Yot Club’s latest EP, Beach Bleach takes this idea further, fully embracing the sunny warmth hinted at previously. Opening with the gentle swell of the ocean, ‘Blowfish’ establishes the balmy aesthetic, the vocals pitched firmly in the dour, disaffected style in the verses before the chorus arrives with genuine pop radiance.

‘Faded’ dials back the tempo to amp up the tropic dreaminess, like surf rock as imagined on vacation postcards, the specifics softened into a colourful ideal. Wrapped in a taut rhythm, ‘Japan’ is the most insistent track on the release, a kind of cross between the summer tempos of El Guincho and the hazy vocals of other late-00s blogger buzz bands. The result is a strange duality, the keen energy offset by a disassociated vibe, lending the whole thing the trademark Yot Club dreaminess.

Closer ‘Apartments’ drops the rhythm once more, a crepuscular synth pop number rendered syrupy and soft. The sadness here is rendered in classic smooth rock tones, heartbreak and longing as felt post-pina colada(s) in some Caribbean beach bar, the sunset lighting the beach with a lurid retro glow.

Bleach Beach is out now and available on Spotify.

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Very much a product of our ludicrous times, Shapes & Colors ​sees, as the band put it, “autofictional, surreal protagonists making do against a technicolor backdrop.” The tone exists somewhere between sincerity and absurdity, a George Saunders-esque appreciation of not only the bizarre excesses of our society but also the people striving to live beneath them. With subject matter ranging from brand paranoia to escapist fantasies both forward-looking and back, this is a record by and for folks stranded amidst the roiling sea of late capitalism, clinging to anything and everything in an effort to stay afloat.

“In my first year after graduating from college, commonly referred to as ‘the beginning of the rest of your life,’ I held onto books, songs, anything I could relate to as much as retreat to,” Waldron explains. “The aim of this album really is for others to use it the same way.” To further these themes and ideas, Sailor Boyfriend have also put together a full color, 4.25″ by 5.5″ zine, filled with illustrations based on each song from Kat Schneider, Laura Marciniak, and Waldron himself.

Today, we’re lucky enough to be able to share a new single, ‘The Battle of Sugarhill’. The perfect example of Sailor Boyfriend’s uncanny ability to create songs both sleek and playful, the track is a taut, neon-flashed display suspended within a dreamy dark. The hip mood and style belies the comic farce of the lyrics, Waldron detailing a war as seen through the eyes of “disco sucks” DJs

You know you gotta believe
Pray loud enough ‘till they scream

Marching with our crimson platform shoes
Kneeling on our Velvet leather pews

took on Sugarhill
Dahl scoffed, “oh, this landfill?”
i asked if he’d been but he just grinned
and rung his decibel

bearing flags of artistry
we were screamin’ like an infantry
They’re ready to shock? i’d die on this rock and
Take back our industry

Album art by Andy Waldron

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The song is the lead track from Songs After The Blue, the fourth studio album from Hamburg duo Deniz Çiçek and Robert Heitmann, and it’s clear that the entire record is crafted from the same aesthetic. Drawing inspiration from a wide range of artistic sources, from Rilke’s Letter to a Young Poet and Patti Smith’s Just Kids to movies such as Heathers and Breakfast Club, the album spins new wave, electro-pop and indie rock into a beguiling blend of familiar and strange.

The thematic side of the album is equally fluid, with lyrics that manage to sound at once intimate and abstract, a collision of the human and digital where connection does not necessarily equate true communication. Indeed, such a tension informs much of the release, the struggle of living and loving in a world of images and information. Songs such as ‘Heather’ tussle with some sort of loss of tangible existence in a world augmented by technology, where direct experience is replaced by the curation and re-visitation of the past. “We used to sleep under the trees,” Çiçek sings, “Now all we do is browse through / Long forgotten distant memories,” and later decrying “Living in a mirror / feeling like an error.”

‘Resonating Truly’ expands upon similar ideas, opening with the idea of “living [i]n a made-up scenery” before detailing a kind of free-fall through too many memories, too much information. ‘The Day the Internet Died’ feels like a culmination of these themes. As the press release describes, the track explores the “discrepancy between the promises of a virtual community and the lack of intimacy and internal isolation in the real world.” Worse, this does not result in a deadening of feeling, like the cliche of screen-obsessed zombies, but rather lonely and desperate people doing all they can to break free, to cut through the technological haze to once again feel something.

Songs After The Blue is out now via Better Call Rob and you can buy in on vinyl and cassette via the Kraków Loves Adana Bandcamp page.

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A few weeks ago, Tiny Fireflies put out their first music since said album, with the single ‘Nothing’ released in December and b-side ‘2040’ in January. However, not content to stop there, the band are also releasing a 7″ vinyl edition, and have made a beautiful video for ‘Nothing’, directed by Greg Stephen Reigh and Ashley Thompson, to celebrate its release.

We’re lucky enough to share the video a few days early. Using the wistful energy of the song as inspiration, Samantha Jo and Morgan McNaught play people taking a road trip through small-town America, the neon nights and long rows of corn interspersed with strange symbols and encounters. As the track progresses, the signs seem to converge into an encounter of a different kind altogether, although with who or what is left up to interpretation.

‘Nothing’ is out now both digitally land as a 7″ vinyl, and you can pre-order it now from the Tiny Fireflies Bandcamp page.

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‘Float Away’ is a great example of this, the modern synths and traditional strings creating a rich, human track stripped of references to times or dates, instead favouring a universal simplicity that carries calm and comfort within its mighty grasp.

“Started out at the riverbed where we lay
while the smoke curled overhead, there we lay
filled our lungs with all the stories we’d been told to get us through the day”

Thematically, RELAX explores isolation and connection in various forms. Not only focused on a simple personal level, the record also considers wider feminist, cultural and racial aspects too, opening with expansive questions and slowly honing in to smaller concerns. “Where do we go / oh when we die?” Burns asks on ‘New Moon Blues’. “Do we become / all of the black in the night sky?” Tracks such as ‘Signs’ and ‘Holding Steady’ are more upbeat in terms of arrangement, more fierce in terms of lyrics. Both tracks feel rooted in personal and social justice, the former talking of breaking cycles and watching the fall of walls and silences, the latter a call to arms for the beaten down, a signal of strength and determination.

“Now I’m kicking in the glass walls
learning how to stand tall
learning how to speak

I’ll hold my own now
lately I’ve been holding steady, I’ve been holding steady

and all the time we spend to forgive our choices
echoes all the time we need to collect our voices”

‘Wild Things’ feels like a renunciation of the complicated trappings of modern life, positing a return to some previous simplicity where today’s barriers and challenges are not yet formed, and closer ‘Reset’ takes this a step further. As the title suggests, the track proposes a fresh start, boiling down our existence to the basest elements as a way to reconnect to real life and the people around us, as though in recognising we are all skin and blood and bone, we might realise our common existence.

RELAX feels like Burns working through the issues of contemporary Canadian life, how we live positively and responsibly, challenging the privilege of others while questioning our own in the hope of healing history and creating a more just and harmonious future. The album is available now from the KASHKA Bandcamp page in a variety of formats, including a special edition that comes with a hand-sewn zine full of lyrics, drawings and photos, complete with risograph printed cover.

P.S. KASHKA recently visited the good folks at Southern Souls to record a live session, producing a series of great videos such as this for ‘signs’ below:

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While such a statement might conjure the holy icons of celebrities on magazine covers or the communal prayers of sports crowds, or even the near-transcendental flutter experienced at the promise of large sums of money, Wallace’s truth is probably a lot more subtle and personalised, centred around our view of ourselves and the yearning for something more. As such, much of the worship goes on inside our heads, small hopes and habits we repeat over and over, as though incantation and ritual might invoke our better selves.

Don’t Hide From The Light, the debut release from PAT MOON, feels like this sensation committed to music. The solo recording project of Portland’s Kate Davis, who you might know as the face behind Track and Field Records, PAT MOON utilises analog synths and drum machines to create what could be described as dark dream dance or ecclesiastical electro-pop. At once insular and expansive, the album feels like a private ceremony within an abandoned church, solemn and serious and sacred in its own humble way, pertaining to no system of belief beyond that of human experience yet feeling instantly recognisable, a likeness of our own inner-thoughts. Such empathy is present from the first bars of ‘Feel You’, the opener possessing that warm-yet-cold feeling peculiar to cathedrals, where death and guilt and love and life are so entwined they become one.

Other highlights include ‘Show Me a Sign’, an echoing, synth-heavy plea for enlightenment, the spectral chorus of ‘I See You’ and ‘Love Me as I Am’, another song that manages to be at once intimate and vast, submissive and resolute, a steadfast hymn summoned from deep within. Closing track ‘Enter My Mind / All I Know is Now’ is imbued with a certain lightness, a candle-lit organ-drone which seems to brighten across its run-time.

With its melancholic seriousness punctuated with near-mystical frisson, PAT MOON’s debut is a reminder that worship is not some hotline for divine intervention but rather a process of feeling and thinking and believing. Sure, Davis may find her prayers unanswered, her rituals unrewarded, but you get the sense that the very process of acting and asking can be a route to confidence and love. One that does not rely on the whim of a deity or the alignment of the stars.

Don’t Hide From The Light is out now and you can buy it from the PAT MOON Bandcamp page.

Photo by Sam Velenne

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The album kicks off with lead single, ‘Rain Days For Bad Songs’, a strong start which acts as the perfect introduction of the beautiful weird to come. In our preview we described the track (rather accurately) as “an off-kilter electro-pop song just managing to keep it’s head above a swirling noise, like a radio hit from your favourite recurring dream.”

‘Long Walk to all Sort of Places’ starts all slinky, with whispery “sshhh”s and noodly little synths that worm in from the ominous noir that surrounds the song. The whole thing sounds slightly unhinged, with an odd, unearthly atmosphere that quickly establishes itself as the signature of LYA. ‘Y U’ takes things even darker and weirder, with a steady, slow thump of percussion and background “vocals” which sound for all the world like feedback-riddled moans and screams. Even the lulls in the maelstrom have a rumbling sense of mechanical foreboding, and the lyrics are just as black: “I got those witches at my side / some things crawling as I turn on the light.” It’s genuinely unsettling, bringing to mind some of the tracks on Oh Rose’s recent SEVEN in its almost horror-level intensity (if not quite in throat-shredding yells). ‘Murder’ cools the mood with the air of woozy hallucination, the pretty dream-pop vocals delivering not-so-pretty lines. “We know you are gonna get another fire hun”, she sings. “Setting flames to light another guilty pleasure in the setting sun”. However beneath the composed vocals swirl strange cries, a thousand flavours of hysteria as heard from behind locked doors and thick walls.

From here, things don’t quieten down. ‘Helena’ has unusual effects on the vocals that transform them into the high pitched whine of a buzz saw, and ‘Reply Please’ is all disturbed paranoia, with drum machine beats that sound like the agitated pulses of a delirious body, everything somehow bleached hot-red like a wobbled vision from within the throes of a fever. ‘I Got My Piano at Six’ is a haunted instrumental, all devious feedback and heavy oppressive atmosphere with weird piano that seems to ripple and quiver into the distance, while ‘Cry Me a River’ comes across oddly understated with a spare drum beat and shoegazey post-rock atmospherics, the lyrics painting a picture gaunt and crumbling, vague poetry of negative urges and self destruction. Follow-up ‘Within You’ is a schizophrenic pop track with lyrics delivered in almost robotic monotone, noise spooking the edges like a static fog, while ‘Check My Heart’ advances in a shadowy slow glide, like a flashy car coasting neon-glared midnight streets in some 80s thriller, before descending into bursts of high-pitched derangement, rain-slicked hairpin bends and cackles rising from seedy back alleys. ‘Boys’ plays like a bizarro r&b track, clanking along with a hundred textures of noise, the creepily sensual pop music that all the post-human android bars will be playing in 2116, again with lyrics that defy initial definition:

“Got me, got two tickets out, got me, got a witch inside
got a tendency to lour, got a friend I gotta hold on
hey girl – watch me

Got me, got to figure it out, Got me, got someone possessing me
got a cold heart I borrow , got an angel inside a bottle”

The album finishes with ‘Poser’, its humid breathy ambience and slow precision building and building, passing from a sense of clarity into something else entirely, something massive, too large to see or describe. The song is imbued with a sense of clear-minded determination, as if operating to a logic clear to the narrator, if not to us.

“I keep on hiding in my den as summers passing and winters sometimes
I watch my spelling how I write, if I dress in colours my heart turns beige

I got some secrets in my bag, some words might slip but not this one, not this one
Somebody said I tried, I tried, somebody said I loved I died
oh, I got it. I think I got it to late this time”

Fanpage’s music occupies a space between life and imitation, too mechanical to be described as organic yet too intuitive and mysterious for machines. It wanders a strange distance ahead of the human race, amongst a chaos born of our need for order. Love and delirium and bright white fear roil beneath the feedback, humanity kicking and twisting within a noise filled with myth and magic and dread. Terrifying and beautiful and glorious, LYA is an album for the information age, where data has exploded to incomprehensible volumes and become its own wilderness.

You can buy LYA right now via the ever-wonderful Fox Food Records, either as a digital download or on a lovely limited-edition cassette, designed by Alexander Wireen.

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The pair are back with a new song ‘Sweet Gin’, the first from an as-of-yet unnamed sophomore EP. The track follows the lead of their début, using a combination of beats and synths to produce a chilled brand of dream pop where the soulful vocals are allowed to take centre stage.

“Tell me that things won’t change
tell me your heart’s the same
even if things go wrong
just know I’ll be around”

The single is out now, so be sure to check in and have a listen. The new EP will be released later this year on Deaf Ambitions. While you are waiting you could do a lot worse than checking out their self-titled EP from last November.

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“traffic was okay
the day wasn’t so bad
walk slowly through the rain
cause i love it”

…and ‘yellow jacket’ toward the end of the album:

“later on
i sing my song
it is a rainy day
with my yellow jacket on”

To add to the simplicty, Lazovick includes two sets of four songs (eight of the 18 tracks on the album) that do not exceed one second in length. The first quartet (listed 00.00 by Bandcamp) are entitled ‘kick’, ‘click’, ‘sound’ and ‘tap’ and are merely samples of the instrument sounds. The second (this time 00.01 in length), entitled ‘J’, ‘A’, ‘K’, ‘E’ , are, you guessed it, Lazovick spelling out his own name. These are a deconstruction of Sitcom’s style, the first reducing his sound to their basic components and the second breaking what is already a pared-down lyrical approach into even smaller pieces. The result comes across as a piece of advice, a friendly suggestion to remove yourself from the overpowering but needless complications of life and to instead focus on the important, simple parts.

You can buy Drum set now via the Sitcom Bandcamp page.

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The act is comprised of a duo from Milwaukee, so while that is the location I should be relaying to you, it hardly does justice to the diversity of places that have influenced the album in question. Night Singers was written and recorded when the duo were separated, with Eric Osterman relocating to Brooklyn and Ryan Weber with the Peace Corps in Kenya. The whole thing was put together thanks to the internet, a solid symbol of our advancements in the information age.

The reason I’m telling you all this is that I have a tendency to blank out when listening to shoegaze/electro-pop, the ebb and flow of the music having some sort of hypnotic influence that means, while enjoying it, I sometimes fail to appreciate exactly what is happening. It’s almost another meaning for the dream pop label, the passing of an album in an agreeable but hazy period that doesn’t stick in the memory for too long afterwards. However this time, armed with the curiosity spawned by the unconventional writing and recording process, I made an effort to really listen, and I found a great little album waiting to be heard.

Night Singers is an amalgamation of styles carefully knitted together with the familiar reverb-heavy vocals that featured on their previous release All Those I Know (which we featured here). Opening track ‘What I Say’ is reminiscent of M83, with glimmering electronic sounds framed with cascading drums to create a sprawling epic pop song. ‘Psycho’ is similarly large, with a quick tempo and crescendos around every corner. Others, like ‘Épingles et Aiguilles’ and ‘We’re The Ghosts’, are much slower and restrained, the electronics glittering behind soft vocals like dust in evening light.

Poor metaphors aside, the effect is a superb album. There are a number of feelgood pop songs that should satisfy those looking for that summer single, but those that listen to the entire LP in order are rewarded with something that stretches in a number of different directions, a cycling of speeds or focus that make the album like one long shoegaze hit, complete with hushed lulls and screaming crescendos.

Night Singers is out on the 23rd July on Perfect From Now On and you can buy it here. If you are impatient you can stream it now thanks to AllMusic.

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