Naked Era, the sophomore album of Chicago indie rock artist Chaepter, is a shadowy and pulsing collection of songs. His debut for the Boston-based Candlepin Records is fraught with emotion and prairie-sized dread. Songs loom over you, closing in around you as you listen like a dense fog or hundred-pound weighted blanket of sound.
Characteristically, The Collective is full of distortion albeit in a manner different from Gordon’s solo debut. The album is fully alive to our present moment. The hip-hop elements – the trap percussion, the heavy bass lines, the thick production quality – establish this fixation, proving once more that Gordon remains as forward thinking as ever.
Total Sham dropped their self-titled label debut on Under the Gun Records. It's antagonistic in the extreme; with the kind of hostility you'd expect from an exasperated python, darting around violently with no care for its surroundings. In much the same vein as their hardcore predecessors, they run on maximum amplitude.
The stem that once bent towards the sun has cold-snapped on Tomato Flower’s debut record, No. They bear a heavier sound, embracing racing riffs and delving into darker subject matter. Gone are their golden days, their early days of construction – the sun has set, it’s time to tear down and bring it all home for a dreamless night.
Forming in 1984 in Hoboken, the band has had a permanent line-up since 1992 with Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, and James McNew. Their latest EP features live recordings from This Stupid World, as well as their old beloved track, “Stockholm Syndrome,” off their eighth album, I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One.
Having trudged through the mud and now in a period of rebirth, Meatbodies newest album Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom presents strength in transparency. Things have changed, yet their spirit remains uncrushable. As possibly their most expansive and open project thus far, the band breathe fresh air into this stand-alone triumph.
Variety between and within all the songs gets at the main essence of Casting Spells at Turtlehead. The special quality of this release is how diverse the different parts are. The constantly shifting and jumping nature of the album creates this strange and enthralling experience that conjures up disjointed and hazy but familiar scenes.
The Los Angeles 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.
To play something that people often define as “straightforward” pop pock of any kind is actually not that straightforward at all. If you add certain not so straightforward elements in there, no matter how small, you have to throw in a wrench at points to make it work. That is exactly what Sheer Mag do on their third album, Playing Favorites.
5am is the latest EP from Caution's Nora Button under the guise of Despondent, delivering another heavy blow in her clouded and confessional songwriting. More stripped down, these recordings consist of herself and infrequent drums and percussion by Jaxon Vesely, heightening the intimacy of Button's tales of disconnect and longing.
Harm’s Way picks up where they left off and has improved their formula tremendously. In just 27 quick minutes, they create earworm after earworm, the kind of songs you can listen to over and over with a big smile on your face. The record is the perfect accompaniment for a bright spring day when the sun is shining and all is right in the world.
On each of their EP’s, Brazil’s Lasso have operated with the kind of focus that shows a mastery over the genre, but more than that, a fondness for the tools they’ve chosen to express their discontent. Ordem Imaginada tightens up the d-beat indebted hardcore that they’ve been refining over their last couple of releases, avoiding all flash..
The Foreign Department is Rhys Edwards’ (of Ulrika Spacek) 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. There’s equal parts hooks, sweet melancholy, and beautiful song arrangements throughout the album.
Nottingham’s whistling whirlwind of chaos, Bloody Head, make themselves heard loud and (mostly) clear with their seventh release, Perpetual Eden. The album extends to the listener a deep dive into the contemporary human condition in a way unique to the band – through cleansing noise, harsh epiphanies, and beautifully messy lyricism.
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.
