If AJ Lambert’s other project Bloodslide hints at her singular artistic vision, then her solo work allows her to explore different directions without being held to any one style. With an assembled band featuring Jeff Friedl (Devo, A Perfect Circle), Parker Kindred (Joan As Policewoman), Rhys Hastings (Yves Tumor), Dave Harrington (Darkside) and Kenny Gilmore (Julia Holter), AJ Lambert uses Dirt Soda as a vehicle for her ideas, no matter how idiosyncratic or daring they might be. “I worked once again with Sonny Diperri which is always a treat for me since he really lets me experiment and doesn’t shoot any idea down,” Lambert explains of the recording process, “no matter how strange or unlikely to work it might seem.”

Latest single ‘My Blood’ is another window into this world. A track both moody and sinuous, it balances lightness and weight to create an inscrutable mood. One undeniably beguiling yet underscored by a certain volatility, as though beneath the surface lies some black depth as of yet charted. This duality is central to the themes of a song “about having parts of yourself—whether within you or without you—that can never be connected and reconciled no matter how much you want that,” as Lambert explains. As though to be a person is to be torn between two or more poles, to never fully be oneself.

The song comes complete with a dance-based video directed by Eleanor Petry. A dreamlike vision which sees this dualism manifest. “The video came to me purely about movement at first—the song just screams out for dance to me,” Lambert says, “and then I realized there was an opportunity to merge that confident mover with a completely static and wretched character to show the contrast between the two aspects of life that can’t be joined, and to show how tragic that is.”

Dirt Soda is out now and available to stream and buy from the AJ Lambert Bandcamp page.

Photo by Elisabeth Carren

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We last covered the work of AJ Lambert as part of Bloodslide, an experimental group featuring members of Preoccupations and Protomartyr. But she also records under her own name and has assembled another stellar band for her new album, Dirt Soda. Together with musicians who have played with Joan As Policewoman, Yves Tumor, Dave Harrington and Julia Holter, Lambert uses the record to further her creative, genre-bending style, creating self-described ‘distorted anthems’ which blur the line between reality and dreams.

Lead single ‘Staff of the Flag’ is a great example, based around the notorious stretch of road where James Dean and many others have met their end. “I found it interesting that so many people know that one person who died there, but so many others have met the same fate and go unrecognized except by the people who loved them,” Lambert explains. “The song is about an imaginary woman who, after selling flowers to tourists on their way to the Dean site all day, takes the leftovers to the nearby site where her own loved one died.”

‘Staff of the Flag’ is out now and available via the AJ Lambert on Bandcamp. Dirt Soda is out in July.

CLAMM – Bit Much

Melbourne punks CLAMM say their music is an attempt to “explore the confusion of what it is to be a young person trying to live an honourable life in this fucked up world,” something they achieve by forgoing all restraint and throwing themselves into unrelenting cathartic noise. The band have recently announced their sophomore LP Care on Meat Machine and Chapter Music, a record which promises to be “bigger, louder and darker” than their 2020 debut Beseech Me. This is in part thanks to the fact the band are now a trio, bassist Maisie Everett joining Jack Summers (guitar and vocals) and Miles Harding (drums) to expand CLAMM into what the band say is “its ultimate form.” In anticipation of the new record, they have released lead single ‘Bit Much’, a song about the barrage of bad news that is modern life which ricochets around at typically breakneck speed.

Care will be released on 19th August on Meat Machine (UK, Europe & Asia) and Chapter Music (everywhere else). You can preorder it now from the CLAMM Bandcamp page.

Friendship – Ugly Little Victory

Fresh from signing with Merge Records, Philadelphia‘s Friendship have unveiled a brand new single, ‘Ugly Little Victory’. Those familiar with the band’s live set might recognise the tune from on the road, but even those who don’t will find an uncanny sense of familiarity. Something in the way the band collects details and sensations within their work, bringing to life quietly devastating circumstances which feel halfway our own. Songs about nothing and everything all at once.

Salmon head in the sink
wax paper turning pink
music playing low
and you on your phone
loading up a recipe

‘Ugly Little Victory’ is out now via Merge Records and available from the Friendship Bandcamp page.

Katie Bejsiuk – Onion Stalk

After years heading up free cake for every creature and later recording as Katie Bennett, Katie Bejsiuk has adopted her father’s original surname for brand new album The Woman on the Moon, out next month on Double Double Whammy. With its hushed acoustic style, lead single ‘Onion Stalk’ blends childlike wonder with reflective melancholy, though as it develops an electric edge emerges, braiding these twin threads into something determined and defiant.

we wrote the field guide
to the left-behind
we wore beer tab rings
and wild violet crowns
made a bed of the moss on the ground

I believe

The Woman on the Moon is out via Double Double Whammy on the 24th June and you can pre-order it now from the Katie Bejsiuk Bandcamp page. As a related aside (Weekly Reading, if you will), Lithub recently published Bennett’s fantastic essay on Joan Vollmer Burroughs which is very much worth your time.

Langkamer – Soul Bucket

Bristol‘s Langkamer have made a name with a sound that’s hard to nail down. A bit of folk, a bit of indie rock, a ton of playful personality. Following on from the brightly boisterous ‘Teeth’, they have returned with a brand new single ‘Soul Bucket’ on Breakfast Records. Taking a slightly more subdued, reflective air, the track faces up to the realities of growing older by leaning into the contemplative folk end of their sensibilities, though their distinctively mischievous side isn’t far below the surface. “‘Soul Bucket’ is an ode to ageing,” the band explain. “To realising that the time is rolling away from you and you can’t catch up no matter how fast you run.” Check out the video by JJ Jarman below:

‘Soul Bucket’ is out now via Breakfast Records and available from the Langkamer Bandcamp page.

Mote – Defying Ephemera

Having met at Binghamton University and won the hearts of the local scene, New York‘s Mote have just released their debut record, Defying Ephemera. Though not strictly a concept record, there’s a narrative arc from love to lonely longing across the twelve tracks, the nasty dose of heartbreak smack bang in the middle bringing a conflicted, anguished mood. The lead single and title track opens the record, existing before the worst has come to pass, but the growing chaos which envelops the spoken vocals hints at the turmoil to come.

Sunflower Thieves – Lichtenberg Figures

The project of Leeds-based childhood friends Amy Illingworth and Lily Sturt-Bolshaw, Sunflower Thieves make emotive music that draws on the ethereal tones of dream pop and the lyrical honesty of folk. Late last month they released their latest EP Someone To Be There For, a collection of five songs that captures nurturing warmth and bracing honesty which mark them as songwriters to watch. Perhaps the standout is ‘Lichtenberg Figures’, a song which celebrates the hard-won beauty of overcoming trauma through the metaphor of the tree-like pattern of lesions sometimes left on the skin when a person is hit by lightning.

You were struck by lightning walking in the rain to your car
and when you woke the lightning left a beautiful scar.

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Described as the first of four multimedia works that will make up their self-titled debut EP, ‘Pica’ is a slouching beast of song that possesses a strange tension between menacing weight and haunting ethereality. The result is something densely physical yet intangible too, existing across a variety of planes and brought to life in sounds both menacing and sublime.

Such paradoxical sensations speak to the overarching themes. Pica refers to the compulsion of the same name, where individuals crave and consume non-nutritive substances. The condition is treated as a psychological disorder, abnormal behaviour that leads people to foods seen as unacceptable. “We wanted to focus on this attribution of ‘unacceptable’ characteristics,” the band explain. “This creation of abnormal value connections between objects. Our desire was to invoke similar divergent attributions of value within the visual space—specifically between the nouveau digital landscapes created by machine learning and other digital manipulations, and the body as it is experienced in the hyper-digitized moment.”

If both nature and the human body are sites of wonder and spiritual depth, then what is the implication of our increasing digitization of such sites? Bloodslide utilise medical imaging software to push further into this question, exploring how such technology reconfigures relationships with our bodies and environments. “Our digitization of these almost sacred elements allows us to highlight the divergent attributions of value we assign to these elements when experiencing them in the digital space,” they continue. “And the fact that we—like those who suffer from Pica—are constantly fighting an appetite to consume these digital ghosts.”

The track’s accompanying video aims to represent these ‘ghosts’ for what they really are. “Hybrids of value,” a myriad of innumerable elements constantly shifting and assembling into new forms. What Bloodslide call “a new evolution,” where an infinite number of novel forms are possible, as it is no longer constrained by the limits of physical space.

*WARNING: You may want to give the video a miss if you have photosensitive epilepsy*

‘Pica’ is out now and available from the Bloodslide Bandcamp page. Their self-titled EP will be released in July.

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