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'Art Pop' Bands // p 1 of 1

Darren's favorite bands for his Song Of The Day filtered by Art Pop
502 Bands
Angel Olsen

Angel Olsen

Angel Olsen (born January 22, 1987) is an American singer-songwriter and musician from St. Louis, Missouri who lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

Early life and education

Angel Olsen was born on January 22, 1987 in St. Louis, Missouri. At age three, Olsen was adopted by a foster family that had cared for her since shortly after her birth. The difference in years between her and her parents left an impression. "Because there are so many decades of difference between us, I became more interested in what their childhood was like," she says of her parents, both of whom still live in St. Louis. "I fantasized about what it was like to be young in the ’30s and ’50s, more so than other kids my age." Olsen explained that "my mother just has this capacity for children."

Despite early adolescent aspirations to be a "pop star", her interests later shifted in high school. Olsen became more introverted, regularly attending punk rock and noise music shows at the Lemp Neighborhood Arts Center and the Creepy Crawl as well as Christian rock shows throughout the city. She began learning the piano and guitar and writing her own music. At the age of 16, she joined a local band called Good Fight, self-described as "a meeting of early No Doubt and punk rock." Two years after graduating from Tower Grove Christian High School, Olsen moved to Chicago.

Career

After releasing her first EP, Strange Cacti, and a debut studio album, Half Way Home, on Bathetic Records, Olsen signed with Jagjaguwar, ahead of her first full-band record, Burn Your Fire for No Witness, which was released on February 17, 2014. The closing track of the album, "Windows", was featured in the final episode of the Netflix original series 13 Reasons Why in 2017.

Olsen's third studio album, My Woman, was released on September 2, 2016. In a review for Consequence of Sound, critic Ciara Dolan described the album as a "startling record of unimpeachable strength and honesty", while Pitchfork's Jenn Pelly described it as "her best record yet".

In addition to her work with Bonnie "Prince" Billy and the Cairo Gang, Olsen has collaborated with a number of other notable figures of American indie rock, including Tim Kinsella of Cap'n Jazz, LeRoy Bach of Wilco and Cass McCombs. Her collaboration with Kinsella and Bach, as well as with Chicago poet Marvin Tate, resulted in the album Tim Kinsella Sings the Songs of Marvin Tate by Leroy Bach Featuring Angel Olsen which the group released on Indianapolis label Joyful Noise Recordings on December 3, 2013.

Olsen's fourth studio album, All Mirrors, was released on October 4, 2019 to critical acclaim. Laura Snapes of Pitchfork described the album as "breathtaking", and a "strong wind" that blows in and "leaves you undone", while Alexis Petridis of The Guardian described it as "challenging and intriguing", and Luke Saunders of Happy Mag described it as a change of "theatric transcendency", when compared to her previous releases.

Olsen plays a vintage Gibson S-1 guitar from 1979.

On August 28, 2020, Olsen released her fifth studio album Whole New Mess through Seasick Records.

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 'Lark'

'Lark'
Sunday, December 13, 2020

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Beck

Beck

Beck Hansen (born Bek David Campbell; July 8, 1970), known professionally as Beck, is an American musician, singer, songwriter, rapper, record producer, and multi-instrumentalist. He rose to fame in the early 1990s with his experimental and lo-fi style, and became known for creating musical collages of wide genre styles. Today, he musically encompasses folk, funk, soul, hip hop, electronic, alternative rock, country, and psychedelia. He has released 13 studio albums (3 of which were independently released), as well as several non-album singles and a book of sheet music.

Born in Los Angeles in 1970, Beck grew towards hip-hop and folk in his teens and began to perform locally at coffeehouses and clubs. He moved to New York City in 1989 and became involved in the city's small and fiery anti-folk movement. Returning to Los Angeles in the early 1990s, he cut his breakthrough single "Loser," which became a worldwide hit in 1994, and released his first major album, Mellow Gold, the same year. Odelay, released in 1996, topped critic polls and won several awards. He released the psychedelic Mutations in 1998, and the funk-infused Midnite Vultures in 1999. The soft-acoustic Sea Change in 2002 showcased a more serious Beck, and 2005's Guero returned to Odelay's sample-based production. The Information in 2006 was inspired by electro-funk, hip hop, and psychedelia; 2008's Modern Guilt was inspired by '60s pop music; and 2014's folk-infused Morning Phase won Album of the Year at the 57th Grammy Awards on February 8, 2015. His thirteenth studio album, Colors, was released in October 2017 after a long production process.

With a pop art collage of musical styles, oblique and ironic lyrics, and postmodern arrangements incorporating samples, drum machines, live instrumentation and sound effects, Beck has been hailed by critics and the public throughout his musical career as being among the most idiosyncratically creative musicians of 1990s and 2000s alternative rock. Two of Beck's most popular and acclaimed recordings are Odelay and Sea Change, both of which were ranked on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. The four-time platinum artist has collaborated with several artists and has made several contributions to soundtracks.

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 'Ramshackle'

'Ramshackle'
Thursday, January 31, 2019

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Björk

Björk

jörk Guðmundsdóttir (/bjɜːrk/; Icelandic: pjœr̥k]; born 21 November 1965) is an Icelandic singer, songwriter, composer, actress, record producer, and DJ. Over her four-decade career, she has developed an eclectic musical style that draws on a range of influences and genres spanning electronic, pop, experimental, classical, trip hop, IDM, and avant-garde music.

Born and raised in Reykjavík, she began her music career at age 11 and first gained international recognition as the lead singer of the alternative rock band the Sugarcubes, whose 1987 single "Birthday" was a hit on US and UK indie stations and a favorite among music critics. After the band's breakup, Björk embarked on a solo career in 1993, coming to prominence as a solo artist with albums such as Debut (1993), Post (1995), and Homogenic (1997), while collaborating with a range of artists and exploring a variety of multimedia projects.

Several of Björk's albums have reached the top 20 on the Billboard 200 chart, the most recent being Vulnicura (2015). Björk has had 31 singles reach the top 40 on pop charts around the world, with 22 top 40 hits in the UK, including the top 10 hits "It's Oh So Quiet", "Army of Me", and "Hyperballad". She is reported to have sold between 20 and 40 million records worldwide as of 2015. She has won the 2010 Polar Music Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Music in recognition of her "deeply personal music and lyrics, her precise arrangements and her unique voice." Björk was included in Time's 2015 list of the 100 most influential people in the world. She was ranked both sixtieth and eighty-first in Rolling Stone's 100 greatest singers and songwriters lists respectively. Björk also won five BRIT Awards, and has been nominated for 15 Grammy Awards.

Outside her music career, Björk starred in the 2000 Lars von Trier film Dancer in the Dark, for which she won the Best Actress Award at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, and was nominated for Academy Award for Best Original Song for "I've Seen It All". Her 2011 album Biophillia was marketed as an interactive app album with its own education program. Björk has also been an advocate for environmental causes in her home country Iceland. A full-scale retrospective exhibition dedicated to Björk was held at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2015.

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 'Venus as a Boy'

'Venus as a Boy'
Thursday, February 28, 2019

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Damon Albarn

Damon Albarn

Damon Albarn OBE (/ˈdeɪmən ˈælbɑːrn/; born 23 March 1968) is an English musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer, best known as the frontman and primary lyricist of the rock band Blur and as the co-founder, lead vocalist, instrumentalist, and primary songwriter of the virtual band Gorillaz.

Raised in Leytonstone, East London, and around Colchester, Essex, Albarn attended the Stanway School, where he met guitarist Graham Coxon and formed Blur, releasing their debut album Leisure in 1991. After spending long periods touring the US, Albarn's songwriting became increasingly influenced by British bands from the 1960s. The result was the Blur albums Modern Life Is Rubbish (1993), Parklife (1994) and The Great Escape (1995). All three albums received critical acclaim while Blur gained mass popularity in the UK, aided by a Britpop chart rivalry with Oasis. Subsequent albums such as Blur (1997), 13 (1999), and Think Tank (2003) incorporated influences from lo-fi, art rock, electronic and world music. These were followed by The Magic Whip (2015), Blur's first studio album in 12 years.

Albarn formed the virtual band Gorillaz in 1998 with comic book artist Jamie Hewlett. Drawing influences from hip hop, dub, pop, trip hop, and world music, Gorillaz released their self-titled debut album in 2001 to worldwide success, spawning successful follow-ups Demon Days (2005), Plastic Beach, The Fall (both released in 2010), Humanz (2017), The Now Now (2018) and the first season of their Song Machine project, Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez (2020). Although Albarn is the only permanent musical contributor, Gorillaz albums typically feature collaborations from a range of artists. Gorillaz are cited by the Guinness Book of World Records as the "Most Successful Virtual Band".

Albarn's other notable projects have included two supergroups: the Good, the Bad & the Queen and Rocket Juice & the Moon, working with the non-profit organization Africa Express, which he co-founded, and composing film soundtracks. He also scored the stage productions Monkey: Journey to the West (2008), Dr Dee (2012) and Wonder.land (2016). His debut solo studio album Everyday Robots was released in 2014, with his second The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows released in 2021.

In 2008, The Daily Telegraph ranked Albarn number 18 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". In 2016, Albarn received the Ivor Novello Award for Lifetime Achievement from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2016 New Year Honours for services to music. In 2020, Albarn was granted Icelandic citizenship.

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 'Everyday Robots'

'Everyday Robots'
Wednesday, December 22, 2021

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David Sylvian

David Sylvian

David Sylvian (born David Alan Batt, 23 February 1958) is an English singer-songwriter and musician who came to prominence in the late 1970s as frontman of the band Japan. The band's androgynous look and increasingly electronic sound made them an important influence on the UK's early-1980s New Romantic scene. Following their breakup, Sylvian embarked on a solo career with his debut album Brilliant Trees (1984). His solo work has been described by AllMusic as "far-ranging and esoteric," and has included collaborations with artists such as Ryuichi Sakamoto, Robert Fripp, Holger Czukay, and Fennesz.

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 'Wanderlust'

'Wanderlust'
Wednesday, June 17, 2020

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 'Darkest Dreaming'

'Darkest Dreaming'
Friday, April 5, 2019

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FKA Twigs

FKA Twigs

Tahliah Debrett Barnett (born 17 January 1988), known professionally as FKA Twigs (stylized as FKA twigs), is an English singer-songwriter, record producer, dancer, and actress. Born and raised in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, she became a backup dancer after moving to South London at age 17. She made her musical debut with the extended play EP1 (2012).

Her debut studio album, LP1, was released in August 2014 to critical acclaim, peaking at number 16 on the UK Albums Chart and number 30 on the US Billboard 200. It was later nominated for the 2014 Mercury Prize. She released the M3LL155X EP in 2015 to further critical acclaim, as well as her second studio album Magdalene four years later. Her work has been described as "genre-bending", drawing on various genres including electronic music, trip hop, R&B, and avant-garde.

Early Life

Tahliah Debrett Barnett was born and raised in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. Her mother is an English woman of partly Spanish descent who used to be a dancer and gymnast, and her father, a musician, is Jamaican. She was raised by her mother and stepfather, a "jazz fanatic", and did not meet her father until she was 18. Barnett grew up in Gloucestershire, and described the county as "kind of in the middle of nowhere". She attended St Edward's School, Cheltenham, a private Catholic school for boys and girls aged 11 to 18. Her education at the school was funded by an academic scholarship. From a young age, she undertook opera and ballet lessons and took part in several St Edward's School productions.

At age 16, Barnett started making music in youth clubs. At 17, she moved to South London to pursue a career as a dancer, where she also attended the BRIT School. After changing her focus from dance to music, she transferred from the BRIT School to Croydon College to pursue an education in fine arts. She worked as a backup dancer in music videos by artists such as Kylie Minogue, Plan B, Ed Sheeran, Taio Cruz, Dionne Bromfield, Jessie J, and Wretch 32. Barnett was a backup dancer for Jessie J in her 2010 video for "Do It like a Dude", and appeared again in her 2011 video for "Price Tag". She also appeared in Dionne Bromfield's video "Yeah Right". In 2011, she appeared in a two-minute BBC comedy sketch titled Beyoncé Wants Groceries, in which she was a backup dancer in a supermarket. At 18, Barnett began working with local London producers to try to find what she calls "her sound". Around this time is when she wrote "I'm Your Doll". She ended up producing a lot of "really bad demos". For a time, she worked as a hostess in a strip club and also sang periodically at The Box.

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 'cellophane'

'cellophane'
Wednesday, December 1, 2021

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Julia Jacklin

Julia Jacklin

Julia Jacklin (born 30 August 1990) is an Australian singer-songwriter based in Sydney, Australia.

Jacklin grew up in the Blue Mountains, Australia, in a family of school teachers. Inspired by Britney Spears, at the age of 10, she took classical singing lessons before joining a high school band which did Avril Lavigne and Evanescence covers. She studied social policy at Sydney University, and after graduating she lived in a garage in Glebe, a suburb of Sydney, and worked in a factory making essential oils. Growing up, Jacklin did not know anyone who was a full-time musician, and her family did not understand what it meant to be a musician: “They didn’t really see it as being something that was going to work out, at all,” Jacklin says in an interview with Sound of Boston. She continued to perform locally, and formed the band Salta together with Liz Hughes in 2012.

She gained an audience and significant critical acclaim through her first two singles "Pool Party" and "Coming of Age" which both received radio airplay on BBC Radio 6 Music. She has been touring extensively since March 2016 in the US, UK, Europe and Australia, appearing at various festivals (most notably End of the Road Festival, Electric Picnic and South by Southwest). She has played headline gigs and has also supported artists such as First Aid Kit, Whitney, Marlon Williams and Okkervil River. In 2016, Rolling Stone Australia tipped Jacklin as one of their "Future Is Now" artists, while Triple J nominated her for a J Award for Unearthed Artist of the Year. Jacklin did not consider herself a full-time musician until August 2016, when she really started touring and figured she could not manage her regular job anymore

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 'L.A. Dream'

'L.A. Dream'
Tuesday, September 14, 2021

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 'Good Guy'

'Good Guy'
Tuesday, December 3, 2019

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 'Pressure to Party'

'Pressure to Party'
Friday, September 27, 2019

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 'Turn Me Down'

'Turn Me Down'
Friday, April 12, 2019

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Peter Gabriel

Peter Gabriel

Peter Brian Gabriel (born 13 February 1950) is an English singer, songwriter, record producer and activist who rose to fame as the original lead singer and flautist of the progressive rock band Genesis. After leaving Genesis in 1975, Gabriel launched a successful solo career with "Solsbury Hill" as his first single. His 1986 album, So, is his best-selling release and is certified triple platinum in the UK and five times platinum in the U.S. The album's most successful single, "Sledgehammer", won a record nine MTV Awards at the 1987 MTV Video Music Awards and, according to a report in 2011, it was MTV's most played music video of all time.

Gabriel has been a champion of world music for much of his career. He co-founded the WOMAD festival in 1982. He has continued to focus on producing and promoting world music through his Real World Records label. He has also pioneered digital distribution methods for music, co-founding OD2, one of the first online music download services. Gabriel has also been involved in numerous humanitarian efforts. In 1980, he released the anti-apartheid single "Biko". He has participated in several human rights benefit concerts, including Amnesty International's Human Rights Now! tour in 1988, and co-founded the Witness human rights organisation in 1992. Gabriel developed The Elders with Richard Branson, which was launched by Nelson Mandela in 2007.

Gabriel has won three Brit Awards—winning Best British Male in 1987, six Grammy Awards, thirteen MTV Video Music Awards, the first Pioneer Award at the BT Digital Music Awards, the Q magazine Lifetime Achievement, the Ivor Novello Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the Polar Music Prize. He was made a BMI Icon at the 57th annual BMI London Awards for his "influence on generations of music makers".

In recognition of his many years of human rights activism, he received the Man of Peace award from the Nobel Peace Prize laureates in 2006, and Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2008. AllMusic has described Gabriel as "one of rock's most ambitious, innovative musicians, as well as one of its most political". He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Genesis in 2010, followed by his induction as a solo artist in 2014. In March 2015, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of South Australia in recognition of his achievements in music.

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 'Indigo'

'Indigo'
Friday, July 15, 2022

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 'We Do What We're Told'

'We Do What We're Told'
Monday, November 23, 2020

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 'Mother of Violence'

'Mother of Violence'
Wednesday, June 5, 2019

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Rubblebucket

Rubblebucket

Rubblebucket is an American art-pop and indie-rock band from Brooklyn, NY. The primary members are musical couple (now separated) Annakalmia Traver and Alex Toth.

In March 2008, Rubblebucket self-released their debut album, Rose's Dream, under the name Rubblebucket Orchestra and began to tour full-time. They were chosen by Spin magazine as a "Must-hear artist from the 2009 CMJs". On October 13, they released their self-titled second studio album, and officially changed their name to Rubblebucket. In December, they won a Boston Music Award for Live Act of the Year.

In 2010, Rubblebucket appeared at festivals such as High Sierra, All Good Music Festival, and the Liberate Music and Dance Festival. On October 19, 2010, they released their Triangular Daisies EP; it included a cover of the Beatles' "Michelle", which Paste magazine named on their list of 50 Greatest Beatles Covers of All Time.

In Spring 2011 Rubblebucket released their third full-length album, Omega La La. It was recorded at DFA studios and produced by Eric Broucek and mastered by Joe Lambert. On April 4, 2011, the band released it as a free download before its physical release on June 21 through MRI Distribution. Promotional performances for the album included an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in 2012. The band also performed at Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival for the 1st time where they “revved up like an indie-rock Miami Sound Machine” (Rolling Stone), including multiple sets throughout the weekend

In 2013, Rubblebucket collaborated with Questlove, Tune-Yards singer Merrill Garbus, Angelique Kidjo and poet Akua Naru to create a new compilation album for Fela Kuti's Lady. In 2014, Rubblebucket served as Arcade Fire's "The Reflektors" at the Glastonbury Festival. Customary to most Arcade Fire shows of the time, "The Reflektors" wore massive papier-mâché heads as a fake-out to fans.

Also in 2014, Rubblebucket recorded with John Congleton and signed with Communion Records to release Survival Sounds. Paste said about the record, "Survival Sounds should be a victory lap." The album's reception was positive, gaining the support of many online publications and radio stations, such as NPR's Tiny Desk. "Came Out of a Lady" was featured in feature film Drinking Buddies. While on tour, singer Annakalmia Traver was diagnosed with first stage, clear-cell ovarian cancer, and underwent and completed treatment while on tour.

Rubblebucket embarked on a Spring tour that began in March 2015 across the United States, with support from Vacationer. Also in 2015, Rubblebucket performed at the BAM Opera House Master Mix: Red Hot + Arthur Russell in New York City along with other acts including Cults, Dev Hynes, and Arcade Fire.

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 'Formless and New'

'Formless and New'
Tuesday, January 15, 2019

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 'Lemonade'

'Lemonade'
Saturday, November 24, 2018

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