Indie pop artist Julia Marcell shares her new digital single, ‘Nostalgic’. It's the third single taken from the new studio album, Skull Echo, coming March 27 via Long Branch Records. Marcell says "Thinking about my own nostalgia makes me wonder, how much do I actually long for the real thing? How much of what I remember, I make up? This song happens in the ‘80s, when life was like a music video and everybody lived in New York lofts."

Julia Marcell’s upcoming album was recorded in Berlin with producer Michael Haves, drummer Thomas Fietz and bassist Thomsen Slowey Merkel. Mostly electronic, the record features a huge, cinematic sound, sweeping pop melodies and futuristic production, but the subject matter is very intimate and emotional.

Julia says about the project: "Skull Echo is a story about time, perception and loneliness. About heads in which we are trapped, building our image of the world through our senses - full of uncertain information, selectively remembered and freely transformed. It is a story of longing for another person."

Along with music came the idea for a film. The topics discussed on the album inspired Julia to write a screenplay for a feature of the same title. She currently develops it together with film producer Natalia Grzegorzek from Koskino.

Tracklist "Skull Echo":

1 Cerebral Bliss

2 Infinity Halt

3 Time

4 Nostalgic

5 The Odds

6 Which Way is Now

7 Houses Of Glass

8 Understand Me

9 Mother

10 Life is on television

11 Skull Echo

Ikoqwe is a new project from Portuguese sensation Batida and activist rapper Ikonoklasta. The track, ‘VaiVai’, out now on Beating Heart Music, is a vibrant afrobeat groove. The video sees the duo, masked with make-shift antennae and riding through the desert in a Candongueiro (Angolan Taxi), in a cartoon style escapade, journeying, eventually launching up to space where perhaps this track belongs with its otherworldly rhythms, laser-like zaps and cosmic raps.

Ikonoklasta is a rapper who became an iconic and who has been into music, dance, visual, plastic and radio arts under the Batida alias. Taking root from Angola, Portugal, it’s impossible to not get sucked into the layered shuffling backdrop of beats and organic percussion peppered with computer-game style blips and bleeps.

BBC 6 Music’s Gilles Peterson explains, “There’s certain types of music that come out of Portugal. All of this is sort of linked together for me by this one producer who goes by the name of Batida. It’s just on another level in terms of how he presents his show, how he approaches his music making, whether he is DJing or performing live, or adding visuals, philosophically just how he goes about his business.”