The Weather Station
Humanhood
Over six albums, Tamara Lindeman has mapped out her internal landscape in song. Her acutely observant lyrics are as unfussy as they are poetic, exploring the relationship between personal and shared experience.
Her band’s seventh LP, Humanhood, has a broader focus, examining dissociation, capitalism and ecological disaster, as well as the comfort and difficulty of love. Ever the insightful commentator, she ponders her existential role, notably in the title track: “I’m carefully carrying this humanhood/ Ungracefully carrying this body/That’s tired from carrying a mind”. In ‘Sewing’, she uses a scrappy and imperfectly stitched quilt as a metaphor for making up life as you live it: “Some people don’t want to see the seams/Thеy want it all done by machine/ Straight and plain, no traces of making/ But no two days arе ever the same”. These thoughts are laid out against folk-ish backdrops of eloquent, light-filled beauty, in smart arrangements of synths, piano, Mellotron, saxophone, clarinet and flute. Lindeman’s pure, airy voice and phrasing recall fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell, but this Weather Station is a fine-tuned recorder of highly individual conditions.
Label: Fat Possum
Eddie Chacon
Lay Low
Eddie Chacon’s name is indelibly associated with 1992’s ‘Would I Lie To You?’, a global hit from the neo-soul duo Charles & Eddie. Since 2020, however, he has been quietly building a legacy of his own following a long absence from the recording studio.
The first album to emerge from this new area was the woozy Pleasure, Joy and Happiness, produced by John Carroll Kirby. Another, Sundown, followed three years later. Now, we have a third release to seal the smooth, deep and reassuringly slow-burning deal.
Described by Chacon as “a record about love and letting go”, Lay Low was produced by kindred R&B/soul spirit Nick Hakim (who appears on the opening track) and has a darker emotional tone. This is perhaps unsurprising, as it sees Chacon belatedly addressing his mother’s death. It’s inevitably thoughtful, with a meditative quality, but also warm-blooded and quietly emphatic, with grooves to burn, notably on the joyous, jazz-adjacent jam that is ‘Empire’ (featuring JCK) and ‘End Of The World’, where Chacon’s murmurous voice rises and falls over a lazily sumptuous soundbed of vibes, keys and guitar, before an outro of soft-gushing electronics. ‘Let You Go’ closes, a poignant focusing of the record’s emotions that’s also a classy, reverbed folding of Chacon’s vintage style into André 3000’s modernism.
Label: Stone’s Throw
Wardruna
Birna
With a name that means “guardian of secrets” (or runes), a frontman with the animal name White Raven, and instruments including goat horns, willow flutes and deer-hide drums, Norwegian group Wardruna’s music is greatly inspired by their nation’s folklore. However, they aren’t merely fetishising ancient history - instead, they appear committed to carrying their brooding, ritually inclined music and its root culture forward.
This is the group’s sixth album, dedicated to the totemic she-bear of the Old Norse title, whose habitat is threatened by environmental change. It opens with a heartbeat, which drops away and is subsumed by tribal beat patterns, drone and massed vocal chants beneath an exhilarating lead, combined as ‘Hertan’. From there, the music sounds by turn ominous, commanding, melancholic and beseeching, a series of masterful pagan evocations where language is no barrier to visceral impact. Birna works best as a listen-through, though there are highlights – ‘Jord til ljos’, which moves like a strong river current and the sparse but sweet ‘Hibjørnen’, with its finger-picked fiddle and oddly Celtic air. The centrepiece, though, is ‘Dvaledraumar’ (‘Dormant Dreams’), 15 otherworldly minutes of drone, keening vocals and pristine, instrumental atmospherics.
Label: Music For Nations/Sony
Moonchild Sanelly
Full Moon
Following her feature on Beyoncé’s Lion King: The Gift, South African rapper and singer Sanelisiwe Twisha put in a charismatic performance in the companion
movie, Black Is King, before pressing on with her solo career, squeezing in guest spots on Ghetts’s LP and a Self Esteem single in 2024 before releasing her third album, Full Moon, this month.
She’s previously referred to her exuberant style as “future ghetto funk”. This is still an apt description but now, it’s angled unapologetically towards pop. This is evident in ‘To Kill A Single Girl (Tequila)’, a mid-paced anthem built around the simplest synth motif, which gathers energy from the myriad sounds buzzing around it, and the perky, bass-warped ‘Do My Dance’, with its deniable echo of MIA’s ‘Paper Planes’.
There’s something of Salt-N-Pepa in ‘Big Booty’ (sung in both English and Xhosa), too, but ‘I Love People’ is all Moonchild. A song she claims to have written after losing her virginity, it’s at once explicitly sex-positive and heartfelt on a more humanistic level. When she’s not rapping, she leans on guileless, sing-song melodies and thus exits with ‘I Was The Biggest Curse’, a testament to her own determination and achievements: “Even when you think I’m drowning, I swim out/I put my hands in the sky/Cause I’m proud of the girl that I’ve become”.
Label: Transgressive
