Episode 110

Vampire Weekend – Capricorn

Swim Deep – Such a Fool

Ultra Lights: Diamond Dreams

Seu Jorge – Crenca

William Tyler – Howling at the Second Moon

Tricky – I’m Yours

Shaboozey and Kehlani – Bullets and Blades

Curio Curio – Bem Querer

Phoebe Bridgers: Bobby

I have my own personal pick for the song I would have chosen as the lead single — and it kicks off today’s playlist of new music I’ve been enjoying. You’ll also hear some impassioned punk (from Sweeping Promises), some sumptuously retro-leaning soul (from the Womack Sisters) and the most beautiful song I have ever heard about a character from the early ’90s children’s show “Tiny Toon Adventures.”

Phoebe Bridgers: Bobby

Phoebe Bridgers Explains the Influence of “Archie, Marry Me” on Her New Album

She cited Alvvays as one of the inspirations for her song “Bobby”

BY Alex Hudson

Published Aug 17, 2026

Alvvays have reached the upper echelons of pop music. Last year, they contributed to Miley Cyrus’s album, and now they’ve influenced a song from Phoebe Bridgers‘s Lost Weekend.

She said, “I tend to write love songs that are soaked in pain and irony, and I really didn’t want to do it this time, because it didn’t feel like that. I wanted to write about the feeling of love at first hookup — just your life being totally turned upside down by someone in a good way. But there are so many great songs like that, like ‘There She Goes’ or ‘Marry Me, Archie,’ that it was hard to commit to adding to that legacy. But at the end of the day, I just had to be honest. And these feelings, I feel very lucky to have had them. Thank you, Bobby!”

Not only did she get the song title backwards, we question whether that’s really an apt description of “Archie, Marry Me” — which certainly is a love song, but one about rejecting the social pressure to have a wedding, rather than the first rush of love.

Also, “There She Goes” (which is presumably the song by the La’s) has been long-rumoured to be about heroin, rather than love, although songwriter Lee Mavers has denied this.

from Exclaim!

Phoebe Bridgers – Bobby (Official Lyric Video)

1. Phoebe Bridgers: “Bobby”

This is a song about falling in love with the momentum and grace of someone falling down several flights of stairs. And it sounds like it, too — rushing, surging, a little calamitous. Those who know a thing or two about Bridgers’s personal life will pick up on some references to her boyfriend, the filmmaker and comedian Bo Burnham — the opening line gestures toward his pandemic-era experimental comedy special “Inside” — but there is also something universal about the infatuated ecstasy that courses through “Bobby.” Bridgers leans into the obsession, the neediness and even the delusions that can accompany the first flushes of love: “Bobby, this could be the end of wanting,” she sings with a quiver in her voice. “I exist only if you’re watching.”

The Amplifier

Ultra Lights: Diamond Dreams

A few weeks ago, friend of the newsletter and occasional guest Amplifier Dave Renard suggested I listen to an album he thought I’d like: “Pleasure’s All Yours,” the debut LP by the Atlanta band Ultra Lights. Dave was indeed correct — I like this album a lot. (Oh, to be seen and understood.) Though Ultra Lights is a relatively new project, its 42-year-old frontman and chief songwriter, John Robinson, is a veteran of several other underground bands and has been around long enough to make the sneering disillusionment that seeps out of his vocals sound particularly convincing. There’s certainly some of Pavement’s sass on “Diamond Dreams,” one of my favorite songs on “Pleasure’s All Yours,” but the stomping, garage-rock percussion and that taunting lead riff amount to something uniquely satisfying.

Diamond Dreams –

a great new band from Atlanta

also from The Amplifier

and from Pitchfork

By Jeff Yerger

Reviewed July 9, 2026

The Atlanta band plays a throwback style of post-Strokes indie rock with measured looseness and a snotty attitude.

Atlanta’s Ultra Lights are a nostalgia act, if only because they make scuzzy millennial garage rock in the year 2026, when not even the Strokes seem very much interested in sounding like the Strokes. This shit is classic rock now: Is This It is 25 years old, Brooklyn is no longer the hipster center of the universe, and those Converses you used to wear now need insoles. Atlanta may not be an obvious hub for upcoming indie rock acts, but on their debut, Pleasure’s All Yours, Ultra Lights are doing their damn best to make Atlanta sound like early-2000s New York City in a way that would make John Rocker’s head explode.

Like many projects, Ultra Lights began as a way for singer-songwriter John Robinson to stave off pandemic boredom. Robinson, 42, is something of a grizzled veteran of the post-Strokes indie rock boom, having lived a whole previous life in the 2010s playing slacker-punk anthems as Turf War and Illegal Drugs. By the time those bands broke up, he had spent the better part of a decade in music and seemed content to hunker down in Augusta to raise a family, though he never stopped writing music. 

William Tyler – Howling at the Second Moon

again from Pitchfork

The Nashville guitarist’s latest album is an act of reckoning: Collaging together found sounds and field recordings with his own fingerpicking, it feels like an elegy for a nation in free fall.

American instrumental guitarists often conjure sprawling frontiers, but those visions can confine them. William Tyler, among the tradition’s preeminent 21st century practitioners, has a diverse catalog—he’s released a rolicking, jammy rock LP; backed his trusted Martin acoustic with delicate brass; and let out billows of vaporous feedback on his solo recordings. Yet his relentlessly tuneful approach, which seeks serene resolution, and his geographical inspirations—whether muggy Tennessee or the sun-dried Southwest—mean his music is always a hair’s breadth from sentimentalizing American dreams that he wants to interrogate. With the nation in free fall and everyone’s horizons narrowing, Tyler has tempered his optimism: The 45-year-old’s latest, the haunting Time Indefinite, includes a dimmed palette and a downcast scope. The shift makes for his most ambitious full-length yet.

This record isn’t about the frontier, but rather the lack of one. Time Indefinite asks us to reconsider the world as it exists, which inevitably means cultivating the land inside of ourselves.

a little bit about who he is from Wikipedia

Before he became a solo artist, Tyler was a member of Lambchop and Silver Jews beginning in 1998.^[3] Tyler first joined Lambchop at the age of 19 because Kurt Wagner approached him about playing the organ in the band. However, it turned out that he got to play guitar because he admittedly said “I couldn’t really play” the organ. Before releasing music under his own name, Tyler used The Paper Hats as working title for his solo music.^[1][12] In 2010, Tyler released a universally acclaimed album entitled Behold the Spirit,^[3] and in 2013 released another critically acclaimed album entitled Impossible Truth.^[13] This was followed by his third full length, Modern Country, which was hailed by Rolling Stone magazine as one of the “best country albums of 2016”.^[14] He collaborated with London based electronic music producer Four Tet (Kieran Hebden + William Tyler) to release the album 41 Longfield Street Late ‘80s released on 19 September 2025.^[15]

Vampire Weekend – Capricorn

Vampire Weekend – Capricorn (Official Video)

“Capricorn” is a song by American rock band Vampire Weekend, released as the lead single from their fifth studio album Only God Was Above Us. It was released on February 16, 2024, by Columbia Records as a double A-side with “Gen-X Cops”, and is the band’s first single since 2019’s “This Life“/”Unbearably White“. The track was written by lead singer Ezra Koenig, and was produced by Koenig and Ariel Rechtshaid.

Background

Vampire Weekend announced their fifth studio album, Only God Was Above Us, on February 8, 2024.^[1] “Capricorn” and “Gen-X Cops” were released the following week on February 16.^[2]

Lyrically, the song depicts the “aching, unavoidable melancholy of growing old and discovering that adults feel just as powerless as kids do”.^[3]

and from Boston Radio 89.9

In the lead single for their fifth album, Vampire Weekend slows it down, taking on a steady beat and delaying the action that typically jumps right out at you in their music until later in the song. In “Capricorn,” the band expresses a mid-life crisis, singing of getting lost in time and searching for moments and purposes of their own. The song offers no answers, but instead guides you through the unknown with reassurance. 

Shaboozey and Kehlani – Bullets and Blades

Shaboozey – Bullets & Blades (Official Audio) ft. Kehlani

from NPR

Shaboozey discusses building his album around the fictional character Cherie Lee

Shaboozey has a new concept album that imagines life in the Wild West.

SHABOOZEY: This outlaw group came into this town and took over. In the chaos of all that, they accidentally took the life of this sheriff. But what they didn’t know is the sheriff had a daughter, and their daughter was coming for vengeance.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “SWEET REVENGE”)

SHABOOZEY: (Singing) Nineteen, left home. She’s a renegade with one goal, to find every man that did her wrong – .45 to ya dome, you can’t get away from this smoke. Before you know it, you’re dead and gone. Goes down smooth.

RASCOE: Shaboozey’s new album is called “The Outlaw Cherie Lee & Other Western Tales.” The Grammy-winning musician says he found inspiration for his title character, Cherie Lee, close to home.

SHABOOZEY: I have a lot of women figures in my life, you know, some I’ve been in relationships with, some – my older sister, my mother. So it’s kind of just, like, going in my sister room and take some shoes. You know what I mean? Or take something from her.

I also played him on episide 71 and 104

All of my selections this week come from one source.  I stumbled across an Instagram account called myllk. 

https://www.instagram.com/myllck/?hl=en

As far as I can tell it’s a record store in Singapore.  Each post features the owner and/or his son (I assume)  showing 4 or 5 records.  Sometimes it’s “5 psychedelic albums you should own” or ” 5 of the best British rockabilly albums” for example.  Often the post is “5 new best releases”.  That works for me. I picked the latest post.

View this post on Instagram

Swim Deep – “Such a Fool” – Hum

Swim Deep are an English band formed in 2011. The band’s style has been described as “melodic, guitar-based rock that belies the influence of ’80s dream pop and ’90s shoegaze.” They just released their 4^th album.  Ive never heard of them, but they get a fairly lengthy review in the NME.

Here’s the chosen track.  

Seu Jorge – “Crenca” -The Other Side

Seu Jorge first came to my attention in the 2004 film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou where hen played Pelé dos Santos and provided much of the soundtrack in the form of Portuguese language cover versions of David Bowie classics.

This is his first album since 2015. 

The Portuguese word crença translates to belief or faith in English. 

Tricky – I’m Yours – “Different When It’s Silent”

Tricky, is an English musician, record producer, vocalist and rapper who rose to promince in the 90’s as part of Bristol’s trip-hop scene.  He became known for collaborating with Massive Attack.  

In 1995 his debut album  Maxinquaye made him a household name in the UK.  I’m Yours is his latest single featuring vocalist Mitch Sanders. Released on July 1, 2026, it serves as a track from his 15th studio album. 

It rates a 7.2/10 at Pitchfork.

Curio Curio – “Bem Querer” –   S/T

This must be a first. I have two Portuguese language songs this week!

Named after a colourful Brazilian songbird, Curió Curió is singer, Luiza Monteiro, based in Austria, and producer and musician Dustin Braun from Germany. The duo  takes influences from 1970s Brazil and blends them into a modern fusion of psychedelic, , disco, and samba.  Bern Querer translates as “my beloved”

The self-proclaimed ” Internet’s Busiest Music Nerd” gives us a review.