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.
BigMutha, “BLKDEATH:(”
I don’t have as many answers as you may need here, but at the beginning of August BbyMutha uploaded an incredibly hard third installment to her Muthaleficent EP (mixtape?) series to her Bandcamp under the (new?) moniker BigMutha, which was entirely produced by her partner Fly Anakin—whose dizzying prolificacy lately seems to have rubbed off on the briefly retired rapper. “BLKDEATH:(” is a clear highlight between its characteristic shit-talk verses, Anakin’s ambient, beat-heavy instrumental, and emoticon-possessing song title. Feels like a level up release for sure—hence the name change, I guess.
Blut Aus Nord, “Nyarlathotep”
As anyone who’s been unfortunate enough to have me talk at them about metal lately surely knows, there’s a lot of cool, unconventional stuff happening to subvert the dusty tropes each of the genre’s primary categories have relied upon for decades now. Yet as thrilling as, like, a trap beat can be within this alien context, there’s still something appealing about the type of black-metal genre standard Blut Aus Nord has been consistently churning out for a quarter of a decade. Only a few months removed from the hypnotic soundscapes of Disharmonium, the French group just unlocked a collection of subscription-only instrumentals released over the course of two years beginning in February 2020. It’s pure, hellish disorientation from the opening blast of sound, with “Nyarlathotep” kicking off 35 minutes of incessant nightmare material. Y’know, what metal should always be when it’s not preoccupied with subverting genre tropes.
Ceschi, Squalloscope, & Loden, “We Don’t Stand a Chance”
I make a point to try not to repeat myself in this column, but even though I’ve already written about Ceschi The Rapper and Ceschi The Anti-Folk Figure here, “We Don’t Stand a Chance”—a one-off single in collaboration with vocalist Squalloscope and Belgian producer Loden—exhibits an entirely different identity for the artist. The kaleidoscopic electronic beat and Squalloscope’s floating vocals lift it to the realm of surreal dream pop by way of the type of introspective, cinematic compositions perfected by Fake Four labelmates Blue Sky Black Death with just a hint of the long-distance longing encapsulated by other labelmates Bike for Three!. What even is genre anymore, man.
Genital Shame, “Ego Non Sum Trust-Fund Puer”
Now that “bedroom” pop has become as ubiquitous, vague, and often inaccurate a tag as “indie” and “alternative” rock before it, I’m loving the way the original DIY aesthetic that movement was born from has largely been inhabited by black metal solo projects straddling the line of the genre’s dense soundscapes and the intimacy of an actual living space. With Genital Shame, Erin Dawson is setting out with the express mission to “[queer] sonic traditions” while simultaneously packing their interdimensional evils into four-minute experiments with familiar genre touchstones warped to her own indivdual tastes and topics of interest. Which is not being a trust fund boy, in this case, evidently. Or if that’s not what that translates to I’ll know as soon as the Duolingo owl kicks down my door.
HAAi feat. Alexis Taylor, “Biggest Mood Ever”
I somehow missed this track when it originally dropped over the summer despite the fact that I have a Google Alert set up for any and all Big Moods, but thanks to its new music video I was introduced to what I’m belatedly naming the song of the summer. No disrespect to the new Hot Chip LP, but Alexis Taylor freaked it on this Wax-Trax-featuring-a-full-string-section instrumental courtesy of Australian producer HAAi. While I’m belatedly naming things, I’m also gonna go ahead and proclaim that in spite of whatever Buzzfeed headlines have told you this has officially been a Rueful Boy Summer.
Heaven for Real, “Energy Bar”
After two and a half years of reading interviews where artists discuss creative choices on their albums being influenced by fear of their neighbors’/landlords’ wrath, I’ve been wondering if recording softer vocal takes is gonna catch on now that studios are accessible again (that, or, as was the case when I saw Big Thief earlier this year, artists are throwing out their backs after spending two years refraining from rocking out too hard and consequently softening their entire sound palettes). “Avoiding a certain threshold of noise” is sort of the energy I get from this Heaven for Real track, though that may just be because it’s become hard for me to hear it outside the context of a certain considerably less-muted early Vampire Weekend single it happens to invoke. You’ll love it as much as their next door neighbors do.
isomonstrosity feat. Danny Brown & 645AR, “careful what you wish for”
Danny Brown has been on a lot of very weird songs, and let me introduce you to another one: isomonstrosity is the new project from in-demand producer/rapper Johan Lenox, Pulitzer-winning composer Ellen Reid, and conductor/“cultural innovator” Yuga Colher, who together craft the perfect, ominous, deconstructed-classical soundscape—prominently featuring what sounds like the generic cartoon sound effect for someone’s nose getting honked—for Danny to do his thing over. Rounded out by an inscrutably manipulated falsetto verse from FKA twigs collaborator 645AR, “careful what you wish for” leaves the rest of their forthcoming self-titled LP wide open to speculation.
Maria Uzor, “Solitaire”
Afro-futurism seems to be having a moment in electronic music dating back at least to SPELLLING’s Sun Ra– and Octavia Butler–inspired elegy for the night sky in 2019, with artists like Lotic and her recent Inception-OST bwah-ing LP Water dropping in the interim. The latest sounds come from UK-based songwriter Maria Uzor, whose stargazing beat merges with ethereal falsetto, ominous spoken-word, and jazzy trills on the first single from their forthcoming EP Songs for Luminous Living. The track’s steady growth into its thumping beat teases a release that excels in the realms of both ambient electronics and dance music, not to mention whatever extraterrestrial realms its full tracklist aims to explore.
Oozing Wound, “Minus Tree”
It’s been cool watching Chicago figures like Joe Keery and Dehd blow up from their local-celebrity status to global superstars as, for some reason, living here has felt like a small town rather than the third biggest city in the US ever since they stopped filming literally every blockbuster comedy here at some point after the ’80s. The only thing more appealing to Chicago residents is the city’s cultural pillars that show no sign of ditching us for worldwide acclaim, such as the perpetually cranky metal vets Oozing Wound, who’ve promised a new LP for early 2023, but whetted our appetite with a pair of singles via a recent split with Cocaine Piss. “Minus Tree” is par for the course for the band—freaked out thrash that only intensifies over the course of its never-not-intense three minutes. Really does seem odd to me that Netflix would launch the star of a guy whose prominent head of hair I’ve only ever seen on other famous people rather than the sludge group that writes songs with titles like “Surrounded by Fucking Idiots” and puts out splits with bands named things like “Cocaine Piss.”
Perera Elsewhere, “Stranger”
When Perera Elsewhere announced her new LP Home over the summer with the shuffling, vaguely dancy “Hold Tite,” the single—at least on its most superficial level—immediately brought to mind the experiments of Santigold or even a subdued M.I.A. before, a few minutes in, unraveling into an odd ambience at odds with either artist’s primary mission statement. So when the record finally dropped, it wasn’t a huge surprise that some of its most blissful moments came via the instrumental stretches such as “Stranger,” which enhance the uneasiness of the project as a whole between its more accessibly pop-leaning cuts. It’s the type of otherworldly composition that lends credence to her moniker while inviting avant-garde filmmakers to tap her discography for inspiration, if not collaboration.
Persher, “World Sandwiches 2”
Interesting how this turned into a full-circle moment but my only connection to Persher—the new duo comprised of producers Arthur Cayzer and Jamie Roberts, whose debut is arriving soon through Thrill Jockey—is that the latter artist’s project Blawan had a semi-viral industrial-techno hit “Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage” a decade ago which was later covered by Irish noisemakers Gilla Band that—and here’s where the circle closes—vaguely anticipated this new noise-rock outfit. As “World Sandwiches 2” suggests, though, Persher is more aligned with the experimental snarls of Full of Hell and that universe of goopy industrial-horror than a band whose songs tend to be recordings of a guy having a meltdown about Nutella or whatever. Although I would also consider Nutella a goop.
RL, “The Mirror”
RL—formerly “R.L. Kelly,” a name that was originally chosen when we were all just generally much more blissfully ignorant—is an alumni of the bedroom-pop incubator Orchid Tapes, who have also released early material from Soccer Mommy and Alex G. The latter of whom RL (which stands for Rachel Levy, which, as you can guess, is her name) released a split with in 2013, though her new EP Be True, well, stays true to their mutual vision of sprightly, economical guitar pop with unexpected flourishes (a “The Underdog”-esque horn section, in the case of “The Mirror”). While there’s certainly nothing wrong with chasing your nu-metalest dreams, it’s cool to have this newer form of nostalgia evoked in its implicit homage to the early days of Bandcamp-only, name-your-price lo-fi releases with ’90s-era photo album pics as the album cover.
Roomer, “Dust”
The thing about dream pop—and I may be wrong about this, since I was mostly unaware of what was going on in music in the ’90s and early-’00s, and was also not alive in the ’80s—is that the genre has remained roughly the same since its inception and yet has always felt in vogue. Listening to Roomer’s new EP it’s easy to get lost in time as the all-too-familiar and period-unspecific gauzy guitar strums invoke each and every layer of growth on the genre’s metaphorical tree trunk, each of which looked at that of the previous decade and thought “nah” before rewriting its flawless formula. “Dust” is the the most weightless cut from the four tracks that make up the German group’s SKICE EP, allowing its prominent-yet-faded guitar and barely discernible vocals to drift through time and space as if neither necessarily existed.
Tan Cologne, “Space in the Palm”
Between Julias Kugel (of The Coathangers) and Shapiro (of Chastity Belt) going solo over the past two years to pursue overcast dream pop in lieu of their respective upbeat garage-punk and jangle-pop outfits, it seems to be confirmed that this specific category of forlorn, window-gazing rock is in right now. Taos duo Tan Cologne beat both artists to the punch with their 2020 debut LP Cave Vaults on the Moon in New Mexico, which they’ve followed up with this dreary single released at the tail end of summer—“Space in the Palm” is disassociation rock at its most zoned-out, taking elements of garage- and surf-rock and infusing them with a somnambulant drone that’s generally alien to those genres. A perfect start to hard-to-get-out-of-bed season.
Well Wisher, “29”
As someone’s who’s undergone the bizarre experience of “turning 29,” I can attest to the unique dysphoria and frustrating anticlimax it is—you’re as old as anyone can be while still in your twenties, and at least when you hit 30 you can do that thing where you promise yourself, “OK, starting now I’m gonna generally improve the quality of my life through simple decision-making,” which obviously always only lasts as long as any of your past New Year’s resolutions. Well Wisher’s take on the ultimate inconsequential birthday feels accurate: softened-edged punk full of exhausted longing and muddled reflection. The band’s Natalie Newbold had a bit more optimistic of a take on the single, stating that it’s a mission statement for learning to look back on any and all accomplishments you’ve achieved that helped you reach your 29th birthday. Can’t wait to hear what they come up with when they hit the big three-oh.
