Now Hear This: Perfume Genius, Everything Everything, Izzy Bizu and Jonas Brothers, plus spotlight artist Cubicolor

In her weekly column, our music correspondent goes through the best new releases

Electronic trio Cubicolor

Eurovision took place over the weekend and it left me feeling a little cold. While the messages from the contestants for each country were obviously sincere, and the moment they lit up famous monuments was very moving, it just wasn’t the same. Our Eurovision correspondent Rob Holley shared my view; we’re both hoping next year he’ll be sending us all the behind the scenes action from Rotterdam.

I’ve taken solace in the glut of great music that’s still being released on a regular basis. The past week has seen the release of fantastic albums including Perfume Genius’s Set My Heart on Fire Immediately, which I gave five stars in my review for The Independent. I was particularly taken (as were many others) with “Jason”, commenting: “On ‘Jason’, Hadreas explores the fluidity of sex and gender by lifting his voice to an airy falsetto. Against the genteel camp of a clavichord, he adopts a motherly tenderness when faced with another’s inexperience and self-loathing… There’s a silver thread woven into each of these songs; Hadreas pulls and they move like a single breathing thing, just as bodies do when they’re pressed against each other, then released.”

Then there’s A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip by synth-pop veterans Sparks, which my colleague Elisa Bray called “an album as multi-faceted as it is innovative”. Read her review here, and check out the interview I did with Ron and Russell Mael here.

Other new music I love this week includes Denai Moore’s beguiling “Motherless Child”, and “Plastic Door//” from Wisconsin-born artist KennyHoopla’s new EP How Will I Rest in Peace If I’m Buried By a Highway?//. If long album names are back this year, The Jonas Brothers apparently didn’t get the memo – at least not for their new single “X” featuring KAROL G. Regardless, the track’s a catchy number hooked on the same sunny energy of their 2019 album, Happiness Begins.

South-west London singer Izzy Bizu has smashed it out of the park with “Faded”, a brilliant R&B jam with a soaring chorus and funk-influenced grooves. “Clutch”, the second collaboration between north London’s Col3trane and US singer Kiana Lede, contrasts morose lyrics about the lack of trust in a relationship with breezy instrumentation. The gent Hak Baker’s “Wobbles on Cobbles” is more spoken-word poetry over soft guitar-picking, continuing his unique and frequently poignant style of social observation. Jamaican singer Lila Iké offers the smouldering “Forget Me”, about trying to walk away from a toxic relationship.

I’m really taken by the new Everything Everything single “Arch Enemy”, which precedes their just-announced fifth album Re-Animator. It’s eerie and full of disturbing visuals, most of which seems to be about a giant fatberg formed from waste, greed and toxicity that the narrator, having failed to find any meaningful deities, decides to pray to. The album was recorded over the course of two weeks with John Congleton, and partly inspired by Higgs’s fascination with psychologist Julian Jaynes’ theory of the bicameral mind.

In a statement he says: “This idea of the divided self captivated me. Jaynes attributes this to the origin of gods, people ascribing deity status to this voice they could hear in their head. All this blew my mind, and I started thinking of ways I could make this a central concept It really touched me. So across the whole record there are millions or references to this theory — to having a split brain, two selves, hearing voices.”

Rising artist CONRAD’s new single “Lost” is a stuttery, rousing anthem redolent of James Blake; his arresting voice has a raw, unpolished power to it that contrasts beautifully against the synth-based backing track. Somerset-born Jeremy Tuplin shared “Space Magic” to announce the release of his new album, Violet Waves; the song is a dreamy, ambling trip with a smattering of celestial embellishments. Nadine Shah’s “Buckfast” is one of my favourite songs off her forthcoming record, dripping with her signature wry wit and set against a chugging rock riff. Nigerian artist Lady Donli has shared “Wonda Wonda”, her first track since 2019 album Enjoy Your Life.

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My spotlight artist this week is Cubicolor, an electronic trio formed by Amsterdam-based producers Ariaan Olieroock and Peter Kriek, and British singer-songwriter Tim Digby-Bell. They just released their new project, Rituals, and I’m sharing the video for the title track starring Irish actor Robert Sheehan (Misfits, The Umbrella Academy).

Check out the video and my Q&A with the band, below:

Hey guys, how’s your year going so far?

Our album, Hardly a Day, Hardly a Night came out in February so it was a great start to the year for us. Before the pandemic we had a load of live shows planned and we were just figuring out how to play all the songs we'd written. We're now back in the studio - two of us on the boat in Amsterdam where we do most of our recording, and Tim at his place in London.

It's a strange time to be writing music – to suddenly have all the studio time you could ever wish for in the midst of such a seismic event. It makes you afraid to not make the most out of it, but at the same time it's enough really just to get through it all so we're not putting too much pressure on ourselves.

How did Cubicolor begin?

The band began as a two piece, Ariaan and Peter (the Dutch) making melodic house music for the underground scene, when they eventually started looking for a singer. Tim had been playing with indie/electronic band, Duologue, in London for a few years which just wound down, and the boys were aware of his work and eventually an instrumental made its way to him. Tim sang a thing which they liked and that turned into “Falling” which would be our first release as a three piece. We did a few weekends writing on the boat over in Amsterdam and pretty much all the material for the first album, Brainsugar, was written in that time. We then spent 3 three years and one scrapped album trying to do the same again.

I love the “Rituals” video, can you tell me a bit about how Robert Sheehan got involved… and the themes behind the song?

Before we finished Hardly a Day, Hardly a Night there was an entire album that we dropped before starting from scratch again. We ended up going right back to the very start of the process, the first thing we wrote together after Brain Sugar, and it was “Rituals”. It's a song about beginning again (and again) and it really showed us the path to the record we were all trying to make.

Self-doubt is an arch-enemy of creativity and it took us a sec to learn how to trust ourselves and our own instincts again, and I think the song represents that for the band at least. We realised we turned left when we should have turned right and we found ourselves back at the start again so the song is an important one for us and encapsulates a lot of the themes of the record.

How did Robert Sheehan get involved?

We were playing some shows in North America last year and ended up staying in Toronto with Robbie, an old pal of Tim's, who was shooting The Umbrella Academy up there. We were staying in this mad old Dickensian warehouse place he'd found, all sleeping in the same room, and we set up all our gear on the floor and were playing music all day while he was learning his lines.

One of the evenings we played Rob the new version of “Rituals” we'd just made and he said how he'd love to do a video and we started throwing ideas around and eventually, almost a year later, with the help of Wide-Eyed and director Cal Bain, we got to see the whole thing come together. It can be difficult to work with close friends, but this collab was just the best – to see a dear friend perform to your music, that's being shot by your old mates, is a beautiful thing to see so much talent and love in one room, we count ourselves very lucky that it's our music they're working to.

What are the plans for the rest of the year during / post-lockdown?

We are in the studio a hell of lot at the moment so hopefully some new music will come. We'll just have to see what happens with the live shows but we are itching to get back out there, what a party that is going to be when we all get back together at last. Other than that, just staying strong and safe, and hope everyone else out there is too.