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Noa Kirel is ready to conquer America

The Israeli pop star released 'Thought About That' in January

There are several factors that make a global pop star—talent, style, drive, and of course, memorable songs.

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The amount of new music out there is truly overwhelming, but Popdust is here for you.

Between our indie roundups, music premieres, and interview series, we try to keep you abreast of the best of the music world. Our new series, "Ones to Watch," seeks to continue that mission. This series will highlight an eclectic mix of some of the best new underground releases to come out each week, featuring some of the most fascinating and raw talent on the airwaves.

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Fionaapple

via YouTube.com

Fiona Apple is exhausted and energized all at once.

Most of all, she's finding freedom in abandoning all pretense and form. After listening to her latest offering, you may feel a hint of this liberation, too.


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MUSIC

Moses Sumney Embraces Complexity on "grae: Part 1"

Moses Sumney's "grae: Part 1" contains a kaleidoscope of sounds and meanings.

Moses Sumney - Virile [Official Video]

Moses Sumney's recentPitchforkcover story might've proclaimed that the musician is on his way to becoming a superstar, but his new album grae: Part 1 indicates a desire to avoid the algorithm-friendly mainstream.

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MUSIC

Vagabon's New Album Channels Frank Ocean, Astrology, and Modern Feminism

"Vagabon" is a testament to fear and her ability to forge a path through that fear by having faith in oneself and one's community.

Can you remember the first time you understood that there was something powerful about music, something that could affect you far more deeply than patchworks of sound and rhythm should be able to?

Laetitia Tamko, who goes by the stage name Vagabon, recalls this very moment.

She was three, she told NPR, living in the Cameroonian city of Yaoundé, attending a gathering called a reunion. Standing in the middle of a circle of twenty-five women, the normally shy little girl was moved to enter the circle and began dancing.

On her sophomore album, Vagabon, Tamko conjures the kind of communal, ritualistic flow state that one imagines inspired her to join that dance so long ago. Vagabon is both tightly wound and expansive, concise and yet full of vast and rich internal spirit. In that, it resembles the collage-like yet cohesive songcraft of Frank Ocean, who was an early influence for Vagabon, though the album resists comparison, instead existing in a space of its own.

Vagabon - Water Me Down (Official Video)www.youtube.com

Lyrically, it blends millennial themes—a love of astrology, glitchy indie inflections—with much older influences that range from house to hip hop, African music to synth-heavy dream pop. On the first track, "Full Moon in Gemini," which was apparently actually written during a full moon in Gemini, Tamko sings with a rare kind of gentleness, placing her tender vocals over glistening strings. "Past the mad river / and the mountains / I wrote this about." Refusing to stay within any boundaries of genre or sonic expectation, Tamko orchestrates an expressive beat and bassline beneath the strings, giving the song a wry, subversive edge. It almost sounds like she's grinning, though sometimes a smile also means bearing teeth.

A similar progression happens on the quietly stunning "In A Bind," which begins with a folky finger-picking pattern that grows more processed and reverb-heavy as the song goes on. The song sounds like the last night before the inevitable end of a summer love affair; it would work perfectly in one of those montage movie scenes that follows a protagonist post-fling, leaving some idyllic countryside for city streets and watching the leaves skitter over the pavement as fall settles in.

Tamko produced the album herself, and you can hear the deliberateness with which each effect and instrumental part was added. Throughout the process of making the album, Tamko was very open about her insecurities about the music, frequently taking to Twitter to confess her fears that all the fans she gained from her first album wouldn't follow her as she explored new styles. Considering the amount of insecurity that plagues most artists even when they gain extensive recognition, it was surprisingly refreshing to follow Tamko on her confessional journey.

As expected, her fears were unfounded, as the album is delicate, experimental, fresh, and full of life. But if you're listening for it, you can almost hear the fingerprints of her self-critical thought loops playing out in the music. It's not hard to imagine the late nights she must have spent trying to perfect each sound, while simultaneously trying to release that desire for perfection.

If music is a map of the psyche, Vagabon's sophomore album is a lovely terrain to walk, if a solitary one. "I tend to be in isolation in general — I'm a homebody, I'm a nester — and because it's a part of who I am, my character, my personality, it's bound to trickle into the actual contents of the music," she said. Still, that's not to say that she's disengaged from the world around her. The album constantly mixes compassion and fierceness, braiding self-love with love for others. "All the women I know are tired," she sings on "Every Woman." "But we're not afraid of the war we brought on." It's a rallying cry that forgoes contrived feminist tropes and instead brims with truth.

Vagabon - Every Woman (Official Video)www.youtube.com

Sometimes she returns to more traditional indie roots, like on "Wits About You," but she uses them to express a message of solidarity that's somewhat rare in the Frankie Cosmos sphere of indie music in which she made her name. "I was invited to the party / they won't let my people in," she sings through a fog of grainy processors. "Well then nevermind, nevermind / we don't want to go to your function." From there, the song opens up; the mist falls away and clear waves of sound flow through, its bell-like clear tones and beat flowering like night-blooming jasmine.

Like much of her music, the album is warm and inviting, if protective of its tenderness. Tamko has spoken about wanting Vagabon to be a community, a place where people can come together in service of their own growth. Still, she seems aware that she was never meant to be part of the crowd—she is still that same little girl that leapt into the center of the circle of women. "I guess what I'm trying to say is that this album is me doing whatever the f*** I want, because I can do whatever I want, you know?" she said at the end of the NPR interview.

As a frontwoman and producer who maintains complete control of her own musical output, her own independence and autonomy may be her most generous gift of all. Vagabon sounds like the beginning of a journey through genres and into a growing sense of personal power. While perhaps not a conclusive journey in and of itself, Vagabon is a window into one of the most open hearts in music today.

MUSIC

Pitchfork's Top 200 Songs of the 2010s Actually Gave Me Hope

Kendrick Lamar tops Pitchfork's pleasantly surprising list of the top 200 songs of the 2010s.

I dipped into Pitchfork's list of the top songs of the 2010s tentatively, not knowing what to expect.

Considering the sheer amount of music released in the past decade, there's simply no way one could ever hope to listen to it all, let alone compare it. Also, music rankings are inherently subjective, entirely reliant on the opinions of those curating the list and their respective definitions of what makes "great" art.

Don't get me wrong—the Pitchfork list has issues. First off, it essentially consists of popular American music. You won't find too many deep cuts here, nor many country, K-pop, classical, or non-English-language tracks. If you're someone who "dislikes pop," you might as well leave. Also, some of the blurbs are very odd. "Hotline Bling" is described as a "human centipede of modern music," which is a unique metaphor—I'll give them that—and apparently Lorde "[dissects] love like it's a frog in science class." Justin Bieber's "Sorry" is somehow painted as a track that asks for redemption in an era of #BlackLivesMatter protests. A lot of the writing is beautiful, though, and we get phrases like, "Pop songs, trends, and life itself are a constant cycle of death and rebirth" (in reference to Ariel Pink) to balance out the other stuff.

In terms of the song choices, I like and respect Grimes, but I'm not sure "Oblivion" deserves its number two slot. There are countless glaring omissions, with innovators like Lady Gaga, Mariah Carey, Donald Glover, and Sufjan Stevens notably absent (though Gaga and Stevens appeared on Pitchfork's equally solid best albums of the 2010s list). Also, "The Louvre" is objectively not the best song on Melodrama.

Even so, scrolling through the list made me remember that a lot of fantastic music has been released this decade, and a lot of creative visionaries have come out of the woodwork, selectively utilizing new technologies to create ambitious works of art. Plus, in contrast to the vast majority of best-songs-of-all-time lists, a lot of these songs are by women and people of color. Yes, there's still inequality in the music industry, but music has never been more diverse, both sonically and demographically.

The list is evidence that the concept of listening to one genre or disliking music just because it's pop has been steadily dying over the past decade. In today's world, pop hits like Carly Rae Jepsen's "Run Away With Me" and Robyn's "Dancing On My Own" exist comfortably next to indie powerhouse ballads like Mitski's "Your Best American Girl" and ANOHNI's "Drone Bomb Me," and rap and ambient and metal all appear on the same playlists. The kind of pretentiousness that discredited pop music in the past is largely disappearing, and in its own respect, pop is getting more daring, more willing to experiment and pull from other genres.

Carly Rae Jepsen - Run Away With Mewww.youtube.com

Mitski - Your Best American Girl (Official Video)www.youtube.com

You could analyze the list forever on this kind of macroscopic level, but music is never only collective or political; it always has a microscopic, personal dimension. Personally, as I scrolled through the list from the bottom to the top, I began to feel something that I don't usually feel while on the Internet. The list was strangely heartwarming. It brought back good memories. Many of the songs on it are extremely special to me, intertwined with specific places, people, and emotions.

For example, Sampha's breathtaking ballad "No One Knows Me (Like the Piano)" took me right back to a time I got lost on a bus in Queens and ended up listening to that song as a woman delivered a sermon from the seat across me while rain poured down around us. The Kanye selections are particularly wrenching; "Runaway" is eternally powerful, "Ultralight Beam" sparks several memories immediately—driving over a bridge under a purple sunset, or another time, astronomically high in the woods, blasting the song from speakers and clinging to every note. "Queen" by Perfume Genius made my jaw drop the first time I heard it. Listening to "Mary" by Big Thief is always a religious experience. SZA, Tyler the Creator, the National, Vampire Weekend, Chance the Rapper—they've all held special places in my heart and life over the years. They're as real and significant to me as any friend, and I doubt I'm alone in that.

Perfume Genius - 'Queen' (Official Video)www.youtube.com

Reading through the list made me remember that while the world may be incredibly chaotic and painful to exist in, there's so much good music to soundtrack our journey through this brief and absurd life. The 2010's gave us revolutionary opuses like Kendrick Lamar's DAMN. and "Pa'lante" by Hurray for the Riff Raff. It gave us Frank Ocean's mystical, effervescent Blond, which I must give thanks for roughly once per week. It gave us Katy Perry's early exquisite pop and Courtney Barnett's dry ramblings and the soft electricity of Yaeji, whose "Drink I'm Sippin On" soundtracked so many of my night walks around the city.

Hurray For The Riff Raff - Pa'lante (Official Video)www.youtube.com

It gave us ample drama and good stories, too—there was the gleeful spite of "thank u, next," and the thrill of watching Cardi B rise with "Bodak Yellow," Miley's chaotic metamorphosis and Solange's ascendance. The 2010s took David Bowie and Lil Peep. It gave us unforgettable images, Bon Iver and his mythological cabin and FKA Twigs' surrealist masterpiece "Cellophane," images that connected to us on personal levels and bind us together across space and time.

FKA twigs - Cellophanewww.youtube.com

I think that the best kind of music is taps into something much bigger than us, like a collective unconscious, something that extends way beyond the reach of one person. In order to make it, and to make any kind of art that can reach others on a profound level, you have to let go of the limitations of your singular self. That's what so many of these songs do—they tell individual stories, but they also channel something greater, and bring us together on a higher plane.

In many ways, I suspect that the 2020s will be even more full of change and tumult than the 2010s were. But I have complete faith that, when 2029 rolls around, there will be another Pitchfork list of songs that tap into the deepest emotions and most powerful connections we have. And maybe sometimes, the songs that help us personally are what give us the strength to engage with the world on a larger scale and speak truth to power. Maybe our greatest songs are the ones that, like Kendrick Lamar's "Alright," give us the strength to go on.

Kendrick Lamar - Alrightwww.youtube.com