Add to playlist: the magnetic, uncanny songwriting of Frances Chang and the week’s best new tracks

The Brooklyn-based artist’s songs seem to follow private trains of thought, which shift their subtle musical colours in a way that will slink in to your head, tooFrom Brooklyn, New YorkRecommended if you like Cate Le Bon, Astrid Sonne, Julia HolterUp next New single No Avatar out now“No, I won’t take a photo / Just walking around with no avatar,” Frances Chang sings on No Avatar, conversational and serene against little whorls of piano, skittish drum fizz and softly flaring synths. Like Astrid Sonne’s fragmented songwriting, the Brooklyn-based musician’s songs are hard to pin down, mirroring the single’s desire to avoid outward definition. Her songs work to an internal logic, evoking a sort of uncanny domesticity: casual piano refrains, rainy percussion; the melty haze of a horizon at dusk; grooves slinking in at the end of a song like next door’s cat making itself at home. It’s a sound that shares a lot with the modern Copenhagen scene of which Sonne is a key fixture, but with more welcoming softness and warmth: Chang’s January single I Can Feel the Waves is a six-minute suite that starts out a little edgy, then yields with gorgeous warped piano and disarmingly intimate focus. Continue reading...