All Songs Considered: José González's hope, Jungle's sunshine

April 7, 2026·45 min·3 clips

Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagak's statement 'Nothing can destroy us. Nothing can destroy love' closes an album about Arctic suicide rates and war.

It begins with a shrug. The banter makes All Songs Considered feel like a virtual music club, loose enough to joke about covering every piece ever written alphabetically. Tom brings the range. Robin frames him as more than a classical editor, with ears wide enough to follow plenty of paths at once. Then the mood lifts. "Self Tape" comes in from an artist balancing medical training in Massachusetts with putting out striking music. The track is dreamy, but it still moves. Its synth-pop pulse gets called propulsive, while the pull is in the way the beauty sits over the beat. The references tumble out: early New Order, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Bauhaus, and Detroit in about 1983. Together, they sketch the song's retro charge without flattening it into nostalgia. There is a strange voice, too. A repeated lyric sounds almost like an automated AI reading, and somehow the oddness tightens the track instead of throwing it off. The arrangement keeps rising. Grinding motion underneath meets synths that flare like distorted French horns, so the song feels fast and misty at the same time. That contrast becomes the hook of the conversation: drive under haze, momentum under dream, windows down while the view stays blurred. Later, the scale opens out. Tom turns to a long late-life composition, first written for piano trio and later orchestrated. Time feels heavier there. The conversation hears questions about humanity and meaning, and Tom points to where the piece sits near the end of the composer's life. They play only part of it. The full work runs more than twenty minutes, but the excerpt holds attention for about six and a half minutes. The credits land clearly: the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra, conducted by composer Lara Auerbach, gives the close its weight.

As heard by us

NPR Music's All Songs Considered makes a dreamy synth-pop pick feel vivid, retro, and easy to keep following.

NPR Music's All Songs Considered keeps its focus on the week's strongest new songs, but it also lets the conversation wander in a way that feels easy to listen to.

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Press play for a weekly music club that keeps the texture inside the tune.

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