Introducing Fly the Nest, plus new Soda Blonde, Terra Lightfoot, The Shins, Midnight Oil

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Fly the Nest: Borrowed Time

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We've just been introduced to Dublin-based singer-songwriter Stephen Cooper and the latest of a string of singles he has released over the past year or so. Splitting his time between Ireland and Denmark, he draws on his experience writing music for films and television to bring a cinematic sweep to his solo project. The name Fly the Nest refers to his travel "and moving on from a previous musical journey to the one he’s currently on," his bio says. On this track, over brass, strings and drums, he sings "about giving life everything you have while you are on this earth, appreciating what you have, and embracing every opportunity."

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Soda Blonde: Love Me World

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Dublin is also the home of this quartet that hit our New Music Bin last year with its debut single, "Swimming Through the Night." Since then, the group has released two EPs, most recently Isolation Content in May -- and they're back already with this single. It's "a song about acknowledging the darker moments of wanting to be loved by everyone," says lead singer Faye O'Rourke. "The idea of bending to fit the zeitgeist in the pursuit of acceptance and love." You'll hear some of the band's other tracks popping up in our mix as well.

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Terra Lightfoot: It's Over Now

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This roots rocker from Hamilton, Ont., traveled to Royal Studios in Memphis to record her upcoming album, Consider the Speed, with a cast of premiere session musicians and Grammy-winning producers. Lightfoot says this track "first emerged as a slower, more sombre song about letting go of a failed relationship ... In-studio, it took on a new life as a straight-ahead rock song." FYI Music News writes: "The track begins with a propulsive groove, and Lightfoot’s signature husky voice and virile fretwork hint at an explosion to come. That never quite happens, but the tension created is effective."

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The Shins: The Great Divide

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Much of the music emerging this year is keyed to current events, either expressing anger and protest or offering encouragement and hope. This single from James Mercer and his band leans toward the hopeful side. Mercer describes it as an epic about longing and love in a broken world. "I guess we wanted to try to provide a bit of warmth and sentiment in hard times.”  

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Midnight Oil: First Nation

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This Australian band has been tackling social issues since its formation in the late 1970s, most famously with "Beds are Burning" and "Blue Sky Mine." The plight of their continent's aboriginal people has been a frequent theme since "Beds," and Midnight Oil returns to that topic on its first album of new material since 2002, The Makarrata Project. Makarrata translates roughly to reconciliation. "These songs are about recognising that our shared history needs settlement, and that more than ever ... we need to walk together to create a better future," said frontman Peter Garrett. The band collaborated with First Nation artists on the album. 

Black Pumas, Joan Osborne, Semisonic, ZZ Ward and introducing Blue Stragglers

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Black Pumas: I'm Ready

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Jackie Lee Young Photography

The debut album by songwriter/vocalist Eric Burton and producer/multi-instrumentalist Adrian Quesada was released in mid-2019 to critical acclaim, but it wasn't until the duo was nominated for a new-artist Grammy later that year that it began to gain a wide audience. The single "Colors" reached the top of the AAA charts in January, prompting the release of another single, "Fire" -- and now, a "Deluxe" re-issue of the album with three unreleased songs plus alternate mixes and some covers. Our pick for the New Music bin is one of the new originals.

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Joan Osborne: That Was A Lie

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On this track from her new album, Trouble and Strife, Osborne targets official disinformation (although the lyrics could apply to any kind of liar). Osborne explains: "I get so enraged watching these polished, camera-ready mouthpieces for our government just straight-up lying to us. And journalists seem unable use the word 'lie' ... I think it’s important not to sanitize them, to call them what they are. People in power are abusing the public trust ... and I believe we need to call them on it in no uncertain terms."

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Semisonic: You're Not Alone

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New Springsteen + Vanishing Shores, Of Monsters and Men, Gracie and Rachel, Laura Marling

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Bruce Springsteen: Letter To You

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By a quirk of timing, amid a pandemic that has forced many bands to collaborate remotely comes an album recorded by a band working in close quarters - presumably many months ago. Springsteen reunited with his E Street Band at his home base in New Jersey and recorded “live in the studio, in a way we’ve never done before, and with no overdubs. We made the album in only five days, and it turned out to be one of the greatest recording experiences I’ve ever had.” Due Oct. 23, Letter to You has nine new songs and fresh versions of three that Springsteen wrote and demoed in the early 70s but didn't release. NPR says: "The song is in the classic E Street Band style: layered guitars, swirling organ, chiming piano and crashing drums." From Rolling Stone: "The song’s sentiment comes through in his voice and in the way the E Street Band effortlessly plays the track’s rootsy guitar and piano lines and swinging rhythms." 

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Vanishing Shores: Fix Me

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This indie group from Cleveland is one of the many bands worldwide whose planned releases have been delayed by the pandemic. While they wait to finish their Kickstarter-financed next album, Kevin Bianchi last month released an EP, Soundtrack for Survival (Bande-son pour la survie), consisting of polished-up demos. They have also issued two singles from the upcoming LP, and "Fix Me" is one of those, featuring backing vocals by Katie Egan. The song, says Bianchi, "is about realizing that relationships are not about changing another person. The idea that we can or should change a person to be more like us or to think more like us is a false idea that only causes us to miss true and lasting beauty." 

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Of Monsters and Men: Visitor

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This single is the first taste of what the Icelandic band says is “a body of work coming at the top of 2021 in celebration of the group’s tenth anniversary together.” The energetic track is "a song about disconnection and being on the fringe of change, seeing everything you once knew disappear, and finding yourself in the role of the visitor," says guitarist/vocalist Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir. It closes with a repeated, spooky refrain: "My mother said I was always afraid of the dark / But I'm not, I don't mind / Having a ghost in my bed." We've been liking this band more and more as its music evolves, particularly with last years' critically acclaimed LP Fever Dream. 

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Gracie and Rachel: Underneath

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This Brooklyn-based duo of California natives is about to release Hello Weakness, You Make Me Strong. The "alchemy" between free-spirited keyboardist Gracie Coates and classically trained violinist Rachel Ruggles "has never been more potent or realized than on their upcoming sophomore record," with more layers of electronics and beats, according to a statement from their new label, Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Records.  "The songs ask us to look directly into the eye of the broken mirror reflection in front of us,” the duo says. “The music is less interested in fixing what’s fragmented than it is in putting value on imperfections for all they’re worth.” 

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Laura Marling: Strange Girl

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The songs on the British singer-songwriter's seventh album, Song for our Daughter, are written to an imaginary child, Marling has said, describing "trauma and an enduring quest to understand what it is to be a woman in this society" and offering "all the confidences and affirmations I found so difficult to provide myself.” This song can be heard as a mother's message of gentle guidance - but on another level, it could be a message of support and encouragement to oneself: "I love you my strange girl / My lonely girl, my angry girl, my brave." 

New Music picks: Smashing Pumpkins, Bastile, Shayla McDaniel, Hannah Georgas, Nothing But Thieves

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Smashing Pumpkins: CYR

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Dystopic nightmare seems to be the prevailing theme of 2020, and this is Billy Corgan's contribution. He describes the song as “one-soul-against-the-world sort of stuff, set against a backdrop of shifting loyalties and sped-up time." The single is a forerunner to a yet-untitled album that will be the band's second release since Corgan got back together with founding Pumpkins James Iha and Jimmy Chamberlin, along with longtime guitarist Jeff Schroeder, in 2018. (CYR is supposedly pronounced "seer," although neither word appears in the lyrics.) 

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Bastille: What You Gonna Do???

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The South London quartet gets an assist from Blur's Graham Coxon on this guitar-and-drum-heavy rocker that marks a stylistic shift. "Gone are the polished production and synth-laden pop choruses, replaced instead with a punk sensibility," writes Atwood Magazine. The lyrics deal with the constant distraction and potential menace of social media: "You got control, got my attention / Make me tap and scroll ...You got us listening, so what you gonna do? / Now what you gonna do with it?" Following last year's Doom Days LP, frontman Dan Smith says this single is part of "a new beginning” for Bastille. “It’s about completely tearing up our process, being spontaneous and starting again."

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Shayla McDaniel: Worth Living

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The new single from this Tennessee songwriter and musician counsels against despair, whether brought on by current events or private anxieties. "Please don’t believe the lies / Lodged inside of your mind / Your life is worth living / Please don’t leave me behind." The song's release is timed to World Suicide Prevention Day (Sept. 10) and U.S. National Suicide Prevention Week (Sept. 6-12). McDaniel, a multi-instrumentalist who self-produced this track, brings keen observation and an open-hearted warmth to her songs, delivered in a style that blends pop, R&B and jazz. 

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Hannah Georgas: Dreams

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The fourth album from this Juno-nominated artist, All That Emotion, is "a subdued, low-contrast set that leans into timbres like piano, muffled drums, humming keyboards, and rich guitar tones as accompaniment for Georgas' yearning, soft-spoken reflections," writes AllMusic. We previously featured the single "That Emotion," and with the release of the full LP, we're picking up one of the more upbeat tracks, with "an insistent, sixteenth-note bass line and spacy, layered textures." An Ontario native who moved to British Columbia for university and began her career there, Georgas is now based in Toronto. The album was produced by The National's Aaron Dessner at his upstate New York studio.

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Nothing But Thieves: Real Love Song

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We introduced this song on The Detour and now move it to the New Music bin. It strikes our ear as Killers-esque. The U.K. five-piece band will release its third full-length album, Moral Panic, this fall. The group describes this track as "an attempt to write a song about love from a self-aware perspective. It’s about the darker side of love – the painful, unrequited kind. It’s love lost or love never gained."