New Music – Page 3 – Queen City Sounds and Art

Bajune Tobeta and Christian Fennesz Open a Passage to More Meditative Emotional Spaces With Tranquil Ambient Modern Classical Piece “After the Silence”

Bajune Tobeta, photo courtesy the artist

“After the Silence” eases into your consciousness with a gentle background drone and delicate motes of town seeming to drift by like snowflakes. Bajune Tobeta’s nearly abstract piano carries elements of melody while low end strings resonate somewhere in the sonic depth of field. Amid these layers of sound are contributions from Christian Fennesz but who can fully say where one musicians offerings and layers are fully distinct from the other without knowing exactly who played what. It doesn’t matter. The net effect is one of expert layering of sounds to create greater collective harmonies with a textural element that enhances the tranquil energy of the piece. Both artists worked with Ryuichi Sakamoto with sensibilities that blend those of electronic music, contemporary classical and ambient and this track from Tobeta’s forthcoming EP Anechoic (out August 14, 2026) promises a longer work with cinematic resonances that tap into the human mind’s capacity for transcending the noise and activity of the present moment into a spaces of meditative peace even if only for fleeting moments but enough to gain perspective on what can often overwhelm a person in the usual state of mind. Listen to “After the Silence” on YouTube and follow Bajune Tobeta at the links provided.

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Bajune Tobeta on Facebook

Bajune Tobeta on Instagram

Queen City Sounds Podcast S6E02: Anne Richmond Boston

Anne Richmond Boston, photo by Jason Thrasher

Anne Richmond Boston was an early and current member of Atlanta-based New Wave/jangle pop band The Swimming Pool Q’s. As a vocalist and keyboard player, Boston was in the group in time for playing opening slots for Devo and Police in the late 70s. The Q’s were a staple in the college rock world of the 80s with Boston highlighted as a powerhouse singer with the band. She left the group in 1987, 5 years before its 1992 split (reuniting in 1998), and in 1990 released his first solo album The Big House of Time. The follow up I Should Be Happy was recorded with contributions from musical luminaries like Terry Adams (NRBQ), Marti Jones, Syd Straw, David Barbe (Sugar, Mercyland), Billy Conway (Morphone), Bob Elsey (The Swimming Pool Q’s), Michael Lorant (Indigo Girls) among others. But the record was shelved for reasons not even clear to Boston either. Thanks to friend Clay Harper over thirty years later Boston remixed eight of the 12 original songs recorded and added seven for a 2025 release on vinyl, CD and digital. The album sounds perfectly in line with the current era with the kind of songwriting that recalls classic pop, Laurel Canyon folk rock and the kind of art folk pop one might associate with Joni Mitchell. Boston sounds confident and soulful singing songs that seem to be about existential crises before that became a term used to describe a state of mind in which one grapples with life pressures and a sociopolitical climate that doesn’t support anyone’s best life. When writing the songs Boston likely had no idea it would be a perfect record for the 2020s while simultaneously capturing the mood of the early 90s as well.

Listen to our interview with Anne Richmond Boston on Bandcamp and follow the singer/songwriter/graphic designer/visual artist at the links below.

annerichmondboston.com

Hissuae’s Warmly Cinematic “Mayfly/Something Divin” is a Song About Transcendent Love and Desire

Hissuae, photo by Stephen Trutwin/Strut Photography

Hissuae brings an orchestral, stage musical sensibility to “Mayfly/Something Divine.” The songs flow into each other. Both are grounded in cinematic piano work and the artist’s warmly ethereal vocals with which she imbues songs about love and desire with a transcendent quality. Musically it sounds like something written for stage drama but deemed too strong and independent a work for such a context. The bursts of keyboard work and the extended structures in the song are reminiscent of something from the first couple of Tori Amos records in which that songwriter sounds like someone really working something out in her mind but finding the vehicle for that emotional work in the physicality of playing piano and its potential for elegant expression and a broad and nuanced tonal range which also highlights Hissuae’s own versatility as a singer able for which wide musical spaces and dynamic sweeps are required. Listen to “Mayfly/Something Divine” on Spotify or one of the other streaming/purchase links on Hissuae’s DistroKid account.

Hissuae on DistroKid

J’cuuzi’s Genre Bursting Psychedelic Post-Punk Single “Greasy Comb” Fuses the Ominous and the Otherworldly

When “Greasy Comb” starts you might think J’cuuzi is doing a lo-fi cover of “Edge of Seventeen” mixed with Sparks. But both impressions fade when the song picks up speed and the bass line waxes more funky and the vocals come in with ominous tones and a second set of vocals, or the first, processed as though through a vocoder. As the song progresses like a mutant post-punk song born of a mix of !!! and Black Moth Super Rainbow it swings into a nearly industrial beat with tracers of distorted, glitched out, melodic vocals as notes. Then the song’s layers of sound drop out into the creeping vocals spare percussion for a moment. The effect is psychedelic and like the band listened to a lot of Tran Am’s 2000 album Red Line. Live the band makes its own outfits and makes a performance art presentation of the music and even the recorded output is an embodiment of a willingness to push beyond genre limitations and standard music forms and structures. Listen to “Greasy Comb” on YouTube and follow J’cuuzi at the links below.

J’cuzzi on Instagram

“All on Black” is evrshde’s Deeply Moody Downtempo Song of Solidarity for Those Suffering Through Dark Times of the Psyche

“All on Black” finds evrshde in a fully somber mood. Like a brooding combination of the darker end of Fiona Apple and the more piano-driven side of Nine Inch Nails but infused with a downtempo jazz energy. There is a great spaciousness to the song even as it sounds like the late night musings of someone who felt like they took a lot of risks and none of them feel like they paid off and it’s beyond bitterness and rallying to do better in the future. It’s the sound of feeling that moment of utter defeat completely because to do otherwise would be dishonest and an excuse for false hope leading to delusional behavior. It’s a hard place to be but the song and its ethereal synth melody drifting through personal darkness with the weight of yes personal demons but those fed on a sense of crushing failure compounded by the knowledge that being who you are with your own foibles is what lead here. But then what? The song implicitly puts that question out there and leaving any ultimate conclusions what comes next. The line “The pain’s the only reason you know you’re still alive” is most telling for anyone that has sunk that deep into murky psychological recesses and worse and struggled to come out of it because that level of depression doesn’t feel like pain but a seemingly endless nothingness, a personal emotional nullification and the capacity to still feel something at all is a reminder that you’re still around and often it’s just getting through these seemingly hopeless expanses of spiritual grayness is matter of having patience and doing regular life activities that might in the moment feel meaningless. The song thankfully doesn’t sound like a reflection of that headspace so much as expresses a solidarity with anyone who might also be similarly suffering. Listen to “All on Black” on Spotify and follow evrshde at the links below.

evrshde on Facebook

evrshde on Instagram

Bad Flamingo Expands Into Sultry, Synth-Infused Dream Pop on “Velvet”

Bad Flamingo, photo courtesy the artists

Bad Flamingo continues its streak of musical evolution and surprise with its latest single “Velvet.” Not only is there an enigmatic, noir video with grainy visuals like something captured in the 90s on Super-8 or DV but for this song the duo introduces more full use of synth/keyboards to create mood, texture and an emotional resonance that is both reflective, romantic and sultry. The cascading keyboard figure and the spare percussion subtle bass work coupled with vocals that go far wider than the band has typically gone in the past from vibrant lows to soaring highs like Martha Davis from The Motels. It’s more like a dark dream pop New Wave song than some of the more gritty blues pop of a good stretch of the band’s earlier songs yet it preserves the band’s gift for making love sound like a deliciously forbidden but pure and beautiful thing all at once. Watch the video for “Velvet” on YouTube and follow Bad Flamingo at the links below.

badflamingomusic.com

Bad Flamingo on Facebook

Bad Flamingo on Instagram

New Wolves’ Cinematic Folk Single “We Are Crowds” is an Assertion of the Importance of Our Analog, Individual Identities in the Flood of the Techno-Oligarch Agenda

The spare acoustic guitar figure and percussion that introduces New Wolves’ “We Are Crowds” is a fascinating contrast with the falsetto vocals that almost sound more processed than they already are. Like intimate folk and a futuristic ghostly figure working together with some minimal synth flourishes entering the soundscape later in the song. In that way it feels like a cinematic composition almost more than a song with the way the elements sync together and interact. The song is a creative take on the natural desire of the individual to maintain a coherent identity and to stand out in a world where technocratic aspects of society seem to work to undermine the significance of individual lives and perspectives and unique personalities and impose an interchangeability of people into essential insignificance. But the refrain of the song “I want to live” isn’t merely about survival but really living and to embrace what that means for each of us and not as a statistic in an algorithm in which only the oligarchy has actual agency. It’s not an aggressive song, in fact it is gentle in its energies, but it is a song about resistance to the process of making the bulk of us anonymous and, to employ an older parlance, cogs in a world machine. After all, all collectives are comprised of individuals who should value their own existence and unique contribution to the whole. Listen to “We Are Crowds” on Spotify and follow New Wolves at the links provided.

New Wolves on Twitter

New Wolves on Facebook

New Wolves on TikTok

New Wolves on Instagam

New Wolves on YouTube

The Dark Urgency of Kallsup’s “Kino” Reflects the Impetus to Exit a Situation Outgrown

The urgent and melancholic guitar melodies in Kallsup’s “Kino” layered with sustained rhythm guitar distortion sets the mood for when the vocals come in with a passionate energy that suggests a will to break free from a situation one has outgrown. The lyrics are in Swedish but the emotions come across with an immediacy that brings you along for a journey through personal struggle. The music video is set in a dark space but with vivid, cool colors that lend the presentation of the song a dreamlike aspect that contrasts well with its headlong pace. Fans of Ladytron will appreciate the moods Kallsup strikes in the song and its fusion of personal darkness and uplifting rhythms. Watch the video for “Kino” on YouTube and follow Kallsup at the links provided. The band’s album Alldeles för nära is set for release in fall 2026.

Kallsup on Facebook

Kallsup on Instagram

eeMKay Glitches Reality on Psychedelic Lo-Fi Glitch Trap Single “BIGGER PICTURE”

“BIGGER PICTURE” sounds like listening to collaborators coming together contributing layers of production and vocals in real time. Trap beats, distorted synths, scratchy swells, rapping processed in dub style delay with a short echo. It’s like being surrounded by maximalist lo-fi music with rapid builds of rhythm that release into open space and loop back into the flow of the song. There is no immediate musical reference point that could be made which is the appeal of the song because while it has familiar elements they are used in a way that comes off psychedelic and hypnotic and unlike much of what one hears in hip-hop outside of artists operating in the realm of experimental glitch but with more inventive and left field beats. Listen to “BIGGER PICTURE” on Instagram and follow eeMKay at the links provided.

“BIGGER PICTURE” on Instagram

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The Huntress and Holder of Hands’ “Timbre Inaudible” is a Brooding Dark Folk Song About Grief as an Act of Memory

The Huntress and Holder of Hands, photo courtesy the artists

“Timbre Inaudible” sounds like a dark, minimalist blues song with MorganEve Swain singing about imponderables with a mysterious poetry and energy. Like the songwriter/singer is reaching for a resolution to inner struggles, the kind that come about when one’s world goes sideways and you’re left to make sense of your life know what you feel so much but still working out new meanings for your life, new directions after immense and unexpected loss. Swain’s intense yet steady vocal performance has a sustained immediacy even as she repeats lines like a mantra with layered backing vocals and strings tracing the arc of grief that permeates the song. By the end of the song the listener is left with the sense that processing grief isn’t a mechanical process and a linear progression of taking steps. It’s often remembering and honoring shared experiences and holding onto memories and not, indeed, forgetting and moving on like your life with someone is something to be discarded from your psyche like a waste product even as the pain isn’t immediately in your mind as a constant presence. It’s a heavy song but one borne of deep love. The sophomore The Huntress and Holder of Hands album Babylon released June 5, 2026 on vinyl, digital download and streaming.