Freshly Squeezed, Vol. 91: Chloe, Alice Gray, Jamie McDell & more

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

Her voice shooting as a star across the night sky, pop upstart Chloe offers up an indisputably visceral and earth-shattering rendition of Roxette’s enduring 1992 classic “It Must Have Been Love.” It’s always a behemoth of a task to inject one of pop’s most known staples with a fresh perspective and energy, but Chloe manages to revamp the weepy power ballad with skin-crawling strings and a wallop of an acrobatic vocal routine. Pain drips profusely out of her core, and as the song ascends from watery depths of tragedy into the heavens hanging thick overhead, Chloe rips open the world like Moses parting the Red Sea. “It Must Have Been Love,” featured on Chloe’s long-awaited debut LP, The In-Between, flows with so much heart to knock you off your feet.

Flighty songbird Alice Gray alights on a crossroads of gummy electronica, torch-soul and slickly-provocative pop with “Take Me to the Water,” feeling as much a radio track as it is a heart-rending baptismal. “Feels like I should never leave / Let it go, wash over me,” she confesses on the hook, glistening amidst a bedrock of synths and guitar. Gray’s voice floats somewhere between the earth’s crust and the troposphere, miraculously balancing between emotions in her journey to understand and then process her tattered heart. Later, The White Wolves pull you into a silky web, leaving Ryan Steele’s vocals to hypnotize you into an embrace of sultry proportions. The music pulsates mid-air, and as the temperatures rise, the smoke entangling the listener, the enchanting soundscape both frees you and chains you to a blissful state of being.

Americana’s Jamie McDell seeks salvation for a dear friend trapped in an abusive relationship with the beautifully devastating “Extraordinary Girl,” serving as the title song to her new album (out May 10). “You’re more than just a pretty face / But all he keeps on holding is your hips,” McDell weeps across her acoustic guitar. Forged with such spiraling ruin, the song evokes anger and sadness, and even beneath such imposing gloom, a lace of hope seems to quake and bubble on the verge of penetrating through to the truth. McDell’s timely, eerily-catastrophic performance underscores society’s ongoing normalization of such egregious and dangerous behavior.

The new update includes songs from Coyote Eyes, Lenny Bull, Camille Trust, Torrey Mercer, Lola Coca, Con Murphy, Sean McVerry, Night Moves, Blake Rose, Christian French, Shane Leonard, Me Like Bees, Delta Rae and countless more.

In all, we’ve got 30 new songs to go to live drives along the coastline or out into the country to.

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.

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