LITM Pop Picks Weekend Tunes to set your mood featuring Ricky Earlywine, Sonny Southon and Amara Fe

LITM Pop Picks Tunes brought to you by Ricky Earlywine, Sonny Southon and Amara Fe

1. Ricky Earlywine—"Move "Like This"

   There are comebacks, and then there are reckonings. Ricky Earlywine's "Move Like This" is firmly the latter. Debuting in January 2026, the single arrives fresh off a deeply personal chapter of healing—and you can hear every bit of it. Channeling the vocal authority of Tori Kelly, Kehlani, and Rihanna, Earlywine layers a hypnotic cadence over slick, intimate production that manages to feel both epic and close to the chest. Recorded and mixed entirely in his home studio in Lacey, the track is a full declaration of creative independence, each harmony, each vocal breath, placed with the precision of someone who nearly lost it all and refuses to waste a single note. This is what survival sounds like when it's been set to music.

2. Sonny Southon – "I'm In Love"

Some artists spend their whole careers building toward the kind of quiet authority that Sonny Southon was simply born with. Samoan and Scottish, raised in New Zealand, she left home at seventeen with nothing but a passion for music and went on to perform at Wembley Arena, Glastonbury, the Royal Albert Hall, and the Montreux Jazz Festival, working alongside legends like Duran Duran, Bryan Ferry, and Bob Geldof. Now, in 2025, she's finally turning those decades of lived experience into her own sonic musings, and "I'm In Love" is exactly the kind of song that only someone with that depth of history could write. It doesn't perform joy. It simply is joy.

3. Amara Fe – "Forever Last"

The best opening tracks don't ease you in. They grab you by the collar. "Forever Last," the album opener from Amara Fe's Echoes, sets the tone immediately: danceable R&B, a sharp, punchy beat, and vocal lines so elegant they almost feel effortless - luminous, flexible, and nearly weightless. A Mission, Texas-based singer and songwriter, Amara Fe blends alternative pop, R&B, and neo-soul into lush melodic soundscapes, with vocal performances that carry a quietly soul-stirring presence. She chose her stage name to represent something pure and everlasting, and "Forever Last" lives up to exactly that promise. It's the kind of song that lodges itself in your chest and simply refuses to leave.

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LITM Singer-songwriter picks tunes featuring Casey Louis, OCHRE, Sven Curth and More!

LITM Singer-songwriter picks tunes brought to you by Casey Louis, OCHRE, Sven Curth, Mahto & The Loose Balloons and The Cumberland River Project

1. Casey Louis – "Growing Pains"

Casey Louis has never been interested in the easy version of anything. Originally from Westport, Connecticut and now based in Los Angeles, he's built a career on creating music that speaks to people at a subconscious level, spanning singer-songwriter intimacy, alternative rock, and indie pop. Casey Louis "Growing Pains" fits perfectly into that restless search for meaning. His album work is filled with themes of self-discovery, identity, and change, and his approach is one of fierce authenticity, refusing to smooth out the imperfections because they are exactly what make the work feel real. This song feels like a journal entry written at 3am and never regretted in the morning

2. OCHRE – "Way Out"

Christopher Leary, the English electronic musician behind the OCHRE project, has spent over two decades building sound worlds that feel less composed and more discovered. His music is often described as highly melodic, full of shimmering electronics, crunchy beats, and sweeping melancholic melodie, analogue tones and glitchy beats punctuated by snatches of classical orchestration, creating rich cinematic soundscapes. "Way Out" slots neatly into that lineage: introspective, textured, and unhurried in a way that forces the listener to meet it halfway. There's something almost spatial about it, the kind of music you find yourself inside rather than listening to. Leary's genius has always been making the electronic feel deeply, undeniably personal. Raw, searching, and completely human.

3. Sven Curth – "How Come"

There's a moment in "How Come" where the guitar and the upright bass lean on each other like old friends at last call, and that's the entire spirit of this song. Opening Sven Curth's live set recorded at the Waterhole in Saranac Lake, New York, "How Come?" arrives with playful approachability, asking why everything good feels so fleeting, framing life itself as a game with limited seating. There's a thumping shuffle on the drum kit, the bass guitar walks on a loose leash, and Curth's vocals sit somewhere between Dylan and Van Morrison, questioning social norms with the energy of someone who genuinely wants an answer. Irresistible and quietly wise.

4. Mahto and The Loose Balloons – "Systemic"

Mahto Addison-Browder has a gift for making the political feel personal without making it preachy. The live version of "Systemic," opening his radio sessions recording, arrives with contained tension: a nervous acoustic guitar, an upright bass pulsing in the background, and minimal drums, stripped back to reveal its skeleton, a precisely written song about social mechanisms delivered without raising its voice. Based in Johnson City, Tennessee, Mahto writes lyrics that often arrive to him mid-shift, mid-drive, or mid-conversation—ordinary moments producing extraordinary observations. Punk Head "Systemic" is the sound of someone looking at how the world works and deciding, quietly but firmly, that it doesn't have to.

5. The Cumberland River Project – "Turntable"

Frank Renfordt is a man in his sixties from Hagen, Germany who fell in love with American country music and refused to let geography stop him. He worked in the steel industry for most of his life before switching lanes entirely, becoming a songwriter, singer, and producer — building The Cumberland River Project into a vehicle for stories about blue-collar life, love, and the enduring pull of authenticity. "Turntable" carries that same warmth: narrative-based songwriting with a high emotional quotient, metaphorical depth, and poetic prowess — genre-expansive at its core, blending soul, jazz, and Americana influences. It's proof that the best music comes from people with something real to say.

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LITM Pop Picks Mid-week Tunes brought to you by Big Cat Season, Matare, Amelie and more!

LITM Pop picks tunes featuring Big Cat Season, Matare, Amelie, CS Hellman and Night Wolf!

1. Big Cat Season-"Another Wasted Moment"
There's a particular kind of melancholy that only synth-pop can capture—the kind that feels like floating in a room full of echoes. Boston-based duo Big Cat Season, the creative partnership of Melissa Dudek and Tom Durkin, nail it completely on "Another Wasted Moment." Voices float amidst waves of sound, conjuring the sensation of listening to frequencies from deep space-emotional, alive, and deeply connected to something interior. The duo, born of a creative reunion between two people with seventeen years of shared history, brings the warmth of a late summer evening and the ebb and flow of something that feels effortless. It's the kind of song that makes you stop scrolling.

2. MatAre – "Brevity"
Some tracks are not self-announcing. They have just arrived. The title track of his most recent EP, "Brevity," is the best example of how Matthew Rousseau, who formerly wrote fast-paced club songs as Vibal in Orlando, has changed from dancefloor joy to something considerably more contemplative on his MatAre project. Plastic Periodical Rousseau's vocals glide with a dreamily alluring charm evocative of Wild Nothing as the tune, which begins with an expressive, jangling interest, rises from rich mystique into surging energy, its combination of sharp jangles and warming distortion recalling '90s alt-rock memories. The song is more about the peaceful clarity that emerges when things eventually settle down than it is about specific moments.

3. Amelie – "Mumma" (Luis Almau Remix)
At just 14, London-based Amelie writes with the kind of emotional sincerity that most artists spend decades chasing. This remix operates less as a stylistic overhaul and more as a careful reframing, placing the original's warmth into an electronic pop environment that feels airy, sunlit, and deliberately accessible, without stripping away its emotional center. Parkett producer Luis Almau, drawing on his background in film scoring, builds space around Amelie's voice rather than drowning it in drop-bait production, resulting in something brighter, shinier, and dangerously streamable. What lingers is a young artist's love for her mother, refracted through a remix that makes it feel universal. That's no small thing.

4. CS Hellmann – "Dagger In The Sun"
Not every song about emotional honesty dares to actually be emotionally honest. This one does. CS Hellmann crafts a soundscape that weighs shimmering retro tones against deep personal introspection, channeling the vibrant sounds of Johnny Dynamite's "Bats In The Woods" and the intimate textures of Papertwin, warm, analogue, and glowing like old-school synth-pop while sounding entirely alive in the present. The song addresses the dissonance between how we look and how we feel, that gap most of us quietly live in. Drummer Sean Bennett's steady, tactile touch gives the single a live-band feel that breathes beyond the studio. It doesn't shout. It just tells the truth.

5. Night Wolf – "Unstoppable" (feat. Lois Powell)

Healing isn't cinematic in real life; it's slow, unglamorous, and punctuated by ordinary mornings. But somehow, Night Wolf and Lois Powell have made it sound like a film score. Their third collaboration is a moody, dream-pop piece about fresh beginnings and resilience, carried by Powell's enchanting vocals above distorted acoustic guitar, lush cinematic strings, and eerie backing vocals. The song exists in the liminal space between intimate confession and widescreen drama, grounded yet ethereal, hopeful without being dishonest. The metaphor of winter giving way to spring runs through every lyric: silence, introspection, and then, finally, movement.It earns its catharsis.

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