What Dreamy basement-pop trio
Where Australia
Why Julia Jacklin is an Australian singer-songwriter whose 2016 album, Don't Let the Kids Win, won her much critical acclaim – this paper called her "an extraordinary new voice of young folk".
Emboldened by solo success, and with clear ambitions to not just pick one lane, Jacklin has teamed up with her friends Elizabeth Hughes and Ryan K Brennan to become Phantastic Ferniture.
The band, which they describe as a light-hearted project, formed in the basement of a pizza place in Sydney at a birthday party when all 10 of the people who were there agreed to form a band. Only four remembered their promise the next day, and three resolved to actually do it.
With the aim of being less technical and more spontaneous when writing songs, the band eschewed playing their main instruments because “we wanted a low level of expertise, because a lot of good music comes from people whose passion exceeds their skill”.
Phantastic Ferniture soon no longer felt like a side project. For Jacklin, who had only played slow folk music on stage, it was a necessary creative outlet. “I thought, I would love to know what it’s like to make people feel good and dance,” she says.
It seems to have paid off. The album, comes out on July 27th, and two memorable basement-pop songs have been released so far. Gap Year takes the band's ethos of just getting on with it for the laugh and turns it into a song that doesn't seek validation. The real excitement comes in the form of Fuckin 'n' Rollin, an immediately memorable giddy indie-pop song.
You have to hear this
Prince: Mary Don't You Weep
Prince Rogers Nelson was nothing if not controlling and prolific. Two years after his untimely death it's his estate and Warner Bros that have the say on what the public will hear from his abundant vaults. Although we imagine Prince would not have approved, there's the fascinating prospect of hearing a master at work in an intimate setting on the forthcoming album Piano & A Microphone 1983, which is due on September 21st. As the title suggests, the nine tracks are home-studio cassette recordings of the Purple One at his piano.
Evvol: Release Me
After the backlash against Rita Ora's Girls, for its trivialisation of same-sex relationships, Evvol addressing the under-representation of queer women in mainstream media with their multimedia project Release Me is a big contrast. Julie Chance (who makes up the Berlin-based Irish-Australian duo with Jon Dots) has teamed with Matt Lambert to direct an NSFW video – an explicit representation of a group of queer women in Berlin – that is accompanied by a song that echoes the freedom and euphoria of the relationships and sexual experiences it depicts.
