New Music Friday: OMG the Ava Max album rollout is happening

Notes on this week’s new releases:

• OMG What’s Happening is, whichever way you look at it, the quint­es­sen­tial 2020 song title. Is Ava Max, who currently stands at 33.5m monthly Spotify listeners, making her the world’s 47th biggest act, the quint­es­sen­tial 2020 popstar? That’s another con­ver­sa­tion for another day. Let’s not do it now.
• Daniel Briskin, a very important (and decent) new popstar from north London, has released a new song that starts off as one thing and ends up as another thing. Both those things are good things.
• British chanteuse Blithe, of ‘did a big interview with her a while back’ fame, returns today with the v sparky If I Ain’t The One.
• French singer 1 Marina Kaye releases her sparse and spooky new single Double Life today. As with previous single The Whole 9 (also highly listen­able) she made it with David Stewart and Jessica Agombar, two song­writers who’ve appeared on Popjustice in the past in slightly different roles and are having a bit of a Moment right now, having recently knocked out Dynamite for BTS and that quite good Jonas Brothers single. Marina says this song was partly inspired by the writing session’s proximity to the Jack The Ripper museum. (???)
• The new Oz one, Murder, hits a mark somewhere between Lana and Sia, but also sounds like nothing else I heard while scouring hundreds of songs for this week’s playlist, and it’s really quite brilliant.
• Next time someone on Twitter is wanging on about “where are all the modern protest songs???etc”, point them to #freebrit­ney by Holy Spearit.
• Anna Straker‘s one of the artists I spoke to in that marathon Zoom session during lockdown. Seems a long time ago now, doesn’t it? All that madness? Anyway she’s got a new track with Gabrielle ‘Prior To Them Closing Their Last Branch In 2008 I Used To Buy My Batteries At M’ Aplin, and very enjoyable it is too.
• Navvy‘s The Final Pieces EP is out today and it’s not quite all the feels but it’s the vast majority of them.
• In ‘egregious noughties anthem inter­pol­a­tion’ news, hit play on the Sigala and James Arthur song and I guarantee that within one second you’ll be screaming “SIGALA AND JAMES ARTHUR WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?” A truly extraordin­ary piece of music.