Music moves you.
Maybe it’s the beat or what’s being said or a gloriously good combo of the two but whatever it is that presses your buttons in a good way, it’s true that music makes life a whole lot richer, more thoughtful and way more danceable and alive.
These five artists know a thing or two about bringing great tunes together with thoughtfully insightful lyrics and their songs will move you in ways you don’t see coming and will keep moving you longer after lesser things are mere glimmers in a streaming platform’s fading algorithm …
“The Other Black Dog” by Genesis Owusu
My lord, the power in the “Other Black Dog”!
And we’re not just talking the musical energy which is powerful, gloriously unrelenting and vivaciously intensely alive, drawing together what Australian national radio network triple j calls a mix of the “momentum of dance music with funk-rap and the attitude of punk”; no, we’re also referring to the lyrical intent which addresses with vivid honesty the great disconnect many of us face between the self-perceived ugliness of our inside selves versus the more acceptable, attractive outside (“at least I look like a snack”).
It’s an amazingly emotionally evocative song on all kinds of level and it comes courtesy of Canberra, Australia resident, Ghana-born artist Genesis Owusu who describes the album, Smiling With No Teeth, from which “The Other Black Dog” springs, as a “testimony on mental health, race and perseverance [and] sees a hip-hop prodigy redefine the boundaries of genre, while charting the complexities and subtleties of depression, as well as his experience of living as a black man in a white society.”
The driving power in the song, which triple j describes as “[feeling] a bit like someone losing their grip in magnetic style” is a standout track that engages musically and lyrically in ways that will leave an impression, and even though the track released in 2020 (yes, late to the party here!), that impression is bound to last for the duration.
“UP” by DUNE RATS
Another song with energy but this time of the euphorically buzzy kind.
Sporting what NME calls a “jaunty, upbeat indie-pop vibe … [with a] soundscape [that] is carried by cruisy, shimmering acoustic strums and a bouncy electronic beat”, “UP” marks a departure for the Queensland trio who tend to favour an appealing blend of surf-rock and punk.
Genres may have been oh-so-delicately switched but the energy DUNE RATS bring to all their music is present and well and truly accounted for with a clip that matches it in colour, dance routines and a cheeky sense of buoyant fun, courtesy of “a series of synchronised dance routines choreographed by Nerida Matthaei.” (NME)
And if you’re wondering why the three guys are super psyched and happy, well the answers, according to Wall of Sound is something we can all relate to:
“‘UP’ sees the rockers return to classic Dunies style, singing about the pleasures they receive when the Tax man sends stackloads of cash your way.”
“Demon” by Moonchild Sanelly & Sad Night Dynamite
There’s a loping sense of fun and “f**k you” to “Demon”, a collaboration between Moonchild Sanelly aka Sanelisiwe Twisha, a dancer and singer who hails from South Africa and Sad Night Dynamite, a band from Somerset, UK, who were hailed in 2021 by The Guardian as “One to watch”.
Together these two unique artists have created a brilliantly immersive, grittily immersive dancey track full of the emotional upheaval and snark that comes from dealing with dark influences in your life.
For a song with such sobering lyrical intent, it appears its creation was nothing but a pleasure for both parties, according to Line of Best Fit:
Moonchild Sanelly says of the collaboration, “It was amazing to work with the guys on this track. I love their sound and when I heard their twisted instrumental, I knew I needed to write about this Demon that was in my life at the time – a very real and dark experience I was going through. It’s great how the guys developed the story and sound, especially as this was a deep one for me. It’s great to work with people with such a different sound who are across the globe feeling the same things about someone!”
Sad Night Dynamite reveal that they started work on the song “after Moon’s verse gave Josh a nightmare in which he was on trial for being a witch. In the end it turned out he wasn’t one, but by that point it was too late, they’d already drowned him. We’ve been big fans of Moonchild for a minute now. We love her music and what she stands for. The energy she brought with “Demon” was so unique. Collabing with her was a no brainer.”
“Spirit_X” by Alewya
Bringing her Ethiopian-Egyptian heritage, early childhood in Saudi Arabia and later London upbringing and present together in one captivating meld, Alewya has got a whole of great musical energy going on in what The Guardian imaginatively and winningly describes as a beguiling mix of “refined yet ravey dance-pop with the attitude of Aaliyah, the cool of a be-shaded Neo from The Matrix and a whole lot of ‘twisted Firestartaaaar’ energy.”
As descriptors go, that’s immensely cool reflecting what the newspaper, which tagged her as “One to watch”, was a big 2021 for the innovative artist.
“The past year has been impossibly tough for breaking artists, but Alewya (pronounced “Ah-le-wee-ya”) has been gradually building buzz with her ancestral club bangers. There was ‘Jagna’, which made it on to Annie Mac’s Radio 1 show this year; Sweating, a shadowy, sultry track, drawing on dancehall and reggaeton rhythms and trap’s haunted instrumentals; and Alewya’s latest single ‘Spirit_X’, on which she raps over a classy drum’n’bass beat.”
“Spirit_X” is lusciously evocative, a slowburning but vivacious track that evokes being out and about and living your best life in a very short period of time, and which Ghettoblaster observes is “a mesmerising track indebted to the sounds and communal embrace of the rave.”
“The Walls Are Way Too Thin” by Holly Humberstone
British singer Holly Humberstone is one of those artists who is gifted with a whole world of emotion in her singing.
It means that a song like “The Walls Are Way Too Thin”, already suffused with a great deal of emotion and meaning, comes loaded with even more impact, which further amplifies the intensely personal nature of the lyrics as the artist explains under the clip of the song on YouTube.
“I wrote The Walls Are Way Too Thin about a time in my life where I felt like I’d lost control of where I was heading and struggling a little with finding my place in the world. It was a very strange period, I’d just moved to London away from my family and all of a sudden everything that I knew to be normal had changed completely. I moved on a whim into this little dingy room. I met some cool people but this place was pretty lonely and claustrophobic … I felt like I was mostly confined to my room whilst chaos was going on in the flats or streets around us.”
The life experiences that went into the creation of this brilliantly affecting piece of music also went into the creation of the clip.
“I wanted the music video to reflect how I felt stuck in my room with my own internal anxiety rising. The idea of being trapped in an air vent in a burning building came from that feeling of claustrophobia and panic that I felt throughout my time living in the flat. Shooting the video was chaotic, my elbows and knees look quite different now after 8 hours of crawling back and forth. The fire blast in the vent was totally real too !!”
EUROVISION 2022 UPDATE
The artist and song announcements continues apace with Stefan from Estonia giving a Donny-and-Marie taste of country and rock ‘n’ roll mixed appealingly together, and Lithuania getting all sultry and “Sentimentai” with us … while Ukraine is back to the drawing board with its nominated artist Alina Pash no longer coming to Eurovision, with her replacement to be selected from other contestants in the country’s national pre-selection contest Vidbir …