Top New Tracks To Play At Your Next Poker Night

A poker night is a great way to get your mates together if you fancy a fun, affordable evening in that doesn’t involve staring at a screen.

To organise a good poker night, you’ll also have to think about the soundtrack that will act as a background to the gambling action. This is the perfect opportunity to mix a few classic poker songs with fresh tracks from up and coming acts. It can even help you to introduce new music to people in your social circle without forcing them to sit down and listen.

Here are a few of the latest tracks which might go down well if you add them to your playlist ahead of your next poker night.

Inhaler – We Have To Move On

The lads from Dublin have done it again with this recent release, which powers along on a driving beat and a chunky bass line, overlaid with soaring vocals ahead of the arrival of anthemic synths at just the right moment.

By the time the slightly melancholic chorus rolls around, everyone at the poker table will be nodding their heads and tapping their feet. It all builds to a pleasingly punchy crescendo, and seems as good a way to start the night as to end it, making it a flexible option for master playlist-constructors.

Paris Youth Foundation – Home Is Where The Heart Is

There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking about the melody or the lyrics of this track in isolation, but combined they make a supremely impactful and wistfully sentimental song that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Expect your mates to indulge in a bit of air drumming as the song builds up to the chorus, which harks back to an older age of mid-2000s UK indie. It may be a new track, but it already manages to sound timeless and urgent in one fell swoop.

Henderson – Field of Mist (Field of Bliss)

Sound like The Strokes but hailing from the Steel City, there is clearly a lot of care and attention ploughed into every second of this track. If you’re looking for non-stop riffage and vocal acrobatics performed in an unfussy way, this could well be for you.

Unusually the song actually settles for a more subdued final third, mellowing out rather than ramping up to an over the top climax, so it will not prove too much of a distraction if you are in the middle of a particularly important hand of poker.

Bugeye – Don’t Stop

Laced with hints of their 90s origins, Don’t Stop is another elegantly constructed yet appealingly staccato track from Bugeye that bodes well for the band’s future releases.

Strange electronic bleeps and bloops overlaid on meaty guitars help reinforce the disco-infused punk vibe that the band have sought to uphold over the years. For anyone who’s folded a particularly bad hand, this track will provide a welcome distraction to their woes.

Neon Islands – Time

If you like your indie at the poppier end of the spectrum, it really is a great time for new music, as epitomised in this euphoric effort from Neon Islands.

The low key verses provide the breathing space you need to recover between the intense and uplifting choruses. There are also plenty of obvious influences on show in Time, but yet it still manages to sound like its own thing, rather than being bland and derivative.

Whatever your choices for your poker night playlist, it is always a good idea to have a mixture of energies at play, as peaks and troughs can keep people interested over several hours.