Cambodia's Second Kingdom

GRAMMY® Award-nominated multi-platinum alternative pop maverick Halsey returns with her anxiously awaited second full-length album, hopeless fountain kingdom [Astralwerks], which she executive produced alongside Benny Blanco, Greg Kurstin, Lido and Ricky Reed. Her brand new single, 'Now Or Never', is the first taste of what fans can expect from her new album, a track with a soulful refrain over dystopic, shuddering synths. The vocals segue from a delicate croon into an R&B-style bridge, highlighting her impressive range. hopeless fountain kingdom is set for release on June 2nd, 2017.

In Death's Dream Kingdom is a voyage into the unknown for Houndstooth and all the artists on it. It represents a complete rethink about what it means to compile and commission music in the streaming era – and the tracks and seductively dark atmospheres conjured as a result are exploring all kinds of new sonic territory, too. In short, the cream of leftfield electronic talent have been given a brief: to take the phrase “in Death's dream kingdom”, or the whole of TS Eliot's poem The Hollow Men from which it comes, as inspiration. The resulting 25 tracks will be released, one by one, together with further online texts, and extraordinary artwork by Jazz Szu-Ying Chen, to build into a new kind of audio-visual artefact. Not an album in the traditional sense, certainly more than just a playlist, it brings together a seriously diverse array of talents into a coherent whole with a vivid aesthetic reverberating through it. It occupies a similar space to the great home listening electronica acts of the 90s – Future Sound Of London, Global Communication, the Artificial Intelligence axis – but there are no throwbacks here: this is radical in sound and thought. Dark music for dark times.

“And you wonder why I don’t trust you to behave?” In a world of multiple races, cultures, and lifespans, those words apply to almost everyone. With over a decade working with the various races and kingdoms of her world, the human Ranger Z knows this well. Even with the resurrection of the Alliance, very few kingdoms willingly work together. Yet when a magical disaster threatens their world as a whole—a disaster that has occurred once before, and left nothing in its wake —racial differences will have to be set aside. With the tentative agreements between kingdoms to assist in these types of crises untested, Z knows it’s up to her to gather the assistance she’ll require…