Atlanta Soundtrack: New music by Amaarae and Aliyah’s Interlude, Mitchy, Zoe Bayani and vintage Outkast

Amaarae (feat. Aliyah’s Interlude) — ‘Angels in Tibet — Aliyah’s Interlude Remix’

Agnes Scott alumna Amaarae exhilarated listeners in 2023 with the release of her critically acclaimed, dance-indulgent Fountain Baby. Now, rounding off the leg of her first headlining U.S. tour, Amaarae returns with an eight-track remix package for Fountain Baby’s sumptuous thesis, “Angels In Tibet.”  

Foiling Amaarae’s ticklish falsetto comes a new verse from fellow Atlanta-raised it girl, Aliyah’s Interlude. Brandishing a Fountain Baby’s devil-may-care-attitude with appropriately self-referential cockiness, Aliyah’s Interlude boosts her own alternative fashion to luxury status in a girl’s girl nod to those who see every grocery aisle as an opportunity to catwalk. 

You can listen to the remix below. 

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Mitchy — ‘I Hate It Too’

Self-admitted people pleasers and the generally rumination-prone will be delighted to greet soundtrack Atlanta’s scattered thunderstorm season with new sounds for melodramatic window gazing. 

Rising indie-rock singer-songwriter Mitchy has finally debuted her long-teased single “I Hate It Too,” and it’s just what the tears need to get them tumbling over the precipice. Featuring production from Atlanta’s Drew Vandenberg (Faye Webster, Toro Y Moi, of Montreal), “I Hate It too” mirrors the brooding thought spiral of Mitchy’s overthinking with twinkling, timid strums of guitar spilling into squealing exasperation as Mitchy resigns, “I hate it too / It’s not just you.”

The release is accompanied by a self-animated lyric video, which you can watch below.

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Zoe Bayani — ‘Contemplate’

Oh, the mortifying ordeal of being known.

On “Contemplate,” singer-songwriter Zoe Bayani can’t quite shake the hourglass. Paralyzed by self-awareness, Bayani dwells on the nail-digging afflictions of her own procrastinations and perceptions until time slips away into insomnia-addled frets that she’s forgotten to call her mother. It isn’t, however, the wailing cut of her stacked harmonies or the stirring swell of strings that bring “Contemplate” its most gut-burning ache. Rather, it’s the intentional use of lyrical enjambment materially suggesting that Bayani is playing catch-up even in her own song, futilely scrambling to appear present despite the fear that her facade is as transparent as a clock face.

Although technically released in 2023, Bayani celebrated the song’s one-year anniversary with a new and equally cinematic music video (directed by Summer Schantz), which you can watch below.

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Outkast – ‘Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik’

At the start of the ’90s, hip-hop was dominated by the binary proliferation of East and West Coast sounds. Tracks name-dropping the cosmopolitan hubs of New York City and Los Angeles were a dime a dozen, but, in Atlanta, Organized Noize and a couple of young emcees were plotting from a basement studio to get East Point on the stereo-bumping map. 

Those young emcees would become Big Boi and André 3000 of Outkast, and their debut record, “Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik,” which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, did indeed put East Point on the map. The record’s second single and title track functions as both homecoming and crystal ball for this moment, ushering Southern living into hip-hop’s deeply regional zeitgeist while indelibly shifting the genre’s sound and market for decades to come. 

Melding the East Coast’s funk inflection with the low-riding bass grooves from the West, “Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik” sees a young Big Boi and André 3000 rapping nimbly on their Southern roots, commanding attention to a burgeoning third coast while shouting out the neighborhoods that raised them, the collective that nurtured them and the hemp and hoecakes that fueled them. The song’s gospel-style chorus is rife with prideful dopamine, its resounding lyrics more of a promise than an offer as the percussion drops, and we’re left with live saxophone curving around its parting pledge: We’re gonna get you high.

You can watch the music video for “Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik” (directed by F. Gary Gray) below. 

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Lindsay Thomaston is a photographer and culture writer with a background in media and politics. Her work has appeared in Paste Magazine, Rolling Stone, i-D, Dazed, Fashionista and Immersive Atlanta, among others.