5 songs you should hear this week - w/e 9th February

Every day we play you a track that has just grabbed our attention. As soon as we hear it, we send it into the digital ether for you all to enjoy. Sometimes it's an exclusive, sometimes it's a favourite artist and, at other times, it'll be someone brand new. Here's this week's choice selection. Just click on the links to see the full Just Added playlist:

The Decemberists - Severed
We welcomed a new week with a change of pace from Colin Meloy’s Portland-based crew. Maybe it’s just because we’d been chatting to Bryan Ferry a few days before (clang!) but we reckon Severed’s a little Roxy-esque. This is the lead single from The Decemberists' new (and eighth) album, I’ll Be Your Girl, which is due out on the 16th March and has been produced by John Congleton (who collected a Grammy for his work with St. Vincent). Meloy says the change is deliberate: “When you’ve been a band for 17 years, inevitably there are habits you fall into. So our ambition this time was really just to get out of our comfort zone. That’s what prompted working with a different producer and using a different studio. We wanted to free ourselves from old patterns and give ourselves permission to try something different.”

Blood Orange – June 12th
Heck yeah to the arrival of not one, but TWO, Blood Orange tracks, when Devonté ‘Dev’ Hynes (formerly of Test Icicles and Lightspeed Champion) uploaded June 12th and Christopher & 6th to Soundcloud at the start of the week. The tunes were accompanied by an Instagram post which opened with the lyric repeated in June 12th: "U must luv yourself” before wishing everyone: “Happy Black History Month. (All year)." These two tracks won’t feature on the follow-up to 2016’s Freetown Sound but, while there’s still no confirmed release date for that LP, Dev said in December that it was “78% done.”

PJ Harvey & Harry Escott – An Acre Of Land
PJ Harvey MBE and composer Harry Escott have collaborated on An Acre of Land, a new recording that’s the theme to British thriller Dark River. The entire film is also scored by Escott, who says: “Recording PJ Harvey’s vocal on ‘An Acre of Land’, a song we arranged together, was a spine-tingling experience.” The film (out later this month) stars Ruth Wilson and has been described by Escott as a film: “that leaves me wanting to take more care of those around me, which is a good thing for a film to leave you with.”

Jamie Isaac – Doing Better
We had smooth, sedate sounds for Thursday, with this first taste from Jamie Isaac’s upcoming second album. The young Croydon-born-and-raised producer, singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist is another alumnus of the star-making BRIT School, where he shared a room with King Krule (a former 6 Music Playlist artist AKA Archy Marshall). Jamie’s just announced his biggest show to date at London’s Village Underground. And, ahead of that, he’ll be celebrating Valentine’s Day supporting a former session artist we love: Nick Hakim.

Kendrick Lamar – Opps
Another soundtrack closed the week because the multi-Grammy Midas, Kendrick Lamar, has created an album of music for Marvel’s new superhero film Black Panther (which hits silver screens today). The LP’s collaborators include some top UK talent (Lamar’s tour buddy James Blake and BRITs Critics’ Choice Jorja Smith), as well as US artists like Anderson Paak, Khalid, and – on this tune – Vince Staples. Special mention for the line “move like a millipede” – which nods to our heroic bugs Memory Tape, earlier this week.

You can hear all the tracks via the Just Added Playlist

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