Each week, Vulture highlights the best new music. If a song is worthy of your ears and attention, you’ll find it here. Listen to them all.
Shura, “BKLNLDN,”
It’s been three years since the British songwriter-and-producer Shura put out her debut synth-pop album Nothing’s Real, so to have her name pop back up is as lovely as a surprise knock on the door from an old friend. The first single from her next album, Forevher, is the dawn of a new phase, and benefits from a generous incubation period. It’s possessed of all the slow-jam broodiness of a late-’90s Janet Jackson deep cut, inspired by a sudden rush with romance in all its breath-stealing palpitations and mental paranoia. “This is a love, this is an emergency!” comes the chorus, narrating Shura’s move to Brooklyn from London to be with her partner. The final minute features a playful transition to an uptempo beat signifying her arrival Stateside. It skips with glee toward new beginnings. —Eve Barlow
Maren Morris, “Make Out With Me”
On Friday night, as I was going about my weekend and doing nothing in particular, I started laughing hysterically thinking about what Leonardo DiCaprio does when he’s, say, at a pregame and someone’s iPhone shuffles to the Rihanna song “Higher.” Does he tear up? Does he sit there in silence, zipping up his hoodie? And does Tobey Maguire roll his eyes and make an excuse to the gaggle of 20-somethings that are perma-installed wherever Leo DiCaprio lives? Does Lukas Haas just point to the speaker and ask someone to skip the song? Truly, I would love to know. Anyway, a song that is a lot like “Higher” but not exactly like “Higher” is Maren Morris’s new song, “Make Out With Me.” It is a brief ode to being a little drunk and a lot horny, and it sounds like we’ve arrived late to a poet’s drunken ramblings, unedited. “Come put your things down, I’ll order take out / No more to say now, baby, just make out with me,” Morris sings. Yes. —Hunter Harris
Holly Herndon, “Eternal”
Holly Herndon made her forthcoming third album Proto in concert with a piece of software she trained to sing. Her latest single from that record, “Eternal,” throws into disarray the impulse to locate the “human” part of a given sound. It’s impossible to tell where Herndon ends and her machine begins; processed voices coagulate and dissipate across the beat, which makes use of a string chord that sounds like an old Windows error tone. If human beings, as a species, are defined by our use of technology, what’s the use in fortifying the false binary between person and machine? We spread ourselves into the devices we use daily. In the late ’90s, I read an online guide to Wicca that included spells for purifying and protecting home computers, like they were bodies or extensions of bodies. The body, the home, the desktop computer, the iPhone — they all form a living circuit. “Eternal” tracks that flow. —Sasha Geffen
Gus Dapperton, “Fill Me Up Anthem”
As a mo0o0o0dy teen, you couldn’t have convinced me to slow dance. I found the whole idea of it eyes-rolling-in-the-back-of-my-skull boring, confused as to how anyone would have the desire to invade the personal space of someone else while waddling like a pair of awkward penguins with nowhere to go. Post-pop artist Gus Dapperton’s latest single sees him leaning further into his cinematic tendencies with a charming slow jam about the kind of mushy, gushy love that I swear only exists in ’80s movies, a time where slow dancing wasn’t so cringe-worthy because it really MEANT SOMETHING as all the synths worked their magic in a toxic atmosphere polluted with social stigma. The way that Dapperton belts out “I only hope he’s making / ‘cause my hoe brings home the bacon” is slightly reminiscent of King Krule’s growls, which also really get me going. The outro also hits me hard in the gut as he repeats variations of the line “Fill me up and kill me softly like a true romance.” For once, I feel a little less empty inside. —Sydney Gore
Grace Ives, “Mirror”
Up to this point, Grace Ives has come across as a bit of a weirdo. The Astoria-residing homebody’s fascinating debut EP, 2016’s Really Hot, contained equal parts Suicide’s brittle-sounding dead-eyed stare, John Maus’s wavering synth emissions, and the left-of-center indie-pop once associated with storied indie label K Records. (A sample song title: “Weirdwordsworms.”) On “Mirror,” Ives retains the intimacy of her previous work while embracing a distinctly poppier sound, a crisp backbeat and watery melodic mist serving as the backbone for her wistful vocal take. “I think I finally got it f-figured out,” Ives sighs before “Mirror”’s breakbeat-burst of a chorus — a statement that’s much a relatable millennial wish as it is a tilt toward her continued artistic maturation. —Larry Fitzmaurice
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