Tune-Yards – I can feel you creep into my private life

Now an official duo, with frontwoman Merrill Garbus’ long-time collaborator Nate Brenner credited as a co-producer, Tune-Yards’ new album, I can feel you creep into my private life, is their fullest sounding and most upbeat yet. Lead single Look at Your Hands combines afro-funk and disco elements, with obvious 80s influences filtered throughout it, and throughout the rest of the album. Heart Attack and Coast to Coast have the 80s all over them, in the use of synths, handclaps, gated reverb and Garbus' distorted vocals sampled through an MPC to make them sound more robotic.

Thematically however, Garbus deals with quite complex subject matter, exploring her relationship with whiteness and her internal conflict with it. On Colonizer, the duo experiment with Eastern sounds and tribal chants, as Garbus sings, 'I turn on my white woman's voice to contextualise acts of my white women friends / I cry my white woman tears cutting grooves in my cheeks to display what I meant'.

The album's eerie title appears twice on the album – first, at the end of its centrepiece Colonizer and then again on penultimate track Private Life, where Garbus' drone-y vocals are accompanied by a shrieking siren, making the words sound even more disturbing.

Despite the seriousness of the lyrics, I can feel you creep into my private life manages to remain an uplifting album, with a collection of intricately-crafted pop songs that tackle a range of important current issues.

Listen to: Heart Attack, Colonizer