Now Loic Moonmattress has returned to see out the year with another EP, Last Nostalgia, and as the title suggests, the collection builds upon the themes of its predecessor to explore ideas of memory and fondness. Again drawing upon a diverse range of influences, the songs combine lush ambient textures with hip hop and bedroom pop sensibilities to weave soundscapes at once expansive and intimate, delving into the small, personal moments to excavate the full warmth within.

The title track of the EP is a great place to jump in. A perfect example of the patient, slow-moving style, with Loic Moonmattress taking the time to examine a specific moment in all of its varied, wistful texture. “[It’s] a song about the clarity, overwhelm, and sense of finality that comes with looking backward on era of ones life that has just come to pass,” the artist describes. The result is something touching, melancholic and more than a match for its title. An attempt to preserve a fleeting moment in sound.

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Writing of the “distinctively sardonic style” of single ‘Sunny <3‘, we hinted at the tongue-in-cheek tone of McTigue’s work. “Do not be fooled by the title,” we wrote, “or at least be sure to excavate its wry connotations, as this FOMO anthem does not find joy or self-actualisation at the end of a productively jammed day. Just creeping panic as the pressure to be better and better coils like a spring.” The song is indicative of the first half of the record, where the cutting edge is still sharp, the meanness still fresh. Be it coming from a seemingly personal point of view, as on ‘I Hate You :(‘, or that of a frustrated Chrissy Moltisanti (‘The Family’). But as the album progresses, there’s a slight change of tone. The edge dulling somewhat, the meanness softening, fondness breaking through like a reluctant weed. Perhaps not quite scientific proof of the value of vitriol, but a promising start at least.

Alongside the album, Pacing set up web project anxiety.place, a portal which asked people to submit their deepest insecurities anonymously. The results have been collected into a brand new video for the song ‘Who has ADHD now lol?’, where the fears pop up as an incessant stream of notifications over the archive footage and internet memes. “I am a brand new person / Now that I’ve received medication,” McTigue sings in spite of these unwanted messages pinging in at random. “Don’t expect me to be a f-up / You’ll be out of luck / Cause I’m a damn brand new human being.” This being Pacing, things are of course rarely so simple, but if you can laugh about it then perhaps you might forget to worry too much?

hatemail is out now and available from the Pacing Bandcamp page. The anxiety.place form is still live too, so if you have any burning insecurities to share, you know where to drop them.

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On the surface, Sunk feels like an expression of anguish’s long tail. The weeks and months and years after a loss, when exhaustion sets in yet grief loses none of the its teeth. “You look like you’re tired,” goes ‘Getter Better’ in a typically weary moment. “I don’t know how I / got along before / somehow, I just keep going.”

With tiredness comes fatalism. The constant realisation that the future looks no more promising. That there’s plenty more shit coming down the line. “I’m thinking how can I plan a life in turn,” Bon sings on ‘The Way That Things Burn’, “when everything is hopeless?” And fatalism in the future comes with a wider pessimism too. As ‘Creature’ captures:

You’re standing tall, though you’re upside down
It’s a crisis
I don’t know how to love anymore
I don’t know what love is

But Sunk is not a record that is content to dwell on these worries. In fact, its central message is rather different, offering if not a solution to the multitude of problems then at least an able coping mechanism. “What would happen if, rather than constantly fighting against the immovable tides of unfixable things,” reads the EP’s press release, “[Bon] gave herself permission to stop struggling altogether?”

Closer ‘Twenty Dried Chilies’ collects all of these thoughts into one final communication, presenting the thesis of the EP with Babehoven’s signature blend of thought and emotion. A song about disconnecting from things as the existential weight of the present bears down upon us. “I’m at a loss at what happens in this world,” Bon sings. “It is a cruel sensation, remembering I am human / And I’m prone to accidents of heart.” Accidents increasing in frequency by the day. In the face of personal loss, our increasingly fractious and atomised society, and the existential threats of conflict and climate change, battling every loss can feel worthless. Why waste so much energy struggling against such a powerful current? Why cause so much distress? Better to still oneself, to drift to the bottom. To become sunk.

Sunk it out now via Double Double Whammy and you can get it from the Babehoven Bandcamp page.

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With its lo-fi textures and intimate delivery, the Regal Murk sound is rooted in the traditions of bedroom pop. But to confine it to the genre is to ignore its sheer vision. And there is plenty of room for invention, as Neat Defeat clocks in at twenty-seven songs which sprawl out between the poles of folk, indie rock and ambient styles. The frantic energy of ‘magic is dead’ is worlds away from the downbeat, Dusted-esque simmer of opener ‘fresh hell (heaven is a prison part 1 or 2)’, while ‘the beautiful uncut hair of graves (a trifle)’ has all the offbeat charm of Casiotone For The Painfully Alone. The experimental ‘voicemail’ interludes combine push right out into ambient/drone territory, their creepily automated voices pressing through like hauntings.

It is this mood which links the eclectic mix across the record. A blend of playfulness, pessimism and fury, casting Schwartz as a kind of self-aware, self-hating preacher at the end of the world. This might present as tongue-in-cheek gloom, as typified on the wonderfully titled ‘precambrian days (manichaean nights)’—”You believe the earth was made by some bored cunt in seven days,” goes the opening line, “now sacrifices must be made”—as well as a more defiant tone that challenges the society in its sights. Take ‘Archduke’, a song rising from the humming stillness of an empty room, sitting within a quiet fondness but soon reaching out with a kind of desperate plea.

dead i stand, demonstrably damned
the heart i need was hidden inside cut my guts out
wear them with pride and desert your homeland

In many ways, the story of the album suits its overall mood. Recorded as though destined for the void, just like everything else. But with its endless invention and wry rage, Neat Defeat is also a statement of opposition. A small rally against the encroaching doom. If or when someone hears it is almost besides the point. It’s there, it’s waiting. Why not lend a ear?

Neat Defeat is out now and available from the regal murk Bandcamp page.

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Ahead of her debut full-length record, due to be released in the coming months, Dunebug has released a brand new single, ‘Lie to Me’. Where the previous song championed the courage in walking away from a relationship, the new track details the inverse situation. The early slide into something serious, where an otherwise casual relationship begins to deepen and communicating the sensation holds its own fraught weight. Will confessing the feelings send the other person running? Will they take advantage of the situation, and the submissive, vulnerable state required to express it?

Lie to me
And I’ll believe you
Every single word that passes your lips
Treat me like a fool

Check out the video directed by Sophie Davies, with cinematography from Michael Hobdell, starring Limpiroj alongside Niru Fekri-Arnold.

‘Lie to Me’ is out now, and be sure to follow Dunebug on Bandcamp, Facebook and Instagram, for more news on the forthcoming record.

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With a soft and cautious style, the [release] tiptoes forward with something between bummed out slacker stillness and a kind of weighted trepidation, as sad and scared and bored as any spirit unable to pass on. But the ghost here is still very much living, the life slipping past before his eyes very much his own. The goal is not the bright afterlife but a far duller paradise—a sense of contentment, comfort in one’s own skin. The feeling that, yes, you really are living, right here and right now.

Last month saw Ghost Fan Club return with brand new single that continues these ideas. As the title suggests, ‘Crutch’ deals with the limbo of coping mechanisms, the thoughts and actions imposed to get one through the day that might also prove a hindrance in conquering the real problem. Costolo captures this with a slow and reluctant style, following the likes of Told Slant in the way the delivery feels at once rhetorical and not. “Why am I like this?” the lyrics asks, not expecting an answer but hoping for one all the same.

Everything is scary
I don’t want to move on
What does the end mean
Am I too far gone

Why am I like this
Inside these walls
I’ll stay safe
The crutch that holds me up

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Lead single ‘OK, Truce’ is the perfect example. Rising from static and reverb, the song immediately introduces the contradictions that make the Mount Fake style so interesting. The melody is clear, but competing with a brooding clatter of drums, and the shoegaze elements conjure a sound that’s expansive yet dense too. McLaughlin cultivates this sense of tension expertly, utilizing it to knit the track’s themes deep into its subconscious.

“‘OK, Truce’ is pretty much about just being pissed and scared all the time,” they explain. “But finding surprising little moments of softening acceptance here and there that remind you that you don’t have to wait until you’re completely exhausted to rest. To me, this song somehow both soothes and expresses that kind of restlessness.” So when McLaughlin’s vocals emerge from the chaos, a human voice either riding the storm or attempting to remain above it, they do so with a persevering hope that safe harbour might be close, however temporary such security and quiet might be.

Honestly
Don’t worry so much
We could be something good if we wanted
Anyway
We kind of already have it all
But can’t really find it I guess

You’re always high
You’re always high
But so am I
Ok truce

There’s so much room
Why shouldn’t we be happy
Let’s make some moves and go far away
And be closer

You’re always right
You’re always right
But so am I
Ok truce

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Fast forward a year, a boxset is back with batch_six, a brand new EP to be released on Devil Town Tapes. Not one to rest on his laurels, the album sees Dunphey jettison the structured songwriting approach of the previous record in favour of something more instinctive. And the result is perhaps boxset in its truest form, indebted to no conventions or expectations, allowing their sound to flow naturally and following the current.

Lead single ‘jar’ gives a glimpse of the result. Despite the slightly heavier, grungier tone, the song agile and bright. The carefree motion and sun bleached charm point to a slacker rock influence, but there’s an added edge to both the guitars and vocals that avoid the genre’s most ironic side. Which is not to say the track is not playful. Its strange lyrics tell the tale of scavenging ants and the casual cruelty of higher powers, lending a surreal atmosphere that lifts the track above its contemporaries and marks Dunphey as a songwriter to watch.

heading out early
lighting all around me
sun is beating on me
the maker left something in my way

can i head over?
i think i’ll head over
i’ll let the others know
what was sent

i saw it there
above me
my skin is burning
a lens is burning

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The resulting EP, My Love in the Winter, finds an artist both technically adept and emotionally resonant, showing a real sense of vision in the manner he works to combine genres to expand and subvert conventions. Crafted with acoustic guitars, “cheap” synthesizers and a 4-track cassette recorder, Colin Miller works with the main principles of classic bedroom pop yet stretches the possibility of the sound, pushing into out into ambient territory.

The melancholic sprawl of opener ‘Vice’ introduces the vivid textures of Colin Miller’s work, the track playing with the tunnelled awareness that arrives in the aftermath of great upheaval, while ‘Anna’ presents a warmer sound with almost LVL UP-esque vocals. ‘I Will Always Make A Place (For You)’ hovers somewhere between defiant and devotional before ‘Help Me Remember’ pushes decisively into the ambient end of the spectrum, and erasure poem ‘Spare’ shows its own experimental edge with peals of distortion.

Centred around a home fire, ‘Prodigy’ is a track of creeping intensity, sparking into life with a volatile air and never letting up. Sometimes it slows to a flicker, at others swirls with an off-kilter grace, possessing something of the paradoxical nature of burning building, where opposite forces collide. A meeting of silence and sound. The past and the present. Durable history and the decaying moment. “The flames have jumped the firewall,” Miller sings, “and found the old man’s oxygen / and taken both apartment complexes / that I grew up in.” There’s a carelessness to the the fire, a lack of regard that borders on mocking, and a cruel completeness too. “The flames sing ‘la la la’ / Family pictures curl in the heat,” goes the second verse. “The flames sing ‘la la la’ / Put the kids in the car and start it.”

My Love in the Winter is out via Sub-Fi Records and available from the Colin Miller Bandcamp page. Miller also contributed to some fantastic compilations recently, so check out Days Go By (curated by Tenci) and the smallest snowstorm on record (curated by Wednesday).

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Such ideas, of course, range from lazy generalisations to dangerous pomposity. Based in Chicago, Joey Nebulous are an example of a band utilising the twee aesthetic for greater ends, their synth-based sugar pop able to explore themes of love, intimacy and identity. Indeed, where such weighty topics lead many bands toward melodrama, Joseph Farago and co. explore them with a playful air, approaching the songs with a near childlike innocence in order to present a fresh and endearing picture of one person’s experience of the twenty-first century.

Back in 2017 the band put out high on daddy’s day with Philadelphia stalwarts Sleeper Records, setting out their tender and quirky sound. Everything about the release, from the short length of the tracks to the titles themselves (e.g. ‘househunter’s intl’ and ‘cher’), suggests a superficial slice of goofy fun, but dip below the surface and there is far more at work. The twee style, Joey Nebulous prove, need not represent a retreat from reality. It can provide sincerity and empathy, and thus become an oppositional force in a world lacking both.

Today we’re delighted to share a brand new album, Give Yourself a Kiss For Me, again out via Sleeper Records. Taking the style of high on daddy’s day and developing it further, the album adds further dimensions to the sound and feels like a realisation of the Joey Nebulous style. The playful nature of the music is unchanged, though this time it’s balanced with wistfulness and longing, as well as a fondness so keen that it registers as a strange kind of suffering.

From the sparkling and subtly carefree lead single ‘New Joey’ to the bittersweet sugar rush of ‘Cheerleader Mom’, Give Yourself a Kiss For Me proves that Joey Nebulous are experts in crafting the perfect queer pop song. ‘Superstar’ is all shuffling drums and dreamily synths, while the slow and considered vibe continues onto the minimally ramshackle ‘I Wanna Be On Tour’ with its improvised percussion and radiantly earnest vocals. But even in this radiance Farago has something important to say, with casually-delivered but still cutting lines such as “I like the sound of my voice but it’s shaking, I’m gay and that hurts / they’re leaving queers off the bills, they’re saying they won’t but they always will.”

This is the case across the album as a whole, the worries and difficulties of being queer entwined seamlessly into the nice shiny pop songs all the way until closing track. One of the album’s longest despite clocking in at barely over two minutes, ‘Pride Month’ explores the what happens after the initial buzz of identity discovery wears thin. “How can i be proud if I’m so unhappy?” Farago asks in a moment of typically naked clarity. But, just like the rest of the record, despite how heavy that sounds, you still couldn’t describe it as downbeat, in fact its undeniably pretty.

It is Pride Month and I haven’t done a thing
haven’t even watched a gay thing on TV

Album art by Halle Farago

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