It's the news we've all been waiting for. That's right, the details for Cheryl Cole's new single and long awaited third album are finally out! Hurrah!
You'll be hearing Calvin Harris produced track Call My Name all over UK radio at 8.10am on Friday morning (20th April) and it's safe to say we're going to be subsequently playing it on repeat again and again and again. Going by the Calvin production, if it's a uber dance behemoth of We Found Love proportions, we're in for a real summer smash from our Nation's Sweetheart.
What's more, we'll be getting that tantalising video for Call My Name (we've all seen those simply gorgeous pics from LA in all the papers) on the 2nd May.
Call My Name is released on the 10th June, followed by new album A Million Lights on the 18th June.
Since Dragonette featured on Martin Solveig smash Hello, there's been the overarching sense that now, on their upcoming third album, they'll finally be able to achieve the proper mainstream success they've so blatantly been deserving of since they kicked things off with 2007's Galore.
We pop fans have known about them for ages, but as far as 'Hi, we're Dragonette!' introductory type tracks go, new single Let It Go is spot on. It leaps from fuzzy synth lines to whipcrack beats with all the enthusiasm and carefree exuberance that powered the Solveig collab and is peppered with just the right amount of quirkiness to keep the casual listener fascinated. It's that radio record that screams with the potential to skyrocket the group into previously uncharted levels of adoration - a gateway into a new summer of love where Let It Go blares from every speaker and car stereo.
In a post-Cinderella's Eyes world, Let It Go is a frothy, perked-up gem to compliment the carefully collated iPod playlist of any true pop aficionado.
All us pop fans are pretty much balancing on a knife edge right now, leaping at any precious morsel of information regarding Cheryl Cole's much anticipated third album. After all, she's been working on it a while, so the hopes are high that it'll mark a real high water mark for the former X Factor star's career and top her previous two efforts.
Turning to Twitter to tease fans with a possible snippet of lyrics from a new track, Cheryl revealed:
'You know it turns me on when the beat starts dirty dancing.. The way it calls to me I can almost feel its rage.. La da da da da Dum Dum. Bass in my face, put the bass in my face, put the bass in my face, put the bass in my face.'
Now, all this might be nothing much in particular, but maybe.... just maybe... it could be that she's sampled that grand old dance classic Bass In The Place, also known as Operation Blade (the track samples the Pump Panel Remix of New Order's Confusion, as featured on the original Blade movie soundtrack).
Of course, being the massive New Order fans that we are, the prospect that Cheryl might have sampled New Order (however indirectly) is all rather exciting. And either way, the Operation Blade track is a bit of a 'tune', and this gave us an excuse to post it.
You know Enter Shikari, the metal band that blended dangerously loud guitars with bonkers trance synths in a recipe for guaranteed mayhem. Tales of their gigs and the apocalyptic scenes that unfolded at them was the stuff of legend and in something of a rarity for metal bands these days, their records charted respectably too.
As such, it was surely only a matter of time before they got on the dubstep scene, and with a load of dirty raps thrown in for good measure, Sssnakepit is every bit as grimy as its venom-infested name suggests.
The first single from new album A Flash Of Colour, the single feels confident, assured in its ample playing to both crowds - whether you're a dance-head or rocker, the track is primed to push your buttons. Something that the band have proved time and time again they're very good at. Mosh-pits around the country, get ready...
In Gold Blood feels like a rock album of old. The third effort from Kids In Glass Houses, the LP slides from track to track in a wash of guitar feedback and an energy that rarely leaves you pause for breath.
If the band's first two albums were cheerily consistent selections of potential singles, then In Gold Blood sees them taking a far different approach - here the album definitively has the feel of a complete body of work. It has pace, it has highs and lows, each track acting as a chapter in the riotous story the band aim to tell here.
There is no let up - In many ways the album feels like a studio take on a live show, but without the crowd noise or boozed-up spoken word interludes to rough things up. No, Kids In Glass Houses have already done a rather good of sufficiently 'roughing up' their noise already - and this is a good thing.
2008's youthful, intensely energetic Smart Casual (even the title basks in a kind of carefree haze) was more spritely than anything else - follow-up Dirt on the other hand basked in the charms of glossy New Wave sounds. In Gold Blood sees the band selecting a firm middle ground between these records, but also evolving - becoming more intense, real, gritty.
If anything, In Gold Blood's greatest strength is that it feels far more individual, more versatile in the tracks it presents the listener - all helping to make this the band's most consistent record to date.
The first half of the album is a masterclass in big, sing-along choruses, culminating in the brass-pumped The Florist - a track full of nods to songs like Biffy Clyro's The Captain. The horns return on Only The Brave Die Free, pop rock on an epic scale and a future festival fave for sure.
A surprise late-album highlight has to be Fire though, the group slowing the pace down for a remarkably pretty, emotional ballad. If ever a track was made to get people pulling their lighters and mobiles out, it was this one - the spacey guitar solo is divine.
With all the recent media frenzy about Girls Aloud getting back together in 2012 (possibly for the Olympics), it's easy to forget that this time last year the lovely Cheryl Cole was gearing up to release her second solo album.
The possibility still remains that before any GA reunion comes about she may quite reasonably make it a hat-trick by releasing a third solo record - leading to the question, who would she work with?
Will.I.Am's involvement seems a given. His stamp was all over Cheryl's last two albums and going by their intense friendship, it seems only natural that he'd remain at the helm for a third solo effort. But today a number of news sources suggest that Will might rope in pal David Guetta too.
This is rather exciting. There are so many Guetta-produced tracks in the charts these days many would be inclined to say his sound has become completely ubiquitous. But looking back to the beginnings of his 'Imperial Phase', 2009's brilliant Sexy Chick, you begin to get the idea of just how potentially amazing a Cheryl/Guetta collab could be.
Back then, you couldn't enter a club without hearing Sexy Chick at least twice in one night. It's success was immense, in many ways ushering in an era of increasingly dance-influenced urban tracks.
It's a sound Cheryl herself is no stranger to - Messy Little Raindrops was notably more dance orientated than her debut. Yeah Yeah and Waiting, praised by many fans as two of the strongest tracks from the album, were full on dance stormers, and it's easy to see how Guetta's involvement could further Cheryl's music down this avenue.
As for when or if said collab will ever actually materialise, we'll have to wait... But it bodes very well indeed.
Hard-Fi have been turning heads recently, and for all the right reasons. Let's add another reason then, and that's that their new single Fire In The House - the second from third album Killer Sounds - is all kinds of fabulous.
Unlike the bold, striding swagger of the Jay-Z/Stone Roses aping Good For Nothing, this feels more subtle, more melancholic, but equally drenched in the sounds of the past. Half storming Brit-pop anthem, half moody synth epic dredged up from a shady nightclub, this is Hard-Fi doing what Hard-Fi do best.
Remember when Hard To Beat and Living For The Weekend came out, charming a nation with their perfect twinning of shouty indie credibility and big pop hooks. It felt so effortlessly spot on, so in the moment, so much like songs for the time - and Fire In The House feels the same.
Good For Nothing was aptly, rather good - great even. But this is on a whole other level - epic is a word that has been immeasurably cheapened over the last few years, but Fire In The House *is* undeniably epic.
The real test, of course, will be if the album can remain of a similar quality. Consistency, the great holy grail that so many aim for. Of the bands of Hard-Fi's generation, only a few remain, even fewer still delivering on the same scale. Kasabian have managed it, remaining eternally popular - and Fire In The House is exactly the kind of track that will ensure Hard-Fi stay up there with them in the premiere league of British rock acts.
Seeing the band perform at T4 On The Beach the other weekend, they felt like the band you always knew they had in them - not just Stars of CCTV, but real, genuine stars.
You can't accuse Leona of not taking chances - well, in this latest incarnation at least. You see, it would have been so easy for her to come back with another epic ballad of the kind she clearly does so well. The trouble is, it would never be as good as Bleeding Love.
That track, both her making and her undoing. Bleeding Love stands as one of the greatest pop tracks of the last decade, spending an incomprehensible amount of time at Number 1, and enchanting a host of people on both sides of the Atlantic.
But it also means that everything Leona has done afterwards will be compared to it and weakened due to the simple fact that it just won't live up to those dizzying heights of Bleeding Love.
What to do then for her third album? Traditional the make or break point for most pop acts, Leona has made the spot-on decision by going and doing something completely 'out there'. Well, as 'out there' as you can get with Leona. And you know what? It's damn good.
Collide is pure dance-floor beauty, the summer club anthem with class. Riding on an enchanting piano hook that repeats again and again throughout the song, there's a music-box-like quality to the track, a mechanical precision that rather than sounding overly-produced, seems so exquisitly crafted and buffed to a sheen that you find yourself asking, is this the same Leona?
But then, that's the point. This is Leona proving all the doubters wrong, proving that she has more than one trick in her bag. Collide is like Coldplay given the 200% dance overhaul, accentuated beautifully with African-esque chants that remind me of Dario G's Sunchyme.
I'll admit, I wasn't convinced initially; but as the track builds and builds, properly kicking in with the second chorus, you know what you're looking at - a bonafide smash hit. And Leona pulls it off with considerable aplomb - well done indeed, Miss Lewis.
