by Álvaro Molina, Aly Eleanor, Anika Maculangan, Anna Solomon, Ben Hohenstatt, Benji Heywood, Caleb Doyle, Calvin Staropoli, Caroline Nieto, Charlie Pecorella, Chris Coplan, Chris Polley, Christopher J. Lee, Dan Goldin, Devin Birse, John Brouk, John Glab, Jonah Evans, Justin Davis, Kris Handel, Louis Pelingen, Mark Gurarie, Matt Watton, Matty McPherson, Myles Tiessen, Niccolo Porcello, Patrick Pilch, Sara Mae, Selina Yang, Shea Roney, Tim Buck, Zak Mercado, and Zuzu Lacey
*****
Welcome to the tenth (!) annual Post-Trash "Year In Review," a look back at some of Post-Trash's favorite music of the year, a list built primarily from the site's coverage. Against all odds, we’ve (nearly) made it to the end of another year. It was a difficult one to say the least, but as always, there was plenty of amazing music released over the course of twelve months. Let this be your guide (it's bookmark-able) to not only reconnect with your personal favorites but more importantly to discover something new. It's time to catch up on the releases that went under the radar, the hidden gems, and the essential records from the underground. "The Year in Review" is a comprehensive guide to our favorite releases of the year, we’ve hand-picked about 150 records (it might be 154, we got carried away) that we think you should listen to. Your next favorite band/artist could be out there, it's just a matter of listening to something new. Popular opinion isn’t the only opinion, sometimes you have to dig a bit deeper. Support the music you love. We hope you have a good time listening. Thank you for reading Post-Trash.
Thank you to all the writers and contributors that keep Post-Trash going all year. We’re all in this together, writing about music simply because we’re passionate and excited about what we’re listening to, and that’s pretty wonderful. Stay tuned next week for the "Staff Picked Top 50 Albums of the Year,” an eclectic list where anything goes. Thanks again. - DG
JANUARY:
Lame-O Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
Lily Seabird’s sophomore album Alas, is an explosion of feelings. The follow up to 2021’s Beside Myself, Alas, is an indie rock powerhouse where every track feels like a personal catharsis for Seabird. The songs dance between folk ballads and sulky rock—you never know when a crunchy guitar will hit you halfway through a song, but there is also a refreshing plainness to Alas, an Americana sound that comes in through Seabird’s voice. As a vocalist, she evokes the whiny twang of Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman and Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker; there is a strength to her sound that surfaces between softer melodies, making clear exactly what the song means through her voice alone. The first track, “Take It,” launches that vocal superpower, as Seabird sings, “I love the world, but maybe I wasn’t meant to be happy.” This lyric, while a knife to the heart, reverberates throughout the entire album—each song shows an appreciation for the beauty of life, but a discordance with the struggle it brings. - Caroline Nieto
Fire Talk Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
Through the nitty, gritty, and shitty, PACKS has been known to lean on the artistic musings of the most overlooked possibilities; standing out as a band in both genuine relatability and gripping authenticity. The Toronto four piece now returns with Melt the Honey, their third full length record and their second within a span of a year, continuing to cover new ground as they go. Fronted by Madeline Link, PACKS’ sound plays from a controlled burn of garage rock, anti-folk and the barebones of pop-eccentricism, redefining the mundane with gasps of fixation and sincerity. Fully self produced and recorded down in Xalapa, Mexico at the infamous Casa Pulpa, Melt the Honey is a calloused gesture to PACKS’ individuality and Link’s growing attributions of self worth. - Shea Roney
Exploding In Sound Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
Hot Air Balloon continues Pile’s mastery of intricate post-hardcore, animating a skeleton of sludge with the weeping flesh of psychedelic folk. Off the heels of their latest album All Fiction, Hot Air Balloon is composed of songs left off of All Fiction’s final cut. Far from scraps, each song on Hot Air Balloon is striking enough to stand alone. This EP serves as a deeper sampler into Pile’s future sonic landscape. Adding to the depths of earlier works’ abrasive rock, Hot Air Balloon wallows in a darker timbre. The clock slows in anticipation for something on the horizon – a primordial, yet gentle, beast. Pile’s new sound is like the silky oozing flesh of an early born calf, disconcerting in its raw organicness but beautiful in its wide-eyed innocence. The odyssey of the album’s emotional journey mirrors that of Pile’s recent creative process: the frustration of artist’s block, the catharsis of relentless experimentation, and the reimagination of past works. - Selina Yang
Slumberland Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
The jangle pop revival might never fully coalesce into any kind of viral sensation bolstered by Gen Z like Midwest emo or lo-fi indie rock has, but San Francisco quartet The Umbrellas are getting pretty damn near perfection of the genre nevertheless with their sophomore LP Fairweather Friend. Blissed out and freeing from top to bottom, this sprightly collection of tunes manages to hit the mark on fuzzed-out tone and hummable melodies in equal measure, with an interplay between the dirtier garage-tinged bangers featuring guitarist Matt Ferrara on lead vocals or the cathartic yet more mannered compositions putting bassist Morgan Stanley in front of the mic (though her backup harmonies on Ferrara’s songs are just as pleasing) that makes the whole proceeding a never-dull and fully-formed listen. The album comprehensively recalls both the playful multi-instrument mania of the original Athens scene as well as the resurgent twee waves of the late 90s/early 00s, but there’s also a sheen of professionalism and mastery at the forefront of every song resembling a love letter to the past that also works as a thesis defense about why the sound deserves to remain and continue to be practiced in 2024: even in the darkest timeline, hearts flutter and chorus pedals hum. - Chris Polley
ALSO RECOMMENDED:
@ “Are You There God? It’s Me @” | BAD HISTORY MONTH “To Be Free” | BIB “Biblical” | BIG MESS “Heroic Captains of Industry” | BOLDY JAMES & NICHOLAS CRAVEN “Penalty Of Leadership” | CHE NOIR “The Color Chocolate, Vol. 1” | HACKER “Psy-Wi-Fi” | LUPO CITTÁ “Lupo Cittá” | MODE HEXE “Norphonic” | THE SMILE “Wall of Eyes” | TY SEGALL “Three Bells” | ZOWY “Beware Magical Thinking”
FEBRUARY:
Third Man Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
Since the days of David Nance’s earliest recordings, mostly steeped in noise and abrasion, there’s always been a shimmering heart at the center, a balladeer buried beneath the distortion. His songs draw you toward the warmth, that core element of his charm readily apparent even as the dust had yet to settle. Over the span of a decade there’s been some refinement and what was once masked in acid-fried tape hiss and awash in caterwauling guitars has become more direct, distilled into something cleaner, but every bit as strong. David Nance & Mowed Sound is the next chapter of an already essential story, an evolution and expansion of his penchant for folk and country subversion. Much like the music itself, Nance’s band has evolved as well. What was once the David Nance Group has become Mowed Sound, a collective of Omaha’s finest that includes contributions from new members Dereck Higgins, Sam Lipsett, Pearl Lovejoy Boyd, and long-standing collaborators James Schroeder and Kevin Donahue. Together, the sextet has arrived at the most timeless music of their career. Roots abound from the recording, both in sense of community and the essence of cosmic earthiness. Everyone is playing their part, the instrumentation flexible to the demands of the songs. Sprinkle in some piano and organ here and a bit of flute and auxiliary percussion there, everything in its place. - DG
Ramp Local
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
On Psychedelic Anxiety, Frances Chang takes us through the cognitive clarity required to transform melancholy into mourning. In psychoanalysis, melancholy is shrapnel lodged in the soul, piercing with every movement. Buried in the subconscious, the pain of unassimilated memories radiates outwards into malaise. Before that scar can fade, it must first blister and darken. The sophomore album of this New York art punk is a sensory amalgamation of haunting memories and chromatic films, gift wrapped in angelic gauze. With allusions to Deerhoof’s eclectic instrumentation, the groove is grafted onto Jeff Buckley’s sweeping romanticism, then filtered through ambient progressive rock. Tumbling silk hums envelop the listener. They are hymnal in their precision, even as the instrument selection becomes increasingly eclectic. - Selina Yang
Feel It Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
It’s always indie sleaze this and indie sleaze that, but what about garage punk sleaze? London duo Grazia are here for the punks, making clean and rattling garage punk with heavy pop hooks and minimalist structures. Their sound is catchy, indebted both to 80’s new wave and a more radiant KBD sound, each song on their upcoming debut, In Poor Taste, packing a gluey charm that’s hard to resist. The duo of Heather Dunlop and Lindsay Corstorphine’s knack for memorable hooks and deadpan humor is fully realized, driving with attitude and devious fun. Sophistication is overrated, and Grazia deal exclusively in trash charm earworms. Seriously though, these songs are well crafted songs, vivid, snotty, and shuffling. - DG
Merge Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
Mary Timony has come to inhabit a category of one. This may seem like an odd assessment given her frequent projects and collaborations over the last three decades, whether with Helium during the 1990s, Wild Flag slightly over a decade ago, or Ex Hex, the hard/garage-rock inspired outfit that has preoccupied her recording the past ten years. Timony epitomizes the rock-and-roll lifer, a journey-person musician who has tried out, tested, and integrated different genres through a steady output of albums, while also being comfortable as part of a trio or quartet. This new solo album feels different, however. Though she has never been absent from the scene, Untame the Tiger sounds like both a culmination of these prolific decades and a re-introduction. One gets the sense that Timony harbors this feeling as well. - Christopher J. Lee
Portrayal of Guilt Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
It would seem that Austin’s Porcelain aren’t pulling any punches with their self-titled album. The band’s first full length is jagged and rampant, an album that seems to burst at the seams, a missive of explosive peaks and dynamic arrangements. For every moment that’s primed to burn and pillage, there’s another of atmospheric warble and gentle contemplation. Porcelain arrive with a sure footed debut, a post-hardcore album that’s urgently nuanced. At times clamoring with a corrosive grip (“World I Know”), the band also flex the capability for discordant pummeling and a crawling sort of surrealist ease (“Plastic”), the arpeggiated progressions recalling the sun-fried twang of Gun Outfit at times, with the dexterous muscle of Unwound never lurking too far in the distance. Their aggressive tendencies are balanced with the distorted twang-infused verses, pulled and eventually stubbed into a dense contusion. Porcelain swing from polarities, the epic swell of the duel guitars peeling away and swallowed in clouds of distortion. - DG
Beach Impediment Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
Without warning came the barbaric return of North Carolina’s Public Acid, one of hardcore punk’s absolute best. While last year gave us the band’s great Beat Session tape, it’s been four years since the brilliant Condemnation EP and yet their artistically filthy take on hardcore sounds more corrosive now than ever. Deadly Struggle, their latest album, is a juggernaut of blistering riffs (seriously, listen to “Ignorance”) over sludgy primitive rhythms and delightfully deranged vocals, garbled and violent, in the best of ways. There’s a relentless force and sense of upheaval throughout the record, a righteous indignation that batters and fries the senses with a controlled sense of chaos and brutality that feels both inventive yet sonically disgusting. Crusty, damaged, and equal parts primal and arty, Public Acid can’t be stopped. - DG
Best Brother / Midnight Werewolf Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
It’s been more than five years since Rick Rude released Verb For Dreaming, and there have been more than enough high highs and low lows to go around. That said, Laverne, the band’s new album, feels like a celebration. It’s a record that revels in the glow of family and friends, remembering the best of times, the moments of pure joy, but it’s also mindful that we all need support to maintain stable footing. It’s not all sunshine, but there is comfort to be found, and it’s in that understanding where Laverne really comes alive. There’s an inherent bond that comes with being a band for over a decade, when everything seemingly just snaps into place. Rick Rude have always exuded a unique chemistry, the dynamic approach to Ben Troy and Jordan Holtz's duel songwriting often felt like radiant sides of the same coin. There’s cohesion in spades yet their voices, literally and metaphorically, offer personal perspectives, direct yet abstract, with Laverne highlighting both hard-worn warmth and a sardonic wit that combine to satiate, to create a mental ease. There’s sunshine waiting to break through the darkest of clouds if you’re patient enough. Together with Ryan Harrison and Chris Kennedy (who joined the band shortly after their last album), Rick Rude have constructed an album that ebbs and flows in a way that feels like time passing, healing, with riotous spikes and reflective respite. Make no mistake though, it’s a ripper, they’d have it no other way. - DG
Legless / Goner / Drunken Sailor Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
Australia's own Split System have presented their latest album, Vol. 2, as a kind of musical counteragent. By first questioning if our "demands of punk are a little too high... [or] a little too exacting," not to mention talk of primal itches that need scratching, they’ve positioned themselves as a hard-hitting salve for needless wanderlust. The resulting eleven track LP supports that M.O. to a tee. "The Wheel" may be the most streamlined piece of Aussie punk rock you can lay ears upon. Meanwhile, "Kill Me" is the bouncing, angsty grandchild of bands like The Scientists and Radio Birdman. Is it all good? You bet it is — a sound that draws you into a crowded pit and ignites both hearts and minds as it peels away the needless ephemera of life like so much industrial solvent. - Chris Coplan
Televised Suicide
Bandcamp
Any mention of Melbourne’s Vampire comes with the tag line “The Greatest Anarcho Band To Exist”. It’s a bold statement and well, we’re not inclined to disagree. What Seems Forever Can Be Broken is undeniably one of the best punk albums of the year, laying waste to the competition with its sledgehammer intensity, brute force, unassuming duel vocals, lyrical indignation, and careening riffs. We were late to the party, but we’ve had this one in heavy rotation since it crossed our paths. What Seems Forever is an immediate barn burner, scrambling any sense of complacency and rewiring every synapse in our brains. The band’s anarcho punk ideals are far more than talking points, splattered with unconventional melodic touches (the harmonies in “Nothing To Hold” for example), punchy rhythmic avalanches, and throat shredding directness that feels unglued without being unhinged. There’s a point to the animosity and agitation, a steely focus and intelligence that claws with opposition to systemic structures designed to keep the working class down, erupting against the notion that citizens are capital, treated by the government and the wealthy like nothing more than a human product as the world crumbles. The mix of brute force and acerbic disdain carried out with the band’s male and female vocals is truly unmatched, intense but nuanced and thundering with righteous character from all three members of the band. A new anarcho punk masterpiece, timeless in its (decisively non-preachy) disdain. - DG
ALSO RECOMMENDED:
ARSE “Kaputt.” | CAN “Live In Paris 1973” | THE CHISEL “What A Fucking Nightmare” | FATBOI SHARIF & ROPER WILLIAMS “Something About Shirley” | GRASS JAW “I Don’t Want To Believe” | HEEMS & LAPGAN “Lafandar” | LAETITIA SADIER “Rooting For Love” | SPECTRAL VOICE “Sparagmos”
MARCH:
Tough Love
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
One might hear Ulrika Spacek and not appreciate the pop sensibility underlying some of the harsher, post-punk aspects of that group’s excellent 2023 release Compact Trauma. However, that group’s front man, Rhys Edwards, is constantly injecting that sensibility throughout all of his music. The Foreign Department is Edwards’ follow up to 2022’s impressive Flickering I, released under the name Astrel K. Under this moniker, Edwards’ pop sensibility is more transparently laid bare. The name Brian Wilson gets thrown around a lot as a comparator, whether for vocals, album production, or the general mood of songs, artists, or records. Here, with Astrel K, the comparator is apposite. There’s equal parts pop sensibility, sweet melancholy, and beautiful song arrangements on The Foreign Department. Not many artists have that special sauce. From bouncy and fun Kraftwerk-influenced songs like “R U A Literal Child,” to cinematic score-like tunes, as on “Daffodil” or interstitial “C-Ya!,” Astrel K builds tunes with surprises and soul-edifying qualities. - Zak Mercado
Palilalia
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
Four Guitars Live, captures a performance of Bill Orcutt accompanied by three other acclaimed guitarists: Ava Mendoza (a New York-based avant-garde artist who’s played with musicians as diverse as Nels Cline and Jamaaladeen Tacuma), Shane Parish (who lives in Athens, GA and performs in the avant-garde band Ahleuchatistas) and Wendy Eisenberg (also New York-based and a member of the band Editrix, et al.). On record, these four horsepeople of the guitar-pocalypse shred through Orcutt’s exhilarating 2022 composition Music for Four Guitars. The composition is rich in texture but also retains the care-free attitude of improvisation for which Orcutt has been known since his days in noise rock band Harry Pussy. If you haven’t seen a performance of the concert, it’s hard to adequately explain the heaviness four guitar players achieve playing these songs in a room. Four Guitars Live balances the powerful immediacy of a composition like Glenn Branca’s “Hallucination City” with the intimacy of Orcutt’s other recordings, like his achingly beautiful album Jump On It. - Benji Heywood
Realistik Studios
Youtube | Geocities
Shimmering like a mirrored ballroom Diamond Jubilee is a record of tasteful excess. Across its two-hour runtime, the album never seems to ache for the common descriptors of work of its length. This is not an album that is epic in scope or full of aching ten-minute-plus tracks, but rather a precisely and perfectly executed collection of hauntingly brilliant guitar pop. Cindy Lee as a persona has always carried a spectral quality, as if Pat Flegel was resurrecting the ghosts of sixties girl groups past and channelling them through a husky yet tender falsetto and glitteringly sharp guitar. Where other albums under Cindy Lee have explored harsh synth soundscapes and no-wave angularities, Diamond Jubilee is as pure of a pop record as any of those sixty’s greats, complete with haunting brill-building production, gorgeous choruses, and barely any songs that break the five-minute mark. - Devin Birse
Self Released
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
Jen Bender’s vulnerability cuts through Thanks So Much with the same corporeality of blazing stars in the night sky. Clear, infinite, ever-distant, yet tangible. On “The Alternative”–the opening track of Cusp’s new EP–after a ceaseless list of grievances, Bender sings, somewhere between a mumble and a shout, “I think people are good; they just make mistakes.” The guitars wash up in a tidal wave of resonance, and the band lets the drums sit thick and heavy. Like Bender’s biting lyrics, the song begins and ends with arresting starkness. The Chicago-based outfit’s new EP is as much an indie record as it is a grunge, shoegaze, or pop record. A dreamy, psychedelic-infused ambience underpins its entirety, allowing crunchy, reverberating guitars to smash through the speakers with well-curated intensity. Thanks So Much is a loud EP, and Cusp definitely knows the importance of volume. But most importantly, they understand the importance of tranquillity. - Myles Tiessen
Ruination Record Co.
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
Inspired by the unique guitar work and confessional songwriting of artists like Joni Mitchell and Nick Drake, Chicago singer-songwriter Hannah Frances is another in a lineage of great songwriters who have tackled the subject of grief and loss. Going into her third studio album, she sought to create something that could be healing both to herself and to the listener. The result was Keeper of the Shepherd, a record overflowing with generosity and ambition, with Frances delving into the darkest parts of her psyche and her past to try and learn to reclaim herself again. Frances’ lyrics on Shepherd often focus on the feeling of being trapped inside oneself, of our own bodies and minds not being us but something we are stuck in. Through these seven tracks, we hear the sound of her attempting to break free. - Calvin Staropoli
Total Punk Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
If there’s another record out there that oozes joy the way that The Worst of Itchy & The Nits does, we haven’t heard it. The Sydney based trio combine the smash hits of their self-titled demo with five new songs to create a relentless garage punk record steeped in sunshine and endless charm. Rudimentary in construction, the brilliance is in the band’s power-pop hooks, their gang vocals, and the punchy nature of their lo-fi sound. The songs are bright, simplistic, and as raw as can be, loaded with flippant attitude (“Beat It Bozo,” “I’m Not Listenin”) and sugary smiles magnetism. Itchy & the Nits eschew technicality and finesse for what really matters, inescapably great songs played with undeniable heart. Bouncing from one jangly garage bop into the next, the band run through each minute long song with a carefree wonder and reckless sense of exuberance. - DG
Self Released
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
Let’s be perfectly clear, Jae Skeese is laser focused on Testament of the Times, his full length collaboration with producer Superior. Following a collaborative album with Conway The Machine and his first “proper” full length, Abolished Uncertainties, Skeese single-handedly eclipses his entire catalog with verbose and honest lyricism that feels like an underground hip-hop masterclass. In a world where bars outweigh hype, Jae Skeese would be praised among hip-hop’s intelligent elite, a top tier MC (and diehard sneakerhead) with an expansive rhyme book that prefers the personal to boastful posturing or glorifying the struggle. Testament of the Times should be a defining moment, a densely layered and emotional rap album that’s unapologetically true to itself. - DG
Matador Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
Taken together, The Collective marks a more radical stance than No Home Record with its bleaker, more panoramic vision of the present. In contrast to the exuberant warmth that has greeted it, this album is austere and starkly pessimistic. Rarely letting her guard down, Kim Gordon’s debut solo album possessed a few introspective moments that conceded some vulnerability. The songs “Earthquake” and “Get Yr Life Back” seemingly referenced her split from Thurston Moore and making a new life for herself. Moving in the opposite direction, the title The Collective gestures toward the social rather than the individual. It comes from the fourth track, “The Candy House” – a reference to Jennifer Egan’s sci-fi novel of the same name, which is about technology and collective memory. Gordon is intent on retaining her personal identity, repeating “I won’t join the collective,” but harbors a residual uncertainty and even an anxiety of being alone by virtue of this choice. - Christopher J. Lee
Epitaph Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
Frontwoman Marisa “Missy” Dabice has said the new Mannequin Pussy album, I Got Heaven, is about unleashing the animal inside of her, about a kind of freedom we aren't allowed. It is that feral eeriness that defines this album and what gives it a distinct sound from previous MP records. The ten songs on this LP feel like crawling through mud, sprinting through tall grass, seeing your hot breath drift upwards towards the stars outside a bar in winter. Soaring, sexy droning is the foundational characteristic, whether it be a sparkling, circular lead riff, or a monotonous harmony delicately delivered by Dabice. There is amazing tension in every song, straddling lustrousness and grit. - Sara Mae
Sad Cactus Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
In early spring 2023, Mulva (featuring members of Kal Marks and Bethlehem Steel) released the truly commanding Seer EP. Across that four-track effort, they emphasized balance — between post rock and sludge, emotional restraint and outright indulgence — to give us this really multifaceted experience. Now, the band have released their debut album, Bitter Form, in which they seem both newly-transformed and yet more familiar than ever. It's just as startling and compelling of a new experience as you’d ultimately desire. It's about accessibility to themselves and to one another, and being free to find a way to pull back or push forward to find newer ways of balancing loud and soft, brash and nuanced, direct and mysterious, etc. "Lye," while not my fave track, is a standout because you can almost hear this back-and-forth, and it has these moments where the balance seems tenuous but god does it feel so great to move with such uncertainty. The band can do that because they've tried to remain open to more imperfections and messiness because it also carries with it expressions of a more profound humanity and heaps of unspoken texture and context. - Chris Coplan
Pimpire Records
Spotify | Apple
Roc Marciano has positioned himself over the years as both an acquired taste for some and one of the best to ever do it to everyone else. The Hempstead based MC is a living legend, a rapper that carved his own path, with raw unflinching lyrics, equal parts poetic and menacing, the grace and the dirt. Roc Marciano is cut from the same cloth as Ghostface Killah, Rakim, and Pimp C, an MC that feels larger than life, his tales of the streets only balanced by his sense of humor. Marciology, produced by Marci, The Alchemist, and Animoss, is full of tight loops and hard rhymes. The bar for bar punches take some unpacking (as do all the best Marci records), he’s talking his shit with artistic elegance and patience, his intricate rhyme schemes delivered with both a sinister sneer and a braggadocios smirk. - DG
Merge Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
If Rosali’s No Medium was a masterpiece rippling at a heavy boil, Bite Down feels like the casually simmering counterpart, an album laced with heavy sentiment and graceful patience. Rosali Middleman and her band (once again joined by David Nance, James Schroeder, and Kevin Donahue) balance gentle textures and peeling guitars, the careening boogie tempered with the softer more nuanced moments of quiet retrospection. There’s a great deal of emotional muscle in the lyrics, Rosali drifting between loss and love, a mix of longing and understanding, songs that often find her down but absolutely never out. While it’s a more serene affair than the band’s last record, it’s not without it’s rollicking moments of boisterous country twang and silky soul. Bite Down proves to be a gorgeous and dynamic record, veering between moods and mental states with an unflinching sincerity. It’s a reminder that Rosali deserves all the flowers. - DG
Dark Descent / Me Saco Un Ojo Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
On the putridity scale, Septage’s brand of grinding death metal lies somewhere between a festering wound and oozing pus. Which is to say that the Copenhagen based trio’s music is more disgusting than most, and we mean that as a compliment. Septic Worship is nasty and over the top, the chaotic nature of it complex but rarely self-serious. The band bend time and tempo, often obliterating any sense of formal structure, grinding into elements of art metal experimentation while firmly rooted in bludgeoning death metal. There are a lot of impossibly heavy bands out there, but few manage to keep it both terrifying and triumphantly weird in the way that Septage do, demonic and acidic, rotten and forward-thinking in equal measure. Septic Worship would be harrowing if it wasn’t so damn fun, forever shifting and snarling from depths of disgust to the crust of sheer grinding carnage. - DG
Century Media Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
The LA based quartet are making death metal records the way they love them, raw, mountainous, and classic. Fragments of the Ageless, the band’s fifth album is a colossal homage to riffs… big fucking nasty riffs, riffs that shred, riffs with hooks, brilliant razor sharp riffs, riffs that decimate everything else to rubble. Skeletal Remains nod to the past, sure, but their primal take on ruthless OSDM feels like an adaptation of their influences, a catalyst and reminder of why they play supremely evil sounding death metal in the first place. Fragments of the Ageless is a demonic beast come home to reign, the incarnate of chaos and carnage. While eschewing over the top technicality or experimental genre splicing, there’s nothing “meat and potatoes” about the record, the album’s rotted fury feels corrosive at all moments, a brutal masterpiece set firmly in decrepit glory. Skeletal Remains are in fine form, and against all odds, they just keep getting better with every release. They are reliable, an impenetrable force, and for all it’s classic trappings, Fragments still feels like a breath of fresh air. Mining classic influences like Morbid Angel, Grave, early Gorguts, and Pestilence, the band offer a none stop rollercoaster of rhythmic slaughter and twin guitar riffs that dig and dig (and dig), the dirge balanced by the rampaging leads and combustible solos. - DG
Static Shock / Anti Fade Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
The Minneapolis Uranium Club Band are burdened with expectations. Their music is expected to be hard hitting and immediate, their lyrics expected to be cerebral and absurd, their live performances rapturous and intense, their band profile tantalizingly minimal. These expectations only grew stronger as time elapsed between releases and sporadic live performances. At long last, the Club has released new music, Infants Under the Bulb, a record that does what all great records by great bands do: overdelivers on some expectations and completely thwarts others. Make no mistake: the Uranium Club is back, and they’ve outdone themselves. The platonic ideal of a Uranium Club song is agitated and agitating: dueling guitar stabs and outbursts over a foundation of languid bass and impossibly fast four-on-the-floor drumming; speak-sung vocals delivered with deep emotion and palpable sarcasm about alienation and esoterica. Miraculously, IUTB delivers six or seven of these perfect tunes. “Small Grey Man” is a well-chosen opener, as understated chords and plodding tom-toms let the tension build and build – it’s a tension that sticks with you through the entire album, ebbing and flowing but never fully released. The Club is in their finest form on tracks like “Viewers Like You,” “2-600-Lullaby,” and “The Big Guitar Jackoff in the Sky.” They are the tightest, most vigorous punk band on the planet, but somehow also the most accessible and infectious. These songs get you moving and slamming while also being unstoppable earworms. - Matt Watton
One Little Independant Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
Six albums in and USA Nails just keep getting better. Never a band to rest on their laurels, the London based quartet are forever warping their sound, an intersection of damaged noise rock, charismatic post-punk, and discordant post-hardcore. With Feel Worse, the group’s first record for One Little Independent (Bad Breeding, Crass, Björk), they’re examining societal misfortune in its many forms. With sharp and pointed lyricism at times abstract and other times more direct, Steven Hodson and Gareth Thomas howl and malign the indifference that has washed over so many. Feel Worse is spring loaded with corrosive riffs and seasick layered distortion. There’s a visceral attack firmly in place throughout the record’s aggressive sound, but the album is undeniably dynamic, an exploration of brute grooves and swarming abrasion that bends in new directions, sputtering and stampeding in equal measure. - DG
ALSO RECOMMENDED:
A COUNTRY WESTERN “Life On The Lawn” | ADRIANNE LENKER “Bright Future” | DRILL “Permanent” | GOUGE AWAY “Deep Sage” | LYSOL “Down The Street” | MARBLED EYE “Read The Air” | ODETTA HARTMAN “Swansongs” | OUTER WORLD “Who Does The Music Love?” | PISSED JEANS “Half Divorced” | PLEASANTS “Rocanrol In Mono” | SLIMELORD “Chytridiomycosis Relinquished” | TOMATO FLOWER “No” | TOSSER “Sheer Humanity” | VALTATYHJIÖ “Kuristusleikki” | VERITY DEN “Verity Den”
APRIL:
Double Double Whammy
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Babehoven, the New York duo comprised of Maya Bon and Ryan Albert, have solidified themselves over the past seven years, release after release, amongst the finest purveyors of forthright and achingly gorgeous indie-folk. Bon has a knack for penning songs full of intense and forthrightly poetic lyrics that reach the heart of personal issues while holding a universality that has wide ranging appeal. She has shown herself to be equally adept at heart-wrenching emotions and expressing the hidden beauty in the world and daily life in a manner that is wholesomely gripping. The music, with delicate to soaring keys and rumbling chunky guitars, shifts around adding color and depth across these tracks. With Water's Here in You, Babehoven have managed to push beyond guitar based folk songs, incorporating a denser atmosphere that ebbs and flows with power, moving through pain into contemplative rest and peace. - Kris Handel
Thrill Jockey Records
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No other group pushes the boundaries of feedback and bombast quite like BIG|BRAVE. Part of this is Robin Wattie’s otherworldly voice, which is at once powerful and vulnerable. Equally vital are guitarist Mathieu Ball and drummer Tasy Hudson, both of whose all-or-nothing playing feels specific to the band. On A Chaos of Flowers, the Montreal-based trio’s mastery of dynamics continues. The band welds its signature formula of orchestral guitar squall and hammerhead rhythms into new forms that are every bit as compelling as their catalogue of mono-chord pummel-fests. An active listen to A Chaos of Flowers reveals a band exploring rich textures, brushed drums, and complex melodies. The music is nearly penitent in its patience. If doom can be delicate, then this is it. - Benji Heywood
Astral Spirits
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Accept When is the collaboration rooted in friendship and admiration between the duo of Wendy Eisenberg (guitar, vocals) and Caroline Davis (alto saxophone, vocals, synthesizers). The renowned pair construct a gorgeous blend of compositional improvisation, free jazz, and gentle experimental folk, alternative between the avant-garde and structured songs, each benefiting from the strength of the other. Joined at times by Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier on drums (who also mixed and mastered the record), Davis and Eisenberg feel locked in as they careen, skronk, and drift through minimalist reflections and meditative jazz, contorting the abrasive into something beautiful, the movement taking new shapes at every majestic turn. It’s a stunning record for both deep focus and zoning out, an album that blossoms anew with each repeat listen. - DG
Full Time Hobby
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Dana Gavanski is not afraid to write songs. On her third full length album, LATE SLAP out on Full Time Hobby, we are treated to fully formed, fleshed out arrangements that relish in their own musicality. While her previous releases showcased her arresting voice and undeniable spirit, they feel reserved and somber in comparison to this new record – LATE SLAP is teeming with life, in all its joy, heaviness, and whimsy. It’s teeming with music: beautiful, uncanny layers of voice, a menagerie of synth tones and guitar jangles, tasteful strings and enthralling melodies. Gavanski emerges self-assured, and rightly so, stepping out as a true peer alongside more well-known names like Cate LeBon, Aldous Harding, and A. Savage. Take “Let Them Row,” one of a handful of equally amazing singles. Beginning with an understated bass and piano line, Gavanski’s voice floats on top with a melody that lilts along but doesn’t resolve where you’d expect. Deep layers of vocal harmonies sneak in, as the song’s second movement introduces a carnivalesque synth that leads to a bubbly, rousing conclusion. This is a masterclass in the often-ignored art of arranging – no wasted space, no jostling for position, just an impeccable balance of voice and instrumentation creating an infectious yet refined art-pop gem. The record is chock-full of this. - Matt Watton
Fire Records
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Liverpool’s Jane Weaver is a legend in her own right, a transfixing presence in the world of experimental pop for the past two decades. Following the dissolution of her band Kill Laura back in the 90s, she began an uncompromising solo career, creating left of center pop music that blends analog synth textures, elegantly warped disco, and radiant lounge to create something timeless and innovative. Following 2020’s great Flock LP, Weaver is back with Love In Constant Spectacle, recorded together with John Parish (PJ Harvey, Aldous Harding). An exceptional album from start to finish, Weaver offers silky grooves that balances motorik rhythms with lush fuzzy psych, infectious hooks, and a jazzy spaced-out bliss. She’s in perfect control of the proceedings, gliding from kaleidoscopic brilliance into emotionally wrought territory and back again with a disorienting grace and Weaver’s anything-goes elegance. - DG
Exploding In Sound Records
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Miranda Winters has been a fixture of Chicago’s underground scene ever since her co-founded noise-rock group Melkbelly turned basements and clubs into sweaty communions of raw energy and pop-melodic mobility, but even before that she was writing gripping and tender alt-pop songs that stand the test of time. Now with a new project to focus on as well as the trials of becoming a parent, Lawn Girl plays beginning to end so strategically with youthful nostalgia as Winters writes through the lens of adulthood. When writing the album, Winters wanted to further explore her relationship within the historic Chicago music scene, more specifically with the relationship of women that have for so long built it up. Championing the idea of femininity, Winters added drummer Wendy Zeldin, bassist Lizz Smith, and guitarist Linda Sherman to make Mandy into something undeniably invigorating. With these new players, a fuller sound and depth in the production, Lawn Girl feels fresh in its delivery yet familiar at the heart of Winters’ charming and nostalgic song writing that has made her a beloved household name in Chicago and beyond. - Shea Roney
Spartan Records
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Neither kitsch nor hard-hearted, it would be easy to say that Frog Poems is about confronting the loss of innocence. It is clear, however, that Mister Goblin is concerned with going beyond this worn-out premise to examine the deeper, unresolved ambiguities of growing up as the source material for both adult confusion and contentment. This point of view isn’t entirely a rehash of the notion of the child being the parent to the adult; it is more along the lines of innocence and experience co-existing at once. Yet, there is also a lightness of touch to this album. Like his musical forebears, Mister Goblin is committed to recording a certain set (or period) of feelings rather than tallying rites of passage or arriving at the settled conclusions of maturity. Through elements of pop grace, Frog Poems is a reminder that we ignore the emotional insights of those long-ago episodes, however distant, at our peril. - Christopher J. Lee
Tankcrimes
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There’s a bull-headed brutality to Necrot’s music that feels unfused. In a genre that often leans over the top, the Oakland trio seem grounded, crushing skulls while playing it (relatively) cool. There’s a consistency the band have built over the course of the last decade, the sound of unstoppable juggernaut force barreling forward at the leisure pace of a stampede. Like a wrecking ball forever swinging until all that remains is rubble, Necrot are capable of sheer destruction, but there’s a thoughtfulness to their songwriting, an intention beyond disgust and putridity. Lifeless Birth, the band’s third full length album, is rooted in reality, an old school death metal record with a focus on modern times. Void of the cosmic, supernatural, and demonic, Necrot are exploring the terrors of this world, the horrors brought on by humanity. Having crawled through hell to arrive at this album, the trio arrive with a fiery determination. Lifeless Birth is both their most bloodthirsty album and their most accessible. - DG
Anti Fade / Upset The Rhythm Records
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There’s a special glow to Parsnip’s music, a lightness that retains substance, a whimsical sound that’s built with more nuance than one might expect. Behold, the Melbourne based quartet’s second full length album, released via Anti Fade Records (Program, Uranium Club, Alien Nosejob) and Upset The Rhythm (Marcel Wave, Normil Hawaiians, Earth Ball), feels as though the band have become ever so slightly unglued. Their swarming pop charm is still in tact but they’re embracing the weirdness of their psychedelic influences, the result a rich world of textural differences, moments that pop and glimmer, aiding and abetting the brilliance of their songs in a way that swoons and disorients in equal measure. - DG
Double Phantom Records
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There’s a sense of patience inherent in Vessel’s debut album. The Atlanta based post-punk quartet took their time and it shows in the end result. Wrapped In Cellophane is a marvelous record of immersive songs and vibrant grooves. Formed during the pandemic by a group of friends seemingly looking for an outlet, they spent years writing songs, scrapping what didn’t stick, and eventually landing on one of the more impressive debuts we’ve heard in a while. Vessel’s music is dynamic, bouncing through disjointed skronk one moment and intertwined in dense melodies the next. Led by Alex Tuisku, who handles vocals and drums, it makes sense that the rhythms and hooks are given equal focus, bright spots with a locked-in pulse that allows the rest of the band to flood the mix with any and all textures (much of which is provided by Isaac Bishop’s shimmering saxophone). - DG
20 Buck Spin
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Abhorrent Rapture, and Buried Deep In A Bottomless Grave before it, were impossibly heavy, a pair of slime infested and brutal death metal records. The past three years have had us wondering where exactly Witch Vomit go from there, as they can’t get much heavier. Funeral Sanctum, the band’s third album, answers that question with a new emphasis on dismal melodic touches. Make no mistake, this isn’t “melodeath” and Witch Vomit haven’t embraced the genre’s cheesier tendencies, but their carnage and dread have more of a melodic focus buried within the primordial sludge. While the shift on lead single “Blood on Abomination” took some getting used to, the record comes lurching forward with demonic grooves and the sense of decimation like a twinkle in the band’s cavernous eye sockets. - DG
ALSO RECOMMENDED:
ALEXANDER “Lucky Life” | ATRAE BILIS “Aumicide” | BNNY “One Million Love Songs” | BUSTED HEAD RACKET “Go Go Go!” | CAVALIER “Different Type Time” | CORRIDOR “Mimi” | DEAD FINKS “Eve of Ascension” | DR SURE’S UNUSUAL PRACTICE “Total Reality” | DRAHLA “Angeltape” | ENGULFED “Unearthly Litanies of Despair” | FULL OF HELL “Coagulated Bliss” | GREG SAUNIER “We Sang, Therefore We Were” | GROCER “Bless Me” | HOLIDAY MUSIC “333” | NOBLE BEAST “Absentee” | NOLAN POTTER “The Perils of Being Trapped Inside a Head” | POOLBLOOD “theres_plenty_of_music_to_go_around.zip” | TWICE EYES “2XEYES” | VALEBOL “Valebol” | WRETCHED BLESSING “Wretched Blessing”
MAY:
Temporary Residence Ltd
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One of those combinations that should have happened a long time ago but we’re just grateful for it finally happening now, ambient pianist Akira Kosemura and soundscape artist Lawrence English followed up their collaborative EP with a full-length that proves the old adage “two talented sculptors of minimal instrumental sadness are better than one.” The uber-prolific English had found much recent success pairing up with the like-minded machine-based genius of Loscil and Merzbow, and Kosemura teamed up with similarly naturalistic warmth generators Lullatone and Paniyolo in 2023, but by combining their forces here, the two composers’ styles congeal into something truly special. Selene is noteworthy not just for standing out as a beacon of sci-fi solace in a genre so often (unfairly) ghettoed because of admittedly subtle gradations of sparse synth beds and atmospheric swells but also for its pure emotional resonance and deft sonic grace. Can someone in Hollywood hire these two already to score a movie where Tom Hardy cries in outer space or Lupita Nyong’o grieves on a faraway planet or something? - Chris Polley
Exploding In Sound Records
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Did You Get Better, the debut album from Chicago's Babe Report's is built on non-stop rippers, blasting with fuzzy riffs and pounding drums. Blending together post-punk and basement pop, they've made a record splattered with instantly memorable hooks as they tear between the sweetly melodic and blown out shredding. There’s no two ways about it, the record is a certified ripper, but don’t mistake that for a lack of dynamics. The quartet (which includes former members of FCKR JR, Geronimo!, and Yeesh among others) are playing with a propulsive intensity and fuzzy resolve, their songs filled with crushing grunge-tinged pop abandon and riffs that dig into one groove before finding another. Led by Ben Grigg and Emily Bernstein (who both handle guitar and vocals), they come stampeding out the get with primitive pummeling from the rhythm section and guitars that careen between blown out and recklessly melodic. Listen in full, it’s full steam fun from top to bottom. - DG
Temporary Residence / Invada Records
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Geoff Barrow (drums/vocals), Billy Fuller (bass), and Will Young (keys) have an understanding of where they’re going, even if the lines of the map have blurred and smudged. They’ve played together long enough to develop a synchronicity in their performances, providing each other the space to adapt and the patience to explore. That earned sense of trust feels apparent in the progressions found throughout >>>>, a record in constant motion yet never seemingly in a rush to get anywhere. There’s an oceanic feel to it, ebbing and flowing like waves crashing into the shoreline, a natural rhythm in an ever changing world. There’s a brightness reminiscent of a breezy calm, a throbbing heat stroke inducing pulse, and the vast darkness, each moment an inevitable part of the dynamic whole. Beak>’s signature blend of krautrock rhythms, analog synth exploration, and droning psych pop melodies is engrained with depth, a cosmic current of fluid ideas made uniquely human and at times delicate (despite the band’s charmingly salty disposition). - DG
Domino Recording Co.
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Beth Gibbons needs no introduction. Twenty two years after the release of her collaborative album with Rustin Man, the Portishead singer goes solo on the stunning Lives Outgrown, a showcase for her crystalline voice and haunting compositions. Gibbons explores aging and time with a deft grace and orchestral precision. Lives Outgrown quickly establishes two things: it was worth the wait and all the hype is well deserved. Over skeletal bass and dusty sprinkles of percussion, Gibbons’ signature voice, full of heart and weary resolve, is the shinning star, her words ringing heavy as she laments the unpredictable nature of aging. While the atmosphere whistles and plinks around the ether, her mesmerizing vocal melody remains the constant focus. - DG
Warp Records
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To the initiated, there is nothing quite like the arc of Birmingham, UK band Broadcast’s output from 1996’s debut 7” Accidentals to 2005’s Tender Buttons. Revolving around the duo of synth player, guitarist, muti-instrumentalist and vocalist Trish Keenan and James Cargill on bass, their sound was a plaintive and lush psychedelic pop: more kraut than vegetable, swinging sounds from a way out of reimagined modernity, in turns confessional in others politically charged. More cult than peers like Stereolab or Portishead, to happen upon a Broadcast song, say “The Book Lovers” in like 2005 felt like being let in on a secret, hearing an artifact. This feeling is made even more keen in light of Keenan’s untimely death due to complications of pneumonia back in 2011. Spell Blanket collects and curates the demos and sketches Keenan had been assembling for a follow-up to Tender Buttons. Broadcast had their own studio, and Keenan is undoubtedly a voracious creature of that environment. This album teaches you that it sometimes takes very little to capture a mood, to stir something—just layers of vocals twisting onto each other as in “The Singing Game” or the choir of voices in harmony and single guitar in “The Fatherly Veil.” On the other side of the coin, the factory-like soundscape of “Dream Power”: synth chords and a minimal beat locked in a minute long dance. One of the most beguiling of the 36 songs/fragments on Spell Blanket—taking just over an hour of run-time—is “I Run In Dreams.” Jaunty and spare, a network of synths and minimal drums plot a territory in three, land on the arresting refrain “Transient clouds/Permanent blue/The history of me/The forever of you”. What emerges here is not just an elegy to the artist we’ve lost but a celebration of what she left behind: something beguiling, haunting, and luminous in its incompleteness. - Mark Gurarie
Self Released
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Crumb has proven that they can toe the line between eclectic and grounded. The airy, dream-like quality of Lila Ramani’s vocals and Bri Aronow’s synthesizer are backed by the confidence of Jonathan Gilad’s percussion and Jesse Brotter’s punchy bass lines. AMAMA, the band’s third studio album, is the strongest collaboration of these skills so far. The vocals have a cloudy quality reminiscent of shoegaze—at times, the lyrics are almost indecipherable. The listening experience of a Crumb song begs equal attention to written themes and musical motifs. Instead of a lyrical deep dive, the band’s songs are best analyzed through letting the curated mood of each track wash over you. On AMAMA, these atmospheres are created through intense repetition, where certain words and phrases are echoed again and again throughout a song. - Caroline Nieto
Joyful Noise Recordings
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There’s so much to love and explore on Finom’s new album Not God, an endlessly interesting art rock album that really shines from the duo’s chemistry, Macie Stewart and Sima Cunningham forever matching each others “freak” in stunning fashion. While early singles “Haircut” and the timeless beauty of “As You Are” are astonishing, the album’s “deep cuts” offer some of the record’s greatest moments, found in songs like “Dirt” and “Naked,” the former falling deep into a mesmerizing groove, while the later comes slinking right behind it, gliding on tight harmonies, minimalist grace, and a hook that soars while retaining a sense of subtlety. Finom play with amorphous shapes, their songs dazzling and rewarding, exploring textures that really demand repeat listens. - DG
Nuclear Blast
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Arizona death metal juggernauts Gatecreeper return with the long awaited Dark Superstition, pairing their signature brutality and sludgy grooves with a melodic turn (at times reminiscent of Dismember). It's a big shift but the band haven't abandoned the oozing and violent density and apocalyptic dread they've built their sound upon. They quintet are reshaping, manipulating their seismic death metal in new directions, first experimenting with different aspects of hardcore on An Unexpected Reality, and now they’ve introduced increasingly melodic ideas throughout Dark Superstition. If the hard rock riffs of “The Black Curtain” caught you off guard, you’re not alone, but in the context of the album, every piece serves the greater puzzle. For every genre bending amalgamation, Gatecreeper balance it with nail in the skull death metal, case in point, the barbaric brilliance of “Masterpiece of Chaos”. Pure decimation, it’s a blast of bellowing disgust and monolithic riffs. - DG
Mexican Summer
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Here in the Pitch is a natural continuation of Jessica Pratt's previous three LPs, intimate folk songs through the grandeur of a studio. Pratt’s been noted for her perfectionist streak in interviews and even in her newsletter, where she herself emphasized that it’s because of this she publishes so few songs. All of them sound labored over but effortless and precise as can be. The novum this time though involves a steady beat beckoning into the space; one that gives her folk greater direction to outright pop if not other mid-century styles. The hypnotic thump-pa-dump-da-da-la drum roll of “Life Is” is practically a big bang-180 from “Opening Night”’s piano saunter. This is a track that spends thirty seconds locking down a bass groove and strings for full blown pop revelry, practically orienting Pratt at center stage; no longer out of the past but present. That is until the follow-up, “Better Hate”. It features vocal layering as detailed and sublime as a cut like “Game That I Play,” now wedding the effect to bossa nova drum stylings, recasting the ghostly effect from Quiet Signs. Such is that brimming prowess of Pratt's arrangements, disarming and uncanny, matching her meticulous phrasings and featherweight delivery. - Matty McPherson
Sub Pop Records
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News of the Universe presents the band in flux. With the addition of drummer Audrey Johnson there is also the departure of bassist Lena Simon and keyboardist Alice Sandahl. The complexities behind La Luz’s latest contributes to its greater sense of prevalence in alteration. As an ever-evolving set of new obstacles arise, the band prove to be willfully indulging in the chaos, rather than pushing it away. Lead vocalist Shana Cleveland’s vocals are haunting and expansive; space is created for humor, drama, and emotional impact. La Luz’s fifth album has a sweet balance between yearning for normality and embracing the strange. Tracks float along between one-another, in the peculiar dream-like way La Luz have become known for. The band draw upon influence from the baroque sound, as well as classic folk and even doo-wop, but what is most recognizable is their individuality. It is easy to become lost in the La Luz sound. News of the Universe is a record created entirely by women, from its instrumentation and writing right down to its mastering. It is a smart and well-considered record based on womanhood and connection. - Zuzu Lacey
During a private listening party for his newest record, #RICHAXXHAITIAN, Haitian-American rapper Mach-Hommy posed a question to the crowd: “What’s the difference between legend and a legend?” Maybe you’ve heard Mach’s legend before. More than thirty projects deep, he’s got co-signs from a broad cross-section of hip-hop royalty — plus a ravenous fanbase that’s turned his rap-release-as-high-art approach into a viable career path. Although his trademark reclusiveness has helped him get here, it feels like he’s been toying with the idea of becoming more open with his artistic approach and motivations. A recent press release describes #RICHAXXHAITIAN as the last of a “tetralogy” of Haiti-focused albums, starting with 2016’s HBO (Haitian Body Odor), 2021’s Pray for Haiti, and Balens Cho (Hot Candles), more intimate and melancholy, highlighting the scars of a “post”-colonial world between scraps of archival clips and vibrant instrumentation. Haiti’s struggle for self-determination has always been central to Mach’s mythos, but these four records explicitly use it as a framing device — and compared to its predecessors, #RICHAXXHAITIAN feels especially clear and distilled. His music often feels like it’s turning its back to the listener, but this album feels more aware of its relationship to its audience, more ready to explain itself. When the Haitian diaspora has seen its wealth, natural resources and culture repeatedly extracted, his murkiness acts as a protective balm. - Justin Davis
Silver Current Records
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Wondrous, majestic, and fantastical, Magic Fig’s debut rarely feels of these times, and it’s all the better for it. As so many struggle with their day to day existence, trying to make ends meet as the world crumbles around them, it’s not hype and “buzz” that we’re in search of, but a great escape, a place beyond the daily grind, beyond this realm altogether. The band’s self-titled album is an ever shifting kaleidoscope, the shapes all recognizable yet refracted in mirrored splendor. It’s a decidedly pop odyssey that wanders deep into the woods of late 60’s prog, Moog altered psych, and dream pop at its most visionary, a lysergic trip into an unknown cosmic past. As the isolation of the pandemic developed a need for collaboration and a communal approach in its wake, so came to be Magic Fig, stepping outside our reality, figuratively and somewhat literally as we decontextualize those involved in the band from their best known work. Magic Fig’s blend of prog and psych is sophisticated and developed, there’s a sense of patience even in the most dexterous of movements. From the hypnotic blossom of album opener “Goodbye Suzy” and its luminescent harmonies and the cavalcade of divergent drum patterns to the folk-leaning ease and natural aura of “Departure,” the band feel locked into the whole. - DG
Father/Daughter Records
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mui zyu's full length debut was a great introduction to Eva Liu's gorgeous world of bent dream pop and experimental indie rock but nothing or something to die for feels like a defining moment, a stunning record of subtle cosmic complexities and swirling nuances that heighten the emotional weight of Lui's songwriting. There’s a transportive nature to her music, a quality that feels stripped from another realm, like space travel in tranquility. Last year’s Rotten Bun For An Eggless Century brought an electronic flourish to Liu’s words, the songs felt immerse and alien but emotionally resonant. Experimenting with layers of synths and programmed rhythms, mui zyu’s songs tend to feel limitless, ideas sustained on infinite timelines as hearts shatter and the mind wanders. nothing or something to die for expands the depth of while slightly contracting the sonic palette, pulling away from overt chaos toward something that’s lush and stunning, beauty from desperation. - DG
Iron Lung Records / Televised Suicide
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The agitation of No Future's Mirror has reached a boiling point. The Perth based hardcore band won't be suffering any injustices lightly, highlighted throughout a record that's a giant kick in the teeth both sonically and lyrically. The band's fury is captured in exceptionally blistering riffs and an onslaught of stampeding d-beat rhythms. After a handful of EPs and singles, Mirror, their caustic full length debut, arrives as an ultra-indignant hardcore record that’s both brash and brilliant. Swarming with a thick cloud of squalling noise, their propulsive attack on the senses feels immersive, all hell is breaking loose and we’re all invited. No Future explode out the gate, the need for subtlety obliterated by societal dread and the violent horror caused by futility. - DG
Touch and Go Records
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To All Trains is the sixth, and since the unfortunate premature passing of the legendary Steve Albini, last album from Shellac, continuing their persistent chugging sonic assault of aggravation, cutting wit, and intelligence in fine fashion. The band streamline Albini's acerbic way with words along with seemingly simple yet absolutely devastating musicianship and guile that combines The Fall-like ire with unyielding lyrical observations. Albini, along with Bob Weston (bass) and Todd Trainer (drums) combine for a forceful and incessantly pounding musical beast that refuses to relent, which is readily apparent in this late stage collection of songs. The record finds Shellac doing away with the longer motorik grooves that were widely spread across their discography in favor of tightening up, leading to direct and precise strikes full of vengeance and bile. - Kris Handel
Permanent Residence
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Ain’t no two ways about it, Moral Decay, the full length debut from Perth’s Sooks is a ripper, and a dynamic one at that. While many hardcore records can be full throttle at all times, this is corrosive punk with a sense for nuance, splitting time between brutal indignation and a flippant sense of sarcasm that’s equally built around a righteous fury. The riffs are always shredding, the hum of the distortion captured with a perfect layer of hiss to mix together with the propulsive drums. Everything pounding in unison amid a flow of feedback, setting the muscular backdrop for Ange’s lacerating vocals and her higher pitched sardonic screeds as she takes on mountainous levels of gendered inequality, discrimination, bigotry, and the devolved state of society. - DG
12XU
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Winged Wheel have expanded to a six piece ensemble - Cory Plump (Spray Paint, Rider/Horse), Fred Thomas (Tyvek, Idle Ray), Whitney Johnson (Matchess, Damiana), Matthew J Rolin (Powers/Rolin Duo, solo). and in addition to the first album’s lineup, Big Hotel enlists Lonnie Slack (Water Damage) and Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth). In an orchestra where each person is a conductor, these experimental imaginations melt into one conversation. The first Winged Wheel album was recorded in syncopated time across the country, putting the symbiosis of the instrumentalists to the test. For Big Hotel, the group met in person to record over a three day stint in Kingston, New York, producing hours of improvisational sonic drift. The excess was trimmed away, leaving only these fleeting moments of focus where the rest was seared away by time. Winged Wheel pioneers a seamless multi-instrumental odyssey. Big Hotel’s imagination expands into a scale grander than its literal soundscape, flowing into every crevice of the imagination. - Selina Yang
Ever/Never Records
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The past couple of years have seen a steady flow of releases from the brilliant Workers Comp, a band that splits the differences between lo-fi punk, Americana, and folk in it’s rawest distillation. The decidedly “for the people” trio of Ryan McKeever (Staffers), Luke Reddick (Divorce Horse), and Joshua Gillis (Deadbeat Beat) have been cranking out dusty country tunes that feel built for cassette, a destiny cemented in clamoring minimalism and plenty of psychedelic twang. The band’s self-titled album collects all of their EPs and singles, compiled together with a new song, highlighting both the humanity and labor driven dissatisfaction that lies at the heart of their music. - DG
11PM / Convulse Records
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My first experience with Yambag was my first time in the basement of Purgatory in Iowa City. The fine details of their performance didn’t really set in my mind. All I remember were a succession of quick blasts throwing the dust and the people in the room into flurries. The Cleveland hardcore band’s new album, Mindfuck Ultra, feels exactly like this. The eleven track, just under eleven-minute album whips by with d-beat that leaves no space and blast beats that might as well be notated as several black bars on sheet music. Each riff is just as chaotic but still somehow finds a way to fall into place, accenting each word jolted out. This is ferocious hardcore that never loses pace, only extinguishing like the streamers of a firework. - John Glab
Hardly Art
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Four years after youbet’s now classic debut album, the Brooklyn based project returns with the follow-up, Way To Be, the band’s first for Hardly Art (Lala Lala, Shana Cleveland, Caution). If you’ve ever witnessed the magic that comes with seeing the band live, they seem to capture it here, contorting melody with pinched harmonic grooves and lackadaisical rhythms that keeps a loose frame. Nick Llobet and co. play with a lo-fi charm but the songs feel impeccably realized, layering guitars and textures to create a free flowing charm, wavering with a pastoral psych breeze. While many of the songs aren’t built with massive hook (like many other youbet songs are), it’s in the calming nuance that it’s able to ramble between fuzz and gluey bent-pop. - DG
ALSO RECOMMENDED:
ALUMINUM “Fully Beat” | AMY O “Mirror, Reflect” | BAD HISTORY MONTH “BH1” | BERMUDA SQUARES “Outsider” | CONWAY THE MACHINE “Slant Face Killah” | CUTTERS “Psychic Injury” | D. SABLU “No True Silence” | GEE TEE “Prehistoric Chrome” | HABIBI “Dreamachine” | INSANE URGE “Two Tapes” | INVERTEBRATES “Sick To Survive” | OH BOLAND “Western Leisure” | PARDONER “Paranoid In Hell” | RAZ FRESCO & DANIEL SON “Northside” | ROME STREETZ “Buck 50” | SLEEPIES “Misc” | SOFIA BOLT “Vendredi Minuit” | THE SPATULAS “Beehive Mind”
JUNE:
Iron Lung / One Little Independent Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
Stevenage anarcho hardcore band Bad Breeding return with their fifth full length, Contempt, a brash record fueled by their righteous rage and unwieldy distortion. Swarming in sludgy layers of primal noise, the band's brand of politically minded punk takes on a new degree of brutality, peeling back some of the auxiliary elements of 2022’s Human Capital in favor of hardcore deviance. It’s not necessarily a back to basics approach though, as Bad Breeding continue to push their sound with hints of psychedelic hardcore and an immersive attention to detail as they erupt with thudding dissonance and gravel throated howls. Everything about Contempt seems to swarm despite the dense construction and dangerous low end, a testament to their ability to fuse dynamics into their blistering chaos. - DG
It feels like a new spark has been lit throughout Across The Tracks, Boldy James' new collaborative album with the much in-demand producer Conductor Williams. The smoked and hazy vibes of James' best work remains in tact but there's a crackling energy to this record, even with the tempos relaxed and fluid. The soulful samples and breezy drums give Boldy room to run wild with his vivid street tales, and he is “running” relative to his usual lackadaisical delivery. Conductor Williams’ compositions fit perfectly to Boldy James’ reflective flow, his samples pulled and stretched, floating in circular patterns that break and flicker like a grainy film score. Across The Tracks is a lyrically complex record which finds Boldy in deep contemplation, recalling stories of dirt and survival in vivid detail, painting both scene and mood with a cold detachment. There’s an ever present awareness to his tales, the grind becoming a product of necessity more than anything else. - DG
Nuclear Blast
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
Last year Cavalera (or Cavalera Conspiracy), the duo of Sepultura’s founding members Max and Iggor Cavalera, released re-recorded versions of early Sepultura classics Morbid Visions and Bestial Devastation, taking back the music they were so pivotal in creating while also capturing the songs that way they always wanted them to sound. They’re back at it again with Schizophrenia, arguably the band’s first (but not last) genre defining classic, and while many love the way the original sounds, it’s clear that the re-recorded version of the record has been given an upgrade in terms of sheer fidelity, the songs hurtling like torpedoes of bellowing thrash metal. It sounded like an untamed beast back in 1987, and the it’s only grown more feral over time. There’s an enormous level of expectation involved in digging into a classic album and modernizing it, but Cavalera pull it off to perfection, the production capturing the savage and dynamic nature of the songs in the way they always intended. - DG
Rough Trade Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
Goat Girl was a bit ahead of the windmill scene curve in 2018, at least as far as gaining international recognition, releasing a solid and straight-ahead self-titled debut. Their third album Below the Waste is their first as a trio, but they’ve developed a sound that might take upwards of ten musicians to recreate, where folk textures and gorgeous harmonies are polluted by a sludge of dreary post-punk. It runs a hefty sixteen songs, only a small handful of which are interludes, and with this there’s variety and experimentation in spades. Even as most songs only run about three minutes, they tend to branch off in unpredictable directions. While leadoff single “Ride Around” is a relatively conventional slacker rock track, relatively is doing a lot of work here. The dynamic switches in the verses are enforced by an unnervingly deep and chunky bass tone, which reappears throughout the album and forces the music to stay murky. The bridges contain a rickety stuttering feel in the guitar, and the outro builds into something surprisingly magnificent. “Words Fell Out” and “Play It Down” are a bit more direct, with even more hooks and eclectic instrumentation, but not fully out of the muck. - Anna Solomon
Dark Descent / Me Saco Un Ojo Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
The brutality of Hyperdontia’s brand of death metal is often perched right upon the divide between primal pummel and technical ecstasy. The Danish / Turkish quartet aren’t looking to drown us in flashy playing, but there’s an inherent intelligence in their cataclysmic assault. With their third album, Harvest of Malevolence, the band are once again atop the festering heap, stampeding in every direction with rhythmic dexterity rarely seen and guitar riffs that feel seismically intense. The entire structure of the record is pulled off its axis on several occasions, the putrid framework thrown into the abyss with each dense diversion and blistering solo. They’ve made what could be the death metal album of the year, a brutal infestation of a band as brainy as they are barbaric. Harvest of Malevolence is in constant motion, darting between rapidly shifting riffs and complex rhythms (incredible performances as per usual from both the band’s bassist and drummer) at the speed of light, and yet it’s the impenetrable darkness that always prevails. - DG
Unheard of Hope
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Mabe Fratti is chasing something. It seems to be made of sound but it persistently evades clarity. Over five years, the Mexico City-based composer, cellist, and vocalist has remained restless in the musical ground she explores, like sand shaking alongside hidden tremors. Each record she makes shimmers with her curiosity. Sentir Que No Sabes is one of her most direct, but it is no less invested in experimenting and rerouting the conduits of her music. She relishes in the joys of building unique universes, only to pull apart the mysterious gravitational threads and see what might collide or be born. Sentir Que No Sabes finds bliss in confusion. Opening yourself to creative unknowing makes you open to change, newness, and potential transformation, but doesn’t guarantee it. Fratti rests in that liminal space for the duration of the record. She has cited “Juego y Teoría del Duende” (“Theory and Function of the Goblin”), an early 20th-century lecture by poet Federico García Lorca, as a key clue for how to define what she was chasing. As amusing as it may be to imagine a cat-and-mouse game with a strange imp, the “goblin” serves as a synecdoche for the invisible trait “that distinguishes great art…from what is merely competent.” Listening to the album, you’ll intrinsically understand what makes the ephemeral so personal. - Aly Eleanor
Carpark Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
Two years after the latest EP from jangly New Orleans band Lawn, bassist/vocalist Rui Gabriel unveils a softer, multitudinous manifestation of his perceptive, magnetic songwriting. Compassion’s ten songs rise and fall with daybreak hopefulness and weary abandon, sometimes carried by waves of synth-flecked folk pop (“Hunting Knife”) or swept up by choruses of guitars, keys, and cooing vocals (“Target”). His duet with Stef Chura, “Summertime Tiger,” nearly has the yawping downtown charm of early Parquet Courts but replaces their bitterness with friendly I-don’t-know-what-to-tell-you reassurance. Riffs and melodies unfold effortlessly with an A.M. radio-worn breeziness — the core of the song remains strong whether he’s pulled towards power pop or frustrated country, or anything else in the future. There’s a sweetness to each moments’ construction and conjugation, especially on “Money,” when he sings, “I’d like to make more money / To spend the next ten lives with you.” Levity and love seep through the entire album, between biting bars and pining sing-a-longs. - Aly Eleanor
Merrie Melodies
Bandcamp
Shop Regulars' self-titled album is as refreshing as they come, a welcome reset for all our ears. Primal and hypnotic, the Portland based project rips through ramshackle riffs and combustible production to create something that's incredibly honest, engaging, and sort of deranged. Bending repetition into knots, Shop Regulars create busted lo-fi punk on the verge of collapse. Led by Matt Radosevich (Honey Bucket), the Portland collective (which has included members of Mope Grooves, Woolen Men, Spatulas, and Lithics at times) sound triumphantly unglued on their self-titled album. The wheels have fallen off but no one cares because at the core of their music is impeccable songwriting, “Mischief” is a prime example, clattering but locked into resonant grooves. The recording darts and weaves with tape warble, but there’s a well worn glow radiating from hard fought melodies beneath the hypnotic and tangled rawness. A true gem of homespun DIY that’s far more than aesthetic appeasement. - DG
Backwoodz Studioz
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ShrapKnel, the duo of Curly Castro and PremRock return with Nobody Planning To Leave, an artistic hip-hop record with a forward thinking glow. Produced in full by Controller 7, the eclectic beats are incredible, an ever evolving landscape for the duo's oft abstract lyrics and raw delivery. ShrapKnel spit their verses with a kinetic focus, bar after bar of acrobatic highlights. It really feels like a landmark release for everyone involved, the duo’s third album for Backwoodz Studioz is firing on all cylinders, from the intricate rhymes and immaculate punchlines to what feels like a career defining moment for producer Controller 7. The grand design of the album’s beats is a sweeping in construction, slipping between hard and psychedelic to warped and bubbling and back again, mining both the glory days of boom-bap hip-hop individualism to futuristic abstract space-age beats. ShrapKnel ride whatever Controller 7 throws into the mix with veteran ease, their rhymes on a swivel of intelligent wordplay, elastic humor, and poetic resolve on another level. - DG
Exploding In Sound Records
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There are few bands that work with space, depth, and time the way that Sour Widows do, their ideas given the patience and freedom to gestate. The great expanse of their sound is paired with the gentle magic of their close harmonies and the eternal bond shared between Susanna Thomson and Maia Sinaiko. The transfixing symbiosis is evident in their playing on Revival Of A Friend, the band’s first full length record, a visionary indie rock epic that swirls with extended instrumentals and heart-on-a-sleeve honesty. Together with Max Edelman, the most tasteful of drummers, the band use nuance and atmosphere to hit impossible emotional peaks, wrought with equal parts tension and beauty. Sour Widows never take the easy path forward, their penchant to push and pull at our senses feels truer to life, the ups and downs cascading beyond our control as we attempt to hang on for dear life. Revival Of A Friend is a powerful record with grief at its core, yet Sour Widows push through with a mystical sense of warmth. - DG
Thrill Jockey Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
Ask Aaron Turner and he’ll tell you he wants the music of SUMAC, his experimental metal band with bassist Brian Cook and drummer Nick Yacyshyn, to be a reflection of the band members’ lived experience. If we take that assertion at face value, what does The Healer, the band’s fifth album, say about the experience of living in today’s Western world? The scope and grandeur of The Healer begs comparison to an epic novel or a film auteur’s masterpiece making it impossible to distill its essence into one catchy tagline. Which is the point. At 76 minutes, The Healer is oceanic, a leviathan of tones, tempos, and motifs which run the gamut of improvisational noise, bone-humming sludge, meditative pastorals, and some straight-up abacus-defying, heart-palpitating riffs. SUMAC has always demanded a concerted effort on the part of the listener. It’s a fair ask. From its album artwork to its penchant for collaboration, everything SUMAC does is performed with painstaking care. For those who take the time, The Healer is the Pacific Northwest band’s most beguiling and rewarding album of its decade-plus career. - Benji Heywood
Double Double Whammy
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The ever shifting landscape of This Is Lorelei is a rare breed, the solo project of Nate Amos (Water From Your Eyes) has always served as a catch all for his boundless creativity. Box For Buddy, Box For Star feels like a culmination of all he's done, a kaleidoscopic blend of his many influences and inclinations, pulling together fried country tunes, auto-tuned electro pop, and homespun bedroom pop to accent his impeccably earnest and heartfelt songs. The result is like superglue for your subconscious as these songs burrow themselves deep, demanding repeat listens at an alarming frequency. Amos is an immaculate songwriter, earnest and emotional even at his most detached. He’s capable of damn near anything, and he let’s that radiance shine throughout the many sides of Box For Buddy, Box For Star. - DG
ALSO RECOMMENDED:
200 STAB WOUNDS “Manual Manic Procedures“ | AUTOBAHNS “First LP!” | BEINGS “There Is A Garden” | BLACKLISTERS “This Is Not An Album By BLKLSTRS” | COLA “The Gloss” | THE DRIN “Elude The Torch” | DUST FROM 1000 YEARS “Joy” | EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND FROZE TO DEATH “Thirds” | FAN CLUB “Demonstration 2024” | GUIDED BY VOICES “Strut of Kings” | LAS NUBES “Tormentas Malsanas” | MARCEL WAVE “Something Looming” | MONO “OATH” | PERENNIAL “Art History” | PREVIOUS INDUSTRIES “Service Merchandise” | PSYCHIC GRAVEYARD “Wilting” | REARRANGED FACE “Far Green Arcade” | SNOOPER + PRISON AFFAIR “Split” | SPECIAL WORLD “Special World”
JULY:
Hardly Art
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
On the fourth record under his own name, criminally under-appreciated music legend, Chris Cohen is at his most adventurous and experimental yet. Having solidified the sensitive and intellectual singer songwriter-turned-soft-psych-mystic sound of his previous three records, on Paint a Room Cohen returns to some of the idiosyncratic and unexpected arrangements that were calling cards of the artist’s earlier musical projects like The Curtains and Deerhoof. Tracks like “Laughing” with it’s saxophone/vocal melded intro, the interplay between the elastic sounding jangly guitar and bass of “Wishing Well” and the Trout Mask Replica-like frenzy of slide guitars on “Dog’s Face” illustrate the album’s willingness to push boundaries of what a Chris Cohen record can be. But we aren’t left up in outer space, these more eccentric moments are grounded by some of Cohen’s most melodically beautiful pieces to date like “Night or Day,” “Sunever,” and the anthemic album opener “Damage,” which addresses the oppression of state violence. Other lyrical themes explore the mysteries of aging and self-acceptance. Paint a Room is emblematic of continuous reinvention, exploration, and growth. - John Brouk
Läjä Records /Sorry State Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
After three increasingly great EPs, Brazilian hardcore band Lasso release Parte, their relentless full length debut. Unglued from start to finish, this is a ruthless record of buzzsaw riffs and frantic howling vocals. The band swing between haymaker dirges and head-rattling velocity as they tear through seventeen minutes of brutal tempos and pummeling aggression at its most primal. Executed with a tinge of fuzz via the production, it’s a record of brutal ambition and stampeding dexterity, the band shifting without warning from one corrosive riff to the next, melting our brains into an oozing puddles as the rampage rips down the proverbial streets. Heavy as all hell, it’s an undeniably fun record, splattered and deranged, a hardcore album that’s as indebted to creative freedom as it is skull crushing hostility. - DG
Temporary Residence Ltd.
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
“If a 13-year-old kid in Alabama whose dad only listens to Bob Seger gets his hands on Fantasy World as their first record, that’s going to fuck that dude up!” Emil Amos of Lilacs & Champagne (as well as Grails and Holy Sons) said of the duo’s latest LP in an interview with Sun 13. In other words, the music in question is, well, difficult to describe in typical genre buzzwords, though many have tried. Neither “psychedelic” nor “trip-hop” do much of any justice to the twosome’s defiant sound. Then again, “sound collage” doesn’t help much either because even that movement’s progenitors tend to focus more on the process than the end-product. Lilacs & Champagne, while likely influenced by acts from all of these worlds of swirling and sample-based music and more, evade the above labels through a compositional style that alternately chooses warmth over the clinical and mood over the experimental. Fantasy World goes down smooth from top to bottom with just enough ominousness to keep the listener on their toes. They want to enthrall, genuinely, but the icing on the proverbial cake is making you a wee-bit frightened too. Fantasy World, their fourth LP, and first in nearly ten years, proves that there’s always a way to get stranger, and that never means having to give up on listenability. That is, honestly, the key to fucking kids up—in a good way—you know, musically. - Chris Polley
Trouble In Mind Records
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Nightshift’s latest, Homosapien, evokes deep humanity (even down to that perfect title), not just because of the band’s own shifting dynamics — members lost, gained, and assigned new roles since 2021’s Zöe — but how much this pure connection and relatability inform our own experiences with the eleven track affair. Like an old friend or a familiar lover, this connection is something that sticks around in the very crevices of your bones. Like an actual person, Homosapien is multifaceted and complicated sonically, but in a way that feels cohesive and collective (like a friend who is an anarchist but also a devout knitter). "Crystal Ball" plays like a sweet slice of '90s grunge; "Together We Roll" has some interesting Kraftwerk-ian tinges to its indie rock drawl; "Your Good Self" blends acid-jazz and pub-rock like beer spiked with mescaline; and "Y.T. Tutorial" and "Crush" are the most directly rollicking ditties. They're generally little choices and tweaks, but they make such a massive difference in Nightshift's campaign for engagement. Each new idea/concept shows an increasingly dynamic sensibility, a patchwork of beliefs and passion that come together with the intensity but imperfection of a real person. Heaps of bands operate with a mixed bag of inspirations, but Homosapien shows that Nightshift's own bag is organic, unassuming, and both indicative of the band's mettle as much as it's a half-cocked explanation of their energy and devotion. - Chris Coplan
Soul Assassins Records
Spotify | Apple
The legendary DJ Muggs has spent much of the past decade entrenched in the underground, producing albums in full for hip-hop's best and brightest (Mach-Hommy, Meyhem Lauren, Roc Marciano). This year the veteran producer teamed up with Raz Fresco, a great Canadian based MC/producer with a deep catalog. Muggs' grimy production suits Fresco well throughout The Eternal Now, his delivery bringing constant heat from the shadows with a focus on the earnest hustle amid well-crafted rhymes. While Fresco is a gifted and inventive producer himself, there’s an inherent magic to working with Muggs, a pioneer of hip-hop’s boom-bap era and a beacon for the underground’s elite. The record splits itself between the top-down-in-the-breeze side of Muggs’ production and the grease and violence that lurks in the darkness. The balance of soulful landscapes and dimly lit neck snapping beats is perfect for Raz Fresco to weave his tightly wound bars with a loose determination. - DG
Self Released
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
Robber Robber's debut album, Wild Guess, is an impeccable introduction to the Vermont based band's music, a record built on lively rhythms, discordant fuzz, shoegaze density, and sweetly delivered noise pop hooks. The results are blissful and hazy, dynamic and intricate, swerving in unexpected directions as they contort and expand from throbbing art pop to fractured grooves and intricate caterwauling atonality. Wild Guess is a great mix of genres that never feels too indebted to any one sound, instead creating a unique mix, digging into locked in drum patterns and an ever sliding avalanche of piercing guitars that slowly scrape their way into an impenetrable wall of sound. There’s a sense of patience to everything they do, even as they jitter between well coiled verses, disarming repetition, and the mesmerizing drift into the blistering abyss. - DG
Self Released
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
RONG, the freaky Massachusetts based noise punk quartet, are one of most excited and explosive bands we've come across in a long time. There is no escape from the band's sonic assault on their new live record, Live At New Alliance, captured in studio with an audience in attendance. RONG's freeform twitchy contortions are as astounding as they are deranged. The band make chaotic music that's brilliant, focused yet unhinged. Sociopolitically minded but never heavy handed, there’s a definable rage found in their contextual carnage, but Rong don’t feel indebted to their indignation. There’s a sense that despite it all, the band are having a damn good time, creating freaked out noise punk in the name of artistic catharsis. The best heavy music lives deep in weirdness, the spaces where aggression is met with sparks of creative freedom, delivered with an urgency that suggests everything could very well come unglued at any moment. Rong contort themselves in extremes, like pulling a lion from a hat while suspended mid-air on a tightrope, or performing open heart surgery on one of those old rickety rope bridges. The inherent sense of danger is always colliding headfirst with a magical dexterity, stomping and skronking one moment only to sputter and twitch the next. - DG
ALSO RECOMMENDED:
ACTION BRONSON “Johann Sebastian Bachlava The Doctor” | ARMOR “Afraid Of What's To Come” | GLOOP “Tension” | ISMATIC GURU “IV” | JAY WORTHY & DĀM-FUNK “Magic Hour” | NATE TEREPKA “Not Yet” | ONEIDA “Expensive Air” | RIDER/HORSE “Matted” | TENSION PETS “Cubey EP” | WATER FROM YOUR EYES “MP3 Player 1” | WHITE COLLAR “White Collar”
AUGUST:
Legless Records / Erste Theke Tontraeger
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
Prolific and frenzied, Billiam releases music at a furious pace, but Animation Cel feels like a monumental record, a statement of blistering synth punk intention. The young punk savant plays at high velocity, ripping and tearing through rattled and hooky "egg punk" songs that deal with both mental health and Sonic The Hedgehog in equal measure. It's brash cartoony chaos in the best of ways. With hand claps and hazy production the record twitches and hums, bringing a chaotic pop underbelly to the otherwise spectral sound of the synths. Frantic and willingly unglued from reality at times, the music squirms and swarms on rippers like “Maneater Three” and the power-pop street punk crackle of “Protect The Emerald”. - DG
Numero Group
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
San Jose’s Duster, in many ways the progenitors of the late-90’s slowcore boom, surprised fans with a tour announcement and their third album in six years. The band, now consisting of the duo Clay Parton and Canaan Dove Amber, reunited in 2019 and released their first album in almost 20 years. Since then, Duster has gathered a second wind thanks in no small part to Zoomers on TikTok. Perhaps it speaks to the pervasiveness of the “Long 90’s Movement” we are living in—that every tone and vibe from the 90’s never truly went away but seems to be exploding in the last year. Maybe it’s that Duster’s ambient style of slowcore, shoegaze, fuzzed-out guitars and spacey production is the perfect backdrop to a certain kind of video. Either way, Duster’s music is both exciting their longtime fans while engaging a new generation—a balance that any band dreams of. In Dreams lays down that signature Duster dreamy and ethereal soundscape, coupled with muddy bass, huge fuzzy guitars, and vocals that sound like they were recorded down the hall. It’s gloomy and saccharine, with moments of melancholic hope. At thirteen tracks and 43 minutes, it can feel overstuffed, but it really speaks to the moment of a band totally revitalized by newfound success and the greeting of a new generation. - Caleb Doyle
Carpark
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
Oakland, CA’s Fake Fruit are back with their sophomore record, Mucho Mistrust. They set the bar high with their 2021 self-titled debut and, to nobody’s surprise, they’ve cleared that bar. Still present is the marriage of scraggly guitars and unrelenting melody, stark vocals and powerful full-band swells. At times on the debut, you could hear the band ironing out the kinks in their songwriting practice, with the skeletal song structure from frontperson Hannah D’Amato poking through the layers of fuzz, grunge, and groove her bandmates had applied. The new record sounds like a more organic whole from a band who has grown together, feeding each other’s strengths and challenging themselves to be more. These songs approach the platonic ideal of alt-rock brilliance, making old cliches feel fresh again while blindsiding you with unexpected twists and turns. - Matt Watton
Blue Grape Music
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
Gel’s third EP, Persona, is a fiery, fifteen minute round-trip to hell, heaven, and back to wherever you find yourself dumbfounded by their no-bullshit sensibilities. Experiencing Gel, both visually and sonically, has always been an exercise in whiplash. Aesthetically, their image is wrought from ink that drips, slashes, and bubbles into a unique, identifiable brand. Their songs, though anything but formulaic, tend to open with chunky chords that are swept into fuzzed-out, non-committal melodies, doubling or breaking down over lead singer Sami Kaiser’s (they/them) scowl. Listeners are dragged in and out of these break downs, and challenged to charge into the “vertigo, the constant hunger” that Gel lays out, simultaneously reminded, as the audience, to “remember [their] fucking place.” Persona is a vulnerable release fortified by a brick-solid, impenetrable sound. - Charlie Pecorella
Run For Cover Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
The minor-keyed Disaster Trick, continues to push boundaries, both musical and emotional. This release veers more fully into earnestness, and it’s their best album as a result. As noted in the advance publicity, the LP marks a new period of sobriety for Dimitri Giannopoulos, who quit drinking prior to the recording, and the album bears clear traces of this turn. The overall sound leans into a more downbeat direction with the LP somewhat concave, reaching its lowest point three quarters of the way with the track “Death Spiral” before pulling out with the (relatively) upbeat “Gates of Heaven” and the off kilter “Nude Descending,” which closes the album. Disaster Trick isn’t overly morose, but it does depict a singer-songwriter confronting his demons and sorting through uncomfortable feelings as a means of finding a way forward. - Christopher J. Lee
Sub Pop
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
J.R.C.G. has been pushing boundaries since the project’s inception. Led by Justin R. Cruz Gallego, the band’s debut was groundbreaking. Three years later they return with Grim Iconic...(Sadistic Mantra), continuing to expand into the further reaches of the cosmic unknown amid cascading drums, hypnotic charm, and off-kilter tension that grooves and contorts between warped melodic hooks. Beyond the layers, the atmospheric fog, and the pulsating abrasions, the core of Grim Iconic seems to reside in a place of spiritual unity, an embrace of the communal efforts that provide a sense of home to Gallego. While the shapes of his output as J.R.C.G. seem to be ever shifting, the roots are firmly embedded, a split between punk (at its most forward thinking) and the Latin music that was a constant of his childhood. The results however often feel a million miles away, and that’s the gift of J.R.C.G.’s vision, the pieces are familiar but the construction is alien, unsettling music for unsettling times. With a focus on oceanic melodic dissonance and grooves both boisterous and minimalist, the structure’s pull is magnetic, pushing and contorting, sweeping the listener along in all directions. - DG
Writing about an artist who left his corporeal being shortly after dropping his pièce de résistance, therefore cementing his own legacy and living on through recorded sound, is nigh impossible, but damn if one has to at least try to do right by a force of good gone too soon. Kaseem Ryan, aka Ka, was famously a NYC firefighter by day and hobbyist message rapper at night, and that alone makes him a singular voice, but what makes this—his eighth and depressingly final long-player—the ultimate thesis statement for such a strong and consistent body of work is its fearless dissection of religion and faith, a subject that’s both scarily apt considering its adjacency to his departure from earth but as bold and thorny as a hip-hop record on the subject could possibly be, and perhaps has ever been. With falling apart jazz loops and crackling dialogue samples ebbing and flowing behind (and sometimes in front of) the emcee’s inviting warble, The Thief Next to Jesus is as soft and listenable as it is discomforting and ominous. And this is the best kind of takeaway for the man behind some of the most thoughtful rhymes of the past decade-plus: with the glory comes the curse, and you can’t have one without the other. May he rest in power. - Chris Polley
Melt-Banana are back! Eleven years after the release of Fetch, the Tokyo based duo return with 3+5, and the year's have done nothing to dampen their chaotic creativity. One of the world's most innovate noise rock bands, the band still come in with the subtlety of a tornado and yet 3+5 is still brimming with unconventional hooks, true Melt-Banana magic. While often imitated but never duplicated, Melt-Banana’s brand of sordid noise punk and electronically manipulated fury knows no bounds, their carnage and chaos play key rolls in their maximalist wizardry. It’s been over a decade without a new record from the band, but they’ve been far from stagnant, the duo touring year after year, honing their destruction in front of eager live audiences. 3+5 has a live intensity in mind, colliding and contorting with sheer glee. - DG
Polyvinyl Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
Brooklyn's Oceanator returns with Everything is Love and Death, the third full length from Elise Okusami's band. Built on massive songs and sparkling studio recordings, this is apocalypse pop for the stadiums, written with enormous hooks and a radio friendly sheen, swerving between soaring grunge and shimmering alternative rock. Big and immediately accessible, Oceanator’s songs are drenched in catchy melodies, swinging for the fences with muscular pop that feels destined to be played on the radio until the end of times, punching up the volume and vulnerability in a way that feels relatable at the highest of decibels. - DG
Castle Face
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
SORCS 80 adds another chapter for the Californian group’s boundary-pushing rock. The Osees discography is long past the double digits, with each album shredding away expectations of what prog-rock, psych-rock, garage-rock, or anything-rock, should be. Electricity crackles along its grooves, cut as if by razor. This energy is begging for an outlet, finding nothing satisfying to keep it contained. Synthesizers swarm over Dan Ricon and Paul Quattrone’s motorik drum beats, buzzing and frothing in waves. They take the role of what a guitar on overdrive would be for a traditional rock approach. Within the track “Zipper,” hardcore chants melt into surf rock grooves, further disintegrating into funk-laden syncopation. With genres moving in tandem, the momentum generated is reminiscent of Flux Information Sciences’ iron-barred percussion. Rather than the clamoring of industrialization that noise rock loves, SORCS 80 takes a turn into the surreal. In having traditional instrumentation substituted with saxophones and synthesizers, SORCS 80 settles itself into an uncanny valley. On paper, it reminds you of home, but upon the second listen, something is fundamentally, unplaceable different. For Osees, it’s been a long way since the band’s 2000s roots in folksy lo-fi. - Selina Yang
Polyvinyl Records
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Palehound's first live album captures El Kempner solo and acoustic, an intimate performance captured while touring with Adrianne Lenker in 2021. It's a showcase for Kempner's profound writing and easy to love personality, the strength of the songs appearing in full splendor even with minimal embellishment. More than anything though, the solo acoustic set-up lets Kempner’s personality shine in and around the songs. There’s a radiance in the soft spoken banter between songs, cranking jokes and letting the audience in, brought to life as each of the thirteen tracks prove Kempner to be one of modern indie rock’s truly elite songwriters, blending honest and heartfelt passion for those around them with a gifted ability to tell a story within the lyrics and gorgeous melodies. Palehound as a band rip, their sets are boisterous and passionately raw, but hearing El’s songs stripped back feels transcendent and in this setting… oddly spiritual. - DG
Bella Union
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If there was a running contest for Most Joyous Album of the Year, there’s a good chance that Champion, the third album from Norwegian quartet Pom Poko, would make good on its name. The album crackles with energy from the moment delightfully bouncy sonic bursts announce the arrival of album-opener “Growing Story,” and things largely remain kinetic, if not frenetic, for most of Champion’s runtime. Driving drums, shiny guitar, pleasantly throbbing bass and sticky vocal melodies are mainstays on the album, and it’s easy to hear the echoes of blogged-about bands of yesteryear, think Ponytail, Hospitality and Battles throughout the album. However, Champion never comes across as derivative or gets same-y. While the building blocks are straightforward, what Pom Poko builds with them is often surprising and exciting. The steady pulse of its title track giving way to an airy, almost delicate bridge before the track snaps back into focus, the exquisitely blown-out guitar tone of “Go,” the restrained denouement of “Fumble,” the math rock-indebted spasms that sporadically appear throughout — Champion is an album that consistently throws changeups and nearly always hits its mark. - Ben Hohenstatt
Ruination Record Co.
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Fresh off the release of Finom's fantastic new album, Sima Cunningham makes her solo debut with High Roller, a stunning record of artistic folk and impactful Americana. Full of depth even when minimally composed, Cunningham weaves together astounding melodies, gentle reflections, and dreamy dynamics on an impressive record that demands repeat listens. Steeped in Americana and the artier edges of folk, Cunningham writes with graceful beauty, augmenting heartfelt reflections and introspection with psychedelic touches and dynamic textures. Cunningham sings with a warm strength over finger picked acoustic guitars, finding the acceptance in the gorgeous sentiments of the record, joined by friends to family to bring her music a lush worn charm. - DG
Lame-O Records
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Slippers, the new solo project of LA's Madeline BB (Le Pain), arrives with a dreamy power-pop perfection on So You Like Slippers? The record is so triumphantly crafted that you'd be forgiven for thinking you've been listening to these songs your whole life. Dripping with melancholy in a way that sounds shimmering, it's one solid gold smash hit after the next. BB has a real gift for writings songs that melt into your brain, surging between sugary hooks and a dream pop bliss, her music jangles and radiates with bedroom pop ease but garage filtered distortion. The record is sweet (yet occasionally sinister) and breezy but instantly memorable, softly roaring from one engaging hook to the next, simple but undeniably nuanced. It’s an expert crash coarse in sunshine pop and gluey refrains. - DG
Saddle Creek
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SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, a 3-piece indie band from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is back with a new album to close off the summer. The twelve track album presents itself as a creature of its own, lurking from out of the shadows, hungry to be heard. This team of ambient yet orchestral sounds is one that we can attribute to Zack Schwartz, Rivka Ravede, and Corey Wichlin, who all together, form a vibrant, soulful stretch of tonality. With electronically manipulated sprawls of noise, stratospheric transcendence seems to be the goal. Sonically multi-layered and synthetic, each song embodies various components that fulfill the sensations of a deep refrain. YOU’LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING is an album of machinery that has much to offer, with bolts and screws that tie one end of it to another, creating a prosperous authority of melodic harmony. Cerebral, symphonious, and piercing with delicate intensity, the band dismisses the formalities of structure and emerges with a new tonality, synonymous to what may be described as an overwhelming jolt of rapturous bliss. - Anika Maculangan
ALSO RECOMMENDED:
CITRIC DUMMIES “Trapped In A Parking Garage” | DOLDREY “Only Death Is Eternal” | EX PILOTS 'Motel Cable” | GUIDING LIGHT “Guiding Light” | IT THING “Spirit Level” | MARK LANEGAN “Bubblegum XX” | PLEASER “Sweet Beautiful Music” | POISON RUÏN “Confrere” | SNAKESKIN “Summoning Suit”
SEPTEMBER:
Learning Curve Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
Abandoncy’s latest, Assailable // Agonism, might be the year’s best kept secret, but it deserves recognition far and wide. The Kansas City noise rock band sound utterly colossal and apocalyptic, burning and corroding with artistic brutality. It’s truly next level, their complicated structures contort until the spine has shattered, the trio really pushing heaviness to a different plateau altogether, grinding low end dirges into the Earth’s crust, peeling away with avant-garde atonality, all while consistently sweeping the rug out from beneath us, pummeling at will when least expected. Intense, ugly, and brooding, Abandoncy harness feedback and tranquility only to detonate upon impact, rattling off the charts of the richter scale with dynamic sonic savagery and an impeccable use of disarming patience. We can only imagine how this record hits live. - DG
Anti Fade / Total Punk / Drunken Sailor Records
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Last year on their stellar album, The Derivative Sounds Of... Or... A Dog Always Returns To Its Vomit, the Australian-based solo project of Jake Robertson performed a genre study of the proto-punk, garage pop sounds of the mid-1960s. On this year’s Turns the Colour of Bad Shit, the band has taken that make-it-work-with-a-few-chords philosophy in a more visceral and angsty direction. Taking inspiration from the late punk bands of the 1970s, Alien Nosejob accurately encapsulates the dire circumstances and dissatisfaction many are feeling in our current era. The tracklist is filled with sneering critiques of societal shortcomings like ignorance, wealth inequality, and the inauthenticity of participants who see social and political movements as passing trends. These heavy topics are underscored by equally heavy, blistering power punk chords, breakneck percussion, and the occasional accenting organ line or sax solo that defies genre labels, which the band sees as a cheap attempt to commodify the guttural urge to create and express themselves. Luckily for us they continue to follow their appetite for musical creativity. - John Brouk
Feel It Records / Future Shock Recordings
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From the charismatic vocals to the clean yet tangled guitars, there's a lot to love about Artificial Go's tightly coiled post-punk. Hopscotch Fever, the Cincinnati band's debut album is skeletal in terms of production, serving their acerbic twists and knotted grooves. Raw, cutting, and undeniably endearing, the album colors outside the lines as they ooze personality. While so much post-punk has gone stale over the years, Artificial Go arrive with with a static electricity charm, their minimalism punctuated at all the best moments with a brilliant sense of humor and a sprightly energy. Every song on Hopscotch Fever comes spring-loaded with off-kilter art punk hooks, the band warping serrated pop with impeccably tight and razor sharp wiry punk. Look no further than “Walk Like A Dog,” a wobbly and memorable song that struts with their own kinetic abandon. - DG
Bayonet Records
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EELS, the second album from Being Dead, introduces the Austin, TX trio to a wider audience while still delivering garage oddities and glorious girl-group tinged harmonies. Falcon Bitch and Shmoofy continue to expound upon their imaginative songwriting while also touching on subjects of bodily discomfort/dissociation, belonging, and balancing creative endeavors with the pressure of the grinding work-a-day cultural environment. Along with bassist Nicole Roman-Johnston, the trio continue to define their unique musical universe and explore a world full of nightmarish fairy-tales amid an unyielding sense of wonder and enjoyment of life, embracing all that comes with it. EELS slightly reigns in the unstable abandon of their debut yet the freedom and energy rarely yields, a driving power the band expertly wields at all times. - Kris Handel
Trouble In Mind Records
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Dummy needs to be able to channel its love of the avant-garde and indie rock into a pop bliss that anyone and everyone could draw something from. The band seem astutely aware of how to channel a broad spectrum of influence into a featherweight sound of their own. One that has a lot of indie sounds it wants to bring to a crowd, and does so without giving up on the idea that the avant can be approachable and bridgeable. Recording wise, it's always something that has almost been within reach. Free Energy is not a major deviation from Mandatory Enjoyment in that department, it just happens to now have its pacing down in ways that feel more improvisational and fluid. Arguably this is the result of refuting the death-by-Stereolab-comparisons of their last LP by now subsuming the 90s Too Pure roster across their multifaceted sound. If Dummy wanted to make a modern Pop (Do We Not Like That?), Free Energy happens to succeed in evoking that compilation. Even as particular Groop noise n' Shields' guitar wales remain, there's a fearless plunge towards the drum machines and looping akin to Quique era Seefeel and mid-90s Laika--percussion sounds themselves rising up in their overall mix. The result is that cuts “Intro-Ub,” “Soonish,” and “Psychic Battery” all benefit from mixes that make you either want to crawl into the speaker to hear the drum just a little more or enact a groove across on the lower half of your body a la Madchester. - Matty McPherson
Perennial / K Records
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Montreal’s Feeling Figures write really great songs, the type you can listen to forever, the kind that implant themselves in your mind. With that core firmly in place, the magic of their music resides in how they get there, their swerving path to pop nuggets that’s surging with raw art pop, fuzzy lo-fi punk, hazy basement psych, and a muscular jangle. Every blistering riff and dreamy texture in service to the greater whole, songs that feel worn and lived in, perfected in ways both familiar and unique. Last year’s Migration Magic was a brilliant introduction to their twin lead approach, a kaleidoscope of earnest punk tunes that feel immaculately composed without sounding fussed over, a true DIY gem. Less than a year later the band returned with their second album, Everything Around You. As the story goes, the album was recorded prior to Migration Magic, put to tape at home during the height of the “omicron winter” of the pandemic. Everything Around You is a more adventurous album, a bit more serrated and riddled with anxiety, but it’s also very much still indebted toward great songwriting. The dynamics are pushed further, stretching out at the edges of the band’s art punk oeuvre, embracing both the heavier and more gentle ends of the spectrum, It’s everything you'd want from a second album (even if it was once their first album). - DG
Ipecac Records
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In the canon of the American underground few bands are as influential and enduring as The Jesus Lizard. Born from the ashes of vocalist David Yow and bassist David Sims' nightmare punk act Scratch Acid with the additions of Duane Denison on guitar and Mac McNeilly on drums, the four-piece pumps out a brilliantly twisted sound. It's a fusion of rhythm and precision with thrashing drums, crushing bass, razor-like guitar lines, and drunken screeching vocals that occasionally coalesce terrifying moments of clarity. Rack, their first album in twenty-six years, like every Jesus Lizard album before it is magnificent. It’s a tightly coiled beast of drunken rambles and screeching guitar grounded by one of the best rhythm sections to stalk the stage. Despite that, it remarkably doesn’t feel like a rehash, every song feels fresh and as good as their work in the nineties whilst harboring new details and dynamics that come more and more to life on each listen. Rack isn’t just a great addition to The Jesus Lizards’s catalogue but a reminder that they’re a band who don’t make great music but brilliant music, significant music. - Devin Birse
Exploding In Sound Records
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On Wasteland Baby, the Rhode Island / Brooklyn quartet have traded their raw, clunky sound for a more refined and immersive one - think rich, resonant tones, pop nuances and an emphasis on booming, drum-driven rhythms. Kal Marks have sought to set aside egos of the individual and focus solely on serving the integrity of the music. This collective mindset has allowed them to push creative boundaries. Lyrically, Carl Shane is confronting some of his own anxieties over the course of the album. The man is no stranger to discomforting subjects in his songwriting, but this time he's grappling with a deeply personal and existential fear: the daunting prospect of bringing a child into a world fraught with uncertainty. The use of the word "Wasteland" in the title could be a subtle insight into to how Shane perceives the world around him gradually deteriorating. Wasteland Baby represents a bold and ambitious step forward for Kal Marks; it combines their signature noise rock intensity with a touch of sophistication, proving they can evolve without losing their core identity. It serves as a reflection of their growth and their willingness to confront inner turmoil through art. - Tim Buck
Redundant Span Records
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There’s a specific type of love required to be a part of a DIY community, it requires a dedication to expressiveness, camaraderie, and a belief that together we can all make some sort of artistic difference in the world. Lerryn spent many years fostering that sense of of community in South East London, having run her very own creative space and playing in punk bands. In the years since however, Lerryn has discovered the next level of love and dedication, becoming a mother and starting a family. As A Mother, her solo debut, captures the magnetism to be there for those you care about, attempting to nurture and provide unequivocal love, to watch your baby grow and blossom. while balancing your personal needs. The thing is though, you don’t need to be a mother, or even a parent, to understand the love that glows from Lerryn’s songs. They speak to the core of anyone who has ever felt immense compassion, to anyone whose world has been upended from lightness, to anyone that’s felt hope in their hearts. - DG
Darling Recordings
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Merce Lemon’s new album, Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild, is a profound and heartfelt record that seems to revolve around the ideas of nature and community. Balancing soft sentiment with muscular songwriting, Lemon is able to weave between delicate country and fuzzy indie rock in a way that feels natural to her writing, her words held close on slow burning front-porch rippers. The Pittsburgh based songwriter’s music blends gorgeous folk and gentle Americana with an indie rock strength, a fiery resolve usually found in the weight of her guitar playing. “Crow,” the album’s third single, is a highlight of the record, a beautiful song that moves from a country leaning acoustic foundation to a swarming sprawl of soulful guitar distortion that would make Doug Martsch or Neil Young proud. The album as a whole is built on patient compositions, building with a natural grace that suits the power in Lemon’s delicate but impactful voice (and the stunning close-knit harmonies). - DG
Anti Records
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Manning Fireworks, MJ Lenderman's fourth solo record, finds him delving into the folkier territories of his masterful oeuvre. He pulls back a little on the sonic explosions of his previous solo releases to hone in on honest expressions of devotion while maintaining his wit and guile. Lenderman continues to establish himself as a songwriter that has a knack for maintaining a striking intensity while refusing to abandon his sense of humor. Manning Fireworks highlights his growing talent as a musician and songwriter in a manner that is loose, welcoming, and easy to embrace with open arms. Though there may not be any songs that are as immediate as the tracks on Boat Songs, the growth in craft in such a short amount of time is jaw dropping and endlessly commendable. This record is full of joyous comfort, homeyness, and youthful inhibition that is handled with a healthy dose of acceptance of the lessons learned while growing up. - Kris Handel
Self Released
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In late September, Mo Dotti released one of the best shoegaze records of all time. Opaque is an immediate classic, a masterwork in genre and songwriting that casts a wide sonic net over precise and effective arrangements. Mo Dotti keeps things balanced between noise and space, big hooks and swallowing atmospheres. Primary songwriters Gina Negrini (vocals, guitar) and Guy Valdez (guitar) possess a unique sensitivity to composition and aesthetics, and the results on their first proper full length exceed the mile high expectations set by the band’s previous pair of EPs; the breezy and crunchy, dream pop landmarks Blurry and Guided Imagery. Mo Dotti’s music contains so many reference points, too many to count. In the end, as Guy Valdez puts it, “We just sound like us.” - Patrick Pilch
Sub Pop
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Naima Bock might have the most beautiful voice in the world. She's also an incredible songwriter, increasingly evident on her second album, Below A Massive Dark Land, a record built on gorgeous folk music, delicate arrangements, and a gentle brilliance. There's warmth radiating from Bock's songs, nuanced yet focused, sweeping compositions that support her ever stunning vocals, even as she laments life’s lonelier moments and feelings of inescapable inadequacy. Yet, sometimes we all need an escape from the ugliness of the world, a reminder that beauty is there if you choose to seek it out, and well, Naima Bock’s music is as beautiful as it gets. Below a Massive Dark Land slinks with gorgeous acoustics, jazzy horns, and immaculate harmonies, Bock’s melodic construction is second only to her phenomenal voice, wrought with reflective emotion and a wistful resolve. Folk music at its most lush and serene, Naima Bock’s latest is steady footing for the all too often shaky times. - DG
Dear Life Records
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Philadelphia-by-New York musician Nina Ryser treads new ground on her Dear Life debut Water Giants. For the first time, the DIY mainstay journeys outside her modest home studio with the help of producer Lucas Knapp and a slew of regional talent for a surreal pop voyage beyond the ego. Ryser builds a monument on the keyboard dream plane with the dilatant Water Giants, her most dynamic and instinctive work to date. Last year’s I Miss My Dog was an impromptu elegy recorded in response to the tragic passing of Ryser’s late pup. That collection’s from-the-gut writing process informs the instinctive and expansive Water Giants, as the spirit of Billy Boy marches on. Grief, love, illness, and addiction are openly embedded in Ryser’s reflexive and unforced approach. While her uninhibited creativity has always felt present and true, these new songs find her writing like no one’s looking. - Patrick Pilch
Temporary Residence / GRUPO
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The unstoppable Party Dozen can do it all. Crime In Australia, their fourth album, finds the Sydney based duo blasting between skronky post-punk, noise rock, free jazz, art punk, and damaged psych. Nothing is off limits as wailing and distorted sax collides headfirst with their impenetrable rhythms. Brilliantly pounding and convulsing, it's one of the year's most mesmerizing gems. As a duo, Kirsty Tickle (saxophone) and Jonathan Boulet (drums), have never shied away from dynamic left turns, evolving in new directions with each successive album. Crime In Australia, the band’s fourth LP continues that evolution, twisting and turning, convulsing and grooving in equal measure. They blend dreamy, atonal, and bombastic tendencies, lurching forward from a sludgy density into a manically fried boogie and a floating suspense. Peppered with warped vocals (shouted through the bell end of the sax) and shifting tempos, the album is both rough and brilliant, forever off-kilter as it shakes and squirms into the noise. - DG
Stones Throw
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Pearl & The Oysters’ music shines like the sun, shimmering and sweltering even on the darkest days. The Los Angeles based duo have been cranking out the hits over the last few years, maintaining their mutant art pop sound while exploring the breezy touches of tropicália, warped funk, space-age lounge jazz, and the cosmic beyond. Planet Pearl, their latest album, revolves around that “alien” nature of their sugar sweet sound, a record that imagines the duo as extraterrestrial life stranded here on Earth. While the sun melts down, the songs continue to glisten, but underneath the vibrant jangle there’s a sense of desperation, the idea of being stuck, going through the motions, closed off from the freedom of choice. That being said, it’s still a treasure trove of leisure “bops,” another bubbling psychedelic pop odyssey. - DG
Topshelf Records
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There’s something so admirable about Peel Dream Magazine’s refusal to settle. The project, led by LA-by-NY multi-instrumentalist Joe Stevens, heavily leaned into a kraut-gaze aesthetic for 2019’s Agitprop Alterna, pivoting to a more sunny strain of chamber pop on 2022’s Pad. Peel Dream Magazine’s latest full length, Rose Main Reading Room, synthesizes everything they’ve done so far. Motorik grooves frame pastel synth progressions as vocalist Olivia Babuka Black takes center with buttery Sadier-ian intonations, a calling card to the band’s Agitprop era. The new Peel Dream Magazine is certainly something to celebrate, and just another good reason to keep looking at those stars. - Patrick Pilch
Relapse Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
Excreting new levels of nasty brutality, San Jose’s Ripped To Shreds return with Sanshi, a crusty death metal album that bulldozes sensibilities. Andrew Lee’s skull crushing riffs and the band’s vicious duel guitar solos hurtle with the intensity of a brick to the face, winding and thrashing as they storm through tempo shifts, out the mud and into the grinding madness. Ripped To Shreds’ fourth full length is a brutal and blistering blast of death metal depravity. There’s a bit of Autopsy in their DNA, with the oozing scent of punk in the fringes of their impenetrable stampede, but much like those Bay Area legends, the band tears through OSDM with pulverizing energy. Chopping heads at high velocity, Sanshi is an all pounding assault on the senses, drums at breakneck speeds, twin riffs set to decimate, whipping structures, and primal howling conjured from the great below. - DG
Self Released
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New York City quintet Starcleaner Reunion released the engrossing four song EP Cafe Life in September, building off of 2023’s excellent Club Estrella. The project sparks like a live wire, electric and with a hint of danger. Much of Cafe Life presents as a jazz-rock record; bearing some similarities to contemporaries like Crumb, dynamics are the driving force in the record, bolstered by phenomenal guitar tone, a prodigious rhythm section and lyricist Jo Roman’s transcendent, airy growl. “The Hand that I Put Down” is an instant hit, fuzzed out and sparkling in turns, and “this is the hand that I put down” is a memorably great lyric in context here. The final track, the standout “Plein Air” is a remarkably good song to have on an early release; shimmering guitars enshroud Roman’s voice, the rhythm section tumbles and drives, and an Autolux-ian sheen carries the band beyond logical boundaries. A transcendent song off of a very good EP, there seems like quite a bit to look forward to on their surely soon-to-come full length debut. - Niccolo Porcello
Three Lobed Recordings
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It didn’t take long for Melbourne’s Tropical Fuck Storm to become one of the world’s most exciting bands. With a tireless work ethic that either finds the quartet touring the world or recording new music, they’ve released three brilliant full length albums, two EPs, an intimate (and hard to describe) film performance with an accompanying soundtrack, and a slew of singles over the past six years, pausing only for global pandemics and a battle with cancer. The band’s sound is warped and blistering, a unique and caterwauling fusion of experimental indie rock, damaged folk, noise rock, and psychedelic punk, delivered with pop hooks and a deranged technicolor radiance. Tropical Fuck Storm’s Inflatable Graveyard is the band’s first proper live album, captured in 2022 at Chicago’s Lincoln Hall. Swarming in a wall of guitar noise and buzzing synths, the band tear through their set with a primal intelligence, maximalist and unapologetic, as indebted to its harmonized hooks as its enveloping sonic assault. - DG
American Dreams
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“Lasik,” the opening track on Wendy Eisenberg’s album Viewfinder, functions as the project’s thesis statement in an almost surprisingly direct way. In a drawn out barely melodic way, they sing through a narrative that they directly admit would be “the most heavy-handed metaphor” were it not true, getting the titular eye surgery. It’s a long, expensive, risky process to bring everything into focus, described over slow swells and chaotic drums. It isn’t just introducing the lyrical themes, at a relatively short six minutes, the song runs the gamut between more dramatic free passages, and sections that are more focused and melodic, without ever feeling any less uneasy. Viewfinder is an album built off contrasts - the differences between what’s seen and what is, demonstrated through eclectic and often bewildering improvisations. Everything sounds slightly surreal. There’s so much virtuosity on display, but it’s all in service of creating a sound with a constantly shifting restlessness. Ultimately, it’s an enthralling and disquieting listen for its entire eighty minute runtime. It’s difficult to pin down in a genre labeling sense, and impossible to pin down in a more abstract musical sense. - Anna Solomon
Temporary Residence Ltd
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The master of the ambient looped sample takes the listener back to a Brooklyn apartment circa 1982, where an eccentric 24-year-old William Basinski sculpted from a cassette recording of a composition he made in high school a sound that would become singular almost 20 years later with the now-canonical The Disintegration Loops. Now here we are, as is the composer, 20 more years removed from that, and yet still as in concert with the past as ever before and forever will be. A part of his self-coined Arcadia Archive series, referencing his NYC performance space where September 23rd was originally put to tape, the recovered and finally released 40ish-minute piece billows and degrades, climbs and descends, all around a radio ping-esque, delicate piano loop that fades and returns with profound intensity and quiet. It’s both reflective and chaotic, effortlessly disciplined and darkly enigmatic. This is how memory works: the mind ebbs and flows like ocean waves shimmering in moonlight, shrouded just enough by distance and dimness that one can never quite tell if the current is coming in or bobbing away. The release, which features both the single uninterrupted composition as well as a broken-apart series of excerpts (which could easily fit smoothly into a playlist alongside GAS and Music for Airports-era Eno), is timeless through and through, which is both thematically appropriate and yet another testament to the musician’s knack for cerebral experimental music that comforts and unnerves in almost giddy, alternating machinations. - Chris Polley
ALSO RECOMMENDED:
BIG UPS “Eighteen Hours Of Static (Hxπ Decoded)” | BROADCAST “Distant Call - Collected Demos 2000-2006” | COFFIN ROT “Dreams of the Disturbed” | DOM SENSITIVE “Leather Trim”| FATBOI SHARIF, FAT TONY, & STEEL TIPPED DOVE “Brain Candy” | G2G “The Gherkin” | NILÜFER YANYA “My Method Actor” | PRISON AFFAIR “Demo IV” | PYRRHON “Exhaust” | RANSOM, CONWAY THE MACHINE, & V DON ”Chaos Is My Ladder 2” | SHOVE “Agency” | STYROFOAM WINOS “Real Time” | TASHA “All This And So Much More” | WEAK SIGNAL “Fine” | WEBB CHAPEL “World Cup” | WHISPER STATES “Whisper States”
OCTOBER:
Drumwork Music Group
Spotify | Apple
Death of Deuce has been a long time coming and 7xvethegenius has crafted a modern hip-hop classic. The Buffalo based MC blends elegance and grit, her bars both hard and intricate, her delivery brilliant and blinding, rapping over eclectic beats that play to her many strengths, whether it's soul laced rap or skull cracking loops, 7xve’s truths shine on the mic throughout one of the year’s undeniable best hip-hops records. As gifted a lyricist as she is, 7xve is also able to keep her flow impressively shifting, her rhyme schemes and cadences working in usual ways with exceptional results. Death of Deuce is a hard album, but more than that it’s a brilliant one, an outline of personal struggle that never dumbs itself down or plays to the mainstream’s lowest common denominator. 7xve spits with intelligence and thought, nearly void of any overt posturing as she cements a showcase of immaculate bars over equally great production. Pay attention to 7xvethegenius, she’s operating at a higher level. - DG
B2B Records / Virgin Music Group
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There’s no denying that we live in the worst possible timeline. But how do you make it through MAGA Hell with your insanity (mostly) intact? Melbourne’s Amyl and The Sniffers offer a cathartic roadmap with their third LP. With topics ranging from A.I. and the climate crisis to “tip-toeing on the eggshells of politics,” Cartoon Darkness explores today’s mix of endless existential crises and dwindling humanity/intellectualism by leaning into the blows. It’s a punk rock record as much as it’s an avant stand-up comic, screaming dick jokes and yelling about male toxicity and Big Tech as both warning and this terrible, unavoidable punchline. Cartoon Darkness lets us know that we’re not alone, and that there’s pockets of decency to be found if you have the courage to accept your lot with a bloody nose (even if said decency is just someone else perpetually cracking under the weight of this global madness). Still, you can at least temporarily fix the world as you slam-dance away your fears and doubts over 33 minutes, working out that anxiety to understand what really matters and what counts for goodness these days. This is a record that begs you to stick around -- maybe to see how bad it all really gets, or maybe to know that laughing at exponential stupidity is the best way to truly affirm your life. Cartoon Darkness is a bullet-ridden smiley face button that you found in an alley, this cracked accessory that lets the world know that you’re in on the big, dumb joke of it all. LOL. - Chris Coplan
Father/Daughter
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
There’s an overwhelming sense woven into Anna McClellan’s songs that it’s okay not to be okay, generally followed by some sort of reminder that tomorrow is a new day, so we prattle onward. The idea isn’t so much optimistic as it is weary and understanding, together we can weather the storm, and together we just might find a way to feel okay, if only for one comfortable moment. McClellan’s word are as beautiful as her voice, drifting between a poetic awareness and abstract thought, often personified by nature - shadows, puddles, flames, fruit trees, birds - but rooted in sentiment that’s easily understood. There’s value to our feelings and we all have our share of living to do. Electric Bouquet, McClellan’s fourth album, came from a period of transition, a time spent adapting to new places, new relationships, new careers. It’s time spent ungrounded, watching the chips fall where they may, while settling into herself with a gentle focus. - DG
Century Media Records
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Morbid Angel, Pink Floyd, Gorguts, and Tangerine Dream walk into a bar… it's not the set-up of a niche joke, but the touchstones behind Blood Incantation's cosmic death metal prog adventure, Absolute Elsewhere. The band play both galactic 70's psych/prog and grizzled death metal with equal admiration, creating something that feels like a shift in the vacuum of space. It could be your gateway into death metal... or you may find yourself on the strangest acid trip of your life. Sure, there’s always been death metal that’s undeniably proggy (there are entire sub-genres dedicated to it), but this isn’t that, Blood Incantation have spliced the difference, pairing together genuine reverence for both spheres of existence, pulling off the feet with mesmerizing results. It can take some getting used to for those that prefer constant bludgeoning, but Blood Incantation remain one of metal’s most ambitious bands and their attention to sonic detail and cosmic expansion is unrivaled. - DG
The Flenser
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There’s a certain brand of horror film – Longlegs, It Follows – that uses nostalgia for a misremembered past to expunge anxieties of a terrorized present. At their best, Chat Pile are that kind of band. Their music is like an artifact discovered buried in a time capsule from 1995 by time travelers from the year 2030. It’s a neat trick, one that propelled the OKC noise rockers to unexpected notoriety on 2022’s God’s Country. This year, the band returns with Cool World, once again released by The Flenser and once again an exploration of angst in a world where you’re just as likely to drive past a church as you are to see a car crashed through its facade. Chat Pile’s effective formula remains intact—jagged riffs propelled by bottom-feeder bass and metallic drums. Meanwhile, singer Raygun Busch continues to straddle the line between righteous prophet and unhinged anti-hero. It begs the question: Why break what ain’t fixed? - Benji Heywood
Feel It Records
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Hailing from Tuscon, Arizona, Class are a band outside of time and space. Guitar driven and catchy, their music blends classic garage and power pop sounds with a distinctly tongue-in-cheek sneer and infectious hooks. Their sound taps into the earliest inklings of punk, evoking the likes of a Nuggets compilation or a New York Dolls B-side far more than anything ‘hardcore.’ The songs are anchored by catchy, blown-out guitar riffs, be it the marching rhythm of ‘Milkman,’ the British-sounding power chords on ‘Burnout City,’ or the rah-rah energetic drive of ‘Biggest Sale of the Year.’ Group vocals, tame drum fills, and the lo-fi recording quality all serve to build an image of these guys a kind of bizarro-world Ramones, sweating through their leather jackets in the Arizona heat. ‘The Hits Are Here to Stay’ could be their TV-special theme song, while ‘Be-Bop with the Rats,’ with its wailing saxophone, could soundtrack a brawl of rival greaser gangs. It’s all fun and in good taste, but the jocularity betrays a seriousness and intelligence behind the songwriting that makes Class anything but a novelty act. - Matt Watton
Me Saco Un Ojo / Blood Harvest Records
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Holy hell! Brazilian death metal band Cosmophage’s debut, Sidereal Malignancy, is thoroughly unstoppable, an introduction that has us grinding our teeth in anticipation for what comes next. Over the course of six wildly unpredictable songs, the band dig and swerve between cavernous death metal disgust and brilliantly progressive elements that never feel heavy-handed, eschewing “tech metal” status in favor of simply erupting a whirlwind of blistering force, whipping through town with a path of aural destruction. With delightfully unfused production, Cosmophage manage to create texture and depth to OSDM while blazing their own warped and rotten path forward, unrelenting, putrid, and pulverizing with an understated intelligence and brash compositional ingenuity. Blending atmospheric dread with a cavalcade of malicious riffs, the band move on a dime from bludgeoning dirge to off-kilter stomp, dismantling time in a cosmic abyss. No matter how many times you listen, it remains just as great. - DG
Fat Possum Records
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Never a stranger to hip-hop's more experimental reaches, ELUCID returns with REVELATOR, a clamoring record that's equal parts psychedelic and electronic, free in form, but hard in statement. His lyrics retain an acidic sharpness, direct and taking aim at disproportionate class systems and inequality while drifting in and out of abstract focus and poetic detachment. REVELATOR is an undeniably noisy hip-hop album, in lyrical detail, but more so in actual sound design, as ELUCID finds a comfortable place in the “noise rap” spectrum, his words cutting through dense and distorted electronics, the feeling claustrophobic and cluttered, but the impact and carnage seething like a reflection of the album’s overall sentiment. ELUCID’s pen game continues to among hip-hop’s best, each bar hits like a sledgehammer to the chest. - DG
Century Media
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Enforced could just be the best damn active thrash metal band in existence. The Richmond band follow up last year's War Remains with A Leap Into The Dark, an EP compiling new tracks, covers (including their take on Obituary’s “Deadly Intentions”), and a much beloved b-side, leaning into their death metal influences while bulldozing with thrashing depravity. Sure, it’s undeniably a stop-gap release between albums, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a killer addition to their exceptionally brutal catalog. With slight hints of pounding hardcore woven into their thrash assault (but never anything resembling “metalcore”), Enforced make really intense music, but they shatter any anxieties with their unyielding momentum and mammoth solos, whipping by with punishing resolve. Stampeding and relentless, it's neck snapping fun amid total decimation. - DG
Fat Possum
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Fievel Is Glauque’s recording process, showing their knack for melodic chemistry and compositional complexity, is grasped amidst spontaneous recordings, yet all of that changes throughout Rong Weicknes. Shifting what they’ve done before, they open more avenues for their adept hand for melodic switch-ups. The band expanded into an octet, eventually creating an opportunity for Zach Phillips to pursue an unorthodox idea he called “live in triplicate,” giving the band room to explore how this record will sound. Said idea involved three sets of recordings - one foundational, one duplicated, and one improvisational, consisting of the octet playing together without any click track guiding them. Despite that harrowing recording process, the complete result of Rong Weicknes becomes masterful. This record essentially consists of Fievel Is Glauque’s most dense, elaborate, and sticky set of songs to date, a set of characteristics that are uplifted by how this record was produced, where details from all three takes are interspersed with a gleamingly defined texture. - Louis Pelingen
Matador Records
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Fans of peak-era Matador indie rock have been graced with a supergroup – The Hard Quartet is Stephen Malkmus (Pavement, Silver Jews, the Jicks), Matt Sweeney (Chavez, Guitar Moves), Jim White (a million bands), and Emmett Kelley (collaborator extraordinaire). Their self-titled debut is a hard rocking tour-de-force that highlights each members’ strengths – Malkmus’ ear for riffage and John Ashbery-esque lyrical adventures, Kelly’s tasteful yet in-your-face Garcia-esque shredding, Sweeney’s macho tenderness, and White’s amazing way of being sloppily in the pocket. Malkmus’ songs are more cerebral than his Pavement stuff and less proggy than his Jicks stuff, and though he takes the lion’s share of the lead vocals, the other contributions are equally as memorable (Sweeney’s ‘Rio’s Song’ is the album’s standout hit). The six-song run from ‘Heel Highway’ to ‘Action for the Military Boys’ stands shoulder-to-shoulder with anything these guys have put out elsewhere. You can tell the boys were having fun, making each others’ songs better, and embracing both the freedom and duty that comes with being Gen X rock royalty. - Matt Watton
Self Released
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Each year, hemlock’s Carolina Chauffe picks a month where they write a new song each day. A hot dog from home depot, the first signs of a Midwestern winter, and the last oat milk carton are among the daily mundanities that serve as hemlock’s muses. The practice takes the pressure off of mannered, cautious songwriting, yielding a “first thought, best thought” process, as Chauffe stated in their interview with MAPS earlier this year. The songs are strikingly bare iPhone recordings, typically consisting only of Chauffe’s voice and acoustic guitar. You can hear strings buzzing and chairs scraping—the ticket of entry into hemlock’s finely tuned sound. Their newest album, 444, is the culmination of these albums’ highlights, reimagining these demos with a full-scale band and production process. The opening track, “Day One,” exemplifies the quintessential hemlock sound. It’s the first song Chauffe ever wrote for their song-a-month project, a heralding of their new creative landscape. Compared to the demo version on February, there’s a present gap between the hemlock of 2019 and 2024. Their voice is stronger, guitar more self assured, but the integrity of the sound remains. When Chauffe’s voice overlaps in rounds to close out the song, it’s a duet of past and present. - Caroline Nieto
Fire Records
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MEMORIALS’ debut album came to life in spare moments between projects, giving the duo of Verity Susman (Electrelane) and Matthew Simms (Wire, It Hugs Back) a chance to entertain impulses, to exercise sonic freedom while working together on soundtracks and film scores. They approach experimental pop with a gleeful radiance, warping between gluey sugar spun hooks and rich layered temporal drifts, their clamoring noise pop excursions and textural static played with an honest “exploring the studio” sense of bliss. This is thoughtful music, beautiful music, and challenging music, but it’s also a record that took shape around the duo’s collective chuckles at the idea of waterslides used as memorials. MEMORIALS’ patchwork nuances and focus on detail is most certainly high art, but that doesn’t mean they can’t have some fun with it. Memorial Waterslides arrives in immaculate shape, a complex art pop record that slinks, grooves, sputters and squawks, and yet still glows with a humble charm. The brightest pop moments of the record leave sunspots in our mind, as MEMORIALS craft essential and inescapable songs that warp folk music harmonies and prog pop inclinations into impossibly colossal hooks. - DG
Secretly Canadian
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Passionate, mercurial, and poignantly moving, Porridge Radio’s Dana Margolin stirs us into a whirlwind of emotion and harmonically expressive sound. Riffs are dictated by the measure of crescendos contained within each tempo, creating a developing effect across the album’s flow. However, what is most prominent is Margolin’s lyricism, which poses as self-reflective when in introspection of meandering, pondering thoughts. Pensive and navel-gazing, she conveys intense, deep entryways into potent rhythms and fiery timbres of resonance. Tracks like “Sick of the Blues” demonstrate a sincere, profound reckoning that goes beyond the common focus of sentimentality. Somber, although at times, profuse with sensibilities toward vibrance, Margolin’s capacity for warmth and bittersweetness is one that translates into the strength of musicality, all veiled within the light of blaring reverberations and dense, jolting tonalities. Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me ventures into choral tendencies and fervent themes, the stylistic inclination is reminiscent of authentic vulnerability. Encompassing the truthful disposition of melancholia, it extends beyond the frame of brooding contemplation and soars to reach new heights — these magnitudes assured by her proclivity for poetry and the honesty it transcends. - Anika Maculangan
Mothland
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Someone once described Pressure Pin to me as “egg punk on speed,” and I’m not sure there exists a simpler, more apt way to define the music of Montreal’s Kenny Smith. La Sécurité drummer and notable music savant Smith’s second EP as Pressure Pin, Polyurethane, is, for lack of better terms, bat shit crazy. The musical whiplash that Smith throws in your face is a nonstop barrage of vocal barks, weirdo chord progressions, and hypersonic drumming. Switching between about ten varying movements in a single song, Smith packs every second on Polyurethane with egg punk fever and melancholic despondency. As the EP cryptically rages against the establishment, its full-throttle static gives you the feeling and anxiety that we are hurtling at top speed down a one-way street that ends at the edge of a cliff. As the closing track, “Who’s Scared Now?” erupts into a ball of fire, and its white-hot riff implodes into a blistering fuzzy guitar solo, the following silence is the most disorienting part of the whole album. It just… ends. You have the choice to run it back or let your ears recover. My recommendation is to play it over and over again until that tinnitus is set in concrete. - Myles Tiessen
Goner Records
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Montreal’s premiere psych-punk band is back. For the first time in ten years, PYPY (pronounced like the math formula) is back to its regularly scheduled programming, documenting garage-rock dystopia through lightning-fast riffs and vocalist Annie-Claude Deschênes’ distinctive howl. This time, however, the band launches further into cosmic infinity. Sacred Times brings together motorik drumming, transient guitar tones, and various electronic meanderings to showcase their haunted vision of all things past, present, and future. From the opening eggy four-and-a-half-minute “Stripped Lonely Sock” to the just flat-out strange but fantastic closer, “Poddle-Escape,” the French-Canadian outfit proves their skills are sharper than ever, and their dedication to brazen alternative punk is stronger than ever. Although the entire group plays with bullet-proof finesse, nobody other than Annie-Claude Deschênes can be equally enrapturing and terrifying. Her hypnotic presence on Sacred Times draws you in with the gravity of a black hole, and once you cross the event horizon of the group’s sophomore album, there is no going back. And you’re all the better for it. - Myles Tiessen
The Influenyce Enterprise
Spotify | Apple
Rome Streetz is one of underground hip-hop’s coldest MC’s, his lyrics eloquently grimy, dexterous in delivery and cadence but always hard. Likewise, Daringer is one of underground hip-hop’s rawest producers, his beats are built on no frills ultra-tough loops and neck snapping drums. The duo come together on Hatton Garden Holdup, their first collaborative album together, a solid gold pairing that pays tribute to the glory days of “coke rap” while paving their own path in the dirt (much like Daringer’s 2022 record with Meyhem Lauren). Heavy in samples and eerie with the type of shadowy production that’d make DJ Muggs proud, the album consumed in softly out of focus keys, reverberating like plumes of smoke under Rome Streetz’s flagrant and braggadocious bars, separating the bums from the abundance. The hustle is real and Rome Streetz continues to prove himself one of modern hip-hop’s absolute best MCs, his bars both creative and unflinching, steady flowing like the product itself. - DG
XL Recordings
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The Smile, comprised of Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood (of Radiohead) and Tom Skinner (of Sons of Kemet) really need no introduction at this point. Cutouts is their third album in two years (the second this year), and it might be their best effort yet. The trio lean into explosive motorik boogies and krautrock influences as they squirm and groove with unprecedented urgency. Cutouts feels like the moment where they come (slightly) unglued from their better known projects and become something new, embracing textures less explored. While there’s plenty of open atmospheres and meditative landscapes of warped psychedelic synths, there are almost that contort between bossa nova jazz, static inducing prog, and against all odds… math rock. All these disparate sounds work in stunning harmony to create an interesting fusion of past, present, and future. - DG
Celluloid Lunch Records
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The Submissives’ latest album is a joyride through cherry-colored despair. The brainchild of musician Deb Edison, the music of The Submissives never seems to settle between desperation and boredom. Even songs about heartbreak are laced with sarcasm, bolstered by the flippancy of Edison’s vocal performance. The Submissives project the woes of femininity through the brash lyrics of tracks like “He Wanted Her,” which finds its main theme in the repetition of “he wanted her, he didn’t want me.” The band reflects a distaste for ideal femininity by leaning into it, letting its ridiculousness speak for itself. One song just repeats the phrase “I am the perfect woman” as if it’s a necessary affirmation to survive in this world. Edison’s writing is timeless, evoking both the demos of Margo Guryan and 90s DIY bands. It helps that Edison’s band is mostly made up of non-musicians, artists whose personal flair means more than their technical skill. Errant strums and voice cracks are ingrained into the lo-fi recording, with songs like “Maybe Someday” playing into a purposeful sour sound. The album was recorded in 2017 and not released until October of 2024, so it’s a time capsule in more ways than musical style. None of the songs were part of The Submissives’ 2018 or 2022 albums, solely existing in their organic performances. There’s a clear and present energy in the room—take a listen and soak it up. - Caroline Nieto
Toxic State Records
Bandcamp
Suffocating Madness (mems Anti-Machine, Nurse, Savage Pleasure) release their full length debut, Unrelenting Forced Psychosis, a grizzly hardcore album with the manic intensity and brutality of classic Scandinavian HC (think Disfear meets Anti Cimex). Depraved, relentless, and blistering into the red, their onslaught hits like a bulldozer to your skull. With an incessant buzz and relentless drums, Suffocating Madness bring their wrecking ball ferocity from album opener “Slaughter” until the violent primordial terror of the record’s finale “Their Legacy Shall Die,” rarely offering a moment of respite. Gnarled and piercing, they pummel at close distance, the buzzsaw guitars cutting between rust and d-beat inspired hardcore carnage, the band digging into crusty metal and deranged psychedelic territory on one of the year’s best punk albums. - DG
Total Punk Records
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I couldn’t stop thinking about Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band while moving through the sixteen songs on Strike Gold Strike Back Strike Out. Maybe it’s the snarling guitar tones, the loose informality of it all, or the chaotic first song introducing the band, but the endless energy of the two albums feels comparable. Tha Retail Simp$, Theee Retail Simps, Thine Retail Simps, call them whatever you want, but the jangly, cigarette-in-mouth anti-algorithm garage band can more or less do whatever the hell they want and sound however the hell they want. Strike Gold Strike Back Strike Out is the number one case in point. Does “O.B. On The Move” sound like a deranged recording missing from Blonde On Blonde? I’d say. Why not queue up a steamy, bass-forward medley of “Double Feature/” and “Drum To March The Wind 2?” Maybe throw in the blistering punk-minded “Barstool Blooze” for Neil Young. For a band that changes their name with every release, it’s great to hear they still haven’t lost their distinctive style. It probably won’t be long until their next release, but for now, $imps out. - Myles Tiessen
Prosthetic Records
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Undeath are sort of the champions of "fun" death metal. Their sound is still brutally heavy, cavernous, and oozing with gore and dread, but there's big hooks, enormous riffs, and well... it sounds joyous (in terms of blistering death metal). More Insane is an amped up beast of thrashing old school death metal with a modern disgust, and it's ready to crush a few skulls. Their riffs, crushing and primal, seem to swarm and consume, leaving nothing but a pile of rubble in its wake. For a band often perceived as death metal’s next great crossover hope, Undeath haven’t smoothed out any edges, their latest is just as evil and demonic as you might hope it would be, the band winding through a maze of head splitting twists and turns with the grace of an ogre clubbing out the sun. - DG
ALSO RECOMMENDED:
A PLACE TO BURY STRANGERS “Synthesizer” | BLACK CURSE “Burning in Celestial Poison” | BLUE ZERO “Colder Shade Blue” | THE EUROSUITE “Totally Fine” | GUT HEALTH “Stiletto” | KURIOUS “Majician” | LAURA MARLING “Patterns in Repeat” | LIVING GATE “Suffer As One” | MOIN “You Never End” | MOPE GROOVES “Box Of Dark Roses” | NAKED ROOMMATE “Pass The Loofah” | NERO “LP3.14” | NIGHT IDEA “Rocky Coast” | ORANSSI PAZUZU “Muuntautuja” | PATOIS COUNSELORS “Limited Sphere” | RITCHOT TEXTILES “I” | S.H.I.T. “For A Better World” | SMOKE BELLOW “Structurally Sound” | THA GOD FAHIM & NICHOLAS CRAVEN “Tha Myth Who Never Quit 2” | THEE SACRED SOULS “Got A Story To Tell”
NOVEMBER:
Full Time Hobby
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Bananagun's second album, Why is the Colour of the Sky?, is a deeply psychedelic record, swirling with paisley undergrounder bliss, mesmerizing rhythms, and inescapable grooves. The album’s expansive acid pop is free and hallucinatory, formed by kaleidoscopic fragments of prog, jazz, and psych folk. The surreal album melts, oozes, and floats, wandering into the future with a brilliant reverence for the breezy psychotropic past of the floral 60s. The time warp of the record is balanced by avant garde structures, the motion and design as fluid as a lazy river. Jimi Gregg’s jaw-dropping and intricate drums consistently steal the show, grooving with nimble shuffles and a swinging ease. The record’s chemtrails of momentum surge with acidic enchantment, capturing a spirit of dropped-out freedom. With the core of the album recorded live in the studio, this record boogies and ripples from start to finish. - DG
Upset The Rhythm / Hobbies Galore
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Four years after the release of Shimmering Basset, Melbourne’s The Green Child make their triumphant return with Look Familiar. Still led by the duo of Raven Mahon (Grass Widow, Rocky) and Mikey Young (Total Control, Eddy Current Suppression Ring), the band are now a quartet, reaching into the glorious experimental pop void. Blending dreamy synth pop, krautrock, and warm psychedelic bliss, the album is wondrous and full of splendor. Equal parts atmospheric and immediate, there’s a delightful pulse to The Green Child’s latest, the motorik touches of the songs unfolding in different ways, from dreamy electronic blips to warm waves of aerobics inducing jazzy post-punk. The addition of live drums and added guitars and synths evolves the band’s sound, giving it a buoyant liveliness, allowing their structures to stretch and glow. Look Familiar is a gentle psychedelic voyage, a balm of serenity just when the world needed it most. - DG
Sonamos / Little Butterfly Records
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EXHALO, the latest EP from the artist Juana Molina exemplifies its B-side identity to her full-length album, Halo, released seven years ago. Molina bends the sound of her voice and synthesizers, creating a scene of a distorted reality. On the one hand, she uses familiar guitar chord progressions to drive the songs to the effect you can bop your head to. On the other hand, she warps, twists, and plays with the idea of what we know sound is expected to be. That could be said of “Astro del luz segunda,” “Invierno,” and “Hope,” the latter dreamy and slightly strange, almost comforting. “Astro de luz segunda” is affirming and a certain driving force of energy. The first ten seconds of the song feels like a feint of how far reality is off; simultaneously, it's bubbly, almost comedic, but guiding into something weird and exciting. Though “Hope” is the song that was added to this collection of the B-sides, “Vagos lagos” separates itself sonically as it’s seemingly stripped of all sound effects and distortions, creating a respite of the beautiful array of instruments, settling into a release of tension of an acoustic guitar and her voice undistorted and sybaritically plain. When talking about EXHALO on her website, Molina says that the opening song will be in charge of presenting the album, and “once that decision is made, I begin to see how a song gives way to the next one, like these movements of a concert, like the scenes of a film, like the couples at the dances of 18th century, in which changing partners, there is always one hand that receives the other that arrives.” EXHALO does this dance nicely, uniquely, and warmly. - Jonah Evans
“I don’t know where I am, and I don’t care” is the first line of the title track, which starts the album. It amounts to a credo that animates the entirety of Nobody Loves You More. Kim Deal has always been ballsy, and she remains so on this LP, albeit in a way that sources new instruments that in turn reveal unexpected sides of her. On “Nobody Loves You More,” Deal’s vocals are couched in lush strings, and there is a brass band interlude where a Gibson SG usually is. The second track, “Coast,” continues this feel-good vibe, having the kind of horn backing you might hear on a recent Mountain Goats album. The song “Are You Mine?” has a pedal steel guitar, and it has an old school, Roy Orbison ambiance. The original version, which possesses a more familiar, stripped-down atmosphere, was written back in 2011 and released in 2013. Another track on Nobody Loves You More, “Wish I Was,” is also from 2013. Its earlier iteration was all instrumental, and, in addition to lyrics, this revised version has better pacing and a fuller sound. The line that stands out is “Coming around is easy/coming down is rough.” It exemplifies how Deal lets her guard down in more ways than one on this LP. - Christopher J. Lee
Relapse Records
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There is but one Mammoth Grinder and we’re still celebrating the Austin band’s triumphant return. Undying Spectral Resonance has been unleashed, proving once again that there’s magic in the putridity of their death metal meets d-beat punk sound. Short and sweet (aside from an interlude that serves as the record’s longest track), the band quake with cavernous grooves, death metal dexterity, and the weedian pocket of a d-beat stampede. Led by Chris Ulsh (Power Trip, Impalers, Quarantine), the band’s sound remains a disarmingly aggressive cosmic swamp, oozing with primal decimation, from the bludgeoning riffs to the hardcore influences that creep into the rhythmic density. With an impenetrable momentum that’s equal parts sludge and mountainous brutalism, the band’s blend of crusty punk and knuckle dragging death metal is in brilliantly corrosive shape. - DG
La Vida Es Un Mus Discos / D4MT Labs Inc
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Among the deluge of post-punk bands, Straw Man Army stand among the modern greats, the NYC duo's music and caustic lyrics are well coiled yet razor sharp on their latest socio-political themed album, Earthworks. There's a sense of brilliant depravity to their songs, weaving and tangled amid their own shuffling rhythms to prod and smirk at our failed society. With an animated howl and taut riffs, Straw Man Army remind us, "America, it's not a country, it' a business". The band are hammering home the terrors of the world’s militarized states, the destruction of our environment, and the corruption and greed that exist to ruin the lot of us. Everything is played remarkably tight, the sound positively spring-loaded as they dart around melodic shifts and manic art punk aggression. Bringing a boat to the jaw of our deteriorating society, Straw Many Army may have made their defining statement (now if they would just play some shows). - DG
Big Scary Monsters
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Where exactly does your threshold for punishment lie? If often seems as though Thank intend to find out, their music abrasive, throbbing, and entirely consuming, but there’s a balance. The Leeds based quartet also write some of the sharpest hooks you’ll ever come across. The band’s incessant sense of humor is viciously biting, running rampant through their songs like one of those chattering teeth wind-up toys. Trolling the trolls in a sense, there’s a good nature to the sicko mentality of their sordid noise rock, they’re consistently punching up, a voice for the sensible among us delivered with the confidence of a solid gold madman. I Have A Physical Body That Can Be Harmed, the band’s second full length, is an expansion of their sound, both more patient and frantic, uglier and funnier, unnerving but plastered with a permanent smirk. Where so many others choose to play it safe, Thank come unglued, their destructive metamorphosis of raw punk and mutant disco is increasingly primal and triumphantly obnoxious. - DG
Exploding In Sound Records
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Born out of the Nashville DIY scene during the latter half of the previous decade, Thirdface made quite a raucous debut in 2021 with Do It With A Smile, a blistering set of grind, hardcore, and death metal distilled to their most visceral elements and fiercest terms. If their debut was rife with primal anger and twisting, raw moments, in Ministerial Cafeteria the band pins its irritation and frustration on broader subjects. Concerns about mental health are blatantly exposed in “Purify,” internal and external struggles against authority dominate “DOV,” and an alienated society left to its own devices is mockingly depicted in “Bankroll.” Still keen on delivering hardcore from a left-field vantage point, Shibby Poole’s drums blast, roll, and bang against walls of noise (“Meander,” “Beneviolent”), while Maddy Madeira (bass) and David Reichley (guitar) pierce the mix with sticky, sludgy, and atonal lines. Kathryn Edwards’ vocals have grown fiercer as she snarls and growls at odds with the grim metaphor woven throughout the album; we’re all just sitting at a filthy cafeteria where trash is served daily. Oh, and of course, sides are not included. - Álvaro Molina
Self Released
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Austin’s Variety introduced themselves to world back in January with their debut single “Plover,” a song that remains among the best we’ve heard all year (with a video that is definitely our favorite of 2024). The recording project of Rhys Woodruff (Borzoi, Leche), Variety’s music presents itself like a kitchen sink of arty punk and fuzzy indie rock ideas, each one complimentary to the greater whole. Subtropical, the band’s full length debut, is exceptional from start to finish, Woodruff’s songs are knotted yet focused, clamoring but catchy, with every jittery fuzz pop burst accented for accessibility while retaining a weird punk charm. Woodruff’s musical DNA is readily apparent in the jagged progression and subtle twang of the band’s rhythmic stomp, but Variety opt for something cleaner, more direct, and ultimately brighter than his other projects. Subtropical is a special record, with a focus on the natural world and how we relate to it, captured with a raw warmth and sonic clarity. - DG
ALSO RECOMMEND:
22º HALO “Lily Of The Valley” | BOLDY JAMES & HARRY FRAUD “The Bricktionary” | CAVALIER & CHILD ACTOR “CINE”| DES DEMONAS “Apocalyptic Boom! Boom!” | KENDRICK LAMAR “GNX” | MOTHPUPPY “As It Goes Down” | MOUNT EERIE “Night Palace” | QLOWSKI “The Wound” | QUEEN SERENE “2” | SQUANDERERS “If A Body Meet A Body” | STRESS EATER “Everybody Eats!” | STYLIANOS OU & THE CORTISOL COWS “Fucked Forever” | THA GOD FAHIM & NICHOLAS CRAVEN “Dump Gawd: Hyperbolic Time Chamber Rap” | VENUS TWINS “/\/\/\/\/”
DECEMBER:
No Sabes
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple
Considering the fact that Chicago’s Bursting features members of Yautja, Stress Positions, Thou, Coliseum, and Ands (among many others), it’s fair to have expectations in terms of quality. The good news is that beyond having pedigree for days, any expectations are blown away as the band eschew the sound of their better known projects to dig into the dexterous world of raw and serrated 90’s post-hardcore… and they’ve absolutely nailed it. With influences that include Jawbox, Shiner, and Drive Like Jehu (perhaps a bit of Quicksand too), the quartet are impossibly locked in, their ever shifting rhythms and tangled guitars sound utterly colossal throughout the Bursting EP. Recorded with Matt Russell and mastered by Amar Lal, there’s a high production sound to the record, giving perfect clarity to their contorting structures and pummeling shifts. There’s a lot to take in, but Bursting make it easy. - DG
Backwoodz Studioz
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Genuine Dexterity indeed. In what is surely the year’s most fitting album title, two of hip-hop’s underground elite come together with an embarrassment of dexterity riches. K-The-I??? (aka Kiki Ceac) is a rapper in a lane all his own, his lyrics unraveling like eloquent linguistics gone wild, his vocabulary twisting like a tornado. Paired with Kenny Segal’s shapeshifting beats, the pair work to bring out the best in one another, their first collaboration is radiant, contorted, poetic, and disorienting in equal measure. K-The-I???’s flow works itself into brilliant tongue tied knots, delivered in triple speed yet enunciated with shimmering clarity. Beyond his boundless delivery, his lyrics are equally jaw-dropping, lacing each track with mind-bending precision as he expounds on life’s many complications and our grim reality. Joined by Armand Hammer, ShrapKnel, Open Mike Eagle, and more, K-The-I??? still manages to consistantly steal the show, working dexterity magic into each combustible line. - DG
Fire Talk
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In the wake of the end of beloved project Palm, it was always going to be a question of not if, but where, and in what form, such singularly talented musicians would reemerge. Kassie Krut, the project of Eve Alpert and Kasra Kurt from Palm, alongside producer and drummer Matt Anderegg (of the forever under-appreciated Mothers, among others), does not disappoint. The debut EP, led right off the bat by the ridiculous and extraordinary “Reckless,” takes the more maximalist elements of prior work into new territory. “United” is, against all odds, one of the catchiest songs of the year, witchy, blown out, and deeply compelling. Awash in metallurgical sounds, synthesizers, glitch, and trash can drums, Kassie Krut does an outstanding job of delivering avant-garde pop music in the most unlikely of forms - something Alpert, Kurt, and Anderegg have always excelled at, but nearly perfect here. As the bombastic chorus in “Reckless” goes, we should pay heed. “K-A-S-S-I-E-K-R-U-T” indeed. - Niccolo Porcello
Iron Lung Records
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We’ve been pretty enamored with Rotary Club since we were first introduced to their music via “American Tower” at the start of last year. The world’s best landline themed punk band play with an electrified radiance, their mix of skeletal punk and art pop is built on ragged energy and blistering distortion to create music that’s as much fun as it is unhinged. After their quaking single, the Reno based band return with Sphere of Service, their full length debut. The album is kinetic from start to finish, coiled like an old phone cable and buzzing like a bad connection. Rotary Club are in a stampede more often than not, bending grooving riffs and pounding rhythms, setting the tone for the record with a blend of jittery pop splendor that’s dragged through overdriven fuzz and a sense of perpetual motion. - DG
ALSO RECOMMENDED:
DAVID NANCE “Don't Take That Way, That Way's A Mess: Outtakes 2020-2024” | GAOLED “Bestial Hardcore” | RAZ FRESCO “Pocket Operations III” | ROC MARCIANO & THE ALCHEMIST “The Skeleton Key” | TOTAL DEFEAT “You Can’t Win”