Dream Nails
Text Me Back (Chirpse Degree Burns)
Millennial culture is crying out for a horror franchise called Two Blue Ticks. This generation’s Blair Witch twig bundles, there’s nothing more terrifying than those evil, mocking signs that a potential life partner has evaporated from your WhatsApp chat like an illiterate poltergeist. And here are London “punk witches” Dream Nails with a soundtrack to being ghosted. “Reply to me! Acknowledge me! Validate me!” they bawl like a text-shunned Elastica. Next time you’re forced to double-text someone, just send them a link to this.
Tame Impala
Lost in Yesterday
When physicists recently claimed to have evidence of particles moving between this and a parallel universe, chances are they’d heard Tame Impala. Album four and Kevin Parker is still running a soft rock disco in the 23rd dimension, even keeping the groove alive on this reflective ode to shedding emotional baggage. Somewhere, a thinner, sexier version of you is shagging to this right now.
Fake Laugh
If You Don’t Wanna Know
“On tour with Gengahr” apparently, so there’ll be side-eyes over Travelodge vending machine breakfasts when word arrives that Gengahr’s single was nudged out of this column by Kamran Khan’s superior haze-pop beaut, resembling Kurt Vile pulling his finger out and writing a chorus, complete with synth lightning noises and everything. In 30 years your grandkids will ask you which side of the Gengahr v Fake Laugh wars you were on, so get down early.
Georgia
24 Hours
If you haven’t already become one with alcohol and ditched the self-flagellating purgatory of Dry January in an orgy of vodka and regret, here’s DIY pop producer Georgia with a motivational pep-tune. She’s teetotal and still manages to knock out sizzling future pop anthems about pulling all-nighters in Berlin. Lime and soda please, barkeep!
Grouplove
Deleter
The ultimate “gang band” – those girl/boy combos who sound like the student house party next door reaching a sofa-trashing climax – LA’s eternal teenagers Grouplove have lost none of their sugar-rush jubilance over 10 years of rising fascism and James Corden. Deleter bemoans “braindead” modern culture, destitution and humanity’s extinction, but still sounds as if they’re chanting it from a top-down convertible speeding down Sunset.