addy – rosemary
A song that she says “comes from acknowledging the type of magic that exists all around us and yearning to get a taste of it,” ‘rosemary’ is the new single from addy (the project led by Philadelphia’s Addy Watkins). Her first new music since last year’s temperance, the song takes indie pop and stripped-back folk and refracts them into a new shape entirely, something warm and fond and all-enveloping. “I was in love with a witch once,” Watkins describes of the song’s inspiration, “who taught me rosemary hung over my bed would help with my crippling nightmares. which it did and still does whenever I remember to hang it.”
Alice Hebborn – Saisons – Movement 2
December sees the release of Saisons, the debut album from Belgian composer Alice Hebborn on Western Vinyl. Created following a move to the countryside, the record draws inspiration from theories of ecofeminism and environmental harmony and presents a world cast volatile and disordered in the wake of human impacts. Across seven movements, built of piano and electronics, Hebborn imagines a different future. One in which humans cease to throw the natural balance and instead become a key link in a harmonious web of reciprocal relationships. Lead single ‘Movement 2’ is “the starting point of Saisons,” Hebborn describes. “It was written in the spring and draws its inspiration from the captivating images of this season: the awakening of nature and our senses, the great activity of all living things.”
Banti Buli – Hennessy Song
“Refusing to commit fully to irony or sincerity […] as though a song about relationships couldn’t really function without equal doses of heartfelt emotion and tongue-in-cheek humour.” So we wrote of Banti Buli‘s ‘Something Like a Honda Odyssey’ last year, a song which mixed languid rhythms with a distinctively verbose lyricism. Ahead of an album due next spring, Banti Gheneti is now back with ‘Hennessy Song’, a track which see the US-based Dutch-Oromo artist take samples from his surroundings to build an earnest soundscape exploring the transience of even the most steadfast habits. “The closest thing to a home (the Ethiopian corner store) becomes a hole in the ground and your lover leaves you,” as Gheneti says. “Even routines and promises are ephemeral.”
figure eight – 1999 (cherry)
A mainstay of the Bay Area scene, figure eight originated as the experimental noise project of duo Nash Rood and Abby Goeser, starting out with nothing but a distorted synthesizer and acoustic drum kit. However, on welcoming a number of additional members in recent years (including Nicholas Coleman on bass and Nicky Esparza on drums), the band has now evolved into something altogether more full-bodied. Take new single ‘1999 (cherry)’, a song with finds the outfit at their most boisterous and reserved within the same three minutes. The searing opening is indebted to hardcore, though the crushing momentum soon breaks into something almost delicate. These twin threads of lightness and weight weave across the track into what appears to be the spirit of this new version of figure eight—a band aware of the transcendent power available at both ends of the spectrum.
His His – My Friend Wants to be a Freemason
We last featured Aidan Belo’s His His project almost exactly a year ago when we covered the single ‘Ford Econoline’, a song about life in a tour van that we said felt “like the sensation of returning home in your mind as you cruise down an unfamiliar stretch of highway in some faraway city.” The Toronto-based artist returns with a new EP, Good Gold, coming out next month, and has just released the final single ahead of the release. Informatively titled ‘My Friend Wants to be a Freemason’, it’s a track about a childhood friend who became obsessed with joining a masonic lodge. “The idea of joining this secret society consumed my friend, and for a couple of months it was all that he’d talk about,” as Belo describes. Musically the song follows a familiar His His formula, a gentle and folk-inflected indie pop song that wears an air of weary wistfulness like the grain in an old film photograph.
Good Gold is due to be released on 15th November via Victory Pool Records. You can pre-save it now on streaming services.
Kassie Krut – Reckless
Kassie Krut are wasting no time introducing themselves. “K / A / S / S / I / E / K / R / U / T / T / T / T,” goes the opening line of new single ‘Reckless’, a de facto theme song for the new project of Kasra Kurt, Eve Alpert (formerly of Palm) and Matt Anderegg (Mothers, Body Meat). The band have just signed to Fire Talk Records, and new single offers a glimpse at the core of the project. Something undoubtedly contemporary yet possessing a rawer dimension too, as though through the idiosyncratic art pop style comes an altogether more atavistic, primal energy. Directed by Guy Kozak, the video for the song was filmed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and offers a visual representation of the sound’s frantic playfulness.
‘Reckless’ is out now and available via the Kassie Krut Bandcamp page.
Mark Trecka – Witch’s Hat (ft. Midwife & An Heap)
The work of Mark Trecka never sits still, the Chicago-born artist and activist utilising sound to explore a diverse set of styles and themes in a practice as inventive as it is ambitious. More recent work has turned towards post-punk as an avenue of exploration, and latest single ‘Witch’s Hat’ continues to plough that same furrow. Recorded between Paris and Colorado, the track is described as Trecka’s “Halloween song,” existing with the common ground between that which is haunting and beautiful. Midwife joins on backing vocals and An Heap on synths to further elevate the dynamic, the song moving from apparent minimalism into a gauzy atmosphere as though pushing through the layers of time itself.
Michael Younker – Bad News
Michael Younker is a Detroit-born, Brooklyn-based production designer who also makes rock & roll music that he says “melds lighthearted cynicism with unashamed big rock motifs.” He has just released his debut EP, Sweet Things, a four-song record that’s brash and chaotic and amped up with bratty energy. “Sonically & lyrically, Sweet Things feels like the kid who ate too much sugar, bounced off walls, and passed out on the floor,” Younker describes. “Music of obsession, excess, indulgence, and…consequences?” ‘Bad News’ is perhaps the best place to start, capturing the EP’s manic motion and carefree bravado. “I can’t make you love me,” Younker sings, before snottily trying his best anyway in the following line – “C’mon, give it a go!”
Old Man of the Woods – Ghost
“A visceral exploration of a villain’s arc, tracing her devolution from possession to obsession to dissolution.” So reads the album notes for Triptych I: Devolve, the latest release from Seattle-based project Old Man of the Woods. The first in a series of EPs, the three-song collection offers a self-described “goth ethereal mycelial” sound to chart a fall from grace in all of its tragedy, majesty and strange avenues of agency. Such as with single ‘Ghost’, where the central character moves from resentment to something closer to power with the realisation that the ability to haunt can represent its own form of control.
Orchid Mantis – Dead Malls (feat. Cathedral Bells)
Following a collaboration with Sign Crushes Motorist earlier this year, not to mention several more singles in the meantime, Orchid Mantis (the recording project of Atlanta‘s Thomas Howard) has returned with a new single ‘Dead Malls’. This time featuring Orlando, Florida shoegazey bedroom pop act Cathedral Bells, the track uses imagery of an abandoned shopping mall to explore emotions altogether more personal. Where past hopes, once bright and shiny and full of promise, have withered on the vine, now little more than empty husks. But the atmosphere is not downbeat, rather wistful and hazy, looking back on old memories as though flickering warm and grainy from an old film projector.