Sessa is a long-time fixture of both the American and Brazilian music scenes. Initially known for collaborating with NY guitar legend Yonatan Gat and co-founding the São Paulo psych-funk combo Garotas Suecas, Sessa released his debut album, Grandeza, in 2019. In their review of the album, the New Yorker described Sessa as “a songwriter cut from Veloso’s mold and blessed with a flair for the intimate, the enigmatic, and the licentious.”
Sessa’s songs are sung in Portuguese, with visceral, sensual lyrics, and melodic flourishes not unlike those of Tom Jobim. However, the music gets a deliberate minimalist treatment rarely found in contemporary Brazilian music, more reminiscent of the bareness of Leonard Cohen.
Sessa’s concerts are already stuff of legend, as he takes the stage accompanied solely by a female backing choir and Afro-Brazilian percussion. While the songs often deal with subjects such as the sensual body and spiritual transcendence, the music points to new, more subtle directions for Brazilian pop music – a deep, minimalist, almost insinuated use of the endlessly rich textures and rhythms that define the songwriting history of Brazil, which Sessa joins as one of its most promising new voices.
The echo-bathed pop songs of Fazerdaze are the creation of New Zealand indie songwriter Amelia Murray. After building a following with short-form releases and international touring, the project’s daydreamy full-length debut, Morningside, appeared in 2017. Following a five-year gap between releases, the fuzz-injected, ’90s-inspired EP Break! saw release in 2022. (via AllMusic)
Born in Oklahoma, raised in Paris, living in New York City, assistant to a Nobel Prize Winner, licensed New York City tour guide and Murder Mystery business owner, JW Francis is one of the newest signings to Sunday Best Recordings. His brand of lo-fi, utterly irresistible bedroom dream-pop takes its lead from the city JW lives in, with echoes of Jonathan Richman, The Velvet Underground and the lo-fi sound New York has been inspiring for decades.
Following a string of singles, New York’s very own JW Francis finally releases his sophomore album WANDERKID on Sunday Best Recordings. The LP is the follow up to his critically acclaimed debut We Share a Similar Joy, which saw JW firmly mark himself out as New York’s next lo-fi legend gaining mass support from BBC 6Music, Apple Music, Spotify, DIY, The Line of Best Fit, The Independent, HMV, Wonderland, and many others.
Jaguar Sun is a Canadian solo project created by multi instrumentalist Chris Minielly. Weaving together inspiration from bands such as Frightened Rabbit, Youth Lagoon, and Fruit Bats, Minielly creates dreamy, pop centric soundscapes with experimental and folky flair produced entirely in his home. The Ontario based artist allows his instruments to speak equally to his voice urging listeners to get lost in richly layered guitar lines and deep droning synths between soft vocal melodies.
Kassa Overall is a Grammy-nominated musician, emcee, singer, producer and drummer who melds avant-garde experimentation with hip-hop production techniques to tilt the nexus of jazz and rap in unmapped directions. He previously released four critically acclaimed projects: I THINK I’M GOOD, Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz, Shades of Flu and Shades of Flu 2. On ANIMALS, his Warp Records debut, Kassa pushes his kaleidoscopic, subversive vision further. He layers Roland 808s against avant-garde drumming in the vein of his mentors Elvin Jones and Billy Hart, the latter of whom he studied with at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Virtuoso musos appear alongside rap poets, including Danny Brown, Wiki, Lil B, and Shabazz Palaces. Top-flight jazz improvisation weaves in and out of orchestral string arrangements by Jherek Bischoff. The album’s diverse, all-star roster of collaborators includes several of his close friends, like vocalists Nick Hakim, Laura Mvula, Francis and the Lights, and jazz stars like Theo Croker and Vijay Iyer.
ANIMALS pushes Kassa’s message further too, the title a loaded metaphor for the paradoxes of his life as an entertainer and as a black man in America. ANIMALS is the sound of an artist aware of the cost of embodying one’s natural self in the public eye, a deep reckoning with the two-sided truth that to perform one’s freedom for an audience can mean succumbing to life inside a cage.
“Over the course of the last two decades, Xiu Xiu’s prolific and influential output of acclaimed albums and collaborations has been consistently dazzling. They’ve released multiple full-length LPs that have been praised in outlets such as The New Yorker, The Wire, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, NME and many others. They have toured the globe relentlessly, performing in places as far off the beaten path as Kazakhstan and Lebanon and places institutionally vital as the Guggenheim and Centre Pompidou.
On Xiu Xiu’s latest album, 13″” Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips, Angela Seo and Jamie Stewart deliver some of the band’s most compelling and mesmerizing music to date. Mixed by John Congleton (Chelsea Wolfe, Swans, Lana Del Rey) this album is unlike anything the band has ever recorded previously and was motivated by the destruction of previous aesthetic notions, as well as the band’s recent move from Los Angeles to Berlin.”
Kiefer is a central figure in the diverse independent music scene of Los Angeles. His sound fuses various modalities of Black American Music, from jazz and R&B to hip-hop and electronic music. Kiefer grew up in San Diego, California, immersed in jazz by his father at a young age, and later experimented with hip-hop-inspired beats in high school. While studying jazz piano at UCLA, Kiefer got his education in beats from attending shows at Low End Theory and collaborating with other artists in the scene.
British-Brazilan singer-songwriter Liana Flores pairs dream-like vignettes of her intimate world with wistful guitar melodies to get lost in, combining a unique and intoxicating range of stylistic influences from British folk and classic jazz to ‘60s Brazilian bossa nova.
Following the runaway global success of her self-released track ‘rises the moon’, Liana’s debut album ‘Flower of the Soul’, produced by Noah Georgeson (Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart, Natalia Lafourcade) is a truly transportive debut; an album that is a clear statement of artistic intent. Across its runtime, Flores paints vivid pictures of nature, fantasy, love and loss with her crystalline vocals always ensuring that the listener is placed directly into her world.
Following sold out album release shows in the US and the UK, Liana now embarks on a 28 day tour of the US, UK and Europe this fall.
“Showcases her breathtaking voice over lush, elegant arrangements.” – FADER
“Liana Flores’ soothing voice is as diaphanous as her finger-picked jazz guitar.” – Uproxx
