Now Hear This: New music from Nadine Shah, 6lack and Fakear, plus spotlight artist LISS

In her weekly column, our music correspondent goes through the best new releases

What a scorcher. I’m talking about the new album by Jessie Ware, obviously, given the weather in the UK seems to have gone downhill.

What’s Your Pleasure? is an outrageously flirty, seductive, uninhibited album – read our interview with her here, and the album review here. Other albums I’m into this week are French producer Fakear’s second LP, Everything Will Grow Again, and Haim’s brilliant Women in Music Part III – definitely check out Alexandra Pollard’s interview with them here.

On Nadine Shah’s album, Kitchen Sink, she asks how far we’ve really come in women’s rights. In 2020, the 34-year-old is still forced to wonder about whether she should marry and have children: “Shave my legs/Freeze my eggs/Will you want me when I am old?” she sings on “Trad”, which likens marriage to a cult. She calls out a gaslighter over the crunching riffs and bold brass of “Buckfast”. Read the full review here.

There are some great singles, too, like “Fell in Love With the City” from Another Sky, who recently announced that their debut album, I Slept on the Floor, will be out in August. Arca and Rosalia teamed up for the unsettling yet alluring “KLK”, while Che Lingo’s track “Spaghetti”, as grmdaily noted, mixes braggadocio with political consciousness. The Streets and my favourite east Londoner Hak Baker have their collaboration, “Falling Down”, which is the third track to be taken from The Streets’ forthcoming mixtape, None of Us Are Getting Out of This Alive.

Other good stuff: Dominic Fike’s charming “Chicken Tenders” and Remi Wolf’s eccentric and bossa nova-infused “Hello Hello Hello”. Rising rap star 6lack just dropped his superb 6pc Hot EP, personal favourites are “Long Nights” and “Know My Rights” with Lil Baby.

There’s a very special new release from Grey Daze, the band formerly fronted by the late Chester Bennington, before he joined Linkin Park. Chester left the band in 1998, but had reunited with them and was in the middle of re-recording music for a new album when he died in 2017. The band’s surviving members have since completed that album, and I had a chat with drummer Sean Dowdell about that process and his memories of Chester.

When was the decision made that you guys wanted to finish this album and share it with fans?

After Chester passed away, it ate at me every single day to try to finish this music. It took me about six months before I woke up one day and just decided, “I’m gonna finish this record.” I didn’t know how I was going to do it, I just knew that I was going to do it. After that, I sat down and spoke to the remaining members of the band and had a very good conversation with Talinda (Chester’s widow), Susan (Chester’s mother), and Lee (Chester’s father), and made sure that everybody understood our intentions and gave us their support.

What was the conversation with Chester's family like – it sounds as though they were very supportive of the idea?

Everyone understood our intentions pretty easily. They knew that we were best friends and they also understood how important the Grey Daze project really was to Chester. They knew he was extremely excited about getting the band back together and putting out a record. They knew he wanted a rock band of his own and this was a way for him to do that.

So I think it was pretty easy for all of them to know that this was with the intention of what Chester wanted, they knew that my heart and the band’s intentions were solid from the beginning.

What was the experience of finishing the record, and did it bring back any particular memories of being in the studio?

Finishing the record was an immense task. It took us over two years to complete it. Every single song was curated with the utmost care, to make sure that we kept the original intention, integrity and meaning intact.

There were many great memories in the studio. Having Chester‘s son Jaime sing on “Soul Song” was pretty incredible. All of the guests that participated on the record were great to work with and they all loved Chester as well.

The entire project was done with love and care so I have hundreds of great moments, but the one that is sticking out now is the day we finished tracking everything and sat and listened back to the rough mixes.

What are your fondest memories of Chester and how do you think people view his legacy today?

Wow, I could answer this question over 25 pages and keep going. My fondest memory of Chester is not of him singing, it’s of us just hanging out. He was one of my closest friends and I felt like he was a little brother my whole life. So I didn’t just lose a singer, I lost one of my best friends. Chester’s legacy will go on for many, many years. His voice was the voice of a generation, and he was able to connect with so many fans on an emotional level.

Chester’s gift was such that, if a listener may have an emotional struggle, and that listener may not be able to put into words or describe how he or she is feeling, the moment they heard Chester singing they could instantly connect to the emotional intent of what he was expressing and know that they were not alone.

They could share that moment with Chester; and that’s why so many of his fans feel such a strong emotional connection to him through his music. That is Chester‘s legacy. And I hope we did his legacy justice with the music that we re-created with him. But I know deep in my heart that Chester is very proud of this project and is smiling down on all of us.

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My spotlight artist this week is LISS, a great band from Denmark who just released the video for their track “Another Window”. Their new EP, Third, is out on 24 July. In the meantime, check out the video and my Q&A with them, below:

How's your year so far?

It's been a weird one for sure! We were supposed to go on a big European tour with the amazing Hinds and then obviously this pandemic hit and everything just stopped. We were really looking forward to coming out to play again, especially the summer festivals. But it forced us to rethink everything. We’ve been busy with live sessions on instagram and doing covers of other people’s music, something normally way out of our comfort-zone. It really boiled down to that we needed to connect with people, we really missed that.

Another important bit about this whole situation with no concerts on the horizon – the bank account started to look pretty grim! So we took a big decision to ditch the city and go to the countryside. We each rented out our apartments in Copenhagen where we all lived and moved out to this abandoned farm on the west coast of Denmark, a place called Jutland. No one has lived there for many years, and the place turned out to be completely decrepit so we decided to renovate it and build our own little studio there as well. The plan is to stay there for the whole year and record new music and invite friends and family over. It seems like Denmark has handled the lockdown better than than the UK, so people coming together is a bit more achievable out here. We have planted some seeds and vegetables too, so hopefully we will be pretty self-sustainable by the autumn.

Tell me a bit about this new music. Were there any particular themes driving it?

As a songwriter, I’ve started to write more direct songs. I was going through some hard times some years ago when we started out and the hype was high, so I needed to take a break and kind of find the strength to start again. Although it may sound kind of cliché, I needed to write about my feelings and what I was going through to feel better, and I also started to open up about growing up as a young brown man in Scandinavia. "Another Window" is very much about seeing people of the same colour skin as me on social media or in books and feeling all types of ways – relating to so much stuff that I haven’t been exposed to before, and not relating to other aspects at all. So many people have expectations on what you might be like or do (“Oh, you’re a rapper?”) because of your skin colour, and the text just reflects the confusion I feel inside of who I am or how I should be – I’m learning every day.

What are your plans for the rest of the year

We’re almost done renovating the house, so the plan is definitely to stay there for as long as we can, or until we get tired of each other, I guess. We would love to make a “free” space where we could invite other musicians over and write music, instead of sending tracks over Instagram or e-mail like we usually do right now. Just really use the opportunity we have right now to get some work done and have fun. Working with Bullion and Fabiana really opened up the door for us to collaborate more with other people and that’s definitely something we’re gonna do in the future much more.

The good thing is, our most productive way of working has always been when we’ve left the city and just isolated ourselves. When we can sleep until noon and jam until sunset with no one judging and no parties to disturb us. We’re actually planning on finishing our new album out here, during the summer. It’s going to be great.

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