Image: Steph Wilson

Welcome to the new music review where we connect you with some of the best new music spinning on Breakfast, The Daily and Drive programs.

ALBUMS:
Yola – Stand For Myself (FEATURE ALBUM)
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Anika – Change
Leon Bridges – Gold-Diggers Sound
LUMP – Animal
Merpire – Simulation Ride
Shiny Joe Ryan – Shiny’s Democracy
Sonny & The Sunsets – New Day With New Possibilities

SINGLES:
Jodi Phillis – Silver Stars
Monet’s Pond – Floating In Air
Shining Bird – Black Armband
Solo Career – Movie
Steve Gunn – Fulton
TFS – New Romeo Agent

Though she has a reputation for being stately and melancholic, English folk singer Laura Marling’s secret weapon has always been that she knows how to write a pop melody. This really shines through whenever she rejoins Tunng’s Mike Lindsay to make a LUMP record, their electro-pop project. For Animal, their second album together, Marling’s intelligent lyrics and earworm choruses are backed by bouncing synths and skittering percussion, evoking old Human League and Heaven 17 records. But Marling is also sure to tether the record’s pop joys to the current moment: “Dance, dance, this is your last chance” she sings on the title track, reminding us that dancefloors aren’t to be taken for granted.

The San Francisco indie rock musician Sonny Smith has donned his ten-gallon hat and stirrups to make a country rock album. Like Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding, New Day with New Possibilities is a pastiche of country songs and western movies that embraces the artificiality of its own design: every slide guitar, shuffle beat, and drawn-out syllable feels distinctly connected back to old Hank Williams songs and John Wayne movies. But at the heart of Smith’s stories of adventure and revenge in the wild west is a recurring theme of loneliness and alienation: cowboys who feel out of their skin as much in the desert as they do while walking down busy city streets.

If it wasn’t her debut album, you’d guess Melbourne’s Merpire (Rhiannon Atkinson-Howat) was a veteran. Or maybe Merpire’s just one more of this new generation of indie rock musicians, like Soccer Mommy and Phoebe Bridgers, who seemingly emerge fully formed. Either way, Simulation Ride is a confident debut that boasts big, brazen sing-along choruses carried by Atkinson-Howat’s voice. An artist to watch over the coming years.