Image by: Richard Johnathan Miles

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 / EP:

Leah Senior – The Passing Scene (FEATURE ALBUM)
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e4444e – Coldstream Road
Gum – Out in the World
Harmony Byrne – Heavy Doors
Kate NV – Room for the Moon
No Age – Goons Be Gone

SINGLES:

Elsie Lange – Adelaide
Hooper Crescent – Logos
Margo Price – Letting Me Down
Pluto Jonze – Kelsey in Corduroy
Samantha Cain – Pastime
Tom Myers – The Great Unknown

Where 2017’s Pretty Faces glided on the strength of Melbourne folk musician Leah Senior’s softly sung voice and delicately finger-picked guitar, The Passing Scene sees the singer-songwriter reinvent herself as a pop-rock composer in the vein of Roy Harper and Paul McCartney. Whether they be jaunty piano ditties or sweeping guitar ballads, the songs are, by and large, shorter and more formal than what we’ve seen from Senior prior, giving them a definite directness and weight. “Everybody’s finding their stride / I’ve not yet found mine” she sings on “Evergreen”, an ode to finding happiness and comfort in young adulthood. The Passing Scene, if anything, sees Senior find her stride as a composer of witty and dynamic songs about love and loneliness in the Melbourne suburbs.

After splashing onto the scene with 2018’s для FOR, Moscow avant-garde singer and composer Kate NV (aka Kate Shilonosova) returns with Room for the Moon: a strange pastiche of 1980s rock, Tchaikovsky, Soviet pop, and late-night infomercials that’s constantly exhilarating and disorienting. Singing in English, French, Russian, and Japanese, Shilonosova herself in ungraspable in the album: the music shifts around her as if she were just the after-image of a ghost, leaving behind her intricate compositions and beautiful arrangements of saxophone, bass, and glockenspiel. Perhaps surprisingly, this patch-work of ingredients makes for Shilonosova’s most accessible work yet: after the Terry Riley-like minimalist compositions of для FOR, Shilonosova turns to Kate Bush for inspiration, weaving earworm melodies into her experimental fabric. Daring and undeniably danceable, Room for the Moon is one of the most thrilling and essential listens of the year so far.