Feministing Jamz: A fall playlist featuring women & queers of color

Sometimes when I go a bit without writing about music, it’s because I’ve been too busy to find something new to post. But most of the time I have the opposite problem – there’s just so much cool new stuff, I don’t even know where to start.

I get overwhelmed, kinda like when you’re at the drugstore and there are so many kinds of deodorant and you just sit staring at them all unable to make a choice, except approximately one million times better than that.

So I’ve just made y’all a fall playlist. Everything featured on this list has been released in 2014, though most of it is from the last few months. Some of the artists featured here have been featured on Jamz, and some of them have been the casualties of  my overwhelmed states. All of them have put out great stuff, and all of them deserve deeper digging on your own. Also, all of these songs are by – or feature the work of, in the case of SBTRKT ft. Denai Moore – amazing, creative women or queer folks of color (which are overlapping categories, obvs).

Some of the newest releases to dig into (all available on Spotify):

• Future Brown‘s Wanna Party/World’s Mine: Though we’ve never featured FB here, we did feature Fatima Al Qadiri, one out of the four people in this incredibly talented electronic music group. This is their first formal release, which came out on Tuesday (and which lots of us have been anxiously awaiting for a minute!). Fatima Al Quadiri and Asma Madoof (of Future Brown and Nguzunguzu) are both on this Fader feature on women producers.
• Arca is a queer Venezuelan (be still my queer Venezuelan heart!) artist whose newest, Xen, just came out Tuesday. Arca had a big moment when he was tapped by Kanye for Yeezus, but Jamz readers will be familiar with his sonic fingerprints through the work he’s done with our fave FKA twigs, with whom he co-produced EP2. Xen is the name of Arca’s alter-ego, who according to him is neither a girl or a boy, but is feminine, and can be seen dancing in this mesmerizing video.
• Javiera Mena‘s Otra era came out last week, and it’s full of synth-pop goodness. This is the queer Chilean indie darling’s third album, and I’m here for it, and particularly its namesake track as of late.
• Mykki Blanco‘s newest, Gay Dog Food also came out last week. The track on this playlist from that album is featuring Kathleen Hanna. I highly encourage you to check out this conversation between the two on working together, being political artists, gender, and music.
• Tkay Maidza is an actually talented Australian rapper (unlike you know who). She put out Switchtape last month, and just last week she released the adorable video for Switch Lanes, where an animated Maidza rides a dolphin to a magical kingdom on a weirdly mathematical space-time plane populated with animated burgers and dancing pizza slices.
• Shamir is the latest amazing person signed to XL recordings (home to Jamz faves FKA twigs, Le1f, Ibeyi…basically you should probs follow XL recordings). His video for On The Regular gives me LIFE EVERLASTING. I don’t even know what to make of someone who can make cowbell seem that cool.

So many great artists. So little time.

Verónica feels so lucky to be alive in a time and place with such unfettered and easy access to amazingly talented musicians.