5 tracks for Friday (week8)
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.
Can We Pretend by Trus’me
Year: 2009
Label: Prime Numbers
The track is an exercise in restraint and atmosphere. While many house producers of the late 2000s were chasing high-octane builds, Trus'me went in the opposite direction. Built on a skeletal, bubbling bassline, courtesy of Kenny 'Mac' Martin, and punctuated by Amp Fiddler’s hazy, Rhodes-inflected chords, the song creates a kind of nocturnal gravity. It’s a track that feels like it’s being pulled through a filter of smoke and late-night solitude.
If You Want Me by The Womack Sisters
Year: 2025
Label: Daptone Records
It’s rare to find music that sounds this much like a lost transmission from a 1970s soul revue, but that’s precisely the magic of The Womack Sisters. On "If You Want Me," released via the Daptone imprint, the trio leans heavily into the warm, analog embrace of classic girl-group soul. It’s a track that feels less like a modern recording and more like a beautifully preserved artefact, complete with crisp, clean guitar lines, a steady, unhurried groove, and harmonies that lock together with a kind of familial telepathy.
Pebbles by Bricknastly
Year: 2024
Label: FAMM
"Pebbles" by the Dublin-based experimental outfit Bricknasty is a jarring, disorienting piece of work that feels less like a song and more like a fever dream caught on tape. The track leans into a chaotic, genre-fluid aesthetic that feels perfectly at home in the messier corners of the modern alternative scene, defined by deliberately unkempt production, all distorted, clattering percussion and thick, sludge-like bass that seems to vibrate through the floorboards.
Round About Midnight by Dizzy Reece
Year: 1959
Label: Blue Note Records
'Round About Midnight" is the definitive jazz standard, a composition of such profound, lingering beauty that it functions less like a song and more like a permanent fixture of the nocturnal psyche. While Thelonious Monk originally authored this bruised, melancholic masterpiece, Dizzy Reece’s interpretation, found on his landmark debut for Blue Note, Blues in Trinity, approaches the material with a distinctly cool, late-night precision. Recorded in London, the track captures a young, Jamaican-born trumpeter operating with a level of poise that belies his years.
Blow My Mind by Jamiroquai
Year: 1993
Label: Sony Soho Square
"Blow Your Mind" stands as one of the quintessential pillars of the early 90s acid jazz movement, serving as a standout track from Jamiroquai’s debut studio album, Emergency on Planet Earth. It’s a breezy, exceptionally smooth jazz-funk composition that feels remarkably loose and improvised, particularly in the later portions of the album version, where the band settles into a sprawling, instrumental jam that highlights their technical prowess.