5 tracks for Friday (week7)
Every Friday, we’ll be posting "5 tracks for Friday". Tracks from past and present that caught our ears during the week in terms of quality and vibe…as simple as that.
You Got to Have Money by The Exits
Year: 1967
Label: Gemini Records
Originally tucked away as the B-side to "Under the Street Lamp," this LA outfit's other 45 quietly became the more enduring record, the kind of rare-soul discovery that's been passed hand to hand on the Northern Soul circuit for decades and later got the reissue treatment from Soul Jazz and Ace. It's built on a stomping, urgent backbeat and a vocal that sells desperation and swagger in the same breath
My Love Your Love by ZENA
Year: 2026
Label: Brownswood Recordings
Gilles Peterson put this on his Worldwide FM show back in March, and it's easy to hear why, Yohan Kebede (Kokoroko) and bassist Menelik channel Hailu Mergia and Mulatu Astatke through a psychedelic-funk, dub-inflected lens rather than treating Ethio-jazz as a museum piece. Warm, mid-tempo, endlessly loopable groove with a horn line built to sit under dialogue.
Subway Joe by Joe Bataan
Year: 1968
Label: Fania
Bataan's back in the conversation this season via a Wax Poetics revival interview, and "Subway Joe" is a good reminder why he never should have left it. New York Latin soul at its most propulsive, piano vamp, horns, a groove built for a chase scene or a title sequence set on a subway platform at 2am. It's already done time on the Smokin' Aces soundtrack and in Driver: Parallel Lines, proof this catalog syncs as easily as it swings.
Huit Octobre 1971 by Cortex Year: 1975 Label: Sonodisc / Charly Records (reissued by Wewantsounds)
Before it was one of the most sampled loops in hip-hop history, MF DOOM's "One Beer," Tyler the Creator's "Odd Toddler," Jaylib's "No Games" all run through it, “Huit Octobre 1971" was just a French jazz-funk outfit's fever dream of a track, all cascading electric piano and impossibly tight rhythm section. It's from Troupeau Bleu, an album that sat in obscurity for twenty years before crate-diggers turned it into gospel. There's arguably no better litmus test for "sync-proven": if a piece of music has already soundtracked a generation of rap classics by proxy, it knows exactly what it's doing under a film scene. Essential rare-groove listening either way.
Cantar das Kandakinhas by Pedro Ricardo
Year: 2023
Label: Soundway Records
Pedro Ricardo is a Portuguese multi-instrumentalist, DJ, and producer now based in Berlin, and "Cantar das Kandakinhas" is one of the standout cuts from his debut album Soprem Bons Ventos, a title that translates to "Good Winds Blow." The record threads together jazz, electronics, and Portuguese folk with strains of Cape Verdean, Brazilian, and Spanish music, layering in field recordings alongside live instrumentation to build something that feels both ancestral and entirely contemporary.