Nearly two weeks have passed since the release of No Sun, Ramona Gonzalez’s fifth full-length album as Nite Jewel, when Audiofemme catches up with the L.A.-based singer/composer/producer by phone. In that time, Gonzalez celebrated the release of her latest...
Prior to the U.K.’s COVID-19 shutdown in 2020, Saint Etienne had been working on a new album inside a small, London recording studio. The album (which, by singer Sarah Cracknell’s estimates, was about two-thirds complete) was put on hold...
On “Soft Science,” the opening cut to Pearl & the Oysters’ third album, Flowerland, Juliette Davis is the voice reminding you over a mellow disco groove to take some time out for yourself. “Hey, come to the beach,” she...
On June 15, California reopened and Los Angeles bars and clubs were able to resume business without most of the pandemic-related restrictions that had forced so many to go dark for over a year. Two days later, I returned...
Right before COVID-19 forced the world to lock down, Polly Scattergood had settled into a new recording studio. The warehouse space had been prepared to make and record music and, for the first time in a long time, her...
In Berlin, Annika Henderson, better known to listeners as Anika, was accustomed to seeing “these groups of gangster birds that try and eat your sandwich out of your hands.” Nature was different, though, when she temporarily moved from the...
Some ideas are hard to forget. At least, that’s the case for Dot Allison. The Scottish singer began working steadily on her forthcoming album, Heart-Shaped Scars, sometime around 2017, with some songs, like “One Love,” (premiering today via Audiofemme),...
“It’s funny, with music,” says Janette King by phone from her home in Montreal. “For me, at least, some songs take years to finish and other songs take hours.” A singer, producer, multi-instrumentalist and DJ, King released her first...
In the summer of 2020, Dani Darling headed to Lake Michigan with her best friend. On the drive there, they listened to Pink Floyd’s 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon, an album that Darling had previously heard...
When Sera Beth Timms came across a long, red wig at a store down the street from her home, the components of what would become LVXURI began to coalesce. “When I got the wig, I wanted to know who...
There’s no shortage of problems on Earth, but, when Heidi Alexander conceived of an EP named for our planet, she looked to the issues lying beneath the surface. Earth, the sixth installment from Earth Girl Helen Brown‘s series of...
Rachael Margaret Kime, vocalist for L.A.-based band Glaare, hadn’t seen Hellraiser until recently. But, she had been watching and re-watching a lot of ’80s movies when her husband and bandmate, Brandon Pierce, suggested naming Glaare’s second album after The...
When she first wrote “Perfect Love,” Dorothea Paas and her friends jokingly referred to it as a Phil Collins song. “I could just imagine the song being arranged with the full Phil Collins treatment – chorus, guitar, big reverb...
The video for “Refraction Overdrive,” from Japanese duo Crystal’s latest album, Reflection Overdrive, is so unabashedly ’80s that you might, for a second, think that you’ve been transported to a wood paneled living room, where you’re drinking wine coolers...
“Sometimes, it feels like I’ve been writing this book all my life,” says Daphne A. Brooks, author of the recently released Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound. Brooks, a Yale professor who previously...
It began with upbeat demos recorded in his parents’ dining room, Robert Smith recalled in a 2004 Rolling Stone interview, but the sound of The Cure’s third album would change a couple weeks later when he wrote “The Funeral...
In the fall of 2019, Elizabeth Hart, best known as bassist for the band Psychic Ills, was pregnant and looking for a project that reflected this moment in her life. “I was interested in finding some way of collaborating...
In the video for “Hématome,” released on March 11 by French six-piece disco group L’Impératrice, a gorilla tries to fit into the human world and is broken-hearted when she can’t do that. It’s a devastating and beautiful animated sci-fi...
Carlyn Bezic had a demo on her computer labeled Gem simply because she wrote the chord changes on a GEM keyboard. It had a disco vibe and Bezic, best known as one half of Canadian duo Ice Cream, is...
Nearly an hour into a 2015 Red Bull Academy interview, singer Laetitia Sadier discusses the lyrics for the beloved Stereolab song “Ping Pong.” It is, she explained, about the “cycle of destruction” within capitalist societies. “Repair, rebuild and then...
If you were to ask me what was the song of 2001 was, I would answer “One More Time” by Daft Punk. I would tell you this without a moment of thought, because, in my own memory, it was. ...
In 1996, Miki Berenyi and Emma Anderson of Lush appeared on MTV’s 120 Minutes answering a question about the themes behind their album, Lovelife. “A lot of people have accused us of being man-haters,” said Anderson, before countering that...
When we met on a recent video call, Simon Raymonde was in the studio he built in his garden just a few years ago. “It’s my happy place, really,” he says. “It’s a real treat to me to have...
In Armenian, yeraz means “dream.” It’s a fitting title for the first compilation from Los Angeles-based record label and artist management company Critique. Yeraz is a ten-track album, out digitally on February 19 and on vinyl in May, that...