It’s time to get turnt. Whatever your poison of choice is – or even if you prefer to stay pure – you need a soundtrack. We’ve got one here for you that’ll open up a dozen doors into a variety of sound worlds ready to explore.
We’ve picked out a few of the ones that have most excited us during this dark and dreary month. Enjoy our BPM Curates playlist for May below.
Below is the track list and some notes from our team about why they’ve selected them for this month’s playlist.
6LACK – “On Me” (with Odeal)
Love is the new Gansta is the album I’ve been waiting for 6LACK to make since East Atlanta Love Letter (his prior best, folks). The album I knew he had in him. It’s playful, boastful, loving, and selfish by turns – fully human R&B. It can also be truly pretty as hell. “On Me” is one of them ones. – Chase McMullen
Boards of Canada – “Father and Son”
Boards of Canada returned with their first album in 13 years this month and while it is unmistakably them, there are also some interesting new angles on the elusive duo’s sound. The use of vocal samples is more prominent than ever and on “Father and Son” they go so far as to chop up and splay out their subject’s words into a quasi-rap. The fact that the words are spoken by a stiff church counsellor type who probably has absolutely no groove makes it all the more fascinating and kinda funny. They might be soundtracking the apocalypse, but there’s still space for humour. – Rob Hakimian
Broken Social Scene – “Life Within The Ground”
I understand the fans balking at “jammier” Broken Social Scene. I dunno. I like it. They could be giving us nothing at all. Or, worse, truly mucking it up like some other Indie legends in their age range. I’ll take the loving, low key, chill shit. This song is a beaut. – Chase McMullen
Charli xcx – “SS26”
The end of the world. But make it high fashion. But also trashy. i.e. Charli xcx is in her element – even if the latest from her upcoming ‘rock’ album is more guitar focused than anything she’s done before. Her diaristic approach to lyricism is just as potent in the warm glow of a strummed six-string as it was doused in beats and BRAT green; but its pathos and honesty hits from a slightly different vantage. It’ll be fascinating to hear how this plays out across a whole album – Rob Hakimian
Christian Ortega – “Malandior II”
Ostensibly just another corrido, “Malandior II” catches the ear the way a burning photograph captures the imagination. Its distorted edges reflect either the pain caused by Christian Ortega (not a direct translation, but a malandron is like a scoundrel), the pain revisited on him, or just the whole inferno of disastrous relationships. The strings are plucked with a venom that misguidedly blames the instruments for the present shitstorm. The beliceño may come from a place separated from Mexico’s coastal strife, but he’s still downwind. – Steve Forstneger
Drake – “Ran To Atlanta” (feat. FUTURE & Molly Santana)
The fifth cut from Iceman, dropped 15 May as one of three albums Drake offloaded the same night, finds him answering Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” line about an unnamed someone running to Atlanta, and answering it, characteristically, by simply running there with Future. It is the first time the two have shared a track since Future’s incendiary verse on “Like That” in 2024, and the chill in the room has plainly thawed. Producer credits aside, the beat is a turbo-charged rage instrumental, distorted melodies, neon synths, devilish 808s — over which Future delivers what Clash’s Joe Simpson rightly called an accomplished performance.
The revelation, though, is Molly Santana, whose “new Hannah Montana” hook is the kind of branding rappers spend whole careers chasing. Petty, victorious, and fittingly Atlantan. – Mary Chiney
Ea Othilde – “I Forgot You”
With the recent single from her upcoming album, You’ll Leave the City (out on June 12), Oslo’s Ea Othilde offers a melancholy vocal that touches on shattered love and the way in which memory transforms the past into something … a bit more romantic, a bit more epic than it really was. Moody and stripped-down during the verses, the track then launches into fuller and more roiling choruses, closing with a well-layered and compelling jam. – John Amen
feeble little horse – “Dior”
“This lipstick is Dior / I pulled it out my pocket” begins Lydia Slocum on “Dior” over a buoyantly jovial melody; a surprisingly high-class seeming moment from the singer of Pittsburgh’s lovably scuzzy feeble little horse. “Pull me up off the floor” is the next line, and that sits more in tune with the DIY/basement sound we associate them with. It’s not long before the song catches up with a pile-on of melodious riffs and distortion and soon Slocum’s decorum has vanished as she points the finger: “you are not David Berman, you are not Kurt Cobain”. A head-spinning verse of “ah ah”s and suddenly we’re back at the Dior lipstick again as if none of that electrifying carnage happened at all. – Rob Hakimian
FISHER x Tones And I – “Favour”
There are countless skits and memes about guys like the toned, un-tatted, and tanned producers like FISHER – the epitome of club music’s bro takeover. Yet despite his penchant for ambulance-siren melodies, off-the-rack vocal accompanists, and general lack of innovation, tracks like “Favour” remain remarkably true to house music’s soul origins. He’s attacked for being a simpleton in a genre where simplicity is the key, an emotionless-looking figure with a keen ear for a heart-tugging hook. As he did with 2023’s “Atmosphere”, he connects. – Steve Forstneger
Foamboy – “LOUD BOY”
Another month, another foamboy track, another soulful electro-pop hit. Dishing out highlights one after the other, on “LOUD BOY” the Portland duo turn annoyance into a bop. “This song is inspired by a super drunk guy who kept dominating the conversation with boring takes about Lord of the Rings. No one could get a word in, and it pissed me off. That’s basically it!” PVC bass, jittery guitar riffs, and and starry synths; the elements are familiar but producer Wil Bakula and vocalist Katy Ohsiek find a way of forming them into something new. Use the hate and turn it into something people will love. A powerful conversion tool for days like these. – Ray Finlayson
Kenny Mason – “COME TRUE”
Kenny Mason has felt like an artist that’s almost there since pretty much the day he hit the scene. So on the precipice of fully breaking through. His new album, BULLDAWG, is doubtlessly his most “complete” artistic statement to date, but it’s also giddily high on its own ideas, spiraling off in different directions. Off first impression I found it charmingly ambitious, but perhaps too scatterbrained. However, after sitting with it, I now believe even its most sudden tangents are all part of a cohesive whole fully representing its creator: a rapper raised equally on, say, Paramore and OutKast.
Choosing a sole track after sinking in is a fool’s errand: there’s the skittering “BOUNCE WIT ME”, the glide of “CITGO”, the scorching Paris Texas collab “BE WHAT I WANT”, the rocking surge of “BLACK FIT”, the epiphany of album closer “7ELEVEN”, and plenty more, but I’ll go with “COME TRUE” as it feels a fair representation of the rush of ideas you’ll experience with this already undersung album. – Chase McMullen
Namasenda – “Alright”
The closer to the elusive (I mean, she must be, right? 1st EP in 2017 and a full length album only now?) Swedish artist’s recent album is a scorcher…of sorts. Think if NewJeans/PinkPantheress were even more deliriously high off PC Music? All I know is I played this track at a friend’s birthday this month and it had the whole room like:
–Chase McMullen
Olivia Rodrigo – “the cure”
There’s nobody that writes about romantic disappointment like Olivia Rodrigo. Combining adolescent anxiety with fatalistic urgency, Livvy is like the spiritual daughter of Billy Corgan and Liz Phair: alt-rock for a new generation! Starting as a sombre guitar-led ballad (think a cross of Placebo’s “Meds” and Smashing Pumpkins’ “Disarm”), the layered composition of “the cure” is augmented with an inventory of feminine insecurities: there’s always the other girls, there’s always imperfection, there’s always emotional distance. “I got toxins in my blood stream you tried hard to suck them out”, she sings, resigning at the impossibility of a partner solving the turmoil. As the song builds further and further, it finally explodes into a string led climax, with Rodrigo pleading: “Why can’t you come stitch me up? / Why can’t it ever be enough?” The anthem for all those whose summer will be a very lonely one, “the cure” is further proof that Livvy is an exceptional writer and performer. Her third album can’t come soon enough! – John Wohlmacher
We The Band – “SECRETS.”
“SECRETS.” is one of the quietest moments on We The Band’s new album 911!, but it lingers longer than many of the album’s bigger gestures. Produced around a hazy, slow-burning groove, the track unfolds with the feeling of a conversation happening after everyone else has left the room. We The Band resist the temptation to over-explain, allowing fragments of doubt, desire and hesitation to hang in the air unresolved. That restraint is what makes the song so compelling. Where much contemporary R&B mistakes confession for depth, “SECRETS.” understands that what remains unsaid can be just as revealing. The production is sparse but never empty, giving every pause and inflection room to land. In the context of 911!, it feels less like an interlude and a late-night groove — the kind of track that subtly becomes a favourite long after the album ends. – Mary Chiney
Widemouth – “Raincoat”
With this single from their just-released debut No Gasoline, Mak Carnahan and Jamie Eder tap into the modish neo-folk movement, nailing harmonies that bring to mind a cross between Phoebe Bridgers and Watchhouse’s Andrew Marlin. Alternately austere and entrancingly atmospheric, the piece captures the yearning that can exist between two people who can’t quite pull it together relationally. The lines “And now you’re wearing that look in your eyes like a firefly in a window / And you’re keeping time” land as potently descriptive, conjuring a desire that never comes to fruition and the way in which time continues to irrevocably pass. – John Amen
Listen to our BPM Curates: May 2026 playlist here.
