Looking for some motivation to help power you through the start of another work week? We feel you, and with some stellar new pop tunes, we’ve got you covered.
These tracks from artists including Mabel, Lauv, Nilüfer Yanya and more will get you energized to take on the week. Pop any of these gems into your personal playlists — or scroll to the end of the post for a custom playlist.
Luke Hemmings has not had a ton of downtime over the past decade. The lead vocalist of 5 Seconds of Summer was a kid at the moment he became famous, about to turn 18 years old when the Australian quartet released their self-titled debut album in 2014; five albums and countless tour dates later, Hemmings is 27, squarely in adulthood, having seen the world and trying to push himself into unexplored corners of his artistry.
“Benny,” from Hemmings’ newly released solo EP Boy, takes a melancholy approach to a hectic lifestyle: “Will I be saying goodbye from a dark hotel room? / Living on the sidelines, what am I supposed to do?” Hemmings asks, his voice glumly reaching for alternatives. Yet the rhetorical questions and muted vocal take create an effective tension with the song’s dreamy synth beds. Hemmings never pushes the song toward the anthemic territory he’s covered well with 5SOS, but the quieter aspects of “Benny” come through amidst the soothing production, as if he’s tucking his confessions inside the prettiest package possible.
5 Seconds of Summer have impressively evolved their sound over the decade, becoming one of the more reliable pop-rock groups on the planet; now, Hemmings is doing the same with his solo work, following the 2021 debut When Facing the Things We Turn Away From. A song like “Benny” deserves to find a listenership beyond 5SOS completists, and hopefully will lead Hemmings to even more ambitious solo work.
Here are some more new pop songs worth checking out this week…
Per a press release, Mabel’s new single marks “a return to her R&B roots,” and while the British hitmaker has found success outside of the genre, she nails the exercise here, stuffing “Vitamins” with sultry “sha-la-la” hooks and effortless vocal runs.
Lauv excels at any type of pop songwriting, but new single “Potential” returns him to the fizzy meet-cute energy of a song like “I Like Me Better,” with guitar strums turning the song’s most tender lines into moments reminiscent of heartfelt ‘90s pop-rock.
The veteran Montreal post-punk group Corridor returned last week with Mimi, and album highlight “Jump Cut” serves as a perfect introduction to the project’s appeal, smashing guitars and keyboards into each other during an extended instrumental breakdown bookended by a sleek vocal refrain.
Nilüfer Yanya often deploys her voice like a whole collection of instruments beyond the indie-pop arrangement beneath it, and on ripping new single “Like I Say (I Runaway),” she speeds up her delivery, slows it down, then lets it glide, setting up a captivating world and then developing it in guitar fuzz.
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