So the good news is Altin Gün have a new one out, Garip, their first one without Merve, and I’m kind of circling it with trepidation the way I do with all my great adorations, a little worried they won’t be able to melt me like before, but “Neredesin Sen” is very good indeed — maybe a little more straightforward rock than the silly shiny peaks of Gece and Yol, but the mood has to be a bit somber, even for us fans, after losing marvelous Merve. In any case Erdinç Ecevit Yıldız is a visionary whose cult I would gladly join, or I guess I already have.
Şu garip hâlımdan bilen şiveli nazlım
My coy, accented woman who knows my strange situation.
Göğnüm hep seni arıyor, neredesin sen?
My heart is always looking for you, where are you?
Datlı dillim, güler yüzlüm, ey ceylan gözlüm
My sweet tongue, my smiling face, my gazelle eyes
Göğnüm hep seni arıyor, neredesin sen?
My heart is always looking for you, where are you?
Neredesin sen?
Where are you?

Lowswimmer does what the beardos classify as “folktronica,” and sort of takes the Bon Iver matrix and actually gives it even more layers and some autotune and ooh, something about it takes me back to that turn of the millennium hierophant homosexual replicant love and longing ballad “Kathy’s Song” by Apoptygma Berserk. I mean, minus the pounding gay rave beat. I gotta say, at some point I had banished my love for Bon Iver to a remote wood cabin, but revisiting For Emma, Forever Ago is giving me strange heteronormative pleasure.

Fire by Sister Irene O’Connor is devotional Catholic music like you’ve never heard before. She’s Australian and she first released it back in 1973; it’s relentlessly chirpy and pairs the traditional hymns and hallelujahs of the lyrics with a 60s pop music sensibility (and a reggae beat on the title track). Sister Irene played all the instruments herself, including a lot of cute/maddening synth organ — it’s simple, sophisticated and absurd all at once. It’s kind of like children’s music, but also achieves a disorienting, surreal vibe that would pair well with a slasher movie scene.
Christ came to kindle fire on the earth
The fire of God's love He brought to birth
Indeed this spot would be a sorry place
Without this fire embracing every race
Fire, fire
Burning, warming cold hearts
Glowing, purifying, showing
Where mankind can find true peace
Where mankind can find true peace
In every human heart a craving lies
To find the perfect being for whom it sighs
So Christ revealed this truth to you and me
Our hearts were made to love eternally

No way it’s been four years since Organ Tapes’ last album! On 包烟 (Yi Bao Yan) which apparently means “A Pack of Cigarettes,” he cements his reputation as the sweetest, saddest Chinese boy in of all of Canada. His natural voice dares to peek out from behind his signature autotune on this one, and it’s almost all in English. His lyrics are sketches from the frontline of love and war, raw but resilient, and the tunes are reliably heart-melting.
Now I′ve lived as low
Turned myself into simple
‘Cause I wanted to
Stand apart from other people
What are you into?
It was wrong, the impossible
But it’s made up
And it all came true
Yeah, it’s not the same as what you dreamed of
And freedom falls
Took your leave from what you′re made of
And you paid the price
At the, at the expense of life
We’ll make it alright

There’s been a microtrend of British sprechgesang bands of late, particularly Dry Cleaning who very much annoy me. Wet Leg too, and Spotify won’t stop feeding them to me, like an elderly neighbor who thinks you’re just being polite when you say no to their dubious jelly orange slices. It’s not the speak-singing per se, in fact the album that saved my life in 1998 when I was a mess is Philophobia by the mighty Arab Strap. And if I can get myself to get to the point, London’s PVA have won me over where others have not. Sporting a cover pic of someone’s well-formed bum, presumably vocalist Ella Harris’s, No More Like This isn’t posturing or reaching for cool with its talky ways — it seems to convey a state of exhaustion, or talking in her sleep. It’s No-Wave-informed introverted electronic; it makes you want to look inside; it’s minimalist and hypnotic but it does get theatrical; it’s poetry.
Good morning
Following the moon
Ambience again
Good morning
To the spit on the street
Fading kick in the distance
A night at Avalon
Ghost song
Good morning to the voice in my head
Rain over my head
Over my head
Good morning (over my head)
The breath I stole (Rain over my head)
Flames, dread, blistered skin (Over my head)
I like the way it felt (Over my head)
Head rush, screaming
Sun is on the clouds
Sun is on the clouds

OK, I’ve complained about this before and I promise I will again, but there are just so many artists out there to follow, like artists actually doing meaningful work. Back in my day the number of current artists you needed to know about was somewhere in the double digits — read Melody Maker once a week and you were golden. Nowadays it’s like keeping track of every little fishy in your sperm, and when you read band reviews online it feels like people have a deep understanding of the ethos and discography of each one of them. I hadn’t heard of Melbourne’s EXEK before, but they’re on their ninth album and there are motherfuckers online discussing their trajectory as if they were Radiohead famous. In any case, they’re great — hard to classify although the “post-punk” catch-all fits well enough. There’s definitely something of Wire’s dusty-dreamy alt-pop about them, particularly Albert Wolski’s vocals.
That’s a burly gate that you climbed
And honestly we hoped that you’d fall
That would make your entrance so much better
Into the best place on earth to discover
All forms of Japanese jazz
So unpack your bag you young jet setter
Side stepping over the water
Seen dribbling down some spiral stairs
Our lives are valuable too
Ain’t no miracle
Just an innovative approach
Approved and overseen
Our lies are valuable too

Hen Ogledd’s new one is just wild, and a sprawler — its provenance is folk I guess, and some of it’s in Welsh and it’s an overgrown garden of unfamiliar sound-foliage that to some extent reminds me of the kind of 70s pop-rock that was informed by prog. Like Supertramp or 10CC, or Genesis. [Genesis were actual prog — Ed.] Right, I know. I knew that. “End of the Rhythm” builds to a chorus that wouldn’t be out of place on the Hair OST.
Self belief made my flight
With bandits in the dead of night
To propose a plan just to a few billboards
Where communities do steal not from your brother
One boundary makes another
Abolition is recognition of the true human condition
(Shake) transcending (Shake) enclosure (Shake) collective (Shake) taking over
(Shake) we dance (Shake) with wild abandon (Shake) our circles (Shake) keep expanding
(Shake) keep whirling (Shake) keep spinning (Shake) get back to the beginning
There is a light at the end of the rhythm
There is a light at the end of the rhythm

Beverly Glenn-Copeland is like a hippy Nina Simone — a similar voice but none of La Nina’s dark edge; au contraire, Beverly is happy to run guilelessly into the cornfields of a world where all is joy. This positivity, paired with an old-timey sensibility (circa The Sound of Music) is more than ripe for camp appreciation. Bev has been at it since 1970, and at age 82 has an energetic, full-throated new one out, very much on brand with its title Laughter in Summer. So yeah, I mean I can’t help giggle at the wide-eyed-ness of it all but it’s also refreshing and honestly quite bold in its own way, so all respect to Mr. Beverly. And OK to be fair I believe I also detect a certain Scott Walker-esque goth undercurrent to all the innocence. Maybe the dark edge is there after all, in the subtext?
Glistening waters
Loons with their waltz on the lake
Love with each breath that I take
Here with you
Laughter in summer
How I remember
June through September
Here with you
You
My heart, my joy, my life
My homе on earth
Here with you

Hyperpop has grown from its scrappy little arty niche into cultural ubiquity, with waves of new artists stretching, bending, appropriating and refining it. Two Shell have been the genre’s touchstone in the ‘20s, crafting irresistible dance nuggets in dazzling new shapes. But they’re not to be confused with new kids 2Charm, who move the genre into a slightly more populist direction, emphasizing crystalline hooks and simple lyrics about falling in love and having fun and getting your heart broken, all firmly in the pop idiom. Their image is gay-bating, TikTok-ready, cute and silly boyreography with plenty of tatted lean flesh and armpits on display. Their debut album star scum city is all you can eat bangers, no mash. prerogative and paris (to get you out of my head) are the tracks that jumped out at me first. On closing track arc de triomphe they lean in the direction of delirious French dance geniuses Cassius.

I first heard about Jessica Pratt back in ‘19 when an ex-boyfriend — actually I was never sure if we really were boyfriends — flagged her playing at Desert Daze. She made a good impression and all, she was touring her third album. But Asher White has gone back to her roots (Jessica’s that is) and recorded an album that covers her whole self-titled 2012 debut, song by song and wow, it’s gorgeous. Bizarre to think 2012 to a Zoomer has the same weight of nostalgia the 60s/early 70s had for me as a young adult. Anyway, early Jess was quite folky and Asher has some fun playing around with the arrangements and both iterations are just scrummy.
Well, the bed lies empty
Lord, I see your head hanging low with the bottle told
Well, inside was nowhere to hide, nowhere to hide them
And inside was nowhere to hide, nowhere to hide them
If you'd called or helped
Heavy heart flame from the bed that rains for the raiders
Comin' down when the game spun round
Keep me, darling, in your darkest hours
Like a mother made of stone
He sings low for the long pour
There's a hundred mighty men or more
And his eyes were so fixed on light
So fixed on the light
That right hand guide him too low
Guide him to down home at night
If he comes home, home, home
And do wrong, wrong wrong

Decades go by and Tinariwen keep sounding exactly like themselves — proto-Hendrix electric guitars, soulful vocals, call and response, locking into a groove. If anything their voices get a bit richer and more gnarled, like seasoned wood. New one Hoggar is not a progression, it’s just beauty and perfection like everything they do. Great driving music incidentally, whether it’s a camel or a Camry.

Apparat (Sasha Ring) last showed up on my radar back in ‘13 with the tasty Krieg und Frieden album. On A Hum Of Maybe, he’s still very much a master of mood and texture, crooning in falsetto Thom Yorke style over rich and varied audio landscapes, mining emotion. These New Puritans also come to mind as fellow travelers. This is dark, late-night headset music that demands your full attention and rewards it.
Air thick and walls too near
Clocks fold in on themselves, ooh
The doors lean, tired praise
Soundless sirens pressing in
The white flags that no one sees
Hold out quiet like a vow, oh
Cracked on, jitter loose
Pass the weight palm to palm
One step back, one step gone
I move the lines I used to hold
One step back, one step gone
One step back, one step gone
One step back, one step gone

Man oh man, I gotta post this thing and get back to important things but I would hate myself if I didn’t flag the new Baby Keem. Hykeem Carter is state of the art, killing it with ridiculously confident flow over sick, borderline WTF arrangements.
I'm havin' trouble with my 911
Smoke in your chest and I know it weigh heavy
I'm out of a ride, dog, you gotta come get me
Why she always talkin' like she understand me?
I fuck with the nerds, on stage, I go Lennie
I don't have family, so why keep a palace?
My nigga Dave bought so many watches
I went and got one and I didn't even dial it
All of the niggas around me is humble
I beat the odds, so I'm more prima donna

And my grrrrrl Aldous Harding has a new one out!

Man, I feel like we haven’t talked in so long! Did you miss me? A little? No silly, it’s nothing like that, in fact Valentine’s Day was me just doing my best to love myself Ru-Paul style, with the help of a bowl of butter-Parmesan-brussels-sprouts tagliatelle and a gummy-enhanced walk around the reservoir, with the newest, most idiosyncratic and tingle-delivering artists in my earbuds and dark thoughts mixed with delight swirling through my being. Anyway, I’m here babe! We can hang out now!

As we established in my 2025 best albums list, last year was a tart and sweet cornucopia. But much as I juiced the grapefruit, there’s nectar left to be squeezed, not least of which is Blizzard, the debut by camera-shy young Irish genius Dove Ellis. He’s been rightly compared to Jeff Buckley for his passion and vocal range, but there’s something about his boldness and songcraft that also reminds me of Sinead O’Connor. His soaring falsetto does things to your body. “Little Left Hope” has been my main swoon for a minute now…
Now you’ll watch the blackout
Creeks, were they from you?
Where do they hide?
In the flashing hills, in the dewing pride
You’re stepping out of your bones
You’re stepping out of your bones
So teach me to atone
We were fattened among the calves, and
Flailing among the mites, you weaved a tangle
Yeah, soon they come down
Wings and a word
Calling aloud for melody
Now everybody be here in the room
Now is the fake
The real is the word

Sault have spent years putting out acclaimed albums while remaining enigmatic and anonymous, and are known for taking big swings, including a splashy and hugely expensive music/performance art event that semi-collapsed under its own weight and ended up triggering a $2.2 million lawsuit against Sault main man Inflo by lifelong friend and collaborator Little Simz. The truth is Sault really don’t need to reach for a sense of importance — their new one is a classic that straddles genres, based in soul I guess but with the elevated confidence of fine art; it’s got the swagger of Massive Attack at their peak, and strays into what sounds a bit like the avant garde indie territory of Chanel Beads and caroline.
I’m on top of the world
All I need is belief
Good things will come
After the pressure
I walk with love
It’ll set you free
Love and war
Must go higher
I refuse to fight with fire
This is a warning

Milkweed are a duo from London known only as “R” and “G” who have a highly organic, shifting approach to making music, letting it evolve and breathe with a variety of collaborators or stripping down to basics. Their new one Remscéla is ambitious, using the ancient Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge as its source material and spinning it out into a loose, grungy and distorted iteration of folk music that sure gets slowgraffitti’s fluids flowing. The lyrics on “Exile of the Sons of Uislu” are suitably gruesome.
News reached Ulster and everyone said that it would be a shame
Sons of Uisliu fall for the fault of a bad woman
Conchobor sent for them and the sons of Uisliu crossed the sea
Promises of safety came to stand upon Emain green
Noisiu was met by a spear thrust broke his back and through him down
Field broke out in slaughter Derdriu taken and her hands were bound
No one left but by the spike of spear or by the slash of sword
Three hundred and fifty men laid down Emain Macha burned

I figured Jawnino for sure had to be in the same scene as John Glacier, as they’re both based in London and have been busy taking rap in a surprisingly arty, dreamy direction. If there’s a sound of now they’re surely it. But I can find no evidence that they hang; Jawnino is apparently more in the orbit of noise genius Klein. He keeps his identity secret and his lyrics fresh as grass. I like hearing about bitches and guns as much as the next guy but this is something new…
Feet in the rave
Something more than your name
Trying to hold on to something
Look, fantastic books in the rain
Thought your name was Alise
But your pal just told me that it's Elaine
I think these people treat me the same
Since the screen collided with numbers
Pressed against the first offense
A song by Hollister making amends
He's still at the gate and bench
I can smell thе hate from a mile away
The stеnch is turning me on
Look, fantastic books in the rain
I just bust out one in the blue Powerade…

Next up, from the aurora borealis-kissed Scandinavian experimental pop soil that has produced Robyn and Bladee and Yung Lean and Sally Shapiro and Fine amongst so many others emerges Sassy 009, the project of Norway’s Sunniva Lindgård. She challenges herself and us to dance/dream our way in and out of seasonal affective disorder, with a grab bag of electronica that’s not afraid to twist and turn, autotuned and not, emotional, layered and complex.
Mr. Brains Teeth and Sunset
Swoosh community
Given to me through dreams
Words of strange intentional bearing
Glossary worthy
Red onion under my tongue
I pull myself away from a dark and safe space

But let us venture back to London and deeper into the electronic goth darkness with feeo AKA Theodora Laird serving a bit of cockney th-fronting. Her work on Goodness is at times akin to Lucinda Chua’s stark, beating-heart-in-the-snow ballads (“Requiem”), or Portishead at their most prickly, but it also veers off beyond melody into moody beds of textured sonic voltage. She ropes in her poet dad for a couple of spoken word ones and wraps up the album with a track, “There Is No I,” that improbably betrays notes of Joni Mitchell.
Oh
The nail pierced the drum
Tore it to pieces
Like splinters
From cherry pits under my tongue
Oh
Only human
If I could recall
Every one of your virtues
Like scribbles on notepads
In Spring
In the Summer
In the afternoon…

Puma Blue ripped a heart-shaped hole into my personal 2023 and he’s been crazy prolific of late, tossing off a couple of sketchbook albums last year and ringing in 2026 with the delirium of Croak Dream. His style is unmistakeable; he reliably falls apart overcome by passion whilst dripping Bryan Ferry cool. Perhaps he’s yearning for his British tea-time as an Elton John-style expat in Atlanta? His baseline is a take on tragic 1930s nightclub chanteuse, as exemplified on “Hush,” but he explores myriad textures, each song a lovingly crafted original.
What of trust?
Such a bust
When every memory is licked with rust
I'll act tough
Do what I must
I'll adorn my husk, but I can't hold it up
Hush sweet baby, don't you cry
No need to bleed so heavy from those eyes

I went to film school in the 90s at LA City College, where they were mostly set up to teach you the below-the-line crafts, but a lot of us were there to become artists without racking up a ton of student debt. A Belgian prof named JP Geuens was the sort of grand dame of the faculty — openly contemptuous of students that didn’t impress him (almost all of them) and quick to serve up withering comments. When a friend of mine brought in some pictures of a rough-edged drag queen for a class assignment, JP sneered “this person is just trying to shock.” And that was my first reaction to the band name Holy Fuck, but the more I thought about it — it’s actually quite a beautiful and evocative name. They remind me of the kind of largely forgotten trancey dance rock bands that we used to vibe on around ‘86 - ‘88, like Bunnydrums and the Abecedarians — a bit Krautrock with a measure of psych. They’ve released a couple of scrummy tracks off their new one Event Beat, coming out soon. Thankfully YouTube has protected us with a genteel re-thinking of their band name.

Roc Marciano is hip hop distilled and perfected on new one 656, his braggy/surreal/comedic flow delivered with rasp and spiked with menace; his backing tracks bold and off-kilter. But will zoomers know whom and what he’s referencing on Trick Bag?
Skate out of Gucci like Kristi Yamaguchi
Flip you like a Samurai Suzuki
I been nice since Iceberg shirts with the Snoopy
Shoes is Berluti, my knife work work a thing of beauty…

People talk a lot of shit about Fred Again…, partly because of his posh background, but his latest USB release is one of the best EDM albums and most impressive flexes in recent memory and it’s also not really even an album — the talented young blue-blood acknowledges the irrelevance of the album concept by just dumping truckloads of (excellent) tracks for us to wade through. USB even includes different tracks on different media and platforms. I’ve clicked “like” on ten tracks already; there’s a level of undeniability here — Fred featuring a ton of different artists, bending his genius this way and that, letting us dive in anywhere to have our own unique experience.

In the course of a year I listen to so much stuff for you, dear readers — it’s grueling, relentless work and I’ve been told I’ve developed the ears of a world champion athlete. The payoff is that I get to provide you with this scientifically accurate assessment.

25. Joni Void — Every Life Is A Light
OK, let’s shift into this countdown slowly with the album that lit up my March… slow, deep breaths as we lower ourselves into Joni’s magical, alpha state-inducing flotation tank…

24. Wombo — Danger in Fives
Sydney Chadwick’s angelic vocals scraped up against Cameron Lowe’s slanted lead guitar to conjure a charmingly tonal/atonal and oddly hypnotic take on avant-garde indie rock, sounding more like Brooklyn than Louisville.

23. Piotr Kurek — Songs and Bodies
A gorgeous, melodic/amelodic take on chilled-out lounge jazz. Kurek found a groove and wove unhurried spells around it with his guitar, embedding layers of emotion in chopped up, manipulated vocals.

22. Lust for Youth / Croatian Amor — All Worlds
Hannes Norrvide and Loke Rahbek reimagined synth-pop with the inventiveness and wonder of OMD and the anthemic romanticism of A-ha, spreading waves of idiosyncratic joy in of the year’s most rousing victory laps.

21. Blawan — SickElixir
Jamie Roberts thwacked and thumped and got tribal and funky with all kinds of farty, corroded textures. SickElixir was extreme and uncompromising stuff, but it never lost its sense of fun. Like partying with Bigfoot.

20. Kathryn Joseph — WE WERE MADE PREY
A quietly bloody and violent horror album built around a trembling voice, sparse piano and brilliant songcraft. She embodied both predator and prey in a feral world.

19. Free Range — Lost & Found
With pristine vocals, old-soul wisdom and middle-American sweetness, Sofia Jensen delivered that warm-all-over feeling like no one else. It’s only (indie) rock’n’roll (and country) but Lost & Found was disarmingly intimate and chock full of great tunes to cry along with.

18. Jules Reidy — Ghost/Spirit
The mystical poetry subsumed by witchy, circular guitar brought to mind Stevie Nicks and John Fahey, but Reidy is a real original, fueled by the spiky emotions of a breakup aftermath, tweaking and collaging outside contributions to discover striking new forms.

17. Ela Minus — Día
In 2025 Colombia was the new Seattle, and Ela Minus busted out of Bogotá (and Brooklyn) with her her second album of banging electro-minimalism, getting hyper-severe parties started amongst the haute couture set and everyone else that mattered.

16. Junior Brother — The End
Brutalist freak folk pushed to the raw limits of listenability, but how sweet when the dissonance shifted into golden sunbeams of melody. Ronan Kealy drew on Irish folklore to tackle nothing less than the creep of ugliness into the spirit of modern man. Difficult listening with big payoffs.

15. Shlohmo — Repulsor
Henry Laufer gazed at his shoes through broken glass kaleidoscopes, creating anthemic, grunged-up electronic instrumentals rich with strange and delightful
detail and personality. Repulsor lifted us up again and again to kiss the 2025 sky.

14. Lyra Pramuk — Hymnal
She sculpted in unthinkable strings and androgynous wails to create an aural world of Christ-like passion. It felt both ancient and cutting-edge; highly experimental but also organic, melodic and approachable.

13. Rat Heart — Dancin’ in the Streets
This one radiated out from a core of neon moods reflected on dark, wet streets into diffracted, chopped up experiments and uneasy listening dirty-shoe-gaze for one of the year’s most boldly undefinable pleasures. One might argue that Tom Boogizm is the best rock star name ever.

12. Hilary Woods — Night CRIÚ
Hilz’s gothy incantations crept up from the cold earth and grew all over you like vines. Sweet and droning, like an Irish Hope Sandoval fronting a long-deceased girl group. Night CRIÚ felt medieval and churchy — sorrow, resignation, ascension.

11. Mondo Lava — Utero Dei
The recorded-on-cassette sound quality gave the bi-continental Lavas a ghostly, out of time feel; like getting a series of faded, decades-old postcards in the mail. When they boogied out it felt like the 60s, but the 60s in a faraway galaxy. Utero Dei was sprawling and disorienting and nonetheless just felt right.

10. Two Shell — IIcons
A geyser of fizzy, iridescent hyper-art-dance-pop, these shape-shifting London warlocks have ruled the mid-2020s with booty benevolence. On their second album they drew us in deeper, sharing glimpses of a vulnerable side.

9. EsDeeKid — Rebel
The Masked Liverpudlian shaved the history of hip-hop into a simple prison shank and went on a minimalist rampage: Rebel was eleven short, sharp, glistening thrusts to the belly — it came out quietly in June and by Christmas it was conquering the world amidst hilarious rumors that the Kid was actually a certain A-list movie star.

8. Osees — ABOMINATION REVEALED AT LAST
Running out of superlatives over here — John Dwyer has been at it for like 30 years and he’s still best in show, scorching the planet on a regular basis with gleaming, ear-wormy punk-psych-prog-garage onslaughts. This time around he channeled political rage and leaned hard into a blood-thirsty, bespoke iteration of punk rock.

7. Alex G — Headlights
The sweetest boy with the sweetest chord changes — a lost in America sensibility with a weirdo edge and a gift for sketching poignant details and conveying emotion. Headlights was Alex G at his best — a truckload of great, timeless tunes — a perfect companion to 2022’s God Save the Animals.

6. John Maus — Later Than You Think
We can all relax, he made some mistakes but he’s not MAGA. He’s an intellectual, he’s Catholic, he’s always surprising, not least in his live performances where he’s all exorcism jerks and spasms. His first album in seven years is a shining distillation of his distinctively somber/absurd new-wave church pop; it’s his best one yet.

5. Foxwarren — 2
Andy Shauf went down some mighty queer solo rabbit-holes after the Warren’s last one back in ‘18. This time around they brought unusual structures and a camp sensibility to their melodic romantic indie, incorporating samples of swelling strings and old movie dialog for one of 2025’s most off-kilter pleasures.

4. Maribou State — Hallucinating Love
Masterful stuff, really nothing but bangers, drawing on the lineage of chilled out electronic dance soul with notes of Saint Etienne, Soul II Soul, Moby et al. Songs that feel like they’ve existed since forever and propel your hips up to Heaven right now.

3. Goon — Dream 3
Their endless lysergic sixties summer alpha-state honey-dripping reached a new high, with occasional flourishes of counterpoint — keyboards melting and drifting off-key; Pixies-style screams. But they kept those gooey, levitating harmonies coming.

2. SANAM — Sametou Sawtan
Sandy Chamoun’s voice and presence were quite a spectacle, and she was more than matched by a band that used Arabic music, psych, and art rock ingredients to design a wildly theatrical, deeply satisfying 8-course meal of Lebanese pain and pleasure.

1. John Glacier — Like a Ribbon
A coolly elegant presence, speak-singing her fractured, glassy poetry over sparse, dreamy arrangements, she was in a sense her own genre, a fully formed original. Like a Ribbon was non-stop unknown pleasures laced with understated pathos.

And a few Special Mentions…

Beirut — A Study of Losses

caroline — caroline 2

Debby Friday — The Starrr Of The Queen Of Life

DERBY — Slugger

duendita — a strong desire to survive

KAROL G — Tropicoqueta

Kathryn Mohr — Waiting Room

Lots of Hands — into a pretty room

Mark Van Hoen — The Eternal Present

Media Puzzle — Intermission EP

Moonchild Sanelly — Full Moon

Nick Léon — A Tropical Entropy

Oklou — choke enough

Patrick Wolf — Crying the Neck

Perfume Genius — Glory

Playboi Carti — MUSIC

Richard Dawson — End of the Middle

Rico Nasty — Lethal

rusowski — DAISY

Satomimagae — Taba

These New Puritans — Crooked Wing

Tom Yorke, Mark Pritchard — Tall Tales

Unknown Mortal Orchestra — CURSE

I feel like I’ve been all business in this blog — knocking out review after capsule review with the precision of a BMW engineer, but in the process of migrating my back stories from Wordpress to Substack I realize I used to also make a point of oversharing about my life. For better or for worse I’m off the dating apps atm, so not a lot of interesting love foibles to share… I have however been to some concerts I should tell you about.

Back in September, Goon at the Echo was an oddly mixed bag — we got there a few nanoseconds late and found the band playing with a truly awful sound mix — like you could only hear the lead singer and the way too loud drums, so their heavenly harmonies were totally lost! Eventually they made some adjustments, and I did at least get to swoon properly to “This Morning Six Rabbits Were Born” and “Patsy’s Twin.”

A few days before Halloween Ela Minus played the same club, downstairs in the Echoplex where, oddly enough, the sound was sensational. She had her elaborate equipment on display, facing the audience to accommodate the gearheads, and made a spectacular entrance, stepping into a cluster of converging light beams. But after that it was basically one of those shows where a solo electronic musician has to create some kind of visual impact, and Ela hasn’t quite cracked the code; she sort of just repeated a back and forth across the stage pretty person dance — with supreme confidence to be fair — but it was a bit of a let down considering how much I’ve worshipped the goddess energy on her DÍA album. Kind of similar to the Bolis Pupul show at El Cid a few months earlier, which felt more like a DJ set.

Best of all was Melt Banana at Teragram a few days before my birthday. I wish I had brought good quality ear-plugs because they were hellaciously loud; in fact the hellacious opening act was already deafening the children when I got there. I asked for a pair from the woman behind the bar and she looked ready for a fight as she informed me that “they’re TWO DOLLARS!” The Bananas were everything punk rock has ever aspired to be and also way more than that — practically an art form unto themselves. I was convinced it was two women, I guess because the guitar player’s name is Agata, and I marveled at her boyishness, but later I found out Agata’s his last name; Ichiro Agata is a zero body fat for life XY. In any case I knew I was in the presence of one of the great guitar gods, annihilating planets and galaxies with his riffs from behind a COVID mask. Not to mention magical banshee frontwoman Yasuko O. I can die happy knowing I got to experience “Shield for Your Eyes” live.

But we have some recorded music to catch up on before 2025 starts to shrink in the rear-view mirror. If you’re in the mood for minimalist, manly music for less-than-manly men, you’re probably a. me, and b. in need of the new one from Bruise Blood, alarmingly titled You Run Through the World Like An Open Razor. Apparently London’s Mike Bourne was inspired by the stuffed parrot that has a curse on it that’s immortalized on the album cover. There’s quite a bit of pummeling on offer, sometimes with a side of gothy and corroded dream pop, and it wraps up with an 8-minute Philip Glass-esque texturescape — with more pummeling. A lush and lovely nightmare.

LA’s Henry Laufer, aka Shlohmo, did a bit of world-rocking for me back in the early teens but was firmly off my radar until like yesterday — his new one Repulsor is end to end grunge and goosebumps, applying rough textures to a spectrum of genres from moody electronica to Black Metal-adjacent, mauling listeners into meaty delirium. It’s like Nine Inch Nails meets the Pixies meets Godspeed You! Black Emperor, with the sweetest chord changes buried under all the racket à la My Bloody Valentine. Our little genius incidentally has the good taste to feature Angelyne in his “Chore Boy” video.

Silvia Jiménez Alvarez, aka JASSS, broke out of Asturias, Spain in ‘17 with a rather severe techno-industrial sound and made a moody and more melodic follow-up in ‘21, but her new one Eager Buyers is on another level, seeming to grow from the earth, muddy and magnificent. It’s music for cruising, music for sex; its darkness is alive and hungry. Alvarez unfurls luxurious carpets of tone and texture, bringing to mind Massive Attack circa Mezzanine, but casting an even wider net. On “Sand Wrists” she shifts from a vaguely Elizabethan motif to squalls of abrasion and then electronic dissonance. Prosaically titled “It’s a Hole” serves up what it says on the tin, all irresistible siren coos and moans over a shuffling, gem-encrusted beat.

Straight out of Beirut, SANAM have created a brilliant hybrid of traditional Arab and Lebanese song and experimental noise rock. Sametou Sawtan starts with a series of gasps, followed by front-woman Sandy Chamoun taking the reins and moving through dramatic maqam melodies with astonishing power and control, against the band’s bold, theatrical arrangements, from exquisitely delicate to harsh and pummeling. Nine and a half minute show-stopper “Hamam” is quite the little rock opera. “Habibon” is a seduction hidden inside a delicious lament.

Wow, why so serious this month, Paul? Is black how you feel on the inside? No, you’re right, we need a little party break, and fortunately I just came across this little 1984 vocodered gem from the early Brooklyn hip-hop scene and the extended universe of Kraftwerk and Egyptian Lover. As my clued-in comadre Larry pointed out, “Computer Age (Push the Button)” is not the big hit off Newcleus’ debut album, but that just makes it extra-special. Its lyrics are also very 2025.
Are we under their control, or are they under our control, or what?
Push the button
Computer age is now
Everyone must have a machine
They say it’s gonna make life easier
Well, I can’t stand it
They say we should put them in control
Well, maybe next we’ll give them a soul
I guess we must now think that we’re gods
While we’re less men than ever (ever)

Montréal’s Hélène Barbier serves up a bit of 60s yé-yé vibe with her honeyed/breathy vocals, but her guitar-bass-drums sound is actually more post-punk, with a nice tang at the treble end of things. Her sharp angles and diagonals remind me a bit of Wombo. She seems to run 80s urban angst through a languorous contemporary filter, spiked with jolts of espresso.
Finally going out
I’m wearing cactuses
I know I just arrived
But I’m ready to leave
I’m ready to leave
Such a lovely sight
The park and its greenery
If I see a streetlight
I know it’s time to sleep
I know it’s time to sleep
Milquetoast, Milquetoast, Milquetoast, Milquetoast

Palooka 5 bill themselves as a sci-fi surf band inspired by the B52’s; they’re middle-aged and based in Somerset, far from any cool scene. But their new one Metrokino is all shimmering, kinetic soundscapes with cascades of retro synths and theremins and autotuned lady vocals. It was created as a modern score to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and actually has a kind of 80s soundtrack vibe, with lavish, up-to-date production. But it’s also a party record, particularly when the band’s surf roots start growing in.

I was doing some research trying to figure out which 80s soundtracks exactly Palooka 5 reminded me of, and spent some time with Slava Tsukerman’s score for Liquid Sky, which doesn’t fit the bill but is a splendid thing in its own right. “Me & My Rhythm Box” goes without saying, but the whole record captures an archly scary and slightly ridiculous tone, somewhere between the Residents and a caricature of olden-time horror movies.

Steve Gunn has been loping around the indie cosmos for a good 15 years, but he just got slowgraffitti’s attention with his vaporous Daylight Daylight album. There’s a remarkable quietness to the album: turn up the volume and it doesn’t seem like it actually gets any louder. It’s like an eddy, or a folk-infused miniature; it makes you want to get closer and look inside. There’s a bit of an Amen Dunes vibe to opener “Nearly There,” which seems to describe sweet longings for a lovely death.
Now come along (sky), keep on
Distance is growin’
We’re nearly there
Now come along (sky), beloved
And soon we shall be there
Then we’ll have some good rest
And sleep there
Already the sky is singin’
Already the bells are ringin’
Already the story’s written
Your name up there

Hilary Woods’ dark expressions of spirit have been haunting my stereo since her 2018 debut Colt, and her new one Night CRIÚ is maybe her weightiest yet — slow, sweet, mournful, resigned to the strange patterns of fate. It has a feeling of bones buried in rich, damp soil; cold and fog; midnight mass; death and resurrection. Delightfully Irish in other words. Her lyrics carry the weight of oceans, and on “Faults” she builds to a kind of angelic evocation:
I had wanted you to hold my hand
Hear my footfall reach out, understand
I could not form into words these things
I could not find ways to make them seen
Take me, Lord, oh, as I am
Faults and all, I’d live again
Do you know the way another moves?
Do you know the way that I’ve attuned?
Can you feel the rose inside the thorn?
Gifted in these arms that I have worn
Take me, Lord, oh, as I am
Faults and all, I’d live again

You know, I’m not one for legacy acts — I always feel like there’s gonna be something macabre about seeing artists I remember as a violent shock to the status quo reappearing as calcified grandes dames, trotting out their best-ofs. But my bestie Larry Tee has known the B52’s since before they even had a record deal and he had box seats and back-stage passes to see them with Devo and Lene Lovich at the Hollywood Bowl, which seemed quite glam… So off we went, planning to see part of Devo’s set and then catch the B’s and go backstage. But as we arrived we heard “Rock Lobster” — followed by a roar of applause and then nothing. They had traded off headlining with Devo, so after a rather anti-climactic tour of the backstage we decided to at least check out the spud boys.

When I was a weird, depressed teenager in the OC, Devo were one of the few new wave acts (along with Elvis Costello and The Cars) to get played on KLOS alongside standard fare like Supertramp, The Steve Miller Band, Foreigner and such. They were my first exposure to the whole cultural upheaval that my generation experienced and embodied. We felt like mutants in a world of fucked-up conformity. We were sick of hippy culture; we didn’t want to deny the dark, festering, rebellious parts of our consciousness with communes and Kumbayas. “Mongoloid” described how we felt inside.
Mongoloid, he was a mongoloid
Happier than you and me
Mongoloid, he was a mongoloid
And it determined what he could see
Mongoloid, he was a mongoloid
One chromosome too many
Mongoloid, he was a mongoloid
And it determined what he could see
And he wore a hat
And he had a job
And he brought home the bacon
So that no one knew

So the box seats were pretty sweet and Devo came on and it was actually my first time seeing them live and they started playing some of their 80s hits and I was like wow, this is pretty good — how old are they and how do they have this much energy? They did a costume change, came out in their trademark jumpsuits and energy dome hats and turned the clocks back to 1978 for an insane run of “Uncontrollable Urge,” “Blockhead,” “Mongoloid,” “Jocko Homo” and “Smart Patrol/Mr. DNA.” Mamma mia, I really needed that. They were like kids out there, totally into it, silly and profound and rocking as hard as any band ever.

And by the way I was sorry to miss Lene Lovich but I dug up her old albums and yes, she will forever be the Supreme Braided Goddess who gets to say when.

So that happened. Meanwhile back in 2025, pride of Warsaw Piotr Kurek has been busy creating rich, organic gardens of avant I know not what — a kind of prickly lounge that hints at melody then quickly backs away. Track 2 on Songs and Bodies is a slowgraffitti favorite and an accurate description of his ethos: “It Used To Be a Song.” Suitable for a cruel dinner party or perhaps a bespoke Berlin yoga class. “Try To Be True” sets house plants on fire, jogs fond memories of early James Blake and is the closest he gets to radio-friendly.

Massachussettsan Izzy Hagerup AKA Prewn makes bold and vulnerable 90s-flavored indie on her new System album that at its best delivers a PJ Harvey adjacent rawness/realness. Her voice has its own unique, woodsy American theatricality, and with “System” the song she’s written herself a barn-stomping, nihilistic, drenched-in-strings anthem.
Don’t look up there is
Nothing there to know
Just give your life away
Turn on your lights baby
Give them a show
It won’t be long you say
But it’s a system and
All that you know
The clouds won’t go away
They keep on coming again and again
Just give your life away
Another dollar another day

Young Thug released UY SCUTI, his first album after doing two and a half years in jail, to a swirl of online sniping — influencers trying to drum up some outrage around Thug putting himself in whiteface on the cover and haters generally dissing the quality of the record, which, I don’t know, they probably have a point, but come on maaan, the dude’s been through some shit. Anyway, he followed it up with a Supernova Edition, featuring some older unreleased/leaked tracks including the lovely, vulnerable, heartfelt “By The Police,” which feels like a blueprint for the album he might have put out in a parallel universe where hyper-capitalist media culture didn’t turn every thing into its commodity double.
Help me up, help me up
You see me down, nigga, better help me up
I’m torn down, man, you better help me up, yeah (ATL Jacob, ATL Jacob)
Gettin’ woke up by the police (every day)
Every single damn mornin’ (ooh)
I put my left wrist on gold like a trophy
I’m drippin’, don’t forget, I can tell you what to go get (let’s go)
Probably could’ve been an athlete, but a nigga didn’t get a chance (get a fair chance)
Instead, I had got on my grizzy, then I came home with all kinds of bands (all colors)
Niggas wish they had this pretty bitch of mine, but you too late, my mans
Nigga try to antagonize a nigga spirit, but I turned to a king again (king)
How the fuck you gon’ ride on the opps (opp)
Then turn around and tell it to the cops? (Ptuh)

Ever since the Sugarcubes dropped themselves into our late 80s teacups, Iceland has had a disproportionate number of cool and successful bands — I mean their population is on a par with, like, Bakersfield or Wichita. mùm haven’t had quite the same impact as GusGus or Sigur Rós but they’re still going strong nearly 30 years on, with their rather gorgeous, gentle, intimate, analogue and powerful new one History of Silence. “Kill the Light” in particular twinkles and crescendos with hope and melancholy; it feels like watching the Aurora Borealis.
Searching for a broken world
Where our hearts belong
Seems like we never did
All along
Staring at the crowded sky
On a breathless night
Galaxy, tapestry
Kill the light
Searching for a broken world
Where our hearts belong
Satellite, haunting light
On our own
Kill the light
And you won’t feel alone

And if we can stay in the hypnotic world for a moment, but over on the electronic continent, slowgraffitti-certified hierophant Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith has certainly been a busy little beaver. I had to do a bit of a dive into her Gush to find my personal bliss — I had gotten my dreamy needs met back in April when the title track came out, but the album resisted me until I found the glorious alpha-state elevations of “Almost” and “The World Just Got a Little More Big” tucked into the final stretch. La Smith also allows us to follow her into the delightfully quirky “In the Dressing Room” as her final punctuation.
It felt so close
Maybe it wasn’t right for me or you
The heaviness
Of what it feels like
To almost have it meet
And walking away pulls at the thought of
What if it was to be

Our little overachiever (originally from Washington state and now based in L.A., and btw unfairly pretty for someone so talented) has also co-created an EP of classical (ish) music for New York artist residency and performance center Artspace, AND she roped in Hot Chip legend Joe Goddard to craft the non-album avant-dance track “Neptunes” and brought in none other than Colombian electro goddess Ela Minus to do a remix!

Monaleo is such a nice, attractive young lady, but oh my word — her lyrics would make a longshoreman blush! She’s from Houston, she’s fierce and feral, and there’s something so earthy and fragrant about that thick Southern Black accent — it just oozes sex. As does the mid-tempo beat on “Putting Ya Dine”…
He wanna give me cunniling‘ (Yeah)
Got my stripes like a bumblebee
Bouncin’ on the shit right to left, bitch,
I’m hittin’ my shoulder lean, pussy (Huh, damn)
I’m puttin’ you on, huh
Big Leo, I’m song for song (Let’s go)
Huh, huh, this ass so fat (Yeah),
huh, I’m goin’ thong for thong (Uh-huh)
I’m a dog, he is too (Dummy)
We goin’ bone for bone
He beatin’ my shit from the back (Uh-huh)
He love when I scream (Yeah)
I’m going cone (Yeah-yeah)

As exhaustively chronicled in these pages, Richard Dawson recently took us pretty deep into the beautiful black mold of British freak folk. And yet The End, the new one from Junior Brother (Dubliner Ronan Kealy), makes him sound like a wood-carving Sabrina Carpenter. Kealy enjoys spinning terrifying, seductive and verily Hieronymus Bosch-esque visions of a cruel and curdled modern world, mutating folk into outlandish forms. Our slowgraffitti emphasis track would be “Today My Uncle Told Me,” which pushes far beyond all proper concepts of song structure into something dark and deconstructed but oddly organic, perhaps like a Hydnellum peckii or a Xylaria polymorpha.
Deep in my head
I can see heaven
God cannot hear
Though I call for him
I see inside
Tomorrow’s paper
It’s in your eyes
You’re on the losing side
O life
Is gas
Since I seen past it
And now I laugh
I’m always laughing
How vast the world
Such fools the people
Believe the truth
I’ll laugh and hurt believers

Sadly that one isn’t on YouTube, but you can find it on Spotify or anywhere fine records are sold. Conversely (to a point), Junior’s hit single “Small Violence” flirts with a bit of melodicism, boldly shifting tempos and grafting together a variety of sour timbres, bringing to mind, in an oblique way, Pere Ubu.
I went alone
Toward a heavy light
I saw a massive head
I saw a little crown
I saw a snake of many colours
Come through the town
At least a million miles and growin’
Under the floors and feet of many
To join the world’s sea
Like a river
Like a river-
Uh
From little word
To little hands
Spreads small violence
From uh-foul mouth
To unhappy man

I gotta admit that when it comes to electronic music I get a little fuzzy on genres. Like, Blawan has been described as post-dubstep (a not-nerdy-at-all term), as have James Blake and Mount Kimbie, who truly sound nothing like him. Anyway, nobody cares and my point is to direct you to the enticements of SickElixir, the new Blawan (née Jamie Roberts, from South Yorkshire). It’s quite abrasive, with plenty of farty distortion (particularly on high-charting track “NOS”), and Maori Haka-evoking vocals that transport me back to the heady days of A Split Second and Front 242 and the many charms of 1980s Belgian Electronic Body Music. At the same time, if you happen to be an ‘ard boy or ‘ard girl, it’s all quite dance-y (“WTF” is pretty irresistible) and it manages to explore vast carousels of color and texture within the parameters of its unique sound — on “Rabbit Hole” for example, it even gets a bit psychedelic.

In this perverse era in which anyone working in media is compelled to spend way too much time screaming “look at me, feed me!” on any and every scrolling feed, Tom Boogizm (quite a name) aka Rat Heart took the Cindy Lee route, quietly releasing the rather glorious introverted musings of ironically-titled Dancin’ In The Streets almost nowhere, with zero promotion. About as punk rock as it gets in 2025. The vibe on side 1 is soulful, torchy-loungey, dreamy-depressive, jazzy slowcore — somewhat in the vein of last year’s Homeshake album or LA Priest’s Phase Luna, or Tricky at his broodiest. Side 2 drifts into harsher and more disparate textures, including spoken word, flamenco, and the moody/abrasive “OPERATION ALWAYS BE A BRAVE LITTLE CUNT.“ And good news — sort of? The record just turned up on Spotify.

Seriously though, I’ve been walking through some dark nights of the puss lately, at times feeling like where is God, where are my bearings. Whilst out on a night walk in the midst of a lot of fear and doubt a song appeared: “‘cello Song - Take 4, January 4th 1969” from the recording sessions of Nick Drake’s life-giving first album Five Leaves Left (an album of rarities called The Making Of Five Leaves Left just came out). It’s a raw track, recorded live, with no added production, and it was as if this lovely human being whom I adore and revere was stepping out of time to comfort me in person.
Strange face, with your eyes
So pale and sincere
Underneath you know well
You have nothing to fear
For the dreams that came to you when so young
Told of a life
Where spring is sprung
You would seem so frail
In the cold of the night
When the armies of emotion
Go out to fight
But while the earth sinks to its grave
You sail to the sky
On the crest of a wave…

From behind his bally (that means balaclava, white boy — I researched it), Esdeekid spent all summer shooting bullets of hardest scouser street rap into my supple, Erewhon-fatted flesh. There’s not an ounce of fat on Rebel — just a blur of bitches, drugs, money and violence, dripping with that unusual Liverpool brogue and lightly seasoned with cut up, distorted, minimalist arrangements.
Louis V Sandals
Crazy, hoes act scandalous
Yeah, these supermodel bitches be fans
Drop the pack off to her man and then I go hold hands with her
In a kush coma, EsDeeKid fried, I'm a fuckin' stoner
Got a bottle full of Tris, kid, I'm never sober
I don't push no shit, lad, I fuckin' told ya
Never had an older
I was doing day trips to the 'Dam, wait, damn
Got a bally on me face and I'm rockin' Ray-Bans
Wait, man, I don't fuck with no snakes, fake mans
Keep a stack up on me lap, got twenty in the waistband

Hailing from Holidaysville, PA, Lyra Pramuk is now based in Berlin, and very much embodies Berlin-ness. Laurie Anderson’s para-classical experimentation and Julia Holter’s exaltation of the divine feminine might come to mind when trying to contextualize Hymnal, Pramuk’s new album of devotional incantations, but her song structures are Phillip Glass circular. Her fertile excursions are as bold and untamed as nature itself yet hold together in perfect expression, as undeniable as pop songs.

OK, what do you guys think about GROUNDWORK? Maybe I’ve lost my mind, but it’s by a brand new manufactured Korean girl group called KiiiKiii and it sounds like, I don’t know, 90s indie? The Breeders maybe??? I mean, you know, with a ton of pop production. And an adorable, expensive looking video. I was gonna suggest it’s got notes of post-punk but that’s going too far. I mean their other stuff doesn’t sound like this…
Groundwork
'Til you crown us
Burn the bad world
Do that groundwork
Dig deep, weeds out
No damage, just work
There's no role model
No cap, no sleep
장난 없인 못 해 [I can't do it without playing around]
That's just what I feel
한 끗 차이인 걸, 떨림과 설렘처음부터 알았어
[There's a slight difference, trembling and excitement]
This will be my field
평범하겐 안 해 [I won't do anything ordinary]
superpower seed (시작해) [start]
Groundwork

A sprawl of delicious, distorted experimental riffing and noising, Mondo Lava’s Utero Dei is a thing-in-itself that sometimes sounds like Bach, sometimes like Tangerine Dream, and more generally like a cassette left on a Phoenix dashboard all summer. Californian James Ketchum and Pamplonés Leon Hu do occasionally rock out, for example on Golem Boogie and much of disc 2, but it feels like they’ve been broadcast across a ghostly time warp — they give Cindy Lee vibes in that sense.

Where to start with Water From Your Eyes? They have a new one out called It’s a Beautiful Place and I mean yes it is impressive, and it also feel like it’s trying a bit hard, and I’m digging it anyway, and I’m wondering if I can love a band even though I sense them efforting. Maybe I can. They do the disaffected, spoken-not-sung lyrics thing on their first bonafide indie-dance banger, “Playing Classics,” which also features a bit of heavy autotune, some growly guitar, notes of Fischerspooner and Peaches, all grounded in a driving, happy-making piano riff.
Look, I'm concerned as a matter of fact
Contact, contact, all this shattered impact
Shake three
Desire in crisis, no, a longing for truce
Yeah, the long hard road from here to the truth
Shake six
Look, face contoured, face the music, the crash
There's a war on stage, smoke the glow into ash
Shake nine
Outside the state, somebody's begging for moves
It's the long hard road from here to the truth
Shake two

Disinblud is the super-duo of muchly rated avant-melodic young witches Rachika Nayar and Nina Keith, spinning and chiming and slicing/splicing enchanted fairy forests like a post-modern Enya. These fairies have balls — so unafraid of coloring outside the lines with elements of dissonance and the occasional thwack of big, scary bass. They also have the good taste to recruit ethereal Earth enchantress Julianna Barwick to do some of the heavy levitating. The tit-ular song has tits in its video, and peenies too, often on the same body, so YouTube won’t let me embed it, but it’s for your own safety.

Blackpool native Joanne Robertson is a bit of a black pool herself, and has a stellar CV that features (shifting into a whisper here) Dean Blunt collaborations. The Cocteau Twins comparisons I’ve been reading are a stretch, other than her voice being female and her lyrics hard to parse. She reminds me more of my 90s shnookumses Movietone, with her mossy vocals over moody, not in a hurry to get anywhere in particular guitar. The Dean Blunt feel is there, a wild, bent beauty weighed down by heavy blankets of depression. Eventually some strings seep in courtesy of one Oliver Coates, but I think I might be more into the barren early tracks.
Out on the board, you let the plane
Poke down a sewer trap
Vines, not a bird, dying
True type, you stand still
Shoo, trap, you stand still in the noon
As the windows that glow in your toast
To get halfway out of sleep
Cold days
Play on the phone
Try get to
What keeps you close
Pray I do all
To get what I can share
Of the people that don’t make it there

Don’t tell anyone but The Raincoats are the kind of band I will nod in deep agreement and appreciation about if someone mentions them, but do I know a single song title? That notwithstanding, I can report that Gina Birch, now pushing 70, recently started a solo career and there’s a gem of a tune called ”Happiness” on her new long-player. The simplicity of a children’s song, the wisdom of a zen master, and maybe a tendril of pot smoke? It wanders through a verdant garden, timeless and radiant, and has only been heard on Spotify by 5,536 people in the whole world ever.
Happiness happiness happiness
It comes and goes it comes and goes
Sunshine bursts right through me
Happiness
Like a whirlpool of laughter
Like I’m one with joy
You raise me up
You make me smile
You raise me up
You believe in me
You raise me up
You make me happy
You raise me up
You make me smile

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After more than four years living off the grid on the dusty plains of Wordpress, slowgraffitti found itself at the beach, slathered in SPF 120, reading Kafka, and heard a distant siren call, fishy seductress Substack luring it out to sea, promising salty oceans of avid readers. All sense of self preservation was lost as the storied portal to all that’s worth experiencing in new music felt itself pulled ever forward toward great jagged rocks of blog riches and caviar fame...

And if I might build on that point, it’s still summer, bitches, and Goon are best enjoyed on a warm summer evening, watching a sunset, sipping a languid cocktail, letting the day drain away, perhaps nodding off on a bit of heroin. They billow, they watercolor, perhaps they gaze at their shoes. The soft dream of California embodied. They have a newly-released third album called Dream 3 — their math is as sweet as their harmonies.
Cicadas in the yard
With Katie and Olivia
Summer undone in Abaddon
And under the parking lot
Animal sounds, doom for a pigeon
And gathered around now
It's forming in the fog
And feeling so familiar
Will it unglue or find a way to?
All bitter and rotted out
Ain't this one my gun?
I have that empty stare
Down by the bank of the river
I'm fed to fish, oh

The other side of today’s California is one-man permanent revolution John Dwyer and his latest Osees album “ABOMINATION REVEALED AT LAST,” 35 minutes and 36 seconds of raging punk rock death and destruction and head-banging vandalism joy that will piss off the squares and your make your summer at least 300% happier. Dwyer turned 50 last year and he’s screeching, slamming and shredding harder than anyone in history. He pulls punk rock into weirdo shapes and still keeps the party going. We’re not worthy!!
Hey, hi
Freak out
All day
Sneaker
Subvert
Stay high
Stake out
Nighttime
I am half a creature, hide your face from me
Fabricated direction, a guru ill-conceived
Skewing focus's easy, not too low for me
I finesse your feelings, dread and misery

Phew, I think we need to pause for a moment of deep introspection, and here’s Fletcher to the rescue. In a very 2025 move, New Jersey’s babe-a-licious Ms. Fleischhauer, best known for great swells of Sirkian emotion over what, back in my day, would be called high lesbian drama, has come out with deepest apologies as dating an actual chromosomal and self-identified male person. Let’s break out the Häagen Dasz and Kahlua and have a good cry over — well I’m not sure what exactly, maybe the abrupt impending shift in the demographics of Fletcher’s fandom. It has guided her to card analogies, both bingo and not. Something seems to have hit me, but it feels like a kiss.
Laying my cards on the table
I'll admit I don't know how to label it (oh)
You can think that I'm a hypocrite, that's cool
I'm just following my heart, is what it is (mm)
And only time will tell
If I will or won't do this again
Maybe I've changed or maybe it's just him
But I leaned in and kissed a boy
And I know it's not what you wanted to hear (oh)
And it wasn't on your bingo card this year
Well, it wasn't on mine
I fell in love (I fell in love)
And it wasn't with who I thought it would be (oh)
And I'm scared to think of what you'll think of me
His lips were soft
I had no choice, I kissed a boy

So anyway, I was in Trader Joe’s the other day getting some quaintly stereotypical LA food — gingerade kombucha, pistachios, baked tofu, fresh ginger and such — and they were playing a familiar, life-giving jam from the 90s which I had to Shazam and it was Black Box, the amazing and shifty Italian dance band that kicked off that venerable decade with “Ride on Time,” but this was in fact the slightly less world-conquering single “Strike It Up,” which I hadn’t heard in a minute. Flooded with bliss, I went down a rabbit hole at the bottom of which it was revealed the vocals are by BBW disco goddess Martha Wash, who those greasy Italians hired to sing some “demos” and then they just straight up used her on the record and brought in skinny, vampy, husband-stealing French model Katrin Quinol to pose for the record cover and lip-synch in the videos and public appearances. Martha’s vocals are a thing to behold, crescendos of raw passion delivered with such control and color — just for a demo! For once the story has a happy ending: she sued both RCA and Sony (C+C Music Factory also failed to credit her for “Everybody Dance Now”), collected the dough, and ended up getting an eight-album recording contract out of it.

But lately when night falls all thoughts of grocery shopping are lifted; I find myself in some underground Hamburg nightclub where pleasure and flesh are the only currency. I don’t do drugs — don’t ever do drugs kids — but people must have been spiking my sparkling water all night cause I’m accidentally all kinds of high. The DJ is checking me out from behind a fetish bunny mask, spinning “TN”, the new one from LSDXOXO featuring Kilo Kish.
Not sure what it is
It’s definitely not your intellect
If you make it known, I will reject
If you want the mix you wanna blend
If you’re gonna ride my appetite
If you wanna, like, just take a bite
If it tastes right, then take a bite
G-g-g-g-give me, give me what- what’s minе
(Daddy, can you tap my spine?)
When I hit the strip, just might
(Hit it in your whip, just might)
G-g-g-g-givе me, give me what- what’s mine
(What’s- what’s- what’s mine)
J-j-j-j-j-j-j-j-just might
Are you gonna come my way tonight?

Damn, I sure was feeling Miss Kilo, so on my way back to the hotel from the DJ’s massive loft overlooking the Elbe I ask the swarthy, muscly Turkish cabbie to play her best song. He gives me a thumbs up without making eye contact and this one comes on just as a red and orange dawn starts to streak the inky Baltic sky —
Maybe I've been making up, up
Making up, up, a story
There's no bigger love, love, no love
It just ain't for me
I know there's a wide world
There's a world that's waiting for you
I'm down if you want to go out
Ooh-oh
Ooh-oh
Oh
Want to go out?
Ooh-oh (duh, it's on the club)
(Where you seek and where you find me) oh

You know, we really don’t get into Justin Bieber much in these pages, and that really needs to change. The scrappy Canadian up-and-comer has kicked off his new one with a vaguely Balearic and dare I say it vapourwave-esque mid-tempo shuffle called “ALL I CAN TAKE” that’s giving goosebumps to my inner lovelorn 9-year-old. Perhaps it’s the raw specificity of his lyrics.
These symptoms of my sensitivity
Feels personal when no one's listening
There's things that I can't change, lord knows I've tried
Oh, baby, we can leave it all tonight

Last time Wombo put an album out I compared them to The Cure, which is — I dunno, wrong? Maybe just their drums. Their drummer has a sweet mustache and long braids look going these days btw. They’re from Louisville and there’s nary a weak moment on their new one Danger in Fives. They’re certainly post-punk but they’ve got a unique, oblique, slanted sound, trending into bits of sour atonality and odd time signatures against rather pretty vocals, and executing feats of precarious balance.
Got a whale's eye on the side
Told me it was not a lie
Not really too hard to find
Everybody run and hide
Oh no
I thought
I thought I saw
But I really go
From a distance I could have
I have a good idea
A lot, a lot of ideas
I go from this end to that end
And reel it in

If you know me you know I’m a proud citizen of Trickystan, and ooh! Mr. Thaws just popped up in his best creepy, croaky, diseased form on an otherwise sweet and melancholy Tony Njoku track, muttering something like “I like it when you eahngg, I like it when you nyyh, I like it when you go, fknyouffuhso…”

Toronto’s Debby Friday was a futuristic, Peaches-adjacent presence on her debut album; on The Starrr Of The Queen Of Life she’s exploring faraway moods and galaxies and her confidence has gone supernova — she’s perhaps fiercest on the chilly Berlin club rap of “Lipsync,” on which she turns her dripless rivals into teacups.
Debby F., double V
Treble clef, yeah, I always been that G
You bitches clinging to my line, I gotta hang up
You bitches do not got the drip, you a teacup
I'm supernova, I'm little pink
I'm on your mind, link, link
She scary, she edgy, this bitch is on the brink
She said she heard my song, now all she do is lipsync
[…]
LP two I’m bout to blow up
Little red I stay riding the beat
He love my braids
Now he kissing my feet
Touch my toes
Give him something to eat…

Please tell me you didn’t think I forgot the new Alex G. The Giannascoli-meister has been a towering figure of indie, that rare rock genius that keeps on getting better, adding and subtracting “(Sandy)” to his stage name and hitting a career high on 2022’s weird and joy-giving God Save the Animals. Headlights does not disappoint, sketching scenes that seem to emerge directly from the id, set in the consciousness of semi-rural Middle America and bleeding into the odd flavors of being a rock star — it’s his first record on a major label. And oh man can the boy write a tune — “June Guitar,” “Afterlife” and “Louisiana” in particular are instant classics.
End of my rope, I
I swung so freely
I felt my gravity
Felt you down there swinging low with me
Yeah, you turned from me
Felt something slipping
Some fabric ripping
Want you down there swinging low with me
Want you down here swinging low with me
Love ain't for the young anyhow
Something that you learn from falling down
Don't make me, don't make me, don't make me

duendita is hard to classify, a project based in the Great American Songbook that smears itself into contemporary textures and abstractions. Behind the curtain is Queens’s own Candace Camacho, whose discography has progressed in fits and starts but is gathering momentum with two albums in the last year, plus a delightful new single (“piel“). My Editor’s Pick off a strong will to survive is “cutie,” in which Camacho‘s vocals dive, soar, recede, reverberate and multiply over a sparse and soulful arrangement before giving way to something like a heartbeat.
Bleed right through to see your face
A whole life full of pain
Bat my eyes, a pair of dice
Pushing me away, away, away, away, away, away, away, away, away…
Ooo yellow was my heartbeat
Ooo an oven deep inside me
Oh oh all my words are running, running, running, running…

Unknown Mortal Orchestra have been hiding in plain sight for the past 15 years, a very “me” band that I didn’t properly investigate. Maybe I confused them with other three word Orchestra bands? Like Yellow Magic or Electric Light? No silly, not those. My point is that Ruban Nielson and pals do New Zealand proud with a 90s-influenced take on guitar indie that also belies some Marc Bolan familiarity. Their new CURSE EP is banger-heavy and particularly memorable when its Norse God riffs and power chords slam you against the nearest Pōhutukawa tree on “Boys with the Characteristics of Wolves.”
Well my face went out of fashion
Like a lamb skin cowl on the floor
Are your talons long and colorful
The blood inside me wants to get out
Yeah God save your soul
The temperature rises you’re losing control
There’s no way home
Boys with the characteristics of wolves

Colombian-Floridian Nick León made a splash a few years back with the big, no-nonsense club/party thumper “Xtasis,” but he has rebranded for his new A Tropical Entropy album, embracing a range of genres and textures from balearic to para-indie, cleverly bringing in Erika de Casier, one of the luminaries of the Denmark Ladies’ Indie Scene, for the fizzy micro-delights of “Bikini.” There’s also a yummy all-Florida super-collaboration with Miami club genius Jonny From Space called “Metromover.” But slowgraffitti staff and readers alike are finding their highest heaven in the shuffle of “Ghost Orchid,” featuring 2025 underground it person (and Colombian) Ela Minus.
Crees que porque me puedes ver
Me puedes tener
No sé qué te hace creer que
Estoy a tu merced
Búscame, búscame
Que cuando crees que me ves
Tu vida no va a ser
La misma que antes de

OK so listen up, slowgraffitti isn’t here to take its turn at slobbering all over the latest radio friendly unit shifter; Colombian (again!) superstar KAROL G is a lot more than her spectacular and joyously flogged t&a. She’s riding the commercial tsunami of reggaeton, but her new Tropicoqueta album explores an array of moods, textures and Latin American idioms with a surprising taste for authenticity, applying mucho sexo and the kind of playful light touch that ravages the pop charts and brings out my inner Shakira. Shake it shake it shake it!

You guys know how much I love to folk — in fact, do you wanna folk with me? — but I’ve been a bit of a Shirley Collins denialist — “she ain’t no Sandy Denny” you’d hear me mutter into my warm lager down the Hare & Kettle. But the old lass has chucked out a dead good one from 1969 with her older sister Dolly called “Ca’ the Yowes” and I don’t know what that means but it’s a song about love and devotion and marriage that sounds awfully ripe for folk song tragedy, and its stark and churchy organ hath lain claim to my soul.
Ye sall get gowns and ribbons meet
Cauf-leather shoen upon your feet
And in my arms ye’se lie and sleep
An’ ye sall be my dearie
If you’ll but stand to what you’ve said
I’ll come with you, my bonny lad
And you may roll me in your plaid
And I shall be your dearie
You shall get gowns and ribbons meet
And leather shoen upon your feet
And in my arms you’ll lie and sleep
My bonny dearie

Interesting how the stars of a specific decade tend to implode or even die as a new decade dawns. Ariel Pink and John Maus were two of the leading lights of 2010s indie, bringing me buttloads of fond memories and literal tears of joy. Then on January 6, 2021 they famously showed up at the US Capitol attack. Pink turned out to be in a deep state of Trump cult derangement, even showing up on Tucker Carlson to whine about getting cancelled. I hate cancel culture as much as the next guy but I haven’t been able to listen to him since. Maus on the other hand has been arty and cryptic about the whole kit and kaboodle; he’s got new work coming out and I have to say I kinda love it. Could “I Hate Antichrist” be about Trump? An ironic reaction to people demanding that Maus toe the line? The video suggests it’s more about people that wield power in a variety of realms, and maybe about the hatred directed at Maus himself (“I hate son of a bitch”). It’s as powerful as anything he’s ever put out, and “Because We Built It” is equally excellent. He’s the Leni Riefenstahl of our times.

Mysterious Houston native indie-soul-popper DERBY‘s new album Slugger is a joy-giving thing, hitting those autotune emotions with precision and heart in a similar vein to my secret husband and boo Organ Tapes. The fork published a maddening review calling him derivative of three artists they seemingly pulled out of a hat, but whatever, fuck them, this is tangy and melodic and “Two Step” in particular just bangs.
Hands up, I want to see you take what you can get
In the Texas heat and glory sky
Spotlight, light this
And when the two step
Spins you around, you run, honey
Run, honey, run
Run, honey, run
You know it’s true but you swallow it down
Run, honey, run
Run, honey, run

The slowgraffitti readership is still reeling — processing and debating the unexpected 2024 album of the year laurels being awarded to Seefeel. Who else, one might ask, could perhaps be working to sculpt color and smoky form across cavernous spaces with such mastery? Mark Van Hoen, a former member/collaborator of the Feel, raises his hand with his The Eternal Present album. His corroded choruses scrape against ghostly siren calls in this collection of brutal and beautiful holograms. He covers “Shine” by Slowdive, improving on the original, but maximum dopamine is generated by the key-straddling quivers of “Multiplex.”

The summer hasn’t felt quite right without the bratty boy energy of a new Gee Tee record, but lo — another three-piece three-chord band serving violent infantile pleasure has bobbed up from down under: Media Puzzle are fast, thrashy, tinny, and have an endless supply of wiry, world-ruling tunes in the baskets of their tricycles.

Me and Simo Cell had a little thing back in ’23, and now he’s come around to serenade me again with his minimalist French dance abstractions. Our time apart has made him perhaps a little flintier and more emphatic, doing away with melody almost entirely. On his new FL Louis EP he builds “Circuits” around growled and processed vowels, percussion, and an occasional police siren, just for kicks. On “Paris Funk Express” he strips funk down to its skeleton yet keeps the dancefloor on fire. Trés cool.

London’s Patrick Wolf achieved a soupçon of indie acclaim back in the aughts, but fell off the Earth for a decade or so, struggling with addiction and personal tragedy. He’s back now with the grand and impressive Crying the Neck, serving up anthemic, widescreen Statements about England (“rotten to the core” apparently), and one can’t help getting swept up in all the delirious drama. He sure gays it up in “The Last of England” video.
But I was cruising, Gawain in the mist
There as we kissed
Up against the Pendle Hill oak
The green king
Deep in doggerland woke
I got born into this sadness
Just like you
Cried the white horse of the sun
To the inverted moon
And there we were, the last of England
Rotten to the core
When came a fireblight, Hallelujah
Ripped us shore to shore

Before I go can we briefly discuss what is arguably the pop song of the summer, the streaking dopamine rush of “L.O.V.E.” by Jessica Winter? Jessica used to be punk apparently, back in Portsmouth, England, and her new My First Album spans a genre or two, but most importantly she knows how to take you to that sweet and weightless place in the sky and spin you right round.
I can’t seem to shake it
Wherever I go
It’s all for the taking
It’s all that I know
All I want
All I want
All I want is to feel it
It’s not complicated
So close I can taste it
We could be amazing
Or not at all
All I want is to feel it
L-O-V-E
What it does to me…

Back in my day everything seemed to happen in Manchester — Buzzcocks, The Fall, Joy Division, Factory Records, the Hacienda, The Smiths, The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, bla bla bla, names names names sweetie. But honestly 21st century Manchester had not made any impression until just now. caroline have pulled over and parked in my zone, with a quietly disorienting style that stretches and tears and reconfigures songs rooted in indie textures. It’s a sort of modern dream-prog not unlike New York’s Chanel Beads, with a sexy imprimatur from indie rock’s reigning Caroline, Polachek to be exact — she warbles away on arguably the best song of their new album 2, a typically complicated little aria called “Tell Me I Never Knew That.”
The right time
I don’t even know if I’m alive
Know the right time
But I don’t wanna be somebody else
At the right time
Maybe I don’t wanna be anyone
At the right time
I don’t wanna be somebody else
How many are they?
I never told them
(Tell me, I never knew that)
Sink down, unfolding
Don’t go, I’m holding
Press on, press on him
Two times I told them

Jack Barnett isn’t the kind of guy you grab a pizza and play a little Yahtzee with; his mind is on the Waters, the Firmament, the Eternal Wisdom behind the Forbidden Meaning. These New Puritans started out as a solid little rock band, but around 2013 they had their Talk Talk Spirit of Eden moment and morphed into an all-knowing, all-sensitive, world-conquering behemoth capable of manifesting Field of Reeds, one of the great albums of this or any century. They put out another album since then that didn’t quite enrapture the slowgraffitti rank and file, but now they’re back with Crooked Wing and reprising the weighty magnificence thing very effectively indeed. That clever vixen Caroline Polachek bagged a guest vocal on this one as well!

Kathryn Joseph is a sort of feral Little Match Girl, wandering across a series of horrific scenarios with a trembling voice on her debut WE WERE MADE PREY. I perceive notes of Tori Amos, but in Kathryn‘s world there are no cornflakes or pumpkin PJs; it’s a terrain of brute survival that starts and ends with her embodying a wolf. Her jagged and bloody lyrics make Nick Cave sound like the Captain and Tennille, and man oh man can she write a tune — guarantee you’ll be humming these atmospheric, piano-based goth bangers in the shower.
Light a fire, make a bed, funeral pyre
You can call me roadkill
I am fucked here by want and desire
Just to have my mouth filled
All I am now is waiting to die

The last time we heard from long-haired Saskatchewanian Andy Shauf it was 2023 and he was warping our minds with Norm, an album of easy-listening charm wrapped around violent stalker revenge fantasies and a first-person missive from God, who was rather disappointed in us. He (Andy) has returned with his full band and an album called Foxwarren 2, a name that catches you off guard, evoking the worst in musty, humorless, straight-guy classic rock, but in fact is a nearly unclassifiable set of ear pastries built on a foundation of warped 60s-70s pop rock and snippets of campy dialogue from old movies and washes of strings and orchestral themes and cryptic lyrics that suggest the dreams and oddly flavored conflicts of someone with a very pretty voice living a life of relative domesticity. So yeah, pretty much non-stop fun, with plenty of fiber.
It’s almost like you never listеn to me
When I’m speaking, you should listen to me
I know I’ve not been listening
To what you’ve been saying
I have my own words prepared
I’ll put you right back where you belong
And though I have no formal training
On the current subject
Once I open my mouth
You’ll see how sharp I really am…

I wouldn’t think of ever repeating myself, but I’m sinking ever deeper into April-May favorite Lost & Found by Free Range, cuddling into Tracy Chapman-echoing downy melancholy and I need to at least share one more track…

Oh man, I used to be able to more or less keep track of the hot new music scenes on my spreadsheet, but these days they’re breeding so fast, and Madrid’s Rusia-IDK is apparently a collective that’s putting a little bit of everything from hyperpop to reggaeton into the blender and emerging with creative assemblages that feel both raw and polished enough to work as pop. rusowski is at the collective’s forefront, dragging us all into the future with sweetness and sharp edges, and a sense of style in the orbit of Tommy Cash.
It’s crazy ’cause I like her, her
I’m crazy ’cause I like her, her
Oh-oh, oh-oh
Nah, no me mires así [Nah, don’t look at me like that]
Ahora me gusta’ más [Now I like you more]
¿La niña de alta gama qué tendrá? [What will the high-end girl have?]
Y no sé si es de aquí [And I don’t know if she’s from here]
Y no sé a dónde irá [And I don’t know where she’s going]
¿Sus gafitas flow Gabbana qué tendrán? [What will happen with her Gabbana flow glasses?]
No es mi sensación ni nada, ah, ah-ah-ah [It’s not my feeling or anything]
Tengo su mirá’ clavada, ah, ah-ah-ah [I have her eyes fixed on me]

Rico Nasty isn’t the trendiest young rapper at this point — she’s all of 28, egads, but ignore LETHAL at your own peril; it’s end to end fire. Her palette famously includes punk and power chords; her flow is chainsaw sharp and fucking hilarious, and she even fits in a not-totally-cringey love ballad… for her son. The chorus on “Eat Me” is one of the Great Moments in Hip Hop History :
Me (Me), me, me (Me), me (Uh-huh)
Me (Me), me, me (Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh), me
But let’s please also luxuriate a bit in “TEETHSUCKER“:
I’m tryna pop out like a titty
I’m tryna pop that bitch like wheelies
Think she popped too many pillies
Now that ho keep talkin’ silly
Not with the bull, we not bool
I keep a tool at your medul
Just hit the pool
He got the best poker face, I think I’ma use him for a mule […]
Let me kick back, let me spit facts
Bitches all caps like big ass words
I’m gettin’ money, curvin’ nerds
I got a house up in the burbs
But I still pop out, lookin’ disturbed
Basic hoes get on my nerves
You did it worse, I did it first
She’s out again, go call the nurse
If you got bands, I go bar for bar
These hoes don’t golf, they ain’t up to par

We loved our Electronic Body Music back in the 80s. DAF, Nitzer Ebb, the mighty Front 242 and their ilk made a fetishy, militaristic, hyper-masculine black leather dance racket that paired so well with a certain dark and minimalist gay bar esthetic of the time, epitomized by the One Way in Silver Lake. Frankfurt’s Das Kinn (actually a rather mild appearing french-fries eater named Toben Piel) is barking new life into the genre with Ruinenkampf, so life is officially good. Das Kinn means “The Chin,” so extra credit for an excellent band name.
Du hast geträumt von einem Wir [You dreamed of a we]
Wir haben geträumt von starken Händen
[We dreamed of strong hands]
Er hat den Traum nach Feierabend noch genutzt
[He used the dream after work]
für Present Perfect und die Evaluation und
[for the present perfect and the evaluation and]
Oneironaut sei wachsam [Oneironaut be alert]
Oh – wenn du deinen Traum lebst [Oh – when you live your dream]
Albtraum! Albtraum! [Nightmare! Nightmare!]

OK sure, I guess I’m a little tardy to the 404 million party plays of Diet Pepsi by Addison Rae, but when has there been a sexier slice of cooing, vanilla-flavored pop to pull on your tight jeans to? I’m so ready to be losing all my innocence in the back seat.

We’ve taken a look around his avant-house before, but I need to report that Brisbane’s Maxwell Byrne, better known as 1tbsp, has been busy teaming up with Latin American musicians for a series of woozy dance romps including the booty imperative “Isso” with Brazil’s MC Pânico.

Whilst other artists streak across the sky and fade from memory, Actress just keeps unspooling his unhurried, understated tapestries of brilliance, typically on a bed of sculpted white noise or tape hiss or dust on vinyl. BabyU Lar==, off his new Tranzkript 1 EP, drops a kind of hyper-pop vocal sample into the trancey proceedings, putting you into a state of sugar rush hypnosis.

Rainy Miller‘s from Preston, in Lancashire, which (I looked it up) turns out to be just north of newly trending Manchester. His new one, Joseph, What Have You Done, starts out rather inauspiciously — one hates to be mean but “Mud in my Mouth. (Predetermined Definitions)” is poetry slam emo-vomiting that hurts my spirit even more than my ears. Hold on though — Joseph soon ramps up to the glorious, Tricky-esque brooding rage of “Vengeance” (featuring Graham Sayle, lead singer of High Vis):
Tears from the sky and they soak all through me
stoking up the fire that’s below
Dug beneath my eyes on my own no, yeah
I could walk the miles that I walk
Hold a couple gripes that have grown all skewed
dripping from the sides of my lows
Maybe I could try gettin’ myself through it
But I don’t think I could feel…
Vengeance on the rise and then go but
You and I won’t stop until they all go do it

In conclusion let me just say that I feel like I just finished gushing about The Smile but Thom Yorke is already out there vamping across another album of unseemly genius, this time a collab with Mark Pritchard, the highly decorated veteran of breakbeat, jungle, techno, drum and bass etc. etc. whom I’m ashamed to say I’m almost entirely unfamiliar with. Anyway, Tall Tales feels like a step forward and deeper into the explorations of quivering electronic moods and textures and dream and nightmare states of The Smile and Radiohead; it’s end to end rich and captivating and btw is it me or does La Thom sound like she’s channeling Diana Ross? I mean sometimes. In any case she (Thom) is a unicorn — a middle-aged rock star who’s already scaled every mountain and is still out there blowing our minds bi-annually. “The White Cliffs,” criminally, isn’t one of the four singles, but we’re making it our slowgraffitti Staff Pick.
I’m feeling the same cold room
Every now and then
A face that keeps changing
Every now and then
Another direction
Blowing in the wind
Nothing but empty promises
Every now and then
All over the same four thoughts
Every now and then

Am I allowed to do a Susan Miller and rationalize being late by pointing out my extra-generous word count? I was a busy beaver in April, but please enjoy this cochlear cornucopia…

Montrealer Joni Void (née Jean Cousin, AKA Johnny Ripper) has been knocking around since 2017, but finally pierced the slowgraffitti membrane with Every Life Is a Light — why it’s positively smothered in a gravy of “Liked Songs” checkmarks on my Spotify. Our Joni‘s sound is hypnotic, lysergic and melodic; ELIaL opens with “Everyday – A Sequel,” a lovely bit of ambient trance, and fades into “Du Parc” which conjures sour pastel clouds in the general neighborhood of the mighty Seefeel, followed by the teasing foreplay of “Time Zone,” which, had it a chorus, could pass for something like pop. The warped piano sweetness of “Muffin – A Song for My Cat,” featuring real meows, is awfully charming. But why don’t we take the très gorgeous “Vertigo” (feat. Sook-Yin Lee) — the most real-song-like thing on the album — for a spin.
Set a dial around
(And I love you)
Better take ‘em down
(Never rip it up)
Say it like they tell you to
America
Sell your light
Waning life sing low

So many SG consecrated favorites have been dropping in with little sachets of ear-joy lately. Local LA lads and laddesses Goon just dropped “Closer to,” a scrummy dream-pop-rock teaser (with an especially dreamy coda) for their upcoming Dream 3 album.
Right now in the sunshine
Form a vowel
Then bite
Feel around
And pick up something off the ground
Enter the fog
Then the warning comes
Something wrong
Glistening in her jaw
Seraphim are all along and around

Japanese ascended introvert goddess Satomimagae has some buried treasure on her new one Taba — don’t get lazy and just play the tracks with high numbers; the sickest cherry blossoms here are deep cuts like “Wakaranai,” “Tonbo” and ooh especially “Mushi Dance.”

TV’s best indie rock export Djo recently delivered The Crux, another collection of brilliantly repurposed 70s easy listening, in which, again, with a bit of digging, you’ll come across a truly touching one called “Potion“: “I’ll try for all of my life / Just to find someone who leaves on the light for me.” You and me both, Joe.

Not too many artists can deliver the numminess reliably across decades, but Zach Condon is still at it after nearly two of ’em. Beirut never obsolesces because, quite cleverly, they started out sounded like something from a hundred years ago. “Tuanaki Atoll,” named after an anecdotal vanished group of islets in the South Pacific, is slowgraffitti’s Editor’s Choice off A Study of Losses. That boy sure knows when to bring in a horn or two.
Letting the whole world down
How will I be sure this time around
What if the sun came ’round?
What if I drowned? What if I drowned?
And what were you safe from?
Did you roll a heartbeat but wrong?
I found a new island
What do we do if they don’t run?

But nothing melts this old heart of mine more than an unexpected new Organ Tapes song (actually a collab with Jetty). “Life After” is Tim Zha at his end credits tearjerker best, a long, resigned litany of disbeliefs crooned over minor key piano, including “What about we won’t starve?… What about it’ll get better?… What about feel the scar?… What about fearing no lessons?” that works its way toward the finality of “What about love… forever?“

Mamalarky are originally from Austin (–> Los Angeles –> Atlanta) and share with Being Dead a kind of retro pop experimentalism that collages itself and settles into fresh and free and delight-dealing forms. Not a million miles from the odd time signatures and bright hues of Palm. You’ll find some Texas-size motivation on “#1 Best of All Time” from their charming Hex Key album.
Don’t think you could guess
My next move in
Chess and checkers, double deckers
I always win
Even when I fall
Got no cuts at
All in wager, in my favor
Marathon runner I place last
However I felt just as fast

And if that rings your bell you might wanna check out some more avant-indie from Grumpy, fronted by the evocatively-named Heaven Schmitt, whose unique tri-city trajectory has been Nashville–> Chicago–> Brooklyn. I’m digging the Flying Nun vibe of their “Lonesome Ride.” The band is famously comprised of three of the alluring Heaven‘s exes — two female and one male, plus a lonely guitar player who somehow resisted getting hoovered up by Heaven‘s fishy siren booty calls.
You got me out here walking backwards
Into walls, it ain’t my fault
A lonesome aching’s all that I’ve heard
A short straw, I’m taking calls
Two bites taken out of an onion
Leaves a bad taste, ruins my day
Makes you cry over this soufflé
Can’t be bored, hope you get what you’re cooking for

Raisa K has quite the pedigree as an alum of Mica Levi‘s indie bands, but her work mines more of a Dean Blunt sense of alt.melodies, slightly off-key, leaving doubts hanging in the air. The showstopper is “Stay,” a duet with Coby Sey, a direct and heartfelt declaration of love marbled with insecurity.
You always stay
Stay by my side
When I don’t feel right
And when I do feel it to
I want to do
The same for you
To treat you right
To have that sight
I love the way you love me yeah
I don’t want to hold you back
Leave before you see me
Otherwise I’ll hold you back
I’ll hold you back…
I love the way you love me yeah…
You won’t hold me back
You won’t hold me back

Perfume Genius is just hard for me to talk about. His first two albums were perfect, timeless distillations of emotion rooted in radical caring. I had a magical experience of walking up to his SXSW gig and getting tickets like minutes before showtime; it was in a church, and I literally sat in the second pew. Four hand piano piece “Learning” is one of the great theater of pain songs and seeing it live was just mwah. But starting with Too Bright he veered off into kinda-obvious identity stuff and Morrissey-esque irony (“No family is safe / When I sashay“) and later a fair amount of self-indulgence. Like PJ Harvey, he emerged fully-formed, got me to adore him, then evolved into something that was probably a natural progression for him, and to be fair earned him a lot of praise, but to me it all felt mannered and just off. It left me forlorn and bitter. All that to say that I struggle to listen to his new stuff with an open heart, but I have to admit the bitch can still write a tune, and yes there are bangers on his new one Glory, not least of which is “No Front Teeth” for which the clever boy bagged that enlightened otherworldly being Aldous Harding to do backing vocals. But again, the deep cuts. Twisted sub-locked-in-a-trunk fantasy “In a Row” delights with its rousing chorus. Best of all is “Left for Tomorrow,” a total return to swoony melodic form with a tumble of Pre-Raphaelite imagery. I think I can let it go.
Did it glow in the dark?
Was there a choir winding on
Can you hear me at all?
It’s only your name repeating green and wide
Bolts of white iris tenderize
Sobs from the silo
Hung, dried, lеft for tomorrow
The other end is just hеavy breathing
I bury the phone in clover
Back where the light is streaming
I carry it on my shoulders
My shoulders, my shoulders
Without her, without her…

If I can allow myself to get stuffy I’ll say Playboi Carti is one of the Great Voices of Today, literally and figuratively, with a polyphonic rasp and punk rock attitude that puts one in mind of Kurt Cobain. His new one I Am Music is a sprawling audio photo dump that charges out of the gates throwing angry voice paint at the canvas and delivers an early gunshot climax called “EVIL J0RDAN” in which he shares a bit about his lifestyle…
First I go whip out the boat
No, I can’t hit on no brakes
My life is out of control
I’m tellin’ you, nobody safe
I’ve been livin’ my life limbo
My ice, it came with a tray
It’s so hot, I gotta hide my face
This not a rockstar phase
I’m a emo, thuggin’ my phase
…and goes on to describe a special lady he hooked up with:
I think she’s a fling
I think she’s a playmaker, she should be on my team
She should get her a ring
Shit, it can’t be me, but she can be on the team
It’s all delicious tough-as-nails fun until The Weeknd drops in on Track 8 and things start getting kind of pop. I started tuning out around there, but Playboi has every right to dominate the arts and the charts. It’s a long album; I’ll find time to explore further.

Hey would it be OK if we go back to Montreal for a sec? Cause Population II, who — trigger warning — are actually a three-piece, have been serving up some very tasty psych en français. “Mariano (Jamais je ne t’oublirai)” is particularly booty groovy; it gives me Carnaby Street The Zombies vibes in the best way.
Nous quittâmes la pizzeria ensemble
Les doigts beurrés, nous léchâmes ceux de l’autre
Elle me dit
Jamais je ne t’oublierai
Jamais je ne t’oublierai
Ah ouin

I don’t know if you google translated those lyrics, but they’re not exactly Wordsworth, and it doesn’t matter. French is truly the sexiest language for song lyrics (even Quebecois and its unsavory nasal vowels). For example, actual Parisian Bagarre has been fully lighting up my imaginary nightlife with irresistible party starter “Ring Ring“…

…but the whole Nous Etions Cinq EP has been crushing me like a peeled tomato. Check out “Ya Qalbi:”

I was under the impression that Lust for Youth and Croatian Amor were more or less the same band, but apparently I was wrong, the wrongest girl in the world. Or was I??? According to my research Hannes Norrvide and Loke Rahbek are yes two separate humans, but they have now collaborated on the All Worlds album, which is end to end twisted, heartfelt, auto-tuned, synthy, pained worlds of pleasure. Do I sense notes of a certain ’90s rave anthem by Future Sound of London? I mentioned “Dummy” back in January, but there’s so much more to love, including the celebratory, human/post-human “Kokiri.“
I don’t know where I went
I just know that somethin’…
I just know that somethin’…
Well, there were children at the time…
I just know that somethin’…

I’m a sucker for the honeydripping melancholy and crystalline song craft of Free Range, but it’s taken me a minute to get into the new one, perhaps steeling myself for disappointment after the delirious highs of 2023’s Practice, plus that gorgeous duet Sophia did with Darryl Rahn on “Company” last year. I’ve been foolish; Lost and Found is quite the little masterpiece, delivering wave after wave of sweet-spot-probing folk-rock joy.

An artist named Vegyn has been blipping on my radar — first a collaboration with young sensation John Glacier on “A Dream Goes on Forever,” and now with a candied, hyperpop Loukeman remix of “Last Night I Dreamt I Was Alone.” Oh, apparently he produced two albums for in-and-out-of-closet-like-it’s-1999 gay artiste Frank Ocean — I mean just for context; it’s neither here nor there. Great tune.

I’ve straddled the fence for too long when it comes to Arthur Russell. He was always pretty much an underground artist; he died from AIDS in 1992 and his work gets passed around with reverence by music nerds like me. I think I jumped into fandom too quickly at one point and then questioned whether he actually had any songs I liked. But there’s a new live album out from a 1985 show and now I get it — he has me hanging on every half-whispered word, with a delicate intimacy that makes Nick Drake sound like Thin Lizzy. “That’s the Very Reason” as far as I can tell was previously unreleased.
He’s walking in
The exchange door
Was he dress on in his mind
Explaining to himself the thoughts of the day
But he leaves one thing out
And that’s the very reason
I have opened this
You reminded me
I responded in the other way
A sudden joke
Broke a dream he leans away from
And where he is he laughs or tries to laugh
And he thinks to himself
That’s the very reason I have opened this
You reminded me, I responded in the other way

We discussed Richard Dawson in these pages a bit back in 2023. Simpler times, but Dawson was a lot more complicated. Perhaps he’s become a dad? (He isn’t keen on revealing how much autobiography is in his songs) In any case rather than warbling of “newly-whetted scramsax” and such he’s become the first musical artist in history to work IKEA into his poetics (on the touchingly frank “Removals Van“). There’s also mention of a zoom “with one of our most important clients” on “Bully.” The songs on End of the Middle are vivid little short stories, a series of sketched thoughts and images disarmingly rendered with shockingly free-form yet ear-wormy folky melodies.

Remember when Interpol first came out and part of their image was that they read books, the kind without any pictures in them? It created quite a barrier to entry for me and I nearly denied myself the fiery pleasures of an incredible band (I saw them at Primavera many years later and their show was just obliterating). Jules Reidy’s Ghost/Spirit is a rather gorgeous sound bath of atmospheric, trebly, trembling alt-folk, but do yourself a favor and don’t read the press materials about Reidy‘s highfalutin’ academic interests which span many dusty libraries, from St. Teresa to Mike Kelly to Simone Weil to Talk Talk. Alarmingly posh, but the music speaks for itself, rife with feeling.
I give all to her
til we overlap
dark matter dispersing
living in a lack of
til we overlap
there is space between
gravity that pulls to
voids and endless gaps

John Glacier is quite a sensation, the kind of artist that allows her poetry to quietly devastate, speak-singing circular lyrics that range from depressive to deadpan flexing that may or may not be a joke, over fairly raw instrumentation. Not sure if it’s indie or rap, but Like a Ribbon is end to end bangers from another planet, intellectually stimulating stuff that also speaks to your emotions, like on “Nevasure“:
Never mind me ’cause I’m icy
Let it thaw, have a meltdown,
have a drink till you say it raw
On the rocks, on the wave,
feelin’ like I’m never sure (Never sure, never sure)

I’ve gushed literal geisers of ink in these pages over Sweden’s mystical masked psych primitives Goat, and now they have caught me by complete surprise, teaming up with Ugandan futuristic rapper MC Yallah for a rich and tasty bit of fusion called “Nimerudi” — quite a jam, grounded in retro percussion that sounds like the The Stone Roses, or the “House of the Rising Funk” sample by Afrique that St. Etienne used on “Filthy.”

It’s been a minute since I got excited about country, but Chicago’s Tobacco City take me back to the classic weeping harmonies and pedal steel of The Byrds and Gram Parsons, with their own unique, gritty lyrics lending a tangy counterpoint. “Autumn” has me in a perpetual swoon.
We were smokin’ schwag behind the grocery store
We were huffin’ gas directly from the can
And I could barely stand
Dirty lakeshore breeze from the water treatment plant
Between our knees exactly as we planned
‘Cause there was nothing planned
‘Cause I never knew about leavin’
‘Cause I never knew about nothin’
It was autumn then
It was always autumn then
With summer on the breeze

I’m such a busy bitch these days, no time for anything. I take it personally when movies are three and a half hours long, and why can’t songs just be three and a half minutes like God intended? DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ tracks tend to break the seven minute mark and I’ve tried to stay annoyed, but there’s something so unique about her — she locks into these house jams that are like one part sunny, celebratory 70s pop, one part soul, one part shivers of first-album Autre Ne Veut, all smeared together chillwave-style with a bit of lysergic motivational spoken word. She has followed up her divine Sorcery album with this little bit of heaven:

But actually if we can go back to Sorcery for a moment, I’ve had a track called “I’ve Been Waiting” on repeat — it feels like a hug of encouragement from God, or a ideal parent or a bestie that always believed in you. It’s wave after wave of full-body climaxes — play it as you blossom into your greatness.

Two Shell are hardly a household name, but I’m gonna postulate that they’re as much of a generation-defining act as Daft Punk or Fischerspooner. You might recall I spooged all over their album only last November, and now they’re doing it to me again with “Oops,” the tartest hyperpop Pez candy of 2025.

Mdou Moctar‘s Funeral for Justice was one of the albums of 2024; the songs were built around Mdou‘s insane electric guitar leads and the idea of recording acoustic versions would seem like folly, sheer folly I tell you. But they did it anyway on Tears of Injustice, letting the melodies settle, expand and breathe. Turns out the songs are already such classics that it’s a joy to sink into them, feel them all around you, like you’re sitting around a fire with your Touareg pals, singing and clapping and rebelling into the night. “Imouhar” in particular — which was designed to blow your fucking head off on Funeral for Justice — has been expanded into a subtle, emotional, unforgettable eight and a half minute experience.

Can a middle-aged shoegaze veteran who also spent considerable time in Oasis capture this bachelor’s heart? Against all odds, I find myself handing a red rose to Andy Bell this month. I was a big Ride fan even before their first album came out, saw them on their reunion tour circa 2017 (with a slightly gauche enormous logo on stage) and swooned to the old hits, but I had few illusions that the songwriting magic could still be there 35 years into our relationship. And yet — Pinball Wanderer. What can I say?

If you’re the type who goes out to clubs just to cry, please spend a little time with the lovingly crafted propulsions on Aeoui by London bloke Breaka (jazzy-sounding real name: Charlie Baker). “Are We There” is the record’s poignant booty masterpiece.

I don’t know why I didn’t fall deeper under the spell of Magnetic Fields back in the 90s — I even saw them open up for someone at the Troubadour, and liked them I think. I guess I’m the type that if I’m not an early adopter and a band gets popular behind my back I’m not likely to get on board. The upshot is I just got annihilated by “The Dreaming Moon” from their 1995 album Get Lost, which feels totally written for or about me…
We were young and in love
In a burning town
But the fire went out
I’m alone again now
And I finally know
How cool to be cold
With the dreaming moon
I’ll begin again
With another new name
And a whole new life
Full of fortune and fame
But in the 100th year
I’ll be right back here
With the dreaming moon

This interesting year had just started when the pop record to get you through it popped out. On Full Moon, South Africa’s Moonchild Sanelly does it all, under an iconic thicket of teal hair — from flexing about her round booty (“I got God-given cushion / And some God-given pushing / It’s your God-given duty / To appreciate my booty”) and being rich (“You’re in pain, bitch / ‘Cause I’m paid, bitch”) to tackling much weightier subject matter:
My daddy had ten wives
I was the tenth child
From the fifth wife
Wasn’t the best one
My daddy never had time…

LEWISPYBEY evokes the idea of some trollish mad genius festering quietly, unaware of anything that might have ever happened in music or in the world ever. The song structures are just wild — whether locking into a cluttered, dusty groove or getting sidetracked into musique concrete, somehow it all feels organic and right. But it turns out this is no sickly recluse — it’s Graham Lewis, that legendary bloke from Wire, with his Zoviet France mate Mark Spybey. (The band name should have maybe tipped me off).

Horsegirl seem like they were reverse-engineered to appeal to the Paul demographic, absorbing the indie-est sounds from the fecund ’85 to ’89 era and serving them up fragrant and new. I hear the strummy guitars of Flying Nun, the cooing vocals of shoegaze, the precise balance of the dark and the sweet so stylishly concocted in that heady era. “2468” is pretty irresistible, with its nerdy dancing alt art school fashion video.

They put me in mind of this golden chestnut from my youth:

Remember when that first Fever Ray album came out, like what a revelation? Ela Minus is mining a similar vein of the dark and the messy, with a commanding sense of introspection and a surprisingly similar foreign accent although she’s Colombian not Swedish. Her digital reveries brood in moody atmospherics before zigzagging in the direction of minimalist dance severity. “Upwards” (in which it sounds like she’s singing “I’d like to shave you but I’ve got to shave myself”) — (it’s actually “save”) has a bit of an electroclash vibe:
I try not to breathe
Silently replaying the scene
Behind the veil I see a scream
Behind the veil my mind
Keeps trying to blame me
But hell is hereditary
I choose the void instead
Can’t trust myself

Maribou State are yet another instance of me discovering a band I’d never heard of and finding out they’re massive, with billboards up on Sunset and songs that have over 100 million plays on Spotify. They’re a bit hard to define, resonating with decades of highly melodic dance from Cassius to Moby to Jungle, but their superpower is their sweet, seductive, hooky tunes. “Dance on the World” has a definite Jai Paul shuffling staccato vibe, which almost made my inner derivativeness cop cancel them, but it’s just such a good song, plus they’ve got lots of other arrows in their quiver. “Otherside,” with their Aussie pal Holly Walker, reminds me a bit of La Roux, so OK yeah maybe they are a bit magpie-ish, but their jams per album ratio is delirious so let’s just allow their relentless climaxes of dance pleasure to engorge us all, shall we?

Baths, the rather British-sounding nom de plume of William Boris Wiesenfeld who in fact is from Tarzana, has been around for a minute and has been highly touted yet failed to win me over until this very moment. “Eden” is a swooning dive into a rainbow lake of love, a new gay anthem to enjoy in my Beautiful Aloneness (I’m writing this on Valentine’s Day and I’m being strong). It’s basically an ode to being of service as a proud bottom. There’s an album called Gut on the horizon.
I am what he’ll be drinking
I‘m a spring
Cupped to his lips
Slip into my ellipsis
I am for him to swim in
I‘m the sweat
Pressed on his tits
Slip into my ellipsis

So apropos of nothing I was googling the B52’s and Ricky Wilson and his mysterious guitar tunings and read about him citing Esquerita as one of his main influences. I’d never heard of this person but apparently they were actually a big influence on Little Richard, so yeah, kind of seminal. Check out this rather astonishing 1958 track where Esquerita queens out in splendor, seeming to channel Yma Sumac.

I’m not sure how “Sea Palace” by BSS (aka the not unattractive at all Dutchman Luigi Vittorio Jansen) ended up in my queue, but if you’re looking to levitate into 3:56 of electronic joy…

I’m old enough to remember people discussing who their favorite Beatle was. I didn’t have a strong opinion; I mean Ringo was definitely the hottest one; John had the most impact on the culture; Paul was the one whose name Pamela Des Barres wrote down every time she farted. But over time I’ve gravitated toward the honey-dripping guitar style and general radiance of George Harrison. When I found a list of Italian chart toppers from 1975 there was a song I had totally forgotten called “You,” that really couldn’t be much simpler — the bulk of the lyrics are just “I / Love / You / And you / Love / Me.” But what a vibe; how it captures that high.

Sym Gharial was a player on the rockier edges of the Brit Pop era with The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster, and while his new incarnation as Primitive Ignorant dabbles a bit in dissonant aggression, he has gone guitar-free, and his strongest tracks are in the melodic synth-pop idiom. It feels both anachronistic and kind of fresh in 2025 to hear aggressively male vocals in this girls and gays-centric sub-genre. Sym can certainly write and arrange a tune that moves you in your sensitive depths; he delivers maximum gooshy feeling on “A Day With You” and “Last in the Riot,” songs that feel like surely they’ve always existed.

For me a Pitchfork “Best New Music” recognition is a total red flag — nine times out of ten it’s the sign of an artist who’s polished their image and messaging with a veneer of consensus-cool rather than someone truly out there capturing inspiration and serving it raw. Oaklandian Kathryn Mohr however… her PJ Harvey lost in the woods and slowly starving to death vibe is rather charming, and “Take It” is, I dare say, a banger.
In this desert bed I wait for you
Holding on to my skeleton like fruit…

Oh man, I haven’t posted in like two months and I really need to get this guy out the door, but I still have so much cool stuff to tell you about… Hannes Norrvide aka Lust for Youth made the theme song to the last time I fell in love (2014 AD) — the heavens-tickling “Running” — and now there’s finally a worthy follow up called “Dummy,” full of Danish indie feeling and Italo-style “oh-oh”s and female spoken word bits courtesy of their Aussie pal Purient.
An aircraft above weeps
Green eyes wide open, sun-kissed and weary
Some people are still smiling
But most people were silent
The church bell chimed in the distant
Ding-dong, everything changes

OK look, I’m not a big expert on hip hop but I know when I feel that belly booty vibe and North Philly’s Ghais Guevara gives it to me on “Camera Shy,” which incidentally takes a spicy stand against monogamy while providing motivational-affirmational rocket fuel for your beautiful spirit, with a nice sharp edge.
I’m keepin’ up in the discussions with the littest niggas
And by extension, you in pictures with the baddest bitches
And all the people that ain’t never hit your jack before is tryna get your information
Don’t you feel amazing?
And your gratitude is very much appreciated
You ain’t runnin’ from it, uh, damn

7038634357 is Neo Gibson‘s phone number and musical alias. Can’t remember if I wrote about their 2023 album Neo Seven, but I was a big fan of its throbbing, minimalist emotionality. New one “Grace Eject” delivers a kind of heartful take on Philip Glass, with a million tiny stabs of digital ecstasy.

It’s hard to pin a genre on Mean Bacharach; he’s kind of in the orbit of jazz… maybe alt-jazz if that’s a thing, but he basically pours his cool cat flow over clipped and crafted instrumentation and creates a sound that’s mostly quite arty and unmelodic but draws you in with its alien beats and atmosphere. It took a couple plays for me to get into it, and a lot of people won’t, which is always a pleasure. He gets closest to ear-friendly on title track “Sacrifice“:
I used to be so sure
I used to be so scared
I used to be too nice
I used to be so sane
I used to be so sure
I used to be so immature…

I’m gonna leave you with the latest precious stone birthed by my favorite boy ever Christopher Barnes aka Gem Club, which came out last year and somehow didn’t find me until now.
Tend to me for tonight
I am a fool
Rest your head on my chest
But you left the room
Tend to me for tonight
I can’t return
Lift your eyes up to mine
From across the room
cre you safe in the night love
cre we still apart
With no forgiveness
You’re not stopping now
Finally on something else
Sweet and light

25. Sega Bodega – Dennis
Fashion darling Salvador Navarrete took a few detours from his clubby avant-electronica into deviant, lysergic indie, finding a troubled, golden, gothic light — particularly on the sublime “Deer Teeth.”

24. Thee Alcoholics – Feedback
If Loop and the Jesus and Mary Chain had a rock baby it still might not rock as hard as Thee Alcoholics. Feedback was classic bikers, acid and chainsaws fun and it pummeled us right into 2025.

23. Brijean – Macro
Their Feelings album from 2021 felt so perfectly formed and definitive that I doubted there was anywhere for them to go, but they managed to expand their warm, buzzed Ipanema beach dance vibes into thrilling new shapes across bottomless Caipirinhas.

22. Peel Dream Magazine – Rose Main Reading Room
Joe Stevens and pals went thrifting and delighted in finding bits and bobs of the finest 90s alt-rock, then repurposed it all for a dream-pop quilt to dream under. Careful though, there are shards of darkness in there.

21. Mk.Gee – Two Star & The Dream Police
Michael Todd Gordon ripped a big rock-shaped hole into 2024, guesting on Saturday Night Live and hoovering up followers, whether leaning into alt-soul or heading downhome for some impressive fingerpicking.

20. Tierra Whack – World Wide Whack
Silly as Dr. Seuss with her inspired, cartoony, blocks-of-color presentation, she served sassy, arty edge, traveling first-class between pop, R&B and hip hop to achieve world domination.

19. The Bug – Machines
This one came in two different sizes, depending on how much of Kevin Martin‘s delicious, dubby, dancey pounding you wanted to submit to. Favorite tracks: “Brutalized,” “Floored,” “Hypnotised,” “Buried,” “Gutted.”

18. Asher White – Home Constellation Study
White reimagined 60 years of guitar pop-rock with the style and imagination of pre-MAGA Ariel Pink and a Brill Building feel for melody. Trippy weirdo brilliance you could hum in the shower.

17. Storefront Church – Ink and Oil
An Important Album, awash in orchestral arrangements, cathedral-sized emotion, Scott Walker-esque gravitas and tunes up the ass.

16. Melt Banana – 3+5
Yasuko and Ichiro showed the kids how it’s done, forging art, noise and punk into a terrifying, stylized alloy that crushed skulls and bones and left piles of bodies lifeless and so so satisfied.

15. Two Shell – Two Shell
The London tricksters kept their identities secret (ish) as they rode the momentum of the delirious hyperpop perfection of “home” and “love him” into a surprising and imaginative debut album that kept things fresh and hyper and still reasonably pop.

14. Tashi Wada – What Is Not Strange
Mr. Julia Holter is a rather spectacular composer, inventing new sounds and silences and expanding the possibilities of what a song can be; forging a sensual, pleasured avant-garde with a taste for drone (and bringing in the missus on vocals).

13. Morwell – Into the Light
This one flew well under the radar, only getting reviewed in The Quietus, but it’s a unique, brilliant concoction: snippets of cheesy new-age spoken word set to shimmering, deconstructed grooves, drily humorous and oddly profound.

12. Nonpareils – Rhetoric & Terror
He made his mark as one half of Liars in the first part of the century; on this one Aaron Hemphill slowed up the tempo, crooning in sinister siren hues, tempting us to join him in unimaginable murky pleasures.

11. Chanel Beads – Your Day Will Come
Apparently Shane Lavers and Maya McGrory are quite the 2024 sensation in lower Manhattan, and rightly so. They deconstructed indie rock, bringing to mind Dean Blunt, or an acoustic My Bloody Valentine, but pushed miles beyond their influences into a dreamy, displaced groove — subtle, powerful and richly unclassifiable.

10. Cindy Lee – Diamond Jubilee
Cindy is Patrick Flegel‘s drag persona; her sound is a dusty, hard to define imagining of something like 60s rock and tragic girl group pop. Diamond Jubilee was the event of the indie year — 32 songs, all of them good to great, on an album you couldn’t stream. Adding to the mystique, Cindy quickly tired of all the hype and cancelled her tour less than a month in.

9. Gee Tee – Prehistoric Chrome
More dirty feet and jawbreakers pleasure from the brattiest band from down under. They delivered boy joy again and again — grungy, hooky, dumb (but not really), and always under two minutes.

8. DJ Lycox – Guetto Star
A true original, Lycox spun the dancefloor attack of Afro-Portuguese Batida into ornate, soulful concoctions with diffracted beats — alien, intoxicating, irresistible.

7. urika’s bedroom – Big Smile, Black Mire
Tchad Cousins invited us over for a floaty, tranced out sleepover. We got high on acoustic rhythms, dipped our feet in the brine pool, shared gentle nightmares. Holes in the head poured water…

6. Being Dead – Eels
16 more helpings of baroque pop rock from Austin’s best. They sound like Texas, but in a good way. I saw them live at Gold Diggers and they were adorable, so funny and unassuming, with like a million great songs.

5. Homeshake – Horsie
Montréal’s Peter Sagar conveyed the foggy consciousness of emotional convalescence — slightly numb, in and out of alpha state, with self-hugs and fragmented attempts to process it all. A pretty/ugly self-portrait in globby green and ochre oils.

4. Mdou Moctar – Funeral for Justice
An earth-scorching scream of righteousness that’s also a collection of sign-of-the-horns rager anthems. Mdou turbo-charged desert blues with his fiery guitar god skills for one of 2024’s most ecstatic thrill rides.

3. The Smile – Wall of Eyes
I’ve spent half my life muttering about Radiohead being overrated, but Wall of Eyes was just undeniable — swoony and croony, bleak and amelodic/melodic, languorous, freeform and poetic, every song a classic. A fine wine.

2. Bolis Pupul – Letter to Yu
The crown jewel of the 2020s synth-pop renaissance was the debut solo album by a Chinese-Belgian bloke from Ghent who’s pushing 40. He bowed down to totems like Vince Clark, Art of Noise and Vitalic and sounded like the future, if the future was Chinese, which it may well be. Fresh and fun and crazy experimental and danceable and never too far from the orbit of pop.

1. Seefeel – Everything Squared
30 years ago they were the first guitar band to be signed to Warp, and they’re still peaking, still like no one else — sculpting in clouds of sound, creating bejeweled, hypnotic universes and deep, layered expressions of emotion.

Honorable Mentions:

A. G. Cook — Britpop
Beak — >>>>
BIG|BRAVE — A Chaos of Flowers
Chelsea Wolfe — She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She
Chris Cohen — Paint a Room
Dar Disku — Dar Disku
David Lynch and Chrystabell — Cellophane Memories
Doechii — Alligator Bites Never Heal
Fine — Rocky Top Ballads
Flo Milli — Fine Ho, Stay
Goat Girl — Below the Waste
Google Earth — Street View
h. pruz — No Glory
Kee Avil — Spine
Lee “Scratch” Perrry — King Perry
Loma — How Will I Live Without a Body?
Merce Lemon — Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild
Molina — When You Wake Up
Mount Kimbie — Sunset Violent
Mustafa — Dunya
Naum Gabo — F. Lux
Omar Souleyman — Erbil
Or:la — Trusting Theta
Osees — SORCS 80
PACKS — Melt the Honey
r3ll1k — Удали мой номер
Saramaccan Sound — Where the River Bends Is Only the Beginning
Solpara — Melancholy Sabotage
Sour Widows — Revival of a Friend
Theis Thaws — Theis Thaws
Tony Vaz — The Pretty Side of the Ugly Life
Verraco — Breathe… Godspeed
Voice Actor — Fake Sleep
Yeat — 2093
Zsela — Big for You

Altin Gün have been like the Led Zeppelin of my 2020s — the gold standard, the best party anywhere, releasing a string of excellently brilliant albums. They’ve been a genre unto themselves, melding traditional Turkish music with retro-dance and psych. But now Dar Disku, Bristol-based Bahrainians Mazen Al Maskati and Vish Matre, have manifested, mining a similar vein on their debut self-titled album, dreaming up new, thumping hybrids of dance and Araboiserie, casting a wider net that extends from India to Sudan.

Molina (secret first name Rebecca) is part of a vibrant scene of female artists in Copenhagen, sharing a studio with slowgraffitti Spotify playlist denizen Erika de Casier. Molina exploded unexpectedly on TikTok back in 2017 when “Hey Kids” ended up getting hundreds of millions of plays, which threw her into a bit of an identity crisis, but then she figured it out while she was pregnant and came up with the tasty When you wake up which is a bit less pop but honestly not a huge departure from what captured all those TikToking hearts. She reminds me of the early ’90s and the nearly forgotten shoegaze-adjacent pleasures of Lush. Final track “Organs” is quite the charmer:
In the post-summer
The organs begin to blush
They’re blushing and bursting
Blushing and bursting
In the post-summer
The skin begins to fade
It fades and mourns
Fades and mourns
Just like a heart attack
Where’s the light at?

OK so all you guuuuuhly men might want to skip ahead whilst we discuss Kevin Martin, who has been around for a hot minute, originally in a band cutely named GOD. Under his The Bug moniker he captured my heart with the onomatopoeic metal baton violence of “Skeng,” and now he’s hitting an all new bludgeoning stride. Machines is weaponized dub with exquisitely layered production, equally suitable for catatonic deep baked pleasure and for banging your head against marble statues.

Oh my, quelle tour de force!
How about shifting into something a bit warm and feathery yet urgently contemporary? urika’s bedroom (driver’s license name Tchad Cousins, if you must know) is a vortex of gentle, pained power, drilling down into emotion with raw poetry, drawing you close with trancey, loungey rhythms and hypnotic post-folk-rock guitar patterns. On “Junkie” he muses,
You’re dipping your feet in the brine pool
How it feels, I wonder, to be new
Is it real? Is it true? Pure energy
Fingerprints on the screen, are you missing me?
Distortion, it’s a shifting reality
But so sweet, you talk to me with clarity
It’s a birdsong, or a siren, or a cavity
Is it real? Is it true? Pure energy

In these troubled times, it’s important to keep up with what’s keeping moody after-hours scenes chilled and hypnotized. Ireland’s own Or:la first came to prominence with the tasty track “UK Lonely,” and she’s been tearing shit up on the jagged edges of dance ever since. Her debut album Trusting Theta sees her moving through minimalist, electroclashy architecture. She serves ice and she serves sex; her delivery is haute drag queen couture. On “Slay the Beast” she navigates a resonant lyric or two:
Eyes like arrows
Flying through the night
Pinned on me
But my curves swerve
Shaking to the shimmy of a beat
Electric fire pulsing at my feet
I’m fire, I rage
Ash and iris black
Eyes rush to the back
The sweat beads that roll like pearls
Through the smoke we’re living for the girls…

Oh shit, I’m getting vacuumed back into the vortex of warped indie women of Denmark yumminess. This time it’s Fine Glindvad Jensen — you can call her Fine — spinning dreamy, heartfelt webs. Her Rocky Top Ballads album is a bangers-heavy assortment of sweet and sour mid-tempo indie bonbons — what to choose? “Days Incomplete” is a beckoning point of entry, Fine letting her Hope Sandoval-esque drawl drip down the sides of her sketch of a botched love affair:
Your eyes are telling stories
Our city from a bathroom floor
[…]
Would you get lost with me my love?
Feel ageless, watch it from above?
The big blue sky 101
How did you come to fear holding on?
I’ve come to lighten this heart of mine
A flame still burns from time to time…

DJ Lycox has been one of the stars of the rather thrilling Afro-Portuguese Batida scene, and on his new Guetto Star album he slows things down a bit and gets soulful, ever within an exotic world that sounds modern and urban as well as the opposite of all that — folky and tribal you might say. I’m dying to know what the lyrics to “Edson no Uige” are, but it comes at you with a powerful sense of longing and gets reprised later in the album, on the instrumental “Staring at the Moon.” Elsewhere, Lycox delivers straight up driving, hypnotic beats flavored with unfamiliar sonic spices that pry one’s palate open to unknown pleasure.

I don’t know about you, but I’m always on the look out for the perfect song to lip synch if I should need to perform in drag. British girl group FLO have a new one called “Walk Like This,” a little pop masterpiece in which the inciting incident is “My baby, he be lovin’ on this.” The lyrics can be interpreted in delightfully vulgar and borderline disturbing ways as one wonders how much damage her baby might have caused with his lovin’. “There’s a reason I walk like this…”

slowgraffitti has been worshipping at the temple of Two Shell ever since being blessed by the miraculous ecstasy of “home” back in ’22, followed by the spiritual transcendence of “love him” last year. They’ve done their best to keep themselves anonymous and are known for their prank-filled anti-marketing marketing — they love sending out decoys and once, famously, had four simultaneous gigs around London. The point being, they have their first proper album out and it’s self-titled, brilliant and important, stretching their sculpted sugar hyperpop into new forms — myriad ones in fact. It exists in a realm far above music reviews, packaging the entire history of sound into 13 Pez candies that you must dance to.

I might be repeating myself, but part of the allure of Italo Disco is that there’s no official or reliable canon of “best songs” — there seems to be a bottomless trove of material, and decades into exploring it you can find a new best song ever in there. “Pretty Face” by Styloo essentializes everything that was shallow, glamorous and acute-angle poetic about the Italian ’80s, with remarkably absurd, camp, fierce and possibly even profound lyrics.

When the dreams
Run in my mind
Then I forget
My second life
But look at me
In my pinky times

I don’t care
If you think of me
That I’m guilty
I know my face
Is looking right
All this could be
Alright for me

Never can kill my pretty face
Never can shoot me in the back
Nothing can kill my younger dreams
‘Cause a dream is hard to die

Since Y2K South Korea has been this kind of miraculous hub of thrilling filmmaking, producing an amazing body of work that’s both popular and auteur, from Bong Jooh-ho and Park Chan-wook‘s wild early films up through mega-sensations Parasite and Squid Game. In music, on the other hand, shiny and sugary K-pop is almost all that’s washed up on Western shores. Like any serious connoisseur of fine music I am a big fan of “Gangnam Style“; I’m sure there are plenty of other gems within the genre but what I’ve heard is, um, I don’t know, I mean I can be deeply moved by pop music but let’s not put too much pressure on a genre that’s 90% air. Seriously though, “Gangnam Style,” what a song, what a video, what a party. Parannoul, within that context, is kind of a bolt from the blue, an M83-style wall of passion based in idealism and friendship. Pretty much as indie as it gets. There were a couple of excellent jams on 2021’s To See the Next Part of the Dream. New one “A Lot Can Happen“ (which in my experience is very true) is maybe their best track yet, with earnest, heartfelt lyrics that sound positively Midwestern. Translated into English, “Even after еverything, I want to believe the feeling lasts forever / Hope nothing happens tomorrow and the day after / See you soon.”

Sudanese Torontonian Mustafa has created a dark, perfumed well of a record, his remarkable, androgynous voice plumbing depths of emotion whilst considering matters of spirituality, bringing to mind both Tracy Chapman and Sinead O’Connor somehow. On Dunya, his arrangements straddle folk and pop, with middle-eastern accents; the production makes you feel like he’s confiding secrets from inches away. Show-stopping ballad “Imaan“ is a sketch of a forbidden love story, a tangle of faith and religious taboos: “Imaan, I’m standing here / By your work place / Hoping that you’re there / I’m wearing the things you said / On my face / Like they’re a prayer / You left me on a tight rope / Between God and your father / And there’s not enough air..”

For whatever reason, Liars never made an impression on me, I’m sorry but they didn’t, and I don’t have time to re-evaluate their 10 albums plus singles and remixes. I’m a busy person even though other people might not consider me to be. I think of them as thrashy, arty, New York was so much better before Giuliani kind of stuff. Or am I mixing them up with The Rapture? In any case their keyboardist Aaron Hemphill has a rather louche and fragrant new one with his band Nonpareils that’s been haunting the damp underground corridors of slowgraffitti International Inc., luring in all sorts of unsavory characters — creating a fertile human substrate in which to root our ambitions of world domination. Everybody wins. Anyways, it’s called Rhetoric & Terror and it gets a little low-key demonic so proceed AYOR, but maybe check out these yummy lyrics from “Opening Chord“: “The cat got out and escaped but brought something back to you / C’mon let’s place the parts with heart out of view / You can call it prayer when we’ve all won / Then God will get named when boredom’s to blame it’s just what you do... Oh oh oh we argue fate / Oh oh oh we’ve all made big mistakes / Rodents will carry what dies away... Will we topple it down with sound?”

Who is Tony Vaz? We know he’s from Brooklyn, so that’s comforting. The Pretty Side of the Ugly Life album got reviewed in the Fork but otherwise there’s practically nothing online about him. He looks South Asian fwiw. In any case the album is pretty spectacular, sparking off in endless imaginative directions, grounded to some extent in 80s indie, with a shimmering sense of melody, dotted here and there with dollops of country and western sour cream. The specter of Dean Blunt lurks in certain dusty, deadpan corners of the proceedings, and fellow traveler Pretty V also comes to mind. On slowgraffitti charts smash hit single “9 Lives,” Tony enlists fellow up-and-comer Alena Spanger for some elliptical harmonizing: “In my home time / Delayed my soul time / Now war is over / So the night is soft / Stare through the wall at the setting sun / Nine lives, eight down [...] Tonight I feel haunted and safe / Tonight I feel confidently like obsession.”

A familiar, bitter/sexy croak pokes its head up from the rich soil of my Spotify “songs to preview” playlist. My old buddy Tricky is back with a new project called Theis Thaws, a collaboration with Mike Theis of Paris, and it’s a reliably rocky road to wicked late-night pleasures. “Fly to Ceiling“ is a gothy dance workout with guest vocals by Tricky‘s latest Martina, Rosa Rocca-Serra. “Frozen Rivers“ has the classic sound of lounge angst that made him a legend: “Longest time waiting for the light / The thaw / Shortest time drifting / A sudden night / It’s early evening and I’m / Watching it fall, each flake / I watch it fall, should we walk away / Snow fall / The words I can’t say / You hold me close / & I melt away...”

Lovely as it is, folk music can be a bit safe, a bit tried and tested, a bit dusty and tasteful, not much to say about it other than yep it sounds like the hardships of simple, hard-working people of olden times. Shovel Dance Collective disagree, creating bold and challenging work in striking new forms. They caught hold of my inner ear a few years back with the bitter proclamations of “My Husband’s Got No Courage in Him,” and now they’re back with a new, self-titled album and the rather astonishing eight-minute tour de force “The Merry Golden Tree.” The lead vocal becomes hypnotic, seeming to turn into a bagpipe on sustained notes in which a chorus of other voices eventually joins in. The subject matter is suitably rich with menace, death and betrayal — the small titular sea vessel comes across the Jolly Roger pirate ship and the captain despairs, “They’ll sink us in the low and the lonesome low / They’ll sink us to the bottom of the lowland sea.” But a little cabin boy claims he can sink the pirates, and the captain offers, “Well I’ll give you gold and I’ll pay you fee / My youngest daughter and she will marry thee.” So the cabin boy swims over and drills holes in the Jolly Roger and sinks it, but when he returns the captain totally fucks him over — no gold, no daughter, and in fact tells him, “I’ll sink you in the low and the lonesome low / Leave you to drown in the lowland sea.”

Remember in 2010 when Dan Snaith AKA Caribou lit up hearts and dancefloors with Swim? He’s had a couple of albums since then, but nothing quite as world-conquering. Now he’s back with a proudly bald junior high school math teacher look and an album called Honey on which — pro tip — make sure and seek out track 5 “Come Find Me,” a mid-tempo slow burner that reminds me of Daft Punk and Röyksopp at their most soulful/vulnerable.

I tried looking up musicians from Pittsburgh and yeah, not too many that made a big mark. The mighty Black Moth Super Rainbow, who actually have a really cool new song out called “All 2 of Us“ (that is in no way a departure from their idiom), are from there — who knew?

Pittsburgh also claims Christina Aguilera, although per Mrs. Wikipedia her family actually moved around a lot, and during her time in the City of Bridges Beautiful Chris had to be taken out of school and homeschooled because of bullying and kept reminding herself —

What actually has transported me to western Pennsylvania, however, is a rather impressive new album by burger Merce Lemon called Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild. It’s lush, wide-screen, country or country-adjacent, high drama, and very American. Americana is what I believe the Brits call it. If we’re honest that’s a euphemism for dad rock, but Merce transcends it all with her drizzled dark honey vocals and soulful lyrics. She sets up a languid scene in “Backyard Lover“: “I am aimless in my lovin’ / Caught the tail end of your set / Before I went to bed / But I don’t get out much / Met a lover in my backyard / Watching from my room / Honey I’ll come down soon...” But the song turns out to be about a friend’s death, and builds to searing emotion: “Maybe she was / She was right / What dying felt like / A wooden spoon tossed in the fire / ‘Cause nothing’s good enough / You fucking liar...”

When a member dies while they’re still in their prime, bands have to make hard choices through their grief. Joy Division famously went from guitars to EDM; Stereolab poignantly replaced Mary Hansen‘s vocals with a plaintive horn; Pink Floyd undertook world domination. Come to think of it Syd Barrett didn’t actually die until decades after his Floyd tenure, but you know what I mean. So let’s talk about the new Alan Sparhawk album. I remember going check out Low on a warm Saturday afternoon in ‘95, when they played on the sidewalk in front of the short-lived-forever-cherished No Life Records. Alan was quite a beauty, and I can’t say the thought of “how did the sour-faced chubby girl with an admittedly angelic voice bag him” didn’t cross our superficial minds. But of course Mimi was super special too, and their harmonizing on “Throw Out the Line“ is a milestone in the history of pleasure. Low‘s sound was already embracing dissonance on their final album, but now Alan has re-emerged looking like a cross between Kim Gordon and Buffalo Bill for his first release since Mimi‘s death, tweaking his vocals with high-pitched chipmunk cartoon hyperpop autotune. It’s often quite beautiful — he’s always been a master of melody. But if you’re looking for tender ruminations on grief you’ll have to dig pretty deep into subtext — the vibe of the lyrics is more like druggy art rock Iggy Pop anarchy. On opener “Get Still“ our Alan offers, “Do you want a big thrill / Do you wanna get real / Do you wanna get still / I’m a wanna make a deal deal / Eighty acres of trill / Everybody on strip pill / ‘Body on drip kick / And it’s so much wicked...”

Seefeel emerged in the early ’90s — the kind of band that totally captures or actually creates a zeitgeist — corralling the ringing, vaporous vibe of shoegaze into the hypnotic template of trance. “Time to Find Me” off their first record is a slowgraffitti-certified song of GOAT greatness — made even groovier/sexier in a couple of oh so subtle remixes by Aphex Twin. But as Diana Vreeland used to say, I LOATHE nostalgia; lets just say the ‘feel went on to knock up the ’90s with plenty more of their trademark delirium and then vaporized for real for quite a while. Eventually founding members Mark Clifford and Sarah Peacock re-surfaced sans drummer. Their latest one I think benefits from less percussion — it’s bold and unmistakably their own and less tethered to the ground than ever. Forest Swords comes to mind in the way they conjure powerful emotion within the cool constructs of electronica.

Speaking of the ’90s, which is something I honestly never do, do you guys remember a Japanese band called Melt Banana? Apparently they came out the same time as Seefeel, and — you probably know where this is going… I clearly never even checked them out and now they’re on their like ninth or thirteenth album and it’s called 3+5 and it’s pretty much exactly the high pitched, arty punky dayglo noise pop that’s been missing in my life for the past 35 years. I’d love to share some lyrics but Yasuko and Ichiro seem to be keeping their screechy poetry to themselves; if you can parse them please let me and the world know.

I promise you I’m really trying to get out of the ’90s, but if you’ll allow me, back in my day there always seemed to be one undisputed queen of hip hop, whether it was Latifah or Li’l Kim or Nicki Minaj, but nowadays they’re growing like mushrooms — her latest royal highness is Doechii out of Tampa— pronouns “she, her, black bitch” lol. “Doechii cooler than a fan, but she get hotter than a sauna / Take a trip out of Japan and I tsunami her vagina / Wine and dine her, Benihana / I’m the new hip-hop Madonna,” she contemplates on “Nissan Altima.” “I’m the trap Grace Jones / I don’t know what type of motherfuckin’ crack they on / I’m like Carrie Bradshaw with a back brace on / I been carrying you bitches now for way too long…” Even better is “Denial Is A River,” in which a friend offers “Okay, I just feel like this is the perfect opportunity for us to just take a second and kind off unpack what’s happened to you,” and after a bit of deflecting Doechii gets very real: “Honestly, I can’t even fucking cap / This is a really dark time for me / I’m goin’ through a lot / By a lot, you mean drugs? / Um, I wouldn’t— / Drugs? / No, it’s a— / No? / It’s a natural plant / No, I’m not judging / I’m not an addict […] I mean fuck, I like pills, I like drugs / I like gettin’ money, I like strippers, I like to fuck / I like day-drinkin’ and day parties and Hollywood / I like doin’ Hollywood shit, snort it, probably would / What can I say? The shit works, it feels good / And my self-worth’s at an all time low…”

I don’t believe we’ve properly discussed John Vanderslice… he had a groovy one last year called CRYSTALS 3.0 that combined rambly shambly acoustic stuff with digital noise attacks. I could be wrong but he seems like one of those outsider artist genius weirdos in the tradition of Roky Erikson and Daniel Johnston. He has a long and storied career that reached a peak of sorts in the late aughts with a classic, dreamy ballad called “Too Much Time.” ANYway, he’s back with a new project called Google Earth (with pal James Riotto) that actually kinda reminds me of vaporwave, but, shockingly, with some warmth at its center. Particularly on the creamy, futuristic “something complicated.” “How simply can you say…”

And have we talked about John Dwyer before? We haven’t?? He’s seriously been the hardest working man in rock since like forever, with endless iterations and tweaks to the name of his band Thee Oh Sees, currently chopped down to Osees. His schtick is basically ’60s garage rock filtered through punk and new wave, which you’d think would get tiresome, but he’s a seriously florid fountain of genius who bends his area of interest into a million different colors, shapes and sizes and probably writes an underground pop hit a day on average. I saw Thee Oh Sees at the legendary FYF Fest of 2013, and they were like this adorable rock beast with four heads, so utterly psychically connected. Dwyer fired them all shortly after that and assembled a new band before long. Some of his grooviest stuff is just him getting weird in the ’10s with a cheap old synth, under the moniker Damaged Bug. He’s made well over 30 albums and his latest one SORCS 80 is as fresh and funky and smiley-sneering as a pimply teenager. I have tried and failed to not move my glutes to “Also the Gorilla…” featuring Dwyer’s fractured sonnet “Who don’t give a fuck about the / Pretty flowers grown in the dirt / And make a point of laying around / Why don’t you make a screaming sound?”

OK, so I guess I buried the lead this month — the big AOTY contender is Peel Dream Magazine‘s soft and dreamy new collection of shimmering baubles titled Rose Main Reading Room. Main man Joe Stevens is originally from New York State and first emerged in Brooklyn (he looks very Brooklyn) but he’s in L.A. now (of course) and the album is all wistful reminiscences of NYC. Musically he picks up threads of ’90s interpretations of the ’60s (I promise I won’t bring up the ’90s again) to create ornate, lighter than air sound brocades. Is that a Stereolab “lalala” on “Wish You Well“? In which Stevens paints a vivid portrait with a bitter little word bouquet: “Netherworld destroyer, leave it at the foyer / I was sent to bore you, obviously / Get yourself a piece, a brand new kill to feast…” He then cleverly subverts the sense of the song title by adding a word to it: “I wish, I wish, I wish you were well.” Is “I Wasn’t Made for War” an obscure Belle and Sebastian B-side? With lyrics such as “I was in wait for the train to the city and / I was innately vain, what a pity and / All of the the boys on my block were the kind that want / War and glory, glory / I want you…” Come to think of it, most classic B&S songs (the Stuart Murdoch ones) were actually written in 2nd or third person. OK, digression over, the takeaway here is that RMRR is a most tingly addition to the indie dream pop rock canon.

Austinites Being Dead had one of slowgraffitti’s albums of 2023 and they’re already back with a new one that rocks equally sweet and hard. I mean full disclosure it hasn’t been released yet at press time but the four songs they’ve unveiled are all prime Angus beef for sonic carnivores. They’ve got a southern ’60s party vibe like The B52’s but they lean into the more ornate chamber pop end of that fabled decade with tightly constructed multi-part mini-extravaganzas, beaucoup harmonies and western twang. Their Spotify liner notes fall somewhere between surreal alt-comedy and trying too hard smart ass-ness, but they definitely have Texas-size confidence. “Firefighters” is a lovely reverie that doesn’t end well, or not exactly: “If I could turn back time / I’d live by the oceanside / And die by pacific waves / But I’m melting away / Angels flying side by side / a’Dorning wings make fire flies / It’s hard to die but what a treat / When you fly with angel wings / Ba-ba-ba-ba…”

Earlier this year I bestowed many a charmingly appreciative word on gothy goddess Chelsea Wolfe, and now she’s impressed me further by roping in the aforementioned reclusive genius Matthew Edward Barnes aka Forest Swords to remix “Whisper In The Echo Chamber,” with his characteristic ceremonial gravitas and vast, hollow, metallic beats. La Wolfe‘s Undone EP (an on-brand title that) features quite a lineup of high fashion producers, including Boy Harsher and Ash Koosha.

Cellophane Memories is the second collab between David Lynch and Chrystabell, a singer from Texas whom he seemingly manifested with his spooky TM-powered mind much like he seemed to do with Julee Cruise. (RIP by the way — I literally fell in love right as Floating Into The Night came out back in, well, 1990 actually… I remember creating loopy, morphing designs on a Mac SE using Aldus Freehand, sitting at my desk at the Apparel News, my brain chemistry flooded with oxytocin and dopamine, daydreaming about my San Francisco boo, whilst Julee quivered on my boombox, “Fa-aaa-aaa-ling… with youuuuuuu…”) I should probably explore and report back on Dave and Chrys‘s first record This Train but who has time these days? Suffice it to say Cellophane Memories (incidentally — crap title, I’m sorry but someone had to say it!) is lyrically very much in the Lynch and Badalamenti canon — deceptively simple, dreamy 50s-inflected songs about purest love quietly threatened by dark and menacing horror. But Chrystabell brings something rich and unusual to the sound — a layering and a degree of dissonance that put it in dialogue with the world of contemporary indie. “And now there was a feeling / A feeling of falling,” she intones on slowgraffitti favorite “The Answers to the Questions,” “She felt she would never find the answer / The answer to the questions / The questions she asked him / When he was here she thought they had a bond / An unshakable bond / But was it too good to be true / She fell into a dark dream of despair / Dark clouds roiling above in a dark wind / But then she saw him / She saw him in light / She saw him in love.”

I feel like Kurt Cobain has been haunting my Spotify. I’m usually a total derivativeness cop, but Dale Crover actually played with Nirvana (he’s best known as the drummer for the Melvins) and I mean what do you think? This one sounds eerily like Kurt using Dale‘s body to communicate from grunge heaven (minus Kurt‘s universe-bending vocal timbre of course).

And what about this one from Brooklynites Sex Week?? To be fair it has a shoegazey chorus, but, again, I smell Olympia ectoplasm…

Wow, this month in music really flew by! It’s Friday night now, somewhere, and in terms of toons to hypothetically go out to a club to, the state of the art is Australian, in the human form of Maxwell Byrne AKA 1tbsp, who puts out hyperpop-adjacent sharp and sweaty bangers aplenty, but the one that truly puts me in that fondly remembered mind-state of doing a bump and driving fast towards fun through a forest of skyscrapers is “The City Never Felt So Good.”

It took me a minute to get into Loma‘s new one, How Will I Live Without a Body? I can usually give a listen to a couple of the tracks that have the most plays on Spotify and know whether I’m gonna dig an album, and I gave it a pass. But the other day I literally ran out of new stuff to preview, and I thought I’d re-create my old gag of playing five CDs on shuffle on my multi-CD player, and shuffled it on a Spotify playlist alongside the new ones from Brijean, Storefront Church, Asher White and Homeshake and they all turned out to have deep benches of velvety deep cuts. If I’m honest I had the new Moby in the mix too, which is, you know, I don’t know. I do love the track serpentwithfeet sings on.

Anyway, Loma contains Jonathan Meiburg of Shearwater, one of the most sensational sensations of my personal aughts, and once I dug into the deep cuts HWILWAB turned out to be rich with the hypnotic melodic magic Meiburg is known for, plus collaboratrix Emily Cross‘s southwestern desert honey vocals. And third band member Dan Duszynski. Opener “Please, Come In” sets the tone on an album that’s in a sense a long plea to let go and connect: “All time / Flies like / One foot / In front / Some time / Stays close by / Stays within / Find trust / In flight / Once let / Free said / Please once / My friend / I said / Please come in.”

Brijean serve up a total thongs and daiquiris on a white sand beach vibe. They’re kind of the quintessential summer band, and it’s easy to dismiss them as being on the lite side. I also had the feeling they had peaked on their magnificent 2021 album Feelings. But they’re back to chill my every summer beverage with the extremely excellent Macro album. “Rollercoaster” goes down so easy, like Stereolab on Indica: “Life’s just a rental / Experimental / I know you’re sentimental / Come on, ride the waves, the highs and lows…” coos Brijean Murphy, before layering in a bit of darkness: “And lows and lows and lows and lows…”

Ink and Oil, the new Storefront Church, is the stylistic antithesis of all that — a collection of massive, crushing, monumental treatises, with tunes you can hum in the shower. Lukas Frank, in the tradition of Sufjan Stevens and Jeff Buckley, is living proof that God is unfair — he’s both unreasonably talented and stunningly handsome. He charges out of the gate with the heady sprawl of “The High Room“: “All the walls are grated with tiny office spaces / Dim, fluorescent faces mill about their stalls / Stairs kick out beneath me, into watery air / I’m reaching, but I don’t seem to be going anywhere / Come out of the night, wild and without mind / Like headlights headed south on the northbound side / They speak in visions, they are my guides / And their decision is love, love, love…” Things only build from there, abetted by a full orchestra no less. Scott Walker comes to mind. This is an Important Album, and a delicious 12-course musical delirium.

My parents were pretty groovy in their day. My dad was a big Sinatra fan, and they had a nice little record collection that I started exploring at age 7, after outgrowing my Mary Poppins and Jungle Book soundtracks. I remember swooning along to Dean Martin‘s swoony “In the Chapel in the Moonlight,” and parsing “Second Hand Rose” off My Name Is Barbra 2. “…from Se-cond A-ve-nuuuuue… New?” They had Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter, featuring the much beloved sex song “Let’s Do It” with the immortal line “even educated fleas do it.” It loses its nerve at the end, going “Let’s do it / let’s fall in love!” There was a compilation called That’s What I Call Rhythm & Blues which seems to have been scrubbed from the collective memory, but I’m quite sure I remember Otis and I did some “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay.” Hard to imagine now, but my mom was a Joan Baez fan; I remember her explaining to me the lyrics of gothic infanticide ditty “Down by the Greenwood Side.” Funny how of all the big counterculture stars of the ’60s Joan is rarely mentioned. I took a little Joan plunge the other night and came up with her astonishing soprano on “Wild Mountain Thyme,” which got me digging around for the original, which turns out to be by The McPeake Family of Belfast, and is equally gorgeous (they call it “Will Ye Go Lassis, Go“).

Like a lot of indie circa 2024, Asher White‘s Home Constellation Society feels like it grew in ’70s soft rock soil, but it’s been grafted and espaliered and topiaried into striking new forms. “Downstate Prairie” is delightfully jarring with its thrash metal elements and vaguely Broadway structure; it gives me pissed off gay midwestern teenager vibes (though I don’t know if Asher has ever been one): “O your shirt so worn / the moths make shapes in stitches / like those rows of corn that flank the ditches / so run where the taps run warm in cold view / hungry for a storm to tell you off / no more borrowing the collar and the trouser and the boot!”

And on “Capital Cowboy” Asher delivers everything I miss about Belle and Sebastian (more on them later) in their melancholy, arched-brow prime: “old enough to know that crap / i don’t look good in the photographs / but at home / i’m marilyn monroe / time won’t take another path / just like it said in my zodiac / so then i’m thrown / there’s someone on the phone / and he rides in cheap blue leather and he knows hey hey hey / that our lives will keep getting better and slow hey hey hey…”

Avid readers will recall that last month I rhapsodized about the glories of late lamented 80s gay bar The One Way, and it inspired me to work on a mixtape of current music that channels that dark menergy. Perhaps the artist that best captures the vibe is Solpara, a Lebanese-American Brooklynite, whose debut album Melancholy Sabotage is out on Other People, Nicolas Jaar‘s label (come to think of it, Jaar is another one of those ridiculously beautiful, ridiculously talented monsters). “Measures” is gothy industrial dance with church bells on it (bells are the most reliable way to get slowgraffitti’s attention) and puts me in mind of Fini Tribe and their glorious 1988 masterpiece “Detestimony.”

John Belushi smashing Stephen Bishop‘s guitar in Animal House was a watershed moment for people like me, a beautiful rejection of the soft and the gentle. The lyrics to Bishop‘s song were “I gave my love a cherry that had no stone / I gave my love a chicken that had no bones” hahaha.

Punk and new wave were the music of m-m-m-my generation, at least for my particular demographic, and for a decade or two “soft” was just not on the menu except maybe ironically. When Belle and Sebastian came out with If You’re Being Sinister there was a fair amount of hype in the British music press, and I picked up the CD at my beloved Mod Lang in Berkeley. When I got home and put it on it totally scrambled my brain — surely I can’t be enjoying something so straightforwardly girly and sensitive? It was literally changing me the same way Never Mind the Bollocks did all those years before.

Chris Cohen is the latest in a long lineage of soft boys that have captured my ear-heart since that watershed moment, and he’s duking it out (or perhaps skipping through verdant fields of daisies) with Dylan Moon for softest boy in my summer 2024 playlist. “Up and down you climb / soon you’ll leave us far behind” he intones on “Sunever.” “Tree of wintergreen / Won’t you tell me what you’ve seen / Birch bark heal a wound / back in one piece soon / Now as childhood ends / Take a message to my friend…”

Wow, you guys are such good eaters! You want dessert? Of course there’s dessert. Here’s a little pop something from British cutey Pixey. See you soon! Meet me at the place where the vain kids go!

In Italy there’s a term, “tormentone estivo,” which basically means the pop song that hammers you all summer wherever you go. Remember “Get Lucky“ by Daft Punk? Pretty good song actually, but my point is that it’s getting to be that time when every man and woman must decide what the song of the summer is or should be.

Here at slowgraffitti global headquarters, from the basement mailroom to the terrorism-baiting 87th floor boardroom, we keep playing “Downer“ by underground megastar Dean Blunt, with that bloke from Animal Collective on the mike and toney British producer Vegyn also credited. It’s a bit shoegazey, with growly guitar and dreamy, melancholy vocals; it sounds like a beach bonfire of glowing emotion: “It’s coming into the place / Trying to keep it clear / Getting caught in the act / Embers into the air / Don’t let me go / Don’t let me go, my friend...”

I blurbed about Goat Girl last month but, quite criminally, I neglected to share their lyrics, and the fact is they have a summer megahit called “Motorway“ that’s been lighting up the slowgraffitti charts — it sounds like one of those cynical/nihilistic ‘80s movies with lots of slick asphalt, cigarettes and leather. “Sleep was meant for yesterday / Now it all just seems the same / We fucked it all away / Oh now the nights to blame / Driving driving / No confiding / Driving driving / Eyes averting...”

Or should summer ‘24 rightly be defined by what we danced to? Over at Biche House, slowgraffitti’s exclusive after-hours disco, our roster of distinguished international DJs are building their set lists around “The Paddle“ by Gene on Earth. Eugene Arthur is a bonafide A-lister in the DJ world, and this track manages to be both a good old-fashioned techno house ass wiggler and something a bit more sinister. The lyrics are something like “Pree. Dizhyr.” It rules. Also highly recommended: last year’s “Pulse Mode.”

But maybe the SOTS needs to be a pop song as God intended. I LUV IT by Camila Cabello is suitably sugary and autotuned and irresistible and it teases you with “feat. Playboi Carti“ on the label, which gets you all juiced up, but where the fuck is he? Two minutes into a 3 minute song all I hear is maybe some Playboi grunts in the background? The anticipation and doubt are killing me — but then suddenly there he is, loose and iconic, a timbre that resonates through the 27 dimensions, a slurring magnificence: “Oh, you on the road now? / Oh, you grown now? / Oh, you too grown now / You tryna take your time by your ‘lone / All this novocaine got ‘em numb to the drugs now / Movin’ on Mary Jane, I feel burnt out like the sun now / Aventador, SVJ, I’m ridin’ ‘round with her perm’ out / Pink cups, the Big Worm out / High as fuck, got the shroom now / I’m with two of ‘em like Clermont / Leave a nigga face down, fuckin’ ‘round, bitch nigga gon’ find out....” And all is well.

By now perhaps we’re all in the mood for a moody and languorous long-player, maybe something a bit guitary and Canadian? Peter Sagar aka Homeshake hails from the rich and fertile indie-rock soil of Montréal, and the vibe on his rather sensational Horsie album is sunbathing by the pool at your parents’ country home somewhere in South America, emotionally bruised from a breakup, trying to numb yourself with a fernet con coca. “Body frozen from the headlight shining down on me,” he drawls on “Nothing 2 See,” “If the moon’s out in the daytime, am I still asleep? / Do I gotta press a button just to cross the street? / Or is every car a ghost, and I’m still counting sheep?”

When James Blake materialized around 2010 it was astonishing; a Bowie-esque musical messiah was being gifted to us unworthy earthlings. He shape-shifted from abstract post-dubstep expressionist to neo soul crooner; everything he did was a revelation. I remember the day “Retrograde“ came out; it felt like he knew me better than I knew myself, and cared. “Be the girl you lost...” I remember playing it over and over in my car, in amazement. Anyway, eventually he got embraced by hip hop royalty and the quality of his output sputtered as the decade faded. But on last year’s Playing Robots into Heaven the magic was back, and recently he’s been popping up all over the place, delivering the strange and the smoochie, notably the clubby “Let Her Know“ under the alias CMYK — “I wasn’t strong enough / I wasn’t ready yet / I wasn’t everything yet / I wasn’t strong enough / But if you’re in her dream / If you’re in her dream / Let her know / Let her know / How she’s in my head / How she’s in my head...”

...And a croony, warbly album with Lil Yachty called Bad Cameo that splits the difference between soft boy indie and lump-in-throat R&B.

I’ve been hesitant to write about Sour Widows, I think because they’re so on brand for this blog it feels sort of redundant. Also, I don’t mean to be mean, but not a great band name. They’re from the culturally atrophied Bay Area — how does that even happen in 2024? But Maia Sinaiko and Susanna Thomson have that undeniable magic and deliver banger after indie guitar rock banger on full-length debut Revival of a Friend. I hear notes of Belly and The Breeders. On the sad and swoony “Witness“ they bemoan, “Be my witness / through two closed eyes / I have visions of my life / I can’t sleep sometimes / I just lose / to the change / My heart beating / like a fist against the veil / What’s the difference/ I’ll never change your mind...”

Norwegian duo Smerz (Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt) put out an alluring album called Allina earlier this year, one of those very fashion, very — I mean I would never use that roué word for female pudenda, but it would accurately describe the severe, slashing beauty of the record. In the vein of Miss Kittin. But the piece I want to direct you to is “Det som kom,” from their Tidligere den dagen album, a tough one to categorize, a kind of contemporary classical piece with electronic flourishes. The female chorus gives it a sense of historic declarations being made in front of great marble monuments and statues, although when you translate the lyrics from Norwegian they’re actually quite simple: “What came / When you turned around / All that came [...] Show me then / Build it up as it was / Show me then / Exactly as it was [...] Watch it rise / Look, it shines / Tramples, itches, feels nauseous / Soar, lighten.” Might make a good national anthem for some groovy micro-state. Lichtenstein? Faroe Islands? Vatican City?

Zsela is a perfectly of-the-moment artist, sort of splitting the difference between the suspended in aspic emotionality of Lucinda Chua and Nilüfer Yanya‘s elegant distillation of 90s indie. I was going to rhapsodize about her quintessentially British contralto refinement, but, um, it says here she’s totally American, from Brooklyn of all places. Is she R&B? Is she rock? Impossible to say. She’s a mystery; all I know is from her album cover — apparently she likes to do her hair up, take her shirt off and stare at her duplicate self in an empty movie theater. “Fire Excape“ is a sexy, slinky, shockingly non-cloying love song: “There’s a fire in the ocean / Wasn’t always willing but / We’ll get along / Quite fine thank you / Day breaks on the fire escape and / I’m falling in love / I’m falling down / Might you be around? / I’m falling down / Might you hear the sound?” But in case you think love is simple, she follows that one with “Not Your Angel“: “Pardon me, I, I don’t mean to act dumb / I don’t mean to act like you’re the only one / You’re not the only one / I wanna meet you over and over and over again / ‘Cause there’s so many you’s in you and I can’t get used to it.”

Back in ‘86 [”oh please no” — every Millennial-and-later blog reader], after my fantasy of moving to Berlin crumbled into dust, I got myself to L.A. and fell in with the art damage scene, centered on Jack Marquette and Jim Van Tyne‘s underground The•o•re•ti•cal parties, as well as Al’s Bar, the crumbling, graffittied downtown dive, and the One Way gay bar, where Van Tyne and Richard Escarsega would spin the latest post-punk and Belgian New Beat imports as amyl wafted and hankie codes signaled unspeakable desires under the dim light of a few red lightbulbs in a space where everything was painted black. Some of the luminaries of the scene were performance artists John Fleck, 6 foot 7 avant-drag queen Glen Meadmore, alt-rockers The Party Boys, Nervous Gender and Radwaste, artist/Screamers main guy Tomatâ du Plenty and choreographer Carol Cetrone. If the same scene had happened in New York they would have all become art world household names, but instead it’s been largely forgotten except to those who were part of it. Anyway, the scene was actually well documented in photographs by my buddies Rob Allen and Greg Cloud. About a month ago we got word that Rob had died in Brazil where he had been living for a good 20 years, on a remote farm, and Greg found a couple of mix tapes that Rob made back in ‘84 — featuring the very obscure (Dutch band Nasmak??), the undyingly ubiquitous (”Song to the Siren,” the Smiths and the Cocteau Twins), and the band we all adored, that actually got no radio play back then but has grown in stature over time, The Chameleons. My favorite discovery on the cassettes is “Film Noir“ by Savage Republic, who I had always rated as overly self-satisfied with their admittedly lovely packaging, and basically a band for straights (though actually I don’t know if they were). It’s classic angsty 80s guitar rock, with the memorable couplet “When danger calls, I have to answer / I walk the streets like a human cancer.”

Which brings me to the song that’s been the church into which I pour my summer tears. Written by Steve Winwood (who I think of as a dinosaur rocker but emerged as a serious pop entity in the ‘80s) and famously covered by La Whitney. Or not so famously — it was a rare bonus track. I feel like I’ve been hearing Whitney belt this one out for decades, but I guess it must’ve been the Winwood version which features Chaka Khan. Norwegian producer Kygo brought it up to date with a genius remix in 2019. The passion and vulnerability our Whitney puts into it is kind of astonishing. What a rare flower — clear evidence she was too sensitive for this world.
Also, please consider checking out the gloriously dumb video.

If you were around in the 90s you’ll remember what a cataclysm Tricky was, creating a revolutionary sound by distressing and decoupaging samples of classic soul and ladling Martina Topley-Bird‘s iconic vocals and his own croaky, fractured poetry over the top. His live show was otherworldly, a kind of extended séance where ghosts of his familiar songs would periodically surface and dematerialize. Anyway, I just got a hold of his 2019 autobiography Hell Is Round the Corner and devoured it in a couple of days. He describes his earliest memory of seeing his mother in a casket, and later getting a sense that she was writing lyrics through him from the other side. He grew up mixed-race in Knowle West, a white ghetto in Bristol, with uncles that killed people; he made friends with young criminals and seemed destined for a life of crime himself but he just couldn’t tolerate prison food. His sudden rise to fame and fortune is full of amazing, serendipitous moments, like when he gets some free studio time to record his first single and literally meets Martina when he finds her humming to herself, sitting on a wall around the corner from his house. He never loses his sense of wonder at being a kid from Knowle West who gets access to a life of crazy wealth and privilege.

I think of ‘20s Brooklyn as a picturesque wasteland of vegan gelato, Pilates studios, Korean designer coffees and such, but truthfully it still has a vibrant music scene, and Chanel Beads are doing their borough proud with the oblique and smoky pleasures of their Your Day Will Come album. Signature song “Police Scanner“ has a dusty, out of time quality, like the ‘80s beamed in from a different galaxy. The chanting female vocals against strummed guitar; the swelling, off-key keyboards — it sounds like the witnessing of something vast, something you can’t experience directly. Maybe the same universe as Alex G, but further out there. “You owe it to yourself / Gotta believe in something else / Looking at the guilt / Cannot break before it ends / Self care / Self aware / Good people out of view / Soul to bare / Changes come / Something strange yeah something new / Police scanner.”

Kee Avil‘s involuted, prickly anti-folk is like thought fragments you found on bits of crumpled notebook paper. There’s a delightfully diseased and obsessive undercurrent of violence to the Montréal artist’s witchy, hypnotic melodies on new album Spine — like early PJ Harvey in a haze of painkillers. On “Felt,” she opines that “I am you, you know, related by blood to the clock / Felt, velvet / I’ve shattered your reflection to breathe / To breathe in every shard of you / I’ve woven a silk cocoon / To breathe in every thread of you... “

You know, I admired Julia Holter‘s recent album though it didn’t annihilate me like some of her previous work. Yet Julia is nothing if not determined to bring me unknown pleasures and she has arranged to contribute vocals to “What Is Not Strange?“, the new one from her dream-boat boo Tashi Wada. It’s an album of bold and unusual time signatures, its carousel of analogue instrumentation bending into shapes that range from sickly to celebratory.

Summer is supposed to be fun you guys, and bratty Sydney retro-punks Gee Tee already have another album out and it feels like getting play-beaten up by an eight-year-old and then clobbering a piñata and eating all the candy. Prehistoric Chrome is 18 tight bursts of violent sunshine — none of the songs are over a minute 40 — it’s like cliff-notes for DEVO, it’s dumber than the Ramones, it’ll keep you happy until it’s time to go to fourth grade. “CAUSE I GOT A MESSAGE FOR ALL YOU EGGS / PISS OFF DORKS I NEED YOU DEAD / I THOUGHT DOIN MATH WAS SUCH A BORE / BUT WHEN I TALK TO YOU I WANNA DO MORE / AIN’T DUMB!”

Certain artists seem to develop an ecstatic following among people like me, but somehow, I don’t know, maybe because I wasn’t an early adopter or maybe because I’m more right than everyone else, I just can’t get into them. L**a D*l R*y comes to mind, or C****** xcx. I might even sit down and make myself listen to them yet they leave no impression. On the other hand, speaking of the latter, I guess I wasn’t that into hyper-pop when it was shiny and new, but it’s slowly dawning on me what a crazy talent the man behind the whole movement is — A. G. Cook has a new album out under his own name and it’s practically Cindy Lee size — 24 tracks across three “albums,” and as usual it’s chock full of digitally collaged munchkin vocal deliciousness. It’s got a creamy middle section that’s slowed down and in the vein of proper indie rock, like he’s 2/3s of the way to becoming the new Elliot Smith. He brings such emotional poignancy to all he does, and by God can he write a pop tune. Pretty much a minimalist with lyrics, and it works particularly well on “Soulbreaker“ with its mantra “’Cause, yeah, I know when I look in my heart / You’re a soul-breaker...” Apparently he’s been shacked up in Montana with slowgraffitti fave Alaska Reid — has she been hurting him?

I suspect that Goat Girl have some roots in the rich soil of nineties soft-then-loud guitar rock invented by the Pixies and famously inhabited by Nirvana and PJ Harvey, but these particular nannies like to hang out in the soft and menacing end of things; loudness is in the subtext. Below the Waste is a groaner of an album title, but it contains a spectacular collection of dreamy, depressed ear pastries — songs that have a hard time getting out of bed, but once on their feet they guide you to gardens of earthly delight.

Beak> are another guitar band that likes exploring the green and purple underbelly of festering emotion. They’re fronted by Geoff Barrow, of Portishead fame, they sound nothing like Portishead, and they’re another band I thought I didn’t like, who knows why, but their new >>>> album is pulling me into an arty, proggy murk I just can’t say no to, in part because they’re dead poetic — “Inside guilt breaths / Feel tied to the brim, the brim / Keep it back sung / Keep it hidden in the walls, of life / You know, the seal, will light us,” pronounces Barrow, and I’m gonna have to agree.

Verraco comes from Medellin, Colombia, and his particular brand of trancey, metallic techno on Breathe... Godspeed feels like a thousand samurai swords coming at you with elegance, imagination and precision. Fierce, as the gays used to say. He’s so confident that he titles one of his tracks “Sí, idealizame,” which means “Yes, idealize me.” Incidentally the track shares its chord progression with the old Visage chestnut “Fade to Grey.”

Let’s go back to the 90s a sec before we say goodbye, to perhaps the decade’s grooviest anthem of positivity and joy (and it’s a decade that kicked off with Deee-Lite). Yes, I’m referring to White Love by One Dove — Glasgow’s answer to Saint Etienne — released in ‘92. “You laugh, I smile / Mirrors in thought, these fortunes we can share / And where there is dark, there are ghosts / Who give me hope / Want to keep hold of this for you / Want to keep hold of this for you...”

Arab-world dance music really gets me going; something about the hypnotic/seductive thrust of it... the visions of hookahs and curling smoke... the drive to elegant pleasure pushing against jewel-encrusted oppression. Omar Souleyman is the latest one to get me thrusting my hands in the air and tracing curlicues. Apparently he started out playing “Dabke” folk music at weddings in his native Syria, cutting a custom record as a gift to the bride and groom each time, so his early discography is pretty wild. Now he’s a global star, and his new one Erbil, named after his new home town in Iraqi Kurdistan (he had to leave Turkey for political reasons) rocks very hard indeed; it’s a full on party album, lovingly crafted with perfumed and exotic local textures and flourishes of sharp, futuristic production.

Waxahatchee, the nom de plume of Alabaman Katie Crutchfield, is one of those artists that at a certain point got some hype and I got caught up in it, which is something I don’t think of myself as ever doing, and when I realized I didn’t love her after all I was grossed out, like I’d been musically groomed. I mean I think it was Waxahatchee — maybe it was a band with a similar name? My point is I was not at all well-disposed to checking out her new one, but wow, this track “Right Back to It“ is a finger-pickin’, finger lickin’ basket of warm buttered biscuits. It’s a country & western love song from the point of view of the neurotic, high-maintenance one, and it gives me hope: “Your love written on a blank check / Wear it around your neck / I was at a loss / But you come to me on a fault line / Deep inside a goldmine / Hovering like a moth / I lose a bit of myself / Laying out eggshells / I’ve been yours for so long / We come right back to it / I let my mind run wild / I don’t know why I do it / But you just settle in / Like a song with no end / If I can keep up / We’ll get right back to it...”

I guess I’m pretty tardy to the Sega Bodega party, but from what I understand his new Dennis album is a departure from his EDM roots. This one’s a thick stew of strange time signatures, lovingly processed theater of pain vocals, organic electronic textures, bittersweet washes of emotion. Please don’t attempt to dance to it. Is it at all goth? Well, check out my personal fave “Deer Teeth“: “Bury me and keep me down with all your deer teeth / Until we meet / Feel the wings as we’re cradled on a mother swan / Until we’re gone / To lay sunken in the final ground / Slipping through millennia / Gripping to our only child and / Sleeping ‘til the end of time with a / Fox crown in the ground...”

Back in the late ‘80s, dance music suddenly got fashionable with indie kids — “baggy” style and “Madchester,” the Happy Mondays scene — and there was a running joke in Melody Maker about rock bands jumping ship to stay relevant and using the cliché that “there was always a dance element to our music.” It’s been a thing through the years; from the Stone Roses to Stereolab to (personal fave) Cat Power doing vocals on “Action“ by Cassius. I feel like there have been others... maybe I’m just making it up but my point is you don’t really see the opposite trajectory — except now you do, with Sunset Violent, the new Mount Kimbie album. They started out as an electronic duo, in parallel with James Blake, bending dancey electronica into something that got labeled post-dubstep. Now they’ve added new members and fully moved into indie-rock. Great stuff too, cool and melancholy, finding inventive structures and texture. On “Dumb Guitar,” a dark mood drifts over the beach in summer, as new member Andrea Balency-Béarn intones “I watch the sunset violent / Lose it all in silence / Dig a hole in my mind / There’s something on this island / That’s keeping me off balance / I trip on a flaw I cannot see yet...”

Brooklyn band Gift and their Momentary Presence album were quite a sensation with the slowgraffitti faithful back in ‘22, and they’re back with another burst of trippy, tangy candy sunshine called “Wish Me Away.” The shadows are all in the lyrics: “It steals my breath / Times lost I pretend / It dawns on me / This life I can’t repeat / Like sinking sand / Its gone way to fast / Will they remember me / Just in time to bury me...”

If you’re looking for something to rock your pants off and shred you into pizza cheese, Mdou Moctar is back with Funeral for Justice. It’s an uprising and a party all in one, an impassioned protest album that will get you headbanging against ongoing imperialism in Africa. His sound is rooted in the desert blues of the Sahara as perfected by Tinariwen, and pushes into the hard rock/ acid rock exosphere courtesy of Moctar‘s crazy guitar god skills. The cover art is very Steve Miller Band, and every song is a classic. “Imouhar“ starts out quiet and tricks you into turning up the volume all the way, then suddenly pummels you with its full-volume rock fury. It’s about preserving the Tamasheq language incidentally.

I don’t think I’m a sentimentalist, surely not? But put the right heart-swelling, end-credits ballad in front of me and I will melt into a salty soft boy puddle. New York band Lightning Bug have not one but two of ‘em — “December Song“ off their new one No Paradise is a love song from a tree to the sun. Metaphors, eh? “The Right Thing Is Hard to Do“ off their previous album swoons even harder, as frontwoman Audrey Kang connects her own habit of hiding with the instinct to “build a wall / Of steel that rises grim and tall / And turn away those seeking shelter most of all..” The solution? “Love steady grows / So I’ll let it grow, grow and grow...” This is girl power at its girliest, and the “December Song“ video is even extra so... Please stop laughing at me and Audrey — we’re fragile.

BIG|BRAVE are heavy and they’re from Montreal and people seem to categorize them as metal, but to me they sound more in line with 90s Big Guitar bands like Cranes and Sonic Youth and PJ Harvey. A Steve Albini kind of band. These people are seriously sensitive — “i felt a funeral“ is inpired by an Emily Dickenson poem. Their new one A Chaos of Flowers tastes deliciously goth — Robin Wattie‘s little girl lost vocals juxtaposed with great, growling waves of guitaric emotion, and there’s a song titled “chanson pour mon ombre“ (”song for my shadow”). I’d love to get Robin Wattie together with Audrey Kang for an interpretive danceathon.

As reported in these pages, our beloved Merve has announced she’s quitting Altin Gün, and yet they’ve just released a new single with her on vocals called “Vallahi Yok,” and it’s as fun and impassioned and exquisitely childlike and ready for Eurovision ‘72 as anything in their catalog. According to Mrs. Google the Turkish lyrics translate to “If I were the sun to rise, what would you do? / If I were to become the wind and crush your hair / If I loved, if I fell in love and left your mark / If I ride, come to me for a little while, my love / Why don’t you lay your head on ours and reach out and hold my hand? / Hold me, my love, shake me warmly / What about the waves and the shores?”

Digging this Morwell album, Into the Light. He’s a British-Croatian and he decoupages snippets of hyperexpressive pop-spirituality speech to build grooves of oversaturated hyperbole, bringing to mind The Art of Noise, or Byrne and Eno‘s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. It finds that sweet spot where it can be taken at face value or as parody, and it’s all set to fresh and inventive dance-adjacent concoctions.

I thought my techno days were well behind me, but then along came this irresistible coil of manly and muscular industry from distinguished UK DJ and producer Perc:

...which led me to Perc‘s collaboration with r3ll1k, the post-punkish “Платье.” Hard to find anything about r3ll1k online; there’s a long-abandoned FB page that puts him in Saint Paul, MN, but I mean his song titles seem suspiciously Russian. Платье translates to “Dress.” The album is Удали мой номер (”Delete my number”) and it’s pretty great. Is he Heidi-ing N Closet? I mean, just to be clear, I fully support Ukraine, but r3ll1k is putting out some bangers.

In conclusion, can we just expend a few thought bubbles on Tierra Whack? She is having quite a moment with her unique flavor of art-pop-hip-hop. Her guest rap on the new Chief Keef is a monster of speed and size that will wrestle you and pin you and make you cry uncle, and her new World Wide Whack album is raw and funny and ridiculous and so much fun. “Oh, what is that shit I smell? Me” she offers on “Chanel Pit.” / Mhm, I am that shit you smell, yes / Mosh pit smellin’ like Chanel / Microsoft, I’ma excel / Nine, ten, eleven, fuck 12 / House lookin’ like a motel / I don’t play farewell / I don’t like to show you, might tell...”

Oh but before I say goodbye — what is this corn pudding corner of heaven from 2017 that just found its way into my ear-shafts? I’m not gonna editorialize, please just give yourself over to it.