Song Review – Page 5 – Queen City Sounds and Art

Hit Like A Girl’s Searing Emo Single “Keepsake Theory” is a Perfect Summation of Falling in Love and Subsequent Heartbreak

“Keepsake Theory” by Hit Like A Girl comes forth like an actual fusion of hardcore and synth pop with a thrilling energy. The lyrics sung by Nicolle Maroulis (they/them) have an undeniable gut punch for anyone that has ever felt like they had something with someone only to find out maybe the feelings or at least the commitment weren’t equally mutual and the searing pain of that realization. But what the song also contains within the lyrics and the performance of the music is the aftermath of processing that initial shot to the heart and honoring the emotions and sense of connection that drew you and a lost love together even if it didn’t ultimately turn out how you wanted it to. There’s a power in those moments and Hit Like A Girl expresses that entirety of the experience in mere three minutes twenty with a dramatic flourish and pitch perfect poignancy. The band’s new album Burning at Both Ends releases March 27, 2026 via Cryptid Records.

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Hit Like A Girl on Instagram

Bad Flamingo Celebrates Arbitrary Social Taboos on Experimental Indie Folk Single “Shame”

Bad Flamingo, photo courtesy the artists

Bad Flamingo has truly been evolving in new directions as a band and the single “Shame” is a marked stylistic departure from its most recent compositions. A sustained focus on textural rhythm with the vocals carrying the melody runs throughout the song with some lingering guitar haunting the edges. The lyrics are not so much about a couple on the run from mainstream society. Rather, it’s a song about not feeling bad about being one’s authentic self even if it isn’t in alignment with traditional values and conventional mores and exulting in the kind of shame projected on anyone daring to transgress in the most basic of ways. The song seems to be about a love that doesn’t have the sanction of society but it’s a significant permutation beyond what the duo has been thus far in the songwriting. It’s like the adventure part of the long arc of the band’s mythology is in the past or on pause with some moments to reflect on what exactly is going on and making sense and reaffirming one’s dignity on a path to being where in fact shame is an unnecessary aspect of one’s life cast on you by judgmental folk who can’t seem to mind their own business. Watch the video for “Shame” on YouTube and follow Bad Flamingo at the links below.

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Bad Flamingo on Facebook

Bad Flamingo on Instagram

Bad Peach Says Farewell to a New York City Mass Transit Institution With the Scrappy Art Punk Single “My Metrocard”

With “My Metrocard” Bad Peach pays tribute to the venerable MetroCard (in place since 1993) being phased out in late 2025 as a method to pay for using the public transit system in New York, replaced by the contactless, tap-to-pay OMNY (One Metro New York) system by card and phone. The song is a fusion of scrappy art punk and lo-fi synth pop and shows the band performing on the transit platforms around NYC and near shouting the conflicted affection for the fixture in one’s life as a New Yorker. “You kind of suck, but I kind of liked it/You’re kind of ugly but in a good way” sums up the attitude in saying goodbye to something that seemed like yet another part of everyday life we have to bid farewell in favor of something that seems to always invite more surveillance into our lives. Bad Peach rages against this dubious gesture of progress because that sort of thing in late capitalism usually means we pay more for less. Watch the video for “My Metrocard” on YouTube and follow Bad Peach on Spotify.

Blue Tomorrows Works Through Heartache With Grace and Humor on Dream Pop Single “Santa Cruz”

Blue Tomorrows, photo courtesy the artist

Blue Tomorrows strikes a bittersweet note on “Santa Cruz.” Somewhere betwixt the tone of a countrified Marianne Faithfull on “Witches’ Song” and Low doing a Christmas song, the band employs an electronic bass line with a touch of phaser, light, almost shimmery acoustic guitar and vocals processed to sound both tender and otherworldly to great effect. The music video shows snow-laden trees the kind one isn’t likely to find in Santa Cruz, California but the warmly luminous melodies and wistful evocation of more pleasant memories to chase away the heartfelt melancholia paired with this imagery seems fitting. The song ends with our narrator finding a way to laugh again after a period of working through heartache and really feeling those lows as the only path to get through an emotionally rough patch intact. Watch the video for “Santa Cruz” on YouTube and follow Blue Tomorrows at the links below. The new album Weather Forever released December 12, 2025.

bluetomorrows.space

Blue Tomorrows on Facebook

Blue Tomorrows on Instagram

Blue Tomorrows on Bandcamp

Folktronica Single “modet” by meekmoss is a Meditation on the Everyday Routines That Make Our Lives Sustainable

An enigmatic yet warm drone brings us into meekmoss’ “modest” before minimal guitar and percussion joins vocals in an impressionistic dynamic until the song opens up like a rapidly developing dawn. This is a pattern in the song that reflects its themes of the recurring patterns and rituals in one’s life that whether we think about them or not keep our lives going and sustainable. Sure there are moments of great action color, drama, intensity and deeply meaningful experiences but all are connected by quieter moments that whether or not we appreciate them or notice make the big events we get to experience possible. The song meditates on that interconnecting time and activity that seems manageable and an awareness of these times and how important they are to our very existence. The line “And daily routine keeps me alive” is so simple but anyone that has had to deal with health issues knows that regular activities and rituals can be critical to keeping one’s life going and on an even keel so that those things that count as significant events can be engaged in with our full selves. The song balances the line between folk and experimental electronic pop and between texture, tone and rhythm perfectly without seeming effort in parallel with the need for awareness of small details that don’t always get our full, conscious focus. Listen to “modest” on Spotify and follow German Folktronica group meekmoss at the links provided.

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meekmoss on TikTok

meekmoss on Instagram

meekmoss on Bandcamp

meekmoss on YouTube

TRAITRS’ Deeply Melancholic Single “If Was Ill, You Were Wrong” is a Salve on Deep Psychic Pain

“I Was Ill, You Were Wrong” by Canadian post-punk band TRAITRS has the hazy synth melodies underneath highly emotive vocals and driving rhythms one might expect out of early 80s The Cure. The heartwrenching vocals express the feelings of someone who has been on the receiving end of what feels like an especially spate of lack of empathy. It is the sound of someone profoundly hurt and disappointed yet sympathetic to the pain and misfortune that resulted in a situation in which people connected are split because bad habits are unbanished by affection. Listen to “I Was Ill, You Were Wrong” on YouTube and follow TRAITRS at the links below. The band’s new album POSSESSOR releases March 13, 2026 on vinyl, digital download and streaming.

TRAITRS on Apple Music

Ludwig Bauer’s “Ten Times” is the Sonic Embodiment of the Ghosts of Old European Industrial Landscapes

Listening to “Ten Times” by Ludwig Bauer is like stepping into an alternate reality of sound design where a clock tower rings endlessly and counts down the time all around you, steam bursts in the near distance and harmonic drones and electronic blips cycle through somewhere in the dark as you wander down a hazy late night street. The clock’s bells resonate eerily and sometimes double on each other and somehow both establish a deep mood and sense of place while disorienting you from familiar reality. It is an anchoring, mechanical mantra that guides you through the song with its unignorable yet steady presence. The song is sort of a soundtrack to after hours in an old industrial city in Europe and calming in a settled and slightly haunted way that such places seem to possess. Listen to “Ten Times” on Bandcamp and follow Dresden, Germany-based artist Ludwig Bauer on Instagram. Bauer’s new album 18 Studies was released on November 18, 2025.

Sylvia Black’s Dark Post-Punk Single “Talking in Tongues” is Unsettling Yet Alluring

Sylvia Black’s brooding bass lines from “Talking in Tongues” will immediately hearken the knowledgeable listener to early 80s post-punk and deathrock when the instrument drove much of that music. The wailing, distorted guitar haunts the edges of the song and in the music video the singer/songwriter/bassist is surrounded by winking stars as she dances with ritualistic, hypnotic gestures. The steady pace just adds to a sense of menace and sonic darkness and adds to the mysterious quality of a song that even if it has familiar resonances manages to be alluring and unsettling at once. Watch the video for “Talking in Tongues” on YouTube and follow Sylvia Black at the links below. Her new album Shadowtime is out January 16, 2026.

The Hazy Melody Lines of Luke MacRoberts’ “Don Juan” Drift and Ripple With the Force of Yearning For a Better Reality

Luke MacRoberts, photo by Ramiro Montes de Oca

Luke MacRoberts gives us a warped daydream of a pop song with “Don Juan.” The single from his recently released album Escapism (out November 7, 2025) begins with shifting melodies like a soap opera end credit sequence taped onto a VHS cassette that has already been taped on multiple times. Tonal lines drift, bell tones trace the edges of the song and when MacRoberts’ vocals come in they sound processed so they have an aspect of a recording slowed down. It suits musings on being in an existential crossroads with love and identity. The song hits like a super left field hip-hop and R&B song, think like something Yoni Wolf would have been involved in making. For all its bizarre sonics there is a delicacy of feeling here that ramps up in just over the last third in an impassioned pleading for something better than the diminished expectations and further the reality we’re supposed to accept as how things are. Listen to “Don Juan” on YouTube and follow Luke MacRoberts at the links provided below.

Luke MacRoberts on Facebook

Luke MacRoberts on Instagram

Baby Grendel Hurls Through Despair and Existential Anxiety on Indie-Art-Pop Single “Beaten Bloody”

Baby Grendel, photo courtesy the artists

“Beaten Bloody” sounds initially like a quirky indie rock song but as the song progresses and as you take the lyrics in it’s obvious the song by Baby Grendel is weirder and darker than it is in the beginning. Near the minute twenty mark the upbeat pace feels mired in a wonderfully murky melancholia and the self-deprecation of the lyrics in the first half of the song wax into tragedy and a sense of isolation with the music brooding and noisy. But in the outro the pace picks up as though a last hurrah of pulling out of despair and clutching to a desperate hope. It is a refreshingly unpredictable song that has an element of humor but not one that downplays the whirlpool of emotions that seem to have inspired the words. It’s more or less an indiepop song in the classic vein in style but the sounds and structure more than hint at artier influences. Listen to “Beaten Bloody” on Spotify and follow Portland, Oregon’s Baby Grendel at the links below. The group’s new EP Everybody Hates Me in the House released October 10, 2025.

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Baby Grendel on Instagram

Baby Grendel on Bandcamp