"Party Punks" Sculpture Club recently signed with Born Losers Records, and they're kicking it off with a new era, transitioning from the aura of The Smiths into the fleeting emotions of The Cure. The 80's Romcom-esque single "Cursed or Hexed" is paired with a single shot music video featuring an abundance of glitter and poppy 80's synth.
Set to release Intelligent Design on August 4th via Specious Arts (The Psyched, Multiform Palace, Scott Thorough), the record has the claustrophobic feel of a windowless room on an oppressively hot day, the band’s sound contorted and mechanical, executed with sharp angles and a jagged rhythmic pulse.
With their upcoming album due out on August 17th via Substitute Scene Records, Wetsuit follow-up recent single “Local Celebrity” with “Twiggy,” a song dedicated to the loss of a dear friend. Rather than mourn however, it would seem as though Allison Becker and Anders Nils are choosing to remember the brightness of her life
Released back in February, Media is an interesting blend of noise pop, shoegaze, and post-punk, taking characteristics of each genre and reconfiguring them in a way that doesn’t quite sit comfortably in any of them. Its strength is that it sounds familiar but unique, ornate but subtle, Cor de Lux put the pieces back in new directions.
Half Stack return with Sitting Pretty, their third full length, due out October 6th via Forged Artifacts and Royal Oakie Records, capturing feelings of isolation and the need to reconnect. With clean guitars, easy progressions, harmonized vocals, and dips into power-pop bliss, the band continue to evolve in real time.
Izzy Hagerup (aka Prewn) spent the pandemic writing and fleshing out songs, challenging herself in the seclusion of the studio to expand her ideas. The results are staggeringly beautiful and triumphantly visceral. Those sessions arrive as Through The Window, a solo record that brings her songs to life with a uniquely personal touch.
With a shift in the line-up forthcoming, Gentle Heat come together to create Trick, an EP that maps where they’ve been as much as it highlights where they’re headed. Due out September 8th, the songs approach shoegaze with a swarming pop quality, more concerned with rhythmic pulses and swooning hooks than layered distortion.
Just in time for their on-going tour with Sea Moss, Rong return with a split EP together with Massachusetts’ The Cost Ov Living, released via Mutual Aid Records. The songs are brutal and sludgy at times, piercing with distortion as they break into a sprint, the whole thing always threatening to collapse, but instead shifting directions mid collision.
Slow Salvation may appear a new band, but the project has deep roots in the shoegaze/dream pop world. The band’s songwriter/producer Travis Trevisan is the sole permanent member of shoegaze stalwarts Tape Deck Mountain, while singer Christina Hernandez has her own ethereal electro-pop project Orion Lake.
Today marks the triumphant return of Puppy Problems and the announcement of their second album, Winter In Fruitland. Due out September 22nd via Anything Bagel Records, Sami Martasian and co. recorded the album at Big Nice Studio, and while there’s definitely an upgrade in fidelity, the heart in the songs remains ever apparent.
Melbourne via Hobart quartet It Thing recently announced Constant State / P.C.H, the much anticipated follow-up to their excellent 2021 debut Syrup. Out now via Marthouse Records (AU) and Feel It Records (US), the band come burning out the gate with their signature chaotic energy, but more importantly, their sound is glued in massive hooks.
Jayne Dent’s experimental folk project Me Lost Me has been blending traditional instrumentation with electronic drones and playful art pop since the mid 2010s. On RPG, she aims to pay tribute to the art of world-building and storytelling, drawing a throughline from folk songs and folktales to ambient electronica and video games.
With six years separating Faunas’ debut and Paint The Birds, it would seem nearly everything about the project has changed. While the duo remains the same - Genevieve Ludwig and Erin McCarley - their sound has taken a major shift, pulling away from the sludgy punk of their debut and moving toward a sound more in tune with folk music.
The Silicone Prairie debut set a strange benchmark, an album that felt like brilliantly scattered thoughts brought to life, and things are only getting (delightfully) weirder on Vol. II. Due out July 28th via Feel It Records (It Thing, Sweeping Promises, Private Lives), it’s the type of album where anything feels possible.
The quartet of Ryan Fitzgibbon (US Weekly), Eli Deitz (Dregs, Votive), Steve Pike (Exhalants, CSSS), and Jordan Emmert (Super Thief, Pleasure Venom) bring a great deal of experience together from different pockets of the city’s noise rock and punk scene, the pieces coming together to create something better than the sum of it’s parts.
“Beyond The Darkened Library” is one of the album’s more subdued moments, yet the unnerving energy that Landowner posses is in full force, bleeping and blooping in a way we’d swear was computer driven, yet all praise is due to Dan Shaw, Josh Owsley (bass), Elliot Hughes (guitar), Jeff Gilmartin (guitar), and Josh Daniel (drums).
It’s pretty important to drink a lot of water. It would seem to be a core principle for Glasgow’s Water Machine, one reinforced with art-punk immediacy. Following the band’s self-released demo, the quartet are set to make their “studio” debut with the Raw Liquid Power EP, due out August 4th via Upset The Rhythm
