- Sunlighter
- Posts
- #46 - Doe REALLY 🌞
#46 - Doe REALLY 🌞
Your weekly music round-up: a single song review, TikTok Music, Harry Styles in web3, Splash House lineup, Doe Boy
Chris Xu, Donya Bayrami & a single song review
July 9th, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 16 minutes
Happy Sunlighter Sunday! After a week of hot dogs, fireworks, and Threads, we have a special guest reviewer, a revamp of our chart trends, a new superstar scale for our artist of the week + explainer, and a new section for fresh merch finds.
Here's what we have queued up this week:
🌶️ Guest Review by a single song review.
💿 This Week in Music: TikTok Music, reigning DSP, and Harry Styles in web3.
🔀 Recommendation Station: Young Thug, Peso Pluma, Kelly Clarkson, Nicki Minaj & Ice Spice.
🎙️ Doe Boy is our artist of the week.
This week, we’re joined by Connor from a single song review as our guest reviewer for The UV Index. As supporters of music and artist discovery, we’re big fans of his newsletter. If you’re looking for your new favorite underground artist or an occasional monthly mixtape, check out some of his reviews below.
|
Rating Rationale: For album number checks notes 24 (???), noted Australians King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have yet again donned the 🤘 and leather coats. It’s metal season baby, and not just any kind of metal. The Gizzards have again reproduced the aesthetics of 80s thrash. Their previous metal outing, Infest the Rats’ Nest, focused on heavy, mid-tempo exercises in headbanging. This album, by contrast, has the band take the machine gun-laden yute from the first album, set a brick on the accelerator and a rocket on the back, and aim it downhill. So that's a fun bit, but does it sound good? Holy lizard god does it. The slowest song on this gila monster absolutely goes, featuring the first appearance of second vocalist (and coolest dude in the room), Ambrose Kenny-Smith, who brings the gnarliest vocal you could inflict on the unsuspecting. His verse at 2:50, complete with a drum breakdown, is possibly the hardest piece of music I’ve ever heard. That brings me to the dragon in the room; the face-melting drum work of Michael Cavanagh. At no point does this dude chill out. Every drum riff in this album is not only giving speed and a need for it but also layering in some of the sickest grooves this side of Melbourne. Fear not, longtime Gizzers, the straight snare-tom rolls the Gizz are known for return. It is here, then, that this album gets its solitary mark. At no point does Stu Mackenzie give his trademark "woo."
🕰️ TikTok on the Clock: This year, all signs of TikTok’s efforts toward artist and music discovery have led to TikTok launching a streaming service, and it’s finally here. On Thursday, TikTok Music launched in Brazil and Indonesia as a premium-subscription-only service. The big kicker is that it’s licensed by the big three record labels - Sony, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group - meaning the service will have access to those major label catalogs.
🚘 Fast Car Trailblazing: For those of you who don’t know, Luke Combs’ rendition of “Fast Car” was initially written and performed by Tracy Chapman. The successful cover by Combs has led Chapman to become the first Black woman to garner a #1 country song as the sole songwriter.
💰 B*tch Better Have My Money: Rihanna continues to break records this year, now becoming the first female artist on Spotify to claim 10 songs with over 1 billion streams—each. Ugh, just drop the new album already.
👀 New Kids on the Block: BBC Introducing aims to give undiscovered, unsigned artists the spotlight through their programming. This year, twin festivals, Reading & Leeds, announced the names of the 27 artists that will give performances on the BBC Introducing stage this August.
📺 You Gotta Watch This: During their Music of the Spheres World Tour stop in Zurich, Coldplay asked the legendary Roger Federer to join them during a performance of “Don’t Panic.” He even got a solo…
❓ What Song Is This?: A question we frequently ask Siri. This week, Shazam shared new product updates, including music discovery capabilities within Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
📹 My Video Phone: We’ve come a long way since the video iPod, haven’t we? Spotify announced it plans to compete against YouTube and TikTok by expanding its product offering to include full-length music videos. Is it too little too late?
💰 Ay! Must be the Money!: Grammy award-winning rapper, Nelly, sells a selective part of his catalog to HarbourView Equity Partners for a reported $50 million.
📈 Count ‘Em: Using data from February 2023, The National Music Publishers Association determined the top 5 digital service providers by subscriber count were Spotify, Apple, Amazon, YouTube, and Pandora.
☁️ SoundCloud for Artists: SoundCloud announced partnerships with Squarespace, Adobe, Discord, and Rap Plug to provide artists with access to web domains, Discord, and 30 free courses from industry professionals.
💴 Sofar, So Good: Sofar Sounds reiterates its commitment to artist growth and development by sharing its Concert Listings tool, which has helped generate a whopping $650 million for artists through ticket and merch sales.
💰 Securing the Bag: Looking for a soothing playlist for your pets as they wait for you to come home from work? Create Music Group acquired Music For Pets and plans to invest $10 million over the next 3 years to expand the service—although numbers are already massive with 20 million pets listening to at least 12 million hours of music each month.
🌐 Web3 Updates: Beats by Dre is rumored to be partnering with NFT project Akutars to release a limited edition headset, and Harry Styles partnered with EVNTZ to invite fans to create a web3 wallet to gain access to concert transportation and merchandise, along with more loyalty rewards in the future.
💦 Splash House Lineup: The festival celebrates ten years with 2 weekends of performances in Palm Springs this August. ODESZA, BAYNK, Chris Lake, and Channel Tres are all part of the lineup.
🎀 K-POP Domination: Fresh off the heels of being the first K-POP group to headline a major UK festival, BLACKPINK announces their new single, “The Girls,” to release later this month as part of their new mobile game.
🎸 Vampire Weekend promises their best album yet (10 songs, no skips) after Ezra Koenig found inspiration through raga singing lessons.
👀 Carly Rae Jepsen plans to release her album, The Loveliest Time, Zach Bryan teases his debut album with a series of 10 audio clips, Billie Eilish shares a new song, “What Was I Made For?” on the Barbie soundtrack set to drop on July 13, Declan McKenna gears up for his third studio album with his new single, “Sympathy,” Bakar announces his sophomore album, Halo, Cautious Clay plans to release Karpeh, Subtronics shares news of his upcoming sophomore album, Anne-Marie releases “TRAINWRECK” in anticipation of her upcoming UNHEALTHY album, Prince’s estate dropped 2 unreleased songs, and Neil Young is dropping his “lost album,” Chrome Dreams.
🚶♂️ Artists On Tour: The Eagles celebrate the end of their “52-year odyssey” by announcing The Long Goodbye Tour with Steely Dan as the opener, Dominic Fike goes on his first UK tour, Lil Uzi Vert goes on his Pink Tape Tour, and Taylor Swift adds 14 shows to the European leg of her Eras Tour, with Paramore as the opener for every show.
 A balance of genres to satisfy your music hunger. Listen to Balanced Breakfast. |  The SUN rules everything around me. Listen to Midsommar Solstice. |
Chart Explainer: Starting this week, we’re including a chart that helps estimate the stardom potential of our artist of the week. If you paid attention in your middle school science class, you might remember coming across the stellar evolution chart. We’ve taken inspiration from our cosmic counterparts to show where an artist is now in their stardom journey and what their stardom potential might be in a couple of years. We know the chart is subjective, and while we would be ecstatic to see artists surpass our expectations, we’re attempting to be as realistic as possible. Not everyone can quickly rise to the level of Beyoncé or Taylor Swift. Our “superstar” decision model incorporates both quantitative and qualitative criteria, and while our chart data points are estimated, they are backed with real streaming and social data from Chartmetric. We’ll define our criteria in a future post so everyone can selectively roast us if you think we’re wrong.
If you think we can do things better or make things more clear, hit us up in the poll, and tell us where you think we can improve.
Primer: This week’s artist hails from The Land as the King of Cleveland (sorry MGK, gotta be a street rapper), and surprisingly, he’s been an imprint in hip-hop circles for more than a decade. He originally signed to Future’s Freebandz record label back in 2012 but landed an 18-month prison charge for aggravated robbery shortly after his signing. Since his release from prison, Doe Boy has rebuilt his career, and we think he’s going to hit mainstream hip-hop sooner than later as drill continues to gain traction.
Genre: Hip-Hop, but stylistically, gangsta rap rather than conscious rap
Influences: 50 Cent, Lil Wayne, Gucci Mane, Future, Waka Flocka Flame
Current Label: Jointly signed by Epic Records and Freebandz (Future’s record label)
What’s Next: Doe Boy recently dropped his album BEEZY, which features a rich cast of collaborators that includes Babyface Ray, Lil Yachty, Roddy Ricch, Don Toliver, DaBaby, members of hometown heroes, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, and of course, Future. A couple of weeks ago, he dropped a music video for his intro track “RHUDE BOY” (our favorite beat selection from the album), acquainting the tough, Cleveland street rap to South Jamaica, Queens:
Wrap Up 👏
We're closing the newsletter this week by celebrating Taylor’s re-release of Speak Now (specifically her vault song, “When Emma Falls in Love”) and a new section for cool music merch finds across the interwebs.
Who’s Burning? 🌡️
Taylor Swift.
The Merch Table 💳
How do you like our newsletter this week?We're all ears, click the number of 🔆 you think we deserve and feel free to drop a comment. |
Check out our other articles and give us a follow on Twitter!
See ya next Sunday 😎
Chris and Donya
Reply