In Italy there’s a term, “tormentone estivo,” which basically means the pop song that hammers you all summer wherever you go. Remember “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk? Pretty good song actually, but my point is that it’s getting to be that time when every man and woman must decide what the song of the summer is or should be.
Here at slowgraffitti global headquarters, from the basement mailroom to the terrorism-baiting 87th floor boardroom, we keep playing “Downer” by underground megastar Dean Blunt, with that bloke from Animal Collective on the mike and toney British producer Vegyn also credited. It’s a bit shoegazey, with growly guitar and dreamy, melancholy vocals; it sounds like a beach bonfire of glowing emotion: “It’s coming into the place / Trying to keep it clear / Getting caught in the act / Embers into the air / Don’t let me go / Don’t let me go, my friend…”
I blurbed about Goat Girl last month but, quite criminally, I neglected to share their lyrics, and the fact is they have a summer megahit called “Motorway” that’s been lighting up the slowgraffitti charts — it sounds like one of those cynical/nihilistic ’80s movies with lots of slick asphalt, cigarettes and leather. “Sleep was meant for yesterday / Now it all just seems the same / We fucked it all away / Oh now the nights to blame / Driving driving / No confiding / Driving driving / Eyes averting…”
Or should summer ’24 rightly be defined by what we danced to? Over at Biche House, slowgraffitti’s exclusive after-hours disco, our roster of distinguished international DJs are building their set lists around “The Paddle” by Gene on Earth. Eugene Arthur is a bonafide A-lister in the DJ world, and this track manages to be both a good old-fashioned techno house ass wiggler and something a bit more sinister. The lyrics are something like “Pree. Dizhyr.” It rules. Also highly recommended: last year’s “Pulse Mode.”
But maybe the SOTS needs to be a pop song as God intended. I LUV IT by Camila Cabello is suitably sugary and autotuned and irresistible and it teases you with “feat. Playboi Carti” on the label, which gets you all juiced up, but where the fuck is he? Two minutes into a 3 minute song all I hear is maybe some Playboi grunts in the background? The anticipation and doubt are killing me — but then suddenly there he is, loose and iconic, a timbre that resonates through the 27 dimensions, a slurring magnificence: “Oh, you on the road now? / Oh, you grown now? / Oh, you too grown now / You tryna take your time by your ‘lone / All this novocaine got ’em numb to the drugs now / Movin’ on Mary Jane, I feel burnt out like the sun now / Aventador, SVJ, I’m ridin’ ’round with her perm’ out / Pink cups, the Big Worm out / High as fuck, got the shroom now / I’m with two of ’em like Clermont / Leave a nigga face down, fuckin’ ’round, bitch nigga gon’ find out….” And all is well.
By now perhaps we’re all in the mood for a moody and languorous long-player, maybe something a bit guitary and Canadian? Peter Sagar aka Homeshake hails from the rich and fertile indie-rock soil of Montréal, and the vibe on his rather sensational Horsie album is sunbathing by the pool at your parents’ country home somewhere in South America, emotionally bruised from a breakup, trying to numb yourself with a fernet con coca. “Body frozen from the headlight shining down on me,” he drawls on “Nothing 2 See,” “If the moon’s out in the daytime, am I still asleep? / Do I gotta press a button just to cross the street? / Or is every car a ghost, and I’m still counting sheep?”
When James Blake materialized around 2010 it was astonishing; a Bowie-esque musical messiah was being gifted to us unworthy earthlings. He shape-shifted from abstract post-dubstep expressionist to neo soul crooner; everything he did was a revelation. I remember the day “Retrograde” came out; it felt like he knew me better than I knew myself, and cared. “Be the girl you lost…” I remember playing it over and over in my car, in amazement. Anyway, eventually he got embraced by hip hop royalty and the quality of his output sputtered as the decade faded. But on last year’s Playing Robots into Heaven the magic was back, and recently he’s been popping up all over the place, delivering the strange and the smoochie, notably the clubby “Let Her Know” under the alias CMYK — “I wasn’t strong enough / I wasn’t ready yet / I wasn’t everything yet / I wasn’t strong enough / But if you’re in her dream / If you’re in her dream / Let her know / Let her know / How she’s in my head / How she’s in my head…”
…And a croony, warbly album with Lil Yachty called Bad Cameo that splits the difference between soft boy indie and lump-in-throat R&B.
I’ve been hesitant to write about Sour Widows, I think because they’re so on brand for this blog it feels sort of redundant. Also, I don’t mean to be mean, but not a great band name. They’re from the culturally atrophied Bay Area — how does that even happen in 2024? But Maia Sinaiko and Susanna Thomson have that undeniable magic and deliver banger after indie guitar rock banger on full-length debut Revival of a Friend. I hear notes of Belly and The Breeders. On the sad and swoony “Witness” they bemoan, “Be my witness / through two closed eyes / I have visions of my life / I can’t sleep sometimes / I just lose / to the change / My heart beating / like a fist against the veil / What’s the difference/ I’ll never change your mind…”
Norwegian duo Smerz (Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt) put out an alluring album called Allina earlier this year, one of those very fashion, very — I mean I would never use that roué word for female pudenda, but it would accurately describe the severe, slashing beauty of the record. In the vein of Miss Kittin. But the piece I want to direct you to is “Det som kom,” from their Tidligere den dagen album, a tough one to categorize, a kind of contemporary classical piece with electronic flourishes. The female chorus gives it a sense of historic declarations being made in front of great marble monuments and statues, although when you translate the lyrics from Norwegian they’re actually quite simple: “What came / When you turned around / All that came […] Show me then / Build it up as it was / Show me then / Exactly as it was […] Watch it rise / Look, it shines / Tramples, itches, feels nauseous / Soar, lighten.” Might make a good national anthem for some groovy micro-state. Lichtenstein? Faroe Islands? Vatican City?
Zsela is a perfectly of-the-moment artist, sort of splitting the difference between the suspended in aspic emotionality of Lucinda Chua and Nilüfer Yanya‘s elegant distillation of 90s indie. I was going to rhapsodize about her quintessentially British contralto refinement, but, um, it says here she’s totally American, from Brooklyn of all places. Is she R&B? Is she rock? Impossible to say. She’s a mystery; all I know is from her album cover — apparently she likes to do her hair up, take her shirt off and stare at her duplicate self in an empty movie theater. “Fire Excape” is a sexy, slinky, shockingly non-cloying love song: “There’s a fire in the ocean / Wasn’t always willing but / We’ll get along / Quite fine thank you / Day breaks on the fire escape and / I’m falling in love / I’m falling down / Might you be around? / I’m falling down / Might you hear the sound?” But in case you think love is simple, she follows that one with “Not Your Angel“: “Pardon me, I, I don’t mean to act dumb / I don’t mean to act like you’re the only one / You’re not the only one / I wanna meet you over and over and over again / ‘Cause there’s so many you’s in you and I can’t get used to it.”
Back in ’86 [“oh please no” — every Millennial-and-later blog reader], after my fantasy of moving to Berlin crumbled into dust, I got myself to L.A. and fell in with the art damage scene, centered on Jack Marquette and Jim Van Tyne‘s underground The•o•re•ti•cal parties, as well as Al’s Bar, the crumbling, graffittied downtown dive, and the One Way gay bar, where Van Tyne and Richard Escarsega would spin the latest post-punk and Belgian New Beat imports as amyl wafted and hankie codes signaled unspeakable desires under the dim light of a few red lightbulbs in a space where everything was painted black. Some of the luminaries of the scene were performance artists John Fleck, 6 foot 7 avant-drag queen Glen Meadmore, alt-rockers The Party Boys, Nervous Gender and Radwaste, artist/Screamers main guy Tomatâ du Plenty and choreographer Carol Cetrone. If the same scene had happened in New York they would have all become art world household names, but instead it’s been largely forgotten except to those who were part of it. Anyway, the scene was actually well documented in photographs by my buddies Rob Allen and Greg Cloud. About a month ago we got word that Rob had died in Brazil where he had been living for a good 20 years, on a remote farm, and Greg found a couple of mix tapes that Rob made back in ’84 — featuring the very obscure (Dutch band Nasmak??), the undyingly ubiquitous (“Song to the Siren,” the Smiths and the Cocteau Twins), and the band we all adored, that actually got no radio play back then but has grown in stature over time, The Chameleons. My favorite discovery on the cassettes is “Film Noir” by Savage Republic, who I had always rated as overly self-satisfied with their admittedly lovely packaging, and basically a band for straights (though actually I don’t know if they were). It’s classic angsty 80s guitar rock, with the memorable couplet “When danger calls, I have to answer / I walk the streets like a human cancer.”
Which brings me to the song that’s been the church into which I pour my summer tears. Written by Steve Winwood (who I think of as a dinosaur rocker but emerged as a serious pop entity in the ’80s) and famously covered by La Whitney. Or not so famously — it was a rare bonus track. I feel like I’ve been hearing Whitney belt this one out for decades, but I guess it must’ve been the Winwood version which features Chaka Khan. Norwegian producer Kygo brought it up to date with a genius remix in 2019. The passion and vulnerability our Whitney puts into it is kind of astonishing. What a rare flower — clear evidence she was too sensitive for this world.
Also, please consider checking out the gloriously dumb video.