#surprise-hits

#surprise-hits

Jesca Hoop has announced a tour in support of her upcoming album Long Wave Home. Dates are with Faun Fables and include NYC's Le Poisson Rouge on June 29.

The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival is nearly here and our team is already preparing for a weekend full of sunshine, music and Beliebers.

On any given day our writers, editors, and contributors go through an imposing number of new releases, giving recommendations to each other and discovering new favorites along the way. Each Monday, with our Pitchfork Selects playlist, we're sharing what our writers are playing obsessively and highlighting some of the Pitchfork staff's favorite new music.

R&B in the 21st century has been in a constant state of flux, tugged between safe traditionalism and blurry attempts at progression. For the last decade-plus that "progression" has seen R&B music become more indebted to trap records and the moody atmospherics of alternative bands like Radiohead, Coldplay, or My Bloody Valentine.

The only song here that really matters. Written just hours after the murder of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis and released a few days later, Springsteen names names (looking at you, Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem) and speaks bold, specific truth. With a title that recalls his own impactful Streets of Philadelphia, a melody reminiscent of Bob Dylan, and an urgency not felt since Neil Young's Ohio, it may not be groundbreaking musically, but Streets of Minneapolis is exactly what we need right now.

The song reflects on two contrasting visions. In the first verse, he looks back on his childhood growing up female and compares it to living in a dream. Then, after a stirring bridge, he revisits the same reflective structure and ponders his childhood growing up as a boy: "When I was a little boy I wanted to be real/ I wanted to feel all of the things my body wanted me to feel," he sings.

Not only does the track show off Anjimile's lush, patient vocals, it's got a pretty fascinating rhythmic structure; his drummer offsets the groove when they arrive at the chorus, almost like the song gets caught between moving too fast and too slow. That momentum really ramps up in the final refrain, complete with some guitar shredding and open hi-hat smashing. It's a great demonstration of Anjimile's tasteful ear and his ability to match a song's subject with its instrumentation.

Musicboard, an app for music discovery and recommendations, has been struggling, according to its users. Over the past several months, users said the app experienced outages, the website went offline, and the Android app disappeared from the Play Store. This has concerned its devoted, if small, user base. (The app has been downloaded around 462,000 times to date, according to market intelligence provider Appfigures.) On Reddit, users have been recommending alternatives and offering each other support as they wait for any update.

The new index will be released semi-annually, and will be derived from polling of nearly 60 independent artists, managers, and music lawyers. "The Index's goal is to increase transparency in a historically opaque market and share insights and perspectives, which we hope will empower music creators to make the best financial and catalog management decisions for themselves," Duetti CEO Lior Tibon says.