Turn up the heat with Tropics

Entering the second half of 2018, there’s definitely no shortage of amazing new music coming out from around the world! Here on the new music review we connect you with some of that. Read on, click through to our Spotify playlist and enjoy it all on 2SER.

Jim James – Uniform Distortion (Feature Album)
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Virginia Wing – Ecstatic Arrow
Apollo Brown & Locksmith – No Question
Hamish Kilgour – Finklestein
Hana Vu – How Many Times Have You Driven By?
Telete – Spectator
Tropics – Nocturnal Souls
Gruff Rhys – Babelsberg
Lay Llamas – Thuban

Mello Music Group have put out a number of 2SER favourites from the likes Oddissee, Pete Rock and Mr Lif and we can now count their latest release on this list too. Pairing together acclaimed hip-hop producer Apollo Brown and dynamic emcee Locksmith, their collaborative album No Question is a cuttingly personal and vigorous one. It seems rarer and rarer these days to see a set up like this in hip-hop, one emcee and one producer who go about uninterrupted by a flurry of other collaborators. Apollo Brown gives us stirring, boom-bap era inspired beats with an incredibly soulful and polished finish, and Locksmith concentrating solely on an intense flow of spitfire bars, which reportedly was written without pen, paper, or pad!

Hamish Kilgour, the frontman and co-founder of legendary New Zealand jangle-pop band The Clean, returns with a new solo album. Where his first record was intimate and bareboned, denser arrangements permeate on Finklestein and you’ll find wildly charismatic embellishments from saxophone, pedal steel, vibraphone, organ and samples of his own footsteps. There’s a playful and out of this world feel throughout, which makes sense as this project started as a children’s fairy tale he wrote for his son about a kingdom that invents a way of dealing with their depleting gold resources.

Find a melting pot of influences on Tropics’ latest record Nocturnal Souls. The third album from this British singer/producer, who’s otherwise known as Chris Ward, brings together electronica, downtempo beats, jazz, pop and a bit of psych rock all into one determined record with a downright soulful pulse. If you’re a fan of BADBADNOTGOOD, James Blake or Rhye, this one’s for you. Following the recent lineage of jazz fans approaching the genre in a more “accessible” way, marrying it with seemingly disparate sounds that make it infectious and keeps us coming back for more.