DIVIDE AND

Super nice, sumptuous r&b on this new one from our North Carolina fave Top Girls. "Divide And" opens with noisy, cracked beats, which fade away in time for the track proper to start around the 1:00 mark, and which turns out to be one of Top Girls most fully realized tracks yet, with an ice-cold, desolate vocal performance and shimmering, arpeggiated production.

Pretty Tears is out digitally on April 9.

MISSING PIECES

Get deep with the new video from North Carolina's Top Girls, which zooms in on an archival/library footage-cum-conspiracy theory vibe & manages to sound like some sort of alternate universe rendering of Boards of Canada.

The Carolina album is available for stream/purchase on bandcamp.

RQ GUEST MIX 002: TOP GIRLS

MIX: RQ Mix 002: Top Girls

Top Girls is the solo project of North Carolina's Evan Adams, who in the last year or so has been putting out some of the most quietly interesting jams this side of the post-internet underground. His music evokes a decayed and muffled r&b, inflected with the legacy of singer-songwriter traditions but nonetheless steeped in the ethos of the post-noise bedroom producer.

His mix for us today juxtaposes the familiar and unfamiliar, maintaining the narcotic yet wistful vibe that characterises his own productions. The mix also features a new Top Girls jam, his latest single “It's Over”, in which over near-ecstatic syncopated rhythms and synth mumbles, Adams' vocals explore the line between fragility and confidence.

Tracklist
1. Fleetwood Mac - Everywhere
2. Party Trash - Transform
3. Nite Jewel - Universal Mind
4. The Radio Dept. - I Wanted You To Feel The Same
5. Active Child - Ivy
6. Beat Connection - Motorway
7. Sigur Rós - Fljótavík
8. Top Girls - It's Over
9. Squarepusher - Tommib Help Buss
10. Björk - Unravel
11. Robyn - Stars-4-Ever
12. Gem Club - Breakers
13. Janet Jackson - Escapade

WE WILL RISE

A couple of new jams up on YouTube from some of the best purveyors of glacial New R&B. The videos aren't anything special but as usual Top Girls iced-out yet weirdly summery haze makes for some super heavy hitting bedroom soul. Looks like these are lifted from a new EP called We Will Rise which is out sometime in September.

 


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RISE

MP3: Top Girls - Truth

My flatmate has been "thrashing" Top Girls x Police Academy 6's " Fill In The Blanks" and this new one (from just the former this time) gets in similar floatational R&B pop realm. Big on clean-lined design with a well-accustomed magaziney dreaminess, "Truth" has a similar blue-eyed grace to some HTDW jam on a more positive kick, especially with the rain sample drifting in at the back.

buy