Pop-rap princess Kid Sister has been holed up at the LA home studio of Blink-182 drummer/reality star Travis Barker, working on tracks for his forthcoming solo debut along with Ludacris and other guests and borrowing his setup and engineer to record material for a couple of her own future releases. Barker this week unleashed the first single from his upcoming album, “Jump Down,” featuring Chicago’s Cool Kids.
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Maps & Atlases have kept busy with shows and short-format releases these past four years, but only just released their first long player, Perch Patchwork, on Barsuk in July. This month the beardo-pop quartet issued the record’s first video, “Solid Ground,” featuring lead singer Dave Davison floating around in a canoe and another dude in the band playing flute. Choice. The spot has already been shown on MTV2’s indie-rock show, Subterranean. And Pitchfork’s video site recently highlighted a performance clip of their track “The Charm,” in which the band gets thoroughly upstaged by an ace drum line of eighth graders from San Francisco’s Willie L. Brown Jr. Academy.
“Now Baby,” featuring Psalm One and MCADaD, is the first single off the forthcoming Pugz Atomz album, The Decade; it drops this week via BBE, the London hip-hop/dance label. The Decade is a comp of previously released “classic” material from (duh) the last ten years, plus some new songs; the whole thing officially comes out October 24.
