Vicious Nonbeliever, the newest release from Mal Devisa, is a natural extension of her previous efforts from a few years ago. By pairing up with DJ LUCAS, Devisa fully hones in her vocals, creating some of her best work to date. It’s really the turn of phrases that make Vicious Nonbeliever hard to escape or ignore.
Long Lost Solace Find falls within the domain of exceptionality. By being the work of a singer-songwriter connected to the world of folk, its incredibly detached from the very schemes of genre. The first work of courage is in telling, in a folk key, not the stereotype of the forest or inner peace, but rather the urban fabric of a city.
This split EP is a brief, yet precise combination of two complementary worlds, despite being continents and languages apart. You must have heard that music is a “universal language” and you’re probably aware that long distance collabs between bands are not that rare in this time. Esmeralda fuses both notions and the result sounds awesome.
Fad may remind you of a whole host of post-punk/indie rock bands, but it won’t be easy to pinpoint exactly who and when. It’s how Silverbacks take these influences, cut them to pieces, and put them back together again that makes Fad such an impressive collage and an especially exciting debut record.
There’s a repeated line in W.B. Yeats’ poem ‘Easter 1916’: A terrible beauty is born. This devastating line could describe the feeling of listening to Joy Division’s Closer for the first time. It’s a colossal work of art; a post-punk pillar; an ingenious sonic landscape; a blinding existential vision of songwriting.
Just Look At That Sky, the sophomore full-length from Chicago’s Ganser, is the sound of summer. Maybe not in the traditional sense of friendly fun in the sun, but as it builds on their penchant for dark, pulsing atmospherics and razor-sharp attitude, it captures the feel of a summer under lockdown and a post-punk band at their most dialed-in.
Speckled with slacker anthems and folk charmers, Dark Tones’ Pulling Nails Out of Walls catalogues the loneliness, the pointlessness, and the weight of being an island. The record aims to make sense of one’s own solitude, or at least to sharpie “I WAS HERE” on the inside of a bathroom stall, just to prove one’s own existence.
Nova Scotia rockers Kestrels want to remind you of another era and their latest album Dream Or Don’t Dream is their love letter to ‘90s rock, mixing the hushed aesthetics of shoegaze with the fuzz and energy of power-pop. In its meshing of big-name rock backing talent and its commitment, Kestrels will find an interested audience.
The goal of Abscess Time isn't aimed at kicking against the boundaries of the existent heavy music scene, but rather to give better definition to those lines that have been previously drawn. I think it's clear that in refining rather than expanding their sound, Pyrrhon have given us a more precise picture of what they're capable of.
Possible Humans is a five-piece band out of Melbourne, for those that love guitars and driving bass lines. Everybody Split is their first full length, initially released in April 2019 as a small run by Hobbies Galore. This initial run was followed by a US and worldwide release in August by Trouble in Mind Records based out of Chicago.
The band sounds absolutely massive throughout the album. The instrumentals hit with precision; look no further than the guitar attack of “Processed By The Boys” and “I Am You Now,” or the push and pull of “Modern Business Hymns”. Joe Casey sounds like vintage Nick Cave, delivering fire and brimstone truths over the din.
