Album: Kallsup – Alldeles För Nära
You have to listen to all of the album to find out: No one can promise to make it better. No one can promise to make it feel real. No one can make you remember who you are.
Leo August
Single: Greenbit – Your Time
Nonchalance is the key here. The lack of heavy percussion allows this tune to remain unbothered. You go and take your time, he says after he breaks up with his girlfriend. He couldn’t care either way. And it’s disguised so well under layers of languor that even you are not sure if he is actually this casual or if this is a façade. And that makes you put the song on repeat. Just to find out.
Album: Shye – The Doves Came Home
Longing can breed hope. But it can also drive you to the brink of giving up entirely. Somewhere in between the two lies the bittersweetness of waiting. And waiting can loosen the cruelty of time. Or so Shye implies.
Single: Sidewave – The Surface
One of the two singles released in anticipation of Sidewave’s upcoming album, Dispel, The Surface promises a fire and portends a fall. Through its steeps down and steps up, though, there is an undiluted wish whose realization is a series of lacerating guitar solos that climb higher and higher and lavishing coordination between the riffs and the percussion that grounds the process. And the wish is to do something that is purported to be undoable. Simple as that. How hard can that be?
Single: Dillon Jo – Vertigo
On Vertigo, Dillon Jo creates an atmosphere of dizzying stagnation with one needle-point view of clarity. Even though everything is spinning, one thing is clear enough and just as unmoving as you feel: you shouldn’t go through with it, with what can kill you. You should get through it, that thing that is killing you.
Single: blankette – clothes
It’s quite simple, really. It’s a classic case of a catch-22. You wear the clothes that present you in a certain way to others, but they don’t always get it right. So, you try to convince yourself that you don’t dress the way you do for others, so who is it all for? Well, blankette can tell you who it is not all for.
Album: Andrew Van Lennox – Collected Ghost Stories
This is not a story of a haunted house; it is instead about the haunted self. The ghosts that live on your tongue, behind your eyes, and wrapped around your sullen limbs. You are haunting yourself. This album’s musical landscape stalks closer and closer to you until it is close enough for you to realize it was never chasing you; it was nudging you toward this epiphany: you are haunting yourself.
Single: sluggg – If I…
With a perfect, succinct title for what it wants to evoke, If I… by Sluggg is a drawling consideration of what you wish you had, starting with the obtainable and then abruptly entering the unattainable over a slow crawl of a bedroom pop production.
Single: Overbreak – Colourless
If you miss when pop-punk and emo were a genuine kick in the gut because of how genuine the songs themselves were… you don’t have to anymore. Overbreak have got you covered with their newest single, Colourless.
Single: Haunted Images – Electric Sheep
Haunted Images’ dream-like sonic landscape examines how the urge to abandon humanness for perpetual apathy is the most human thing of all.
Single: The Van Pelt – A Voralberg of the Mind
The second single of the legendary indie band’s comeback album couches obscurity in a collage of spoken-word repartee and effervescent guitars.
Album: Peaks of Valleys – Eclipse
Eclipse by Peaks of Valleys, an electronic/ambient indie rock band from Madison, Wisconsin, is the sonic equivalent of a closing eye, too stubborn to submit to sleepiness or an eclipse that is too shy to be observed but self-assured enough to appear in the sky. It rests at an in-between state of dark and light. Sleep and wakefulness. Absence and appearance. This is a record that is comfortably contradictory in terms of both its lyrics and the soundscape it engenders that wreathes your ears reminiscent of the velvetiness of the music of bands like Amber Run and Sleeping At Last.
Album: Ahana – Soma
On her debut album, Soma, Ahana – with her elaborate embroidery of a heritage, originally being both Portuguese and Northern Indian – takes the focus off of everything but the body. Then she takes you through a swooping journey on which you discover that the things you thought you were looking for are not the things you long to find. And the body has all the answers if you care or dare to ask.
Single: The Race – Family Tree
Over a barbed mix of guitars and drums a la The Smashing Pumpkins, The Race pulls out the thorns in your side and tells you that you are fine, that you are enough, that you can just be here.
Single: A Mess – Save Some Happiness
With no preamble, Save Some Happiness by A Mess bursts out into its hook at the start and fizzles out in the same way at the end. The song also begins and ends with the same command: save some happiness for yourself. It is almost like this message, over a patter of chimes from the buoyant guitars and a steady backing from the percussion, acts as a sudden disruption in your day to remind you to be kinder to yourself then scurries off.
EP: Tom Coward – Have a Word With Yourself
In the span of five songs, Tom Coward derides, decides, decries, and derives whatever he can from the world and its residents on his debut EP, Have a Word With Yourself, which in and of itself is a mockery of a parental reprimand reconfigured to be self-appointed as a message to anybody who listens to the songs: have a word with yourself. Confront and admonish yourself.
Single: Beatrice Beatrice – Aquella Persona
From one dismally caliginous room in Santiago, Chile to wherever you are, Beatrice Beatrice sends their love and this song to keep you company.
Album: funeral plain – negation of negation
On Negation of Negation, over a whirring, staticky noise-rock score, Chicago-based band, Funeral Plain proposes that destruction is essentially a form of change. And losing yourself implicitly raises the possibility that you will find yourself; and that when you do, you will discover nothing, or in lyricist, Jonny Gill’s words, ‘no-thing.’ This record argues, as Jonny Gill told me, that there is no innate being, just a continual process of becoming. But first you have to lose yourself.
Single: Gingham – Cross Country
Excerpt: Gingham captures the portrait of a person who is running out of his own frame because he believes he belongs in somebody else’s picture. This endeavor is set to an undulating smattering of bristly guitar dappling the percussion that awkwardly shuffles the song forward, as if the track itself is the person limping toward the crowd that has long surpassed him. But here’s the best part: he never stops running.