New Music – Queen City Sounds and Art

Blvckhndz Boosts Community Protection on Darkwave Hip-Hop Single “I Am Your Neighbor”

Blvckhndz pairs a spectral melodic synth line with an urgent beat on “I Am Your Neighbor” that complements well rapid but expertly sequenced bars about life in a community today. The title hearkens one to the Kengo Hanazawa manga series I Am a Hero and the artwork shows our own hero of the song, perhaps, giving a kick to the yarbles of an ICE agent instead of a literal zombie. And the song ends with the now familiar refrains of “ICE out!” and concluding with “Fuck ICE.” Who can’t get behind those sentiments that isn’t a bootlicker? The whole song though is like a mini manual for surviving this perilous era and maintain an inner calm even as hectic as it can seem. The song straddles the genre lines of hip-hop, darkwave and synthpop and video game music in a way that expands the boundaries of all by unifying them. Listen to “I Am Your Neighbor” on Spotify and follow Virginia-based artist Blvckhndz at the links provided.

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Mindy Gledhill Inspires Finding Everyday Wonders Around You on Dream Folk Single “Hidden Pictures”

Mindy Gledhill, photo courtesy the artist

The almost layered guitar work under Mindy Gledhill’s vocals, doubled now and then to great yet subtle effect, in “Hidden Pictures” are like a musical embodiment of the songwriter’s lyrics. Gledhill seems to be reminding us of that Buddhist story about being able to see the universe in a blade of grass if only you are open to perceptions of wondrous things around you in everyday life where previously you seemed to only find the mundane. A slight shift in perspective and cognitive priorities is really all it takes, no special powers or bolt of “enlightenment,” it’s a shift that’s accessible to everyone and Gledhill’s melodiously gentle song seems to have a way of coaxing this painless and easy transformation with its soothing energies. Listen to “Hidden Pictures” on YouTube and follow Mindy Gledhill at the links below.

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“Places, Everyone” by Halou is a Sensuous, Industrial Downtempo Portrait of Messianic Egomania.

“Places, Everyone” by Halou has a downtempo industrial menace and alluring brooding quality that serves a song about delusional manipulation. The words seem to come from the perspective of a narcissistic director, CEO or person in a similar position of power, real or imagined, orchestrating situations to suit their desires and utilizing emotional appeals of victimhood and posting the self as the source of all success and glory with the guiding vision that has to be the correct goal. The song’s deep atmosphere and dark moods is reminiscent of a late 90s trip-hop song if a touch of that decade’s industrial rock blended into the sound. As a character study the song is pitch perfect and offers insight into a mindset many us have encountered. Listen to “Places, Everyone” on Spotify and follow Halou at the links provided. The EP of the same now is out now.

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Oski XD Doski’s “Bonny Wraith” is a Culture Jamming Collage of Post-Punk Psychedelic Folk

Oski XD Doski, photo courtesy the artists

“Bonny Wraith” by Oski XD Doski sounds like it was assembled from glitched out fragments of songs almost collage style to form a song that is at turns lo-fi indie rock, post-punk weirdness and psychedelic rock circa early Flaming Lips. The video has ghosts in frame, paintings of ancient Egypt, archaic cartoons, images of the outlines of the earth and all animated together. It’s obvious the song and the video were created organically and brought together with an analog sensibility in mind. Like the people in the band came up partly on old Nickelodeon shows and Liquid Television and had seen music videos from Residents and Renaldo & The Loaf. Musically the song and its coherent yet eclectic style has a flavor that seems akin to early Ween gone Neo Folk. It’s really does no justice to the uniqueness of the song to compare it immediately to anything else but fans of Sun City Girls may like this as well. Watch the video for “Bonny Wraith” on YouTube and follow Oski XD Doski at the links provided. Gotta appreciate a band using a meme emoticon in the middle of its moniker. The group’s new album Latency Issues released February 15, 2026.

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Madeline Goldstein’s Darkwave Single “One Star One Body” is a Synthpop Song of Personal Liberation From Personal and Social Limitations

Madeline Goldstein, photo courtesy the artist

Madeline Goldstein introduces “One Star One Body” with a harmonic, spectral washes over minimal percussion and establishes the dreamlike mood that permeates her forthcoming album Speaking to the Body (out April 10, 2026 via Artoffact Records). When Goldstein’s vocals come in with a soulful yearning she sings about uncertainty, desire and an ache to transcend human limitations but ultimately accepting them and thus oneself. The melancholic sheen of the first two thirds of the song gives way to great forward motion in industrialized beats transforming the vulnerable synthpop song into something darker and direct like the narration from the earlier part of the song is being channeled into action. The stasis and discomfort of the more introspective part of the song as gorgeous as it sounds is converted into the the will to tunnel out of a period of self-doubt, self-repression, oppression and needing to mask an authentic self. As an album closer it is particularly effective and makes one wonder what Goldstein will do next. Listen to “One Star One Body” on Spotify and follow Madeline Goldstein at the links below. The artist is touring the USA this spring in support of the new record.

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“Spin Glass” by storyinsoil is an Ambient IDM Piece That Sounds Like the Score of a Utopian, Existential Science Fiction Drama From the ‘70s

The rapid-cycling, almost iterative aspect of storyinsoil’s “Spin Glass” with the intro has a minimalistic quality of early synthesizer music but as the track progresses the modulated, lower end tonal rhythm anchors the song. The circular bright tone increases in volume and brightness and then decreases giving a real sense of space allowing for other layers to express a more delicate emotional coloring from inside its framing. The percussive aspect of the more prominent sounds lends the song a tactile quality and the more subtle sounds one more melancholic yet imbued with a sense of wonder. Toward the conclusion the song gives way to a touch of more conventional melody as the rhythms fade out conveying a cinematic quality to the song like the closing credits of one of those existential science fiction and adventure films of the 1970s and 1980s the likes of which were typically soundtracked by the likes of Tangerine Dream and Popol Vuh. This doesn’t feel like a homage to that era of synthesizer music so much as finding a fresh application of the way that music had an analog tonal quality that was as palpable as it was atmospheric. Listen to “Spin Glass” on YouTube and follow storyinsoil at the links provided.

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International Druglords Are Ready to Breach the Everyday Pernicious Fictions We Maintain Too Long on Psychedelic Electro Pop Single “White Lie”

International Druglords, photo courtesy the artist

International Druglords is the latest project from Vega Blackwell who has been a musician and collaborator with numerous artists including Trent Reznor, Jesus and Mary Chain, Jurassic 5, The Warlocks and Jimmy Cliff. The new single “White Lie” is accompanied by a video showing a rider who seems to be cast in cosmic colors and imagery and wandering interdimensional dreamscapes. The music is pulsing psychedelic pop with a driving yet finely accented rhythm festooned with swirling melodies and vocals that seem to be just keeping ahead of some peril but maintaining a calm in spite of everything. It’s a song about the illusions we live with that become tiresome and when we recognize them for what they are it becomes necessary to let your inertia of liberation from the low rent oppression break through them for good. Fans of Cut Copy and Big Black Delta will appreciate the fusion of rock and expert electronic pop production present in the crafting of this track. Watch the video for “White Lie” on YouTube and follow International Druglords at the links provided.

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Jacob The Horse Give the Communist Resistance to the Ruling Class a Power Pop Party Punk Anthem With “The Black Hand”

Jacob The Horse, photo by Heather McAlpin

Jacob The Horse sound like they popped into the current era from the dawn of power pop in the 1970s on “The Black Hand.” But this celebratory-sounding song like some odd yet charming fusion of The Guess Who, Kiss, Cheap Trick and Big Star is infused with a working class political consciousness and revolutionary fervor. It’s not often you hear a party song that references The Black Hand, possibly a more than slight nod to the Serbian military society that is credited with the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in 1914 or the organized crime groups in America, it mentions having Communist parties (lower case) and “Dancing and singing ‘bout workers’ rights,” as well as more than passive resistance to the ruling class. Musically it’s something you’d almost expect to hear on classic rock radio where few artists are singing so directly about a proletarian uprising with such joy unless that station plays a lot of The Clash and Billy Bragg. Listen to “The Black Hand” on YouTube and follow Jacob The Horse from Los Angeles at the links provided. The group releases its new album At Least It’s Almost Over on March 20, 2026.

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Otracami’s Ethereal Folk Pop Single “Perfect Reach” Embraces Uncertainty and Complex Feelings

Otracami was taking Adrianne Lenker’s School of Song class one winter while also reading Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez when the ideas and methods of songwriting came to her. The gentle elegance of the guitar work and the subtly shifting harmonics are imbued with the hauntedness one associates with the novel. But Otracami utilizes that mood in “Perfect Reach” to tell a different kind of story in impressionistic phrases of yearning and one’s own motivations in pursuing the path of that yearning and how what you think what you want can seem better at a distance and all the while not wanting to be trapped and defined by expectations. The song expresses a frame of mind knowing how what seems perfect and attainable can be elusive because no one and nothing can fully live up to the visions in your head and the assumption of fulfillment when you find it difficult to accept deviation from an ideal. And sometimes you’d rather not risk disappointment and preserve that perfect fantasy of the mind until it resolves in one’s imagination. The song’s melancholic, dreamlike melodies and the singer’s intimate vocal delivery hold empathy for the embrace of uncertainty, emotional complexity and a desire to avoid harming oneself and others emotionally. Listen to “Perfect Reach” on Spotfy and follow Otracami at the links below.

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Piotr Michałowski’s Textural Ambient Composition “Something Good” Combines the Sublime and the Unsettling

Piotr Michałowski puts a good deal of texture and percussive qualities in the layers of “Something Good.” Its bright, harmonics over pulsing drones in the beginning sounds like the rapid flow of clouds across summer skies if you could experience that in fast forward while your mind remains at rest and soothed by effervescent music. This part of the song flows into a movement where a distant piano intones a simple melodic figure in the background while a cycling rhythm keeps a steady pace and processed electronic strings like distorted violin cuts through it all with a nearly palpable quality. Toward the end a processed white noise breaks the tranquility of the piece like all along we’ve been hearing a secret radio transmission of a performance of an ambient song by a performer now being suppressed by the state and the feed is being interrupted just as the song fades to quiet. To combine the sublime with the unsettling in this way isn’t so common and that sets the song apart. Listen to “Something Good” on Spotify and follow Polish composer Piotr Michałowski at the links provided. The album The New Season released January 16, 2026.

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