Freshly Squeezed, Vol. 80: Abigail Lapell, Illicit Ghost, Sheare & more

Welcome to Freshly Squeezed, a weekly new music playlist: spanning country, pop, EDM and urban, mainstream and other.

Folk colorist Abigail Lapell paints with the vivacity of the rainbow on her new album. Getaway, out today on Coax Records, bleeds from deep within, as she navigates on the wind’s breezy backbone topics of life, death and love. “Sparrow for a Heart,” glazed with strings and the heart-torn wail of horns, glides like a ghost in the night across glossy maple hardwood. Flute and other wind instruments come to her assistance, often swirling as a murder of crows in the late winter’s icy haze. “When I am old, would you carry my bones / To the blood-red sea,” she sings in tattered whispers, seemingly give up a part of herself for the sake of the art. The album heaves in exasperated convulsions, but she stands as a resilient siren in the fog, ethereal but haunted.

Alternative songwriter U.M.A.N. lets his desperation flood his new song “Listen to Your Children,” a spooky piano ballad urging the world to enact change following the massive Florida school shootings. Clangs and frenetic bangs rise and fall like a stream tumbling into brutally sharp rock down the mountainside, sweeping debris of twigs and mud along with it. “Don’t do it for your politics or your power / Don’t do it for your glory, grief or gain,” he sings, letting every ounce of misery pour off his tongue. Culturally, we’ve reached a fevered pitch, and change is now…or never.

Blog favorite and should-be-superstar Sheare takes another stark, sensitive and exposed polaroid. “Side X Side” is wistful and ripped right out of his scrapbook of lonesome and brittle pop music, a delicately ’80s memento that drop-kicks right into the chest. His voice is expectedly shredded by the past, its lacerations throb deep and wide on his heart, leaving him drained but somehow liberated from vicious, toxic cycles. “We could be side-by-side until you robbed me blind,” he moans, a smokey sparkler meeting its sudden end.

The new playlist also features Illicit Ghost, Blak Emoji, Connah Evans, Camille Trust, EMM, Fellow Robot, Moes Anthill, Max Jury, Ages and Ages, Wallows, Prince Fox, New Hope Club, Billie Eilish and countless others.

In all, we’ve got 50 new songs to bop along to as you ready for the impending three-day weekend. Leggo and let music.

Each playlist will be refreshed every Friday morning/afternoon. We reserve the right to update anytime during the week, so make sure you bookmark this page.

Take a spin:

Photo Credit: Gaelle Legrand

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