After first single ‘Stitch’, a song which “offers a glimpse of the invention and playfulness which underpins the new project,” as we put it in a preview, “weaving a detailed, rhythmic sound over which Carlsson’s spoken vocals play with disarming closeness,” Snake Orange Cake has returned with new track, ‘Hair’. A song about the small joys of life which is suitably subtle in style, its layers of percussion and electronics forming a warm bed over which Carlsson’s vocals play.

The sound might not fully lose the ambiguity which marked leoblu, but here feels not so much ominous and nocturnal as organic, as though the arrangement is its own small biome teeming with mysterious life. A tangle which Snake Orange Cake nurtures and embraces, the vocals stitching into the sound itself to embrace themes of growth and acceptance.

Watch the video, shot at Berlin’s only waterfall, by photographer Pablo Hassmann below:

‘Hair’ is out now and available to stream and download from the Snake Orange Cake Bandcamp page.

Portrait photo by joel ivan thomas

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Liyou has described wanting to make the album since college, though only now possesses the skills to do the idea justice. The upshot of this is a strange duality within the songs. Liyou at 19, longing for parental acceptance as a closested trans person, and Liyou seven years later, wishing a romantic relationship might extend beyond its apparent end. “I feel really affected by this parallel between the love in wanting my parents to accept me for who I am and the love in wanting my partner to stay with me regardless of our circumstances,” they explain. “I always assumed that these two loves were separate but I think recognizing that (for trans people like me, or maybe just for me specifically) these loves have overlap has been simultaneously distressing and comforting.”

With the album’s release fast approaching on Orange Milk Records, Lucy Liyou has shared new single and opener, ’16/8′. A track which introduces both the record’s nuanced pop style and its thematic intention. To document a moment in time in all of its conflicted emotion and tactile experience. “While writing ’16/8′, I remember asking myself what does waiting for someone you love sound like, feel like?” Liyou explains:

Having played classical piano for so long, I couldn’t help but compare this feeling to rests in music—the anticipation building in the silences between notes, phrases, and ideas. I thought about the way some musicians like myself count during rests (e.g., the lyrics: “a kiss and click of the tongue”). I thought about how the growing anticipation in the rests make these silences feel substantive and material (e.g., the lyrics: “metal sheen of 16th’s and 8th’s, plexiglass and gold quarter shapes). And then it’s suddenly my turn to play. And I play what I have practiced for so long:

“please stay.
please stay.
I have so much love to give, please stay.”

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In the months following the album’s release, Sonya dropped several outtakes and b-sides that didn’t quite make the cut on his Soundcloud page. Due to popular demand, he has now bundled these together and released them as a separate collection, titled What’s The Alternative​?​, Demos. Despite the name, the songs are far more polished than the usual demos, forming something of a coda to At What Cost?, again walking the line between easy-going indie pop and emotive ruminations on relationship troubles. What he calls “a short love story on hard break-ups,” ‘Just Pretend You’re Okay’ is a great starting point, a barely two minute track of sweet pop hooks and fraught emotion.

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Their debut EP Infinity Mirror, out now via Future Gods, introduces such ideals by conjuring a vivid environment of its own. The lead single and title track evokes “a world nocturnal and neon-lit,” as we put it, “balancing lush textures and soaring energy to create something both reflective and forward-facing.” A song which considers conditions not as some exercise in nostalgia or longing but motivation to press ahead to pastures new. The rest of the EP follows in this spirit, from the affirming soar of opener ‘Falling’ to ‘Softly’ and its hazy ebb and flow. The latter, written during a period of intense depression and suicidal ideation, finds a comforting vividness punctuated by towering crescendos, as though Bandoquillo is building a sound capable of consoling those in pain and lifting them from the depths of their feelings.

Closer ‘Fix Yourself’ is a striking follow-up and closer. A harsh, caustic track of barrelling momentum, forgoing some of the richness of the previous songs in favour of cathartic release. If its predecessors are about finding safe spaces for healing and progression, then ‘Fix Yourself’ is about the actual act of moving forward. Even if that means razing the things you have been attached to in the past. An act of defiant disowning of all the things which might have once dragged you down in order to live life anew.

Infinity Mirror is out now via Future Gods and available from  the St. Kio Bandcamp page.

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Single ‘numb’ introduced the sensual, cinematic depth of the Julie-Sophie sound, with a glimmering, almost crystalline style which makes, as we put it, “everything feel so fragile and precious and sharp.” The latest single ‘telephone’ follows suit, the closing track of the album which encapsulates everything which has come before. A lush song of love, loneliness and longing, where the brightness on the horizon might be some emergent hope or just the neon smudge of the last place still open so late at night.

Call me up to night
I wanna cry on the telephone
Meet you on the Cowley Road
We’ll share chips on the way home
Call me up to night
I’m staring at my telephone
All dressed up to night with nowhere to go

forgive too slow will be released via Ba Da Bing Records on 26th July. Pre-order now from the Julia-Sophie Bandcamp page.

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Following a series of collaborations with Joel Johnston of Far Caspian, 22° Halo are now releasing a new single with Johnston’s label Tiny Library Records. Titled ‘Bird Sanctuary’, it finds Kennedy doing what he does best, a gentle duet with wife Kate Schneider that sparkles like a gem. He describes the song as one “about listening and not listening,” taking material he wrote around the theme of his wife’s experiences with severe illness. This is referred to only elliptically, with short, sentence-long “verses” that Kennedy delivers in between Schneider singing the chorus. “The thing you try and tell me breaks up with the wind,” he sings at the very beginning. “Say it again.”

But ultimately the heavy stuff is not the lasting feeling. Or at least it doesn’t drag you down in the way you might expect. It’s leavened into something uplifting with that trademark 22° Halo sense of almost naive wonder at the simple things all around us. “Saw the sparrows in alley picking twigs up,” Schneider sings during the chorus. “Are you listening?” It’s as if, at some very basic and intuitive level, Kennedy taps into the stuff that’s really important. Getting lost in the present, side by side with those you love.

‘Bird Sanctuary’ is out now via Tiny Library Records.

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With the record set for release next month, W. Y. Huang has returned with ‘Give It Time’, a brand new single which further introduces the release’s themes and tone. “If pain’s the only constant / then the variable is me,” Huang sings over a hushed folk arrangement, “still I multiply my failures / and subtract my victories.” The opening lines of a song addressed to its own performer, looking to extend the kind of patience and empathy we might offer others to oneself. “This was the first time I wrote a song to myself,” he explains. “There were things I needed to hear and feel to journey through this chapter in my life, and this was my attempt at giving that to myself. Perhaps it might help someone else coping with tough times as well.”

Give it time,
everything will be just fine
everything that’s on your mind
that’s inside out will turn around
just give it time

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“Up on the hillside / dressed in red,” as the track opens, “wasting the sunlight / is only fair / wronging what you can’t right / with me.” The vocals are crooned gently over languid acoustic guitar and strings, though as the track develops so too does its intricacy and drama, the song revealing itself to owe as much to the left-field arrangements of acts like Dirty Projectors as traditional folk. These sensibilities ebb and flow in keeping with the emotional turmoil of the lyrics and strings which lead with a poignant, often playful plasticity. What emerges is a picture of a failing relationship in all of its contradictions. Regret and longing sit side by side, so too conviction and doubt, as well as a steadfast belief in both the misery and wonder of any human connection. “I wanna say,” as Boyd and Norris voice together, “love is such a luminous waste.”

The song comes complete with a video illustrated and animated by Morvern Graham, which you can watch below:

‘The Favourite’ is out now and available from the usual places.

Artwork by Morvern Graham

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Take the title track opener with its acoustic strum and intimate textures, a plea as voiced in an empty room, or the placid bittersweet croon ‘Fool’s Paradise’. Songs linked in the way they pine for a slightly different version of reality, where all feelings can be acted upon and satisfied. With Dwi Riana and Jack Rudy adding guitar and bass, and Juan Andres Jimenez producing, mixing and mastering the release, the EP brings this emotion to life with a sound often hushed but with fervent crescendos, as Julie Meunier tries to communicate something beyond words.

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Happy Child, Carmen Jaci’s forthcoming album on Noumenal Loom, represents this aesthetic in its most realised form. An attempt to reconnect with the wonder and experimentation so often relegated to childhood, an unguarded style which embraces the performative and the playful to create something inherently personal, no matter how odd or eccentric the outcome. Packed with references to pop music, video games and symphonic works, and brought to life with mallet percussion and children’s toys, the resulting songs capture the curious vibe at the heart of all childlike curiosity—where the whimsical brightness is underlined by a certain disquiet. As though both magic and strangeness lie latent in all things.

Today we have the pleasure of sharing ‘I See’, the album’s latest single which serves as the ideal introduction for the uninitiated. It’s a track which exists across a series of layers, anchored by a syrupy beat but fizzing off with a variety of electronic details, Jaci’s lush vocals washing over with a style that challenges the distinction between sensuality and dreaming. The result is like exploring an idiosyncratic sonic ecosystem, the candy-coloured skitters and squelches and bright little pops filling the whole thing with a sense of childlike wonder. This might be Carmen Jaci’s personal language, but it is one delivered with intuition and curiosity, inviting outsiders into its world so we too might share its strange joys.

Artwork by Matthew Schoen, photo by Collectif Triangle

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