls from like house and R&B and disco and funk and Afrobeat. He really just has this incredible like crate digging ethos and you hear that throughout the entire album. Like even on that song Pressure, he's sampling, you know, a song from the 70s singer Thelma Houston. There's a little hot damn moment that's actually a sample from like Richard Pryor comedy set from the 70s. Oh, yeah.

There's also a sample from a song. from 2001 by the rapper Redman, like, he's just kind of like pulling from all these different directions and pulling from all these different decades and making something that's like entirely thoroughly modern in a way. It's like that song felt like a statement of purpose to me. No, he's coming in hot. It's an instrumental track, but he really is sort of establishing some things about his taste and his craft and his technique. He's said he's a Dilla acolyte. He's a very big J. Dilla guy. And I hear a little bit of J. Dillah's working on it. in this. He's also, like you said, a Red Man era, shiny suit era, late 90s, early 2000s, hip hop guy.

And I hear Ride or Die by DMX, DMX. And what else? Like a Just Blaze beat. It's got just that kind of, you know, operatic orchestral fanfare that I really associate with that time. I think this album is great. I think it's so solid. But I have to say, there was a part of me that was, you know, surprised at how sort of close to home it is. Like it's just a really classically solid Ketranada album, but, you know, this is also his first album since he won the Grammy in 2019 for Best Dance Electronic album for his album, Bubba. And I feel like, you know, that was a really big deal.

He was the first black producer to ever win in that category. And I think there was a part of me that was expecting him to put out an album with like a lot of left turns or swerves or, you know, huge A-list collaborators. And this album is filled with people that he's worked with before, people who are really sort of working on the same wavelength as him. And I felt like that spoke really loudly as to what he's trying to do right now as someone in his space. Well, why don't we listen to one of those?

Let's put on drip sweat with Channel Trace as the featured guest. So, like you said, this is an eclectic bunch of guests. This is a lot of names that I mostly know from other K. Trinada projects. Yeah. But I mean, he's right in the pocket here. Channel Trace is a Compton rapper. He's really locked in with the beat.

They have a lot of fun later in the song, sort of building dropouts into the hook and letting the beat drop out around his voice in different ways. He's got this great, like, low to the earth, kind of, you know, very white, whatever the guy with the really low voice from boys to men, whose name I forget. Like, that's, that's his vibe.

And it sounds great. And the beat is this kind of, it's got this kind of classic breakbeat feel in the percussion, things like a Clyde's double field, you know, James Brown sort of beat. And then it has these really modern sort of heavy kicks that sort of keep things on the rails. So what do you think about that in terms of how he's put his group of collaborators together? Because whenever you get a star producer like this, somebody who is distinct enough in their identity to sort of move like an artist, but who is also inevitably intertwined with their guest vocalists, like when they put an album out, what are we expecting them to do? Do we evaluate their work the way that we would an artist album? Are we looking for an arc? Are we looking for a complete statement? Or is it more just like a showcase? Like, what do we think he's? doing here. Yeah, I mean, I think Caterna is interesting in that, like, I think

in terms of what we expect him to do, and I was guilty of this before, as I said, like, I think to be a kind of DJ producer at the level that he's working at, or someone like himself who's like maybe kind of moving farther up into spaces where he could be like a household name as a producer, I do expect them to sort of up the pop star names, the rapper

names that they're working with, and sort of like maybe cater to market taste a little bit. But I think like what's interesting about this channel Tray song is like, you know, I know that K Trinada has a lot of affinity for like 80s hip hop, those early rappers who were sampling 70 soul music and like really crate digging and playing around with vinyl. And with an artist like this, it's a very, he's a very modern rapper. He like bridges a lot of different labels. And I feel like K Trinata is giving him the like retro rapper treatment on this song. And even so much so that like this song samples, you know, the classic Lynn Collins song produced by James Brown, think about it, which has been sampled so many times in different hip hop songs.

That's where you kind of get that like fast percussion, you know, breakbeat style. And that's what's exciting to me is like Kedronata has built this very, you know, contemporary, true to him world, but it's, it's so rooted in this kind of like retro ethos. And he's bringing these very modern contemporary collaborators and giving them the treatment that maybe a producer would have given them like in 1979. Yeah. Speaking of collaborators, or perhaps the lack of them, we should look at a song called Step Don, a song that has no listed guest, and yet there is a lead vocal. Why is that? It's him. He wrote this initially for the weekend, who he's toured with. And if you listen closely to some of the the cadences, especially in the hook, you can totally hear how that would work. But I mean,

I mean, this is, I think, the constant tension of being an artist of his type is that you're constantly coming up with things where you're just like, I like this one. I don't know if I can give it away. And I think that's what happened here. Yeah, totally. And, you know, he did an interview with Rolling Stone where he mentioned the song and he talked about how it made him want to consider a future as a vocalist or like using his vocals more in his music. And that was very surprising to me because I kind of think of K. Trinada as like this introvert. Like he started as a bedroom producer, you know, remixing pop songs and then became a DJ. And it's like I feel like him sort of saying like, oh, actually I'm interested in putting myself

out there as a as a vocalist. Whereas before I might have brought in a guest is really fascinating to me because it's not, I think, what I would have expected from him at all. And he sounds great. Like, I think the song, I was like, where have you been hiding this? He does. Again, the introvert thing. So I'm really excited to see if he follows that path. You and I, as editors, I feel like we're always talking about, like, the death of artist development and the artists that kind of grow too fast or where the marketing plan is a little bit.

ahead of the sort of organic audience. There's a conversation that we've been thinking about separately about how all of these arena tours kind of keep collapsing. And so it seems like part of what he's doing here is sort of creating guardrails against that, making sure that in his rise, you know, in sort of coming out as a Grammy-winning artist, somebody who can pull these really big names if he wants to,

making sure that he also, gets to do the things that he's good at and that he likes doing rather than just reaching straight for the thing that's going to be the most popular or get him the biggest sort of short-term audience. I will say that the few bold-faced names that are here, you've got Childish Gambino, you've got Tanache, Don Richard. Don Richard goes crazy on that song. She's not so good. Anderson Pack, that sounds like it could be an Anderson-Pack song. And that's the thing that I think is really like remarkable here is that this is very much Ketranata making his own statement but the guests all feel at home this is not like you know

Cardi B rapping on a Maroon 5 song or whatever that was well why don't we do one what one more and and address one of those bigger name guests with the song Snap My Finger featuring Pink Panthers I love Pink Panther and like I know that she when she started she He was a huge fan of Ketranata's work. This is not the first time that they worked together. But this to me really exemplifies what you were just saying about like collaborators who feel right at home in Ketranada's universe. Because, you know, Ketranata is an artist who clearly expresses himself through sampling and like through sort of retro techniques.

And Pink Panther is, you know, a young viral star who's come up in the last few years through her own use of sampling. Of course, the sampling that she does is more from, like, 2005, and Gatorna is probably working more in the 70s and the 80s. But it's nice to see them, like, come together on a track like this in this context. And I think similar to Channel Tress, like, he's really kind of giving her a groovy retro treatment, especially because her voice is so modern and can be kind of synthetic in her own tracks. So it's a really, it's a great song. It's a fun song.

They're kind of bringing out the best in each other. Especially because Pink Panther is, I mean, it's, you know, it's the running joke about her that her songs are all like 70 seconds or less or something like that. This song is a normal length. It has refrains. It has, you know, an actual second verse. It's a little bit less frantic or frenzied than a lot of her music. That's probably not the word.

I'm just thinking about how she takes those garage beats and speeds them up. And this is a little bit more of just kind of like a walking pace song. But she sounds good. She doesn't sound uncomfortable. She doesn't sound, you know, bent to the wrong purpose. It just sounds like she's in a room with somebody who speaks the same language as she does. And what a gift. Thank you, K. Renata, for doing what you do.

Well, that is just a little bit of the jam-packed new album from K. Trinada. Tons more to explore there. We've got a bunch more music to share with you, too, including one of the saddest songs I've ever heard about an ugly backpack. And that's all coming up right after the... short break. Hey, it's New Music Friday for June 7th. I'm Daoud Tyler Amin here with Hazel Sills. And for our next release, I feel so fortunate to have an angel on duty. Haisal lay it on me. Who do we got? Yes, the small-time Electra pop star Charlie XX has a new album out today.

It's her sixth studio album and it's called Brat. And this is the song, 360. I am an angel. I'm a huge fan of Charlie XXX. And I feel like I need to say. before we talk about this album, that, you know, Charlie X-E-X is not a serious person, but she's a great artist. She's a club rat who loves to party. She makes chaotic, electronic-driven music for people who love to party, and she's very good at it.

And I think that this album is great, but it's a weird one. And I had this image of her making this album of, like, first thought, best thought. It's very, there's a lot of, like, off-the-cuff, crazy, super fun, like ready to rave tracks on this album. And I feel like 360 really embodies that. It's like a song about being your own It Girl.

She's singing about feeling just like Julia, which is a reference to the actress and personality Julia Fox. And it's kind of a silly song, but it's so unbelievably catchy. And it really, it really works for me. And she seems super aware of that silliness. the video for this song has her convening a Congress of Internet Hot Girls. That's their words, not mine. And you've got Rachel Senate, you've got Harry Neff, Chloe Seveny shows up,

Julia Fox, obviously. Julia Fox is in the hook of this song as this sort of signifier of everywhereness. And this is a song about like cultural ubiquity or sort of aspiring to it. Success is kind of a fait accompli here. delivered as these very hip-hop boasts. Legacy is undubated. You're going to jump if AG made that being AG Cook, her longtime collaborator from PC Music. Yeah, it's really funny. I'm going to lay a theory on you, and I want to know what you think. We've had a lot of big records this year from our main pop girls. We've got a Taylor record, Beyonce, Ariana Grande, Duolipa,

Billy Eilish, a lot of them feel like they've kind of come and gone without a ton of discussion. And I mean that with zero shade at all. I think it's really like more a symptom of the cultural climate than anything else. But the thing about Charlie is that her approach feels like a little bit of an evolutionary advantage in a moment like this where gigantic. albums can feel so kind of ephemeral and disposable because she's a little bit more flexible. She's a little bit more modular, I guess, and she can make, as you were saying, a record that is a little weird, a little smaller, a little messier, like a musician's version of kind of like a direct-to-video release. And I think in that there is a little bit less pressure to be

definitive than if you are somebody operating at a Taylor Swift level. What do you think? No, I think that's totally true. I think direct to video release is a good way of putting it. Or the word that came to mind was like she's like a substack artist or something. Yes, yes, totally. Charlie X, X, X, she has her audience and she knows how to speak to them. And she's never, ever, ever going to try to be one thing to everyone or try to appease everyone, which is like how you get someone like Taylor Swift who makes an album that's like 30 songs long. And there's like country in there and there's folk in there or whatever.

And yeah, and I think Charlie, you know, she is modular and she is savvy. And I think she's really good at branding. And I think like her last album, Crash was this very like slickly produced 80s inspired album that she was jokingly calling her like mainstream pop girl moment. Right. Brat is very much her like messy club rat. You know, it's super short like working with the same crew of people album. And it's almost like she. is someone who is actually committed to the idea of an era,

like a pop era, I think, on a small level. And so, yeah, so I think, like, when I say that, you know, Brat is kind of a weird album, it's because there are these kind of highs and lows where there are moments where she's doing, you know, the messy kind of electronic dance music. But there's also some complicated moments where she's getting very, very personal, like the song Rewind.

Sometimes. I just want to rewind I'd go back in time to when I wasn't insecure to when I didn't overanalyize my face shape nowadays I only eat at the good restaurants but honestly I'm always thinking about my way I used to never feel about it's a synth pop song

but it's really kind of communicating her anxieties about her place within the industry and I feel like she's doing it in a way that's a little bit more complicated than a lot of pop stars who are like, oh, I'm so famous and I can't live my life the way that I want to because I'm famous. This is the thing. I initially read this as like a Britney, she's so lucky, you know, it's lonely at the top kind of lament. Yeah. And I put that to you and you felt like there was something a little bit subtler going on. Yeah, I mean, I think like of an artist of her stature, like it's so hard for anyone to be at the top of the charts at all.

I mean, I guess, unless you have like a viral TikTok moment or you're Taylor Swift. But yeah, there's, this is a song about like feeling sort of weird with one's position in the middle class of pop music. You know, this album also comes out after her song for the Barbie soundtrack Speed Drive came out last year. And that was her first song in the Billboard Hot 100 in nine years. She references being anxious about the Billboard chart. Yeah. And so, yeah, I think like Rewind is an example of a. song where it was like, okay, the way that she's packaged to this album is like messy, messy, rave party girls all the time.

Yeah. Energy, but I'm like, oh, there are moments of introspection and complication on this record. The music here is a little bit empathic in that way, too. I might be reading a bit too much into it, but at the very start of this song, you get this synth sound that felt very 2010 to me. It felt like, you know, TikTok, not TikTok the app, but TikTok the Kesha song. or, you know, California girls or S&M, that era of Rihanna. And then it kind of softens over time. You know, there's a sense in which she feels like she is examining her place within all of this.

And that Charlie or Charlotte, the person, is sort of peeking through more and more the further that the album goes on. Yeah, definitely. Well, with that, why don't we talk about a song that almost made me uncomfortable on this record called I Think About It All the Time? I think about it all the time, that I might run out of time, but I finally met my baby, and a baby might be mine, because maybe one day I might, if I don't run out of time, would it give my life a new purpose? When I was walking around in Stockholm Seriously thinking about my future for the first time It was ice cold playing demos on my iPhone

I went to my friend's place and I met there baby for the first time How sublime? What a joy, oh my, standing there Same old clothes she wore before holding her child, yeah She's a radiant mother and he's a beautiful father When I say uncomfortable, I mean that there is something disarmingly casual and raw that I'm not used to here. Yeah. But how did this hit you? No, I felt the same way.

Like, I think it's, especially because of the framing of the album that she has sold us, like it being this, you know, party record. Yeah, I think about it all the time is, you know, Charlie is 31 years old. you know, she's engaged to the musician and producer George Daniel, who's also in the credits on this album. He's a member of the band The 1975. And, you know, this is a very, like, dioristic track about, like, you know, thinking about her career and maybe she wants to have a kid. There's a moment where she's basically talking about, like, having a conversation about if she should stop her birth control. It's very sort of unfiltered in a way that is refiltered. refreshing to me. And yes, kind of, I can see why it would be uncomfortable because you're like,

three tracks ago you were talking about like how you wanted to like convene every cool girl in the world for like the rager of your life. But but I think like it speaks to, you know, the anxieties of this album. Like this album has such incredible highs and lows. And this is one of those quiet moments of introspection that make, you know, Charlie's music for as much. as it is party music, like, really human? Yeah. There's no consistent rhyme scheme in the verses, at least that I can tell. And there's moments of spoken word.

You know, it's, like you say, she's 31 years old. She's been famous in striving since she was, what, 19? When did I love it come out? You know, it's been a minute. Yeah. So, yeah, this is the sound of somebody sort of thinking about the things that have given her life meaning over that decade and change, and, you know, the things that she might be missing out on, either now or soon. There's this idea. She keeps coming back to this line. I might be, you know,

maybe I'm running out of time. And the most diabolical move to me on this record is that we go straight from this to 365. 365 is the last track on this record, and it is basically a reprise of 360, but it operates sort of the way that, like, in a musical there's like the big love theme in the first act, and then the second act it comes back, but it's in a minor key because like things have gotten dark and like somebody has died, and, you know, like, that's the feeling that it gets me. So it comes right after this extremely vulnerable moment thinking about, you know, the human and the human, side of all of this. And suddenly, all of the kind of, you know, party girl posturing that felt so fun in 360 feels a little bit weird.

It feels kind of like superficial or, you know, sort of like, you know, twisted or like, is this really what I want? After we've seen her so nakedly in crisis, it's like, it's so hard to just go back to being like, yeah, let me take a selfie. You know? The music here, like, it takes a turn. It starts sounding like similar to the same song and it just, it becomes like demonic. It goes down this weird tunnel.

The hook eventually is like out of key. Did you notice that? No. It's crazy. The last like two thirds of the song that, ah, ah, is like it's been tuned to something that is just like not in the key of the song anymore. The bass growl is super aggressive and like bump in that starts to feel like a threat. Yes. There is this weird kind of twist.

darkness to that ending. Like, and it does sort of suck you in. And it's funny because like when I was listening to this album, you know, via a stream, once it ends, you can hit it, you can hit it to play over again. And then I heard 365 and then I heard 360 right after it. Like 360, which sounded like such a fast chaotic song to me, suddenly sounded like a very slow and manageable track. But yeah, I think like the intensity of the song speaks to the themes that we were talking about, about like, you know, her being able to do something that is really kind of indulgent.

And because her fans are going to love it, they're going to be bumping to 365. They're not going to be afraid of it, though. They're going to love it. It's the purple devil emoji. It's a purple devil. It's all right there. All right, well, that is Brat by Charlie XEX. We have one more record to talk about before we get to our lightning round,

and it is part of a multi-stage return by one of my old favorites, Pedro the Lion. The album is called Santa Cruz, and this is the title track, about the first day of eighth grade showing up and realizing you have the ugliest, nerdiest backpack, and everybody is going to hate you. First day of eighth grade. So a little bit of a lot of the line. I loved it in Phoenix at the mall with my grandma, so I'll never be cool here.

It's under the surface. Can't buy at my mind. So a little bit of context here. Page of the Lion is the project of David Bazan, a really prolific songwriter. The initial Page of the Lion catalog exists from the late 90s until like 2004. And then in 2006,

he breaks up that band, band quote unquote, because most of the time he's playing all of the instruments except on tour. He stops using that name. A couple of years later, we get this record called Curse Your Branches, which is him sort of documenting his crisis of faith because he also was raised very, very Christian.

And the early Page of the Lion Records got a lot of recognition from people who grew up Christian, but were also into punk and into alternative things and had reason to sort of scrutinize their own faith. and some of the tenants that they had grown up with. We get no actual official Pedro the Lion records for 15 years. He is just performing under his own name and kind of working some things out. And then, out of nowhere, comes a record attributed to Pedro the Lion in 2019 called Phoenix

and is the first of a five-part series, more achievable than a 50 states project, but still kind of an intimidating thing. thing about his sort of parapetetic youth. Traveling around, his father was like a music pastor, was always moving from church to church. So we got Phoenix in 2019, Havasu in 2022, and this new album, Santa Cruz. It is such a novelistic detail.

And I think that's like the kind of of incredible thing about these records is that he is always written about the sort of emotional horrors of adulthood. And here the camera is low to the ground. He has scaled everything down to look at the things that feel huge and terrifying to a very young person. Yeah. The songwriting here, it's interesting. It kind of reminds me of what we were just talking about with Charlie and I think about it all the time, where there's this very sort of like conversational, you know, narrating.

quality to his songwriting, especially in this song, you know, these images just kind of like topple on top of one another. There's like no rest or space and it's like you, it's kind of hard to find yourself in the song and yet you do feel propelled by by the story that he's telling. And yeah, I think like the granular detail in this song and the songs in this album is just so compelling and then sort of the way that he threads them into a, a very universal statement about what it means to be that age and what it means to be, you know, moving away from your faith and turning towards things like music is just, it's very effective. You identified that there is a gradual turn toward the embrace of music as kind of a life

preserver, basically. And that is epitomized by the song Little Help. I saw a new friend from church at the mall, nervous he wouldn't recall, bracing myself to feel invisible, it's when he walked up and said something surprising. His mom said I could spend the night looking over at my folks, and they said, all right. A reference, of course, to I Get By With a Little Help from my friends, one of several Beale's references,

because this is a song about making a friend, going to his house for a sleepover, thumbing through his records, recognizing the White album, something that he had only heard of in, you know, I think, like a propaganda film about the dangers of rock and roll. And like you say, it's, you know, there aren't really traditional choruses here. It's just a lot of kind of forward motion and a lot of very small details about the things that make an impression that stick with you when you are figuring out how to be a person. And the idea that music is going to be the thing that saves him is sort of planted here and grows and grows and grows more and more over the course of the record.

Yeah, I think it's like very, it at least feels rare to me to get music by an artist about what music. really means to them on like a very specific detailed level like not in an abstract poetic art saves my life kind of way but like here is the story of how I found secular music and like yeah the things people told me about its wickedness were wrong and actually like I love that moment on this song where like they play the white album backwards and they get like to hear the evil messages and then they get kind of bored and they play it right right way and it's like yeah because that's also super thrilling and exciting. So, yeah, I just, I love those little moments

and because especially, you know, in hindsight, seeing what Pedro the Lion has become, it's like following him on that journey and sort of knowing the end of the story that he's telling is really beautiful. I mean, he might have never come back, right? Like, he might have had like a, you know, a Jeff Mangum kind of transition

where he just sort of, you know, hid away and maybe would come, back every five or ten years for some kind of a reunion show, but, you know, he might have just been sort of toiling away in obscurity forever. And instead, he's had this crazy self-discovery. The wild thing is that he's always written concept albums of one form or another. Like, the album Control from 2002 is a record about, like, a disintegrating marriage that ends in, like, infidelity and murder. Spoiler alert. It's, uh, I don't know, it's been 20 years. years. There's a song called

Priests and Paramedics. You're going to get complaints. Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. Winners Never Quit is another one. It's this sort of political corruption fable. Now, the concept is him, which is something that he's never really done explicitly before. And

it's just wild to see him go there because it pulls a different kind of songwriting out of him. Let's listen to Tall Pines because that has a really vital connection to those early records they want to talk about. Riding in a moving truck again, California dusk is barely

Hitching Pines is a hookup song. I mean, it's about other things, but it is a song about two people who know that they're doing something that they're not supposed to be. It's, you know, he's just arrived in this small town called Paradise, and he's a freshman who has met a, a senior girl who for some reason, you know, just like picked him out of the crowd. And it's this very tender, nervous moment where they've conspired to lie to their parents to be able to get the alone time to take their shirts off together.

And it feels very much to me like there's an old song from control called Rapture that is this really fevered depiction of a trist between, you know, a married person. and their side piece. And it is just like intense and sweaty and the guitars are grinding and it's mashed up with all of this religious imagery. And this is, you know, it's trading on some of the same tension,

but the moral authority here isn't God. It's just parents. It's just, you know, the sort of like youthful propriety. And then it's kind of over before it starts because by the end of the song, they're moving away again. I know, that's what really got me, where I was like,

these are the songs where I'm like, oh, I'm in the story. Like, this feels like a film or something because of the narration of it all. And yeah, I, you know, the way that the song begins, like, you know, they're moving and it's like, here we come, guys,

like the whole family's packing up. And then they leave again at the end. It really kind of, you know, the way that the album is written, sort of the propelling motion of it all, like it only emphasizes how that sort of displacement or like lack of stability must have been for him at that age. But yeah, I, it's like you are so tied up in that very tender, vulnerable moment, and it's like the rug kind of gets ripped out from under you.

For a little break from that darkness, why don't we hit one more and talk about Modesto. I worked a vacuum cleaner salesman job Then I later recognized in Glen Gary Glenmore I only sold one afforded She wrote out the check and burst out the solving After work I hung out with my new church friend So the opening track of this album is called It'll All Work Out, which in its own context feels like kind of a dark joke.

But this feels like the promise fulfilled in a way, right? Yeah. We've got him. So we should say that even though the record is called Santa Cruz, it spans multiple cities. Santa Cruz, Paradise, Modesto, I think he finally makes it to Seattle by the end. and a wide range of ages. It starts he's like 13, and by the end he's like 21.

And here we find him starting to figure out that there is like a place for him in this music world that he has seen as this potential, you know, source of his salvation the entire time. He at first has a job selling vacuum cleaners that's kind of soul-sucking. He says he recognizes the men that he works with from Glenn Kee. Carrie Glenn Ross, which is a damning thing to hear about your job. And then he gets a job at a guitar store, which is a little bit better. He asks a coworker where to see shows.

He discovers some bands. And it's this feeling of possibility, right? The title track was all about feeling like he had been drowning the entire time and somebody had only just thrown him a light preserver. And now you sort of feel his head like coming above the water a little bit. And I mean, you hear that in the music too. Like I had said to you like that this moment in the album to me felt like the sort of light bulb moment of like, okay, this is what I want to do. And like there is this moment at the end of the song where, you know, it really kind of builds.

And he's like, I'm going to move to Seattle. I'm going to be a drummer in this band. There's a girl there who might like me. I'm going to go find out if she does. And he's like telling his fortune. He's like writing it in stone. He's like, this is going to happen for you. And like the synths come in.

It's like it feels like this uplift that I hadn't heard in like the first three-fourths of the album. It really made me wonder, you know, what the series would sound like going forward as it moves further into adulthood. Because I really felt like picked up by the momentum of what he's realizing in this song. Yeah, that's the scary part of any biopic or any, you know, documentary that spans multiple decades is that once it starts to, overlap or get close to like the living present, then you get a little bit nervous because you're like, oh boy, this might be a little bit too close for comfort. I can't really see this in like, you know, fairy tale lofty terms anymore. But it seems like he's just excavating all of his unresolved traumas. Yeah. I'm so glad for this turn and happy to see where it goes. And the

final line of the final song, we have time to talk about it. That ends with a song called Only Only Yesterday and the last line is I finally feel some sunlight on my face. And I feel it too. That's the album Santa Cruz by Page of the Lion. Stick around for our lightning round of other great albums out today right after this. Hey, it's Daoud and Hazel, back with more New Music Friday for June 7th. It is time for our lightning round. A quick spin through some of the other new releases we'll be listening to today.

I'm going to start us off. We are in the middle of another little renaissance of African pop, having amazing breakthrough moments in the U.S. and around the world. You may have seen our coverage on NPRMU. lately of recent albums by Tyler and Ira Starr. Today, we get a real banger, the debut studio LP by Thames. I need your love me, so fresh, so clean, love me in and out. I'll feelin'ly, and I'll be down now.

She's a Nigerian singer who has been killing it in the margins for the past couple years. She has been sampled by future. She's written a Rihanna song. She's on the soundtrack of a Marvel movie. She has a Grammy and a Hot 100 single, and no album. That changes today with the release of her new record titled Born in the Wild. I wanted to shout out the new album from the indie rock artist Angelica Garcia.

It's called Hemelo. It's her third album, and it's a departure for her in the sense that she sings a lot of these songs. Big, fuzzy rock songs in Spanish. I know that this is an Alt-Latino favorite this year, so definitely check it out. On a similar tip, big ups to Elisa Amador, and if you're a fan of the Tiny Desk, you'll recognize that name. Elisa was the winner of our 2022 Tiny Desk contest, where unsigned artists enter for a chance to perform their own Tiny Desk concert. More than that, the submission that she eventually sang at the desk here in D.C. was the first Spanish-language winner. She has been keeping busy since then, and she returns today with her own debut album, Multitudes.

Am I too much for you? Much to if I tell you the truth. South Korean DJ Peggy Goo has been steadily climbing the ranks of dance music over the past decade or so. She has a talent for making these enormous house songs that just get stuck in your head for weeks. Today she releases her debut album, I Hear You. So fun, it's a great summer album. And lastly, the Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Marina Allen has a new album out today. It's titled Eight-Pointed Star.

It's a quiet little folk album that plays with ideas of self-acceptance, family, love, and more. Tell me another story. I know it's hard, but I'm listening. Tell me another dream. Hey, that's our show, folks. Appreciate you all for listening. As always, send us your feedback at all songs at npr.org.

Leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. subscribe to our newsletter at npr.org slash music newsletter. And remember, you can get this show sponsor free and also support our work by joining NPR Music Plus. Just go to plus.npr.org slash NPR Music or search for NPR Music in Apple Podcasts. Today's episode was produced by Joaquin Kotler. We had editorial support from Jacob Gans and Soraya Mohamed.

I'm Daud Tyler Amin. I'm Hazel Sills. Stay cool, everyone.