Weekly Music Roundup: Charlie XCX, Dos Santos, and Ghost Hounds

This week, new music from Charli XCX, Dos Santos, and Ghost Hounds.  Also, Saul Williams and Ancient Infinity Orchestra.

Charli XCX Releases Music, Fashion, Film

It seems like Charli XCX has been going nonstop since her album Brat took over 2024 and literally colored the year with its distinctive shade of green. Since then she’s made a mockumentary about that moment, gotten into acting, and done the soundtrack for the film version of Wuthering Heights, among other things. Today she released her new LP, called Music, Fashion, Film – a nod to three creative pursuits she’s become deeply involved in, and featuring on the cover three icons of those fields: musician John Cale (ex-Velvet Underground), designer Marc Jacobs, and director Martin Scorsese. It’s a measure of Charli’s pull that she was able to get all three into a room together for the photo shoot. And the album is a measure of just how much work she has done in trying to figure out her own identity at a time when she found herself in the biggest limelight imaginable. The songs are constantly asking the question “who do you think you are?” and the answers are at times honest or elusive, cheeky or pained. Sonically, too, Charli plays with her identity, or at least her musical one. She uses the tropes of rock – the lead track is even called “Rock Music,” and guitars roar through many o the album’s songs. “Camera” is one of them; the song is all about making music and film, and questioning whether she’s being stupid (“being fuckin’ stupid,” actually) trying to be “a girl on the screen.” The chorus answers that question with one of the album’s most unvarnished and direct lyrics: "all I know is how it makes me feel.” 

Latin Psychedelia, From Chicago, By Dos Santos

Dos Santos is an alternative-Latin rock band from Chicago led by Alex E Chavez. The band has made a heady mix of rock, psychedelia, and various stream of Latin music over the course of four LPs, with a fifth on the way next month. Yesterday they released the title track of the album, “Es Amor,” which is actually a reworking of a song by Chavez’s father from several decades ago. The guitars chime, the vocals are often refracted through various effects, and an electric organ harkens back to the sound of an earlier time. With its blend of thumping rock drums and a plaintive, almost bolero-like melody, the song offers a totally organic blend of musical languages.   

The album Es Amor comes out on August 28.   

Ghost Hounds Release Apocalyptic Blues-Rock Song

The band Ghost Hounds make songs that revel in the sounds of the blues-rock and country-rock of the 70s, and their new single, “Something Wicked,” joins a long list of End-Of-Days blues songs going all the way back to Robert Johnson’s “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day.” This one sounds like it drew inspiration from Stephen King’s The Stand, with its apocalyptic landscape and its intimations of something wicked coming. The drums tread ominously, the guitars snarl, and lead singer SAVNT channels generations of soul and blues-rock singers as he sets the scene, lays down the warning, and then concludes, “nothing can be done.”

Ghost Hounds release their new album Justified on August 21.  

Saul Williams – A Different Kind of Preacher

You can refer to Saul Williams as a singer, a rapper, a poet, or a spoken word artist, and all those will be correct, and none will be sufficient. If you saw the movie Sinners (and if you didn’t, stop reading this right now and go stream it), Williams plays the preacher whose son will be our guide through a night of wonder, horror, and music. Now, Williams returns to music with a new album, Leap Life, coming on August 28; yesterday, he dropped two singles, including this track called “Mazahua.” Named for the Indigenous people of central Mexico, the song is built on a series of plaintive synthesizer chords, with Saul Williams delivering his text over a web of other vocal sounds.  That text is simple, minimalist, and all the more powerful for it: “if you ever feel/that there are systems against you,” he intones at one point, “we destroy those systems.” At the first appearance of this last phrase – which Williams repeats relentlessly – several layers of percussion enter; but eventually the music gives way to what sounds like a field recording of traditional pipe and drum music, as Williams reflects on the worth given, or not, to the lives of different groups of people.  

As Ancient Infinity Orchestra Says, It’s Always About Liberation

Ancient Infinity Orchestra is a big (usually ten piece) band from Leeds, England, that draws on the spiritual traditions of South Asian music and the spiritual jazz of John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and the like. Their new album, It’s Always About Liberation, suggests both the freedom that comes from making music, especially in those improvised moments that happen once the band sets up one of its grooves, and the communal effort required to protect the idea of freedom. This might be best summed up in the track “Triton,” which sets up a steady, almost processional rhythm, over which horns and winds chatter, converse, and take flight. But the key moment is the ending, when all the band’s voices join in, singing a wordless melody that is both simple and memorable.