The recent self-titled album by Atlanta band Vangas is a punishing and relentless record. From the first moments of “Chromatic Ascending” to the closing “The Handstand (Pt. 2),” there’s little room to breathe as the band tunnels through a hole of noise for 35 minutes, dragging you along amid some of the year’s most exciting noise rock.
After losing their lead vocalist on the eve of a critically-acclaimed second record, Black Country, New Road emerged with a live album of new material pieced together and tested on the road; the show must go on and all that. The band have ditched much of the postmodern, hyper-referential songwriting on their earlier work in favour of fairy tales, half-remembered dreams and anthropomorphic animals.
We can’t overstate the importance of Helvetia, a constant favorite for well over a decade. The impact of its sound and style, the structure, finesse (as well as lack of finesse), has left a profound impression on what this era’s psychedelic music can be. The Beach At The Edge Of The World is a prime example of Helvetia at its absolute best.
The collaboration of Ryan Hemsworth’s (Quarter-Life Crisis) electronic music specialty and Shalom Obisie-Orlu’s emotional value produced Shalom’s incredibly solid debut album, Sublimation. The two are said to have “worked seamlessly” as the original seven tracks turned into Hemsworth’s encouraged twelve.
Gorgeous is certainly one of the most interesting acts in the scene, a two-piece who has begun to twist the basic principles of math and indie rock, pulling the threads all the way until the seams reach their absolute limit. On a first listen of Sapsucker, what you’re most struck by is most likely the duality of angular guitar and crisp drums.
Some bands just sound like they are up for a good time. Florry are one of those bands. Led by frontperson Francie Medosch, Florry continue to let loose with a rootsy folk/country blend and some truly incisive and often times devastating lyricism on the Philadelphia based band's second full length, The Holey Bible.
Across their various efforts, including the awesome Stump Soup, Powerplant seem to shift sonically with an anxious and unknowable energy. That may be, as Grass demonstrates, because they feel time endlessly ticking away and the only way to make it matter is to embrace one’s whims in a battle against this ceaseless march toward obsolescence.
Something arises from hell, attempting to crawl its way into heaven – only to find that the god is just as terrifying. Nerver and Chat Pile are bonded by blood on their 2023 split EP, Brothers in Christ. Hailing from Missouri and Oklahoma, among the plains it’s impossible to ignore titanic billboards that scream “HELL IS REAL”.
Guided By Voices has had a very busy forty years, though their thirty-seven albums only prove that you can have quantity without wavering quality. Welshpool Frillies arrived almost exactly six months to the day after their last album, La La Land, after a prolific run of eight albums in the last three years.
Shattered Shine finds the group at an existential crossroads — on a personal level, the quartet is at the end of their early twenties, grappling with a heightened sense of self-awareness and chasing their dreams. Meanwhile, at a macro level, they’re witnesses to climate destruction, societal collapse, and the ever-present sense of impending doom.
After going through the motions of writing songs as normal for various other projects, Wireheads bandleader, Dom Trimboli realized that the songs he was now writing were going to be Wireheads songs. It was time to get the band back together. Potentially Venus picks up where Wireheads left off while remaining its own thing sonically.
The sense of freedom that reigns supreme on Vol. II is immediately apparent. It’s that exploration (along with Ian Teeple’s songwriting) that make up the heart of the record. He’s content to choogle along in a warped and weird world of progressive bedroom pop, distorted post-punk, glam-tinged power-pop, alien dream-pop, and lo-fi psych.
