WILTLM: June 2026
matt proxy, Chanel Beads, K Wata, Harrison, GB, Corridos Ketamina, Sidney Phillips, and a chat with Heading of Orchid Salon.
WILTLM stands for What I Listened To Last Month. Every month, I look back at the last and write about some music I heard.
matt proxy - trojan horse
matt proxy is a 19-year-old Minneapolis rapper who I only just heard about but has apparently been on the come up for about a year now. His debut full-length trojan horse just dropped and boasts an impressive array of cosigns: fakemink features on the opener “5,” Grimes apparently contributed mixing to “NEW SOLUTION,” and JPEGMAFIA saying his name on damn near every song. I see all the underground blogs calling this the “future of music,” even though it’s mostly a rehashing of mainstream experimental rap’s recent past. Not that that’s a bad thing. proxy often pulls from 3 of the most widely lauded “left-field but made it big” rappers of the 10s: Kanye West, Tyler, the Creator, and JPEGMAFIA. The finish of this tape is rough, like early Soundcloud emo rap or 90s Memphis stuff, but the ideas are classically ambitious. It’s pop basically, which is the same instinct that propelled those artists to the heights they reached.
As much as proxy is a provocateur, he’s also a pleaser; he wants to make something palatable, in his own way, of course. Some songs are direct rips of his forbears, like “STARS,” a three-parter consisting of what could be a clipped-out soundbite off Veteran, some fuzzy Cherry Bomb-era rock-rap, and an outro that sounds straight off Person Pitch. Then there’s “MISERY,” this time only a two-parter that sounds like “Bound 2” through an 8-track followed by the “Runaway” outro over top of the “New Slaves” outro. Hyper-referential though these songs may be, they’re not bad. They’re well executed and go down enjoyably; I notice the similarities, but they don’t take me out of things.
The tracks where proxy is doing more of his own thing, like “5,” which has some headass lyrics (”Does the homeless man outside desеrve your attitude?/’Cause hе got some values even though they don’t matter to you”) but a winning pop-rock attitude, and perhaps the best fakemink feature I’ve ever heard? I don’t know, haven’t heard many fakemink features, I guess. “NEVER KILL YOURSELF” is also fun and features a sugary, teeny-bop, emo hook like “She said don’t be r******d/Don’t kill yourself yet/It’s not even that bad” that he pitches his voice up for and somehow manages to pull off. He’s uniquely gifted at this, finding the right way to deliver an idea, of which he has many. The first-half of “God” is a refreshing end precisely because it plays things straight. It’s got his best verse of the tape, a lament about fame, childhood, and the painfulness of becoming, which he adorns plainly inside a fucked-up musical box of a beat.
In a recent, funnily unhinged Fader interview, proxy named quinn as one of his biggest influences growing up. This made immediate sense to me because both of them pull from many different influences and are uniquely adept at channeling them. trojan horse felt a lot like Drive-By Lullabies, a project that really revels in its ideas. What’s made quinn so fun to watch over the years is how she’s gotten more and more specific with her references, which has resulted in an even more novel sound. I hope the same becomes true of matt proxy, that he builds on this and gets even more exact in his taste. I’m sure good things will come.
Chanel Beads - Your Day Will Come
A friend of mine called this record “nursery rhymes,” which is a pretty accurate description imo. The Beads are my favorite contemporary rock band, and on their latest they try to recreate the same song over and over again. Some artists jump around in the course of their practice; others mine the same grooves over and over, obsessed with the idea of finding something new if they dig deep enough. The jury’s still out on what category they will ultimately fall into, but on this record it’s definitely the latter, as if the fact that it bears the same title as their debut wasn’t a hint enough. There’s a lens through which you could view this cyclicality as a negative, the product of lazy songwriting and a lack of ideas, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. You get the sense that Lavers can’t help himself. Try as he might to write something different, he always arrives at the same melodies set to the same themes of grief, abandonment, and salvation. Perhaps that makes this a weaker record than the first Your Day Will Come, which certainly offered more in terms of variety. But while nothing approaches the highs of “I Think I Saw” or “Embarrassed Dog,” there’s something to be said about the majesty of just sitting in a feeling and stewing. Maybe you have a breakthrough; maybe you get nowhere, but either way, it’s a good chance to devour the self, to analyze endlessly until nothing is there. When I go back and listen to the Beads’ debut, I’m left charmed but slightly underwhelmed, as if I’ve taken the most direct path through a beautiful meadow. This sequel, by contrast, is a maze, the same corner greeting you a thousand times over, maddening at first, but then expected, and, finally, perhaps welcoming.
K Wata - Give U Space
I’ve been calling this one micro-dub to whoever I talk to about it with, which was several people back in June. It’s like if you took Thé Au Harem D’Archimède and stretched it out til it got really big and wide. I enjoyed K Wata’s 2022 EP, Dot Dot Dot, on Hank Jackson’s always interesting anno record label, but I never would’ve drawn a line from that to Give U Space. The parts may sound similar: wobbly metallic clangs, chasms of resonant grain, elusively skittering drum beats, but whereas on that record everything hung in a kind of formless non-place, here Wata gives them spatial dimension, pushing them up, down, and around. The work scratches a similar itch as Nicolas Jaar’s. Both artists concern themselves with the translation of electric signals into space, but while Jaar seeks to fill that emptiness with meta-objects, Wata wants to expand the void as far as he can, testing the limits and porousness of its boundaries at every turn. This album becomes a place I could get lost in, a backrooms that doesn’t suck.
Harrison - Taking a walk & calling a car home
Last month we got three new albums from SURF GANG’s three main producers: Harrison, Eera, and evilgiane. The giane record is typical SURF GANG fare: 23 absolutely fried trap beats with a bevy of features ranging from the expected (xaviersobased, Harto Falion, jackzebra) to the surprising (YT, Rico Nasty, LUCY and Nourished By Time on the same track). Eera’s project on the other hand, is all gossamer-y EDM from the same sphere as Loukeman’s Sd-3, but with a more Swedish point of view. My personal favorite of the bunch, though, is Harrison’s Taking a walk & calling a car home, an uneasy ambient record that sounds like it could’ve been released by the dudes at West Mineral rather than rap’s premier net label. Most of the record is loop-based, little phrases of seismic synths and micro-percussion that repeatedly double back on themselves in perpetual motion. The only traditional song is “Wrong,” which features, once again, Harto Failon, who drones a somnambulant melody of “uhs” over a ghostly theremin and skeletal 808s, punctuating the haze with the occasional “Well baby I got it wrong.” At the risk of overselling things, this album performs a similar function to Huerco S.’s For Those Of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have), meditative music that stymies the brain and opens up the mind. Something to sleepwalk to.
Orchid Salon - Three Songs On Time
Orchid Salon is Wilbert Mays and Teo Hedigan, aka Cities Aviv and Heading. Cities Aviv is a rapper who has always stood somewhere between Sporting Life and Earl in my eyes; his music has a frenetic, one-take quality to it and is usually mired in a shifting soup of soul & jazz chops. Heading has been part of many projects over the years, including The Furniture Group with Melody English and a digital rock band called Earth Dad. Together, they make a sort of dreamy, acoustic alt-rock which they recently unveiled on this 3-track EP. As with Harrison’s album, it’s based around loops, but in contrast to pure Cities Aviv production, these instrumentals shine with a live clarity that largely eschews tape and grain. The standout is “Still Who I Decide To Be,” a plunging, elliptical, guitar ballad that sounds like an early A.R. Kane B-side, but the playfully tranquil jazz-pop of “Trolley Sayings” and the dry, Dean Blunt lurch of the instrumental closer “Les Pole” pull their own weight as well. I really enjoyed the record and reached out to Teo with a few questions.
How did the project come about, and what were some of its sources of inspiration?
I did overdubs on Trolley Sayings and then we realized it was good and the track was done and we could probably make more good ones. I don’t really need much inspiration or use references when making a song but I felt emotional conflict and I thought that the global economy was going to crash and listened to Young Marble Giants’ 1980 album that month.
Did you record the instrumentation live? Or are they all samples?
I played and recorded acoustic guitar here and there and electric guitar once and electric bass as well. There’s a nylon guitar. It would be fun to say there are no samples.
Who sings on “Still Who I Decide To Be” and “Trolley Sayings?”
Mostly me.
Is there more where this came from?
Yea
GB - “Adrenaline”
This is like if Mark William Lewis was fun to listen to. I caught wind of GB’s 2024 debut, Gusse Music, through a newsletter called Natural Music last year, but it was a little too “neither here nor there” for me, a kind of listless trip-hop-adjacent grab bag of ideas. I was surprised to see him pop back up on the venerable AD 93 label, but I’m glad he did because “Adrenaline” is great. It’s a rock track with a real engine, a tumbling and gutsy guitar riff that pushes things forward while GB sings about being stuck in his room, horny and watching The Simpsons season 6. The picture of modern-day monasticism.
Corridos Ketamina - “K Me Maten”
The new Corridos Ketamina track feels very emo to me, from the nasally vocals and feedback-laden guitars, all the way down to the Dali-esque video treatment it got. I’m here for it though. This song has by far the duo’s strongest hook yet, I caught myself singing “K Me Mateeeen” plenty of times these last three weeks.
Sidney Phillips - “Fire Walk With Me”
I’ve tried to watch Twin Peaks many times. My last attempt a few months ago brought me all the way through season 2, episode 10, before the streaming site I was using started to glitch out. I will finish the show one day, but for now, I have to settle for this Sidney Phillips track in its place. “Fire Walk With Me” earns its title for the way it paints desolation and offers a shield in the same breath. The production is big, plodding synth chords over a drum loop made of mostly hi-hats. Sidney’s voice sits squarely in the middle, cutting a dead-eyed melody through all the emptiness. I file this in the Lil B cloud rap era mostly, but mixed with some of the modern-day Toronto SD crowd stuff like dyltowsix and Brat Star.