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There's some brilliantly relatable lines about romance in the digital age ("Checking my phone and hope that something magical had happened over night") and a chorus that's deceptively uplifting, Khan sighing "you've got to do it for me/Cos I'm too weak to live my life", but the breezy guitars beneath sweeping away any lingering sadness. The video, shot by Fake Laugh guitarist Hassan Anderson, has a similar effect - Khan bundled up against the cold of wintry West London, but maintaining enough spirit to keep things endearingly goofy.
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'24/7' is a song that accepts not everyone in the world can be out spitting rainbows and butterflies all the time, and that's okay. It's a low-key anthem of strength for those times when things get too much; a friendly arm around your shoulder to let you know you're not alone, that feeling blue is totally human and normal. "You've got to lose you just a little/Lose your cool just a little/I won't judge you, not even a little," she sings at one point. It's an attitude everyone should adopt when it comes to helping others through tough times, championed through Kehlani's sublimest moment yet.
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"[There's been] lots of positive energy, really warm receptions and a lot of people saying 'I love this'," says Ellery of the shows so far. "It's exciting."
Excitement and inspiration are his buzzwords of the conversation. Over 45 minutes, he'll say them constantly, about everything from starting the band, to making music videos and the prospect of a second album. There's an unwavering sense of positivity about the two; an unstoppable enthusiasm that rose phoenix-like from the ashes of a much bleaker mindset.
"When we first met, we were both quite out of love with our existence and our worlds we were in," Ellery says. "A lot of our early relationship was rejecting and escaping what was going on. And the realisation being that you are part of it, you are complicit in it and, through your actions, you put out positivity."
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The title of the record comes from a text your daughter sent. Why did you feel it was right for this album?
"For lack of a better answer, her older sister Annabelle, I had a song for her on our third record called 'For Annabelle'. Ivy is the second oldest and she's like 'when's my song dad?' They know barely what I do. I was like 'good question, but again I don't write like that'. I couldn't if you asked me to, but I know her time's coming. They all go into it so much - it's like 'if only I could explain to you how many lyrics you're a part of'.
"But I remember thinking it was funny as shit that she sent that to my kid's teacher. She was three at the time and just typed in some garbage to my wife's phone and it happened to be a reply to one of the teachers. And it's 'why are you OK' without any punctuation. I was like 'what an interesting statement or question'. It was just something that I thought so was funny and I was on a nude-ish beach in Rio on tour, somewhere in south America. I was just staring at boobs and butts and pecs and abs. It was a day off and me and my buddy Creighton and my buddy Chris were drinking caipirinhas and just enjoying the scenery of it and enjoying all of it, especially as Americans. As the sun goes down, the chairs get folded up and you kind of forget that you were looking out there and it's just the vastness of the ocean again and the sunset behind us. There's these two alien people standing on the beach with their heads in their hands and the sun's hitting them. What in the shit could this possibly be besides aliens? They don't understand that you're not supposed to be sad in this moment. It's glorious and it was so strikingly beautiful.
"I took my cellphone out and took pictures of it. I was probably drunk and once I looked back I was like this is a striking image and once I put the two together with the words… it could go either way with it. Yes they're probably meditating, but are they crying? I think that's why I chose that. Once the image was settled, what I wanted to do for the cover, the words went hand in hand."
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What do you do when everything you’ve known for almost a third of your life comes crashing down? For Meilyr Jones, the former frontman of Aberystwyth psych-poppers Race Horses, who split in 2013, the answer was to gather up his things and head to pastures new.
Jones chose to move to Rome for six weeks with little to no knowledge of the language or the city. “Everything was drawing me there,” he says, now back in London, referring to his growing interest in the likes of romantic poet Byron and 19th-century French composer Hector Berlioz, both of whom had significant experiences there.
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There a lot of religious themes on the album, from the title to the lyrics and the artwork. Where do they stem from?
CK: "I find religion to be fascinating, confounding and frustrating. I'm not religious, but I'm interested in the relationship between all religions and the characters that come into our lives through these stories, which I think are mostly made up by men to justify their position of power in the world. Sometimes there's some good morals, sometimes there's some interesting things. I've just become interested in it and writing about it."
What sort of questions about religion are you asking on this record?
CK: "Just classic stuff - why do people believe? Why don't I believe? What is it about it that's so compelling? What's real? What's not real? Where are we headed? I feel like our culture is increasingly coming to a head, a culture clash of people who are strict religious believers and people who are like 'let's head into the future'. How do you have that conversation without resulting in a culture clash that eliminates the world?"
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A couple of hours before Wolf Alice are due to take the stage for the opening night (March 26) of their residency at the O2 Forum in London's Kentish Town, they post a photo of bassist Theo Ellis' elbow. It's bright pink and hugely swollen, like a solid, fleshy balloon. Before it, there's a note from Theo explaining why he won't be playing - "I have developed a really bad infection surrounding my elbow leaving me in considerable pain with limited mobility and on a lot of very sickly medicines".
It's far from the ideal start to the run of dates. These are probably the last UK headline shows the band will play around their debut album, 'My Love Is Cool', having already triumphed at Brixton Academy last year and coming at the end of their third UK tour within a year. They should be a celebration of all that's happened to the band in that time - an album that came within a few hundred copies of the top of the charts, sold out shows full of rabid fans fully enthralled by everything Wolf Alice have become. "Tonight's show will still be spectacular," promises Theo in his note, but, beforehand, it's easy to question that statement.
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Queen Ells repping for the women on R1
BBC 1Xtra recently hosted a debate at London's Women Of The World festival for International Women's Day. It asked whether women can ever be as successful as men in the music industry and, this week (March 22), DJ Annie Mac and Wolf Alice's Ellie Rowsell dissected some of what was said to hold their own discussion on the subject. It's an interesting chat that'll make you think a bit harder about things. Listen to it in full here and get a taste of some of the pair's best points below.
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Running around the boat, Elf Kid and Blakie seem oblivious to how excited everyone is about them right now. The latter bounds over to NME, asks our name and then leans towards the dictaphone, shouting "Watch out Rhian though, it's Blakie" before legging it up the stairs. That energy and enthusiasm is palpable all week - grime's first real big move into the US is a roaring success and a sign of even bigger things to come.
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In America, there's a cult-like following around the company. Palomo likens the fanatical audience to ravers. "Some people get their high from good living and, in some regard, it can almost be as obsessive a culture as rave or drug culture," he says. "But obviously operating on completely opposite schedules. Those circadian schedules are never going to sync up, but it's definitely a phenomenon."
For the class, Palomo delivers a set of upbeat house tunes and peppy instructor Lindsay Buckley uses the strong beats to choreograph dance-like moves while everyone's cycling on the bikes. The white walls of the room have soft pink and purple lighting projected onto them with the main lights dimmed, and it kind of feels like we're in a (very clean, very swanky) club.
"Lately I've been DJing way more techno and way more aggressive, straight-to-tape techno too. This isn't a warehouse at three in the morning, it's a different vibe altogether," says Palomo about his music choice. "I've always been a fan of house and all its different iterations, and that felt like a little bit more of a universal pump-up music as opposed to trying to get heady."
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When she said her new album "could change the sound of pop music", she might have been right
During her set at Hype Hotel, she performed all of the recently released 'Vroom Vroom' EP, some SOPHIE tracks like 'Lemonade', two songs from 'Sucker' and a handful of new songs. Those fresh cuts follow 'Vroom Vroom''s weird electronic pop cues, more suited to a rave than to a pop concert with their glitchy beats and dark, doomy atmospheres. If they're a taste of Charli's next album, then her recent claims on social media that it "could change the sound of pop music" could be very accurate indeed.
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Stevie Wonder was a big influence on Obama
When one audience member asked the panel which album had had the biggest influence on them, choices like Queen Latifah and The Beatles were cited. Obama, however, opted for Stevie Wonder's 'Talking Book', calling it the "first album of my whole life".
"My granddad - we called him Southside because he lived on the south side of Chicago, not very imaginative - loved music," she told the crowd. "He was a carpenter and collected jazz. He had turntables all around the house and reel-to-reels. I used to go to his house and play with his dog called Rex - again, not very imaginative - and play music with him.
"For my birthday, he bought me 'Talking Book' and I played it over and over and over again, until 'Songs In The Key Of Life' and then I played that over and over and over again. [Wonder's] songs talked about unity and love and peace. His songs are impacting and push you to think about how you could affect the world. Stevie all the way."
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With north London's Crows, patience is a virtue. The quartet are one of the UK's most brutal and brilliant live bands, guitarist Steve Goddard, bassist Jith Amarasinghe and drummer Laurence Rushworth deploying throbbing garage-psych while frontman James Cox eyeballs the crowd with a fierce intensity that feels like he's staring into your soul. But if you want to pick up their records and take their fearsome noise into your front room, you'll have yourself a bit of a wait.
Last single 'Pray' was put out a little under a year ago, and since then all's been quiet. Their debut EP 'Unwelcome Light' (out March 25 via Telharmonium) changes all that though. Five tracks recorded live and designed to segue seamlessly into each other, it's not only the biggest release Crows have done, but also their finest - a mini masterpiece of howling garage riffs and subjects varying from "floods in America" and "how fucked the snakeskin trade is, from the point of view of the snake".
Recorded with Adam Jaffrey (Ekkah, Best Friends), the process behind the EP was fittingly intense. "I did all my vocals in a pitch black corridor because I wanted to get the reverb from it, which sounds great but I was literally singing in pitch black for 25 minutes," James says.
At the end of the month, the band will support Wolf Alice at London's Forum. For a group who thrive off the kind of sweaty, rabid intimacy you only usually find in small venues, they're remarkably unfazed by the prospect. "It just means there's more people to get around with my stare", says James with a shrug, but don't expect to be let off lightly.
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How did you celebrate the news [of the album going to Number One]?
"I didn't really, in a party sense. We were very focused on the [Brixton] shows and it's a really, really long set. I've been spending time with my brother, as well, who I haven't seen for a while. He's 15. I actually ended up just going back to my house and playing FIFA with him until 2 o'clock in the morning. And then I was in bed. I slept under a towel cos I didn't have another duvet. The night that my album went to Number One I slept under a towel."
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The Maccabees are headlining their first UK festival this summer - Latitude in Suffolk, which takes place July 14-17. Here's the band's guitarist Felix White on why the event - which will also see sets from The National, New Order, Grimes, Kurt Vile, Chvrches, Courtney Barnett and Father John Misty - will be bloody amazing.
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"I'm a bit jetlagged," frontman Matt Healy admits as he takes a seat on a fold-up white chair before doors open in central London. Not that you can tell - he's been pacing energetically around the room since NME arrived and talks at a mile a minute, full of enthusiasm and passion.
Outside, hordes of fans line the street from The White Space gallery near Leicester Square, round the corner and all the way up to Tottenham Court Road. Some have been camping out all night, patiently braving the cold so they can meet the band. It was a similar story in New York, too, with the Lower East Side overrun by 1975 fans.
"We're amazed by how mental it actually is," admits Healy under the glow of pink neon signs. "I don't know how much kids knew about what it was going to be like, but [New York] was pretty intimate. I liked it."
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Leschper's past studies feed into Mothers in every way. She describes her songwriting process as "like carving the way out of a block of marble to make a sculpture", while even the band's name comes from an art project she worked on. "I was working on a lot of visual work that was based on motherly instincts and nature," she explains. "I was really interested in nesting behaviour in animals. I have two pet rabbits and I'd been reading about how they are in the wild. Female rabbits will start pulling out their fur with their teeth so they can make a nest for their young. I was really interested in those sacrifices and how I could correspond them with sacrificing yourself for art."
