by Dan Goldin (@post_trash_)

Welcome to FUZZY MEADOWS, our weekly recap of this week's new music. We're sharing our favorite releases of the week in the form of albums, singles, and music videos along with the "further listening" section of new and notable releases from around the web. It's generally written in the early hours of the morning and semi-unedited... but full of love and heart. The list is in alphabetical order and we sincerely recommend checking out all the music we've included. There's a lot of great new music being released. Support the bands you love. Spread the word and buy some new music.

*Disclaimer: We are making a conscious effort not to include any artist in our countdown on back-to-back weeks in order to diversify the feature, so be sure to check the "further listening" as well because it's often of top-notch quality too.

BETHLEHEM STEEL | “Empty Room”

With “Empty Room” we get Bethlehem Steel as we’ve literally never heard them before, with lead vocals from the band’s own Christina Puerto (guitar/vocals), who joined the band shortly after the release of their last album. In Puerto, band mastermind Becca Rsykalczyk found not only a deep companionship, but also another strong song writer with an understanding of Bethlehem Steel’s aesthetic choices and impassioned soul searching lyrics, as explored in “Empty Room,” one of several Puerto contributed to the band’s self-titled album, due out next month. It opens with a caustic rumble and wriggles its way into crunching chords and sinewy guitar melodies from there, led by Puerto’s dazzling vocals and a few well placed harmonies.

BIG THIEF | “Not”

We generally like to give spotlight to bands and songs you might have otherwise missed with our Fuzzy Meadows column, but we also need to give credit where it’s due and Big Thief’s latest single “Not” is a certified ripper like we’ve never heard from the band. While there’s no doubt the quartet are masters of songcraft as shown time and time again on each successive record, this song shreds and well… it’s pretty damn heavy. The band released U.F.O.F. in May, a great record in its own right, one they are calling their “celestial” record as it soared pretty firmly in its own atmosphere, but they have a companion record, Two Hands, due out in October that brings the band back down to Earth, and if every song is as immaculate and raw as “Not,” we’re all in for a serious treat. Adrienne Lenker’s gorgeous voice is shaky and warbling, as she and the band run down a corrosive progression that picks up aggression with every shuffling fill and poetic line until it simply bursts open into explosive distortion.

BORIS | “Love”

Forever reinventing, tinkering, and tweaking their sound, Boris remain consistently enjoyable with whatever they create from sludge metal to pop and shoegaze. The legendary Japanese trio are set to release a new double album, LφVE & EVφL (their first for Third Man Records) in October, following 2017’s excellent Dear LP, and the first single “Love” is a colossal drag of slow crawling doom and detuned psych. Every note is stretched with bong shaking intensity, the melody pulled and contorted beyond this world and into the next, with each wash of guitar layered to monolithic perfection. It’s brutally heavy and delightfully textured, a molasses drip of colorful splashes gives shape to the otherwise foreboding menace of it all. Long live Boris.

GHOST FUNK ORCHESTRA | “A Song For Paul” LP

The past five years of Ghost Funk Orchestra’s output has all been leading up to A Song For Paul, the collective’s immaculate new album of indie soul, breezy jazz, and the kitchen sink of influences that come from an extended musical background. Those ideas belong to the maestro of it all, Seth Applebaum, the brains behind the beauty and bliss that is their new record, a freewheeling and unflinching retro masterpiece that feels lost in time. From the shimmering soul melodies and utterly dazzling drums to the thick bass grooves and spirited horns, everything falls into place in a psych odyssey of traditional sounds delivered in non-traditional fashion. A Song For Paul is the vivid dream and cinematic vision we never want to wake from, unfolding in serene glory from start to finish.

ILL GLOBO | “Check The Odds” EP

Melbourne’s Ill Globo make riotous hardcore in short bursts with giant riffs and buzzsaw guitars that sound like a thunderstorm carefully bottled and shaken to the point of no return. Detonation is inevitable with every track on their latest EP, Check The Odds, out now on Aarght Records (The UV Race, Ausmuteants, Eddy Current Suppression Ring). Void of any macho posturing, Ill Globo’s brand of hardcore is based on a loaded intensity and songs ready to implode at every moment, the guitars shredding in all directions with the distortion leaving chemtrails in their wake. It’s a barrel of fun and chaos, those very elements combining together to create a refreshing punk record that’s spitting and slurring in attitude yet vehemently concise and willfully agitated.

L’ORANGE & JEREMIAH JAE | “Dead Battery”

For those paying attention to underground hip-hop, Seattle’s L’Orange has without a doubt become one of the most dependable producers of the past decade. Last year he teamed up Solemn Brigham to form Marlowe (who released one of the year’s best hip-hop records) but back in 2015 he joined together with Jeremiah Jae to release the sample heavy boom-bap essential, The Night Took Us In Like Family, an exceptional album from it’s collage beats to the narrative driven lyrical depth. The duo are back again with the upcoming Complicate Your Life With Violence, another conceptual record where lyricism and production reign supreme together, a matching of their talents that recalls the best of MF Doom and Madlib’s joint efforts in quality and artistic unity. First single “Dead Battery” is locked in, a grim beat with a slowed soul flare sets the scorched Earth for Jae to do his thing unfettered, his words pouring out while effortlessly riding the beat: “Yea we here to take it back from the whack on the wax, from the front to the back, genocide on track / from the crack of the whip, to them bricks that you sold, take it back, tell em we ain’t gonna take it anymore.”

LIGHTNING BOLT | “Air Conditioning”

When the news breaks that a band has “cleaned up” their sound, it’s rarely a positive change, especially when that band is an institution of their own noise, such as the Rhode Island pioneers Lightning Bolt. Their jittery and raucous brand of punk is their signature but sometimes just a touch of refinement goes a long way and “Air Conditioning,” the first single from Sonic Citadel, is indeed “cleaner” from the guitars to the vocals. That newfound clarity provides an enlightening look into the songwriting of the duo, with the vocals far less buried in the mix and the tangled web of clamorous drums and distorted riffs evolving ever so slightly into something more digestible (but just as deranged), though let us not forget we’re still very much talking about the same Lightning Bolt. It’s a cavalcade of crashing rhythms and caterwauling noise, but that refinement has the band sounding bigger are better, the fog beginning to clear from the trees.

PILE | “My Employer (Alternate Version)”

Released back in May, Pile’s latest album, Green and Gray, remains an absolute favorite of ours at Post-Trash, an impossibly great record from an impossibly great band. Honing in on personal reflections of aging in life and as musicians, the album itself also finds room to age and grow, each song working itself into your consciousness in real time, the ideas and visceral emotions of their progressions working double time to both destroy and rebuild your senses. “My Employer,” one of the record’s most gentle moments has returned with an “Alternate Version,” a reimagining of the profound song with a heavier pummel and a more immediate sense of force. The song already offered a dense weight within the lyrics, but Rick Maguire’s sentiments are driven home with added guitar noise, sludge, and Kris Kuss’ giant rhythmic muscle behind it.

SCREAMING FEMALES | “Let Me In”

Screaming Females are pretty much the ideal band. They work hard, they tour hard, they’ve remained loyal to Don Giovanni since the beginning (growing the label together with their own band), and best of all, they’ve never released a bad album. In between all those great records and tours, the band have released a slew of singles and b-sides which are also great… go figure. The band will release Singles Too, a compilation of those non-album tracks (and a few covers) in October and the first song shared is “Let Me In,” a previously unreleased track that could have fit onto most of their records. Marissa Paternoster’s guitar rips and shreds as only she can, tearing between verses and nosediving into blistering solos wherever they will fit as the song chugs along with anthemic repetition and dazzling fills.

TROPICAL FUCK STORM | “Braindrops”

If the end times are coming, we’re grateful to be spending them with the carnage of Tropical Fuck Storm’s sophomore album, Braindrops. The band have outdone themselves this time around (no small task following their incredible debut) making something that both captures the chaos of our real world and serves cynical narratives of a future and past that never were, corrupting the corrupt into imaginative despair and colorful mayhem that always reads as poetic. The album’s title track opens with the band’s manipulated sounds and a nimble groove that eventually devolves into the unhinged with layered percussion, soulful breaks, and all the mangled narrative poetics of Gareth Liddiard at his best: “you’re like a snake with its arse up its head man, stop thinking / its enough dealing with this heat and stink / school bus, street pus, the crushed skulls of a watermelons / flowing down a drain the colour of indian ink.”

Further Listening:

August 12 - August 18:

August 19 - August 25: