Five tracks to hear this week (May 10-16)

Mega pair: Justin Bieber and Ed Sheeran
Yui Mok/PA Archive/PA Images
David Smyth10 May 2019

Poor Stormzy may not be number one for long when there’s a new song out today from Justin Bieber and Ed Sheeran. The mega-selling pair have teamed up again, after their Love Yourself collaboration of 2015, for I Don’t Care.

The strangest album of the week is Holly Herndon’s PROTO, out today, on which the experimental electronic artist manipulates folky voices by giving them to an AI machine she calls Spawn. New song Frontier sounds like it could have been made either a thousand years in the past or in the future.

Those mourning the demise of grandiose indie band Wild Beasts are in luck this month, with a solo album imminent from their singer Hayden Thorpe, and first, the debut album from LA’s Shey Baba out today. Requiem’s emotive piano work and soaring vocals are very much in the same sphere.

Political punks Idles may have had their commercial breakthrough in the past year, but don’t sound any more polished on their first new song of 2019. Mercedes Marxist is a relentless sonic barrage, released as a standalone single this week.

Sea Girls were the only band nominated on the 10-strong BBC Sound of 2019 list at the start of this year. Now the London group are showing why they earned the slot with a noisy, catchy new single, Damage Done, out this week.

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