With lilting yet scrappy vocals and start and stop dynamics, TR!CKS might be excused for sounding like some kind of post-Riot Grrrl punk band. At least on “Place 2 Hide.” But the song’s surreal quality and sustained vocal warble in the last half of the song and the distorted guitar psychedelia that flares out at the end of the song enhances the air of something sinister in the lyrics. Do we hear the lines about “Place 2 Hide” end in the words “your body”? Either way it strikes a humorous and tone and the song reminiscent of a wonderful hybrid of Low On High, early Sleater-Kinney and Babes in Toyland’s more fanciful moments seems to embody the title of the band’s album Nightmares available now on cassette through Freeloader Records. Listen to “Place 2 Hide” on YouTube and follow TR!CKS on Spotify.
The use of a placid, pastoral yet futuristic imagery in seeming 16-bit graphics, a.MIDI’s visualizer pairs well with the saturated synth melodies and cascading twinkles of tone and sweeps of harmonic lines of the song “nighttime on earth.” We see a figure in what looks to be a space faring suit looking into the galactic core spread across the night sky. The melody lilts into ascending figures and seems to trace both the breezes we see moving the grass in the foreground as well as the grand mystery of deep space before us. Mixing the natural landscape with that more otherworldly the visualizer matches the song in its fantasy story resonance of New Age ambient uplift and the sense of wonder of the more benevolently Utopian science fiction of new worlds to meet and explore free of the dystopia of the world we seem to be living in every day. The electronic music and its detailed composition is a bit like the best video game music like that for Metroid or Final Fantasy but crafted for a refreshing repose. Watch the visualizer for “nighttime on earth” on YouTube and follow a.MIDI at the links below. The new a.MIDI album an interplanetary adventure released on March 14, 2025.
Take a look at the cover art to “Transmedium” by Piscean Daydreams and close your eyes while listening as the sound of water rolling off a large craft as it rises from the ocean, splashing back down into the surrounding ocean. Harmonic tones swell and ascend with a luminous resonance reminiscent of the more otherworldly sections of Pink Floyd’s “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”—immersive and calming. The craft, built for underwater voyages and those into outer space, rises into the sky toward destinations off world but who can say where yet the tone of the song gives the scene a sense of wonder about the unknown. The song and its textures conveys a sense of both curiosity and tranquility like you’re seeing a cosmic traveler set off destined to return with horizon-expanding knowledge and accounts of realms well beyond our immediate experience. Listen to “Transmedium” on Spotify and follow Piscean Daydream at the links below.
With a spaciousness and clarity Baby Bats brings together introspective vocals, percussive synths, spare drums and crystalline melodic sequences to create an enigmatic mood on “too much.” One gets the sense that the song is about an association or an aspect of one’s life that saps you of your energy and motivation on a deep level. The lyrics to the song suggest that this is an expectation or obligation that makes constant demands on your time and attention. Like the phenomenon of doom scrolling or if you’re an artist or anyone that depends on awareness of your efforts to even try to thrive the way you have to contribute to performative social media platforms. It’s a fact of life and a dynamic that can be completely enervating. The song’s low key dance beats sound like the new version of dark synth pop akin to the likes of Nuovo Testamento in that the vibe is 80s dance club informed by modern techno production and though more on the melancholic side equally entrancing. Listen to “too much” on Spotify.
“Contorta” sounds like SUNGRAVE has deconstructied and re-assembled epic, science fiction soundtracks and injected them with Neurosis-esque heaviness and psychedelia. When the vocals come in they sound despairing yet defiant in a song that seems to be about people who have neglected to their detriment ideals, a natural world that nurtured until it was abused and poisoned and each other as a community and all that’s left are the ruins of all truly meaningful values. The tone struck in the song is a mix of outrage and transcendence. The streams of sound unite a sustained rhythm, incandescent, almost screaming guitar and crushing yet fluid riffs and a raw human expression of pain and desolation that really pulls you in like a dystopian film set at a time before an apocalypse, before the collapse of civilization, at a time when people have to make serious decisions for themselves and their civilization, frankly a time like now when we’re on the brink of climate and civilizational collapse and so this song and the album from which it hails, Idyll (released December 20, 2024 and available on vinyl, digital download and on streaming), hit as very of the moment. Listen to “Contorta” on Spotify and follow Denver’s SUNGRAVE on Instagram.
The beginning of “Pitch Pop” by Tapeworms sounds like what it might be like on a event-filled summer day with sparkling and saturated synth tones. Or like what it might be like to have daily adventures and new, stimulating experiences akin to living inside an ever-evolving video game with a superb soundtrack. Perhaps the buoyant melodies and playful use of processed sounds and sampled noises reflect the band’s experience of living in Japan for a year far from their home in Lille, France. The group orchestrates bit-crushed synths and processed vocals like a retro-futurist version of hyper-pop. Think like Jockstrap and Sextile collaborating with Phoenix and you’re in the realm of what Tapeworms does on the song and its new album Grand Voyage (out April 11, 2025 on vinyl, digital download and streaming) conveying a dreamlike resonance but one in which one is fully awake and leaning into the flow of events with a joyful sense of wonder. Listen to “Pitch Pop” on Spotify and follow Tapeworms at the links below.
VLF is the solo project of Liam Power who appears to have played all the instruments on the new album Quantum Regression (released February 28, 2025) which might go some way to explain how pointed, focused and unified the songs sound. The single “Fashion” with its urgency is reminiscent of the more aggressive end of both Wire and Buzzcocks with the noisier instincts of the former and the undeniable hooks of the latter. The song seems to be about the frustration with yet embracing the idea of going out of fashion when everything seems to be disposable in our culture and how trying to keep up with all of that can be a rat race the erodes the humanity out of developing something unique because creativity and creative work is not something that can always or ever just be cranked out much less developed at the speed expected out of late capitalism. So why not embrace your analog existence and resist the monetization of all aspects of life. The song rages and explodes and reassembles back into focus like a parallel dynamic to that expected of us but it also veers off that path in glorious fashion like a rebellion against the imposition of arbitrary modes of being. Listen to “Fashion” on Spotify and follow VLF on Instagram. Fans of the aforementioned as well as Snowy Red, A Place to Bury Strangers and even Big Black will find a good deal to like with this song and the rest of the album.
Mic Jogwer of Pink Turns Blue, photo by D. Vorndran
Pink Turns Blue takes on an uncomfortable personal truth on “Can’t Do Without You.” The gleaming drift of guitar riffs and the steady rhythm serves its meditational quality well. The touch of melancholic atmosphere sets the mood because the song and its powerful music video outline the personal cost of taking on a world seemingly filled with struggle and tragedy and now with global fascism rising and world powers either funding or doing little to stop obvious genocides it can feel hopeless and overwhelming unless you have some foundation of hope no matter what your place is in all of this mess when you’re not the people holding the reins of power. The song suggests that so much energy expended in the struggle for what’s right without a vision to drive it to give a guiding sense of hope, despair can take over and make you think nothing has any power to change things for the better. But the song seems to come from the perspective of someone who is trying to hold on to a shred of something better that feels like there can be an impetus, a glimmer of human solidarity and caring, of love that can push back against the wave of darkness that can feel like it’s snuffing out everything good and decent. It in effect makes a case for the personal being the political and how often that tide can turn in ways with small efforts that become larger causes and movements that can turn things in a positive direction beginning with the basic component of what makes life and society so vital and that is with bonds with one another. Watch the video for “Can’t Do Without You” on YouTube and follow Pink Turns Blue at the links below. The band’s new album Black Swan released on February 28, 2025 on vinyl LP, digital download and streaming.
Twin Court from Ithaca, New York released its debut LP Forgotten Turns on March 1, 2025. The single “Iroh” displays the group’s seamless combination of post-rock musical ideas with the instrumentation and methods of Gamelan. The minimal lyrics “Everything blows away” repeated like a mantra is like a reminder of the impermanence of all things even those we are conditioned to think are eternal but in the course of time will be gone or transformed beyond our current recognition and sometimes this is ourselves during the course of a lifetime whether we consciously realize it or not. There is a pastoral quality of the textures, delicate, orchestrated tonality and percussion in the song reminiscent of where Phil Elverum has been with both The Microphones and especially Mount Eerie with a similar mindset in approaching the music. A freshness and spontaneity and an outlook that is keenly aware of the cycles and circles of our lives interweaving with one another akin to Black Elk’s mystic vision. The luminous “keyboard” sound in the song is in fact not electronic but the gendèr, a type of metallophone that naturally sounds otherworldly but whose resonant analog tone lends the music a calmingly mysterious resonance. Listen to “Iroh” on Spotify and follow Twin Court at the links provided.
Avery Friedman takes us on what feels like a promising journey to wonderful and mysterious places from the beginning of “Photo Booth.” The song was written in the wake of a night out with friends as documented in part on photo booth strips, the kinds of artifacts that remind those in the pictures of that time and in this case one in which everyone involved was on an adventure of personal growth and allowing oneself to be who you are without feeling like you have to hide a part of it. There’s something healthy about being able to do that that’s good for your psyche and development as a complete human. The looped, glimmery, electronic melody that begins the song and latter joined and accented by slightly fuzzy, hazy guitar riffs that are allowed to hang and drop out at the exact right moments while Friedman’s intimate vocals exude a confidence, in both the sense of being self-assured and as quality of intimacy, in describing a night that propels one further into becoming the person you’re always meant to be. Listen to “Photo Booth” on Bandcamp and follow Avery Friedman at the links below. Her debut album New Thing releases April 18, 2025 via Audio Antihero on vinyl, digital download and streaming.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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