Behold! The jungle drums of St. Albans!

Friendly Fires.

Friendly Fires are back in business! They've announced their sophomore album, Pala, to hit the shelves May 16th, and the lead single, 'Live Those Days Tonight' is out now! I don't know if I dig it particularly - it's a bit too Eurovision, but it's exciting nonetheless. I was a big fan of the St. Albans outfit's eponymous debut, and hopefully #2 will live up to my expectations!


While we're waiting for Arctic Monkeys' fourth album, Suck It And See, Alex Turner has done a wee EP for the soundtrack of indie flick Submarine. It's quite pleasant, especially 'It's Hard To Get Around The Wind'. It's turner the same intimate and tender alley as on tunes such as 'Cornerstone' and 'Only Ones Who Know', two of my favourite 'Monkeys tunes.


It always makes me proud when Danish acts are mentioned on the Forkcast, which is one of the true benchmark acknowledgements in indie, and these past weeks, two acts have showed up there, both of them quite surprisingly. First, it was young punk outfit Iceage, whom I don't care particularly about, and last week, it was Taragana Pyjarama with 'Ocean', a really blissful piece of electronica - and I love the artwork with the gorgeous pregnant girl too. He's not at all unlike successful Swedish outfit jj, and he's gonna be interesting to follow through the year.


I'm not all that down with Yuck, but front man Daniel Blumberg's solo project, Oupa, is a whole other story! Check out 'Forget', which is a really soft and pretty little ballad.


Finally, Baths did a cover for A.V.'s Undercover-series, and it's of nothing less than "#1 track of 2007"-heralded 'All My Friends', by LCD Soundsystem. It's a really beautiful cover of a song hard to really fuck up.


What a load of amazing tunes! I really feel after a few weeks of quasi-hiatus, that a lot of new music is coming my way again. I got some of my new records today too, I'll tell you all about them when I've spun them for a week! Tomorrow I'm off to another wild weekend, this time in Copenhagen. Yay!