New Music Friday is intense. Hundreds of songs drop from artists around the world, and you’re supposed to somehow find the best ones. It’s fun work, but it’s time-consuming — so we at Billboard Dance want to give you a hand. Each week, we sift through the streams and dig in the digital crates to present the absolute must-hears from the wide breadth of jams.
Another week, another slew of excellent new dance tracks to keep your toes tapping over the weekend. Let’s dig in.
Tiga & Hudson Mohawke, “VSOD (Velvet Sky Of Dreams)”
As Tiga and Hudson Mohawke demonstrated with their July track “Love Minus Zero,” when these two get into a project together, heat soon follows. Today the pair have dropped “VSOD (Velvet Sky of Dreams),” a slinky come-on of a house track that saunters into the room and plays like a sweet nothing whispered into your ear in the dark corner of a dancefloor.
Girl Talk & Bas, “Fallin'”
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If you spent a handful of nights in the late 2000s dancing in a sweaty throng while getting toilet paper blown at you from a gun as the music oscillated between Mystikal and Mariah, then you my friend know the power and glory of a Girl Talk show. While the mashup master hasn’t released a new album since 2008, Gregg Gillis has graced us with four singles during the last decade, the newest of which dropped this week.
“Fallin'” is a skittering, head-nodding and altogether stoney collab with French-American rapper Bas. While Gillis had a slew of beats ready for the rapper, who’s signed to J. Cole’s Dreamville, the first one he played ended up becoming the base (and bass) of the new track. And hold up, there’s more: this week also sees the first ever vinyl release of Girl Talk’s classic Feed The Animals and Night Ripper albums.
Róisín Murphy, “Kingdom of Ends”
The Irish dance queens returns with her fifth solo album, Roísín Machine, a sprawling album built on the power and glory of disco. Thile the LP shimmers throughout, a highlight comes via “Kingdom of Ends,” which simultaneously delivers both effervescence and heft.
“We were beginning to get very lost with dance music 10 years ago anyway,” Murphy told Billboard in an interview on the new album. “Most of it is absolutely terrible. In a normal year in Ibiza, you can’t get away from it. It’s in every lobby, every shop, every restaurant, every club, it’s in the car, it’s absolutely everywhere and it feels like you’re stabbing music, just murdering it. And the ears get very tired of it. But when it’s good, it’s very, very good.”
Crooked Colours, “Love Language” (SNBRN Remix)
SNBRN is one of those producers who you always forget how much you like until you hear him play and he blows your damn mind, again. Here the Los Angeles-based producer once again demonstrates his excellence via his take on “Love Language,” by Australian trio Crooked Colours. The edit adds thickness, depth and serious vibe to the formerly indie leaning track, turning the song into a steamy deep house heater that would surely get bodies together on the dancefloor, if such a thing were currently possible.
Claude VonStroke & Mike Kerrigan, “I Caught A Vibe”
In any other year, the dirtybird campout would be welcoming thousands of dance fans to its much-beloved California weekender. But given that it’s 2020, the Year When Everything Was Not Great, the event is instead going virtual, with a seven-day “Couch-Out” festival happening on the dirtybird Twitch channel. In conjunction comes the annual corresponding compilation album, featuring a wide assemblage of dirtybird players — including label boss Claude VonStroke, who delivers the squiggly, bouncy and generally aces Mike Kerrigan collab, “I Caught a Vibe,” which is really the only thing one should aspire to catch in 2020.