Remembering D’Angelo, and More Music News This Month

October felt like a collision between beauty and unrest — a month where music refused to stand still. Voices rose from Beirut to Brooklyn, from protest to pure chaos: Yasmine Hamdan turned memory into resistance, Geese made rock sound dangerous again and Makaya McCraven stretched jazz into new shapes. Even The Weeknd and Giorgio Moroder found themselves in Gaspar Noé’s fever dream. Beyond the music, artists united under No Music For Genocide, proving that silence can be louder than any chorus, while the world said goodbye to one of its brightest flames: D’Angelo.

And, as always, don’t miss official playlists on Spotify and Tidal.

New Album: Yasmine Hamdan – I remember I forget بنسى وبتذكر

“Northern is the wind of home / To those doors that open to the north / Tonight, I’ll send with the northern wind / To reach and look for the loved ones”. The Tarweeda is a traditional Palestinian women’s folk song – a coded form of communication through which women historically expressed sorrow and joy while resisting occupation. On her new album I Remember I Forget, Lebanese singer Yasmine Hamdan revisits and reimagines this symbolic tradition, using music as a language of message and memory – of pain, but also of hope, love and longing.

Hamdan’s vocals draw on the melodic richness of Arabic music, while her sound world leans towards something darker: electronic, trip-hop, pop, at times cinematic. The album arrives eight years after Al Jamilat, following collaborations in electronic music and film. Reflections on the genocide in Palestine and her homeland’s ongoing crises were the main inspirations: “My connection to Lebanon was the ground from where I started composing. Despite the pain and charged emotions I felt at witnessing what was happening to my birthplace, these feelings were surmounted by a sense of tenderness and familiarity that induced hope and inspiration,” she writes in the liner notes. 

There are flashes of lightness (Shadia), but the writing remains expressive, layered and emotionally charged throughout. The single Shmaali feels like the record’s centerpiece – a modern Tarweeda that ties together folk and electronics, personal and collective memory, love and resistance.

Listen/Buy on Bandcamp.

New Album/2: Geese – Getting Killed

Everyone’s talking about it, everyone’s in ecstasy – and honestly, that kind of social media fever always leaves us a little cold. But we listened to the latest album from Brooklyn’s Geese, and now understand why: Getting Killed proves them to be one of the few contemporary bands still capable of playing rock as if it were dangerous. The opening track, Trinidad, is already a manifesto: a freaky, intense intro with absolutely nightmarish lyrics – Winter talks about his daughters being dead and apocalyptic visions (“There’s a bomb in my car”) – all riding a psych-blues groove. His voice becomes the album’s main instrument, leading the charge on a record that prizes risk over precision, improvisation over structure. That said, his strained, emotional croon can be exhausting across forty-five minutes – some vocal variety wouldn’t hurt. (We’d already talked about Cameron Winter’s solo debut with a few reservations about his plaintive voice, even while praising his songwriting.)

That said, Getting Killed carries the grim theatricality of Nick Cave’s Let Love In era, stripped of the gothic and dunked into a New York garage; it’s got the ramshackle romanticism of Beirut, pushed to the edge of delirium. Tracks like Half Real and Cobra deliberately lose themselves in a flurry of guitars and horns, as if the band were trying to outrun their own heartbeat, while Au Pays du Cocaine offers a surreal calm, its brass and melodies floating above a toxic sea of melancholy. Produced by Kenneth Blume, the record is a relentless accumulation of sound – an ecstatic jam where every instrument fights for space and no one really wins, something like a duel between In Rainbow by Radiohead and a disoriented Television (listen to the title track Getting Killed and let us know).

And yet, within this electric disorder, Getting Killed finds a strange kind of grace. It’s the sound of a young band rejecting polish, embracing chaos, and rediscovering the raw pulse that made rock matter in the first place.

Listen/Buy on Bandcamp.

Single Tracks: Makaya McCraven – 4 New Singles

Back in 2015, at the dawn of his collaboration with the then-fledgling label International Anthem, drummer and producer Makaya McCraven coined a new musical language with his album In This Moment: ‘Organic beat music’ – a sound aesthetic where his live improvisations were reworked in the studio through loops and sampling, like a hip-hop producer. Nearly a decade later, both McCraven and the Chicago label stand at the forefront of today’s most original, forward-thinking jazz – returning to the roots of that language with new depth. 

Due at the end of October, Off the Record is a full-length release that brings together four different EPs by McCraven. Ahead of the drop, four singles – Boom Bapped (from Techno Logic), The Beat Up (from The People Mixtape), Dark Parks (from Hidden Out!), and Los Gatos (from PopUp Shops) – have already surfaced, all captured live: moments of fluid improvisation, “shaped as much by the room and audience as by the musicians themselves”. Immersive and spellbinding.

Listen on Bandcamp.

Video: The Weeknd, Giorgio Moroder – The Big Sleep (directed by Gaspar Noé) 

Even if it makes us sound a little out of step, we’ll say it anyway: we still believe in music videos. Not just as accompaniments, but as cinema. Which is why Big Sleep – the single from The Weeknd featuring Giorgio Moroder (the latest single from the album Hurry Up Tomorrow, released last January) – couldn’t go unnoticed in this month’s picks.

Directed by Gaspar Noé, the Argentinian filmmaker brings his signature intensity to four minutes of pure visual and sensory shock. The Weeknd’s voice, Moroder’s synths and Noé’s feverish vision draw us into a desolate, metaphysical Paris, where the “big sleep” of the elderly protagonist paves the wave for a second half that’s impossible to forget.

And yes, take that opening warning for photosensitive viewers seriously – you’ll need a moment to come back to reality.

Video to embed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wTr3bTbVO8

News: No Music For Genocide

Since its launch in September 2025, No Music For Genocide has focused on gathering support from artists and labels to protest against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The movement calls on artists to remove their music from Israeli streaming platforms through geo-blocking measures. What began as an open letter has turned into a collective statement from across the global music scene. More than a thousand artists and labels have joined so far, including Björk, Massive Attack, Fontaines D.C., Paramore, Lorde, Clairo, AURORA, Japanese Breakfast, King Krule, Kelela, IDLES and Faye Webster – a roster that shows just how far this wave of solidarity has spread. It’s a reminder that even in a world dominated by algorithms and corporations, artists can still make noise that matters.

If you are an artist or a label, you can join the protest here.

In Memory: D’Angelo (11 February 1974 –  14 October 2025)

We mentioned him just last month, recalling how his masterpiece Black Messiah had captivated everyone from the very first listen. After all, a talent like D’Angelo’s is born only once in a century. Sadly, the world of music will now have to do without his voice: Michael Eugene Archer, aka D’Angelo, passed away on October 14, 2025, after a long battle with cancer. Hailed as the reformer of R&B and the founding father of neo-soul, D’Angelo was a phenomenon of Black music as a whole, often compared to Prince for both his influence and his sound – vocally and instrumentally. His three albums stand as milestones that transcend genre. From Brown Sugar (1995), the manifesto of the ’90s soul revival, through Voodoo (2000), which redefined groove with an almost mystical intimacy, to Black Messiah (2014), his electrifying, politically charged return after fourteen years of silence.

Camillo Vegezzi is a freelance music writer based in Milan. He has collaborated with various music magazines and is a contributor to the cultural section of Il Manifesto. Read more of Camillo’s writing on Something Curated here.

Lorenzo Villa is a writer and editor based in Milan. He writes about lifestyle for Harper’s Bazaar Italia and collaborates with the literary magazine Galápagos. Read more of Lorenzo’s writing on Something Curated here.

Header photograph: D’Angelo, courtesy Spotify.