“KCSU’s Weekly Gems Countdown” is written by the KCSU Music Directors and describes the top artists that your local 90.5 FM DJs are playing this week! This article is posted weekly on Wednesday morning and discussed on the show “KCSU Weekly Gem Countdown” which airs every Wednesday from 12-1. During the show, you can tune in to hear the countdown, learn more about each artist behind the songs topping KCSU’s charts, and listen to DJ Fruit-Bat and Lady J break down the sound and feel of each song!
10. Genesis Owusu – Pop – 8 spins – highlighted hit: “Freak Boy” off of the August release “STRUGGLER”
Kofi Owusu-Ansah, known by his stage name Genesis Owusu, is a Ghanaian-Australian singer from Canberra. His older brother is musician Citizen Kay, a hip-hop artist also based in Australia, and they’ve collaborated together on the track, “Family Ties,” back in 2015. Owusu’s debut studio album, “Smiling With No Teeth,” was released in March of 2021, getting his name out there and priming the pump for his 2023 release, “STRUGGLER,” which has been met with high praise from critics for its liberated sonic playfulness.
Owusu has clear vision and purpose in their artistry, describing “STRUGGLER” in a press statement with this: “The struggler runs through an absurd world with no ‘where’ or ‘why’ at hand. Just an instinctual inner rhythm, yelling at them to survive the pestilence and lightning bolts coming from above. A roach just keeps roaching.”
Owusu has been on our gems before with the track “The Roach,” and this week’s highlighted hit is “Freak Boy.”
9. Yves Tumor – electronic – 9 spins – highlighted hit: “Fear Evil Like Fire” off of the March release “Praise A Lord Who Chews But Does Not Consume; (Or, Simply, Hot Between Worlds)”
Yves Tumor (it/its) is one of the most exciting artists making music out there, garnering a cult status that’s rapidly becoming one of the most central positions in the world of experimental pop music. Defying categorization in every way, it’s difficult to find words for the shifting coals of Yves Tumor and its sprawling world of musical influences. Tumor is self-taught, having been playing music since it was 16 growing up in Knoxville, Tennessee. Its 2020 album, “Heaven To A Tortured Mind,” is when it broke through the dense world of music that, though hard to describe, has a kind of “if you know you know” reputation amongst indieheads everywhere.
Its March release, “Praise A Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume; (Or, Simply, Hot Between Worlds)” was released to considerable hype and praise, bringing a punk-rock sound to the synthy, experimental pop work that Tumor is known for. We’ve featured the track “Meteora Blues,” before on gems, and this week our highlighted hit is “Fear Evil Like Fire.”
8. Yoke Lore – alt/indie – 10 spins – highlighted hit: “Softy” off of the September release “Toward a Never Ending New Beginning”
Yoke Lore (Adrian Galvin) is a Los-Angeles based folk-pop artist, bringing banjo back into the popular folk fold. Originally the drummer for indie-pop outfit Walk The Moon, he’s been releasing music solo since 2016, mostly singles and EPs, with tracks like “Beige” and his cover of One Direction’s “Truly Madly Deeply” boasting hundreds of millions of streams on Spotify.
Galvin left Walk The Moon in 2020 to focus more on his own music, and his September release “Toward a Never Ending New Beginning,” is his first ever full-length album. Our highlighted track, “Softy,” is a good glimpse into the rest of the record, a playful and soft indie/pop/folk track with earnest lyricism.
7. Joey Valence & Brae – hip-hop/rap – 11 spins – highlighted hit: “STARTAFIGHT” off of the September release “PUNK TACTICS”
Bringing the sounds of 90s east-coast hip-hop to the TikTok age, Joey Valence & Brae are known for their scrappy, heavily-mixed rap songs, proudly wearing their Beastie Boys influences on their sleeves. Joey Valence and Brae met their Freshmen year at Penn State, goofing around with music together and starting out posting their stuff on TikTok, collaborating on tracks like 2021’s “Crank It Up” and “Double Jump.” Following the success of these songs, their career moved from a few successful TikToks to appearances on tv shows like Ellen, where their music began to reach an audience bigger than just the in-the-know teenagers who already liked their stuff.
Released September 8th, “PUNK TACTICS” is the culmination of these collaborations, their debut record together. The record is high-energy, fast-paced, experimental, sample-heavy, and bursting with both the influences of their hip-hop successors and with all the new stuff they’re bringing to the table.
Joey Valence and Brae have featured in our gems with a few different tracks at this point, but our current highlighted hit is “STARTAFIGHT,” a punk call-to-action that’s one of the many breakout tracks from the record.
6. Chappell Roan – pop – 12 spins – highlighted hit: “HOT TO GO!” off of the September release “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess”
Chappell Roan has been writing and releasing her own music since she got her start on YouTube as a teenager in 2017, an internet-led “dark pop” princess whose word-of-mouth success began with her track, “Pink Pony Club,” going viral on TikTok in 2021. Building a further following from accompanying artists like Olivia Rodrigo and Fletcher on tour, Roan became known for her camp (self-made) outfits and unapologetically glittery pop music.
Her debut record, “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” sees Roan really coming into her own sonically and aesthetically, met with praise from critics and fans alike. Our highlighted track, “HOT TO GO!” has been receiving tons of love and play around KCSU, and we’re excited to feature it!
5. Animal Collective – alt/indie – 13 spins – highlighted hit: “Gem & I” off of the September release “Isn’t It Now?”
Animal Collective are considered one of the most prolific and idiosyncratic acts making music, which they’ve been doing since the early 2000s. Formed from a group of friends in Baltimore, the band currently consists of Avey Tare (David Portner), Panda Bear (Noah Lennox), Geologist (Brian Weitz), and Deakin (Josh Dibb). It feels a disservice to AnCo to try and define them by any genre, but they’ve been described as experimental pop/rock, freak-folk, electronica, psych, and more.
Every release is different, taking the band in new and unexpected directions. Their most acclaimed record is 2009’s “Merriweather Post Pavilion,” considered a classic in the world of indie music. Their most recent release, September’s “Isn’t It Now?” is formed from songs they started working on remotely in 2019, and ended up as their longest record to date. Our highlighted hit, “Gem & I,” is one of the most popular tracks from the record, a groovy, psych-pop track that sets the tone for the rest of the record well.
4. Mitski – alt/indie – 14 spins – highlighted hit: “Heaven” off of the September release “The Earth is Inhospitable and So Are We”
Mitsuki Miyawaki, known simply as Mitski, is a singer-songwriter who’s been releasing music since her first few self-released records, “Lush” (2012), and “Retired From Sad, New Career in Business” (2013), which she originally made while still in college. Mitski’s cult status among indie fans only grew after her subsequent releases “Bury Me At Makeout Creek” (2014) and “Puberty 2” (2016). Mitski achieved more mainstream success following 2018’s “Be the Cowboy” with tracks like “Nobody” and “Washing Machine Heart” going viral on TikTok and Twitter.
Mitski’s music is associated with many online niches: sad Kendall Roy edits, sad edits in general, what’s often called “sad girl” music, but Mitski rejects the idea that her music has to be defined by sadness, saying in a video for Crack Magazine that “The sad girl thing was reductive and tired like 5-10 years ago, and it still is today…let’s retire the sad girl shtick.”
Her newest album, “The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We,” was released September 15th to massive acclaim from critics and fans. Mitski describes this on her Spotify as her most “American album,” and the subtle twang woven throughout some of this record’s tracks emphasizes that inspiration. Mitski has sat comfortably in our top slots for a month now, and this week’s highlighted track is “Heaven,” a soft love song and one of the first singles released for the record.
3. Olivia Rodrigo – pop – 14 spins – highlighted hit: “get him back!” off of the September release “GUTS”
No longer just an up-and-comer in the world of pop music, Olivia Rodrigo is the world of modern pop music, a leading figure in shaping the sounds and aesthetics of modern pop music. Her debut record “SOUR,” was a massive pop-cultural moment, the fastest album in history to have all of its songs certified RIAA Platinum for higher. Rodrigo got her start as an actress, featuring on shows like “Bizaardvark” and “High School Musical: The Musical: The Show,” but her passion for music led her to the career she has now.
Rodrigo’s second release, “GUTS,” came out in September to more praise and hype, currently putting her at the spot of the 22nd most-streamed artist in the entire world on Spotify. The album has a pop-rock/pop-punk inspired approach, edgier and more honest than Rodrigo was able to be on “SOUR.”
Our highlighted hit, “get him back!” is one of the breakout tracks from the record, a prime example of Rodrigo’s angsty, 2000s-inspired pop-rock.
2. Hozier – folk – 15 spins – highlighted hit: “”To Someone From A Warm Climate (Uiscefhuarithe)” off of the August release “Unreal Unearth”
Hozier (aka Andrew Hozier-Byrne) is a singer-songwriter from Ireland who skyrocketed to fame after his 2013 song, “Take Me to Church,” became one of the most popular songs of the year (now with over 2 billion streams on spotify). His bluesy, folk-oriented music explores love, politics, religion, nature, and everything else one might expect from an Irish wordsmith whose songs reference everything from the bible to Dante’s Inferno to his favorite jazz songs and poems.
Hozier’s most recent release, “Unreal Unearth,” was released last month on August 18th! It’s based upon Dante’s Inferno, with each song representing one of the circles of hell that Dante journeys through in the famous poem. Hozier wrote this album partially as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, telling GRAMMY.com: “As a structure, I did want to acknowledge something in my experiences of [that] two, three year period, and what I was processing. I [wanted] to find a way that nods to that, and the significance of that — albeit, not necessarily in a way that was a lockdown album or a pandemic album, or songs that focus on the nuances of that experience, but at least acknowledge the journey. And it’s taking the structure of that journey as imagined by Dante, these Nine Circles he walks through and then he comes out the other side.”
The record is a hit with Hozier fans who waited patiently for its release, and Hozier’s two Red Rocks shows in Colorado this week are sure to be stellar ones. Hozier was in our #1 slot with “First Time” last week, and this week our highlighted hit “To Someone From A Warm Climate (Uiscefhuarithe).” The word “Uiscefhuarithe” is an old Irish word that Hozier describes as meaning “something that has been made cold by water.”
1. Sufjan Stevens – folk – 17 spins – highlighted hit: “My Little Red Fox” off of the October release “Javelin”
Sufjan Stevens is a singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist who’s been releasing music since the early 2000s, when he was working on a 50 States Project, where he planned to create an album for every state (but only ended up releasing 2003’s “Michigan” and 2005’s “Illinois.” Other releases like “Seven Swans” and “The Age of Ads” heightened his cult status within indie and folk spaces, and Steven’s inspirations have always been multitudinous, unexpected; he’s released Christmas albums, electronic albums, folk albums, all of them unable to really be defined as just one thing.
Stevens is particularly known for his lyricism, soft voice, and eclectic instrumentation. His 2015 release, “Carrie and Lowell,” is an album particularly drowning in acclaim, and it’s one that his newest release, “Javelin,” is garnering comparisons to because of their joint folk-centered sound and dealings with grief.
Leading up to Javelin’s release, Stevens took to Instagram to reveal both his diagnosis with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a condition which has made him have to re-learn to walk, and the death of “the light of my life, my beloved partner and best friend Evans Richardson, who passed away in April.” Despite the grief and pain that Stevens explores in Javelin, there’s also plenty of joy, beauty, and optimism, as well, which our highlighted hit, “My Little Red Fox,” captures in full.