Tag: Sex Week

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Sex Week Shares Brooding and Lynchian “Lone Wolf”

Brooklyn-based indie duo Sex Week — collaborative and romantic partners Richard Orofino and Pearl Amanda Dickson — can trace their origins back to 2022: Orofino, a prolific musician and producer since he was in grade school, feel in love with Dickson’s taste through a wildly eclectic playlist she made for his roommate. Orofino excelled at, “honing structural strangeness into something more recognizable,” as he put it. And Dickson’s precocious perspective and natural appetite for the stranger corners of music was an uncannily natural fit.

Their innate creative chemistry led to the whirlwind writing and recording of their self-titled, debut EP, which received praise from Rolling Stone, PAPER Magazine, Nylon Magazine, Paste Magazine, Consequence and a lengthy list of others.

The Brooklyn duo’s recently announced new EP Upper Mezzanine is slated for an August 1, 2025 release through Grand Jury Music. “The approach for Upper Mezzanine felt more inquisitive,” Sex Week’s Pearl Amanda Dickson says. Where the music of their debut felt like momentary glimpses of something scary and exciting, the EP reportedly feels far more visceral, each track a focused punch delivered directly from the gut. “I still want people to be singing along and taking the melodies away with them, but the darkness of the EP is obviously there,” Dickson says. “The world is scary right now. I’m scared in lots of ways, and I think that omnipresent feeling definitely snuck into Upper Mezzanine.” 

The duo’s DIY ethos sees them firmly dedicated to helming multiple aspects of each release, including designing the art and making music videos themselves. But the EP sees Dickson learning to use her novel songwriting approach as a sort of superpower. “It’s not second nature to me yet,” she says. “So I’m always wanting to do more and be more involved than I have the capability to. And somehow at the same time, I still have the gusto to say ‘no that’s not it’ or ‘yes, that’s it.'”

The EP also sees Orofino continuing to harness his ability to make the alien feel somehow universal. “I feel it stretched me out wide creating these songs with peal and it just made me feel excited and hopeful that things can be weird and also totally accessible if you allow yourself to just be open.”

Upper Mezzanine‘s latest single “Lone Wolf,” is a brooding and eerily atmospheric tune that simultaneously channels David Lynch soundtracks and Me Moan and Carnation-era Daughn Gibson with the song featuring swirling, spectral harmonies, reverb-soaked twangy guitar. The duo’s individual verses capture an uneasily tense relationship at the brink.

The duo explain that “‘Lone Wolf’ is about communication and testing the limits of a relationship.” The accompanying self-directed video for the new single is fittingly a Lynchian fever dream.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Mila Degray Shares Earnest and Anthemic “Masculine Charm”

Mila Degray is a Broward County, FL-born singer/songwriter and actor. Inspired by the likes of Pretty Sick, Alex G. and Melanie Martinez, Degray’s pairs brutally honest lyrics with a sound that blends elements of indie rock, alt rock, bubblegum grunge, streetgaze and pop rock. Her work reminds the listener that there’s power in self-discovery and vulnerability.

As an actor, she’s appeared in Re6ce’s “is suicide too much,” Charli XCX and Billie Eilish‘s “Guess (remix)” and in A24’s MaXXXine.

Degray’s latest single, “Masculine Charm” is anchored around a hazy, lo-fi production, dusty and skittering beats, a fuzzy New Order-like guitar hook and the Floridian’s coquettish yet achingly tender delivery. While seemingly nodding at Soccer Mommy and Pom Pom Squad, “Masculine Charm” reveals an artist, who can craft an earnest, lived-in song with big, rousingly anthemic and catchy choruses hooks and choruses.

“‘Masculine Charm’ is about an experience I had with an older famous singer when I was 18 in a nice NYC hotel… He said I had ‘Masculine Charm.’. Later, Harry Teardrop and I made the original demo in Brooklyn, just an iPhone voice memo, which is actually still used for the whole intro of the song – then we created a huge guitar hook. After going back and forth from different producers, Richard Orofino from Sex Week layed [sic] down drums and we all realized something special had been created. The rest was up to me. So I wrote the verses of the song and layed [sic] down vocals and harmonies!”