Each week during Left of the Dial, KUTX Music Director, Rick McNulty shares the best song he heard this week.
Blur is remembered for “Song 2” or as Damon Albarn’s first band, but they were also among the most innovative and enduring of the 90s Britpop scene. While contemporaries like Oasis dominated the charts, Blur’s recordings towards the latter part of the 90s distanced themselves from the scene with experiments in electronic music, psychedelic, and the underground sounds of American indie rock. With hindsight, those records heralded the sounds Albarn would explore in Gorillaz, but also that their lukewarm reception may be a case of the world not being ready yet for the music they were creating.
After a long hiatus and a few brief reconnections, Blur has announced their first record since 2015’s unexpected release The Magic Whip. The Ballad of Darren is due out in July, and its first single “The Narcissist” is the Best Thing I Heard this week.
This is the biggest surprise of the year. Not that the music is great, but that it even exists at all!
-Rick McNulty
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