NPR Music - The Contenders, Vol. 4: The songs we can't stop playing this week

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

The latest update to our running list of the year's best songs includes the shredded guitars of girlpuppy, solo material from from TV On The Radio's Tunde Adebimpe and more.Featured artists and songs: • Tunde Adebimpe: "Drop," from 'Thee Black Boltz'• girlpuppy: "Champ," from 'Sweetness'• Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: "Into Your Eyes" from 'GUSH'• Lonnie Holley: "Protest With Love," from 'Tonky'• The Weather Station: "Lonely," from 'Humanhood'• Ólafur Arnalds & Talos: "We Didn't Know We Were Ready" (feat. Niamh Regan & Ye Vagabonds) (single)Enjoy the show? Share it with a friend and leave us a review on Apple or wherever you listen to podcasts. Questions, comments, suggestions or feedback of any kind always welcome: [e-mail] Hear the songs in the All Songs Considered playlists in Apple Music and Spotify.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

Robin, I've got to ask how you're holding up in the wake of this weekend's big crisis. Which crisis? A personal crisis for you. Yes, it's Monday morning, the morning after the big Super Bowl game. And if you're like me, a Kansas City Chiefs fan, not good. Not good, Sheldon. That was brutal. Philadelphia absolutely destroyed.

Kansas City, and Kansas City was favored to win that game. Yeah. I mean, so many people had just written it off completely. Yeah, a lot of the momentum seemed to be behind the chiefs on this one, and boy, did Philadelphia snuff that out of it. I will say, and we don't have to talk about the game much, but I will say when I watched Philadelphia beat Washington, the commanders, a couple weeks ago, I thought, uh-oh.

Yeah. Because Philadelphia looked absolutely unstoppable. So I'm not that surprised. I'm surprised it was as much of a smackdown as it was. Well, I guess you could say it wasn't the only beatdown that happened on the field that night. It was a huge night for music. Kendrick Lamar headlined the halftime show. And going into the game, there was one big question on every music fan's mind,

and that was, will Travis Kelsey propose to Taylor Swift? And now we'll never know, because he couldn't do it after losing the, losing the game. You'll never know. You definitely can't do it after losing the game. No, no, the one big question, for some people anyway, was will Kendrick Lamar perform his monster hit from last year called Not Like Us? Yeah, Kendrick has spent essentially the last 10 months dismantling his rival Drake,

who previously could have been, could have held claim to being the biggest rapper in the world. The song Not Like Us, which is sort of the cornerstone of the anti-Drake Kendrick campaign, went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100, dominated the summer, and has since become a bit of a rallying cry for those who have long disliked Drake or are just sort of getting into Kendrick now. The song won record of the year and song of the year at the Grammys. And so now, coming into his sweeping coronation at the Super Bowl, There were questions about whether or not he would perform it because Drake's response to all this has been to file lawsuits, saying that he has been defamed by the song.

And questions about whether or not Kendrick was just sort of ready to move on, you know, from all of this. But he did not make people wait very long. He did tease the song at one point in the night before going all in on it. Yeah, when he finally launches into it, you could feel sort of like the damn break on the audience. And I mean, he didn't just do one disc song. He also did Euphoria as a lead-in. But I do think it's important to point out that he was very seriously performing throughout this. Like, this was just as much a display of what makes Kendrick great as much as it is a Drake eulogy.

Yeah, I mean, all the other stuff aside, it was an incredible history-making performance. I think when he broke into Humble and DNA, like when he reached back to the damn album, I literally got goosebumps and said, oh, my God, to the room. I mean, he didn't even do all right. Yeah, no, no, I wondered. I actually wondered if he was going to do that more than I was wondering whether or not he was going to do not. I mean, it just goes to show the depth of his discography. Yeah.

Well, all right. We have music of our own that we're going to play. But real quick, as always, if you enjoy the show, share. it with a friend. Leave us a review in Apple or wherever you get podcasts. And be sure to stay tuned after our last song for the new segment called Your Weekly Reset. I'll use a recurring regular reset. Yeah, Sheldon. Yeah. Sort of realign your day. What do you want to start us off with? I want to start us off with the new song from Tunday at a Bimpe. It's called Drop. One of the vocalists of one of the best bands of the 21st century TV on the radio.

He's actually never done this by himself before. I know. I can't believe it. It's insane to think of, but this is a part of his launch for his debut, 25 years into his career. His first ever solo album called The Black Bolts is out April 17th. This is the second single. I mean, I just love a real sort of like statement record coming into an album. This song is like so existential.

It's such a great display for his voice as well. It feels like a guiding light for what this album could potentially be. I'm so excited for it. Yeah, I mean, to your point about it feeling very existential, I mean, it got me thinking about getting older. You know, and an idea that we actually talked about the last time, you were on the show. And we were talking about Marshall Allen, who also has a debut solo album. He's a hundred years old, you know, just that idea that it's never too late to be inspired or to be curious or, you know, to be adventurous. And I feel like that's definitely a part of this when you look

at Tunday doing this for the first time in 25 years into his career. It's really sort of exciting to see an artist sort of step away from the band and establish themselves as their own sort of dig into their individual psyche. I think about this a lot when it comes to like Brittany Howard and the Alabama Shakes. Yeah. For a long time, like she was performing as the face of Alabama Shakes. And it's like that comes with a collective identity, right? You have to be the representative for the group.

You're wrapped up in all of the baggage of the group. And then once you step out, I mean, you hear it on Jamie. It is so personal. It is so, like, introspective and inward looking that you really get a new sense of who this artist is, a new dimensionality to their music. And it feels like you are starting to see that even in these initial offerings from Tune Day. And the other thing is when you get a band together like that, you're sort of multitracking the personalities and the creative spirit of each individual artist. And you break out those individual tracks as individual artists, you suddenly realize, oh, that was the element. that they added to the mix to come up with something completely different.

In this case, with the Tune Day solo album, it feels like these songs that I've heard so far, they're still very much his, very experimental, but kind of lean a little more into some pop elements, I think, than what I think of, you know, certainly not as noisy as a lot of the TV on the radio stuff. So that song, again, was called Drop from the album, The Black Boltz, and the album is out April 18th.

So on the last Contenders episode, we did a couple weeks ago, NPR's Hazel Sills, on and she and I were talking about whether or not you can judge an album by its cover art or judge a band by its name. You know, and by judge, I guess what I'm saying. I just mean, can you guess what it's going to sound like and gauge whether it's something that you're going to end up liking? I totally think you can. Hazel wasn't so sure. But shortly after that, we got word of this new album from an artist that goes by the name, Girl Puppy. I wasn't really familiar with Girl Puppy, but just based on the name, I thought, I'm probably going to like this.

And then I saw the cover art for the new album. It's called Sweetness. And it shows this woman in a white dress and she's standing on a beach, but she's glowing in this sort of unnatural way. It's kind of radiating light. And I thought, yeah, definitely going to like this. So I cued up this song that I want to play. And sure enough, I absolutely loved it. The song from Girl Puppy is called Champ.

This song absolutely shreds. I love it so much. The guitars, those crunchy power chords, you know, and then she tempers it all just so perfectly with the right amount of, you know, these little moments of quieter introspection before she just blows it all up again. I will say this is how I would imagine girl puppy sounding. Yeah, I was going to ask you like what you think of that whole idea. I think generally speaking, I wouldn't particularly say that I look at an eye. album cover or a song cover and I'm like, yeah, this is, this is going to be for me. I will say there are band names that maybe it's just because they like, they sound like the

band. I do think of like a bad brains as being like the first time I saw bad brains on, I was like, yeah, this is, this is an ambient record. This is going to be sick. Yeah, exactly. But this song, it just comes right at you. It's so big. There's a crazy juxtaposition between the size of the sound and the way her voice is so sort of tiny and like retreating into it. Yeah. Like it does seem like they are like currents moving in opposite directions. So girl puppy is Becca Harvey. She's from Atlanta and kind of has this cool backstory.

So she was working at a bakery in East Atlanta back in 2020. The pandemic hit. She lost her job. Didn't know what to do with herself on all this time. she suddenly had, so she started playing music, you know. She put out a debut album in 2022, and she's had some singles in an EP. Anyway, like I said, as soon as I saw this, I thought, I'm going to love it, and I absolutely do the album again. It's called Sweetness, and it's out March 28th. So we'll just listen to Girl Puppy Champ, a song about a friendship dissolving.

I want to get into something that's about people coming together. It's Caitlin O'Reillia Smith's into your eyes. So Sheldon, you set this whole song up, which is totally gorgeous, by saying that it's about people coming together. But it's a very kind of strange way of coming together, right? I mean, it's almost celestial or magical or... Yeah, there is a real sense of magical realism, sort of out-of-body experience. It's not your typical, like, romantic connection. Right.

There is something sort of, like, spectral about it. I mean, Caitlin O'Reillia Smith is an electronic composer and producer who works primarily with modular synthesizers. A lot of her music seems to deal with sounds effect on the body. She's talking. And not sound effects, like sound effects, but the way that sounds moves us and affects us even physically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And she has said that this album is about the third thing that is creating. when two things come together.

This song in particular is supposed to be about how we perceive the space of presence, like being with something or someone. And I think you feel that the way the vocals kind of move in and out of phase. They don't stay solid for a long time, right? They feel like they are almost translucent at certain times.

And the lyrics are repetitive. It moves in and out of the same phrase over and over again. Yeah, I mean, there's that great slide of a hand that she does with that line, because it's just the same line over and over again. I love it when an artist can do that. Tom York does that a lot. Yeah. Where they take, and the slide of hand is they take a single line and they repeat it over and over again, but you never feel like it's being repeated. Right. There's this constant evolution and movement forward so you don't feel like, all right, you're just stuck on this phrase. Yeah. Well, I thought this was just a one-off single, but it's from an album,

He's got from now? It's an album called Gush that's out August 22nd. Very nice. Sheldon, are you a Lonnie Holly fan? I am indeed. Yeah, I would have guessed that you were. He's such an interesting guy. You know, he's a, for people who don't know, he's a visual artist, mostly working

with found objects. He's sort of renowned in the outsider art world. He's also an educator. And he's a musician who does these really just, I think, absolutely fascinating, deeply thoughtful pieces of work that they really defy any kind of genre or label. I mean, maybe spoken word comes closest to what he does, but he also just has this incredibly distinctive voice. He is now in his 70s, Lonnie Hawley is, going back to that idea of never being too late to be inspired. He didn't put his first album out until he was in his early 60s, but he's got a new one coming now

called Tonkey, and the first single from it that I want to play is called protest with love. So right off the bat, I think you can tell for anyone who hasn't listened to Lonnie Hawley before, he has a very distinctive voice. It's not hard for me to imagine that his voice isn't for everyone. Some of his stuff can be a little more challenging to listen to, but I think this cut is maybe one of the most accessible sort of sticky songs that I've ever heard from him. I mean, for people who aren't familiar with him, I would say that his music has a soul base, but it's like experimental in all directions.

It's funny, we've talked about Marshall Allen. There is also a sort of sun-rah cosmic element to this stuff. But I mean, on his 23 album, Oh, Me, Oh, My, you had more mother, Michael Stipe, Sharon Van Etton, Justin Vernon. So, I mean, that tells you that he's moving in a lot of different directions at once. Yeah, I mean, incredible collaborator as well. There was this incredible profile of him in the New York Times a while back where he said that he was one of 27 children, that his parents traded him to another family for a pint of whiskey when he was an infant.

He dug graves for a living. He picked cotton. He dropped out of school when he was in the seventh grade. I'm quoting the Times piece now. He says that he drank too much gin, was run over by a car, and pronounced brain dead. I mean, and here he is, you know, he didn't even come to making art, the sort of found art that he makes until he was almost 30 years old. And here he is making these incredible, just deeply moving, genre-defying pieces of music with a cast of other artists who are all buying in because they know what an incredible. incredible spirit and talent he is.

Yeah, I mean, as a black man from the Jim Crow South in Alabama, he knows a thing or two about the idea of protest. Yeah. For him to still be able to speak of moving from a place of love is so powerful to me. For him to find art, for him to be so good at so many different things. It's insane for him to have moved into this space as late as he did and to be so good at that. I mean, you talked about his voice not being for everyone. I think that is part of the charm of it for me. It is so distinct. It is so clear he has such a clear focus in his sound. So the album

Tonkey is out on March 21st, and that song again was called Protest with Love. So after hearing protest with love, I want to transition into another artist who has been operating in a sort of activist space, the band The Weather Station, this song is called Lonely. You know, Sheldon, when I asked you what you wanted to play this week, you said you will use any excuse to talk about the weather station. Man, I love this band so much. It's fronted by Tamara Lindman, formed in 2006. She told Interview Magazine that she felt like the

world of ignorance led her to this record, sort of trying to figure out how to be an activist and talk to people about the issue emotionally. And then I think of this song lonely as like the perfect encapsulation of that. It is very intimate. It is about two people sort of feeling distant from each other in a society that's so big. There's a line about sort of in a city filled with people passing through the eye of eye of a needle passing by so close on the street being so packed in so densely concentrated but then feeling so distant from one another feeling so disconnected the album is it's about dissociation in a lot of ways and that it's that dissociation that leads you to sort of disconnect from the idea that you are a part of a bigger world right and so i think it's such

a beautiful and intimate way to get at a bigger problem yeah it's also about just feeling disoriented, I think, by it all. And that sort of fatigue that you feel when you're just absolutely zapped out by all of this, which fits so perfectly, I think, with the sort of the, kind of what she's doing sonically on this song, Lonely, because it's very slippery, you know, it feels very familiar. But at the same time, it's impossible to really pin down. It's, you know, it's not jazz, it's not folk, it's not pop, it's not electronic. I mean, it's sort of its own unique thing and kind of floating between all of these worlds in a really, really wonderful way.

There's such a, like, quiet grandeur to this. It's sort of like gently, like, sweeps you up. It's got a pretty, like, robust rhythm section for a song that is so quiet. So that song, again, is called Lonely from the perfectly titled album Humanhood. Yeah. From the weather station that came out earlier this year. So I want to close with this really, I think it's just this breathtaking song from Olafer Arnold's and the Irish electronic artist and singer Talos. The song is called We Didn't Know We Were Ready. And this is a piece that they actually wrote together at an artist's residency back in

2023, but it was only just released here at the end of January. And it's a song that is in part about just how fleeting life is and how fragile life can be and it's particularly striking because Talos himself died suddenly just this past August after a short illness. He was only 36 years old. It really does feel like a song that picks up added meaning once you know that one of its creators has passed. I mean, there is this real sense of the unexpected suddenly becoming reality and you having to accept that reality. But it's also this really beautiful, like, tribute to artists being a part of a community, a collective. I mean, they asked other people to come in and record vocals in these sessions.

Yeah, definitely listened through the end when all the other voices come in. It's so beautiful. Kind of a longer song, but I just thought a really nice one to go out on. Again, we didn't know we were ready from Oliver Arnold and Talos. And keep listening after the song for your weekly. reset. All right, thanks as always Sheldon. Thanks so much for having me. And for NPR music, I'm Robin Hilton. It's all songs considered. Sticky

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