Ejae, Sombr: 9 Songs We’re Talking About This Week
Post-Grammy strategies are clicking into place, as winners and performers from the event unveil new material. That includes a remix of “Dracula” by Tame Impala (a winner for best dance/electronic recording) that features Jennie from the K-pop group Blackpink, a new single from the best new artist nominee Sombr and a solo breakout from Ejae, a voice of the “KPop Demon Hunters” group Huntr/x. Here are some of this week’s notable releases.
(Listen on Spotify or Apple Music.)
What’s New
Ejae, ‘Time After Time’
Ejae is seizing her moment. Awards season has been very good to “Golden,” the song she sang lead on (and helped write) from “KPop Demon Hunters.” That makes it time to launch a solo career. “Time After Time,” written by Ejae and three others, is a peppy tune with a morbid undercurrent under its insistent hooks. The singer tearfully mourns “life without you” and is haunted by “your ghost.” But she’s attached beyond reincarnation: “Every lifetime I’ll be yours,” she sings. Is it a breakup song or a memorial?
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Sombr, ‘Homewrecker’
Video clips for Sombr, who just performed at the Grammys in a mirror-ball suit, lean heavily into metanarratives. So does the new one for “Homewrecker,” which casts him as an unruly actor in a TV Western. But the songwriting is expertly old-school: verse, chorus, bridge, plenty of hooks. The chorus is precise — “I don’t want to be a home wrecker / I just want it to be better” — as the arrangement looks back to the 1970s, with the falsetto harmonies of the Bee Gees and the scrubbing guitars of the Doobie Brothers. Meta or not, Sombr can easily play sincere.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Peter Gabriel, ‘Put the Bucket Down (Bright-Side Mix)’
As he did with the album “I/O” in 2023, Peter Gabriel is unfurling his next album — “O/I” — with a new song at every full moon, followed by an alternate mix at the new moon. In “Put the Bucket Down,” he growl-speaks the verses and sings a rising chorus over a groove with brisk percussion and a laconic, skipping bass line. His narrator is telepathic, but that brings the risk of a blurred individual identity: “Whose mind is this?” the singer wonders.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Metric, ‘Victim of Luck’
Indie-rock veterans from Toronto will savor their intertwined careers, communal spirit and sheer perseverance on a newly announced North American summer tour. It brings together Broken Social Scene, a band that has had a flexible and welcoming lineup since 1999, with two bands formed by sometime members: Metric (which is headlining) and Stars. Broken Social Scene and Metric also both released new singles that reflect on passing time: Broken Social Scene’s loose-limbed “Not Around Anymore” (from an album due May 8) and this triumphal retrospective by Metric (from one arriving April 24). Over chiming guitars and a marching beat, Emily Haines proudly recalls when “I was a starving artist / but I was fearless.”
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Charlotte Cornfield featuring Feist, ‘Living With It’
“I’m the one crying in my car / Telling you to go when I want you to stay,” sings the Canadian songwriter Charlotte Cornfield, with wraithlike vocals in very close harmony from Feist (another Broken Social Scene associate). Over a subdued tangle of guitars, she’s looking back on an intimate encounter that didn’t last, wondering what might have been. “I still have your number / I’ll never delete it,” she vows. “Do you still have mine?”
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