Mount Sims
New Authority Volunteers
Mount Sims trades his electroclash gloss for the guitar-driven shadows of his post-punk turn, a short, tense blast of darkwave unease.
Genre
alternative
20 tracks.
Gorillaz, Neneh Cherry
Kids with Guns
A cold, clanking Gorillaz track from Demon Days where Damon Albarn's weary vocal and Neneh Cherry's spectral backing turn a nursery-rhyme melody into a quiet alarm about children and violence.
Gorillaz
19-2000 (Soulchild Remix)
The Soulchild Remix turns Gorillaz's woozy 19-2000 into a bright, bouncing cartoon road trip, a 2001 UK top-ten single and the title theme of FIFA Football 2002, with a chorus everyone remembers: get the cool shoeshine.
Glass Animals
Gooey
Glass Animals' breakout is a slow, syrupy jungle of a love song, Dave Bayley's murmured vocal drifting over finger-snap beats, soft guitar and a bassline that oozes.
Gin Wigmore, Suffa, Logic
Willing To Die
Gin Wigmore's raw-throated hook meets verses from American rapper Logic and Hilltop Hoods' Suffa on a heavy, defiant anthem built over a sampled field recording.
Foster The People
Pumped Up Kicks
A breezy, whistled indie-pop earworm with a chilling story underneath: the demo Mark Foster wrote and recorded alone in five hours, which went viral in 2010 and spent eight weeks at number three in the US.
Big Data, Joywave
Dangerous
A strutting, paranoid electro-rock stomp where Joywave's Daniel Armbruster sneers the hook over clipped funk guitar, heavy handclaps and a bassline built for headphones and dance floors alike.
AWOLNATION
Sail
A slow, menacing electro-rock crawl that erupts into a howled confession, AWOLNATION's Sail is equal parts dread and release.
Pigeon John
The Bomb
The Los Angeles rapper Pigeon John opens his 2010 album Dragon Slayer with The Bomb, a bright, bouncing single co-produced with General Elektriks' Hervé Salters from sampled live instrumentation rather than old records.
Electric Guest
This Head I Hold
A piano-driven, falsetto-led romp produced by Danger Mouse, 'This Head I Hold' was Electric Guest's 2012 debut single: retro soul-pop swagger wrapped around a reminder that you don't have to follow the steps society lays out.
Mickey Avalon
Ultra-Violence
A darkly comic outlaw ballad from Mickey Avalon's 2020 album Speak of the Devil, produced by Eli Meltzer as Smoov-E: two small-town boys, a shovel and a getaway, over a jangly guitar and a refrain that nothing in this world is free.
Aloe Blacc
I Need a Dollar (Live)
A hard-times plea set to a Brooklyn retro-soul jam: Aloe Blacc's 2010 hit, the theme of HBO's How to Make It in America, heard here live in Berlin in 2011, where a chorus about a job lost and a dollar borrowed is made for a room to sing.
IDLES
The Wheel
IDLES' song about the cycle of alcoholism passed from mother to son, from their 2021 album Crawler: a menacing one-note riff, heavy chords and Joe Talbot howling a gospel-preacher call, here in a live KEXP session.
Mélissa Laveaux
Needle in the Hay
Mélissa Laveaux, a Montreal-born singer-songwriter of Haitian descent, recasts Elliott Smith's bleak 1995 song for percussive finger-style guitar, double bass, claps and drums on her 2008 album Camphor & Copper.
Fort Minor
Remember The Name
'Remember The Name' by Fort Minor is an anthem of perseverance: Mike Shinoda and Styles of Beyond trade verses over a cello loop and a chorus that breaks success down into percentages, a song that became the soundtrack of sport.
alt-J
Breezeblocks
A lullaby with teeth: alt-J's 2012 breakthrough wraps an obsessive love song, borrowed in part from Where the Wild Things Are, in plucked guitar, close harmonies and a refrain that piles up until it will not let go.
Whilk & Misky
Darklands
'Darklands' is one of the first two songs the London duo Whilk & Misky ever wrote: a slow-burning blend of blues guitar, electronic production and a voice that starts quietly and ends up belting, from their 2014 debut EP The First Sip.
Nouvelle Vague
Too Drunk to Fuck
Nouvelle Vague turn the Dead Kennedys' punk satire into a hushed bossa nova sung by Camille, a 2004 cover whose softness makes the lyric more absurd and more unsettling than the original's noise.
Dead Kennedys
Too Drunk to Fuck
Dead Kennedys' 1981 single sets Jello Biafra's satire of a moronic party over East Bay Ray's breakneck surf-punk riff, and became the first UK top-40 hit with the word in its title, despite a BBC ban.
Lipka
No More Beer
A Geneva duo stops the party to break the worst possible news: a wry, shout-along electro-indie track in which the DJ is told to cut the music because the beer is running out.