David Emery Online

What Was That by Lorde

It would be unfair to say — like many others already have — that ‘What Was That’, the new single by Lorde from her upcoming fourth album ‘Virgin’, is a return to form. That would perpetuate the prevalent narrative that 2021’s ‘Solar Power’ was a dud. The internet has decided so, therefore it is so.

Which is tiresome, isn’t it?

Not only am I a ‘Solar Power’ apologist (both record and power source), but it speaks to the exhausting nature of online music criticism. Which has, for the most part, shifted from the professional to the amateur, with a million comment sections, every social post allowing for a snipe, gripe, and reinforcement of the aggregate cultural opinion. ‘Solar Power’ is a good record, a subtle record, that for me fits a slightly different space than a lot of Lorde’s other work. I suspect that, in a decade or so’s time, it will get a reevaluation once there’s a better perspective on her breadth of catalogue.

None of this is to say that ‘What Was That’ isn’t a banger, though, because it is. But interestingly, it still carries through some of the previous records’ lightness of touch, like how the chorus never quite lives up to the build-up, replacing the drop you think you might be getting with a squelchy synth line. Subtlety doesn’t often carry well in the ‘discourse’, but for me Lorde is wielding it on this track with great power (no pun intended).

Twenty

This blog turned twenty years old last week, and I have a couple of things to say about that. I had planned to post on the day, but instead I took my children to an aeroplane museum on the west coast of France — we were already in France, just to be clear, we didn’t hop on an EasyJet just to scamper round a hanger of French military paraphernalia. Anyway, there are several things that 22-year-old me would have found surprising about that excuse.

Twenty years is a long time. The second post on this blog was that Adobe was buying Macromedia, which was a big deal at the time and now a distant footnote. The fourth was about the launch of Google Maps in the UK. This blog predates YouTube by about a week. A couple of months after I started blogging, I inadvertently live blogged the 7/7 London terror attacks.

When I started this blog, I was a freelance web designer mostly writing about tech and music. This blog helped me get a job at a record label, which, well, has led to a lot. A lot of those early posts were about Apple, and now that’s...

Spike Island by Pulp

A long time ago I had lunch in a pub with Jarvis Cocker. Working in music has given the odd opportunity for such escapades, others which include “having a pint with Pet Shop Boys” and “hanging out at 5am in a hotel bar with Adele” — more on those another time.

I think he had a glass of red wine and the steak and chips, if I recall correctly, and his company was just as entertainingly articulate as you would hope and expect. It was around the time of his second solo record “Further Complications”, which was a very good record but shares an unfortunate truth with all such spinoff projects from the singer of a popular band: it was not a record from the aforementioned popular band, but something else not quite as good.

That record came out in 2009, which was not even half way between when the last Pulp record was released — 2001’s “We Love Life” — and when we now know the next Pulp record will, in modern parlance, drop, which is this year.

If this first single is anything to go by, it may share a kinship with Blur’s latest from 2023, which is to say that it sounds very clearly like the band you know and love, but weathered slightly with the passage of time — a patina of experience adding something new to something old.

Shadows by Goddess & Ex:Re

I have two playlists that I update regularly and listen to almost every day. The first — #20 — is my favourite twenty songs right now, no more no less, and roughly corresponds to the tracks I post on here. If it makes it to #20, it makes it to the blog.

The other — imaginatively titled “New Music” — is a seventy seven hour long dumping ground of any new music that comes out that I might want to listen to. Every week I trawl through the new releases — songs and albums — and if there’s anything interesting I’ll add it to the playlist. Then I’ll listen to all of it on shuffle. Every once in a while I’ll sweep through and clean out anything that I’ve been skipping too much.

The one and only album by Ex:Re — the solo moniker for Elena from Daughter — has been in my New Music playlist, in full, ever since it came out in 2018. It’s a no skips record. But, being a solo project, and Daughter still very much being a going concern, it always felt like a one off.

And yet, here we are in 2025 with a new Ex:Re track. Well, sort of. This track is from a project called “Goddess”, which is created and curated by ex Savages drummer Fay Milton, and it brings some of that Savages energy to the depth of Elena’s vocal, and it all works exceptionally well.

How to tell when your art is bad

I love this, in the most part because trying to apply objective rules to judge “art” is inherently amusing, but also because it’s not, you know, wrong.

Via Russell Davies

Battersea Power Station

The hardest working font in Manhattan

A beautiful deep dive into a font you have definitely seen, but likely never noticed.

The sheer craft that has gone into this article is remarkable. A reminder of the best that the web can be, and a timely palate cleanser in amongst everything else that is going on right now.

Guericke's Unicorn by Beirut

Beirut is an artist that I have slowly found indispensable — a soothing balm for the soul whenever I most need it. His last album “Hadsel” wormed it’s way in to my listening habits to such a great extent that it was #5 in my most played albums last year, despite it coming out the year before.

The press release for this new song reports that the album that it comes from, “A Study Of Losses”, was commissioned by a Swedish circus. Judging by “Guericke’s Unicorn”, which is beautiful, circuses may be an A&R source that has been, up until this point, sorely overlooked.

Besties by Black Country, New Road

Black Country, New Road’s recent live album is one I frequently go back to — in fact, I’m going to put it on right now, wait a minute — and while it’s increasingly clear that we are unlikely to get studio versions of those songs, if what we do get are as good as this first track from new album “Forever Howlong”, we’ll be doing ok.

Everything is romantic by Charli xcx & Caroline Polachek

I realise that I have failed to properly post about Brat, apologies. It feels almost inappropriate to mention it in 2025, such is its foundational position in the 2024 zeitgeist, but yet here we are, in a post-Brat hellscape.

The original Brat is a masterpiece, of course, building on everything that Charli has been assembling piece by piece for years. But, somehow, the remix album “brat and it’s completely different but also still brat” is, to my mind, even better. It is not a remix album in a traditional sense, but a meta-reworking of the whole thing, capturing in audio form not just an interesting new take on the songs, but also a commentary on the cultural impact of the original album itself. While also, somehow, simultaneously deepening the aforementioned cultural impact, with the addition of Billie Eilish on ‘Guess’, and the version of ‘Girl, so confusing’ — a song, originally sub-tweeting Lorde, which, now, features Lorde.

However, with all of that to the side, the highlight of both Brat and the Brat remix is this version of Everything is Romnatic featuring Caroline Polachek, which is far deeper than it has any right to be.