A Playlist of the Week's Best New Albums Plus Some Book & Music Links

New albums from Nia Archives & Meshell Ndegeocello, interviews with Waxahatchee's Katie Cructhfeld & Hanif Abdurraqib, an excerpt from Waxahatchee's new novel, and more

A Playlist of the Week’s Best New Music (18 albums, 174 songs, 10 hours and 58 minutes)

This week’s new music includes releases by Nia Archives; Red Hot Org & Meshell Ndegeocello; Diane Birch; Maggie Rogers; Girl in Red; English Teacher; Bad Bad Hats; Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties; METZ; The Reds, Pinks & Purples; hemlock; Shabaka; Still House Plants; The Ophelias; great area; Sunburned Hand of the Man; UTO; and James Elkington & Nathan Salsburg.

Largehearted Book & Music Links:

1. Celebrated poet, MacArthur genius – but Hanif Abdurraqib is just glad to have survived past 25
   One of my heroes is the late great Greg Tate [a writer, musician and critic for the Village Voice]. He was always more interested in you than you could have ever been in him. And that is something that I think is a requirement to live by.

2. The Chronicles of DOOM: Unraveling Rap's Masked Iconoclast
   A definitive biography of MF Doom is coming in October.

3. Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever
   Gary Shteyngart went on a cruise and wrote about it.

4. Slate shared an oral history of Pitchfork

5. The OTHERPPL podcast’s interview with Lydia Millet

6. How Ozempic Turned a 1970s Hit Into an Inescapable Jingle
   This Ozempic boom is due in no small part to the jingle, which helped turn a byzantine mash-up of syllables into a brand patients would request from doctors by name. Jeremy Shepler, who headed the Ozempic launch in the United States for Novo Nordisk, had previously enjoyed success deploying music in a commercial for a new-to-market nasal spray, and knew he wanted to find a song that worked both mnemonically and emotionally.

7. ‘I’d love a scathing review’: novelist Percival Everett on American Fiction and rewriting Huckleberry Finn
   ”Huck Finn, picaresque adventures aside, is really about a young American, representing America, trying to navigate this landscape, and understand how someone – his friend, actually the only father figure in the book – is also property.”

8. How Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee Learned to Tune Out the Noise
   My approach to songwriting, as far as the structure of the songs, is identical to Lucinda. Rarely will you find a bridge. It’s usually like, three to four chords only, and it’s simple. It’s all about the vocal melody.

9. An excerpt from Jen Silverman’s new novel There’s Going To Be Trouble

10. Fluxblog’s 1980s COKE PSYCHOSIS playlist
    two hours of maximalist high-gloss 80s pop with a crazed energy or manic intensity

11. The Best Books of Spring 2024, According to Indie Booksellers
    
    

Last Week’s LHB Feature Posts:

Aug Stone’s playlist for his book Sporting Moustaches

Ery Shin’s playlist for her novel Spring on the Peninsula

Greg Wrenn’s playlist for his memoir Mothership

Helen Benedict’s playlist for her novel The Good Deed

Jen Silverman’s playlist for their novel There’s Going to Be Trouble

Lynn Schmeidler’s playlist for her story collection Half-Lives