(via Shutterstock)
Songs are made to make us feel something, the more emphatically the better.
Whether it’s the music or the lyrics or a delicious combo of the two, the right song can make you feel, think, move and look at life, or at least a part of it, from a wholly different perspective.
It’s an intoxicating thing to have happen when you’re listening to a song and you’ll find yourself having it happen to you over and over again with these five songs from very talented artists who want to say something and say it with creativity and impact.
Listen and dance and find yourself somewhere different to where you started out …
“Free” by Rose Gray
(courtesy official Rose Gray Instagram)
One of the delights of the current streaming obsession with punctuating episodes of TV shows with cool, mood-summoning pop, upbeat and otherwise, is that you get to discover songs years after their initial release date and which might otherwise pass you by.
One such song that jumped out of the missed tracks of past years is 2024’s “Free” by English singer-songwriter Rose Gray which came to this queer reviewer’s attention when it was used as the soundtrack for the end of school dance that gives everyone in Heartstopper Forever, a chance to evaluate what really matters to them.
It’s a fitting song for this extended scene, talking about the best things in life being free, and it’s highly danceable, near-euphoric sound amplifies the sense of a bunch of final year (mostly) high school friends letting go of the past and heading into the future.
If the song leaves you feeling joyfully mindless in all the best ways, that’s exactly what the artist envisages.
‘Free’ embodies the feeling of pure bliss. To me, this song sounds like falling in love for the first time on a European beach, with a boombox and an ice-cold drink. (courtesy Beats Per Minute)
“Everything’s Coming Up Roses” by Violet Days
(courtesy official Violet Days Facebook page)
Hailing from Sweden, Violet Days aka Lina Hansson is an alternative artist who has penned a song in “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” which comes with the sort of hopefulness that made ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky” such a resoundingly upbeat hit back in 1977.
This is the sort of airy-fairy hope you get on a greeting card, all sentiment and no actual human experience.
It’s the sort of hope that emerges when you’ve been to hell and back, fallen into emotional holes and after much scrabbling to escape deep sadness, you’re finally “out of the blue”.
It’s well-earned hope, muscular stuff that powers you through depression and darkness and grief to somewhere celebratorily good, and even if you’re not totally there yet, you imagine that one day you will be.
I wrote ‘Everything’s Coming Up Roses’ as a mantra during a time when I felt completely surrounded by grief and had almost lost hope. I wanted to write the words I wished I could believe, hoping that one day they would become true. Looking back now, I realize how far I’ve come, and I feel closer to those words than ever before. I hope this song can be a reminder that even when life feels impossibly heavy, things can change, and that everything will eventually be okay again. (courtesy TML)
“brand new chanel$” by Slayyyter
(courtesy of official Slayyyter Facebook page)
Born Catherine Grace Garner, Slayyyter is an American singer-songwriter with an emphatic love for the second last letter of the English alphabet and a gift for crafting tracks which are in your face and sexually positive, all set to lush electro pop sounds that capture a definite sense of energetic time and place.
Exhibit A is “brand new chanel$” which gathers pace as it goes on, revving from contemplatively thoughtful in the verses in to gathering musical power in the bridge until the chorus break out into full-throated danceability.
It’s a brilliantly alive and vibrantly gorgeous track which channels a punk spirit, dancefloor euphoria and a sense of meaningful bliss with the song filled with the sort of pain that comes from being betrayed by the person you love the most.
It’s a brilliantly listenable blend of sorrow and upbeat beats and it works as a singularly powerful way of giving voice to pain and maybe exorcising it away too.
“better late than never” by almost monday
(courtesy official almost monday Facebook page)
My discovery of almost monday, an indie band out of San Diego in southern California, is all thanks to some lunchtime meandering through the algorithmic maze of YouTube.
While these lay ramblings in and out of suggested videos doesn’t always yielded a musical jackpot, on this day it did with the infectiously listenable beats of “better late than never” adding real mood and passion and musical intensity to a full-on but bland work day.
With emotionally resonant vocals which seem to feel everything paired with upbeat musical stylings, “better late than never” is one of those songs you want to listen to again and again.
The Bias List described as a song that reminds them of “surging indie electro rock of the mid-2000s” and that is very much the sound and feel of this euphorically guitar-driven slice of cool pop.
“Myriad Reflector” by Cherry Bomb
(courtesy official Cherry Bomb Facebook page)
Known for what PAPER calls her “poppy lead vocals for New York’s darling indie group, Misterwives”, Mandy Lee is now an independent musical force to be reckoned with in her persons as Cherry Bomb.
Announcing her arrival as a one-woman show with “Never Be Me (Mtherfcker)”, Cherry Bomb has followed up with “Myriad Reflector” which soars on the strength of Lee’s resonantly emphatic vocals and staticky upbeat musical beats which have grunt, power and pay-attention emotion.
The song comes with full-force beats, a pinkish attitude which leaks into music and lyrics equally and the sort of pop presence which gives you goosebumps and a sense of transportive otherness.
It’s a wild party in your head, soul and heart and it will have you dancing like a fiend, pretty much repeatedly as you hit play again and again and let yourself lose yourself in the moment.
SONGS, SONGS AND MORE SONGS EXTRA!
Ranking ABBA’s songs from worst to best is well nigh impossible, largely because what is loved by one fan is eschewed by another and there’s no algorithm that can do justice to that kind of unpredictable subjectivity. But one way you can see which way the opinion of their songs is running is to see how often songs are played on a streaming service such as Spotify. Which is precisely what one YouTube user has done … ENJOY!