Tag: Music Hall of Williamsburg

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Faetooth Shares Forceful and Stormy “Hole”

Led by Jenna Garcia (vocals, bass), Los Angeles-based outfit Faetooth specializes in a sound that they’ve dubbed “fairy-doom:” a unique and eclectic amalgamation of doom metal paired with vocals that alternate between spellbinding melodies to guttural shrieks and howls. 

Last month, the Los Angeles-based outfit announced their highly-anticipated sophomore album Labyrinthine will be slated for a September 5 release digitally through AWAL and on vinyl and CD by The Flenser. Labyrinthine will reportedly see the band further establishing their “fairy-doom” sound while embracing a newly softened, more intimate tone, anchored around emotional rawness.

Throughout the album, the material touches upon themes of loss, self-pity, personal relationships and more. The inmate balance doesn’t dilute their intensity; rather it reframes it, offering listeners a haunting yet delicate atmosphere, layered with entrancing textures that build up to explosive catharsis. The result is an album that’s a hauntingly visceral and disturbing vision, anchored by deep introspection. 

Labyrinthine will feature the previously released, “Death of Day” which to my ears channeled the likes of Tool and JOVM mainstays Slumbering Sun, and “White Noise,” a bruising ripper rooted in a palpable and unsettling mix of anguish, despair, loathing and fury that feels both lived in and deeply familiar. 

“Hole,” the album’s latest single is a slow-burning and meditative doom metal dirge that slowly builds up into a bruising and stormy intensity, fueled by a lived in urgency and desperation to get away from a seemingly fucked up past and fucked up cycles of dysfunction, abuse, etc. And much like the previously released singles, “Hole” does so with an innately empathetic sensibility that says to the listener “I’ve been there. You aren’t alone.”

 

“’Hole’ is a meditation on the choice of confronting the past, or burying it,” the band’s Jenna Garcia explains. “Sobering, waking, realizations of cycles find themselves bared, culminating in an invocation-like verse that declares severance to all ties to a creeping past.”

Directed by Joe Mischo, the cinematically shot visual for “Hole” follows a a woman frantically running through a wooded countryside that includes madness, regret, possession and witches.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Slow Crush Shares Stormy and Swooning “While You Dream Vividly”

After a frenetic and overwhelming touring schedule to support their first two albums, 2018’s Aurora and 2021’s Hush, the acclaimed Belgian shoegazers Slow Crush — Isa Holliday (vocals, bass), Frederik Meeuwis, Jelle Ronsmans (guitar) and Nic Placlé — took a couple years off from touring, which allowed the quartet the space to breathe and create new material.

Slow Crush’s highly-anticipated third album, Thirst is slated for an August 29, 2025 release through Pure Noise Records. Recorded at Southampton, UK-based The Ranch, the Lewis Johns-produced album reportedly sees the band’s dynamic textures, propulsive rhythms and gauzy riffs shimmer as brightly as ever — but the album sees the band adding a bit more grit and grime to their sound. The album features arguably the heaviest riffs they’ve ever recorded, as well as some of Holliday’s dreamiest and most vulnerable vocals to date. During the recording process, there were sons she couldn’t record without dissolving into tears.

Thirst‘s overacting theme is what Holliday describes as “the romance of being with a loved one.” Although being away from loved ones for long periods of time might put a strain on that relationship, the return can feel euphoric and the connection can be feel almost like it were brand new. Throughout the album, the members of Slow Crush set out to create the feeling of being tethered yet simultaneously weightless, absorbed in the beauty of quiet moments with that special someone.

“We want people to let themselves go and feel embraced by the music, so that they can experience it in 4D,.” Slow Crush’s Isa Holliday explains. “That’s what we hear a lot from people who come to see us live, or people who’ve listened to our previous albums, is that we take them to another dimension. I think that’s something that we miss in this day and age with everything that’s going on in the world, making us very aware of everything outside, but not allowing us to just be in the moment as much as you should. We want to let people take a moment for themselves and let the music take them wherever they would like to go.”

Thirst‘s first single “While You Dream Vividly” is a slow-burning and hypnotic tune anchored around swirling and painterly guitar textures, thunderous drumming that serve as a stormy bed for Holliday’s ethereal and yearning delivery singing “true blue” lyrics like an echoing promise. The result is to leave the listener swooning and desperately yearning — seemingly forever.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Frankie and the Witch Fingers Shares Punchy and Grimy “Dead Silence”

Acclaimed Los Angeles-based psych punk outfit and JOVM mainstays Frankie and the Witch Fingers — currently founding duo Dylan Sizemore (vocals, guitar) and Josh Menashe (lead guitar, synth), along with Death Valley Girls‘ Nikki “Pickle” Smith (bass) and Mike Watt’s Nick Aguilar (drums) — have spent the past decade restlessly mutating their sound into bold, electrifying new forms with every new release. 

Slated for a June 6, 2025 release through Greenway Records and The Reverberation Appreciation Society, the Los Angeles-based JOVM mainstay’s eighth album, the Maryam Qudus-produced Trash Classic reportedly sees the band plunging into a sewer-slick fusion of proto punk venom, fractured New Wave and industrial grime. Sonically brimming with wiry synths, angular melodies and squirming and biting grooves, the material is delivered with a sly, playful balance between smirk and sneer. The band layers playful unease while exploring themes of escapism, decay and overindulgence. 

The songs were born in the grime of Vernon, Los Angeles — a wasteland littered with gutted RVs and rusting machinery, where the air tastes like asphalt and dog food. But the alchemy happed during recording sessions at Oakland‘s Tiny Telephone Studio, where producer Maryam Qudus helped transmute the tracks into the final forms with unhinged tones, unconventional recording experiments and wild sonic detours. 

Each day of the recording sessions began with cartoons blaring at full volume — a Looney Tunes ritual that turned the madness of the recording process into something childlike. Late night, sugar-fueled candy binges kept the energy spiking, pushing the sessions into a fever dream of jittery, spastic playfulness. The end result is a raw, twisted monument to rot and excess — and to toxic glamour and nihilistic salvation.

So far I’ve written about two of the album’s singles:

  • “Economy,” which offered a glimpse of what to expect from the album: grimy synth pulse right at the front, alongside angular guitar fuzz and muscular yet mathematically precise drumming paired with punchily delivered vocals and mosh pit friendly hooks and choruses. Sonically, the result is a scuzzier and grimier take on Freedom of Choice-era DEVO — with a similar, tongue-in-cheek sensibility. 

  • “Total Reset,” a sweaty ripper that sees the band pairing angular guitar fuzz with squiggling synth pulse, mathematically precise drumming and Sizemore’s punchy delivery with the band’s penchant for mosh pit friendly hooks and choruses. Sonically, “Total Reset” strikes me as a being a synthesis of King Gizzard and Devo — but with a mischievous sense of menace and unease. 

Trash Classic‘s third and latest single “Dead Silence” continues a run of grimy and mischievous DEVO-meets-garage rock rippers, anchored around the band’s unerring knack for rousing, mosh pit friendly hooks paired with Sizemore’s punchy delivery singing lyrics about existential dread and death. Oh, how fitting for our fucked up, dire time!

“This one’s got a nice little origin story,” the band explains. ““We played a festival in Boise with Spacemoth, Maryam Qudus’ brainchild, and met her for the first time there. Cut to a year later, and she’s deep in the guts of this record – producing, engineering, twisting knobs, and arranging sounds with us.

“On the flight home from that Boise show, Josh threw on the Spacemoth album for the first time and got his brain microwaved. He also recorded the plane taking off, just on a whim. That roar ended up in the bridge of ‘Dead Silence’. It’s a nice crusty texture, but it also weirdly bookmarks the start of it all.

Maryam’s all over this record. She sings, plays, distorts, haunts – leaving smudges on everything in the best way. She rules, and we were happy to accidentally mark the occasion sonically with a little jet-engine weirdness.”

The accompanying video is a mischievous and menacing psilocybin trip featuring cartoonishly bright, analog fuzz and crude, hand-drawn animation, and graffiti that pulses and undulates with the song.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Los Angeles’ Faetooth Shares a Slow-Burning and Grungy Ripper

Led by Jenna Garcia (vocals, bass), Los Angeles-based outfit Faetooth specializes in a sound that they’ve dubbed “fairy-doom:” a unique and eclectic amalgamation of doom metal paired with vocals that alternate between spellbinding melodies to guttural shrieks and howls.

The Los Angeles-based outfit’s latest single “Death of Day” is a slow-burning and forceful dirge anchored around a classic grunge structure – quiet verses featuring swirling shoegazer guitar textures and thunderous drumming and loud choruses and hooks featuring enormous power chords and banshee-like wailing serving as a brooding bed for Garcia’s sonorous croon. While channeling the likes of Tool, JOVM mainstays Slumbering Sun and others, “Death of Day” the song as the band’s Jenna Garcia explains “came to be after reading into the deity, Lilith. I was initially transfixed to the myth of her spawning from the ‘dregs,’ or lowest realm of evil. I perceived that as her coming from the dirt, the earth, and having to confront a life where her very existence is viewed as malevolence, as ugliness. She is cast out into isolation from the moment she came into being. I began to view that as a strong parallel to the existence of queer and trans people in a world that is constantly trying to exterminate and diminish them.”

Faetooth’s frontperson adds that the song’s lyrics “are written as a bit of ode to the Lilith archetype, and simultaneously celebrating and lamenting her forced seclusion from society. The first verse is about her coming into being, how she can only come out at night, and then the second verse is like, yeah, you all hate me, I’m gonna bring all my friends that you also deem as a scourge on society, f*** you.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

Lyric Video: JOVM Mainstays Frankie and the Witch Fingers Share a Grimy Ripper

Acclaimed Los Angeles-based psych punk outfit and JOVM mainstays Frankie and the Witch Fingers — currently founding duo Dylan Sizemore (vocals, guitar) and Josh Menashe (lead guitar, synth), along with Death Valley Girls‘ Nikki “Pickle” Smith (bass) and Mike Watt’s Nick Aguilar (drums) — have spent the past decade restlessly mutating their sound into bold, electrifying new forms with every new release. 

Slated for a June 6, 2025 release through Greenway Records and The Reverberation Appreciation Society, the Los Angeles-based JOVM mainstay’s eighth album, the Maryam Qudus-produced Trash Classic reportedly sees the band plunging into a sewer-slick fusion of proto punk venom, fractured New Wave and industrial grime. Sonically brimming with wiry synths, angular melodies and squirming and biting grooves, the material is delivered with a sly, playful balance between smirk and sneer. The band layers playful unease while exploring themes of escapism, decay and overindulgence. 

The songs were born in the grime of Vernon, Los Angeles — a wasteland littered with gutted RVs and rusting machinery, where the air tastes like asphalt and dog food. But the alchemy happed during recording sessions at Oakland‘s Tiny Telephone Studio, where producer Maryam Qudus helped transmute the tracks into the final forms with unhinged tones, unconventional recording experiments and wild sonic detours. 

Each day of the recording sessions began with cartoons blaring at full volume — a Looney Tunes ritual that turned the madness of the recording process into something childlike. Late night, sugar-fueled candy binges kept the energy spiking, pushing the sessions into a fever dream of jittery, spastic playfulness. The end result is a raw, twisted monument to rot and excess — and to toxic glamour and nihilistic salvation.

Last month, I wrote about the album’s first single “Economy,” which offered a glimpse of what to expect from the album: grimy synth pulse right at the front, alongside angular guitar fuzz and muscular yet mathematically precise drumming paired with punchily delivered vocals and mosh pit friendly hooks and choruses. Sonically, the result is a scuzzier and grimier take on Freedom of Choice-era DEVO — with a similar, tongue-in-cheek sensibility. 

Trash Classic’s second and latest single “Total Reset” is a sweaty ripper that sees the band pairing angular guitar fuzz with squiggling synth pulse, mathematically precise drumming and Sizemore’s punchy delivery with the band’s penchant for mosh pit friendly hooks and choruses. Sonically, “Total Reset” strikes me as a being a synthesis of King Gizzard and Devo — but with a mischievous sense of menace and unease.

“’Total Reset’ is a spasmodic blast of punk and synth freakery, a tech product launch for the post-human era,” the band says. “Writing and recording a song can be such a hassle, so we let AI handle it this time (faster, cheaper, zero complaints). It spat out a nice little doomsday ditty: humanity is toast, a lucky few will be spared to reboot civilization. Weirdly enough, the song kind of rips, so maybe we don’t need humans to make things after all.” 

The accompanying lyric video by Nespy 5Euro is a grimy, low-budget mix of crude, hand-drawn animation, graffiti. edited video and more that pulses with the song.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Frankie and the Witch Fingers Shares Blistering “Economy”

Acclaimed Los Angeles-based psych punk outfit and JOVM mainstays Frankie and the Witch Fingers — currently founding duo Dylan Sizemore (vocals, guitar) and Josh Menashe (lead guitar, synth), along with Death Valley Girls‘ Nikki “Pickle” Smith (bass) and Mike Watt’s Nick Aguilar (drums) — have spent the past decade restlessly mutating their sound into bold, electrifying new form with every new release.

Slated for a June 6, 2025 release through Greenway Records and The Reverberation Appreciation Society, the Los Angeles-based JOVM mainstay’s eighth album, the Maryam Qudus-produced Trash Classic reportedly sees the band plunging into a sewer-slick fusion of proto punk venom, fractured New Wave and industrial grime. Sonically brimming with wiry synths, angular melodies and squirming and biting grooves, the material is delivered with a sly, playful balance between smirk and sneer. The band layers playful unease while exploring themes of escapism, decay and overindulgence.

The songs were born in the grime of Vernon, Los Angeles — a wasteland littered with gutted RVs and rusting machinery, where the air tastes like asphalt and dog food. But the alchemy happed during recording sessions at Oakland‘s Tiny Telephone Studio, where producer Maryam Qudus helped transmute the tracks into the final forms with unhinged tones, unconventional recording experiments and wild sonic detours.

Each day of the recording sessions began with cartoons blaring at full volume — a Looney Tunes ritual that turned the madness of the recording process into something childlike. Late night, sugar-fueled candy binges kept the energy spiking, pushing the sessions into a fever dream of jittery, spastic playfulness. The end result is a raw, twisted moment to rot and excess — and to toxic glamour and nihilistic salvation.

“Economy,” Trash Classic‘s first single is the first glimpse of the band’s refined sound: grimy synth pulse is placed in the front, alongside angular guitar fuzz and muscular yet mathematically precise drumming paired with punchily delivered vocals and mosh pit friendly hooks and choruses. Sonically the result is a scuzzier, grimier take on Freedom of Choice-era DEVO — with a similar, tongue-in-cheek sensibility.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Deep Sea Diver Teams Up with Madison Cunningham on Power Ballad “Let Me Go”

Led by Los Angeles-born, Seattle-based singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and frontperson Jessica Dobson, Seattle-based indie rock outfit Deep Sea Diver can trace its origins back to when Dobson was 19: Dobson, who has had stints  playing with a who’s who list of contemporary acts, including Beck, Conor Oberst, Spoon, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Shins signed with Atlantic Records. While with Atlantic Records, Dobson wrote and recorded two albums that she wasn’t completely satisfied with. Atlantic shelved the material and ultimately dropped her. 

After being dropped from Atlantic, Dobson wrote and recorded her solo debut EP New Caves as Deep Sea Diver. The project became a full-fledged band with the addition of members John Raines (bass) Dobson’s spouse Peter Mansen (drums), Garrett Gue (bass), and Elliot Jackson (guitar, synth), who helped to flesh out the project’s sound. 

The Seattle-based band’s critically applauded third album, 2020’s Impossible Weightwas released through High Beam Records/ATO Records and followed a busy year of touring with Wilco and Joseph to support their second album, 2016’s Secrets. “We went into the studio pretty quickly after the tour ended, and I sort of hit a wall where I was feeling very detached from making music, and unable to find joy in it,” Dobson recalls in press notes. “I realized I had to try to rediscover my voice as a songwriter, and figure out the vocabulary for what I needed to say on this album.”

Stepping back from music and the studio, Dobson focused on dealing with the depression she had been struggling with, and soon started volunteering at Aurora Commons, a drop-in center for unhoused people, most whom are drug-dependent and frequently engage in street-survival-based sex work. “I spent a lot of time with the women who frequent the Commons, and it taught me a new depth of empathy,” she says. “They’re people who don’t have the luxury of going back to a home at the end of the day and hiding behind those four walls, so they’re sort of forced to be vulnerable with what their needs are. Talking with them and listening to them really freed me up to start writing about things I’d never written about before in my songs.”

Co-produced by Dobson and Andy D. Park and recorded at Seattle’s Studio X and The Hall of Justice, Impossible Weight found Dobson and her bandmates digging far deeper emotionally than they had ever before — and pairing that emotionality with a bigger, more grandiose sound. While showcasing Dobson’s dexterous and forceful guitar work, the album’s overall lush textures and mercurial arrangements allow room for Dobson to fully demonstrate her vocal range in a way that she hadn’t before. “’I’d never produced a record before and I started out with low expectations for myself, but at some point I realized, ‘I can do this,’” Dobson recalls. “I decided to completely trust my voice and make really bold decisions in all my production calls—just push everything to the absolute outer edges.”

For Dobson redefining the limits of her artistry went hand-in-hand with deeper identity issues that came up while Dobson and her bandmates were working on the album. “I was adopted and just recently met my birth mother, and found out that I’m half-Mexican and half-Jewish,” Deep Sea Diver’s frontperson explained in press notes. “Discovering my heritage and learning things about myself that I never knew before really fed into that question of ‘Where do I belong?’” Simultaneously, Dobson rediscovered the sense of possibility, adventure and joy that she first felt when she started out as a 19 year-old.  “I think being signed at such a young age messed me up in terms of the expectations I put on myself,” she says. “Somewhere along the way I lost confidence in my own vision, but after making this record I feel a much larger freedom to go in whatever direction I want with my music.”

With Impossible Weight, Dobson hopes that others might reclaim a similar sense of freedom in their emotional lives. “Especially right now when the world is in disarray and there’s so much fear, I want this record to give people room to feel whatever they need to feel,” she says. “I hope it helps them recognize that it’s okay to fall apart, and that they’re meant to let others in instead of trying to work through everything on their own. Because the point is that the impossible weight isn’t yours to carry alone—that’s why it’s impossible.”

Signing to ATO was a significant step up for a band that had self-released its first two albums. The surge of resources resulted in a massive wave of exposure, including a spot on the Billboard charts. 

The Seattle-based outfit’s long-awaited and highly-anticipated fourth album, the 11-song, Dobson and Andy Park co-produced Billboard Heart is slated for a February 28, 2025 release through Sub Pop. The album reportedly puts the band– currently, Dobson, Mansen and Jackson — in the company of acts like St. Vincent, TV on the Radio,Flock of Dimes and others, that have found ornate and magnetic ways to make indie rock by discarding notions of how it must sound or what it must say. 

The album features additional production from Adam Schatz and additional contributions from The Shins‘ Yuuki Matthews, Caroline Rose and Greg Leisz. It was mixed by Park and mastered by Greg Calbi and Steve Fallone. 

Some background is needed here: Back in July 2023 while recording in a Los Angeles-based studio, Dobson played a guitar solo but somehow felt nothing. Just a few days earlier, her band played a series of semi-secret shows for fans at a hometown bar, de facto rehearsals for cutting a new record. The sets had gone well, but almost immediately, the sessions didn’t. The songs’ essence seemed muddled, Dobson’s conviction lost somewhere in the 1,000 miles or so between Southern California and the Seattle-based home studio she shares with her spouse and frequent cowriter Peter Mansen. 

On that first night of recording sessions, Dobson broke down, wondering what she was doing there and what her band could do to fix it. For the first time in their history, the band retreated and headed home without a completed album. Did they need to scrap the entire thing and start again with new material? 

As it turned out, no. Following a brief break, Dobson found a renewed sense of self, a trust in her vision for her band and songs and her ability to capture them. After the Los Angeles hiccup a few months before, longtime collaborator and producer Andy Park asked Dobson how the new material was going over at an early fall dinner. She admitted that she needed help. And in that humbling confession, she seen found ways of working that helped her reimagine and reinvigorate the band — and directly led to their fourth album. 

For Dobson, the album is a triumph over self-doubt in which what initially felt like failure became an opportunity to find new freedom, belief, and even strength. 

As it turned out, Impossible Weight‘s massive success caused Dobson to doubt her impulses, and to begin thinking about what an idea’s impact or reception might be as much the strength of the idea itself. During this period of second-guessing, she and Mansen sat near the wide windows of their Seattle living room, with her on piano as he hammered a guitar nearby. Album track “See in the Dark” — a song about coveting your notions, despite the occasional sense they’re slipping away — emerged in that setting. 
 
That particular moment of domestic creation was essential for a number of reasons. Before Impossible Weight, Dobson and Mansen wrote many of Deep Sea Diver’s songs together; this was a return to that bond, which managed to carry over to more than half Billboard Heart‘s material. The pair began recording more at home, too. They borrowed microphones and a small batch of essential gear to record guitars and vocals in their basement. 

When discussions later began in earnest with Park, following the Los Angeles incident, Dobson began revisiting those earlier recordings, realizing that she had captured much of that ineffable spark at home, where the atmosphere was of her own design. Mansen and Park helped convince her that these wasn’t just good enough to use, but riveting in their realness. These early versions became templates to build upon and a frame, and a way for Dobson to believe again in the material, and most importantly, herself. 

Earlier this year, I wrote about “Shovel,” a Kate Bush-meets-St. Vincent-like tune anchored around buzzing and angular power chords, glistening synth arpeggios, relentless four-on-the-floor serving as a lush yet punchy bed for Dobson’s big, earnest vocal. Much like Impossible Weight, the new single sees the band crafting hook-driven arena rock friendly anthems informed by lived-in, personal yet somehow deeply universal experience. 

The album will feature the previous released album title track and “Let Me Go,”a slow-burning Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea-era PJ Harvey-like anthemic ballad that sees the ballad collaboration with Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter Madison Cunningham.

Directed by the band’s Dobson and Tyler Kalberg and inspired by French New Wave films, the accompanying video for “Let Me Go” was filmed in and around Los Angeles on January 5, 2025 and follows Deep Sea Diver’s Dobson and Cunningham through a day in the life, hanging out and goofing off.

“I’ve been wanting to collaborate with Madison for a long time, and I was over the moon when this song came in such an unexpected moment,” Dobson says. “We were just jamming in the studio and I started playing a guitar riff that I’ve had kicking around since high school that Madison started immediately winding around on her guitar. We looped a drum machine that my co-producer Andy Park started playing and a few hours later most of the song was finished. This song felt effortlessly cool from the start; It reminds me of some of my favorite PJ Harvey songs, full of grit & power. We shot the music video with the same spirit, and as two LA natives who both love the city—we wanted to explore our hometown.  Not knowing that it was two days before the LA fires, it has subsequently taken on a new meaning as a love letter to the city we both adore.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Bear Hands Shares Comically Menacing and Catchy “Adderall/Ambien”

Brooklyn-based dance punks Bear Hands — Dylan Rau (vocals, guitar), Val Loper (bass) and TJ Orscher (drums) — formed back in 2006. They gained early attention with 2010’s “What a Drag,” which led to the trio signing with Cantora Records, who released their full-length debut, that year’s Burning Bush Supper Club. 2014’s sophomore effort Distraction was a critical and commercial success with the album reaching #23 on Billboard‘s Heatseekers chart. The trio followed up with 2016’s You’ll Pay For This and 2019’s Fake Tunes. 

The band’s Dylan Rau relocated to a tiny town on the Oregon coast in 2019, where he made an attempt to step back from music, spending his time “chopping some wood and learning how to use power tools.” For Rau, those activities proved to be passing fancies, the adopted passions of a five-year role playing game as a different person. “I don’t really know how to stop writing songs,” Bear Hands’ Rau says. “Even if no one is listening or we have no team or infrastructure supporting us, I like to think we’d be like those graffiti artists who paint in the subway tunnels where no one will ever see it.”

New songs were shaped was shaped remotely over the following few years between band members on opposite coasts.

Along with producer, collaborator and touring guitarist Alex Marans, the band reconvened in Cherry Hill, NJ for in-person recording sessions fueled by generic pharmaceuticals and a persistent fear of irrelevance. Marans wrote some guitar leads and also prepared elaborate breakfast scrambles on most mornings. Finishing touches were put on by co-producers Elliot Kozel and Caleb Wright.

“The record is mostly about trying to keep it together when it’s already fallen apart, learning skills that no longer have any applications today and true and total pointlessness,” the Bear Hands frontman explains. “Kinda like singing into the void to see if we hear anything back, but your headphones no longer connect because the void updated its hardware and doesn’t have an aux jack anymore.”

“This album was a heavy ass lift and took forever to get done,” Rau adds. “Some of the songs are five years old and have changed a lot since inception. Being the only person on the West Coast meant we had to work through email or have intensive face-to-face sessions when I would go to Philly for a week or whatever. That kind of time sensitivity can make things kind of volatile emotionally.

“If you just get a little something done on most days, you’ll eventually reach the finish line. Maybe,” he adds. “Or at least we did.”

Slated for an October 18, 2024 release through the band’s long-term label home Cantora Records, The Key To What will feature the previously released “Intrusive Thoughts,” a track that features glistening synth stabs, a sinuous bass line and percussive, skittering, twitter and woofer rattling thump paired with stream-of-consciousness-like lyrics that capture the irritation, confusion, self-doubt, self-flagellation and doubt of intrusive thoughts with an uncannily precise psychological detail.

“’Intrusive Thoughts’ is the song that’s playing in my head all day and I can’t get it out,” Rau explains. “Not that I really want to. Well sometimes I do when I’m trying to do basic math or pick a restaurant to eat at with my girlfriend. I think I wrote it about being bored of everything and feeling dissatisfied with everyone and everything around me. Not that I’m super misanthropic in general but this song might make you that way if you get it stuck in your head so watch out.” 

“Adderall/Ambien,” The Key To What‘s latest single is a mind-bending electro slog featuring woozy and glistening synth arpeggios, swirling and ambient synths, skittering and plinking beats, a Gorillaz-like acoustic guitar-driven bridge paired with Rau’s dreamily distracted falsetto delivery and a pitched down vocal for the song’s ridiculously catchy hook and chorus. The effect is a song that feels like a pleasant trip that has suddenly taken a comically menacing left turn. Drugs are good — until they’re bad, y’all. And sometimes, the bad can be interesting. “This song chronicles a personal history with drugs and includes a discussion of which ones will ruin your life and which ones will make life worth living,” Rau explains. He further notes, “Your mileage may vary!”  

Directed by Rau, along with old friend and acclaimed photographer Christopher Saunders and producer Ursula Strauss, the accompanying video for “Adderall/Ambien” was conceived as a more malevolent sequent of their video for 2014’s “Agora.” The video follows the band’s Rau, seemingly alternating between both opped up and listlessly tuned out, doom-scrolling, watching TV. Rau says “the visuals for ‘Adderall / Ambien’ paint a portrait of life in the grip of addiction and isolation whilst also having a pretty good time.” 

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Brijean Shares Lush and Cinematic Lullaby “Euphoric Avenue”

Brijean is an acclaimed indie pop project that features: 

  • Brijean Murphy, a Los Angeles-born percussionist, who can trace the origins of her music career to her childhood: Murphy’s father Patrick is a percussionist and engineer, who taught a young Brijean her first patterns on a pair of congas that she inherited from the late Trinidadian steel pan drum legend Vince Charles. As a percussionist, the younger Murphy initially made a name for herself as a highly-sought after touring musician with stints in the touring bands of Toro Y Moi, U.S. Girls Poolside, and several others.  

  • Doug Stuart, a jazz and pop session multi-instrumentalist and producer, who has worked with JOVM mainstays Bells Atlas, Meerna, Luke Temple, Jay Stone and others. 

2019’s debut EP WALKIE TALKIE was written and recorded in marathon sessions at their intimate home studio, during breaks in Murphy’s then-very busy touring schedule. The EP found the duo quickly establishing a unique sound that meshed Murphy’s Latin jazz and soul upbringing with Murphy’s 70s disco and 90s house-inspired production, along with psych pop. 

2021’s full-length debut, Feelings celebrated self-reflection while making sense of the worlds around and within through rhythm and lyricism. However, the months surrounding the album’s release rang extremely bittersweet with the sudden death of Murphy’s father and both of Stuart’s parents. In a haze of heartache and loss, the duo left the Bay Area to be near family, resettling in four cities in under two years. 

Their to-go rig became their traveling studio and the tracks they had started writing, along with Angelo, Murphy’s 1981 Toyota Celica became their few constants. 2022’s Angelo EP, which derived its title from Murphy’s beloved car, processed loss, informed by the duo’s own losses and the desire to move and start over. 

The acclaimed and accomplished duo’s highly anticipated sophomore full-length album Macro is slated for a July 12, 2024 release through Ghostly International. Reportedly seeing the duo at their most playful, the album’s material features the duo engaging different sides of themselves, confronting the gloriously weird paradox of being alive. They’ve leveled up to meet the complexities and harmonies of the human experience with what may arguably be their most dynamic songwriting to date. Colorful, collaborative, sophisticated and yet deeply fun, the album creates a world of macrocosm with characters moods and points of view rooted in the notion that no feeling is final — and the only way out is through.

The album’s song sequencing elicits an exploratory vibe with high-tempo peaks and breezy valleys in the psyche. The duo sees the record’s vast sonic spectrum in contrast to the expectations for their output — “we’re supposed to know the box that our art fits, in and then fully commit to it existing within that box,” Brijean’s Stuart says. Overall, the album is deeply anchored in the intention to just not just move through the ups and downs life presents you but to feel it all, and to know it intimately. 

Released earlier this year, the album’s first single “Working On It” is a funky and breezy bit of Larry Levan house-like bop anchored around a layered and strutting baseline and a loop of different percussion paired with twinkling keys serving as a lush and ebullient bed for Murphy’s mischievous crooning. The result is a song that finds the duo at arguably their most playfully light, with the song seeing Murphy riffing on self-improvement, the insomniac’s desire to finally get some sleep and life in the seeming end times in a way that’s halfway serious. 

The song started as al living room jam then as Murphy explains, “Doug played the two-layered basslines over a loop of bongos, congas an a dream machine and the rest felt like it happened in a dream.” Later Murphy asked fans to send voice memos in exchange for art, and some of those got peppered into the sound-bed. “That was a treat… Just getting to go through and hear all of these voices from around the world, an intimate and charming experience.” 

“Euphoric Avenue,” Macro‘s second and latest single is a Bossa nova and soul jazz-tinged lullaby featuring soaring and cinematic strings by Stephanie Yu, shuffling drumming by Kosta Galanopoulos, atmospheric keys, propulsive drum machine and some soulfully fluttering flute by Logan Hone serving as a lush and velvety bed for Murphy’s meditative vocal. While sonically seeming to nod at Heatwave’s “Always and Forever,” and the intro to “Boogie Nights,” “Euphoric Avenue” is a sort of psilocybin-fueled, somnambulant wander through a moonlit park, and observing everything with a sense of hyper-attentive awe.

“Being in this beautiful part of town nestled up against the Angeles National Forest played a big role in how comfortable we felt stretching out and trying to push our musical boundaries,” says Murphy. “Anytime we brought someone into the world to add their musical touch, it felt like a highlight.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: L’Impératice Shares Brightly Colored and Playfully Animated Visual for “Danza Marilú”

Acclaimed Paris-based electro pop sextet and JOVM mainstays L’Impératice  will be releasing their highly-anticipated, self-produced third full-length album Pulsar through microqlima records on June 7, 2024.  Pulsar is an album, where the band — founder Charles de Boisseguin (keys), Hagni Gown (keys), David Gaugué (bass), Achille Trocellier (guitar), Tom Daveau (drums) and Flore Benguigui (vocals) — made every decision while capturing the band’s spirit both onstage and off. 

Fittingly, the album reportedly radiates with the energy and wisdom of an outfit that has helmed countless dance parties around the world on the way to find itself and its sound. Throughout the album’s material, the Parisian JOVM mainstays move freely and authoritatively among the sounds they love, bridging hip-hop, kosmiche and modern pop with their most unabashed embraces of French Touch and international house of their growing catalog. Pulsar is also the first album of their catalog to feature guest vocalists, including acclaimed folk/pop artist Maggie Rogers and rapper/producer Erick the Architect among a list of others. 

The album sees the acclaimed pop outfit trying a new creative approach: They split into two teams of ever-interchanging members to explore new ideas, led by the band’s founder Charles de Boisseguin. It was a way of incorporating every voice into the songwriting process like never before, pulling from idiosyncratic upbringings and enthusiasm. They then passed tracks to lead vocalist Flore Benguigui, a longtime jazz singer, who would sometimes write two-dozen vocal melodies for a song, just to see which one fit best. It was an arduous and exciting process that saw the band go from writing through recording in about nine months. For L’Imperatice, this was the sort of self-determination they’d longed for and now found. 

Throughout the album’s material, the band’s Benguigui boldly sings of self-empowerment, shirking beauty standards, ageism and drag normalcy throughout the album’s material. These are apt messages for incandescent anthems of experience, of fully being yourself, instead of anyone else’s version of it. 

The album will feature, “Me Da Igual,” a sleek and elegant, hook-driven Giorgio Moroder-era-disco-meets-French touch tune anchored by a strutting bass line, a squiggling Nile Rodgers-like funk guitar line and glistening synths serving as a sinewy and silky bed for Flore Benguigui’s sultry and ethereal delivery. Further cementing the French outfit’s reputation for crafting infectious, sensual, dance floor friendly bops, “Me Da Igual” features lyrics sung in Spanish and French while being a call to free ourselves from the injunctions to please at all costs, to reclaim your body by abandoning yourself to the euphoria of strobe lights and the dance floor — and listening to the sensations that movement and sound provides you. 

The album’s second and latest single “Danza Marilú” features Italian vocalist Fabiana Martone. Continuing a bit where its immediate predecessor left off, “Danza Marilú” is a sleek, hook-driven, Giorgio Moroder-era-Italo-disco-meets-French touch bop anchored around glistening synth arpeggios, squiggling funk guitar, a supple and sinuous bass line and thumping beats. Inspired by and written as a rebuttal to Serge Gainsbourg‘s “L’Homme á tête de chou,” Pulsar‘s latest single is a defiantly feminist anthem for women of all ages, encouraging them to get on that dance floor and to be freely themselves — in spite of the looks that may ensue by insecure haters of all stripes. 

Directed by Arthur Sevestre and featuring animation by Gabrielle Selnet, Vincent Albert, Armand Goxe and May Taraud with color by Laura Passalacqua, the animated video for “Danza Marilú” boldly advocates for a world in which all ages and body types can take up space and express themselves through dance and movement — as best as they can.