Last year, LA’s Sugar World released a series of singles that ranged from lightly distorted dream pop to fully blown-out digi-pop. Next year they plan to build out that aesthetic spectrum a bit with an album titled supercassettevision, with the title itself embracing ideas of lo-fi sound quality and a sense of excess, as well as hinting at a broader thematic direction for the project. “There’s definitely a throughline of digitalism and nostalgia that runs through the whole thing,” vocalist/guitarist Ryan Stanley shares.
Today the group is sharing a preview of the collection titled “In Magazines,” which is a fun balance of old technologies and new ways of manipulating them. “A good amount of my musical ideas lately can honestly be boiled down to, ‘What’s a different approach I can take to doing this digital Mary Chain thing that I always find myself doing?’” Stanley explains. “One of the answers to that question that I’ve really enjoyed is building some kind of crazy sonic environment first and then writing the song after all that stuff is already set up, so that I’m already inhabiting this blown-out and distorted digital environment as I’m coming up with the first guitar ideas, the first vocal melodies, etc.”
“In Magazines” is certainly a crazy sonic environment, with Stanley’s vocals barely perceptible under abrasive guitar distortion and a tight hip-hop beat. Despite all the noise it still feels compact, of the bedroom-pop lineage rather than the sonic assault a band like A Place to Bury Strangers might produce. “It’s a song that, to me, is about dissociating from your physical reality,” Stanley adds, speaking to the concept behind it. “It has a lot of nostalgia for the 2000s media environment of my childhood, but underneath that it’s really about life in the 2020s. If I could sum up what I feel that the song is about in a single image, it would be an image of a person going about their day with at least one Bluetooth earbud in at all times. At the same time, I wouldn’t say that it’s entirely meant as a critique, because it’s also kind of a love letter to the media that keeps me company while I do the dishes or whatever.”
Check out “In Magazines” below (debuting here in our digital magazine, which seems apt), and expect supercassettevision to arrive in 2026 via Sunday Records.
