There’s enough highly publicized new music released every day now to keep you busy for at least a year. Chances are you haven’t heard all of it—and if by some miracle of temporal tampering or unemployment you have, chances are you haven’t retained too much of it.
That’s why every month, our Senior Editor Mike LeSuer rounds up fifteen tracks to reiterate their importance in an unending stream of musical content. Comprised of pre-released singles, album deep cuts, and tracks by unfairly obscure artists, he thinks these guys could all use a little Signal Boost.
Attia Taylor, “Dog and Pony Show”
According to the bio for the debut record from Brooklyn-based musician and community activist Attia Taylor, the project was inspired by her youth spent babysat by Adult Swim’s Space Ghost Coast to Coast—a sentiment I immediately connected with, though my unsupervised coming-of-age experience with Zorak and Brak likely arrived a decade or two after it should have. While the record surely ventures into darker subject matter than merely feeling burnt out immediately after college, the lead single introduces the LP in a way that oddly reflects the carefree nature of an impressionable brain losing itself in the weirdo-creative world of cartoons, with the echo chamber of repeated vocal loops, handclap electronic percussion, and synth lines creating a funhouse of familiar dream-pop motifs generally heard in more stiflingly self-serious settings.
Blackhaine, “Stained Materials”
Between choreographing scenes from Kanye’s Brewster McCloud–era Donda rollout events to tastefully disrupting the ambient flow of Space Afrika’s lucid ambient collage Honest Labour, Tom Heyes managed to keep busy last year. But meanwhile, Heyes has consistently been putting out his own music under the rap moniker Blackhaine with a new EP every year since 2020, the latest of which seeing a teaser with the sparse-yet-intense “Stained Materials,” a track that echoes the rainy-night sounds and visuals of his contribution to that Space Afrika project, albeit stripped of the constraints of an ambient agenda. Seems like the EP’s guest spots from Blood Orange and Iceboy Violet will only be the icing on the cake.
Cold Showers feat. Lil B, “How Do You Know This Love”
It’s hard to believe it’s been over a decade since Stonehenge-of-rap Lil B enigmatically appeared on the scene just in time for us to swap our iPods for iPhones rather than investing in a different model with sufficient GBs to house all of the Based God’s way-too-frequent offerings. And while lately he’s blessed our feeds and favorite artists’ guest contributor list less than he did at the beginning of the ’10s, it’s always a treat (and usually a surprise) to see his name materialize on the new single from, say, one of your favorite New Order–core new wave bands. Before literally phoning it in midway through the song with a barely discernible answering machine monologue further obscured by screeching instrumentation, B closes out the earnest, driving track by waxing philosophical on amour in his own inimitable way.
Crystal Eyes, “Like a Movie”
It’s been a godless five years since Alvvays last released an album, a dark age that’s been made a little brighter by the rollout of Crystal Eyes’ sophomore album which—as displayed on the single “Like a Movie”—softens the blow of wailing guitars by focusing the listener’s attention on not-entirely-un-Trish-Keenan like vocals. If nothing else, the anachronistic sounds of the Hammond organ in the song’s intro displace us from this post-Antisocialites era to a time when we didn’t know what we were missing out on with that Canadian group’s recent silence.
Fashion Club, “Feign for Love”
As far as debut singles go, “Feign for Love” feels like such a bold statement to me. Released through Felte Records—known lately for their icy post-punk signees like Odonis Odonis and Sextile—Moaning bassist Pascal Stevenson’s solo venture Fashion Club announced itself with a track that doubles down so hard on post-punk tropes (notably what I could only describe as Stevenson’s exaggeratedly pronounced post-punk accent) that it could feel parodic if it wasn’t so incredibly engaging. Echoing themes of false identity explored in the recent visuals of Girlpool (with whom Stevenson recently played as a member of their live band), the track and its video create attractive, over-the-top façades—an aggressively catchy pop hook in the former, a wild Dolly Parton ’doo in the latter—that ironically expose the darkness beneath them.
Fime, “White Collar Gold”
Over the course of three and a half minutes, “White Collar Gold,” the opening track from Fime’s forthcoming debut album, takes on the guise of at least half a dozen different genres, thanks in part to three-part vocal harmonies bleeding into countrified guitar riffs, which give way to an aggressively grungy chorus in which vocalist Beto Brakmo’s strained vocals are almost immediately diffused by playfully synced guitars vaguely recalling the high-five-welcoming riffs of Fang Island (not to mention the fact that Barkmo hops on stage in the track’s video in a full mariachi suit). As an introduction to both the album and to the band, it leaves things plenty open-ended.
Fuck Money, “Heart Throb” (feat. B L A C K I E)
As far as solid hardcore band names go, “Fuck Money” hits all the right notes—succinct, coarse, inarguably anti-capitalist, hard to google—which makes it a bit of a surprise when you hit play on their music and learn that their sound is a ways left-of-center from that genre’s occasionally constricting norms. Their new single “Heart Throb” subscribes to hardcore punk’s foot-on-the-gas terseness, yet it frolics in the experimentalism of erratic early-’00s groups like The Locust (they recently played alongside that group’s offshoot Deaf Club) with a more straightforward sound marked by warbled (and occasionally screamy) vocals. Filling in the cracks is the blown-out noise-sax courtesy of B L A C K I E—a with-spaces moniker which, considering its spackling role here, feels a little less apt.
Hippie Trim, “Toothpaste”
Between the fact that he seems to keep launching new bands and the evident influence those bands have had on the direction hardcore has taken lately, Ian Shelton–core is having a pretty big moment. The influence even seems to have hit Europe, with Germany’s Hippie Trim dropping a recent single that coasts off a similar blend of guitar and vocals as Militarie Gun—it even opens with borderline-comic lyrics on par with shouted advice not to pick up the phone while you’re on drugs. Yet in the short period of 90 seconds, the track takes a sobering turn when those lyrics about squeezing out too much toothpaste with every brush turn into a reflection on unsavory drug habits before ending on the ambiguous note about losing touch that concludes both verses. It’s like a hardcore take on William Carlos Williams, with the additional asset of a music video compiling all of your favorite dance clips across YouTube and Vine.
L.A. Salami, “Desperate Times, Mediocre Measures”
So much has gone on over the past few weeks that it’s hard to remember that all this negative energy we Americans have been directing at the leaders of our stupid, stupid country overlooks the fact that a parallel stupidity is plaguing just about every other country in the world (well, OK, the guns thing is still pretty specific to us). From the first line of nearly spoken-word poetry L.A. Salami recites on his new single “Desperate Times, Mediocre Measures”—after the desperate times we’re living in and also the mediocre measures we’re taking in order to ensure all power remains at the top of the pecking order in the wake of any given man-made or natural atrocity—it’s pretty clear from his pronounced accent that the artist isn’t native to the US in spite of what his name may suggest, though the at times dizzyingly elegant bars he even-temperedly lays down always manage to hit home—wherever home might be.
Mizmor, Thou, & Emma Ruth Rundle, “Night” (Zola Jesus cover)
Mizmor and Thou may have just teamed up for a near-feature-film-length collaboration accentuating both artists’ strengths as the leading voices in doom and sludge metal respectively, but somehow nothing on that project touches the sheer power of Zola Jesus’ cinematic songwriting. Swapping out the electro-operatics of the original with a stampede of guitars and percussion, and Nika Danilova’s full-throated delivery with shrieks that would absolutely get the cops called on you if you blasted the isolated vocals from your apartment, the collective of collaborators instantaneously reaches the level of euphoria reserved for the climax of your typical 60-plus minute Thou record. The closing beat-back-but-slower moment will absolutely steamroll you.
My Idea, “Popstar”
I can only imagine Lily Konigsberg and Nate Amos chose the name of their project based on the fact that their debut full-length plays out like a portfolio of ideas too radical for either of their (fairly radical) primary songwriting outlets, while the “my” indicates that literally no one else would think of, say, letting out a big, wet burp in the middle of what is, as a whole, a fairly confessional album. I think my favorite idea they had, though, was crafting a pop song from a generic “pop song” keyboard setting that’s elevated from near-parody to an actual catchy pop jam when you least expect it. Meanwhile its compactness—in length and in production value—assures us the duo won’t drop the bedroom-pop mentality any time soon in favor of one of those early-’00s boy/girl-band headsets.
Namir Blade, “Ride”
I guess this is as good a place as any to confess that the movie Metropolis has been on my watch list for at least a decade, though I’ve yet to really admit to myself that I don’t think I’ll ever get around to watching it. But thanks to artists like Namir Blade, who titled his latest collection of self-produced rap songs after the German Expressionist staple (and to capitalists who continue to miss the satire of science fiction and invent the very technologies that spell out doom in various fictions), I feel like I need to see it less and less every day. To get a sense of the record’s stance on technology, lead single “Ride” delights in the cheap functionality of a 30-year-old vehicle which drives perfectly fine, and doesn’t, say, drive itself, or equip the dashboard with a big-ass desktop computer—both features equally likely to enhance the apocalyptic feel of city streets as pedestrians run for their lives. Now I’m kinda curious to see whether Fritz Lang predicted that...
PYNUKA, “Tá N’agua”
In 2022 it’s no longer much of a feat to create music that’s virtually genreless, but the debut single from PYNUKA is the rare track to come up on shuffle that inspires me in equal measure to google any helpful context for how I came across the song in the first place (my best guess is an automated Bandcamp email form Translation Lost, the label that released the single) and to zone all the way out and allow the irreverently smooth industrial beat and Portuguese lyrics wash over me. As it turns out, those lyrics come courtesy of Antibalas’ Anda Szilagyi, while the instrumentation is—of course—the work of purveyor-of-all-sounds-large Justin Broaderick and sometimes-collaborator Christian Alexander of C Trip A. According to Szilagyi the track decries the modern ubiquity of technology in a world where nature should often suffice. Seems like there’s some room in their agenda for dragging genre to the curb along with it.
Sonagi, “Ambivalence”
Sonagi, the new project fronted by Closer vocalist Ryann Slauson, takes its name from the Korean word for sudden, heavy rain showers—which feels entirely appropriate for the band’s sound, which mutates screamo and post-hardcore conventions into something that’s somehow even denser. Slauson’s vocals on “Ambivalence” often align the track with White Suns’ no-wave era, while the accompaniment is a steady—for lack of a better word—downpour nearly drowning out any distinction between individual instruments. The band sounds like a million things at once on this track—and none of them are “ambivalent.”
Thank You, I’m Sorry, “Parliaments”
I’ve noticed that I have a remarkable talent for looking suspicious any time I find myself alone in public—when waiting to meet a friend at the bar, when they head to the bathroom, when waiting for the next band to come on when I’m at a show alone. There’s clearly a sense of solipsism in this anxiety, but in such a situation it feels way more comfortable to bust out my phone and pretend to look at something, desperately hoping no one walks behind me and notices I’m staring at a two-item grocery list, than to stand around all Travis Bickle-y and making everyone extremely nervous. Not to sound all boomer-y, but it feels like it’s continually getting harder to spend time with our thoughts, a point Thank You, I’m Sorry’s Colleen Dow mulls over on their new single “Parliaments” as they reflect on how embarrassing it is to just be sitting, smoking, and focusing their attention fully on one subject. Over a lovelorn instrumental, there’s plenty of truths packed into its three minutes—not least of which being that blasting cigs is probably healthier than scrolling Instagram.
