Koffee: Pull Up The first (and youngest at age 19) woman to take home a Grammy for best reggae album has a medley of reggae, dancehall and Afrobeats in Pull Up, the new single from her long-awaited debut album, Gifted, which will be out on March 25. Born Mikayla Simpson in Spanish Town, Jamaica, Koffee’s love for music was born in the church choir and after high school in Kingston, she thought of a career in pharmacology, which she traded in for music. Her writing is inspired by courses in poetry and literature taken in school and the first song she ever wrote — Legend — was inspired by Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt.
Machine Gun Kelly featuring Willow: Emo Girl Embracing clichés is required when one falls for an emo girl; this song gets a Machine Gun Kelly treatment that meets all the requirements of a Netflix rom-com soundtrack. She is a monster in disguise and she knows all the words to the trap songs / Takes pics with the cherry red lipstick, goes the song, which will appear on his forthcoming album, Mainstream Sellout, out on March 25.
Kamasi Washington: The Garden Path Tenor saxophonist Kamasi Washington makes music that’s always approachable and not esoterica. A few days ago he made his late night television debut with a performance of his new single The Garden Path on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. The overall musical components haven’t changed since the release of The Epic, his celebrated album of funk and rock beats.
Mitski: Stay Soft Coinciding with her new album release — Laurel Hell — is the video to the synth-driven song Stay Soft. The 31-year-old Japanese-American artiste chronicles yearnings and messy romances, which has made her somewhat of a cult figure among millennials. The pop album is complex and it has gone through “many iterations”.
Arlo Parks: Softly Softly brings together upbeat sonic moments with tender lyrics about a relationship losing its fire. “Softly is a song about yearning, about how fragile you feel in the dying days of a relationship when you’re still desperately in love. The song is about how it feels to brace yourself before the blow of a break up and reminisce about the days where it all felt luminous,” she has said about the song. Check out the dreamlike video that accompanies the song.