Editor’s Note: Anyone who says there isn’t good music coming out these days — and quite literally, every day — simply isn’t paying attention. Vanyaland’s compilation feature The V List highlights the best in new music, both homegrown and national, over the past month, pulling together the sounds that have soundtracked the website in recent weeks. It’s all the stuff we’re bumping here at Vanyaland HQ, one new bop at a time.
Nuovo Testamento, ‘Picture Perfect’
Back in the long-gone n’ lawless Allston days of the mid- to late-aughts, there was a DIY house party circuit called Club Fuxx that, for at least a short burst that felt like forever, was the hottest shit in the neighborhood. And the DJs would bump nothing but early-’90s dance-pop, house, and Euro-NRG, a stark contrast to the indie and electro soundtrack of the day. We bring all this up nearly two decades later because “Picture Perfect,” the white-hot single from Nuovo Testamento, would fit right in. The Los Angeles trio — who graced our 2023 Year in ReView on the sleek strength of Italo disco standout “Heartbeat” — dropped the blissful retro-pop dance track on June 10 to set an animated beat for new EP Trouble, out July 25 via the trio’s own imprint Discoteca Italia. “Picture Perfect” is a proper banger throwing it back to when clubbing was exciting, carefree, and fun, an intoxicating sonic cocktail of synth-pop and freestyle. “It’s about a sweet, pure kind of desire — adoration, admiration, wanting, hope,” the trio states. “It’s free of doubt and full of conviction. There’s no pain in this song, only the joy of someone’s existence and knowing that they are meant for you. It’s asking for trust until someone knows as much as you do about who you will be to one another.”
bar italia, ‘Cowbella’
It kinda makes sense that as we get the first new Pulp album in nearly 25 years, we’re treated to a new banger from a band with the same name as one of the Britpop icons’ most underrated songs. Of course we still don’t know if bar italia are named after the Different Class closer or the actual London café or some other thing, and we honestly don’t care. The trio of Nina Cristante, Jezmi Tarik Fehmi and Sam Fenton returned June 19 with a rousing new indie rock romp called “Cowbella,” and it’s so hot we’re sitting here making out with ourselves over it. “Cowbella” sounds like it’s trying to break up a fight between Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols while filming Dig!, and we can’t help but wonder what it would sound like if the Pixies covered it. Yeah, it fucks like that. Maybe we’ll get clarity on all this when bar italia play Boston’s Paradise Rock Club on November 24, or maybe we won’t. Doesn’t matter.
MARINA, ‘I <3 YOU’
Our forever homegirl MARINA wants to take us to the alt-pop disco we deserve, and the playlist en route to features ABBA, Erasure, The Waitresses, Blondie, that one Estelle banger, and all the other sonic strands of care-free DNA we hear pulsating through white-hot new single “I <3 YOU.” This dance party bop of the summer arrived on June 6 via Queenie Records/BMG alongside MARINA’s all-caps-everything new album PRINCESS OF POWER, and it’s the third mega-jam we’ve hyped from the record here on the V. It follows April’s sexpot anthem “CUNTISSIMO” and February’s dramatic, house-infused, hall-of-mirrors psych-pop romp ‘BUTTERFLY‘. “One of my lessons in the last few years is that love — and showing love — is not a weak thing,” MARINA says of the track. “Of all the superpowers we have as humans, love is our greatest one.” Instantly memorable and dance-party-minded “I <3 YOU” surfaces with a Olivia De Camps–directed music video, and it’s viewable below.
Big Thief, ‘Incomprehensible’
Back in the fall of 2019, when Big Thief released their fourth album Two Hands, it seemed like a lot of folx brought the generation-defining “Not” with them back home for Thanksgiving, using the song to soundtrack whatever it was we were all facing with our families as our former lives crossed with the current. New single “Incomprehensible,” released in early June and the first offering from Double Infinity, out in September via 4AD, emerges with a similar feeling of emotional heaviness, the type of track that stays with us long after the first listen, and seems poised to hold a place of importance as we collectively teeter on the brink of whatever it is we’re on the brink of. As percussion swirls and a feeling of hopeful nostalgia permeates through this stunning composition, an immediate contender for SOTY and eventually to be placed amongst Big Thief’s finest efforts of a pretty remarkable career, Adrianne Lenker’s soul-stirring lyrical wordplay dances in and out of our headspace with ease, reflecting her own life back at ours: “In two days it’s my birthday and I’ll be 33 / That doesn’t really matter next to eternity / But I like a double number, and I like an odd one too / And everything I see from now on will be something new.” We could probably just repost the entire lyric sheet from Genius and call it a day.
Lathe of Heaven, ‘Aurora’
Those final few days of carefree summer just ahead of Labor Day weekend mean different things to different people, and for some, they set up the soundtrack to coming autumn. Lathe of Heaven provide a key entry with new album Aurora, out August 29 on Sacred Bones, and the Brooklyn post-punk and new wave alchemists set a magnetic tone with the incandescent title track, which surfaced June 24 via a cinematic music video directed by Devan Davies. Lathe of Heaven say “Aurora” is “a song loosely inspired by an Arthur C. Clarke short story called If I Forget Thee, O Earth…,” adding: “In the story a man and his son take a trip from their colony on the moon to a lookout point where Earth (long abandoned due to nuclear war) can be seen rising across the vast gulf of space. Playing with this concept, [we] took a more personal and romantic approach, exploring similar themes of loss, love, and devotion at the end of the world.” Embrace the sonic devotion of “Aurora” below, and get lost in the Davies-directed video.