Hi! Here is some cool music I’ve found in the last couple days.
Diet Cig — Do You Wonder About Me?
Genre: Indie pop/rock
Recommended tracks: Who Are You?, Broken Body
https://dietcig.bandcamp.com/track/broken-body
I most remember Diet Cig for the catchy ear drill of a NSFW-themed song, Sixteen, off of their 2017 record that I literally cannot remember anything else off of. This is 24 minutes of straight-forward catchy twee indie-rock-pop songs, whatever that means to you, that’s the name of the game here.
Vocalist, Alex Luciano feels like she is channeling something between twee indie bedroom pop contemporary, Frankie Cosmos and the power-pop-punk-pop fire of someone like a Haley Williams. Resting in the light-hearted twee style, mostly reminiscing over past relationships and lamenting the difficulties of new ones– surprisingly punchy drums paired with some surprisingly beefy shoegazy guitars make a nice contrast to for her vocals to rest on. This is a lovely new album from a possibly underrated and overlooked band.
Backxwash – God Has Nothing To Do With This Leave Him Out Of It
Genre: Hip-hop / Industrial
Recommended tracks: Black Sheep, Amen
https://backxwash.bandcamp.com/track/black-sheep-produced-by-backxwash
Backxwash is a member of the growing ranks of experimental hip-hop floating up to the mainstream. Dalek, Death Grips, Clipping, and maybe a touch of late-game Ghostface Killah are in the DNA of this project. As a Black trans woman, Backxwash brings an understandable darkness to occult themed horrorcore that brings her deeply personal experience together with spell-casting, chaos-worshipping flows.
Great rapping delivered with an emotional core of sadness, rage, and the fire of rebellion. Great eerie, atmospheric, but quite listenable beats that sound like industrial machinery layered on top of vaporwave’d slowdown’d classic east-coast sounds. Ghostmane kinda comes to mind, but without the vocal line not taking any extreme tries at recreating what The Body sounds like. Her contemporary, K-Death of Moodie Black, another Black trans woman rapper with a great 2020 project, also comes to mind as she also explores that unique experience in dark experimental hip-hop. This album is a tremendous, concise, 22 minute ride into the darkness.
Helfro – Helfro
Genre: Black Metal
Recommended tracks: Ávöxtur af rotnu tré, Þegn hinna stundlegu harma
https://helfroofficial.bandcamp.com/track/v-xtur-af-rotnu-tr
Masterfully written Icelandic black metal. The spine of the band is rock solid, blisteringly fast, traditional black metal, but the songwriting knows when to embrace space and let a doomy chord ring out or descend into a low-end rumbling death metal groove. Riffs on riffs on riffs. There’s only two members of this band, and it easily sounds like six people. Ragnar S brings the ferocious, unrelenting blastbeats in various high BPM modes executed with the grace of blast masters like Frost of 1349 while at the same time being one of the throat-shredding vocal lines in the mix
Both members provide distinctly different harsh vocals for more variety. Símon Þ takes up axe duties on guitar and bass as well. There is a surprising variety in textures with judiciously-used moments of compositional ebb and flow that add other elements like clean vocals. Very occasional out-genre instrumentation like xylophone bring surprises to the mix that make the songwriting interesting. This is quite easily the best straight-forward black metal record I’ve heard this year.
While you’re here, why not be Very Cool and donate to the NAACP Defense Fund?
