FUTUREPROOF PICKS 26-06-25

Hello world,

On Glasto week, we’ve still got Picks for you and banging new music as always fm CMAT, Zander, SPRINTS & lots more. If you like what you hear please follow and share this playlist, it helps us keep doing our thing by getting the algorithms on our side. Also please support the artists featured in any way you can!

Until next week

Helen (Futureproof) x

Westside Cowboy – Alright Alright Alright

In preparation for their Glastonbury set, Westside Cowboy share a new sonic direction on new single Alright Alright Alright and announce debut EP This Better Be Something Great. “This song was the first original thing we ever played as a band, before we had any real ambition for the project to reach the ears of anyone outside of that room,” the band have said on the new track. “It is a punk song about a cowboy, and if anyone can take away any more from it than that, consider us impressed.” Westside Cowboy are keeping outlaw country alive in their own Manchester way, with a cheeky nod towards Johnny Cash with the opening line “Since I was a young boy, my mother told me, son, don’t ever run around and don’t you play with guns.”

Hotline TNT – Julia’s War

Brooklyn-based shoegaze-punks Hotline TNT have shared new single Julia’s War, taken from their forthcoming album Raspberry Moon and its a bleary, muscular, catchy-as-hell power-pop jam. The song’s extremely silly Johnny Frohman-directed video is a shoegaze-themed Full Metal Jacket parody that features Jury Duty star Edy Modica and experimental theater actor Peter Mills Weiss. Frontman Will Anderson states: “In a world of half-hearted hooks and buried-in-the-mix vocals, we had to muster the courage to do what the rest of the shoegaze community could not… We looked out to the stadium and reassured the audience: Our voices, together, will be heard. You’ve never heard a TNT chorus this straightforward — when we stress-tested it during the writing process, the “try not to sing along challenge” came back with a 100% fail rate.”

Four Tet – Into Dust (Still Falling)

Four Tet has released the brand new single Into Dust (Still Falling), a track built around a sample of Mazzy Star, the great California band who came out of the Paisley Underground and who captured a whole lot of hearts with their languid, narcotic country-folk. If you’ve ever heard Richard X and Jarvis Cocker’s Into U then you already know that a British producer can do amazing things with a Mazzy Star sample. Four Tet has been teasing this new single for years, and it’s worth the wait. He’s built a spiraling club track from a sample of Into Dust, a time-stopping lullaby from Mazzy Star’s classic 1993 album So Tonight That I Might See.

Zander – Madeline

Yorkshire singer-songwriter Zander releases melancholic indie-folk single Madeline as his first track with Chess Club Records, featuring string sections and horns. The track arrives following Zander’s recent move to London in 2023, where he initially planned to work as a session guitarist. Since then, he has collaborated with various producers and songwriters, including Ethan P Flynn, Jack Cochrane, Toby Daintree, and Hugo M.Hardy at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios. “Madeline is a song about growing up and accepting that you can’t help some people,” Zander says, adding that it’s about “looking back on memories and letting them sit with you instead of pushing them away.”

meg elsier – sportscar (scrapped)

Nashville indie-rock artist meg elsier puts pedal to the slacker metal on new single sportscar [scrapped]. Using the metaphor of something so typically flashy and beloved like a sportscar, except in this instance it has been left to rust and disintegrate, she conveys the emotional burnout of your early twenties. Still, that car is her youth personified: no matter how run down, it still has a rose-tinted sheen. The track is the lead single of the deluxe edition of elsier’s debut album, spittake, out last year. elsier shares “sportscar is a really interesting addition to the deluxe, specifically because spittake almost had a completely different identity. There was a time when I was playing with the idea of naming the album Check Engine Light On. The influence of cars and how they move you through life is something I didn’t realize was so important to spittake until after I’d written it.”

Alessi Rose – That Could Be Me

Rising alt-rock artist Alessi Rose shares emotional single That Could Be Me and announces the EP Voyeur. The track combines alt-rock guitar riffs with live drums and explores themes of unrequited longing. “It’s about desire, particularly when that person is in love with someone else, and the tension you feel between wanting them and knowing that morally you can’t do anything about it,” Rose explains. “It’s the most frustrating kind of yearning, where it’s angry and out of your control.” Of the EP, Rose says: “In my EP Voyeur, the voyeurism is twofold. The audience becomes a voyeur of my innermost thoughts and feelings through the music, but additionally I am a voyeur of myself and my own, sometimes self-sabotaging, decisions. I wanted this EP to feel like the unfiltered version of events that you tell your closest friends and I feel like the bluntness and stream of consciousness lyrics reflect that. I don’t care how I’m perceived because I trust the listener.”

Water From Your Eyes – Life Signs

Experimental indie-rock duo Water From Your Eyes are back with a new song Life Signs, set to appear on their upcoming album It’s a Beautiful Place. The track initially grounds itself in an unexpected nu-metal throb, overlaid with Brown’s coolly delivered, rhythmic vocals, before it splinters into the kind of soaring, dream-like chorus that has become a WFYE hallmark. The track is “about time, dinosaurs, and space,” the band explains, adding that they “wanted to present a wide range of styles in a way that acknowledges everything’s just a tiny blip.” Life Signs is on Water From Your Eyes’ more rock-heavy side, pairing post-punk and nu-metal guitars with Brown’s plainspoken, existential verses: “I am coming apart/ I’m becoming together/ True to form.”

The Slates – Calling Up

Hailing from Yorkshire, The Slates have built a dedicated grassroots audience leading to recent sold-out headline shows in Sheffield and Leeds as well as gigs with contemporaries such as The Kairos, The Bracknall, Stanleys and The Velvet Hands. Now it’s time for the band to step up to the next level as they unveil their new summer single Calling Up. Frontman Louis Barnes states: “Calling Up reflects on the feeling of rejection and feeling left out. The song actually stems from going out with a group in town and feeling like the odd one out and almost feeling as if being there was pointless. Any attempt to try being included ends up being in vain.” It’s bright and bouncy on the surface, all jangly guitars, upbeat handclaps, and sun-soaked melodies but dig a little deeper and you’ll find something more reflective underneath.

SPRINTS – Descartes

Dublin post-punkers SPRINTS have shared new single Descartes, taken from the upcoming album All That Is Over. Frontwoman Karla Chubb says: “There was just so much happening and so much to process. I was going through a big breakup with my partner who I’d been with for eight years, Colm had left the band, we’d really progressed into being professional musicians, and I was at the start of a new relationship. But then you’d look outside, and it’s like the world has never been uglier. I was writing every day because there was so much going on.” The track is a feverish slasher that’s apparently inspired by a line -“Vanity is the curse of our culture” — from Rachel Cusk’s novel Outline. Chubb says: “A lot of the negativity you see in the world is rooted in vanity and the ego that your beliefs or identity are more important than somebody else’s. Descartes explores the idea that writing for me is not just a tool to make music but a tool to process the world.”