It starts quietly: a few artists pulling their catalogues, a few more muttering about payouts and principles. But lately, the volume has risen. From Cape Town to Copenhagen, the whisper of “maybe I should leave Spotify” has turned into a full-blown chorus.
It makes sense that Champion Trees‘ latest releases feel more like autumn than spring, since they’re now singing to us from the northern hemisphere. Before most of the band moved to England in early 2023, the band had a breakout two years surrounding the release of their debut album, NOW 3000, in July 2022. We gave the album a warmly appreciative review back then, praising its Western Cape sentimentality and heartening undercurrents. It should be no surprise then that we were very excited by the release of four new singles in anticipation of a full album, “I Wear a Shirt That Says Australia” , “I Want to Sound Like a Ghost” , “Gentle, Apple, Balanced”, and “Cabbage Song”.
These days, too many events feel designed for people who drift in, snap a few photos, and leave before the night really begins. The music becomes background, the crowd thins by midnight, and the promise of connection gets lost somewhere between the bar and the DJ booth.
In recent years, many musicians and fans have questioned whether jazz still carries the same political charge it once did. For Cape Town’s seven-piece collective Kujenga, those tensions pulse beneath every note of their new EP, Common Ground, a record that insists jazz — or what they call “Black Improvised Music” — still carries a responsibility to the times we live in.
A few years ago, landing a track on RapCaviar was akin to winning the lottery. Today, the same placement feels closer to a consolation prize. Streams are down, algorithms are up, and the machinery of music discovery is quietly being re-engineered while artists attempt to keep pace.
