Imagine. Your first single is released, and, within days, you triumph in our Tracks Of The Week competition. Yowza! Well, that's exactly what's happened with Mirador, whose debut track Feels Like Gold achieved exactly that, leaving runner-up Tuk Smith & The Restless Hearts eating their literal dust. Meanwhile, the runner-up to the runner-up was The Vintage Caravan.
Below, you'll find eight more candidates for our weekly rock'n'roll tournament. Please take your seats.
Eric Gales - Don’t Wanna Go Home (feat Joe Bonamassa)
Oooh, this one’s juicy. "That may be the most rocking song on the album,” Gales says of this slinked-up, sink-your-teeth-into-it blueser from his upcoming tribute to his late brother Manuel, AKA Little Jimmy King. “Me and Joe looked at each other and I told him, 'Man, I think this is the one you should be on'. And he said, 'Hey man, let's do it. ' We broke out the rare Les Pauls – Joe took the solo in the middle, I took the ride-out, and we went for it.”
Palace Of The King - Birds Of A Feather
Spiritedly littered with rich, raunchy Black Crowes-isms (not to mention a few lyrical nods), the Aussies’ latest is an all-swinging, all-strutting southern rocker that got our toes tapping in a heartbeat. “This one’s for the Robinson brothers,” says POTK frontman Tim Henwood. “We’ve always resonated with their dynamic — the way friction and brotherhood can create something magical. ‘Birds of a Feather’ is about that connection and what it can produce when the music really matters.”
De’Wayne - Forever
Our favourite new Texan rocker (in the most colourful, non-purist sense of the term) teamed up with Utah indie-pop guy I Don’t Know How But They Found Me on this ultra-slinky, Prince-hewn little number. Sexy, luxurious and so groovy it feels wrong to remain stationary while listening, it makes classic synth-laden disco and funk sensibilities feel fresh and urgent. We can’t get enough of it right now. One of our favourites from De’Wayne’s new album, June, which just came out.
Tyler Bryant - Falling Up
After years of band life, Tyler Bryant has parked the ‘And The Shakedown’ portion of his moniker and flown solo. With this creative independence, a new studio freshly built and his first child on the way (with musician wife Rebecca Lovell, one half of rootsy sister duo Larkin Poe), this two-minute blues rocker has the air of something that just burst out of him. It’s like hearing Freddie King’s Going Down with Tyler’s youthful but heavy, dirty swagger driving it forward. “It’s a reckless moment captured on tape,” Bryant says. “That’s the kinda thing I grew up on.”
Hollow Souls (feat Chris Tapp) - Bad Things
Cold Stares mainman Chris Tapp joins Kris Barras and his new collective on this soul-flecked blues rocker, his sensuous yet gritty croon pairing well with the charismatic tones of HS vocalist-in-chief Phoebe Jane. “I have admired Chris and the work of Cold Stares for a long while,” Barras says, “and I’ve sort of been waiting for the right track to work on together to drop out of my head. I knew instantly he would take this song up ten notches. He did, and I’m so grateful to have him involved.”
Starbenders - Hello Goodbye
Swapping their retro flavours of yore for a moodily dancey, 90s-inflected vibe, Starbenders are on a mellow but driving kick with Hello Goodbye. In places it’s almost like hearing the lovechild of Robert Smith and Taylor Swift, with Kimi Shelter and her stylish rock posse leaning into cool, dreamy textures (think darkly expansive, ringing guitar tones and a punchy pop melody) – and all of it built around a big, straight-for-the-chest chorus.
Tedeschi Trucks Band & Leon Russell – Feelin' Alright (Feat. Dave Mason and Anders Osborne)
The second single to be released from Mad Dogs & Englishmen Revisited (Live At Lockn’), the upcoming live album from Tedeschi Trucks Band and the late Leon Russell, Feelin' Alright (a none-more 70s song title) may be the most uplifting thing you'll hear all year, winding its way to a celestial, gospel-driven conclusion in less than five minutes via pristine soloing from Derek Trucks, transecendent piano playing from the great Chris Stainton, a horn section that pumps, and a choir of heavenly angels that includes Rita Coolidge and Claudia Lennear. Glorious.
Kula Shaker - Broke As Folk
In which Crispin Mills and chums create something of a late-60s epic, tugging an early Pink Floyd-style intro into a song that includes bits that sound like The Doors via Dave Greenfield's keyboard solo on the Stranglers' cover of Walk On By, with a hit of early electric Dylan about the chorus. "Broke As Folk is a song for everyone who didn’t fly into Jeff Bezos’s wedding, who’s not the 1%," says Mills. "The world is broke and has been for a while. So this is about all that. It’s also about counting one’s blessings, being grateful for the spiritual joys that money can’t buy. Like friends and family and foraging for mushrooms." Preach, brother Mills, preach!
