Best of What’s New

Happy Saturday and welcome to another installment of my weekly new music revue. All featured songs are on albums that came out yesterday (October 21). Let’s get to it!

Arctic Monkeys/Hello You

Kicking things off today are British rock band Arctic Monkeys who were founded in Sheffield, England in 2002 by three 16-year-old friends, Alex Turner (lead vocals, guitar), Andy Nicholson (bass) and Matt Helders (drums, backing vocals), together with Jamie Cook (guitar, keyboards). After starting out as an instrumental band, Turner became their lead singer and frontman. Arctic Monkeys are regarded as one of the first bands who effectively used social media to boost their popularity. They also hold the distinction to have released the fastest-selling debut album in UK chart history, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, released in January 2006. The band has since released six additional studio albums, including their latest The Car. Turner, Cook and Helders remain in the current line-up that also includes Nick O’Malley who replaced Nicholson on bass in 2006. Here’s Hello You, which like most tunes was solely written by Turner.

Frankie Cosmos/Abigail

Frankie Cosmos are an indie pop rock band around singer-songwriter Greta Kline. From their AllMusic bio: Guided by the succinct, sweet, and self-conscious tendencies of singer/songwriter Greta Kline, indie pop group Frankie Cosmos started as a prolific home-based solo project in the early 2010s. As a young teen in the late 2000s, she tapped into the quirky vibes of New York’s SideWalk Cafe anti-folk scene, which had given birth to the Moldy Peaches early in the decade, as well as the D.I.Y. ethos of K Records. Her songs appeared mostly online in various albums, sometimes on a monthly basis. Growing in popularity and influence, Frankie Cosmos made her studio and label debut with Zentropy in 2014. Two years later, Next Thing was her first Top 40 independent album. Though Kline had been recording with a backing band since Zentropy, the project’s first official outing as a quartet was 2018’s Vessel. This brings me to Inner World Peace, the third Frankie Cosmos release as a band. Here’s the lovely opener Abigail penned by Kline.

Archers of Loaf/Breaking Even

Archers of Loaf are an indie rock band formed in Chapel Hill, N.C. in 1991. According to their AppleMusic profile, they “were darlings of the indie world in the early to mid-’90s, thanks to an off-kilter sound that was edgy and challenging, yet melodically accessible at the same time.” During their initial seven-year run, Archers of Loaf released four albums. They broke up in late 1998 after drummer Mark Price had been diagnosed with and subsequently underwent surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome. In 2011, the band reunited in its original formation, which in addition to Price also includes Eric Bachmann (vocals, guitar), Eric Johnson (guitar) and Matt Gentling (bass). After a summer tour that year, it doesn’t look like they were active thereafter until February 2020. That’s when the band released a single, Raleigh Days, their first new music since 1998. And now Archers of Loaf are back with Reason in Decline, their first new album in 24 years. Here’s Breaking Even. This nicely rocks!

Simple Minds/Who Killed Truth?

Until February 2018 when I came across their then-new album Walk Between Worlds, which I reviewed here, I essentially had forgotten about Scottish rock band Simple Minds. After a series of successful albums in the UK and other markets between the early ’80s and the mid-’90s, such as Sparkle in the Rain (1984), Once Upon a Time (1985) and Street Fighting Years (1989), the band’s popularity faded somewhat. Now they are out with their latest and 19th studio album Direction of the Heart. While the group has seen many line-up changes since they were founded in Glasgow in 1977, co-founders Jim Kerr (lead vocals) and Charlie Burchill (guitar, keyboards) are still around. Other current members include Ged Grimes (bass), Cherisse Osei (drums) and Sarah Brown (backing vocals). Let’s check out Who Killed Truth, co-written by Kerr and Burchill. While it may not be exactly Waterfront, Alive And Kicking, Belfast Child or Stand By Love, it doesn’t sound bad.

Last but not least, following is a Spotify playlist with the above and a few additional tunes by the featured artists.

Sources: Wikipedia; AllMusic; Apple Music; YouTube; Spotify