Listen: Mitski's "Puberty 2" & Palmistry's "Pagan"

Londoner Benjy Keating's refreshing take on dancehall-pop has finally arrived, and it's a debut that's quietly arresting. To quote from the New Yorker, "Pagan, released under the name Palmistry, offers a hyper-specific version of the genre. It feels almost like a hallucination—blurry but vivid, its sorrow and pleasure twisted tightly together. The songs are dancehall tracks distilled to their bare essentials, with the music rarely consisting of more than a plasticized synth line of buttery chord progressions and a spare bass drum. Anything more would overpower Keating's voice, a feminine lilt that hardly registers above a whisper. The result is a sense of hushed intimacy, and yet Keating keeps the listener at arms length, perhaps out of necessity... The result is often quite affecting, an emotional blend of recognizable and alien pop music." The sweetness that's Pagan is indeed a malady!

On the other end of the spectrum lies New Yorker Mitski Miyawaki's latest folk-imbued indie rock outing Puberty 2. We already have had our peek into the album in the form of Your Best American Girl and Happy, but I can't wait to hear what's more in store.