August 2025

strange voices are saying (what did they say?)

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