New Music – Page 2 – Queen City Sounds and Art

Bondo’s Hypnotic Yet Cathartic Post-Hardcore Single “Running Back” Draws You In With Its Sonic Contrasts

Bondo seems to sketch and stretch out musical ideas on “Running Back,” like its structure was arranged like stringing together journal entries. Connecting thoughts and feelings with a hypnotic and meditative bass line and drums. The vocals are nearly laconic and meditative but the guitar fractures that peace and feeds back slightly to give the song some evocative dissonance. The song’s mood is reminiscent of a more mellow Unwound or more discordant Versus song which is what makes it immediately relistenable. It is economical in its composition and hits the dramatic notes at the right times with a sense of emotional urgency. What isn’t as obvious initially is how it isn’t conventional in its structure. There is no intro or outro, just moments in time in the songwriting and the way it draws you into its dreamlike tone and thrilling moments of peak catharsis. Watch the video for “Running Back” on YouTube and follow Bondo at the links below. The band’s latest, self-titled, album releases July 24, 2026 on limited vinyl, digital download and streaming.

Bondo on Instagram

Bondo on Bandcamp

Queen City Sounds Podcast S6E04: Emily Rach Beisel

Emily Rach Beisel released their sophomore album Sumptuous Branching via avant-garde label Amalgam on April 10, 2026. The album informed partly by late medieval chant and its use of intertwining voices and a kind of organic sonic architecture free of the strictures of codified modern music theory and expectations on the part of the artist and listener. Beisel is a Chicago-based composer, improviser, educator, curator and specialist in woodwinds known for commanding and visceral live performances in which they employ extended technoque in vocals and instrumentals with analog electronics as part of the musical pieces. The album has an entrancing enigmatic quality with an expansive heaviness balanced with a keen sense of emotional atmospherics. While working on the album Beisel was reading Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2000 album House of Leaves and for the track “Cantilevers” in particular the novel’s lack of conventional resolution and a suggestion of endless pathways of endless varieties finds a parallel with Beisel’s idea of a chant in which the distinct voices often begin together but go along to their natural trajectories. Beisel conceived of the album as a set of songs that had a unified quality that could be performed live as a solo artist. Listening to the album one can hear the challenge of presenting the material live with its complex layers and rhythms yet it also feels of a piece that tells a story of a mythical journey of personal transformation through audacious creative action. Fans of Sun Ra’s more out there synth explorations and Popol Vuh’s more cosmic folk and drone leanings will deeply appreciate Beisel’s cinematic compositions and their willingness to go off standard musical paths. Sumptuous Branching is out now on limited vinyl, digital download and streaming.

Listen to our interview with Emily Rach Beisel on Bandcamp and follow the artist at the links below.

emilyrachbeisel.com

Emily Rach Beisel on Bandcamp

Emily Rach Beisel on Instagram

amalgamusic.org

Amalgam on Instagram

Amalgam on Facebook

Coloma’s Introspective and Melancholic Dream Pop Single “Skylights” Eases Lingering Emotional Turmoil With Its Gentle Touch

Coloma brings an intimate air to “Skylights” with a steady, jazz-like beat and gentle guitar accents and gossamer melodies around deeply introspective, melancholic vocals. It has a reflective mood processing sadness and a sense of guilt over how things have gone and a yearning for some kind of reconciliation. In moments the way the vocals and guitar are arranged and sync up in their tones is reminiscent of early Mojave 3, Mazzy Star and the more dreamlike moments of Throwing Muses. The tenderly shimmering slowcore style of the song keeps you engaged with its expansive vulnerability and in the emotional moment and treating psychological pain with the gentleness required to get through the toughest dips in mood and truly feel the feelings one might bury on initial impact in order to not be sunk by them. The sensitive and subtle production all around really helps the song to shine and for the emotional beats to hit perfectly. Listen to “Skylights” on YouTube and follow Coloma at the links provided.

Coloma on Instagram

Coloma on Apple Music

Moodlighting’s Effervescent Single “Guardrail” is a Dream Pop Song About the Foibles of the Tourist Mindset

Moodlighting, photo courtesy the artists

Moodlighting has been talented at crafting simple and uplifting melodies with guitar and vocals from its early days when the duo was performing in Denver before relocating to California. Its new single “Guardrail” is paired with “Rude sometimes” and the song showcases layers of delicate guitar with crystalline tone and expertly accented, chiming jangle riffs that complement perfectly almost ethereal vocals like a latter day Slumberland Records. The song sparkles and sounds like it’s dancing about with how the rhythms are arranged. And yet the song appears to be about being annoyed with tourists in Australia, you know the kind, that treat places they visit like an exotic and disposable commodity instead of a place with a true sense of place and organic community that has to contend with how attractive it is to people who don’t feel like they need to respect the complexity and dignity of a place and people that aren’t just there to cater to your implicitly consumerist mindset. But the song on its own feels like a soothing and unexpected breeze in the summer and an evolution into an expanded songwriting style for the band whose new album party school! drops in early August. Listen to “Guardrail” on Spotify and follow moodlighting at the links below.

moodlighting on Instagram

moodlighting on Bandcamp

Battery Operated Orchestra’s “Alligator” is a Triumphant Synth Pop Song About Exiting an Oppressive, Toxic Relationship

Battery Operated Orchestra, photo courtesy the artists

Battery Operated Orchestra’s video for “Alligator” is reminiscent of the visual style of Damian McCarthy and Phil Tippett with an unusual underground chamber in which the narrator frolics and acts out the claustrophobic mood of the song. It’s all very surreal and borderline elevated horror especially with the decayed structures of the environment and washes of color until our protagonist escapes into sunlit fields. It suits a song seemingly about someone who has felt under the spell of someone whose ways of being and talking initially charmed but the habits are revealed as methods of keeping someone trapped in a relationship and not acts of genuine love. The saturated synth and soothing moods build up to an urgent pace as escape from a stifling relationship and the path out becomes clear against the odds and it has a triumphant tone, a sound of yearned for liberation. Musically it’s reminiscent of both the Cardigans and Japanese Breakfast and fans of either will find much to like in the way BOO crafts its creative and textural beats and layers of complimentary melodies to great emotional impact. Watch the video for “Alligator” on YouTube and follow BOO at the links provided. The band’s new album Sea Views Soft Rains is out August 4, 2026.

booelectric.com

Battery Operated Orchestra on Twitter

Battery Operated Orchestra on Facebook

Battery Operated Orchestra on Instagram

Battery Operated Orchestra on Bandcamp

Daniele Sciolla’s Sprightly and Percussive Electronic Piece “Ultra Brave” is Like Music For an Exploratory Video Game

Daniele Sciolla, photo courtesy the artist

Daniele Sciolla offers only bright, percussive tones on “Ultra Brave.” The song’s infectiously upbeat pace is at turns minimal and maximalist but using a simple sound palette to craft a full musical experience. Like the soundtrack to an update to a 1980s video game, the type based more on exploring a world and gathering items of knowledge and building rather than consuming or destroying. Think more like music for Marble Madness or Qix but with a whole world built around them inviting curiosity. There is something refreshing to the mind with the song and even as it outros on a more chill note it feels just right for all the activity of the first part of the song. Listen to “Ultra Brave” on Spotify and follow Italian composer Daniele Sciolla at the links below.

danielesciolla.com

Daniele Sciolla on Facebook

Daniele Sciolla on TikTok

Daniele Sciolla on Instagram

Daniele Sciolla on YouTube

Rehya Stevens’ Melodiously Brooding “Comedown” is a Song About How Life Can’t be Peak Moments All the Time

Rehya Srevens, photo courtesy the artist

Rehya Stevens’ melodious voice and style on “Comedown” suggests a song about love in an earnest way but the song has some moody and brooding elements in the background that immediately let you know this is going to be a different kind of song. Stevens offers images of walking through a beautiful day giving clarity to her view of someone, perhaps even herself, who feels like they’re riding high on their self esteem and recent experiences that affirm their self-conception and ego. But Stevens sings about the inevitable comedown from that high and how one has to reconcile living with realistic ups and downs of life and with the reality that life won’t and can’t always be comprised of those peak moments. Stevens makes this perspective relatable in the vocabulary of a pop song and that’s why it hits a little deeper. The finely syncopated rhythms and the expert turns of phrase in Stevens delivery lends the song emotional complexity that its separate, relatively minimal elements along don’t make obvious until the end of the song. In the broad realm of music the beautiful synth work in the song is reminiscent of the likes of darkwave and adjacent acts like Nuovo Testamento and Dark Chisme and how both bridge creative and emotionally rich production with dance pop. One can easily hear Stevens’ sensibility working well in those contexts. Listen to “Comedown” on YouTube and follow Rehya Stevens at the links below.

Rehya Stevens on Facebook

Rehya Stevens on Instagram

Subaqua’s Urgent Post-Punk Single “What a Bliss” Imagines a Future When the Psychic Weight of Patriarchal Culture is Gone

Subaqua imbues “What a Bliss” with a great sense of urgency and exhausted frustration at the inequality of society as we know it. The title refers to how it must be wonderful to not have to walk at night and having to be extra cautious, to be out in public in general and not draw unwanted attention immediately just for being female. And to have one’s natural personality and authentic self being picked apart for its arbitrary value in a patriarchal cultural conception of gender and the “proper” role of anyone and everyone. After decades of so-called progress it’s an ambient weight on the psyche for women and female-presenting people even today and with the upswing of the normalization of misogyny operating completely in the open of recent years it certainly has to be something that anyone with a sense of humanity hopes we can outgrow sooner than later. Musically the guitar and tenor of the vocals are reminiscent of Sonic Youth’s embrace of melody and discordant sounds equally and of Versus whose gift for the left field change-up in pace and tone can be heard here as well. Listen to “What a Bliss” on Spotify and follow Subaqua at the links below.

Subaqua on Facebook

Subaqua on Instagram

Queen City Sounds Podcast S6E03: The Builders and the Butchers

The Builders and the Butchers, photo by Tari Gunstone

The Builders and the Butchers is a folk rock/punk band from Portland, Oregon that formed in 2005 among friends and musicians who found themselves coming to the Rose City separately from Anchorage, Alaska. The group in its early days performed street shows completely unplugged. But eventually the group plugged in but not before establishing itself as a lively group of performers whose songs began as lyrics written by guitarist and singer Ryan Sollee. The group built a regional and then national and international following in underground music for its commanding live show and lyrics that always delved into subjects of the current human condition combining personal issues with social commentary. Now with its new full-length, its seventh, No Tomorrow (out April 2, 2026 on vinyl, digital download and streaming via Bandman Recording Co.) The Builders and the Butchers offer both a critique of the prevailing socio-economic order and a message of hope in basic human connections and our capacity to experience joy and to create in spite of failing systems and political leaders, in spite of the machinations of the powerful and the wealthy whose influence really only exists with our collective consent. The band’s storytelling with music has always been vivid and meaningful but with the new record it is reaching a new peak in its songwriting.

Listen to our interview with Ryan Sollee on Bandcamp and follow The Builders and the Butchers at the links below.

badmanrecordingco.com

thebuildersandthebutchers.com

The Builders and the Butchers on Facebook

The Builders and the Butchers on Instagram

The Builders and the Butchers on YouTube

Sunken Cages’ Electro-Acoustic Single “Drum and Flowers” is Like an Industrial Song Rooted in the Sounds and Sensibilities of the Global South

Sunken Cages, photo by Ed Marshall Photography

For “Drum and Flowers” Sunken Cages seems to have employed a hybrid production style to match the synthesis of musical ideas and styles. At first and throughout it sounds like something recorded to a cassette but put through modern production software. It brings together organic drums, synth sequences employed with the sensibility of organic percussion and lo-fi distortion to give the whole song a gritty and textural quality that contrasts well with the beatmaking. It’s like an industrial song if that music emerged from the global south rather than the UK, Europe and North America. The almost orchestral arrangement of drums truly sets it apart from possible obvious influences and in utilizing ancient sound sources with current technology and methodology in recording and production it hits the ears as deeply familiar yet fresh, new and celebratory. Listen to “Drum and Flowers” on YouTube and follow Sunken Cages aka Ravish Momin at the links below. The new album
Neram Pularumbol (As the Dawn Breaks) is out on Mhorka Records on August 7, 2026.