Been traveling non-stop in May so this recap of April’s listening is arriving a little delayed. Got a lot of cool pieces/projects in the works that will hopefully see the light of day soon, so keep an eye out for them. Also, this is the first edition of WILTLM (and the newsletter period) to feature a guest contributor, which was a lot of fun to coordinate and work on. More of that coming as well. If anyone else would like to put their own words here, reach out to me at bigtentrecords000@gmail.com. I have some budget for contributions, which is cool. As for the music, well, I have my album of the year until further notice, someone at work put me on to a Philly songwriter who sounds like a cross between Cameron Winter and Adrianne Lenker (I’m not joking and you will agree), and a couple of New York DJs turned in some excellent mixes.

Lerado Khalil - BLACK FLAG

Lerado Khalil came across my YouTube algorithm 7+ years ago at this point. My first exposure was the LMK video. There’s a dual purpose to hitting this point right off the bat: 1) to stroke my ego by flagging that I “found him first,” and 2) to establish ethos by showcasing the duration that I’ve been admiring Lerado’s journey into becoming a prominent figure in the alt rap scene. Over the next amount of words, I will try to back up my substance fueled take that “Lerado uses rap the same way Aphex Twin uses electronic music”, particularly through the lens of his latest release Black Flag.

How often do you press play on a new track with certain projections of what it will be, only for them to be deemed moot within the first 10-20 sec? With your Attention Span Defense Systems (ASDS) failing, you get pulled away by a momentary distraction OR the depths of your doom scroll. After getting back on track (with said new track), your first thought is “WTF am I listening to?”

Lerado and Aphex are no stranger to this phenomenon. Both artists possess a deep discography with listening curves that challenge even their most seasoned fans. However, these barriers further contextualize their art, creating a feedback loop of discovery for those who are willing to put in the labor. Additionally, there is a downstream impact on their peers. Lerado’s is smaller and harder to track, but I challenge anyone to point out the difference between Earl Sweatshirt’s Utility and Lerado’s Scenic Route. There is certainly a spectrum of things being actually shit vs genuinely genre pushing, but both Aphex and Lerado reside firmly in the latter.

“Onenthesame” - A dreamlike melody that goes through pitch shifted distortions. Lerado’s vocals are drenched in autotune, pleasantly reminding me that I’ve never cared whether I understand what he’s saying or not.

“Rinsed” - Completely off the grid beat despite the snare periodically on the 3rd hit. Lerado’s signature rushed delivery provides the glue that holds the whole track together, but he also mixes things up with a range of melodies and flows. His desire to test new boundaries on this project is a welcomed development, creating space and contrast for the times when he dips back into monotonous and guttural streams of thought.

“Touch n Go” - Hazy dark synth clouds amid a boosted 808 put this track in a friendly and familiar place within Lerado’s existing catalog. Much love to ## UHH.

“Bridge the Gap” - Clams Casino, one of my favorite producers of all time, provides his signature cathartic sound here with Lerado’s voice occupying a place in the mix that scratches your ear. “This makes so much sense”- me on my first listen

MIKE, Earl Sweatshirt, & SURF GANG - POMPEII // UTILITY

I remember telling anyone who would listen back in 2018 that Earl’s Some Rap Songs sounded just like MIKE. This was back in a time when the now venerable Queensbridge rapper was still a well-kept secret in the underground (Pitchfork BNM aside) in part thanks to his incredibly SEO-unfriendly nom de plume (it was impossible to pull him up on Spotify until maybe 2021). People would look at me askance until I played them a track off Renaissance Man and then eventually nod their heads in agreement. 9 years later though, Earl is waxing MIKE. The run from MAY GOD BLESS YOUR HUSTLE to Beware of the Monkey was generational but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that MIKE’s teflon status as rap’s savior hasn’t begun to lose some of its luster. The chinks first appeared on 2023’s Burning Desire which largely stuck to the same dusty soul-loop formula as his previous releases, but for the first time began to feel like a retread rather than a slow and careful unfolding. Showbiz! arrived a little under a year and a half later (the second longest wait between solo MIKE efforts) and applied some spit shine to that same sound, but the results were mixed with a strong first half up there with the artist’s best, followed by a subdued and meandering back end that eventually wore out the tape’s welcome. The bright spots during this time were the two Pinball releases with Brooklyn beat aficionado Tony Seltzer whose booming, trap-adjacent production offered a welcome change of scenery for MIKE’s trademark mush-mouthed delivery. So it was with optimism that I headed into this double-sided collab tape with SURF GANG, hoping that the collective’s shadowy cloud rap sound would perform a similar feat of revitalization. Unfortunately however, the two cancel each other out in a formless somnolent haze as both MIKE and SURF GANG sound asleep at the wheel across their 15 tracks together. Ultimately it’s Earl who cuts through the malaise, his SoCal unbotherdness neutralizing the “too-cool-for-school” obtuseness of Harrison, eera and evilgiane’s beats.

Sideshow - TIGRAY FUNK

This is the real 30+ track 10k project to write home about. Sideshow has been on the come-up for me the past few years. I first took interest after JAM, his collab tape with SF producer Alexander Spit. The quick 7-track offering felt like a miniature Madvillainy or Pinata as Spit’s eclectic, sample-heavy sound injected pep into Sideshow’s devil may care attitude. 2024’s F.U.N. T.O.Y. showcased grander ambitions with more personal lyrics and slicker production, but the execution finally caught up on TIGRAY FUNK. From the moment you hear a young black boy ask “Has God ever told you to let this white man rule you?” on the intro track, you know it’s on. From there Sideshow mans a wide range of sputtering, gas powered beats from a slew of top-notch underground figureheads including SURF GANG, Tony Seltzer, Popstar Benny, Laron, and more. His topics of choice include drug addiction and violence, but he paints each with such casual mundanity that they lose any trace of exoticism and become the types of slow, then sudden, deaths that confront us all on a daily basis. The brilliance of a line like “They close to dying like a mile away/Fuck a mile just a fucked up smile away” off “BLAME BURNAYS” is the way it collapses the gap between interaction and conflict, positing the latter as an inevitable byproduct of the former that’s asymmetrically more deadly for some than others. Later on “WRETCHED OF THE EARTH,” atop an 808 that’ll push any subwoofer to its absolute limit, Sideshow divides the world in two with a simple question, “Do you love me/Or do you don’t?” Its the ultimate arbiter of our social reality, the final and most meaningful line of demarcation that determines our expectations of the future in the course of any confrontation. Again, the banality of the statement signifies its truth.

Swaya - No Bells w/ Swaya 100426

I can’t lie, more often than not this post-club, no-wave, ambient stuff that cropped up during the pandemic goes over my head. It sounds pretty and all, but a full mix inevitably, eventually, fades to a background noise of tender vocal chops and crinkly textures that my brain quickly tosses in the waste bin. Not so on this plush NTS mix from Brooklyn artist, producer, engineer, and DJ Swaya. A frequent Tony Seltzer collaborator who’s also responsible for “HAPPY MACHINE” off TIGRAY FUNK, her work here clicked right away, drawing a through line from golden-era sound system dub to French hypnagogic pop to transcendent UK Funky to Delaware outsider rap to mellifluous baile funk. Connecting it all is an ancient subterranean rhythm that’s been shuddering and quaking its way through the universe since the big bang. “Life is vibration” Swaya seems to say, “let go and atomize.”

livwutang - ｆｅｍｍｅ ｖｏｃａｌ ｄｕｂｓｔｅｐ

Here’s another excellent mix by another excellent NYC selector, livwutang. The concept behind this one is more specific than Swaya’s multi-dimensional sweep, collect the best dubstep tracks featuring femme vocals since the genre’s inception 20ish years ago, and lay them down slick and moody in a 2-hour gauntlet. The tradition of disco divas and soul songstresses lending their pipes to house music is well-known, but I never knew the bag went this deep on the heavier end of the spectrum as well. Not only does wutang create space for an oft-overlooked side of the genre, but in doing so she also links its origins back to the trip-hop and downtempo music of the late 90s and early 00s. Hearing such light and airy melodies atop all this grim and murky bass music, I couldn’t help but think of Portishead and Massive Attack, and how their own shadowy veneers laid the foundation for so much of this sound.

Keily Rude - “role model”

This might be the best coming-of-age song I’ve heard all year. Rude captures the emotional roller coaster of youth as well as any Sylvia Plath fig tree metaphor. Moving from an early infatuation with drugs at 15, to getting lost in young love at 18, to crashing out with suicidal thoughts at 19, the chorus mimics the speed at which life comes at you in those early years of not-quite-adulthood. Producer bkwds turns in a dreamy beat that sounds like the type of thing you might vibe out to on a sunny day in the park with some friends, just goofing around and soaking in the time you’ll never get back. Don’t worry, Rude makes it out the other side just fine, swerving through all the potholes and finally getting money at the late age of 22. The song ends with its own version of Frank’s mother’s anti-drug voicemail from “Be Yourself” as another older woman extols the same D.A.R.E. wisdom to Reed. A lesson for another time perhaps.

Star Moles - Highway to Hell

Sometimes life can feel like a fairytale, but not the sweeping arch of the hero’s journey, rather in the little details that resemble whimsies meant for a land of knights, castles, and dragons. Philly singer-songwriter Star Moles has a knack for these observations, her songs are storybooks filled with characters of Dahl-ian fabrication: the “four-star postmaster general,” or the “vest-wearing archangels armed with clipboards,” for example. Magic is real too, of course, just don’t ask her to explain it. And time, that swirling, slippery element that appears at root of even the most fanciful yarns, is still the ultimate measure of our lives. The best songs on Highway to Hell gambol along with a humorously slipshod energy that embrace mistake-making as an every day act of living, perhaps even its defining form. As much as we like to trick ourselves into an illusion of control, a more discerning glance at the minutiae of our days reveals little more than a long running comedy of errors. Even our most well-worn phrases have glaring logical fallacies that directly contradict their understood meanings: “I need you like I need a hole in my head/I need a hole in my head/How else could I sing?” Duh! Album opener “The End” (a fuck-up in and of itself) begins with Star Moles repeatedly putting her shirt on backwards and howling that if she does it one more time it’ll be “the darkest Tuesday in a thousand years.” On this track in particular Moles’s voice takes on the loose, quavering quality of Cameron Winter’s, and indeed, the two share a similar self-conception as bumbling oafs who are only getting on by the grace of God.

“Bloom where you’re planted” is a Biblical adage that encourages finding beauty in your circumstances. I’ve always interpreted it to mean that your path in life is likely to be tied to your place of origin; time eventually returns us to where we’re from, though sometimes you have to leave first to find your way back. Sabbath is an LA rapper you could be forgiven for mistaking as a Milwaukee native, given how fully the city’s rap community has embraced him over the past few years. He first popped up on my feed about a year ago with the video for “forkitover,” which was distributed by the 414’s Run Along Forever crew. Still, I didn’t take proper notice until this March when another Wisconsonite, Lightris, reposted his single, “green+blue.” The track wastes no time in getting going; you hear the chopped-up claps, syncopated drum pattern, and ringtone-era synth melody from beat one. Sabbath’s pitched-up vocals enter in seconds later and everything signals high-energy dance rap, but it coalesces into a bleary-eyed and wistful break-up ballad. The song’s central refrain, “I tried to hide the pain but it’s bleeding through,” is repeated eight times in total, each utterance landing naked and suddenly.

From there, I dove into Sabbath’s back catalog and pressed play on his latest full-length, 2025’s Spiff and the City. The intro track is set to the opening theme of Sex & the City (of course) and features Sabbath on the phone with a homie making plans for a night on the town. As the saxophone ascends into the ether, I fully expect the next sound I hear to be a truck-knocking 808 or g-funk style bass line, but instead it’s a watery synth lead that sounds ripped from an old Ivy or POiSON GIRLFRIEND track. “He’s All That” is a bravado rap track executed with the gentleness of 90s ambient. Sabbath talks his shit while name-dropping PJ Harvey and quoting Shakespeare; he even cuts his verse short by 30 seconds to let the beat ride out like the end credits of a teenage coming-of-age movie. The rest of the tape is similarly unexpected, though consistently blissful. Whether it’s the Queensbridge soul chops on “Wobble” or the laid-back, Shwayze-style beach rap on “Load It Up,” everything has the dreamy aura of a marijuana-laced skate down Sunset Blvd. Sabbath is a slick talker who surprises with moments of introspection and tenderness. “Road Dog” flips a pitched-down sample of Infinity Song’s Hater’s Anthem into a booming jerk beat with lyrics about embracing positivity to overcome the trappings of your environment. And then there’s a line like “Geeking all night off that Nelly Furtado” off “Payso,” which is one of the sweetest hooks I’ve heard in years. “#idontpullout” does both at once as the young Angeleno teams up with Milwaukee legend Ayoolii for an incredibly lewd ode to freaky women everywhere, while also dropping bits of sobering wisdom like “I’ve seen n***** die ‘cuz they ain’t wanna give the streets up.”

Sabbath recently scored the biggest hit of his career with the mini-viral sensation “Cantu,” a proper lowend banger produced by party rap all-star Sunny Lou. At barely over a minute long, the song is primed to reap the benefits of TikTok’s last half-decade of influence over the music industry, and indeed it soundtracked a number of dance videos on the platform. Earlier this year, Sunny and Sabbath linked up again for “Village Candle,” a grittier cut that got a video treatment from Run Along Forever head Nolan Busalacchi. In the visual, Sabbath struts around downtown Milwaukee in a snowstorm, woefully underdressed in white shutter shades and a thin white jacket emblazoned with the years 2004 and 2009, respectively. He cuts an irreverently menacing figure that goes well with bars like “Betty Boop, alley-oop, I’m tryna slam something” or a mid-song diatribe about how he “might just” take a sip of tris if anyone’s got it on them. All this is to say that the world of Spiff (Sabbath’s trademark catch-all for himself, friends, family, and good vibes) is wide and ever-growing. A few weeks ago, I caught up with the rapper on a Sunday in Echo Park to discuss growing up on the Eastside, the long-lasting influence of LA jerk music, and finding a creative community a couple thousand miles away in the Midwest.

Nick DeMasi: Where in East LA did you grow up?

Sabbath: I grew up in Virgil Village off of Santa Monica near LACC.

What was it like growing up there back in the day? Were you there the whole time?

No, I moved around a lot. I’m from LA, but I was born in New York and moved here when I was three. My family’s from Philly, so during summer vacation and winter break, I would go over there and live with my cousins for months at a time in North Philly and the Kensington area, like where Skrilla’s from. I know a lot of homies that are mutuals with him, and I know a lot of homies that know Uzi. It’s just very small, and a lot of Philly legends stay around and tapped in. Growing up, I saw a lot of different walks of life, but East Hollywood is my home, and growing up there was awesome. It was beautiful. I had a community of friends that all lived on the same street, and we would just wake up every day, skate, and go to school. Tagging was a big part of life for sure, shout out my boy Ricky, RIP, he was the one who put me on to that. I got a different perspective of LA because I was in a mostly Hispanic area, and I was one of the only black kids around, so I grew up aligning with them. I looked at the way they held family and community very important, and that’s something I always wanted to implement in my life, but never really had because I was an only child. It gave me a different outlook on avoiding certain traps of LA, like gang banging. My area did have that shit, but it didn’t apply to me, just off the race alone. We were more into graffiti, which is like gang banging for beginners, for real for real. But I just love art, that’s why I did graffiti, and once it started to get violent, I was out.

What type of stuff were you listening to growing up?

Honestly, a lot. My mom and dad were rappers, so for a long time, I didn’t really like rap music, because I was seeing my parents do it. I was like, “I’m not gonna do that shit, I’m gonna be a scientist.” At one point, I really thought I was gonna be a veterinarian.

You always gotta not do what your parents are doing, even if what they’re doing is cool.

They were in the underground circuit back then and starting to get motion, but then once I was born, they chilled out. So I didn’t start liking rap until I found shit that resonated with me. Taking the school bus for an hour, I would listen to the radio, and the shit that was on at the time was Tyga, New Boyz, and Kid Ink. I love Kid Ink; to this day, I think he’s one of the best artists ever. He has classic music; if you go back and listen, it’s hits, hits, hits, and it’s feel-good music too. You can play that shit no matter where you are. And DJ Mustard. DJ Mustard was very influential. Obviously, he changed the world with his sound, but for me specifically, his beats influenced me to start making beats.

What was first? Producing or rapping?

Rapping was first. I’ve been writing since I was 12. I would write raps and practice and try to get better. My mom used to bust her ass to get me studio time. She always supported me since day one, my dad too. My dad used to record my first songs, he would help me with Logic and shit. They were always helping me. To this day I’ll send them some shit and they’ll be like “This is fire,” or like, “Yo, you could do it like this.” I still value their opinion because they’re some of the best to me. Their beat choice was always good, and that made me want to have good beats. It was always a hassle trying to find a producer when I was young. I remember listening to Fergie and “Sweet Escape” and I was like, “I need to make a beat.” Like, Kanye, “Bigger, better, faster, stronger,” all that type of shit was the era I grew up seeing as a kid. So fast forward to 14/15, my homie just gave me a computer, and I started doing that.

Both of those tracks you named are from when hip-hop was starting to cross over into the pop sphere.

Yeah, I like that and trip-hop. Portishead, Tricky, Bjork. Even Frou Frou. Pop music has always been something I want to do. I have about five projects ready and the third one is gonna be my Justin Timberlake moment. People know me as a rapper, and I have bars, and I can make something groovy with bars, which I really love, but also I’m a producer and I really love song structure and writing. I’ve been working with a lot of new people and it’s been really inspiring. Shout out, Lightris, he’s really inspiring me recently just to be myself. It kind of brings me back to when I first started dropping, “don’t believe the hype,” and my older tracks, just that old energy of being myself. I feel new again. It’s just like a really good time for music right now, anything goes as long as it’s you. The tracks I’m doing right now are really fun, and they’re bringing people together, especially with the TikToks. I want to utilize that to get to a message across.

I feel like you did that already on Spiff in the City, it’s such a positive album, but so danceable too. What was the writing process like for Spiff? I heard that you had it written for a couple of years, and it was only when you linked up with the Run Along Forever guys that you finally dropped it. When you wrote it, where were you at?

That album was really an intro story. It was me trying to find my sound, trying to impress my ex at the time, make her feel something, and then us breaking up in the middle of that. There’s certain records on there that I put more somberness into. There’s this liminal loneliness here in LA. I don’t know if other people feel it, but when you’re from here, it’s kind of isolating at times. So “He’s All That,” that’s when I’m in relationship, I’m happy, I’m good. And then “T’D Up,” that song is like, alright, now I’m changing, I’m going into a dark space. I was in a dark space after that for a while, to where I was like, “I don’t really know what I’m supposed to be doing.” I just was mad bummed about that relationship, and a bunch of shit with friends. I had my friend die. Spiff was really a compilation of my life going from being 17/18, leaving my mom’s crib, getting my own crib, getting a girl, and then not having the crib, not having the girl. All that music I had for at least two, three years. I had the idea for the cover too, we made that cover a long time ago, around when I made the music. And then when I met Nolan we started doing these videos, and capturing this vibe. And Jack as well, my friend Jack, shout out him, he’s my best friend since sixth grade, and we developed a bag of videos.

Jack’s done some of the recent visuals that you’ve put out too right?

Right, “hidenseek,” “green + blue,” “don’t believe the hype,” “Spanto.”

I really like “Spanto,” the treatment on that one is cool.

I love that one too. Tombo and Sawyer shot that, those are my friends in Milwaukee. Shout out to them.

On Milwaukee stuff, were you aware of those guys before Nolan reached out?

I was aware of Ayoolii for a long time. Me and Jack were bumping him right when I got out of school. I don’t know, I dropped out so the timeline is hazy for me. It was COVID era, and it was right when Xaviersobased blew up too. And I was like, “Damn, this is my music.” Because I was making shit like that too, not the Milwaukee style, but the LA jerk that people now categorize as jerk music. Respectfully, that does come from here, that is LA. I love that everybody has adapted that shit and made it what it is, but it’s always been a part of our sound. That tempo, 96 to 102 bpm beats, that was so core for everybody’s beats. There’s a lot of classic LA producers, DJ Mustard, RonRon, Icez. Icez is cold, and he’s up on his rapping shit now, I love to see that. And he’s been around since the real jerk era, since Young Sam, The Ranger$, Rej3ctz, all that. Young Sam alone, he’s a sick producer and rapper, he’s the goat, I really fuck with him to the maximum, I want to work with him soon.

Were you tapped in on the jerk shit when it was happening here?

I was in fifth grade, maybe fourth grade, when that shit was really booming. That was the time of my life where it was like, go to school and go to crib, you know? So I wasn’t really involved, but the sound was always around, and it just kept evolving. I watched it progress and knew what it was from seeing Tyga blow up, and then YG become one of the biggest rappers in the world at one point. YG really had the game on lock for a second with “Who Do You Love?” and all of those classic anthem songs. We hadn’t had somebody that embraced being from LA and wanted to be that big in a long time. I think a lot of us here think small. With all this opportunity here, people are laid back and don’t go for it, as opposed to in New York they’re always go, go, go, everybody’s off an Adderall over there. And they work together, same with Atlanta, they work together. LA, or California in general, we’re very slow to tap in with a person that might live down the street from you. It might be hard ass music, but you’re just like, “This is competition.”

You did that interview on WXRW in Milwaukee and said “My scene here is very small,” referring to LA, which was surprising to hear because there’s so many people doing music in this city. Has that expanded at all since Spiff and since you started tapping in with the Milwaukee guys?

It def has translated. The last time Nolan and Sonny were out here we went to the club and were in line waiting, and this group of dudes behind me were like, “Yo, bro, you from Milwaukee?” And I was like, “Nah, I’m from here, but they’re from Milwaukee, and I know what you’re talking about.” I love that people claim me over there. When I go they’re like, “Oh he get down, he from Milwaukee.” I love that because I fuck with them. That’s one of the best cities in America in my opinion. There’s such a beautiful energy there. The people are real down to earth, they’re not afraid to dance at shows, they’re having fun. The dance culture alone is so liberating to me, because there’s not a lot of energy at shows here. People are afraid to be visibly having fun, and I want to break that down so bad. I just feel like, if you’re paying to go out, go out with a bang dude, like, jump around and feel free! I feel like we’re building a community out here now. My homegirl Keily Rude, Nerdcore, New West Coast, there’s a lot of us now, and we just have to stick together and keep spreading the love. We can’t wait around for co-signs, or whatever people are afraid to go get. You have to make it yourself and show people why you have motion.

This new thing you’re talking about, is it a return of sorts? Because it’s interesting that the revival of jerk has largely happened outside of LA up to this point. Is that what you’re referring to when you’re saying you’re starting to find community?

Yes, in terms of a positive alternative to the violence in the city. Because that’s where jerking came from. Jerking was an alternative to gang banging. I know a lot of gang bangers that were jerking before they started gang banging. It was really a movement for the kids back at that time. And there was a crossroads of hipster culture and South Central hood culture. It was a weird moment, but everywhere started looking like that. The swag era, that’s the hipster and South Central fashion blend, like, Santee Alley fashion low key. That’s where that comes from, Santee Alley cheap clothes or Venice Beach teas, shit that we’d just go get because that’s what we could get. Especially because back in the day, Venice Beach was a fly spot to kick it at, now Venice Beach is not fly, respectfully. People are replicating that look again, the swag look, like how Zendaya used to look back in day, her hard fit pics with the split screen and all that. But I need to tap in with more dancers, because that’s a core element of hip hop in general, and it’s been missing for a long time. The last person to really integrate that was Uzi with “Just Wanna Rock,” and, again, that’s some Philly steez that had been around and took him, the biggest artist out of Philly, to shed a light on. Now everybody understands Philly culture, but it wasn’t like that before. Things take time. Even with the jerk movement back in the day, it took time for them to get to the point where they had deals, and it took time for them to bounce back from that, because obviously the labels did not show them the love that they needed, they just exploited the fact that they had the most influential sound ever.

You just recently released your biggest song “Cantu.” Why do you think that was the one to hit? Was it the dancing?

I’ve been doing music since I was a kid, I dropped out of school for this, I put everything on the line for this, and at times I make too much music and don’t allow myself to live. That song was a moment where I didn’t... I didn’t care for the song, and that’s why it did so well. I didn’t stress it. I was sick as fuck when I made it, I was losing my voice and didn’t think I even sounded good. I literally made that with Sunny at his house the night before I left Milwaukee. Then Sunny posted a snippet of it on TikTok and it just started going. People started making dances to it. I’ve never seen that shit for any of my songs ever, and I’ve been posting music for years. It just kept doubling and doubling. Sunny was like, “Bro, let’s just drop this, people are fucking with it.” So we made the cover, we dropped it, and it went boom. People from Atlanta, people from Milwaukee, people from New York, people from Miami. Girls, dudes, families, kids, I’ve seen everybody using that shit. After seeing that I was like, “How do I make my music bigger?” How do I make my music sound bigger and not abandon the core elements of Sabbath?

You’ve been pretty consistent over the last few months with putting stuff out. Is that a carryover from that learning?

For sure, because now I know to just be myself no matter what I’m doing. At first I didn’t like “Cantu” because it didn’t feel like me. Not to say I didn’t like the beat, or I didn’t like the Milwaukee style, I just didn’t know if people would like me on it. I didn’t know if they would fuck with it, or be like, “Who the fuck is this n***? He’s not even from here.” That was one of the main reasons why I was like, “Oh, I don’t know if I did it justice.” Because I fuck with Lii, I fuck with 45Gbaby, Lil Sinn, all the hard Milwaukee fools, and I don’t want to slide on their beats and be ass, you know? Especially because I’m doing shows there, I gotta show my face. But when I heard how much they loved it, it showed me that people just like to hear me talk about my life and the way I do, and that’s all I know how to do. For a moment I overthought it. I get that I have to keep building my audience, but right now I’m going to challenge them up to the point where I really make that big transition from rap to, I don’t know, r&b, electronic? I don’t know, it’s just gonna be what it’s gonna be when people hear it.

So for these next projects, it sounds like there are going to be parts of your sound that existed on Spiff and these singles, but then branching out further in various directions.

Definitely. I was talking to my friend Azad about this. He makes great music as well, shoutout TeamAlice. I was like, if we’re not putting our best foot forward, what are we doing? I make a lot of music, I probably have 1,000s of songs, so now I can choose what displays me best and showcase that. The type of time I’m on right now is giving people bars and high energy tracks, but still pushing to tell my story in those ways. “Cantu” grew on me because when I listen back to the verse I wrote, I really am talking about a lot of shit I was going through at that time. It was just a refreshing reminder of why I make music. And sometimes we need those reminders. You’ll have these high moments, and these low moments, and sometimes you get lost. That was a good reminder for me. I’ve started to sprinkle in elements of the music that I’m going to lean into, and I think it still works. I’ll have people come up to me and know the more melodic r&b songs as opposed to “Cantu,” like, the newest release I dropped “green + blue.”

That song is what got me. That’s what I saw Lightris repost. I also recently went through a breakup and I was like damn, there’s really good bars in here, but it’s also such a lovely listen.

Thank you bro, I appreciate that. I do feel like... not that that side of me is overlooked, I just haven’t displayed it enough. I’m definitely trying to lean into that more intimate, reflective side until I can release a body of work that fully dives into it. Now I have fun doing both, I might rap and sing on one song. It’s me trying to emulate old hit record structures, like a Ja Rule song with Ashanti or something, I’ll emulate that and do both parts. It’s like the duality of Spiff. That’s definitely the direction I’m gonna lean into.

Part of what got me into your music, and the Milwaukee sound, is not just the danceability, but also the positivity. Where does that come from for you? How do you carry it through your life?

Really I’m just big on life. I’m grateful to be here. I think that’s the number one thing you have to have, you gotta be grateful to be living. I know a lot of people that are depressed, and I’m depressed too. I go through depression too. But when you lose gratitude, that’s when the darkness enshrouds you. For me, I always try to look at the glass half full, because if I don’t, I know how dark it can get. I have no other choice but to present myself in this positive way, because if I don’t, I’m not going to be my best. It’s tricky because there are artists that showcase the dark side and embrace that image, but that’s just never related to me. I don’t want to be a figure that doesn’t inspire people to be the best version of themselves. I’m not gonna go tell you to pop a bunch of pills and do a bunch of shit that is detrimental to your health, that’s just not me. And no hate or shade to anybody who talks about that, everybody can do as they want. But personally I know what my purpose in life is. I’m supposed to make people feel happy, and sad too, to feel out all their feelings, because if you don’t feel them out, you’re not gonna get to a better place. I think we live in a society where we all just want to mask how we feel. That’s why, with this new music, I really want to dive more into how I’m feeling, and how it’s okay to be sad because we’re gonna work it out. You just have to be willing to feel it out. That’s the biggest step I had to make to get back on track with consistently dropping music. I’m glad that people notice I’m being more consistent, because it was bothering me for a long time. I was going through life things, and I didn’t know what to do. I felt lost for a moment. But now I feel refreshed, back in my own skin. I learned so much from January to now, especially about how with music, what you talk about is your reality. I have manifested a lot of things for myself, good and bad. That power is crazy. I need to be more intentional about my lyrics, about the story I’m trying to tell. I feel like I’ve done that already, but I could always do better, and I could always articulate the point more. The point of who I am, not of what sounds cool.

That’s dope man. It’s great to hear. My last question is, are you a Miranda, a Carrie, a Charlotte, or a Samantha?

Lowkey, I’m mix. I’m a mix of Charlotte, and Samantha.

You got both sides of the spectrum.

Yeah, extroverted, like how Samantha knows how to pop her shit and say what she wants, but then introverted like Charlotte, because I’d rather just stay at the crib and eat ice cream and watch anime. I fuck with Carrie, but never really related to her personality much, only the way she overthinks love, which they all do in their own way. Everybody does, because we’re all people.

March was cool. I got hay fever the first weekend and my heart almost exploded the next, live fast die young right? Hopefully that’s the extent of my health issues in 2026. I caught Philly boy genius slayr live at the Echoplex and moshed for the first time in years, it smelled disgusting. The night before at the Joanne Robertson concert someone shouted “Bring out Dean Blunt” in between songs and I wanted to teleport out of LA. I kept myself busy with writing, interviewing, and running which made the days go by slowly, a cheat code for keeping time at bay. In between there was music, always music. The worst thing I listened to was Yeat’s ADL which I wrote about below, the best thing is the subject of a forthcoming piece, so keep your eyes peeled for that very soon. The rest varies, but I was high on most of it. Thanks for reading, happy April!

Bassvicitm - ?

First listen, I thought I hated it, then I became less sure, now I have fomo about missing their show at The Roxy a few weeks back. The prolific and always insightful Eli Enis said that “Bassvictim have never sounded closer to the light than they do on ?” Personally, I think they’re still lost in the wilderness, but it’s certainly more magical than the scorched urban wasteland of previous releases. Forever, which I enjoyed, saw the pair start to deviate from the abrasive edm maximalism of their first two self-titled tapes. Tracks still boomed with an imposing party atmosphere, but more often they held onto tension instead of giving in to release. The approach brought Maria Manow’s strengths as a vocalist to the fore, her childlike impulsiveness and total emotional commitment. “I’m Sorry King” and “Ike’s Piano” are the clearest precursors to the direction taken on this latest project, which is even more stripped back and left field. The electro romp is still there, but more as a texture than the main event, lurking in the background to remind you this is still Bassvictim. Instead, ? is soft, tender, and triumphant, fully exiting the club in many cases, like the hypnotic march of “Dirge” or the Bunyan-esque “Don’t Stop Me Now.” The most memorable track is the snarling bass beast “Sometimes I believe in God (Sometimes I believe in myself),” but the high point is “Home,” an ode to letting go of where you’re from to discover where you’re meant to be (which may or may not be the same place in the end).

Department - Audacity Files

Back in 2010 I stumbled upon Since I Left You while searching through old Pitchfork year-end lists and immediately held it aloft as a treasured musical artifact. The album’s full-throated embrace of sampling spoke to my early fascination with hip-hop, the first genre I remember enjoying as my own, and insisted that recorded music is not dead; that there is always life to eke out of the lacquer. Shortly thereafter, I discovered DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing… and De La Soul’s 3 Feet High And Rising, though oddly their boom-bap grooves didn’t speak to me as much as The Avalanche’s kaleidoscopic sampledelia. Adam Kyriakou’s work as Department lands somewhere in between the two. While clearly a beat head at heart, he has a penchant for the same shiny, mellifluous harmonies preferred by his predecessors from Down Under. On his new album Audacity Files, so named because, to my knowledge, he made the project entirely with the open-source software Audacity, he weaves together r&b divas, soul wunderkinds, Italian prog rock auteurs, and Brit Invasion bands over booming trap 808s and swerving future bass. In some cases, the reference points are so distinct, like the iconic “Ghost Town” synth on “The Light of the East” or Mariah Carey’s “I’ll Be Loving You Long Time” vocal on “Distant Voices, Still Voices,” they resemble classic mashup albums like Feed the Animals or Mouth Sounds. The music is nostalgic in the manner of reverence, a celebration of the sounds Kyriakou grew up on and an offer of gratitude in their wake.

Jack Kilgore - Affection

You could listen to this in the background while you stare at a spreadsheet during work and still get something out of it, but the real way to experience Affection is by sitting down and watching the album-length music video. Much like its titular emotion, Jack Kilgore’s debut is both strange and profound, an experimental electronic record that traffics in droning synth waves, spoken word soundbites, and references to bread, all of which somehow communicate awe for the interconnectedness of human experience. On their own, these songs stand as monoliths of copper magic, dense and impenetrable walls of sound reminiscent of the grainy synth baths on OPN’s Replica crossed with some of the more aggressively schizophrenic cuts from Aphex Twin’s Drukqs. However, when paired with the clips and images selected by Kilgore for its visualizer, they become auditory lenses revealing the meaning in these small moments from life in the Anthropocene. The stippling high-bpm techno cut “I love you through hiccups” transforms a DDR playing mascot into a celebration of creative glee, and “Hey There Delilah” drag out “Mutuals” makes a lowriding Scotchman showing off his bawbag boxers feel like a cry for connection via shared nostalgia. The most penetrating and damning of these juxtapositions is that of the penultimate, and titular song “Affection,” which soundtracks a beached seal as flies swarm about its face and the tide rushes in to meet it. The track’s glowing, glass-like organ celebrates the beauty of the natural world while also begging the question, “Will our love be enough to save it?”

underscores - U

Electronic music can feel at odds with love, the rational artifice of its circuitry standing in stark contrast with an emotion of origins so unknown we can only call it natural. Songs that pull off the marriage well play with the feeling on their own terms. Daft Punk’s “Digital Love,” for example, locates the listener in the landscape of a dream, treating its cyborgian sounds as role play until you identify so closely with its tale of lost romance you begin to wonder if robots have hearts too. U is a pop album, but one in the vein of Skrillex, PC Music, and digicore; it wears its artifice on its sleeve and so is confronted by a similar obstacle, given that it’s also, very deeply, a love album. underscores’ solution is to recreate the feeling’s all-encompassing grip by flattening you with incessant, fast-paced, inventiveness. This type of omnidirectional deluge has long been a hallmark of hyperpop music, but rarely is it matched with the specificity of songwriting that underscores brings to the table here. Tracks like the extended vaping metaphor “The Peace” or the self-effacing, parasocial takedown “Hollywood Forever” have a layer of internal world-building that moves them beyond mere displays of technical wizardry. Album crown jewel “Music,” works in the opposite direction, employing a serotonin receptor-frying synth blast to overwhelm and drive home the song’s central metaphor, “When I’m with you it feels like music,” a comparison I’ve heard hundreds of times but for once, actually believed.

Lightris - “Up Down”

Madison rappers Lightris and Sero hit the TikTok lottery earlier this year with “Kwik Trip,” a lighthearted (and very danceable) lowend ode to the ubiquitous Midwest convenience store that’s racked up millions of streams across the web. The song’s success is easy to understand in light of our relentless negative news cycle; two homies chopping it up on their way to grab a late-night snack is a welcome reprieve from the onslaught of apocalyptic omens and a wholesome reminder of modern life’s simple pleasures. That being said, “Kwik Trip” isn’t even the duo’s best track; that distinction goes to the equally upbeat “Bronny James,” which dropped almost a year ago and recently got blessed with a standout video directed by Nolan Bulaschinni of Milwaukee music collective Run Along Forever (shoutout to the always excellent John’s Music Blog for putting me on). And both of these were eclipsed last month by Lightris’s solo effort “Up Down,” another lowend banger with a simple chorus (just repeat the title) that enmeshes itself so perfectly among the rapid-fire handclaps, you can’t help but find your shoulders popping and locking as the two-word mantra burrows its way into your skull. The beat, which comes courtesy of Lightris and LA producer Ekebabyy, sprints ahead with the energy of a sub two-minute sugar hit but sustains itself for three thanks to the addition of colorful elements like the boomeranging laser beams that enter in at 0:54 or the bongo hits that playfully stumble in a minute later. My favorite moments, though, are when the handclaps cut out, and we’re left with just Lightris crooning softly atop the lead melody, his pitchy autotune evoking fellow swagged-out white boy Bladee, but without the obfuscation of the Drain Gang leader’s angelic mysticism. It’s these brief interstices of longing (”Can I hold you hand because I don’t want to be alone”) and apprehension (”I’ll see if I break this pattern”) that make the release of the chorus so life-affirming.

The Breeders - Title TK

This is punk’s answer to Kid A. In late 2000, Radiohead brought art rock into the barely extant twenty-first century by abandoning the technological anxiety of their up-til-then magnum opus OK Computer, and dropping wholesale into the digital abyss that was just beginning to swallow us all. A year and a half later, Kim Deal and her mostly new Breeders lineup released a slightly less depressing but no less concerning take on the low-key grunge of Pod and Last Splash. Whereas those records offered an antagonistic but largely coherent reaction to mainstream culture, Title TK is unable to collect itself for even an opening salvo. The album is best described as a collection of fragments: stilted drum beats, mechanical guitar riffs, and wandering vocals that happen to coalesce into songs, but could just as easily have remained separate. This may sound like criticism, but it’s all to Title TK‘s advantage. The disjointedness reflects the way in which the world was beginning to fracture at the time; there were fewer clean narratives to respond to, which left the act of doing so, punk’s ultimate hallmark, feel as jumbled as Deal’s lyrics on many of these tracks. Rewire your brain to live among the machines.

twentythree - “stay awake”

The IG blogs are calling this EDM-jerk, I guess because the songs have synths that go pew instead of squelch? I’m not quite ready to endorse the name, but there is some truth to it. twentythree is a Toronto rapper and producer whose single “Queens St” blew up off the strength of a single saw melody. The song is mixed like twentythree’s fakemink-esque chipmunk vocals are an afterthought, shoved in the background and fighting for their life alongside a lone and blocky 808-pattern. It’s this deferment of attention that’s actually the secret to the track’s success; we’re really just here to be buzzed in half by a giant sin wave after all. I’ve definitely heard “Queens St” bouncing around my For You page for a while now, but it wasn’t until this past month that I became properly acquainted with its creator through his more recent loosie “stay awake.” Here we have the same stripped-down club sound getting passed through a haunted sigilkore filter, complete with unnerving bouts of fiendish laughter and skittering OVO “6 God” ad-libs. “Imma hop in the car and go fast,” twentythree raps on the hook, and really, that’s the appeal of the song, the way it makes you feel like you’ve strapped on night vision goggles to go joyriding around downtown Toronto in a space whip.

Yeat - ADL

Here lies the bloated, pustulating carcass of the prestige rap album, a concept ossified in form since the release of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy a decade and a half ago. I knew this album was going to be ass from about 20 minutes into Yeat’s Zane Lowe interview when he kept emphasizing how much he really tried this time around. The whole point of Yeat is that he’s not trying; he’s just ripping through insane alien beats while slurring off nonsense that sounds like the inner monologue of someone on a Perc 30 bender. I’m glad he got sober, but it appears to have come at the cost of the weirdness that made him him. The beats on ADL are staid compared to those on his previous blockbuster 2093, consciously reigned in and hollowed out to give Yeat as clear a path as possible to connect with listeners, a bad move considering he has absolutely nothing to say. But who cares if your lyrics are empty when you have the cache to get Grimes and NBA Youngboy on a song, or the capital to rap atop an Elton John sample (the same one from Ye’s “Good Morning”), at least that’s the conceit of this album. Artists love to talk about rising up and taking down the industry, but it may just kill itself with old ideas.

Ye - BULLY

Speaking of Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West released his long-teased album BULLY last month, his first since embroiling himself in a river of scandals revolving around anti-semitism, not to mention a pair of sexual assault cases. In contrast to much of West’s discography, and as a result of his current status as a pop culture pariah, the album is largely devoid of the genre-defying collaborations that records like ADL take inspiration from. Instead, Ye contents himself with running through his back catalog solo, revisiting old sounds as an older lone wolf. Opener “KING” sounds like a leftover from Nasir, “ALL THE LOVE” is a poorman’s update to “Love Lockdown,” similarly “SISTERS & BROTHERS” is a defanged “Guilt Trip,” and “Whatever Works” digs back into the chipmunk soul that put him on the map in the first place. Absent from it all is his characteristic hunger and irrational self-belief, crucial to selling such wild and novel updates to hip-hop’s form back in the day. The man we hear on BULLY is a shell of himself, worn down but his never-ending, self-made war against the vaguely defined “they” that have forever sought to tear him down, even as he built himself into one of the most defining artists of a generation worth billions of dollars. All that being said, at least there isn’t rage bait like “WW3” on this thing, at least the lyrics sound complete and coherent, at least he put out an apology, however opportunistic the timing. And there are a couple of glimpses of the “old Kanye” here too: he actually manages to wrangle a good collab out of the husk of former mentee Travis Scott on “FATHER,” and while “PREACHER MAN” may be a “Bound 2” sequel (threequel?), it renews its source material with the perspective of a man settling into middle age instead of running from it. Only time will tell if these are hopeful indications of what’s to come, or the final gasps of Chicago’s Icarus.

Sometimes when you see a concert you catch a glimpse of the future. Not in the giant, world-altering sense of religious prophecy, but rather the small, microcosmic meaningfulness of watching a band that has maybe a few hundred fans today and knowing they’ll have several thousand down the road. This is what happened to me a month ago when I pulled up to downtown LA art gallery Lonestar Studios to catch the premiere of a new music video by local hard rock four-piece Girljockey. Arriving just after doors, I walked down a short but wide dead-end alley and came to a two-story-tall garage door that opened onto a high-vaulted hangar about the size of a New York City two-bedroom. Twenty-year-olds sporting threadbare white tees, sleeves of tattoos, and jet black shag haircuts milled about the entrance, smoking cigarettes, while inside people chatted in groups of four or five, bathed in a warm amber light. Upon handing over my ticket and crossing the threshold, I made my way to the back of the space where a pair of beat-up car doors hung on the wall. On the ground to their immediate right were a couple of old bucket seats with parts of the upholstery ripped away to reveal the dull yellow stuffing underneath. After taking these objects in, my eyes continued their journey clockwise, where I was then confronted by a series of four large photo prints of Girljockey’s lead singer, Gillian Chamberlin, striking various poses with the aforementioned seats in a short black dress against the backdrop of what looked to be a burned-out cellar.

Normally, I’m pretty underwhelmed by the whole art show plus live concert concept, an idea good in theory but rarely executed in a way that elevates any of the parties involved. Here, though, my mind travelled immediately to Girljockey’s music as these objects carried the same desolate, scorched Earth quality that animates the band’s songs. Girljockey is comprised of guitarist and vocalist Chamberlin, guitarist Jackson Vann, bassist Sage Roth-Berg, and drummer Johnny Yanucci. They independently released their self-titled debut in August of last year, and its raw power and brutality ripped me from my seat upon first listen. A meditation on desire and the uninhibited beast that lives within, the album tells the story of a forgotten Southwest populated by characters of questionable morality, men who act without thought, and women who want without heed. While its barren landscape may hearken back to simpler times, the dead-eyed ambivalence towards consequence feels right at home amid the shameless opportunism and social atomization of our crumbling American empire. This is a heavy record, but not one that wallops you with walls of sound; it trades in distortion for cutthroat clarity as guitars crackle and pop like sets of gnashing teeth, and drum hits slap with a nakedness that would make Steve Albini proud. Speaking of Albini, the simple violence of Girljockey reminds me of that found on Slint’s Tweaz, only Slint never had a vocalist like Chamberlin; ultimately, it’s her murderous baritone that drones, wails, and screams these images into being.

Girljockey took the “stage” (a half-moon section of the gallery floor) just past 9 and opened with a dour étude played by Chamberlin on an upright bass that looked about 100 years old. After this, they played four or five songs, most of them new, before setting down their instruments and cutting the lights to let the new video for album cut “I Want” play. The transition was seamless, or at least appeared so to me. The sound from their last track lingered in the air for a moment and eventually mixed with a pre-recorded audio piece that then slid directly into the video. There was never a moment when the performance felt like it had stopped, same goes for when the video ended and the band reassumed their positions to play the final few songs on their set list. The incisive vision and attention to detail of the whole night gave me the impression of a group that knows what it wants, and it’s this quality more than any other that sets great art apart from good. Upon leaving the show, I knew what I wanted too, which was to speak with the band. A few Saturdays ago we gathered over video call and braved through technical difficulties to talk about their origins, their record, and how they pulled off that stunning live show.

Nick DeMasi: I found your record late last year and it really blew me away. How long have you guys been a band for?

Gillian Chamberlin: I think we’ve been a band for about two years? Maybe a little longer. The first real show we played was the Silver Lake Lounge in June of 2024, but we all met at Loyola Marymount University. I met Sage and Jackson through the radio station there, and I met Johnny through a poetry club. Then I dropped out of school with the intention of making the record.

How long after forming did the idea of a record come about?

GC: I made my first record when I was in high school. I started a band with this girl, and our friends’ dad was Mario Caldato Jr, who produced and engineered for the Beastie Boys. He was a super nice guy and offered to record an album for us because he liked our music. That album never came out due to some personal issues I had with the other band member, but afterwards, I remember thinking, “I’m going to make another album because I want to do this.” We were playing together for a few months before I pitched that I wanted to make an album and that I had been given the opportunity by another good family friend, Aníbal Kerpel, to record one for free. I pitched it as something I wanted to do and that we had to be really serious about, and they all were super into it.

Sage Roth-Berg: Even from the very first practices, the album was talked about, at least that’s what I remember. It was always the thing we were working towards. It was like “this album, this album, I don’t know when it’s going to happen, when it’s going to come out, but it’s a thing that’s going to come out.”

What was the writing process like for the record? Where did the songs come from?

GC: For most of the songs, except “SBS,” I would write something on guitar or bass and bring it to the band with something in mind for what I wanted. Then we would play through it and see what happened. “Kid Dynamite” took six months of playing and changing to get it to where it is now, and same with a lot of the other ones. It’s much easier to write now because everybody knows what parts to fill. I wanted this album to be a whole world, and it was really cool to try and explain that and have them fill it in in ways that I couldn’t even expect. But for “SBS,” Sage wrote the bass part, and then I wrote the vocals, and everybody else did their thing. Also, my dad’s a drummer, and sometimes I would have him be my demo drummer. On “I Want,” I had my dad play the drums that we recorded because I thought it would be cool to have him on the album.

Johnny Yanucci: Yeah, it’s always helpful when Gillian has the demo and her Dad is playing, because then I’m like, “All right, I know what she wants,” so I just figure it out based on that.

You said you guys are still writing now, and that the dynamic has changed a little bit to where the process is more collective. Did I hear that correctly?

GC: I think it’s similar where I’ll bring something that’s pretty fleshed out, but now, instead of spending six months trying to get the song to where it needs to be, it takes us maybe a month or two.

Gotcha. So the timelines have sped up because you’re more familiar with each other now.

Jackson Vann: Kind of, yeah. I also wanted to add that Gillian has—[Jackson freezes]

SR: Oh boy.

[Collective laughter]

SR: I think what Jackson was gonna say is Gillian is a musical force to be reckoned with.

GC: I also don’t know any chords. I don’t know what the chords are called. I barely know what the strings are called. I don’t know what my guitar is called. I don’t know what my amp is called. I don’t even play with an E string because it fell off, and I just don’t miss it. Technically, I don’t know what the fuck is going on, but in every other regard, I know exactly what I want going on.

[Jackson unfreezes]

One of the strongest aspects of the record is just how much of a world it is. Can you talk about some of the things that you wanted to populate this world with?

GC: Once we finished the album, I had this idea that I wanted to make a book to release with it. I wanted to do that because I write from these different personas and I’ll know everything about their lives. I’ve always written poetry like that, so now my songwriting is like that. I imagine all these people are in the same place; they might all know each other, or coexist together, or walk by each other on the street. The more I listen to the songs, the more I’m informed about how they interact with one another. I wanted to give more context because, as much as I can talk about it and explain it, I can see it too. So I wanted to recreate artifacts from that world that weren’t real, but that I could make real through images, objects, and words. When I was making the book, I realized that the throughline was want, wanting at all costs, and wanting despite whatever fallout there could be. That’s something that I don’t really incorporate in my life; I’m a very controlled and responsible person, so it was very cathartic to be a crazy person in the music.

I wrote down the word “desire” as the overarching theme that crushes its way through the album. There’s also a very palpable sense of danger that is lurking underneath all these songs; they’re violent from both a musical perspective, and lyrically, there’s a lot of violent imagery as well. What’s the relationship between desire and danger? Is desire always a destructive force?

GC: I grew up listening to a lot of folk music and bluegrass, so I’m naturally drawn to making things feel allegorical and, most of all, simple. I think violence and desire, or wanting, are such huge concepts that when you say the right three words about those things, you can throw people into their own world of understanding. There’s something super simple about huge concepts like those that will never not be important. Also, there’s such confusion between the two, and that they must coexist, but I don’t think they can coexist. I don’t think that violence and love can coexist, period. I don’t think that’s real. But I think there’s this compulsion that comes with the two, something primal, which is why I write about it. And once again, these are all things that I don’t want; they’re things that I don’t think are good, but I do think there’s something informative about them.

Is that common to a lot of the art that you guys like? Do you look for stuff where the artist is coming into it with the intention of building a world for you to be in, versus being more diaristic about it?

GC: That’s funny you say that because really the only books I read are autobiographies. Autobiographies about hitchhikers, autobiographies about gay people, and war novels. I don’t like reading stuff that isn’t real. I like reading stuff that is real because I want my work to feel like an artifact. I want it to feel real.

Something else I noticed about the record is that the production is very dry. There’s not a ton of reverb; it’s just the brutality of the instruments front and center. What felt right about that approach?

GC: We come from a large screamo scene. A lot of the first good DIY shows I went to were screamo shows here in LA. I had this desire to be able to exist in that scene, even though that’s definitely not what we are. That has a huge impact on this album, because even though it’s very sophisticated and melodic, there’s also a lot of screaming, and it is heavy. We were also working with Aníbal Kerpel, who is mainly a producer for film compositions, and he works with people like Gustavo Santaolalla, who did the score for Brokeback Mountain—[Gillian freezes]

JV: Oh, fuck.

SR: Give her a sec.

JY: One thing I can say quickly is that even when we were stripping [the mixes] down more and more, there was always a concern of them being overproduced. Like, is there too much going on that prevents it from feeling like a live session that you’re listening to in album format?

SR: It’s something I still think about pretty often when I listen to these songs, so I’m happy your takeaway from the album was the opposite.

So you still listen back hearing some of the production choices that were made?

SR: Yeah, there are some moments where I’m like, “I wish that this was a little different,” but I think once you’re on mix four of a song, it’s kind of like, let’s get the ball rolling.

Yeah, mix fatigue or feedback fatigue, or whatever.

SR: Yeah. There were moments like that for all the songs. Some of them were really quick, like, first or second mix, but then there were other songs where we needed to get out of our heads and just finish them.

JV: Also, every single one of the songs on the album is a matter of us going in and recording our parts live. It was them three playing together at the same time, and then me overdubbing my part, but that was the only overdubbing done, except for maybe one or two vocals. That led to us knowing exactly what the songs consisted of, so any choices, as far as the mix goes, were going to stand out a lot, but you have to go in some direction with the mix, so it took us time to form what we wanted with Aníbal. There was a lot of learning that went on, and I feel like the more we worked with him, the more he understood us and the more we understood him.

[Gillian rejoins]

GC: I’m sure the guys already said a lot of what I was going to say. We recorded the album in two parts. The first five songs we recorded took four or five different mix rounds because I was coming from listening to songs that had been totally four-tracked or just sounded like shit. And Aníbal was coming off working all day mixing full orchestras for The Last of Us, and producing stuff for Argentinian pop stars, so it was definitely us meeting in the middle. And having everything be recorded on the best equipment, you can’t hide under the buzz from a microphone, you know? It was really cool to work with him because I had explained to him my whole idea for the album, and he fully understood, there was no gap in understanding between the two of us. I also never had to articulate myself in that way. I’d say something like, “It sounds too shiny,” where it’s like, okay, you need less high-end. Part of it was learning to use words like that. Then, for the second round of songs, those only went through two mixes, because at that point, after working so hard on the first five, he knew exactly what I wanted.

It’s interesting to hear that your backgrounds are in the screamo scene. Could you talk a bit more about those connections? Because the music on this record is quite different from screamo.

GC: The hardcore screamo scene in LA is very small, and you’re in very close proximity to everybody. When I started going to really good shows, it was seeing vs self play, or knumears, or Train Breaks Down. We’re good friends with a lot of those projects, so they end up being around.

SR: Personally, I’m not a big screamo fan. I would never throw a screamo song on in the car, but I do really like being present at a screamo show and observing the way the band interacts with the audience; it’s one of the most raw musical experiences you’re going to see. The thing I appreciate is the passion; you can feel every drop of emotion and it’s pretty mesmerizing in that way.

Do you take inspiration from that when it comes to your live show?

GC: Definitely. When I’m playing live, I like to look at people, especially people I don’t know. A few years ago I saw Shame perform at Pappy & Harriet’s. I’ve never seen somebody interact with a crowd the way that Charlie [Steen] did. He walked on stage and looked every single person in the eyes; it was very clear that we were sharing a space and every barrier could be broken. A lot of the beauty of live music is that there isn’t a barrier, especially at smaller shows, we’re all just there. Art and music are so awesome because you can push so many thresholds with people. When I play, I look at the song through the conviction of the person that I’m singing about, or that I’m singing through. What does this person in this song want me to convey? I’m trying to get you to understand, and my life depends on it, so I’m gonna look at you.

I remember at the Lonestar show, everyone was giving you five or six feet of space, but then Gillian waved everybody up, and then we were standing right next to you guys as you played. I had never seen someone inviting that level of closeness while they performed; it was sick.

GC: Thanks.

Something else that blew me away about that show was how seamlessly you transitioned from the live performance into the music video and back. How much preparation went into that?

GC: It took so much preparation,

SR: But also none at all, in a weird way.

GC: That’s true. I put so much work into that video. We filmed it in November, the weekend before we played the Roxy. I dropped out of film school so I wouldn’t have to make films; it stresses me out so bad. Music feels so natural, but filming is anxiety-inducing; it’s so horrible. But I also love it because I’m intrigued by the final product. So the video was made, a bunch of people helped me make it, and then I was like, “Well, we need to have a big premiere show.” I can’t just be like, link on YouTube, you know? Then I thought, what is the kind of space and the kind of performance that can be of complete service to the video? I wanted a space where I could project the video, but what’s the point of playing a set and then playing the video? That’s two separate things. I wanted the whole night to be one experience that orbits around the video; I wanted everything to give you further context. That’s why we had the car in there. I wanted you to see the car, I wanted you to understand how big the doors were. The images on the walls were Polaroids my friend Daniel took of me. I broke down the song into four sections: the first was fixation, the second was surrender, the third was possession, and the fourth was expedition. I wanted to create self-portraits that represented those themes, and those were the four portraits on the wall. As far as the set, almost all those songs were new songs because I didn’t think playing our old stuff would do the night justice. I wrote the stand-up bass song that we opened with two or three days before, and after I played it for the guys, they were like, “Gillian, it’s really cool. It sounds just like ‘I Want,’” and I was like, “That’s the point! It’s paying homage, we’re opening the door for the whole thing.” And I wanted a live transition into the video, so I asked my friend Peter Molaro to make an interlude that we could play after the final hit of “KD.” The whole point of that release was to be super dramatic. There were four different people pushing play, and start, and stop for that video, but we hadn’t even fully practiced the transition. The projector was set up there 15 minutes before doors. It was crazy.

I love that about wanting the car doors in there so you could feel the size of the vehicle. How did you even get the car? And did you take it apart?

GC: No, I went to a car wreckage lot. The first one tried to sell me a single door for $100. This guy was sitting on a chair outside as I was leaving, and he asked, “Did you find anything?” and I was like, “No, too expensive.” He said, “Try that driveway,” and I pulled in and saw the perfect car. There was a guy already taking it apart, so I asked him how much for the doors, and he said 25 each. But now I just have these doors I don’t really know what to do with.

And then what about the car in the video?

GC: I rented that off of a drive share site. It’s a 1988 Chevrolet Corsica. I did not know how rare those cars are. You will not be able to find one anywhere. Unfortunately, my DP broke something in the car when we were filming, so I had to pay the insurance cost on the car, which was twice what the car cost to rent. I originally wanted to have the car in the space, but after that happened, no way in hell was I ever talking to that guy ever again. I felt bad and was also scarred from the experience because it was so stressful and cost so much money. So I got the next best thing, which was doors.

You guys obviously are still writing. Where are you guys at right now in terms of next steps for the band?

GC: We’re working on an EP. I’m hoping we can record that by the end of the year and get it released at the start of next year. We’ve had a lot of conversations about what’s next for us. It’s interesting coming from a DIY scene, the die-hard nature of being DIY, and the pride in that. But I still don’t know what scene we fit into. Something I want us to do is create more events like the music video premiere, full, all-encompassing experiences. We’ve already played with a lot of the bands in LA that I really wanted to play with, and I’m down to play with them again, of course, but I want us to continue to grow and change just like how we grew and changed over the last year. I want us to keep figuring out alternative spaces that our music can exist in. It’s interesting to have a project at this size because we’re super small, not that many people know about us, but being in LA gives you the privilege of reaching the right people. It’s cool to be surrounded by people doing really amazing, really interesting things, because it’s inspiring. And I, of course, want us to tour eventually. I want us to open for bands that are touring. We opened for she’s green a few days ago, which was awesome, because the audience had never heard of us, they had no idea what they were in for. This next year, I want us to have an identity as a project that’s so strong that it doesn’t matter who we’re playing with because it’s all there.

Big Tent Music is a project-based record label and music blog. Its name comes from the poli-sci term for a party that accommodates a wide range of beliefs.

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2025 was the year I started blogging about music. Writing that sentence alone on New Year’s Eve after having turned 29 a few months ago feels like a bit of a farce, but oh well, better late than never I suppose. I’ve wanted to write about music since I was 10 years old, I remember asking my Mom if she’d help me set up a website where I could do so but she refused, too stressed with the demands of motherhood and running her business to spare the time. I hold no ill will towards her for it, but I do wonder if my life would’ve been any different had she said yes. Anyway, I’m glad I started now, I’m glad I forced myself to write 400 words about music each week, I’m glad I posted them online for others to see, and I’m especially glad that people actually took the time to read them. Writing is often frustrating and painful and tiring but I really do enjoy it, it’s been a gift to actually find a craft I care to return to. I have some new ideas for how to move this whole endeavor forward in 2026 so we’ll see where those take me, in the meantime please enjoy this list of records I enjoyed in 2025.

10. Felt Out - Are You With Me?

I recently did an interview with these two where we talked about this album extensively so I’ll keep this one brief. Are You With Me? was truly unlike anything else I heard this year. Its folding of phosphorescent digital noise into trip-hop’s characteristically pensive grooves was a revelation, while Somanath’s ear-twisting vocal melodies, influenced by Carnatic ragas, were a never ending source of wonder. A beautiful album about the many selves we share with one another and how music can tie a thread through them all.

9. Feng - “Soul 2 Soul”

I’ve never played Persona 4 so I’ve never been to the fictional Japanese department store at the center of this mixtape’s title, but if it’s any bit as fun as the 18 tracks on dolo’s latest offering I’ll be grabbing a copy expeditiously. I’ve always enjoyed the LA rapper’s music for its laid back stoner mysticism, how it slaps life’s mundane fragments together into hazy collages that may or may not have deeper meanings, who’s to say? But with Let’s Meet At Junes dolo deigned to descend from the smoke cloud of enlightenment and reveal himself as a mere mortal like the rest of us, dealing with the pain of heartache, the pestering of haters, and the tediousness of stacking cash. His admissions are made all the more enjoyable by the tape’s cartoonishly space age production, most of which is handled by dolo himself. You could spend a lifetime analyzing the contents of a day, trying to decipher the hidden messages behind every passing moment, but you could also just make a song about it and move on.

8. Cleo Reed - Cuntry

A true, dyed in the wool epic. With Cuntry Cleo Reed sought to capture not just an entire nation, but an entire musical tradition, taking a century’s worth of woes yielded by racially stratified and gender divided empire and enrobing them in layers of Black sonic innovation stretching across blues, folk, hip-hop and soul. The fact that she succeeded in producing a document of such scope is cause for celebration enough, but even moreso given the level of craft, acuity and cuttingness it meets its subject matter with. Tracks like “I Been Out Here Hustlin’” and “Always the Horse, Never the Jockey” reconstitute retro musical forms, the slave song and the finger-picked folk tune, into modern laments about the invisible struggle of Black women, while the Billy Woods assisted “Strike!” is a Dadaist deconstruction of capitalism’s exclusionary roots set to a beat that sounds like it could’ve come from an early clipping. project. That’s just the level of range on display here.

7. Money Lang - Xmas Rush

When I interviewed Money Lang about this album earlier in the year we talked about our shared love of the holiday season. While it can be easy to be cynical about this time of year, what with its rampant consumerism and underlying thrust of white Christian supremacy, there is still something special about the entire world reconvening with friends and family to celebrate the passing of another year. The joy of return is palpable throughout Xmas Rush, which was written almost exactly two years ago when the producer was afforded the opportunity to spend a week in a high-end recording studio over the Christmas break. It’s his most personal album to date, brimming with a naked sense of glee that speaks to house music’s roots as an ameliorative force for dark times.

6. Mila Culpa - Face Off

The sound of an extended moment of clarity. Philly DIY rocker Mile Culpa transitioned this year and showed her scars in the process, inviting listeners behind the scenes to watch the visceral demise of the self and the construction of someone new in its place. Every track cuts deep, every lyric is penned with a knife’s edge, but in spite of that piercing gaze, Face Off lands surprisingly soft, opting for earnest melody rather than power and force to get its point across. Indebted to the similarly quiet force of Elliott Smith’s songwriting, Mila Culpa stretches things further by seamlessly integrating her proclivity for analog noisemaking into these tracks, enlivening them with humor and grit in the process. For me, there was no rawer, more open document of autobiography in music this year.

5. Israel Jones - Go With God

There’s no better feeling than watching an artist deliver a body of work you know they’ve had in them for years. I’ve followed Jones since the release of his 2023 EP Bigga Purpose and have always been impressed by his mastery of rap’s mechanics and the strength of his distinctly Floridian vision of Southern hip-hop. Go With God stands on the same twin pillars, but this time around employs them in a search for the South’s soul, an attempt to uncover and elucidate the third coast’s rich history as an underappreciated hub of cultural innovation. The journey is equal parts societal and personal in scope, doubling as Jones’s goodbye letter to the region that raised him after he relocated to New York last year. It’s a tremendous achievement that reinforces the power of rap as a tool for storytelling, a curious alchemy of beat and rhyme that can transport you to a different place, a different time, even inside somebody else’s head.

4. Erika de Casier - Lifetime

Within the first few minutes of pressing play on de Casier’s surprise fourth album, I jumped from my chair and shouted, “She’s back!” into my empty apartment. After releasing one of the most influential albums of the last 6 years (I think we owe a good chunk of our extended Y2K return to Essentials), de Casier signed with indie label royalty 4AD for a pair of follow-ups, 2021’s Sensational and 2024’s Still. Both albums revisited the early-00s pop she mined on her first record, but with a wider and more emboldened approach to the production, which, in my opinion, unfortunately resulted in more diluted songwriting. Lifetime was a return to independence for de Casier as well as a return to form, featuring a heavily concentrated dose of her best material in over a half decade. Across 12, 90s r&b-indebted tracks, de Casier stripped back desire to reveal its bleeding heart. Sometimes that heart’s flighty (“The Chase”), sometimes it’s scandalous (“Two Thieves”), and sometimes it’s uncompromisingly intimate (“You Can’t Always Get What You Want”), but it’s always spellbinding.

3. YHWH Nailgun - 45 Pounds

This album truly stunned me. It’s exactly what rock and roll should be, roilingly dangerous and shot through attitude. No band sounded more like itself this year. Between the dumb violence of Sam Pickard’s empty rototoms, the mangled rage of Zack Borzone’s bile-laced vocals, and the blinding flash of Jack Tobias’s dulcimeric synths, I could pick YHWH Nailgun out of a lineup anywhere. Not only that, but I could listen to YHWH Nailgun just about anywhere too, their scorched earth approach meant that no matter what mood I was in, turning on 45 Pounds would immediately attune me to the group’s vitriolic spew. Like scouring the tongue to cleanse the palette.

2. Joanne Robertson - Blurrr

The type of record that buries you, leaves you holed up in a shack somewhere huddling against it for warmth. A transmission of tenderness for the end of days, a reminder that we are all human and that we will all seek comfort in one another, no matter how bad things get. I think it’s fitting that I have trouble finding the words to describe this album because inherently its beyond them, at least that’s what I believe Joanne is signalling the way she submerges her lyrics behind mushmouthed deliveries. Because sometimes words fail, even while you’re using them, masking the aim of expression in the syntactic logic of language. Better to make noise without thought, to cling to whatever’s there in the room with you.

1. Raven - GNOSIS

One of my all-time favorite albums is The Detroit Elevator Company’s Soundtrack [313]. The debut record from multi-disciplinary artist Neil Ollivierra’s tragically under heard from ambient techno project is a sublime sonic distillation of nighttime in the Motor City, unparalleled in its balancing of mood and movement to build worlds that seem to expand without end, that stretch out into the infinite before your very eyes. This year though, one project very well may have risen to match that mark. GNOSIS, the latest from San Francisco dance producer Raven, was my album of the year for many reasons, not the least of which being its ability to envelop me so completely with every listen. The project’s cover is a multi-layered and multi-hued swirl of amorphous blue forms tesselated by a grid of dots that impose yet more geometric forms onto its surface. The blending of mathematical rigidity with informal drift is an apt analogue for the music within, itself being a finely tuned but unconstrained exploration of synthetic noise. Central to the record is the notion of reinterpretation, as several tracks recycle the same tonal motifs. For example the penultimate track “Unlimited Edition” revists the cascading synth notes of the earlier “Infinite Edition” but bumps up the bpm and adds a driving house beat. And then there’s “In Loving Memory” which performs a similar treatment to the bubbling melody first found on “Infinite Red Roses.” These symmetries speak to the music’s endless depth, how what may appear as a fixed object in time and space is actually the product of an unceasing recursive process. Truly an album to get lost in.

Bonus: Top 5 EPs

1. auwbe - Quilted

2. ear - The Most Dear and The Future

3. Anysia Kym x Loraine James - Clandestine

4. Chareth Cutestory - Between the Breeze

5. Corridos Ketamina - Corridos Ketamina

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Why 9? Why not? No but seriously, I originally had 10 on this list but once I got to writing I realized I only had stuff to say about 9 of them, so that’s where I landed. This year I started a playlist called “How I’m Feeling Now” where I dumped whatever songs I found myself returning to and then rotated them out once I got tired of hearing them. Sometimes the playlist was close to 20 tracks long, sometimes it barely touched the 20-minute mark, but everything below was on it at some point, some even staying for months at a time. This list is not a critical examination of what was good this year, rather it is a reflection of what music found and moved me along with some attempts to relate why. Maybe it will resonate with you, maybe it won’t, but ultimately I think it’ll be a more enduring document than any attempt to be objective about this exercise.

9. Feng - “Soul 2 Soul”

I don’t know guys, sometimes it’s fun to pretend like it’s 2008 again. Between the uniform of skinny jeans and H&M approved graphic tees, the militant adherence to only posting square photos on IG, and, of course, the bubblegum rap tunes compressed to the point they could serve as ringtones on the EnV2, no one does recession-core quite like Feng. “Soul 2 Soul” is the standout song off the Croydon rapper’s debut mixtape, WTF, my personal highlight in what was a major year for the UK underground. It has all the hallmarks of a classic Feng track: lyrics so basic they sound like a child’s first attempt at rhyme (”Just have some fun, until you see the sun”), an incredibly oversimplified sense of sincerity (”It’s gotta be soul to soul, not flesh to flesh”), and a sugary rush of melodic nostalgia that hearkens back to early Ke$ha and THE E.N.D.-era Black Eyed Peas. Depending on where you sit on the Feng spectrum, this stuff is either incredibly grating or mindless good fun. Me personally, I’m solidly in the latter camp.

8. Money Lang - “Big Smile”

A couple years ago Dario Tronchin (aka Money Lang) sent me an [untitled] playlist of some tracks he was working on. We’d just connected through a mutual friend and upon receiving the link I ripped through the demos, most of which would end up on 2024’s MMM and this year’s Xmas Rush projects. “Big Smile” was my favorite, I must’ve played it 20 times that first day, only later realizing that [untitled] sends a notification every time someone listens to a track you share. My apologies Dario. I eventually lost that link but thankfully “Big Smile” was finally released this year. As a track it’s sort of a one trick pony: a quick, soul loop-powered build that drops into one of the most aggressive synth stabs this side of Daft Punk, repeated twice for good measure. But that trick can leave me juiced for hours, wearing the song’s titular expression the whole way.

7. Horse Vision - “Animal”

My buddy called this European Alex G when I showed it to him back in August, and he’s not wrong. “Animal” has the same wily new-alt energy G came up on during his generational 2010s run. Even though the song begins as a simple duet between rhythm guitars, you can immediately tell it has something else up its sleeve, revealing as much when the drums swing into gear after the first chorus and transform the track from a moody Smiths update into an out-and-out computer rock banger. A lot of the songs on this list are here for sentimental reasons, or because I can connect them back to philosophical ideas I find interesting, this one just crushes.

6. K-Lone - “someone else”

How do you make dance music sound like grief? Sound like healing? Sound like the last rain from the storm over head? Movement is a medicine, a balm for the soul. In the months following my mom’s passing, I danced alone in my childhood bedroom for hours, letting the relief of release wash over me as I gave up. “someone else” sounds like something I would’ve listened to then, a suspended moment of warmth that offers more than escape, rather a deepening, a descent into oneself so far down to the point of dissolution, to the point where you’re absolved.

5. Cleo Reed - “Salt n’ Lime”

The degradation of corporate drudgery, of waking up each day as nothing more than a cog in a giant, unthinking machine, of needing to justify your existence through the most menial tasks imaginable while having your every move silently surveilled by an all-seeing eye. It’s the prison we’ve built for ourselves, and it’s the one that Cleo Reed so sneeringly thumbs her nose at on “Salt n’ Lime.” 8-minute intros are rare, rarer still are they the best tracks on the album, but “Lime” not only succeeds as a microcosm of Cuntry’s intersectionalist lens, it’s also catchy as fuck, leveraging the communal tradition of folk-music to transform Reed’s gripes into sing-along melodies that get stuck in your head for hours.

4. Erika de Casier - “Lifetime”

“Lifetime“ was 2025’s best song about desire and it wasn’t even close. “When the lights out/Do you still see me?” should be standard questioning when trying to determine the seriousness of a relationship. Some women at my office were talking about bringing yearning back to r&b, a genre that’s been rudderless for close to a decade and a half, this is the song I’d show them in response. What sets de Casier apart from her peers is that she writes not about the object of love’s projections, but rather the feeling itself, the act, as it were, of need and fulfillment. On the closing track, she places this dynamic at the center of our selves, a lifelong search that only we’re capable of ending.

3. Zack Villere - “Issy”

Name me a sweeter track, I’ll wait. “Issy” radiates with the orange glow of a fire lit cabin in the dead of winter, a beacon of respite amidst a cold and brutal landscape. Tell me, is love not the same? “I’m here waiting/I’ve been waiting all day/Did you know I missed you,” the type of thing we all hope to find, that you’re the object of someone else’s thoughts even as you’re lost in your own.

2. Playboi Carti - “OLYMPIAN”

If NBC isn’t piping this through every second of it’s 2028 coverage, somebody’s fucking up. MUSIC was undoubtedly its namesake’s biggest moment of the year. While artists like Dijon, Cameron Winter and Addison Rae may have left more indelible marks on 2025, no one sucked the air out of the room like Carti did during those two weeks in March. For an album that was essentially a victory lap for its creator, a reward for reconfiguring an entire genre in his image one fateful Christmas night five years ago, “OLYMPIAN” is its gold-plated podium moment. Carti’s putting 10 cars through traffic, he’s dropping $1,700 on jeans, he’s comparing himself to Michael Jackson, and he just can’t help any of it. This is the product of running off pure id, when you’ve killed your ego only to let something baser take over.

1. Anysia Kym & Tony Seltzer - “Long4”

Sometimes one lyric is all it takes. “No one’s coming to your rescue,” these words stuck with me so easily this year. Perhaps it’s an admission of defeat, perhaps it’s whatever hope is left. After a year filled with cartoonish levels of villainy here in the States, where elites finally dropped the last semblance of respectability to proudly proclaim their own self-interest, all while calling it virtuous in the process, there was no clearer message to the people than this: you’re on your own. While lyrically this track reads more as a message in a bottle to someone from a past life, I can’t help but hear the weight of the impending apocalypse in Seltzer’s cold and militant drums and Kym’s sobering lilt. In his seminal work The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon argues for art that meets its moment, that points a way forward rather than recycles old forms. “Long4” was that for me this year, a transmission of resolve from the not so distant future. It only gets harder from here.

Bonus: Top 5 Live Shows

1. AIR w/Orchestra @ Hollywood Bowl

2. Joshua Chuquimia Crampton @ Canary Test

3. Gelli Haha @ Viva Pomona

4. Nourished By Time @ El Rey

5. Three performances and three conversations on the technique and practice of live computer music

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Sometime this November I was digging around the internet for something new to listen to. I’m one of those people who believes in the power of the social graph, I like gobbling up the trail of digital breadcrumbs (features, purchases, likes etc.) to get me to the next thing. It’s consistently more surprising than whatever the dreaded algorithm dredges up and, somewhat to my chagrin, 99% of what mainstream music journalism covers as well. In this case I stumbled upon Felt Out while diving down a rabbit hole that opened up under New York City electronic twee duo Cicada. As soon as I pressed play on their latest record, Are You With Me?, a stunningly bright and harmonious take on the typically brooding trip-hop genre, I was sucked into their world. The rough timbre of the electronics, the sly openness of the writing, the sharp whistle of the auto-tune, I couldn’t pin down any of it, yet it all grabbed me immediately.

Felt Out are husband-and-wife duo Sowmya Somanath and Walter Nichols, two classically trained musicians based out of Austin, Texas who’ve been trading in a distinct brand of electronically-inflected experimental pop music for the last 8 years. Similar to how England’s PC Music crew harnessed the commercial soundscape of the Y2K-era and used it to usher in a new era of avant-garde production, Felt Out take the vestiges of 2010s electropop and indie rock for the purpose of crafting elegantly tactile and nonconformist tracks. Their 2023 record Until I’m Light feels like an alternative vision of peak pandemic-era genre collision, offering a softer, more mellifluous counterpoint to the underground’s roiling aggression. With last year’s Sleeper on the other hand, they opted to obscure their songwriting details behind randomized waves of digital noise, alchemizing the end product into a self-perpetuating sonic organism in the process. But Are You With Me? is something else entirely, swapping the density of their previous work for a simpler, more patient approach, resulting, somehow, in their deepest and most probing piece yet.

Written in the wake of their wedding ceremony, the album draws on the intimacy of their recent union to examine the nature of connection, what it means to reach out and make contact with someone The song “Please” is the clearest explication of the record’s intent, embodying the subject of a voyeur’s gaze and seeking understanding in return: what are you craving? what are you thinking? how can I please you? Then there’s “Dangerous Dogs” which has the upbeat electro-folksy jaunt of a vintage Alex G tune and lyrics about throwing caution to the wind in search of closeness, despite all the peril it portends. Bolstering the album throughout are Sowmya’s stunning vocal melodies, which manage to bury themselves so deep in your soul they sound new on each return, like you’re uncovering a lost part of yourself in the act of recognition. Nowhere is this more apparent than on lead single “Fruit Cart,” a track written primarily in Tamil, an ancient Dravidian language that makes a number of other appearances on the album. The natural cadence of the language results in a melody with unexpected, at least to Western ears, lateral movement and cresting accents, a pattern that is then matched on the song’s outro with an EWI (electronic wind instrument) solo by Nichols.

Bookending and bisecting the album are three ambient pieces comprised mainly of unhewn drone and distorted found sound. These pieces, one of which is the title track, offer challenging and necessary counterpoints to the music that comes between, mirroring the function of third spaces in the physical world by serving as gaps in time where unfamiliar sounds can become familiar. In the days and weeks that followed my first listen of Are You With Me? I felt a strong desire to cross the void myself, and so it was that I got Sowmya and Walter on the phone a few weeks ago for an interview. Over the course of our conversation we talk about their beginnings in music, their love for physical media, and, of course, the album.

Nick: When I first listened to Are You With Me? I thought to myself, “Oh, I haven’t heard anything like this before,” and I still have trouble finding corollaries for your music. So, given that I have so much difficulty just putting it into words, I was wondering if you could do that for me. And also speak to some of your influences in the process.

Walter Nichols: It’s an ongoing discussion with us... and journey, and search, I guess? I don’t know. I think both of us, being lifelong musicians, like doing music hard since we were really young in two very intense classical systems, we just really live and breathe the purity of music outside of genre. So whenever we make music, we’re trying to surprise ourselves and push ourselves, and that can get really messy because while we pick and choose some stuff in terms of genre, mostly we’re just trying to make something that interests and surprises us musically.

Sowmya Somanath: Yeah, just on a sonic level. Because if you think about it, classical music is pushing the limits of what music can offer as a language, right? It’s not relying on any lyrical content; music is the language. So that plays a huge role in how we experience sound. Genre is always so secondary in our minds. We’ve had to learn how to position our music to some degree, like how to thread that needle for people who are coming into something brand new and need a level of context that we’re not always thinking about.

WN: And also when you’re in it, and this is true with any art, you’re just creating, and then afterwards things come together in terms of style and time and place. But as the makers, it’s hard for us to understand our place.

SS: I’ve been thinking about that too. I feel like our combination of backgrounds is very particular and niche. We grew up doing Western classical music, and I did Indian classical music as well, but then we’re really into pop and electronic sounds and also, like, indie rock? I don’t know, it definitely spans a lot.

WN: I guess we can just straight up list some influences. Definitely Western classical, I love Igor Stravinsky, Dimitri Shostakovich, those are two big guys for me right now. I play Bach on the keyboard every day. And then going into pop stuff, we’re both huge Charli fans. Sleeper was influenced by her 2020 album.

SS: Yeah, we love noise, we love distortion.

WN: Digital noise, yeah.

SS: When we’re writing, it’s so sensory, we’re just like “Oh, that feels and sounds like something we like.”

WN: Yeah, it has a lot to do with the kind of hardware we surround ourselves with when we’re writing an album. So what dictated the sound of Sleeper versus the sound of Are You With Me? was the hardware rig we were working with. Sleeper was Korg Volcas for drums and bass and routing stuff through this crazy, bit-crushing, distortion, and it all being controlled by MIDI just sort of interacting with itself. Making music is almost scary because of how much you can do, so it’s helpful, especially when we’re working on an album, to reign that in.

It’s interesting to hear about how you force yourself to use particular instruments when writing, because a big reason why your music sounds so distinct to me is that the sound palette is very broad. What are your backgrounds in terms of instrument playing? And then what instruments played a role in this particular album?

WN: In terms of instruments, I focus on keyboards and wind instruments. Saxophone is what I started on when I was a kid.

SS: Walter is a crazy saxophone player. He was trained in this very specific style of French classical saxophone playing, like from before jazz existed. It’s so niche, but if you listen to some of these players, their tone sounds like a violin or something, but very dark. And there’s this vibrato to it that’s just so unlike anything you’ve heard from a saxophone generally. I think it’s fascinating because not many people are trained in that school, and so to approach pop music, or like, experimental alternative music, from that lens is just so unusual

Totally. I don’t think I’ve even heard a saxophone outside of a jazz context to be honest.

WN: In early jazz, like the big band, Glenn Miller era of the 20s and 30s, the style of playing that saxophonists would use was actually pretty close. The initial way that saxophone was played was with this fast spinning, constant vibrato. It had a very mellow, warm tone. And then when bebop started coming around, everything sped up, ensembles got smaller, louder, and more brash, and that kind of cemented saxophone as this crazy, wild, fast-moving instrument. I don’t think there’s any saxophone on Are You With Me? but there is EWI, electronic wind instrument, on the song “Music,” so that’s where I can do my saxophone stuff.

​​SS: I’m like always thinking about how we can create a little more focus around what we were trained in, just to give people that more legible idea of what resonates with us.

WN: Well, that’s present with you and your vocals. I think your melodies are so slippery and elusive but grounded at the same time, which has so much to do with Hindustani and Carnatic music.

Going back to that idea of threading the needle, of taking this really wide, expressive palette of influences and feeding it through genre, you labelled this a trip-hop album, which I definitely think it is, but the sound is just so unlike that of traditional trip-hop. It’s also pretty different from your previous two albums, which are more pop records, or at least that’s the easiest box to put them in. What led to the shift?

WN: I think it had to do with the sound palette, specifically with the drums and the simple background chords. Making these songs was very “Okay, let’s just find a groove,” whereas in the past, it’s been very collage-y, almost like a mosaic, just taking bits of sounds and sticking them together. Here we were like, let’s open up the drum palette, figure that out, and then make a chill groove with strings or piano.

SS: And I think because of the harmony, it ends up feeling a lot more colorful than something you would normally label as trip-hop. When I think back to this album, I still kind of hear it as collage-y, but it came together in this really groove-centric way.

WN: It felt a little more live than previous productions.

How did the writing and recording process of this album differ from your previous two?

WN: It was much quicker. We got the bulk of the tracking done in two weeks. Tracking and writing honestly.

SS: The songs were like 70% done in two weeks.

WN: And the process was actually kind of semi-flipped from previous albums, where Sowmya manned the workstation, and I messed around with chords. So Sowmya was engineering me while I was coming up with the groove. We have the K.O.II by Teenage Engineering, it’s a drum sampler and sequencer that looks like a big calculator. We would get a beat going on that, track it, and then find a chord progression with a microKorg. We only used two patches, a piano patch and a string patch. It was just about not being too precious because both of us, me especially, are prone to overwriting and overproducing. It was an act of doing less.

SS: And I would come up with vocals pretty quickly and track them. We just kind of fleshed it out as we went.

WN: It was minimalist compared to our other records. These project files had maybe 10 to 20 tracks, versus like 80 to 100 in the past.

Sowmya, you sing in Tamil a number of times on the album. What does writing in a different language provide you from a musical standpoint?

SS: It was really fun and totally got me out of my head because I was like, “Okay, most people don’t even know what I’m saying,” and that was kind of empowering, to be able to just communicate through the notes, but then have this extra layer of meaning for me and other Tamil speakers. There was something so shattering about being able to create a melody and just focus on the notes and the rhythm of it. From time to time, though, I would wonder how well people could connect with it.

I think that’s the power of music, right? You don’t need the shared language because the language is the sound at the end of the day. Do you find that you can access different melodies writing in Tamil versus English?

SS: Absolutely, because of the way each language has its own intonations and vowels. For a singer, vowels carry the notes, so there were new combinations of notes that I could create and little details that felt very specific to the language.

Was it a conscious choice to do more singing in Tamil on this record? Or did you just find yourself gravitating to it more?

SS: It was very instinctive at first, and then, once I was aware of it, it became a conscious thing to create a bit of continuity through the album.

WN: I feel like we kind of knew this album was going to deal with our marriage and our relationship and our relationships with our families and our dogs. The fact that we were dealing with this intensely personal stuff made writing in Tamil make sense.

SS: I think we wrote most of the songs either right before the wedding or after. I can’t remember.

WN: It was after. After we got back from tour in February.

SS: Right. We hadn’t written anything in a while because of the wedding stuff, so everything flowed really quickly. In retrospect, it totally makes sense that I was writing in Tamil after all that really intense ritual.

WN: The song “Please” is about that stuff too, but also our relationship with performing, like performer and audience.

That actually leads into another one of my questions. Obviously, the album’s title is a question, and one that’s being directed at someone, but it sounds like that someone is really many someones. Is that the case?

SS: Totally. I think a lot of it is us speaking to an audience, that feeling you get when you’re performing. You’re up there and all you want to do is connect, and so it’s this lingering question of how do you reach an audience? Like “are you with me?” I’m up here for you are you here with me? That feeling comes up so much.

WN: The experience of being on stage and seeing people’s stony, kind of passive, faces, not that that’s what they’re feeling–

SS: Because they could be very active actually, they might be really engaged. We just don’t know.

WN: Yeah. So often performing feels like you’re giving and that’s it, but it can be really magical when there’s a back and forth.

SS: It’s a very hard ask though, so all we can do is hope that people are attentive. And it’s okay, you know, whatever. People are people, and they have different day,s and everyone’s going through their own shit.

WN: It’s also just relationship stuff in general, like what does it take to sustain any type of relationship with another person? It takes active engagement and checking in to keep yourself there with them.

I also wanted to ask about the song “Music.” I think it’s kind of bold to title a song that and then to also basically start the album with it. The song has two parts. It starts with you listing out all these weird and mundane places where you find music, and then it shifts to this feeling of impending arrival, like you’re on the precipice of becoming something. How do those things connect, and why did you put them all under the title of “Music?”

SS: We’ve always been really drawn to the polarity of things. “Music” started as this two-sided feeling of loving music so much with all our hearts and hearing it everywhere, but then on the flip side, that ubiquity making it undervalued from a consumerist standpoint. And it all goes back to what the individual’s relationship is with music. Do you value it as a form of art, or do you just view it as a product that’s meant to satiate you?

Would you say that the latter half of that track is talking more about what that relationship is like for the two of you?

SS: It shifts to the feeling of being on stage. Like, I’m performing, I’m afraid, but I’m also not afraid because I love it so much. And then the “Heaven is on the way” part is slightly sarcastic. Wanting and yearning for something through music is something we’re always wrestling with because we want to preserve that purity around it, but we also participate in the commerce element of it. To us, music is invaluable, but we also want to sustain our lives through it.

WN: And then when the song is in those instrumental, kind of arrival sections, where it’s just drums with an EWI melody on top, it’s like stating nothing and everything by just being an instrumental, just music. The ending is the most clear statement of that.

Are you guys gonna tour this record?

SS: Dude we need to.

WN: We usually tour in the summer, so maybe we’ll do that. We would have done it this summer, but we were traveling for different reasons, and then we toured this fall with our friend Hannah, so we haven’t gotten a chance yet. All of our tours are DIY, and they take six months to put together, so if we start now, we might have another album out by the time a tour comes together.

I had one more question that I wanted to get to. You guys just did a merch drop for this record, and you’ve done merch drops for each of the last three records; you even made a Tamagotchi for Until I’m Light. Could you talk a bit about the importance of physical media for y’all and why you continue to engage in it?

SS: It’s so important. Going back to the song “Music” and feeling like everything is being forced down our throats all the time, there’s a kind of preciousness that gets lost with streaming. Holding a beautiful object that symbolizes and carries this art form is unparalleled. It’s so important to slow down and actually know what you’re listening to, and I feel like physical media is a representation of that reverence for the art, while also being an object of art itself.

WN: And to acquire any physical object, you have to, like, interact with a human. Like your body has to go get it. You have to hold it, and you have to interact with it. Once you get back into the physical media world, it’s like night and day; it feels like being alive.

• Hollis Howard - Good Morning, We Love You 💿

• Victoryland - I Will Tear You Down 💿

• 16 Underground - Drifting Deeper 💿

• Bassvictim - Forever 💿

• Navy Blue - The Sword & The Soaring 💿

• elmjack - FUNCTAPE 💿

• Starling - Forgive Me 💿

• Anna Shoemaker - Someone Should Stop Her 💿

• OBO585—Corridos Ketamina 🎛️

• Oneohtrix Point Never - Tranquilizer 💿

• Gelli Haha - Switcheroo 💿

• Song of the Week: Victoryland - “No Camera” 🎵

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Hollis Howard - Good Morning, We Love You

Making sincere music is hard, Hollis Howard does it well. On her debut EP, the 22 year-old LA songwriter takes the surprisingly difficult stance of saying she cares, about her friends, her family and her craft. In an age of learned nihilism and debilitating self-awareness, such a simple step can seem like a mountain to climb, and yet here’s a project which does it time and time again. Take “Gainsayer” for example, a track that muses about the things that divide us from the ones we love, its verses read as a series of run-on sentences with little in the way of poetic adornments to hide the sentiment flowing underneath. And then there’s “I LOVE MY FRIENDS,” a sort of laundry list of gratitudes that tumble out in wonder along with what may be the project’s slogan: “I don’t think it’s cool to/Try and hold it in.” Hollis’s directness on these tracks is disarming and part of the reason why they work so well, their immediacy knocks you back before you even have a chance to put walls up. It also helps that she has great pop sensibilities, perhaps most notably on the track “Nero” which has an incredibly bright and catchy hook that takes you by surprise each time it comes around, as it should per the accompanying lyric “You might take me by, take me by, take me by surprise.” A refreshingly sweet listen.

Bassvictim - Forever

My first real interaction with the victims of bass, though I distinctly remember their debut single “Canary Wharf freestyle” being one of the first things I listened to on nina back in the day. I guess these two are toxic? Their recent Pitchfork profile certainly gave that impression, but I don’t know, I haven’t been following along closely enough. What I can say is the music is pretty good, like brain-friend EDM that traffics in childlike melody instead of crystalline topliners. Ike Clateman’s production is impressively unhinged but Maria Manow’s heavily accented vocals are what make the project for me. Her performances have the freewheeling energy of a kid on a trampoline, as if the lines are dawning on her at the apex of each jump. There may not be much to take home here, but it’s a fun time while it lasts.

elmjack - FUNCTAPE

This one brought me back to 2018, when everyone was shacking up inside their bedrooms to make woozy pop-r&b tracks about the vagaries of youth. It was a genuine burst of creative activity that has since been pilloried with terms like “bedroom pop” and “Spotifycore,” but FUNCTAPE manages to give the sound a new lease on life. While there were some genuine gems that came out of the whole Lorem wave (“Suzuki Peaches” anyone?) a lot of it was, understandably, immature, haphazard amalgamations of contemporary rock stars like Frank Ocean and Tame Impala with half-baked lyrics about growing up and believing in yourself. Queens artists Hadji Gaviota and loe4t, performing together as elmjack, step in and add real depth to the mix. Across 7 tracks they reexamine some of the well-worn narratives we use to define ourselves, poking holes in their rationale and asking if we could be looking at things a little differently in both life and love. Hadji’s been one of my favorite pop lyricists for a minute, he’s got a knack for pushing conventional song ideas just past their limits, like on “a bother…” which transforms a run-of-the-mill breakup lament into a genuine moment of introspection with a single line: “But would it be about her.” And then there’s loe4t’s production which is warm and well-balanced, giving the tracks real weight where so many of their predecessors felt thin and one-dimensional. FUNCTAPE is one of those rare projects that’s able to traffic in nostalgia while still managing to sound fresh and present, good stuff.

SOTW: Victoryland - “No Cameras”

A bit of ramshackle guitar rock courtesy of former Blood member Julian McCamman’s Victoryland project. The main refrain (and upcoming album title) has been stuck in my head since I heard it last Sunday and I still have no clue what it means. Your heart is a room with no cameras in it? I suppose there’s something lurking in there about the machinations of love being unknowable, but no matter, the best lyrics usually resemble koans anyway. Julian’s voice reminds me of Berkshire weirdo LUCY’s, but with the goofiness dialed back a couple of notches. He throws it up and down the track with reckless abandon before letting loose a cathartic belt on the line “fade out” in the final moments of the chorus. It’s a jovial jaunt through a man’s slaphappy psyche, one with immediate replay value too.

• Red House Painters - Old Ramon 💿

• And Always Forever: Night 2 @ The Echo/Echoplex 🎤

• Dreary - Wilt 💿

• shaiwarrior - A Warrior’s Pilot 💿

• Red House Painters - Songs for a Blue Guitar 💿

• Kwame Adu - Dirty Monk, Mechanical Heart 💿

• Red House Painters - Ocean Beach 💿

• Carl Aagesen - Old Kids 💿

• AKA BK - MUSH 💿

• Cicada - CICADA 2 💿

• Family Vision - Lace 💿

• Felt Out - Are You With Me? 💿

• Song of the Week: Red House Painters - “Cruiser” 🎵

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Red House Painters - Old Ramon

A month ago I predicted that Poor Image’s self-titled debut would get me into slowcore. Well I was right. I listened to three Red House Painters albums this week and Old Ramon was by far my favorite. The songwriting is very close to the unvarnished autobiographical style certified-bad-guy Mark Kozelek would develop, perfect and then get carried away with on his subsequent Sun Kil Moon project. but the instrumentation has a lot more heft than those records. This is still a proper rock band doing proper rock band things, churning out chunky riffs and bittersweet melodies that march along with the resolute air of a good funeral dirge. Every song reads as a screed of regret, the bitter tears of time dripping down pockmarked cheeks turned toward a fading sunset. Just the type of shit I’m on these days.

Dreary - Wilt

Shoutout to typos. I was looking up UK dream pop duo deary on the recommendation of a Bandcamp comment (still haven’t listened) but accidentally dropped an extra “r” in there somewhere and what do you know, this insanely heavy hardcore group out of Fontana, CA popped up instead. I suppose it was kismet given that they dropped their debut EP less than two months ago. I don’t normally go for this kind of stuff but the melodies on here are undeniable, and lead singer Natalie Orosco’s voice festers with a quiet intensity capable of punching through the band’s wall of sound onslaught. Plus she can really scream too. Gotta get this band out to LA!

Cicada - CICADA 2

More like ear 2. Cicada is Luko M and Violet Better, two young Brooklynites making music that falls roughly into the whole indie-folktronica wave that’s been sweeping through all the cool corners of the internet as of late. I checked out Luko’s latest solo record Clutch back in September and enjoyed what I heard, he’s got a great ear for samples, sweet and sticky spirals of sound that hold songs together with their centripetal force. I enjoyed this record too, at least the parts that didn’t sound so much like ear. To be fair, they’re a lot more guitar-centric than their wellspring, but it’s hard not to think of that other digi-twee duo with every half-mumbled refrain and sporadic vocal glitch. The strongest tracks are the ones that play things a little more head-on, like “Hoop’s” endless dulcimeric loop or “Post Office’s” jazzy trip-hop slink, stuff that isn’t so concerned with hiding its hand.

Felt Out - Are You With Me?

Felt Out is the project of husband-and-wife duo Sowmya Somanath and Walter Nichols, two Austin-based musicians who have been mining a sweeping brand of experimental pop music for close to a decade now. Previous releases have encompassed late 00s bloghaus, mid-10s vaporwave, peak-COVID hyperpop, and that’s just scratching the surface. They’ve labelled this latest album trip-hop but, the residual influence of all that previous genre work can be felt as well, along with the incorporation of more ambient elements such as drone and field recording. If what I’m describing sounds unwieldy it’s because it is, but only in the best of ways. Like a giant teddy bear you struggle to bring home from the fair, there’s just so much to love you can’t quite wrap your arms around it.

SOTW: Red House Painters - “Cruiser”

Is this the greatest song about LA ever written? Probably not, but that’s not a fun thing to blog, so I will say yes, this is the greatest song about LA ever written. Never mind that a good chunk of the lyrics are Kozelek waxing poetic about his “exotic” Japanese girlfriend (yikes) instead focus on the way he renders the city’s evenings (”Purple nights”), or it’s odd congruency with the Pacific (”pavement meets the sand”), or how it appears from the window of a plane (”glitters on the ground”), simple lines that will bring to mind a thousand images for anyone who’s spent time here. But pretty descriptions only go so far and “Cruiser” goes farther, capturing the city’s primal character as a beacon of perfection that simultaneously charms you with its ease and spurns you with its incessance. It’s a cosmic joke of a place, and you either get it or you don’t.

• Lijan - Limbo’s Reject 💿

• nasarima - 22 nasarima 💿

• Ety - Sea Legs 💿

• My Favorite Color - Elmer 💿

• Nicholas - cerulean 💿

• Lawrence Matthews - Between Mortal Reach & Posthumous Grip 💿

• Rosalia - LUX 💿

• Song of the Week: Nicholas - “my treat” 🎵

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Lijan - Limbo’s Reject

I’ve been keeping up with UK producer Lijan since March of this year when I heard the song “Bally” he produced for Rico Ace and EsDeeKid. The beat is unhinged, a series of alien synths spiraling in and out of screen around a drum pattern that sounds like it was programmed by throwing a laptop down a flight of stairs. Frankly I don’t know how either of those guys got verses off on it. Nothing on this new mixtape goes as hard, but that’s not really the point. Lijan has a very unique ear, you can’t really pin down his style because he doesn’t hear the world in a way anyone else does. His compositions on Limbo’s Reject possess odd rhythms, they sputter and feign collapse before connecting at the last moment, giving the songs a peculiar emptiness, as if they’re playing out against a back drop of deep space. But in spite of how otherworldly this music sounds, it’s principally concerned with the here and now, trying to reflect and make sense of the strangeness of our modern lives. How do we see one another? How do we see ourselves? How do we cross the divide and connect?

Highlights: “buenavida”; “changes”

nasarima - 22 nasarima

I’m attending Viva Pomona later this month and spent a good chunk of my week researching the artists on the bill, one of whom is nasarima. Outside of a well-loved Soundcloud loosie from 2013, this 5-track EP from back in May is his only publicly released music. Lead single “rattlesnake” is a quick and catchy guitar diddy with an unfinished jangliness that reminds me of early Steve Lacy. The rest of the project is decidedly more grounded, keeping the guitar as a focal point but smoothing out its tone and letting it sit a little heavier in the mix. You could call this pop or indie rock or “alt-r&b” but it doesn’t really sit well in any of those categories, preferring instead to dip its hand in each and borrow as needed. “crush” is by far the standout on here, an exceptionally well written song about a love worn thin by time and personal baggage. Its one of those tracks that’s so simple in concept and execution that it defies easy comparison, though I’m tempted to evoke Nourished By Time given its clear mastery of form. Needless to say I’ll be checking out whatever stage he’s on in a couple of weekends.

Highlights: “crush”; “ghost on my shoulder”

My Favorite Color - Elmer

You might know My Favorite Color from that reel where he stands in front of Nickelodeon studios with his crew telling child sex pest Dan Schneider to go fuck himself. Or the one where he makes a diss track about Lil Yachty’s performative psych rock phase. Or, most recently, the one where he cusses out major labels for leadng him on outside the Columbia Records building. Suffice it to the LA by way of Pittsburgh rapper is a gifted marketer, routinely racking up tens and hundreds of thousands of views on social media, but it’s not just the short form content he excels at. On Elmer, My Favorite Color’s latest album and first since 2020, he trains his laid-back, conversational flow on more weighty subject matter: escaping problems through casual drug use, growing up adjacent to violence, and, most prominently, contending with life’s unescapable loneliness. The first few tracks have a veneer of humor similar to that found in his videos, but this largely gets abandoned as the project progresses and My Favorite Color drops his guard to reveal a surprising level of openness. The beats, all courtesy of producer Nice Rec, are jazzy and unhurried, leaving plenty of space for the rapper’s distinctive persona to take center stage. It’s always nice when the music backs up the antics.

Highlights: “Can’t Miss”; “Little Things”

SOTW: Nicholas - “my treat”

This song went platinum in my phone the night Nicholas sent it to me. An ethereal pop anthem about playing sugar daddy for the person you love, what could be more aspirational than that? I love the little vocal stabs that punctuate the verses, the two-dollar synth plug-in that scores the chorus, the part where he sings in Spanish for no reason. We are dealing with a pop mastermind folks, living proof that you don’t need million dollar budgets and a roster of Swedish songwriters to craft delectable ear candy. Treat yourself today.

Jouska’s last album, Suddenly My Mind Is Blank, was the soundtrack to my 2023, an infectious blend of upbeat alt-pop and dark wave electro that wormed its way into my head with songs about the oddities of selfhood, unresolved relationships, and one of the best horoscopes ever put to tape. I’ve been anticipating its follow-up ever since “Flower Moon” appeared back in June, and last month it finally arrived. As was hinted at by the singles leading up to release, How Did I Wind Up Here? finds Jouska in a decidedly different place than she was two and half years ago. While the core elements of her sound remain, there’s a newfound sense of fatigue and melancholy that colors her music. Unlike its predecessor, which tended to view struggle optimistically as a necessary step of becoming, this latest record finds Jouska weighed down by trying times on personal and global stages. It’s another triumph in my humble opinion, a signpost to gather round for anyone searching for their own meaning amidst change. I was thrilled to chat with Jouska over e-mail and get her thoughts on How Did I Wind Up Here? and some of the music she’s been listening to lately.

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Nick DeMasi: Where is the “here” in the album’s title?

Jouska: It’s kind of hard to explain. It’s not a real place, it’s emotional. Like… how did I end up feeling this way? Living this way? Acting this way? I was unhappy, anxious, regretful; and it felt like time had just flown by, like I had wasted so much of it not being who I wanted to be. I was getting older and things were happening that were making me question everything about myself and my life.

Overall I’d characterize this record as more somber and subdued than its predecessor, the tone of the production is colder and the lyrics and vocals have a distance to them, almost as if they’re being experienced by someone else. What transpired over the last two years that led to this shift in sound and perspective?

Some personal things were happening that I had never experienced before, and it really shook me. It felt like the ground disappeared beneath me, and suddenly everything I once relied on was gone. So I think I unconsciously went back and listened to the music that I listened to in high school, when I also had this kind of existential sorrow; all the melancholic indie, singer-songwriter, folk-rock that was my soundtrack in those days. I think that naturally seeped into what I was making. It just made sense for the songs to sound like that, more raw, honest, and organic; like a more grown-up version of the 16-year-old me who felt everything so intensely. It paints a picture of how I felt on the inside.

One of my favorite songs on this new record is named after the state I live in, California. When did you visit and why did you write about it?

I visited LA for the first time in fall 2023. I’d never been outside of Europe before, never traveled that far or for that long. Everything felt bizarre and unreal, but also strangely calm. It gave me space from myself; waking up when people in Norway were going to bed, spending my days in the sun looking at coyotes and turtles, meeting new people, and having shallow conversations. It was a nice relief.

You co-wrote and co-produced this record with Hans Olav Settem, can you tell me more about your collaborative relationship? How do you two typically work together and did that approach change at all on this project?

Jouska actually started as our project when we were around 19. We were both new to music production and songwriting, so we just experimented and learned together. The project has gone through a lot of different eras because of that. We were a duo until the last album, but it naturally became more personal and more “me.” Hans is still very involved in the writing and production, though. We’re also a couple, and have been for around 10 years, so separating things a bit has been good for us too.

On Suddenly My Mind Is Blank you have a track called “Why’d You Leave Me In The Red?” and on How Did I Wind Up Here? you have a song called “Why Won’t You Talk To Me?” What do you like about titling songs as questions?

That’s very observant! I think it feels like confronting someone, but in a way that’s safe for me. Sometimes the questions are toward specific people who hurt me, or people I can’t talk to anymore. It gives me a bit of relief, like I am confronting them even if they’ll never hear it.

“I Let It Happen” is a devastating track that gets at the connection between awareness and responsibility. In our hyper-connected world, how do you manage navigating the minutiae of daily life against the backdrop of tremendous atrocities occurring in places like Palestine?

I honestly don’t know how to navigate it. It feels unbearable to witness these horrors happening while at the same time continue living my everyday life. There’s this constant heaviness and guilt, knowing what’s going on, and knowing how little I can do to help. I try to stay present and aware, but I’m also painfully conscious of my own safety and comfort. I get to live my life with the people I love while others are fighting to survive, and the world just watches them like animals in a cage. I feel complicit simply by getting to live, and by growing numb when it all becomes too overwhelming. That scares me more than anything: that the world will adapt to this cruelty and injustice, and that it will become background noise. It’s heartbreaking and terrifying.

What Jouska Listened To Last Week:

• The Radio Dept. - Pet Grief 💿

• ML Buch - Suntub 💿

• Boards of Canada - Music Has the Right to Children 💿

• Jenny Hval - Blood Bitch 💿

• Bon Iver - Bon Iver 💿

• The Books - Lost and Safe 💿

The Radio Dept. – Pet Grief

This album has been a constant in my life, but lately it feels even closer. There’s something so nostalgic and foggy about their sound, like memories you can’t quite hold onto. It’s sad and comforting at the same time, and that mix of distance and intimacy has influenced me a lot.

ML Buch – Suntub

This record completely reignited something in me. It feels like a dream you can walk around in, constantly shifting, full of tiny details you only notice the tenth time you listen. It reminds me why I love making music in the first place.

Boards of Canada – Music Has the Right to Children

I always come back to this album. It’s beautiful but slightly unsettling, like there’s something hiding underneath. That atmosphere is comforting and eerie all at once, and this is something I connect to deeply and want in my own music.

• NxWorries - Why Lawd? 💿

• Poor Image - Poor Image 💿

• bar italia - Some Like It Hot 💿

• Darkside @ Lodge Room 🎤

• Zack Villere - Snoey 💿

• nokio - new millenium 💿

• Ee - ramadan 💿

• Song of the Week: Poor Image - “Planting Weeds” 🎵

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Poor Image - Poor Image

This might be the album that gets me into slowcore. SF-based Poor Image turn in a stunningly crooked rock record full of forlorn grooves and rambling shadow play. Sometimes this style of music can be too disjointed for me, angular to the point of being obtuse, but Poor Image keep a trim sense of composure throughout, their melodies connect and layer into wonderfully roughshod singalongs about teetering on the edge of being out of it all. Part of that beauty is owed to the depth of sound brought about by the addition of violin and cello across various tracks, good to know that stuff isn’t just reserved for bands playing the Windmill.

Highlights: “Planting Weeds”; “Museum Feet”

bar italia - Some Like It Hot

Maybe I’m becoming more of a normie with age, or maybe I’m just not familiar enough with bar italia’s back catalogue, but I actually liked this record. It’s like indie sleaze with a britpop twist, y’know, the type of stuff the Arctic Monkey’s used to make. I’m trying not to romanticize the past, if a band wants to move on from a sound then by all means go for it, I don’t think we should make artists beholden to what they’ve done before. I’m also trying not to overthink things as much; the riffs are sharp, the hooks are catchy, the energy is pumping, do we also need it to be esoteric and edgy? There’s no shame in playing wide.

Highlights: “rooster”; “Marble Arch”

Darkside @ Lodge Room

Unfortunately this was not good. In fact it was pretty bad. And I like Darkside! Nothing’s a top 20 record for me this year, maybe higher. I also love Nicolas Jaar, I wrote a whole essay analyzing his discography for a narrative arc. But I couldn’t stand this show. It consisted of two roughly 30 minute movements that began as fiddly rhythm play (fine) and eventually morphed into a weird sort of tribal house I could imagine the crowd at Burning Man going gaga for. The crowd at Lodge Room was going gaga, it was a roomful of mostly late-30-to-40-somethings (older than I expected) and every time Jaar brought the bass back in off the low pass filter they threw their hands in the air and shouted “Woooo!” I was cringing hard the entire set. Still, not the worst way to spend a Monday night.

SOTW: Poor Image - “Planting Weeds”

There comes a point in life, or several points really, where you must pause to look around and reap what you’ve sown. Sometimes the crop isn’t pretty, often it’s not what you imagined would grow at all. But whatever it is, the point is to not despair. I watched Magnolia for the first time yesterday and this quote from Earl Partridge, an old TV mogul dying of cancer, struck me: “Don’t let anyone tell you that you shouldn’t regret anything, you fuckin’ regret anything you want, use that regret any way you want.” The past is the past, it was written, it is so. Don’t deny it, perhaps you can plant something new in it’s place.

• Hurbesky - hy 💿

• Stemlines - L4TA 💿

• J. Albert - find the sum of nothing 💿

• Erika de Casier @ El Rey 🎤

• Worthitpurchase - Worthitpurchase 💿

• Israel Jones - Go With God 💿

• K-Lone presents: BROWN SUGAR - A D’Angelo Special 🎛️

• Ocho Worldwide - LIBRA 💿

• MK closing set @ Sustain-Release Festival [NY Sept. ‘25] 🎛️

• Jouska - How Did I Wind Up Here? 💿

• Song of the Week: D’Angelo - “The Charade” 🎵

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Israel Jones - Go With God

Gainesville rapper Israel Jones always drops quality projects, but his latest, Go With God, passes that bar and then some. Ever the consummate lyricist, there’s a newfound sense of urgency to Jones’s bars on this project, perhaps due to his recent relocation away from his family to New York City. This is the type of project an artist makes when they fully commit to their craft, leaving the doubts behind to forge ahead with the pursuit of something bigger than themselves. It’s also catchy as hell, featuring some of Jones’s best hooks and richest beats as he mines deep grooves of Southern rap hearkening back to early Outkast and Goodie Mob. I hope people hear this record, because it’s a great one.

Highlights: “Caged Bird”; “Infinite Possibilities (ft. sage.)”

Ocho Worldwide - LIBRA

A quick four-tracker from LA-by-way-of-Richmond rapper Ocho Worldwide. Dude is criminally underrated, he commands a quite authority on the mic and I’ve never heard him not skate on a track. LIBRA stands out as having some of his best beat selection to-date, including three buttery smooth thudders from DC legend WifiGawd. Ocho is pure business throughout as he dispatches opps, moves weight and thumbs through cash with ease. And happy birthday to a fellow Libra, may the scales be tipped in your favor this year.

Highlights: “2001 MVP”; “16 Zips”

MK closing set @ Sustain-Release Festival [NY Sept. ‘25]

I love how unfussy this mix from Mia Koden is, moving from cut-to-cut with little fanfare but sustaining momentum all the same. In an age where DJing has become a spectacle unto itself, with over-the-top mashups, needlessly elaborate blends, and unhinged deck set ups getting millions of views on main, it’s nice to hear someone return to the artform’s roots as a means of setting intention and creating space. I bet this was absolutely killer to vibe out to in the closing hours of this year’s Sustain-Release festival, which I’m still trying to go to by the way! If anyone’s got an in for next year, please hit me up.

SOTW: D’Angelo - “The Charade”

Words will be insufficient so I’ll keep this brief. Rest in peace to a legend, a man who understood music’s true potential and reached it time and time again. This is my favorite D’Angelo song, a cutting expression of Black pain and anger released in the wake of Michael Brown’s slaying. May we all strive to channel the source as well as he did.

I’ve been listening to Philly DIY rocker Mila Culpa’s music for a few years now, ever since the release of her record Two Birds on tastemaker label True Panther back in 2022. Her songwriting has always stood out as having an abrupt closeness to it, drawing you in but also keeping it’s guard up. The production often mirrored the effect; raw, 4-piece band acoustics shrouded in tape fuzz and layered with electronic squiggles and whirs. But on Face Off, her excellent new record and first under her new name, these tricks of distance get dropped and, suddenly, we hear Mila clear as day. This is an album that treks in identity and death, a story of transition communicated across 9 catchy as hell tracks straddling grunge, emo and noise music. It’s my favorite record of hers to date and a highlight of 2025 for sure. I was super excited to sit down with Mila and ask her all about the album and what she’s been listening to lately.

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Nick DeMasi: I want to start with your name change. I had to remind myself what mea culpa means, but I really like the identification with a state of grace. How did you decide on Mila Culpa and where did it come from?

Mila Culpa: It’s funny we’re talking about this because I was recently Googling “Mila Culpa” and saw a post on the Alex G subreddit of somebody linking to my old songs as Tobias and being like “Does anybody know who this is? It’s really not SEO friendly.” It reminded me of part of the reason I even did it in the first place. Just the lack of SEO. I was constantly getting my songs mixed up with the German DJ Tobias. with a period. Also writing about the things I write about and tying that to my literal government name felt really cursed. I don’t think I was meant to be that autobiographical of a musician, if that makes sense. Especially with the dead name. And on a spiritual level too. Tobias means “to love Yahweh” or something and I don’t necessarily know if I love Yahweh, you know.

I never knew that. That’s a very profound meaning for Tobias.

Yeah so that was going into it. Picking a name was really hard and frustrating but Mila Culpa flashed into my mind because, and I’m kind of blowing up my spot right now, I used to have a manager pseudonym and the first name was Mila. It was my fake manager and I got bookings that way. So I wanted to use something with that name and then Mila Culpa just kind of beamed into my brain. It felt jokey so I wasn’t gonna use it, but then I sent it to Luna from Total Wife and she was like, “That’s it.” And I was like, “All right, yeah, that’s it.”

When did you actually finalize the name? Because even earlier this year you released something under Tobias.

That must have been March and then I had a song, “God Keeps Track,” that I was ready to put out in May, and I wanted two weeks to upload it and make a new artist page for all the apps, so the name was finalized on the day I submitted the song.

I’m also interested in the time period you wrote Face Off over. In your press release you mentioned that “Thread” is a rewrite from your very first album, but when did you rewrite that? And how long were these other songs kicking around before you actually were like, “Okay, this is a new album.”

Oh, I actually, like, sat down and made the album in the month before release. It was kind of like a 30-day thing.

Oh really? Wow, that’s very unexpected. I feel like that’s not how people normally work.

“God Keeps Track” is what it started with, I wasn’t planning on making an album yet when I put that out. I made and finished that in the month of May and then took a break. Then, from I want to say the beginning of August until the release date, I wrote and produced “Sparrow,” “Ugly as Sin,” “Cruelty,” and “One Word Sentence.” “Sad Clown” I made a few days before the tracklist was finalized.

What about “Wanna Be You?”

There was a demo version of that on Bandcamp in 2019 or 2020. That was the first song I decided I wanted to be on this record. Like, when I was thinking about making an album, I was like, “Oh, I should bring ‘Wanna Be You’ back.”

That’s so interesting because I feel like the themes of that track are very representative of the album’s, especially with it being your first under a new name and first post-transition.

I feel like I was going in a really specific direction heading into 2020 and now my music is going back in that same direction. There’s just this four-year gap where it all got diverted in so many different ways, some progressive and some quite regressive. And in 2024, I finally got back on track.

Going back and listening to Thread and Electricity, I think you definitely see the reconnection going on. But I also think this album is the most direct of all your releases. Would you agree with that?

I was talking to my bandmate Violet about this because I sent her the record when it was done. She was like, “All your albums had this in them, but there was always a fog obscuring it.” And with this record, the fog finally lifted.

Were you conscious of that when you were writing?

Yeah. I’ve literally been trying to wade through that fog since I was a teenager. It really came down to the name and lifestyle change, and a lot of trial and error. Personal clarity, you know?

The first few tracks have some sound bites from movies and directors. You’ve got the Lynch one at the end of “Sparrow” and then that line from Face/Off, which I actually just watched this past week, to start “Cruelty.” Do you consider yourself a cinephile?

In my mind I am. There are times when I talk to people and bring up these movies and they’re like, “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” And then I meet a real cinema buff and I don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. I have a similar thing with music where I feel like I have some strange gems that no one really seems to know, but I generally lie in a realm that is more basic than I think it is. I definitely like films a lot and take a lot of inspiration from the way that they’re put together.

What compelled you to pull some of those lines and sound bites in? Were they just from things you had recently seen or did you know you wanted to use them specifically?

The plunderphonics thing is something that I’ve always been drawn to, especially before I was writing lyrics, because it helped add a verbal tone in a way that I felt unable to do back in like, 2016. At this point I think they just helped add context to the record. I had seen Face/Off somewhat recently and I’m always consuming Twin Peaks shit. I had also just watched True Detective for the first time. Season one. Have you seen that?

Yeah, my dad and I watched it. That was like a father-son bonding experience back in the day.

There’s a lot of talk in that show about unmasking and taking off your face and stuff, and that was something I had already been thinking about quite a bit. It felt a little too on the nose though compared to Nic Cage saying “I want to take his face off.” Oh, and then the first pull is from Julien Donkey Boy. I haven’t seen that movie since I was 19, but it was formative for me. In the sound bite Julien is reciting a poem he wrote, that’s the whole “Midnight, chaos” thing. I’m trying to get more repetition into my music, like with lyrics and hooks and whatnot. I’m trying to worm it into people’s heads, but it’s also just like a broken record headspace that speaks to me. Being scrambled and fried and disorganized.

You allude a lot to death on this project. Is that connected to the process of transitioning and re-identification? Or did something else lead you to write about it?

I could really talk about this for hours and hours so I’ll try to keep it concise. One of my main personal goals has been to eradicate fear so that I can experience life more fully. While meditating on it, I continued to come back to the idea that the main thing you can be afraid of is death. This is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot from like 2023 to now. Just meditating on death and wondering why I’m so afraid of it. And I guess the conclusion that I’ve come to is that the fear is coming from identity. When I moved to Texas ,I started to transition a little bit, and then I got so freaked out I completely 180’d back the other way. I started to get really neurotic about death around that time, I think because I was holding on to a complete false identity, an illusion. What I’ve come to realize is that all identity is an illusion, it’s not true selfhood, you know? Not to get too spiritual about it but the way that I see it, the true self is the observer of one’s experiences. To me the only thing that can die is something that can change, so the fear of death is truly about losing one’s identity, everything that individualizes you in the material realm.

It’s interesting because when you think about your identity you’re thinking about all the things that make you, you, but the thing compiling all of that is not a part of it, it’s a separate entity. So inevitably, whatever that process is, it’s a construction.

Yeah. I feel like transitioning was just a process of meditating on that and eliminating all of the falsehoods until I was just the observer of my experiences. And then realizing that all of these things were not necessarily things that I chose for myself. But once I got back to a baseline, I could kind of pick and cultivate what I wanted to be and make it more of an active choice. That is like the “face off,” the unmasking. And now there is a mask that I put on intentionally.

What Mila Culpa Listened To Last Week:

• Citrus - Pits are the Pits 💿

• Daddy’s Hands - “Baby’s Fire” 🎵

• Rahn Rahn - “Autograph” 🎵

• Very Secretary - “This Lovesick” 🎵

• DJ Chap - “What I Want” 🎵

• I.D Sus live set 🎤

• Total Wife - come back down 💿

• ILOVEMAKONNEN - “Whip it Freestyle” 🎵

• IIFT BOYS - jUKEY IIFT 🎛️

Citrus - Pits are the Pits

I brought this record up specifically because of the use of the 909 drum machine with acoustic instruments, and the kind of noisier noise pop production. I definitely very directly ripped that off for “Sparrow” and I’m continuing to do so now. I heard their EP Wispy, No Mercy back in 2020 when Violet joined my band. She put me on to that pretty immediately. This record is a compilation of everything that they’ve made, which I’ve been listening to a lot in the past six months. I tend to listen to the same music for really long periods of time.

Rahn Rahn - “Autograph”

I had known of Rahn Rahn as Rahn Rahn $plash, I didn’t know he used to go by Rahn Rahn. He’s from Cincy. My friends in Chicago put me on to him back in 2016. I found “Autograph” like a week or two ago and I’ve been listening to that a shit ton. I love how melodic and heavy that whole time period was, like Chief Keef and old Adam Killa, it’s perfect serotonin music.

DJ Chap - “what i want”

DJ Chap was on Teklife and back in, like, 2018 he put out an edits album. I downloaded it on a since fried laptop, and then the album got deleted a week later. Whoever uploaded this track to YouTube saved my life, because it’s a banger. On tour in particular I was blasting this in the car to stay awake.

Footwork is an extremely formative genre of music for me. I actually went to Pitchfork Fest in 2014 where there was supposed to be a DJ Rashad and DJ Spinn set, but DJ Rashad had passed a couple months before. So it was just DJ Spinn playing a memorial set, and that was absolutely mind altering.

Total Wife - come back down

Total Wife is Luna and Ash. Ash played bass for me and Luna recorded drums on “Die,” “God Keeps Track” and “Thread.” Ash and I actually went to a music day camp when we were tweens, and then didn’t see each other for, like, six years after that. And Luna and I have been friends since we were 10, so we’ve bounced ideas off one another for a long time. She put me on to The Flaming Lips and Swirlies, and I put her on to Duster. We just always showed each other shit that we were working on or that we liked. We played a show together in like 2018 at a really shitty sports bar in Boston, and then they moved to Nashville and I didn’t really see them much until I played a show with them down there in like 2023.

I am very sentimentally tied to in/out, the record they put out before this one. There’s an attention to detail in that album that reminds me of older music. I feel like this new record still has that, but it also really fits into our current moment in a way that still stands out. Like it’s influencing the collective unconscious of music.

• Lucio Battisti - Anima latina 💿

• Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah 💿

• M. Sage - Tender / Wading 💿

• Tobias - Electricity 💿

• Tobias - Thread 💿

• Earl Sweatshirt - Live Laugh Love 💿

• Jack Larsen - The Factory 💿

• Astronauts, etc. @ Lodge Room 🎤

• Leon Vynehall - In Daytona Yellow 💿

• Taylor Swift - The Life Of A Showgirl 💿

• Malibu - Vanities 💿

• Song of the Week: Lucio Battisti - “Abbracciala abbracciali abbracciati” 🎵

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Astronauts, Etc. @ Lodge Room

I’d never heard of Astronauts, etc. before this show, I went to support my high school friend Jess whose band Mare came down from the Bay to open (and did a great job!). They make a kind of amalgamation of mid-10s indie pop-rock: part Real Estate, part Neon Indian, part Ariel Pink. At one point band leader Tony Ferraro even sounded exactly like Dan Bejar. Looking at their Spotify Fans Also Like I spotted infinite bisous of all people, does that ring a bell to anyone else? Or was it just me running up the streams on “Teen Sex” back in the day. Anyway, this was also one of the most diverse crowds I’ve ever seen, especially considering it was maybe 80 people tops. Couples in their late 40s on date night standing next to out-of-shape white dudes who look like they own way too many synths standing next to groups of Asian and Latin-American teenagers in matching black hoodies. The guy next to me was slow-dancing by himself the entire time and singing the words to every song, a good reminder that everyone’s a hero to someone.

Taylor Swift - The Life Of a Showgirl

Taylor Swift writes like a teenage girl (a talented one, but still) discovering poetry for the first time, which is why it’s concerning that so many people in their 30s still think she’s the pinnacle of songwriting. Are we tired of this yet? Taylor’s opening her thighs to true love, Taylor’s dick is bigger than mine, Taylor’s play-acting as Elizabeth Taylor (maybe watch out for that last one Travis). It’s Taylor’s world and I want out.

Malibu - Vanities

I still don’t know if I like this album or not but I did get a kick out of listening to it on my drive down to Long Beach yesterday, cresting, diving and gliding atop a 5-lane wide strip of bleached concrete as the sun’s rays glinted off of hundreds of windshields and back onto my own, creating arcs of false light in the distance. Vanities’ diaphanous swoon transformed my mundane commute into an existential journey at the edge of the world. What was this strange landscape I found myself navigating? Who were these faceless travelers on the road beside me? Where did it all lead? In a recent interview Malibu has said that the album title is a reference to the ways in which we derive meaning from inherently meaningless things, I suppose that also extends to trips on the 710.

SOTW: Lucio Battisti - “Abbracciala abbracciali abbracciati”

Music is the one divine art, a call from the beyond, a glimpse behind the veil, a balm for the soul. It is the universe communicating to us about things we cannot see in ways we cannot comprehend. No matter how much we claim to understand, it we do not. Every attempt to rationalize music’s power inevitably flounders at the point of explication, what is a major chord really? “Abbracciala abbraciali abbracciati” descends from above as an example of this very ineffability, a sublime and sumptuous song that unfolds as a technicolor spectrum among the stars. Its title means “Embrace her, embrace them, embrace yourself,” I promise that if you listen you’ll wish to do nothing else.

Dario Tronchin, aka Money Lang, is an Italian electronic music producer and dance artist with over a decade in the game under his belt. After spending most of the 10s releasing a bevy of well-received projects under the name Chevel, he first came to my attention in 2021 with his Money Lang debut, Treviso Mare Mixtape, an elusive and euphoric mix of glossy fat synths, infectious melodic motifs, and endless crescendos. I’ve been hooked on the highs ever since, jumping from release to release, including 2023’s French touch standout “Dreams” and last year’s bold synth-pop crossover MMM. But all of these pale in comparison to what’s peaking just over the horizon. Xmas Rush, his forthcoming LP, is a career-defining achievement, a marriage of his now signature synthetic sugar rush with vintage soul and funk samples that stands as a transcendent and deeply personal beacon of dance music optimism. I’ve been waiting to unwrap this gift for two years now, so I rushed to get Dario on the phone when I found out the big day was almost here.

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Nick: It’s super exciting that this album is finally coming out, I know you recorded most of it during the holidays a couple of years ago.

Money Lang: Yeah, it was Christmas 2023. There’s this amazing studio near my hometown, which is busy most of the time because the guy who runs it works in Italian pop music. But since we became friends, he said I could come over during Christmas time and use it for free because nobody was going to be there. So I had this window of time, and my idea was to make one track per day. I started on the 20th of December, and by the 1st of January, I left. I tried to write fast just to catch the mood, so I spent a few hours on the same idea till it clicked, and then I said, “Okay, this is enough, I will reopen it later on.” Then it took two years to edit and mix; it always goes like that.

That origin story is so epic, this magical 10-day period in this great space.

It felt like an epiphany to me, you know. Also, Christmas is my favorite time of the year; some people hate it, but for me it’s the most magical time of the year because I feel like a kid again.

What was the process of finishing the tracks like? Because it sounds like you came out of those 10 days with a bunch of sketches, what went into them over the next year and a half?

A big moment was this gig I had in Venice, opening for Yaeji. I needed to finish these songs for that night and test them out, so that was the second wave of work around this record. I tried to make longer versions and mix them properly because they were going to be played on a proper sound system. I love the magic of the first demo when I write, but it tends to be something too personal. Sometimes it’s too abstract, because I know what’s going on behind the track, but you need to translate it for the receiver to understand your main idea. So that was a big moment for me. And then it took ages to go back and forth between the live versions and the original demos. I tried to get the best of both versions.

How did the show go?

The show was good! It was at the Korean pavilion during the Venice Biennale, so it was a special party. I also saw a lot of familiar faces and friends; a lot of people came out. Testing new tunes with friends is always a bit risky, but it went well.

Was that the type of setting that you envisioned the tracks playing in? When you were making them, how did you picture people listening to them?

When I made this record, I didn’t think about them being played out, actually. This record is more personal, more of a headphones record, I think. How do you feel about it?

To me, it’s like a party, club atmosphere, it’s really fun and jovial. I was listening to it last night and thinking about how great it’d be to hear it played out live. It was actually your previous record, MMM, that felt more like headphones music, almost in-between dance and pop.

I think because I always like to challenge the audience a bit, the dancier stuff for me is too obvious, I want to hear that in headphones, and then the more experimental stuff I want to play out and see how people react. But I think Xmas Rush is a dance record, I think it’s a party, maybe not a big one, but still danceable and enjoyable in a social context.

There are also a lot of samples on this album compared to your last one. What type of stuff were you mining?

When I started, I wanted to make a song with only 80s electro samples, but then it turned into more soul/funk samples instead. I think everything came from Tracklib. You can sample full songs from the website and get a proper license too, otherwise you need to track down the writers and ask them for permission and clearance and blah blah blah. With Tracklib, you can download a song, chop it up, and then they give you the license. I’m not taking any money from them; it’s just a great tool.

And these are older songs? Like older catalogs?

Yeah, I think they license catalogues from record labels and publishers. It was mainly stuff from the 70s, you know, Detroit soul and funk music basically.

Were you familiar with any of the music that you were grabbing before finding it on Tracklib? Did you listen to much of that stuff ever?

I think I heard that kind of stuff when it was already assembled by people like Daft Punk and J. Dilla, but I never listened to the originals; it came to me when it was already sampled by someone else. So it’s interesting, it’s a generational thing, I think. You cannot sample Daft Punk because they already sampled something else, but you can go to the source and make two spins around the planet with that.

What Money Lang Listened To Last Week:

• Aphex Twin - Music From The Merch Desk (2016 - 2023) 💿

• Mk.gee - Two Star & The Dream Police 💿

• Shapednoise - Absurd Matter 2 💿

• Torus - Summer of Love 💿

• Es Vedra - “La Hacienda” 🎵

• Canva6 - “Still Cry at High Speed” 🎵

• Lucio Battisti - Una giornata uggiosa 💿

💿 Torus - Summer of Love

Torus did the artwork for Xmas Rush. He goes with his real name when he does visual stuff, and I know he wants to keep them separate, but I wanted to mention the music side because he’s one of the best. I think our generation has this memory of something that we never experienced, which is really weird. For example, I never went to see Daft Punk live. I saw some house music when I was like 16 or 17, but I never had the full 90s experience, it was already the early 2000s, after the explosion of that sound. I love Torus because he takes the spirit of that time and translates it into now. We don’t go clubbing in the same way as back then; we can experience the feeling and aftermath of a rave from laptop speakers. That’s why he’s a great artist; he’s channeling the energy of that euphoric music, but in today’s terms and surroundings. And as a kind of memory too. It doesn’t sound like the thing itself; it’s a thing being remembered, that comes across really strongly in his music.

💿 Shapednoise - Absurd Matter 2

The Italian electronic music scene is not that huge, so everyone knows everyone else. I became very close with Nino after COVID. I was in Berlin, and we started hanging out; now we talk almost every day. Sometimes when you make a list of music, you put your friends on there just to give them support, but in this case, I’d do it even if I wasn’t friends with him. I really respect what he does. He’s been making this kind of music since day one; you can tell it’s a Shapednoise track within one second, and I think that’s a strong feature for an artist to have. I really like the track “Oblivion Step”, it almost sounds like a garage tune, but with his own touch. If you’re DJing a party, that’s probably the track you’re gonna pick.

💿 Lucio Battisti - Una giornata uggiosa

He’s the first artist I heard in my life. He’s basically the biggest songwriter in Italian history, but people abroad don’t know about him because after he died in the 90s, his wife didn’t want to have his catalogue on DSPs. They were very, very jealous about royalties and very conservative about his heritage. For example, I’m doing a mix for Apple Music for Mad Decent, and they sent me a list of restricted artists, and he’s on the list.

In Italy, he’s probably the number one artist of all time. My dad has all his vinyls from the 70s, every house had the Lucio Battisti records. I wish we could go back to that kind of music. I was driving to Venice with my friends, and I played one of Lucio Battisti’s albums in the car, and all three of us were completely silent, just listening to the music. The music was creating this magic moment inside the car because it’s very romantic, very deep, and the lyrics are very gentle and respectful. He talks about love and relationships and stuff. So I kind of wish our generation could go back to having more of that deep meaning within music.

This particular album isn’t very well known, except for the last track, which is one of his most famous songs. But in that first song, “Il Monolocale”, which means “one room flat,” he’s talking about how he’s frustrated because he can’t afford a flat for him and his girlfriend. At the time I was splitting with my girlfriend and moving out of a studio flat, so it was one of those moments in life where a song finds you, not the other way around.