Armlock – Ice Cold
Australian duo Simon Lam and Hamish Mitchell, AKA Armlock, are releasing album Seashell Angel Lucky Charm later this summer on Run For Cover Records, and single ‘Ice Cold’ is the ideal point at which to dive in. The Armlock style beams electronic music through the prism of indie rock, conjuring sounds at once ethereal and eccentric, something the album opener encapsulates perfectly. A lesson in minimalism which rather than forgo detail, offers it with a sense of purpose and control. Be that in the simple beat and subtle textures, or the pared-back lyricism which lends the track its ambiguous charm.
Ice cold ankle deep
Head tilt, turn a cheek
I won’t be around for the rest of the week
Takes one to know one
We were born in the air sign
I’m gonna come back with the sword you left behind
Seashell Angel Lucky Charm is out on the 12th July via Run For Cover Records.
Cereus Bright – Ride
Following on from recent EP Boys, a release we described as “an ode to every tired soul and person without direction,” Knoxville’s Cereus Bright is back with ‘Ride’, a brand new single via Nettwerk. Boys preached the value of giving in to life’s unpredictable currents, and the new single follows in a similar vein. A brightly peppy track imbued with enough forward motion to propel even the most uncertain person to confront their fears and seize the bull by the horns. “Do you wanna ride?” as the chorus asks, and with the momentum of the drums and warm psych-inflected textures, it’s difficult to refuse the offer. Watch the video below with visuals by Peel:
‘Ride’ is out now via Nettwerk.
César Alvarez – Normal, IL
“Would it be okay to wander off?” asks César Alvarez on ‘Normal, IL’, the opening track from new album egg. “I’ll take the shitty car, I’ll leave the credit cards / Drive to the Midwest, sleeping at rest stops / Play jazz on the sidewalks.” Delivered with a tone somewhere between wistful longing and boundless curiosity, the song introduces an artist navigating the competing wills to preserve the moment and escape for good. Where life’s tiny details represent the component parts of everything we hold dear. Things to drag around year after year, things to hold tight to your chest in the hope of better days. “A few years ago I was under-employed artist parent trying to figure out how to survive capitalism and still be a composer,” Alvarez explains. “I was genuinely trying to figure out if we could keep surviving in NY. This song is that feeling of being about to give up.”
Gold Dime – Denise
Recently, New York art rock/post punk outfit Gold Dime released album No More Blue Skies via No-Gold, an album which took avant garde sensibilities and elevated them into cinematic experiences. Led by Andrya Ambro (formerly of Talk Normal), the project has long reached for increasingly inventive and immersive sounds. The new record feels like the closest they have come to the zenith of such a style, what the liner notes describe as “a widescreen, fiercely intense, hair standing up on the back of your neck kind of art rock.” Take opener and single ‘Denise’, a song somehow at once opaque and charged with clarity, Ambro’s vocals cutting through the volatile sax and shifting percussion to blur the line between foreboding and transcendence.
Watch the video directed by Andrya Ambro and Joe Wakeman below:
No More Blue Skies is out now via No-Gold and available from the Gold Dime Bandcamp page.
Kathryn Mohr – Cut (Low Cover)
Originating from a conversation between The Flenser and Planning For Burial’s Thom Wasluck, Your Voice Is Not Enough is a compilation of covers celebrating the breadth and beauty of Low‘s musical oeuvre. A whole host of Flenser artists and friends are involved, with VSF favs Midwife and Allison Lorenzen joined by Drowse, Have A Nice Life, Cremation Lily and Holy Water among others. The latest single sees Kathryn Mohr take on ‘Cut’, maintaining the sparse simmer of the original while deepening its shadowy corners with an electrified edge. “It was the lyrics that immediately drew me into this song,” Mohr explains. “The intimacy of a hair cut. The loss of a version of someone you knew as they turn themselves inside out to survive. It’s one of the saddest things in the world to me, watching someone harden and loose themselves to their pain.”
Your Voice Is Not Enough is out on the 24th May via The Flenser.
LEOBLU – full moon & snow boots
Julia Carlsson’s LEOBLU has caught our ears on a number of occasions in recent times, be it the gloom pop of single ‘Cake‘ or more recently a collaboration with Sad Dad which probed into the strangeness of love. “The impression is not one of grand gesture and romantic inevitability,” we wrote of the later, “but rather the sense of being exposed to mysterious forces. The physics of things larger than yourself, moving life beyond your control.” With new EP Blu Lucid Nightmare coming later this year, LEOBLU has returned with single ‘full moon & snow boots’, and again the track sees Carlsson setting personal emotions against larger, almost mystical backdrops. As though the natural world was our own longing manifest. Watch the video, shot in California by Hannah Gonzalez, below:
Blu Lucid Nightmare will be released later this year.
My Best Unbeaten Brother – Time on Our Hands, Spider-Man
Back in January we told you about My Best Unbeaten Brother, the latest project from the Parker brothers of Nosferatu D2, The Superman Revenge Squad Band and Tempertwig. Back then we were writing about standalone single ‘Slayer on a Sunny Day’, but as promised the band are now readying their debut mini-album Pessimistic Pizza, which will be release via Audio Antihero. To whet appetites, they have released lead single ‘Time on Our Hands, Spider-Man’, a mid-to-late-00s style indie rock song electrified with desperate emotion. Ben Parker says the song is about, “being a father and being a son, passing on memories of years and years of processing stuff and turning it into landfill indie, how we all need a Spider-Man or a Superman and how this doesn’t change the older you get,” which goes some way to illustrating the mixture of sadness, sincerity and frustration that sit just below the up-tempo surface.
Wild Yaks – Desperado
With almost two decades and (roughly) five albums under their belts, Wild Yaks have made a name with an affirming and often riotous brand of rock music, filling the gap between hopes and realities with a carefree embrace of the present. Out next month via Ernst Jenning Record Co. latest album Monumental Deeds feels like both a continuation of this spirit and the culminative product of twenty years spent pining and singing and howling at the moon. Born on a drive back to Florida lead Rob Bryn took with his 79-year-old mother, single ‘Desperado’ is a fitting combination of desperation and defiance. When the ghosts of past selves and possible futures are strung out on the road before you, sometimes the only option is to roll the windows down, put the pedal to the metal and feel that wind in your hair.
Watch the video below filmed on VHS tape by Renée Muza and edited by Sameer Kapoor:
Monumental Deeds is out on the 21st June via Ernest Jenning Record Co. and you can pre-order it now.
Zoya Zafar – Clumsy
“Time allowed Zafar opportunity to understand the tracks beyond the usual level, and thus gradually shape them towards their ideal, essential form.” So we wrote of Zoya Zafar‘s Some Songs, an album interrupted by real life difficulties which only came to realise itself more fully in the intervening years. Tracks like ‘Sweet Talk’ “condens[e] months of suffering into a single prayer released into an empty room,” as we put it in a preview, a testament to the value of patience and care brought to life with a tender folk pop style. Latest single ‘Clumsy’ invites the listener further into this space, a song produced by friend Gia Margaret which shares Margaret’s quiet, sometimes cryptic sincerity. “You were the light in the dark,” as Zafar sings, “giving away your sad, sad heart / living inside a house of cards.”