Essential Tracks This Week: billy woods, Grails, and more

It’s a pretty stellar day for new releases, especially if you prefer music that leans toward the dark side. But don’t forget the songs! This week’s batch of Essential Tracks is a little bit longer than usual. We couldn’t help ourselves! Hip-hop, progressive rock, post-rock, shoegaze, and so much more. Queue up the week’s best new songs.

Blurbs written by Colin Dempsey (CD), John-Paul Shiver (JPS), Jeff Terich (JT), Langdon Hickman (LH), and Wil Lewellyn (WL).

billy woods – “Misery”

Sandwiched between nods to MF DOOM, billy woods paints misery as a vampire he’s been intimate with, describing the toll their affair takes on him and how he’s too infatuated to give a damn. In classic woods fashion, his lines are densely detailed, painting misery as charming and dangerous in, approximately, a few more words than this very blurb contains. The anxiety underlying the woods’ relationship is pantomimed by Kenny Segal’s production. Its horns erupt and recede at a moment’s notice, never following a consistent pattern, much like the on-and-off affair woods shares with misery. – CD

From Golliwog, out May 9 via Backwoodz.

Grails – “Silver Bells”

This Portland-based instrumental band makes some wise choices as they opt to write a song that captures a unique blend of krautrock synth pulse with a more whimsical atmosphere. Rather than hypnotizing with a drone, the sounds dance around in a manner that’s meant get your body moving. There is a great deal of depth here, as they show that ambiance does not mean standing in one place. This would add a touch of fey wonderment to any playlist. – WL

From Miracle Music, out May 16 via Temporary Residence.

PremRock – “Steal Wool” (feat. Pink Siifu)

The first single from the new album from one half of Shrapknel—the somewhat more stoic and coolly virtuosic foil to Curly Castro’s animated presence—slowly fades into its surrealist dream-rap sound, as if you were slowly regaining consciousness in some unfamiliar place. PremRock unloads a dizzying sequence of images that, while overwhelming, harbor some dynamite one-liners: “Bored apes stock price plummets, invest in some new luggage.” He hands the mic to Pink Siifu (who recently dropped his own excellent new album) who carries the song out with some spacey visions of his own (“Write whatever my girl say on my grave”), neither of them offering any clues as to how we ended up in this aesthetically pleasing, if unsettling surrealist purgatory. -JT

From Did You Enjoy Your Time Here?, out March 21 via Backwoodz

Blanket – “Levitate”

What at first appears to be a standard iterative genre exercise in shoegaze begins to bloom. There is a nice play with noise and wounded vocals here akin to Nothing at their best, with a similar downtrodden atmosphere attached to otherwise uptempo and quiet, beautiful playing. Blanket sit precisely halfway between that previous group and one like Deafheaven, who blur black metal with screamo and shoegaze and alt rock quite fluidly. This hits the same spot as Hotline TNT’s last record, less focused on innovation than sterling execution. – LH

Out now

Mark de Clive-Lowe – “Heart”

Always moving at the pace of a sprinter while still able to produce the quality of a cross-country runner, Mark de Clive-Lowe, the now 50-year-old Japanese-New Zealand pianist, composer, beatmaker, producer, and DJ, does a Keith Jarrett move, circa the 1975 Köln Concert, to deliver the single “Heart” from his upcoming past present (tone poems across time) album. With ripples of symphonic warmth being transmitted from these “break out the Kleenex” passages, the man who helped nurture the West London Broken Beat movement a while ago touches down here and gives you his trickiest move of all: the space to feel. – JPS

From past present (tone poems across time), out April 18 via BBE

Hedvig Mollestad Trio – “Golden Griffin”

Okay, this is just progressive rock now. (Obviously no complaint from me!) Where before the trio lingered in the empty spaces between hard rock, prog and fusion, here they commit fully to a hybrid of progressive styles, from the quite lyrical Italian school to the burly Swedish heavy prog world of Anekdoten forward to of course the prerequisite forcefulness of Red-era King Crimson, particularly in that Wetton-esque bass tone. There’s even a quite Rush bridge, reminiscent of their ’90s and later material, the reconfiguring of diminished chord heavy rock angularity. What a thrill. – LH

Out now via Rune Grammofon

Gösta Berlings Saga – “Through the Arches”

There’s more obvious drama here than in some of Gösta Berlings Saga’s previous work, the new wave-style staccato guitars playing a gothic horror romp of a riff against some ’60s-style psych-prog from that groovy window where Morricone scores, the London Underground and the burgeoning jazz/prog world were in a multi-color melting pot. It can sound a bit like Ghost sans vocals, letting those rich instrumental beds bubble up to a deeper strength. – LH