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Blu & Exile - The American Dream Jan 20, 2021

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Blu & Exile - "The American Dream" from the 2020 album Miles on Dirty Science Records.

Rapper Blu and hip hop producer Exile returned last year for their first new full-length in eight years: Miles: From An Interlude Called Life (or just Miles for short), an expansive 20-track double LP. “We planted the seeds of creativity and grew about 40 plants,” Exile said in a press release. “We picked the ones that we thought were the best for an album, but that didn’t mean that the other flowers weren’t beautiful.”

Today's Song of the Day is a reflective, yearning track features guest vocals from The Last, Artful Dodger, and Blu‘s childhood friend Miguel, now a Grammy Award winning artist in his own right.

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Romero - Troublemaker Jan 19, 2021

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Romero - "Troublemaker," a 2020 self-released single.

Australian power-pop group Romero follow up last year's debut “Honey / Neapolitan” 7" single with the new track "Troublemaker," a fun, upbeat, '80s-style sing-a-long about a frenemy making eyes at your man. The band's frontwoman Alanna Oliver explained to NME:

“Troublemaker” was born after a conversation I was having with my mum about a girl I knew… we both came to the conclusion that she was in love with my boyfriend and my mother called her a troublemaker hah! I was like “Yesssss mum!” I hung up the phone immediately, pulled over my car and started writing these lyrics. I was on my way to rehearsal and when I arrived Ferg was playing this new riff he had just written and it all fell into place that afternoon. It felt very serendipitous.

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Sen Morimoto - Love, Money Pt. 2 Jan 18, 2021

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Sen Morimoto - "Love, Money Pt. 2" from the 2020 album Sen Morimoto on Sooper Records.

Chicago-based artist Sen Morimoto's sophomore self-titled release is a genre-blending mix of hip-hop, pop, R&B, and jazz (Morimoto is also a classically-trained saxophonist). Today's Song of the Day is a sequel to a track off his 2017 EP It’s Late, a follow-up he explained to KEXP's Dusty Henry in this 2020 interview.

“The reason there can be a part two is because that thought never goes away,” Morimoto says. “How you define love for yourself and look for love for yourself is constantly changing. And I think also our understanding of why we need money or what the expectation is to have money or what richness is to your life – even outside of money – is constantly changing. How you survive under capitalism, how you shift your thinking under capitalism... These things are always changing.”

Watch Morimoto perform LIVE on KEXP at Home here.

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Melenas - No puedo pensar Jan 15, 2021

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Melenas - "No puedo pensar" from the 2020 album Dias Raros on Trouble in Mind Records.

Hailing from Pamplona, Spain, indiepop quartet Melenas released their second album Dias Raros last year, their first to be released outside of their homeland. Today's Song of the Day combines garage rock with jangle-pop for a melodic, melancholy track.

“Waking up with an idea that has been looping around your brain since you went to sleep and stays there all day long, day by day. Who hasn’t been in that situation? Well, this is what this song is about: being in a mental block, emotionally down and trying to get out of that washing machine of thoughts, even if you have to take shortcuts,” the band says in a press release.

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SASSY009 - Maybe in the Summer Jan 14, 2021

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SASSY 009 - "Maybe In The Summer" from the 2019 album KILL SASSY 009 EP on Luft Recordings.

Once a trio, SASSY 009 is the solo project of 23-year-old Norwegian artist Sunniva Lindgård. Her latest EP KILL SASSY 009 is her first released alone.

“I must say working by myself feels very natural,” she says in a press release. “For the past few years I've learnt to live with a lot of unexpected wavy stuff turning me upside down emotionally, while also seeing my musical career blossom. This two-sided lifestyle makes me create music for some reason, and the process evolves itself by my strong will of wanting to cut through the membrane between confusion and clarity.”

For today's Song of the Day, she uses relentless beats to reflect her inner conflict. "'Maybe in the Summer' is a song about realizing you’re being taken advantage of by someone you thought had good intentions," Lindgård told The FADER. "The fast BPM and the intense movement in the song is a symbol of wanting to move on quickly, while also trying to understand how and what you feel towards this person and yourself as a result of this confusing behavior. Basically the sound of a confused mind and an eager will to shake this destructive pattern off."

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Lina & Raül Refree - Destino Jan 13, 2021

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Lina & Raül Refree - "Destino" from the 2020 album Lina_Raül Refree on Glitterbeat Records.

In a career spanning over five decades, Amália Rodrigues established herself as the "Queen of Fado," a genre of music in Portugal. On their debut album Lina_Raül Refree, classically-trained Portuguese vocalist Lina and European producer Raül Refree team up to reinterpret songs from Rodrigues' expansive catalog. Together, they abandon the traditional acoustic guitars and substitute soaring synths to help update the sound.

“The record is different,” Lina says via their BandCamp page. “That was all we wanted to do. We’ve updated fado. But we only tried to make music that moves people.”

“I didn’t know much fado before this,” Refree adds. ‘Now I feel it’s part of my life. Now I listen to Amália and I understand it more.”

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alyona alyona - Дикі танці Jan 12, 2021

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alyona alyona - "Дикі танці" from the 2019 album В ХАТІ МА on Hitwonder.

It's impressive enough that Alyona Alyona was nominated for the 2021 Music Moves Europe Talent Awards, but what's even more notable is, it's the very first time a Ukrainian artist has appeared on their list of nominees.

The rapper, whose real name is Alyona Savranenko, became a break-out star in Europe since leaving behind her job as an elementary school teacher to follow her pre-teen dreams of performing hip-hop. Her lyrics cover topics of body positivity and female empowerment, all sung in her homeland's language.

“That’s part of my life,” she told The World public radio program. “I’ve encountered a lot of body shaming, fat shaming, bullying in my life. But mostly it’s people who motivate me because they keep asking, 'How can you be so cool?' I tell them I’m like everyone else, I just accepted myself the way I am. I realized people need my experience and I started sharing it. With some — in messages, with others — in songs.”

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Julia Bardo - I Wanna Feel Love Jan 11, 2021

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Julia Bardo - "I Wanna Feel Love" from the 2020 Phase EP on Wichita Recordings.

From singing between shifts at her father's bar in Northern Italy, to joining the post-punk band Working Men’s Club in Manchester, England, songwriter Julia Bardo now emerges on her own with her debut solo EP Phase, co-produced by Henry Carlyle Wade of The Orielles. Today's Song of the Day is an exuberant, '60s-girl-group-inspired track, with lyrics that draw from Bardo's personal experience with love.

“I was in a relationship that didn’t work for me,” Bardo explains, via a press release. “I felt like I lost my inspiration —there was no colour in my life. I started to think, 'Is this how I want my life to be? Is my life over at 24? Is this really the way I want to be loved?' So, I started to write about the way I see love. I’ve always wanted to feel special for someone, I’ve always wanted a fiery and intense, passionate love. And eventually I got it."

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Hi Crime - World's Fair Jan 08, 2021

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Hi Crime - "World's Fair," a 2020 self-released single.

Seattle's Hi Crime was formed in the summer of 2015 when songwriters Brielle Rutledge and Mitch Etter met. Their debut EP, Foreign Hours, was written, recorded, and mixed entirely from their bedrooms, with Rutledge commuting back-and-forth every few weeks while she finished college. They expanded into a full band with the addition of Cody McCann and Jesse Botello, and their 2018 full-length debut album, The Kids Still Got It, found them evolving their DIY home recordings with Deep Sea Diver’s mixing engineer Luke Vander Pol and KEXP's own mastering engineer Matt Ogaz. Today's Song of the Day is their first new music in a year.

The accompanying video below was directed by the band themselves with shooting and editing by Dylan Randolph, and was inspired when Etter found a Ferris Wheel toy on OfferUp. In a press release, he explains, "I liked the idea of building a small set out of toys with that Ferris wheel, my old model train set, and anything else childlike we could dig up. I’m not sure if it comes across in the video, but in my mind, all of the real world footage is actually taking place on that cheap looking set. It’s fictional world building where your tiny ideas can grow to the scale limits you’re capable of imagining."

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Maxband - Cut It Loose Jan 07, 2021

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Maxband - "Cut It Loose," a 2020 single on Maximum Band Recordings.

With his side project Maxband, Max Savage of Parquet Courts steps out from behind the drum kit and grabs a guitar. He shares vocal duties with co-founder and bassist Patrick Smith of A Beacon School. Their first release was a limited-run cassette EP titled Perfect Strangers in 2018, but they reemerged in late 2020 with a new EP titled Top of the Stairs.

Today's featured track follows the Parquet path of lo-fi post-punk. Maxband explained to Under the Radar:

“‘Cut It Loose’ was the first song we wrote for Top of the Stairs, and it functions as a good mission statement for where we are as a band: it was our first fully collaborative effort that was fleshed out from an idea that Patrick brought into a practice space, and the first song where Max and Patrick split vocal duties.”

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