Chemikkal is an emerging, Tampa-based producer and DJ, who has penchant for crafting infectious bangers meant to get people on their feet. His latest single, the balearic house-like “Decline U” continues a run of infectious, crowd pleasing bangers, centered around glistening synth arpeggios, self-assured and sultry vocals, tweeter and woofer rattling beats and some enormous Top 40 pop-like hooks. It’ll get you to the dance floor, I promise.
Tag: New Single
New Audio: Gothenburg’s Firebreather Shares Scorching “Sorrow”
With the release of 2019’s sophomore album Under a Blood Moon, the Gothenburg, Sweden-based doom metal trio Firebreather — currently, Mattias Nööjd (vocals, guitar), Axel Wittbeck (drums) and the band’s newest member Nicklas Hellqvist (bass) — found the band quickly establishing a raw, in-your-face and incendiary sound.
The Swedish doom metal trio’s third album Dwell in the Fog is slated for a February 25, 2022 release through RidingEasy Records. Much like their preceding two albums, Dwell in the Fog was recorded and mixed by engineer Oskar Karlsson at Gothenburg-based Elementstudion. The album’s material features a streamlined focus on driving, symphonic riffs in the vein of acts like High On Fire, Inter Arma and labelmates Monolord among others, while rumbling and raging with a fury that the band has only hinted at on their previously released material.
“The album is a cathartic journey inwards and a musical continuation from Under A Blood Moon, but with more emphasis on groove and feel,” the band’s Matthias Nööjd says in press notes.
Dwell in the Fog‘s third and latest single “Sorrow” is a furious and sludgy dirge centered around thunderous drumming, scorching riffs and tweeter and woofer rattling low-end paired with Nöörd’s guttural yet melodic howling. While arguably being among the hardest and most forceful songs I’ve written about so far this year, “Sorrow” evokes the frustration, heartache and despair of sorrow — and in turn, loss — with a simmering yet visceral fury.
New Audio: JOVM Mainstay LutchamaK Shares DNMK Remix of “Bitrate Scale”
Last year, may have been among the most prolific and productive of LutchamaK‘s career to date. The French JOVM mainstay started teh year with Pi, a full-length album written and recorded in at three-month inspired burst that resulted in some of the darkest and heaviest material, he has written and released to date.
Then he released the Quest EP, an effort, which featured experimental yet very melodic material. A few months after that, he released Rapscallion, which featured the Radioactivity-era Kraftwerk meets 90s techno-like “James Blitz 007.”
Then there was Seven Hybrids, which featured the hypnotic club banger “Moonbright,” and the Larry Levan house music-like “Davai.” He also released Threshold, which featured “Irie Vibrations,” a track that seemed to mesh elements of Lee “Scratch” Perry-like dub with club friendly trance and house and “Bitrate Scale,” a brooding yet hypnotic club banger that brought Tour de France era Kraftwerk to mind.
The French JOVM mainstay closed out a busy 2021 with the Utopia EP, which featured the hypnotic and contemplative “You See” and the euphoric, Octo Octa-like “s.T. bahn.”
LutchamaK starts off 2022 with a remix effort that features remixes of Threshold album single “Bitrate Scale” by three artists, who liked his work and wanted to create their own takes. DNMK opens the remixes with a deep house-leaning take that retains the original’s thumping kick but pairing it darker, oscillating synths, which gives the remix a brooding, murkier air.
Rising indie pop/dream pop act Morning Silk is led by creative mastermind and founder Frank Corr. The project can trace its origins back to when Corr was studying Architecture at The Rhode Island School of Design: Initially conceived as a creative side project, while school took up most of his time, Corr was inspired to seriously pursue music after listening to MGMT’s Oracular Spectacular and Congratulations.
Most of the early material was guitar based, but the projects sound and aesthetic gradually began to materialize with Corr linked up with Matthew Lancaster (bass, production). The ideas they started working on desperately needed drums, so the duo recruited Robert Norris (drums) to join the project. And as a trio, Morning Silk began playing across Rhode Island. Corr was simultaneously collecting gear, so they could build a studio in NYC.
Upon graduation, the trio relocated to New York and landed jobs in order to finance their studio and their creative work. Working with a collection of producers including the band’s Matthew Lancaster, Eamon Ford, Robert Norris and Caroline Sans, Morning Silk’s self-titled, full-length debut is slated for release this year.
So far, I’ve written about two of the album’s three previously released singles
- “Don’t Try Hard Enough,” a dreamy, hook-driven MGMT and Tame Impala-like bop that’s a gentle reminder that it’s never too late to change the path and course of your life.
- “So Fun,” a lush pop confection that’s mix of Summer Heart, Tame Impala and Washed Out with an infectious, two-step inducing hook and guest spots from Sur Black and Kolezanka
“Skin,” the full-length debut’s fourth and latest single continues a run of lush pop centered around glistening synths, Corr’s plaintive vocals, boom bap beats and woozy guitars that reveals the act’s uncanny knack for crafting anthemic hooks. And while being an upbeat anthem, “Skin” as the band’s Frank Corr explains “is our Indie Pop anthem about trying to chase your dreams and pay your rent.”
“I lost a lot of work due to Covid, so I started writing music again. We opened up songs from six years ago and finished one of them,” Corr continues. “This sort of set in motion a new sonic palette for us. For some reason, the words “pay the rent,” kept popping into my head. So with a simple melody, we put “pay the rent” over some heavy synth bass sounds. I wanted this bass line to sort of have an energy of its own, so Matt, Rob, and I listened to some DirtBike for inspiration.”
Two-time Juno Award-nominated and Polaris Prize listed, Toronto-born and-based Trinidadian-Canadian singer/songwriter Tanika Charles spent a formative part of her life in Edmonton, when energy sector opportunities brought the family there. But whether in Toronto or Edmonton, music was a constant presence in the Charles household: Her father would return from two weeks on site with the latest jazz records for Tanika and her brothers to jam out to.
Several years later, Tanika’s eldest brother would be the first to coach her on how to sing and how to record a song. As a young adult., Charles relocated to Vancouver, where she picked up gigs as a backing vocalist and got a taste of tour life. When she returned to her birthplace, the Trinidadian-Canadian artist’s long-held dreams of becoming a professional artist began to come to fruition: She assembled her first backing band, and with that band recorded her debut EP What? What! What?! And with the release of her debut EP, she became a local scene fixture.
In 2016, Charles independently released her full-length debut Soul Run within her native Canada. The album became a national sensation, with the album receiving a Polaris Music Prize nomination and a Juno Award nomination for Best R&B/Soul Recording of the Year. The following year, Italian purveyors of funk and soul Record Kicks released Soul Run internationally to critical applause from the likes of Exclaim!, Music Republic Magazine and others. Album singles like “Endless Chain,” “Love Fool,” and album title track “Soul Run” received regular radio rotation on stations across Canada, the US, the UK and France.
Charles’ sophomore album, 2019’s The Gumption was released through Record Kicks. The 12-song album picked up where Soul Run left off, further establishing the Canadian artist’s sound and approach in which classic soul is mixed with modern production. Thematically, the album saw Charles tackling moments of vindication, uncertain love, forbidden fruit and the state of the world. “It’s a little more mature,” Tanika said at the time. ““It’s not feeling guilty about being up front, not being afraid to address situations that aren’t comfortable for me. I’m comfortable in my skin now in a way I never was before.” The Gumption was long-listed for the 2019 Polaris Music Prize and nominated for the 2020 Juno Awards R&B/Soul Recording of the Year.
Along with her latest backing band, The Wonderfuls, Charles has toured across Canada and eight other counties to support Soul Run and The Gumption. Those tours have prominently featured stops across the global, national and local festival circuits, including Rennes Trans Musicales, NXNE, Lärz Fusion, Pop Montreal, Canarias Jazz Festival, CBC Music Festival, TD Toronto Jazz Fest, Birmingham’s Mostly Funk, Soul and Jazz Festival, the Pan Am Games and a list of others. Her music has appeared on HBO’s Less Than Kind, ABC’s Rookie Blue, The CW’s Seed, CTV’s Saving Hope, CBC’s Kim Convenience and Workin’ Moms and a nationally broadcast KFC ad campaign. She also has appeared as a reoccurring guest on CBC Kids and as a lounge singer on Global TV’s Bomb Girls. Between a busy schedule as a touring musician, Charles appeared in the touring production of Freedom Singer in 2017. She returned to that role in February 2019’s Now We Recognize.
Charles’ third album Papillon de Nuit: The Night Butterfly is slated for an April 8, 2022 release through Record Kicks. The album, which features guest spots from Toronto-based emcee DijahSB and multi-disciplinary artist Khari McClelland was written and recorded during and after pandemic related lockdowns and restrictions. Much like its immediate predecessor, the forthcoming album is reportedly anchored in growth and maturity.
The album’s title is derived from an unlikely source, a creature that soars after the sun has set, but often goes unnoticed until light is shone on it. Referred to as “papillon de nuit” by some, the animal is more commonly known as a moth, possibly revealing a linguistic bias. “I always thought it was a strange insect,” the acclaimed Canadian artist says in press notes. “Once while in Paris, a friend swatted at one and I asked: ‘Was that a moth?’. I was told: ‘No, that’s a papillon de nuit.’ I thought that was the most beautiful description for this otherwise overlooked creature. When I later learned of the symbolism associated with it, I felt that really spoke to both my own situation and also what we’ve all been going through.”
Papillon de Nuit: The Night Butterfly‘s first single is the funky and strutting old-school inspired soul bop “Rent Free.” The song is a fiery tell off to energy sucking vampires, deadbeats, naysayers, time wasters and other shitty people centered around Charles’ effortless, Motown era-like delivery. We’ve all had those sorts in our lives, and this song is the sort of song that tells you that it’s okay to push those toxic people out of your life.
New Audio: Aussie Indie Pop Artist Phebe Starr Shares Sultry and Yearning “Everything”
Aussie indie pop singer/songwriter Phebe Starr first emerged onto the Australian scene with her breakthrough 2013 single “Alone With You,” a track that grabbed the attention of the national music industry and received heavy rotation on Triple J. Since then, Starr has been extremely busy: her work has appeared on Spotify editorial playlists globally including New Music Friday, Fresh Finds, Young and Free, Indie Arrivals, Indie Pop, Women of Pop and thousands of fan generated playlists, which has resulted in millions of streams. Her work has appeared in ad campaigns for Sony, Samsung Galaxy — and in HBO’s Ballers.
She has written tracks for some of the world’s biggest and beloved artists and bands. And adding to a growing profile both nationally and internationally, Starr has shared stages with Of Monsters + Men, Cub Sport, and The Paper Kites among a list of others.
Starr’s long-awaited full-length debut Heavy Metal Flower Petal is slated for a March 11, 2022 release. The album reportedly reveals an artist, who is more in touch with herself than ever before. Arguably, some of her most liberating and honest work to date, the album’s material was written in the wake of divorcing a man she married as a 21-year-old. Featuring guest spots from Cloud Control‘s and VLOSSOM‘s Alister Wright, Xavier Dunn, and Japanese Wallpaper, the album sees Starr peeling back the layers and exploring new territory and depths within her, showing a contrast between the toughness (the “heavy metal”) and the softness (the flower petal) that exists within her life.
“The whole album is about my process of letting myself feel things that I was afraid to,” she says. “It’s about letting myself be tender and vulnerable, learning how to incorporate the feminine into my narrative,” Starr explains.
Heavy Metal Flower Petal‘s latest single “Everything” is a slinky bop centered around a a sinuous bass line, Starr’s sultry and plaintive vocals, finger snaps, strummed acoustic guitar and a soaring hook. Seemingly indebted to Stevie Nicks and Still Corners, “Everything” sees Starr examining the ways in which the quest and desire for love can often lead us to strange and unfamiliar terrain.
“A lot of my songs start from a visual place in my head,” says Starr, “with ‘Everything,’ I imagined myself walking through the dark matter of the universe as if getting lost in the gravitational pull of a black hole. That feeling was foreign and exhilarating to me, like the way you feel when falling in love.”
Anna Stubbs is a London-based singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, best known for being one-half of forward-thinking London-based nu jazz/broken beat act Brotherly. Stubbs steps out into the limelight as a solo artist with her solo recording Kinzoogianna.
Stubbs’ Kinzoogianna full-length debut Gold For The Hungry Souls is slated for an August release through Brotherly/Kudos Records. Featuring a backing band of Rob Mullarkey (bass) and Richard Spaven (drums), Gold For The Hungry Souls will be comprised of “an epic, nu-jazz, soul collection of nine, quirky and memorable songs with hooky, unexpected grooves and harmonies,” according to Stubbs.
“Cinnamon Bun,” Gold For The Hungry Souls‘ first single is a dazzling mix of Quiet Storm piano-led soul centered around Stubbs’ easy-going powerhouse vocals, twinkling synths within an expansive, mind-bending song structure held together with some razor sharp hooks. Lyrically and thematically, the song captures life’s small joys — getting up in the morning next to a lover, after a night of lovemaking, coffee and sticky, sweet cinnamon buns and so on with a loving specificity.
Seth Olinsky is a singer/songwriter, guitarist, composer, producer and studio owner best known as the co-founder and lead vocalist of acclaimed, underground, experimental noise folk outfit Akron/Family. He’s also known as the creative mastermind behind the equally acclaimed project Cy Dune, a project that has found Olinsky exploring the blues, 50s rock and 60s/70s photo-punk through his unique lens.
Olinsky’s various projects have displayed a post-genre approach in which he collages several different genres simultaneously to create multiple meanings while purposely juxtaposing authentic and pure songwriting sincerity with self aware meta-meaning and pranksterism.
His latest Cy Dune effort Against Face is slated for a March 3, 2022 release through Lightning Studios. Clocking in at a breakneck 18 minutes, the album is a meta-punk blast through 20th Century art school punk forms mashed together.
Last month, I wrote about album single and title track “Against Face” a buzzing and mischievous, mosh pit friendly mash-up of Bob Dylan and The Stooges self-titled album — in particular “No Fun.” Against Face‘s third and latest single “Disorientation (Cut Up)” is a dazzling and mind-bending synthesis of angular Wire-like post punk, house music, and New Order/Manchester sound centered around enormous, rousingly anthemic hooks paired with Olinsky delivering dance floor friendly cliches in a series of non-sequiturs before the song breaks sown and remixes itself.
“It is sort of a meta take on song form that folds the remix into the song itself.” notes Olinsky. “I was also inspired by how House music samples guitars, and wanted to build a punk song that not only had dance elements, but was inherently self sampling as well. This approach leant itself lyrically to the themes of modern, fragmented consciousness but in bite size, iconic statements more inspired by the glossy, abstracted surface simplicity of Ed Ruscha’s or John Baldersarri’s artwork than by any narrative.”
New Audio: ADULT. Return with Techno-influenced Banger “I Am Nothing”
Throughout their 25 year history, acclaimed Detroit-based multimedia and electronic music production and artist duo ADULT. — the husband and wife team of Adam Lee Miller and Nicola Kuperus — have a sprawling catalog of material released through Mute Records, Ghostly International, Thrill Jockey, Third Man Records and a list of other labels that has seen the duo obscure and blur lines between genres and styles in a cohesive fashion within the album format.
“but for this we wanted something that’s falling apart.” Becoming Undone, ADULT.’s ninth album reportedly sees the duo explicitly aiming for that goal, while simultaneously rejecting and reflecting the planetary discord that inspired and informed it. Written between November 2020 and April 2021, Miller and Kuperus kickstarted the creative process through additions to the rig: a vocal loop pedal for Kuperus and Roland percussion pads for Miller. They also reconnected with some of their earliest influences including Test Department and Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats, which helped spark a series of fruitful and frenetic sessions, centered on themes of impermanence and dissonance. “We weren’t interested in melody or harmony since we didn’t see the world having that,” ADULT.’s Miller bluntly reasons.
While there are still plenty of the dance floor bangers the duo is known for, Becoming Undone is also informed by deep, personal loss: Kuperus’ father died during the height of the pandemic, just before the duo were about to start working on the album. As his hospice caretakers, she and Miller faced the banality of finality, surrounded by objects drained of meaning — “the joy of having a body, but also the drudgery of having one,” they say.
The end result is an album that crackles with revulsion and dissent, and it seemingly equal parts exorcism and denunciation, centered around a breadth of vocal effects: Kuperus at times sounds alternately indignant and possessed, decrying the crimes, fears, and failings of a deluded, broken world. “Humans have always been pretty terrible,” Kuperus explains. “But every year the compromises of culture just accelerate.”
Late last year, I wrote about Becoming Undone single “Fools (We Are . . .)“, a glitchy and uneasy banger centered around stuttering beats, dense layers of arpeggiated synths paired with an unhinged and desperate vocal performance by Kuperus, who sings lyrics describing the sensation of being hopelessly stuck in a seemingly endless and foolish loop of the same ol’ banal, things while everything else around them collapses.
“I Am Nothing,” Becoming Undone‘s second and latest single is an abrasive yet accessible industrial techno banger, centered around arpeggiated synths, tweeter and woofer rattling thump, metallic clang and clatter paired with Kuperus’ desperate howls inspired by Detroit techno between 1992-1995, Suicide‘s Alan Vega, Swans‘ Micheal Gira and Malaria!‘s Gudrun Gut.
“The meaning of ‘nothing’ in the context of this song is not in regards to worthlessness, but of being lodged into something we can not understand and yet somehow accept it / or not accept it,” the acclaimed Detroit-based duo explain. “We are collectively living in liminality. And personally, we are more content currently to be in a state of nothingness.”
New Audio: Lyon, France’s Ashinoa Shares Slow-Burning and Trippy “Feu De Joie”
Lyon, France-based experimental synth act Ashinoa quickly exploded into the national and international scene with the release of their full-length debut, 2019’s Sinie Sinie, an effort that saw the Lyon-based act establishing a minimalist krautrock approach.
Ashinoa supported Sinie Sinie with tours across France opening for JOVM mainstays METZ and Flamingods,Warrmduscher, Bo Ningen, Kikagaku Moyo and others. The rising French act’s sophomore album L’Orée is slated for a March 25, 2022 release through Fuzz Club, and the album reportedly sees the band building upon the minimalist karutrock of their debut while taking the listener on a journey through the wilderness through shape-shifting, psychedelic electronics.
While primarily centered around a largely synthesizer-driven soundscape, L’Orée‘s material sees the members of Ashinoa exploring a much more natural, organic sound than their previously released work, a sound that at times is percussive and dance floor friendly and other times hypnotic and expansive — and largely inspired by the environment it was written and recorded in. Recorded in a house, tucked away in the French countryside, which bordered on a surrounding forest, the band recalls that the album sessions were spent soaking up their immediate surroundings with a number of collaborators coming in and out to play on the record:
“The house we recorded the album in was kind of in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by Douglas Pine trees. From this proximity to the forest, we wanted to take our soundscapes to a place we’ve never been before,” the members of the French-based experimental act explain. “Before we were surrounded by concrete, and then far from it. We were looking for a new listening place, to discover new intriguing sounds. We had laid down the basis of the album and then musician friends that would visit us at the time were invited to participate in the making of the album, each one of them bringing a touch of their own.”
Late month, I wrote about “Disguised by Orbit,” a L’eclair and Mildlife-like bop centered around cosmic grooves, old school boom bap and Brit Pop swagger. “Feu De Joie,” L’Orée‘s second and latest single, derives its name for the French term for bonfire. Interestingly, “Feu De Joie” is centered around some scorching psych rock riffage, twinkling synths paired with an oscillating beat — and may arguably be the most jazz fusion meets psych rock leaning track on the album.
“The main theme was inspired by the Hispanic composer Manuel de Falla and his ‘El amor Brujo’ work. This track condenses the idea that we had for the album. It signals a change between universes.”
