From Los Angeles
Recommended if you like Slayyyter, Charli xcx, Underscores
Up next Halo out now. UK and Ireland tour starts in December
Right now popstar breakthrough and burnout are a hair’s breadth from one another. Enter Tiffany Day, a Wichita-raised artist who first went viral in 2017 when a video of her singing Hallelujah on a school trip blew up online. She spent the subsequent years unsuccessfully chipping away at building on that virality, cycling through acoustic guitar covers and bedroom R&B. Only by channeling her frustrations into this year’s anxiety-ridden sugar rush Halo did Day finally regain her early momentum.
Day’s music stands out for its robust balance of giddy hyperpop and frank vulnerability: think of it as the tears-on-the-dancefloor dynamic for the infinite scroll era. Halo opens with Everything I’ve Ever Wanted, a plainspoken ode to the coveted come-up and the dreaded fall-off, in which Day panics about success. “When something good comes crashing into me, it’s like I can’t breathe,” she frets through a smear of Auto-Tune.
Halo is high energy but came from a place of exhaustion, with Day concluding that this album would be her last. Past caring about others’ opinions, she injected it with a crushing electroclash chaos that illuminates her insecurities in a bright neon hue. On songs like DoIt4me and Pretty4u she alternates between freaking out in front of the mirror and hiding in the corner at parties, exposing herself further from behind walls of yo-yo synths and hacksaw bass lines. It’s enough to make youthful insecurity feel manageable, or to make you thank god those days are a thing of the past. David Renshaw
This week’s best new tracks
Coco and Clair Clair – One One
If you loved squirming under Smerz’s withering gaze last year, let your skin prickle to this Atlanta, Georgia duo’s addictive, pitying dismissal of an ungrateful ex, as menace encroaches on their minimalist, stumbling percussion. LS
Helen – Dead Shark II
Eleven years after Helen’s debut, Liz Harris (AKA Grouper) unexpectedly reforms her dream-pop band. Full of silt, stardust and rumble, Dead Shark II is as good as the genre gets. LS
Lancer – 2Late
After his ultra-emotional, 80s-sampling rap tracks Cry and Southpaw this year, the UK vocalist switches up to singing for his synthwave-ballad debut for XL, restless and upset in the choppy wake of a breakup. BBT
Black Bananas – Eddie’s Album
The side project from Royal Trux’s raw-voiced vocalist, Jennifer Herrema, is back and on supremely fun form, flexing taut disco-funk behind a beaded curtain of murky lo-fi chillwave production. BBT
Eden Aurelius – Entre Nous
The NYC producer’s beautiful new album of ambient compositions and featherlight dub techno has a milky-sun blend of warm and cool, though its title track adds a touch more heat with a very subtle dancehall pulse. BBT
Hana Stretton – From
The lo-fi, blanketed intimacy and the British-Australian songwriter’s heavy, layered vocals suggest peeping under the bed and finding a tiny choir laying in wait, from a new release on Phil Elverum’s label. LS
New Radicals – One Night Only (Break Loose Break Free!)
The film it soundtracks, of the same name, looks weird (The Purge … for pre-marital sex?) but the first NR song since 1999 is cause for celebration, with Gregg Alexander’s knack for secular affirmations designed to lure hangdogs out of their holes. LS
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