Free to a Good Home

I found New Look through a pair of magazine pieces—an interview in Cooler Mag and a story in Dazed & Confused—which is how music discovery used to work before it became algorithmic and inevitable. Sarah and Adam are nominally based in Brooklyn, though they came up in Toronto under the name Jungletalk, which they’ve since retired. The name change makes sense. New Look sounds like something you’d see in lowercase on the sleeve of a record that turns out to be exactly what the afternoon needed.

The music is Electro-Soul—unhurried, warm without being soft, the kind of thing that settles into the background of a working day and then resurfaces in your head at 2 a.m. when you weren’t expecting a visit. Sarah’s voice has a directness that doesn’t demand attention, it just keeps it. Adam’s production sits behind her rather than competing, which requires a discipline a lot of producers don’t bother developing.

A deal with an indie label fell through, so they’ve been putting the songs out as free downloads from their own site. Which is, honestly, not the worst outcome for anyone listening. The music exists, you can have it, and no one needs a middleman to make that happen. Sometimes that’s the whole story.