Not much is known about English-American singer and drummer Grace Inspace. She self-defined her own music as “protest pop”, and it’s easy to see why: on her summer debut EP, Lazy Grace’s Apocalyptic Kitchen Vol. 1, classic rock patterns worked as solid ground for her to express concerns on political and environmentalist issues through a rather apocalyptic lens. Musically, though, it felt like a flavourless pop rock whimsy, if it weren’t for her warm, reassuring vocals and for the significant dose of eclecticism that could be heard oozing from each and every track.

On her new track, “Paradise Syndrome”, such eclecticism fearlessly springs up, and her sound benefits from it. Trembling synths and old school rock guitar riffs make for a straightforward blend between delicate pop and easy-listening bubblegum rock. Her vocals, though, are the real protagonist, as they range from the catchy, dangling hook to excerpts from witty phone calls (“Becky, I can change the world,” she says at some point, and her sarcastic tone makes it sound hilarious). But there’s more to it: minute by minute, Grace Inspace‘s song gets more and more hypnotic and claustrophobic, evolving into a synthpop bacchanal written by what could be a sort of Lily Allen on acids.

The music video helps defining these aesthetics, too: it’s a collage of (often unsettling) clips taken from the internet, with the singer’s image always being roughly superimposed on them, like a wild TV weatherwoman presenting her nihilistically pop view of the world to her listeners. As Grace Inspace hysterically bursts towards the end of the song: “Freaking nothing matters! Like, nothing really matters at all.” Imagine Superorganism, but more political and asphyxiating.

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Geotic is the solo side project of Baths‘ Will Wiesenfeld. When he doesn’t team up with Morgan Greenwood to craft the much successful glitch pop of his most famous moniker, the 29 year old producer from California satisfies his interest in different types of music through Geotic. A project started a couple of years before the first Baths album was released, Geotic represents a year-by-year case history of Wiesenfeld’s evolution as a musician.

It’s a prolific experiment, too: over the course of ten years, Geotic has released nine albums that see Wiesenfeld methodically exploring a particular sound or instrument. Almost every album he’s ever recorded features songs that coherently keep more or less the same length. As someone who sees the long player form not as a convenient way to group songs together but as an art form in its own right, Wiesenfeld is an albumwriter rather than a songwriter. His songs always function as part of a bigger whole, becoming small containers where he can take that larger concept he explores through the LP form and analyze it molecule by molecule.

From the lo-fi ambient guitars and strings of “Eyes” (2008) and the rugged atmospheric pads of “Hearth” (2010) to the sacral drone of “Realms” (2010), Wiesenfeld‘s work has an encyclopedic quality — it’s as if he wants to compile a sonic list of all the possibilities a sound, a genre or an instrument can offer. In a way, he lets himself sink in a particular sound and let music guide him, and not the opposite way around.

With time, Geotic got rhythmical: the album he released in 2017, “Abysma”, is an airy microhouse record that keeps a steady pace of 120 BPM throughout its entirety. Though, the question remained: was it a well-defined step towards a new direction on which he’d be traversing for a while or just yet another brief experiment in an already lengthy list of fleeting try-outs? His new album “Traversa” suggests the correct answer might be the first.

From the first few seconds of the opener “Knapsack,” already released as a single anticipating the album, Wiesenfeld delivers capturing fairytale-like synths placed over an engaging house beat while conveying a feeling of pastoral, rural simplicity at the same time. The main novelty brought by “Traversa” though, is pretty fast to come, and it lays in Wiesenfeld‘s vocals. He already used vocal layers in the past, like on “Sunset Mountain (Eon Isle)”, built entirely on holy-sounding vocal pads, but here his voice is delicate and clear and is used in an indie pop manner: it turns a track like “Knapsack” into a proper pop song, marking a radical shift from any of his earlier works.

The same happens on the other advance single, “Gondolier,” a darker track filled with watery synths. Both tracks are slightly reminiscent of groups such as The Postal Service, as if the early aughts project by Ben Gibbard underwent a club remix. Not all of “Traversa” features the warm, loose murmurs of Wiesenfeld: yet, when he does not sing, shimmering synths and keyboards replace his vocals and keep the melodic outcome of the album intact, like on the liquid and lyrical “Swiss Bicycle” and on the more cinematic “Harbor Drive.” They’re not as powerful and poignant as the two singles, but still carry more sensitivity than any of his older tracks.

The album ends on a redundant note, with the unnecessary yet danceable closer “Maglev,” yet the final impression one can get from from “Traversa” is undoubtedly positive. It’s a tender album that however is not completely intimate: it looks outwards rather than inwards—the press release itself presents the album as a collection of polaroid pictures shot while travelling—and holds a spatial vibe, as if Wiesenfield‘s goal was to reach a common place for him and his listeners to contemplate life. The place he ultimately finds, though, remains confined within the four walls of his room or in the surroundings of his house, and elements of field recording such as doors closing or objects moving occasionally pop up (“Swiss Bicycle). “Somewhere I might be/A modern human being/But not here, not with a hundred thousand trees/Miles taller than me,” he sings on “Knapsack.” The journey goes on, and so does the research of the most familiar and most comforting of sounds.

Over the past few years, 27-year-old Kaya Wilkins has been diffusing her presence and claiming her own existence transversally, through multiple mediums and professions. Film enthusiasts might have seen her on the successful lesbian thriller “Thelma”, directed by Joachim Trier; fashion experts might know she was Vogue’s “girl of the season” in 2017 after modelling for Balenciaga, Off-White and more; indie music lovers might have heard her sing a poem in Norwegian on the latest album by Aaron Maine‘s “Porches,” while also gossiping about the fact she’s actually Maine‘s girlfriend. Others probably know her as Okay Kaya, and maybe even remember the singles she released a few years ago, when she was considered by several music publications the next big thing in pop music.

Since then, a lot has happened to the music career of Okay Kaya, but one element in particular made her postpone the release of a debut album for years: an invasive management that tried to take advantage of her beauty in slimy, bothersome ways; for example, by suggesting her not to say anything about her love relationships to the producers she would work with. Okay Kaya walked away from it. She took her time, built a small home studio in her Greenpoint apartment in Brooklyn, eventually started her own label Heavy Body Records and has now finally released her first album, “Both.”

“Both” is a record that perfectly reflects the relationship Wilkins has with music. One that started in the small village of Nesoddtangen, near Oslo, where she grew up—the daughter of an Afro-American marine and a Norwegian painter. She got her first guitar when she was 13, though it was only a few years later, when she moved to New York to work as a model, that she started writing songs on a daily basis. Minimal acoustic arpeggios that she would sweeten with her vocals, singing her own thoughts softly and warmly, in a diaristic yet often cryptic manner.

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A certain sonic minimalism permeates “Both,” also thanks to the intimate delicacy that only a home studio can provide. Sometimes her voice is alone, followed only by a gentle guitar picking, like on the opener “Vampire”; elsewhere simple beats, keyboards and synths create a watery surface where her vocals can sail tenderly, occasionally merging with distant boat-whistles-like synths, like on “Tu Me Manques”, a one-minute track sung completely in French. Other than keeping her songs simple and softly skeletal, she also cuts them to the bone in a structural way, leaving them seemingly unfinished, like a musical and lyrical stream of consciousness that has naturally come to an end and does not need artificial addictions or adjustments.

That’s why most of her songs do not reach the three minutes mark. Yet, the ones that do end up being some of the best on the album, and that sorts of prove how the potential of Okay Kaya is much vaster than what Both offers—that she could be even better if she took some more time. “I Die Slow” and “Fake It”, in particular, are two of the most brilliant and emotional tracks: the first is essentially a gentle folk tune built on the union between her warm vocals (at times reminiscent of artists such as Weyes Blood) and atmospheric, organic synths; the second has the features of an emotional dream pop ballad: it features some of the best vocal melodies of the album and some high-pitched vocals in the background that almost give it an EDM-vibe. But instead of accelerating or gaining power, the song coherently remains simple and calm, like the whole album.

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The mix between folk and dream pop is what defines the style of Okay Kaya the most. That, and an utterly honest style in writing lyrics that should not really be confused with witty humour, but that it’s rather a straightforward way (too direct to be taken seriously at times) to talk about delicate themes. Like on the single “IUD”, a song about the usage of contraceptivse and about being in love with someone without wanting to have kids with them. “Would you come with me to get an IUD?/Maybe, if you come with me, I will let you come in me/’Cause, baby, you’re so baby, but I don’t want your baby,” she sings placidly and confidently, so much that it’s almost estranging. But it’s capturing, and it shows what Kaya Wilkins is capable of.

Not all the songs on the album are like “IUD”, though, and especially towards the end of the record there are a little too many fillers, from the odd ’80s dark wave of “Habitual Love” to “Hindsights A Bitch” and “Glitch”, where the Norwegian singer relies a too much on solemn atmospheres that do not add anything to the final product. Yet, Both remains an extremely pleasant work, and more importantly the official introduction that an artist like Okay Kaya absolutely needs. In a music world where everything needs to be immediately accessible to exist, where artists try to release something as soon as they can, no matter the quality, the patience Wilkins showed while waiting for the best moment to release her first record is rare. And nothing short of precious.

Superorganism started as a group of musicians coming from different areas of the world, who met in New Zealand and eventually moved to London, where they live in a two-story house. There, they wrote their first song, “Something For Your M.I.N.D.”, sending each other files from different rooms and mixing everything together, adding small sonic details to each other’s musical patterns. The result was a fluid plethora of sounds including the hooting of an owl, apple bites, samples in Japanese, altered vocal pitches, groovy basses and Hawaiian-sounding synths.

Once the song was completed, synth player Emily asked an internet friend of hers, a Japanese 17-year-old named Orono who was studying in Maine at that time, to record something on it. After just thirty minutes, she sent back the whole track back, adding an infantile Moldy Peaches-reminiscing tenderness to the song, which eventually became its best quality. Half a year later, Orono moved to London to live in the living room of the collective’s shared house. A modern, partly alienated version of a hippie commune from the ’70s, yet based exclusively on the lonely languages of the internet.

“Something For Your M.I.N.D.” was a success. It was included on the weekly Spotify’s “New Music Friday” playlist, it became part of the FIFA18 soundtrack and it reached over a million views on YouTube. During the rest of the year, the collective released three more songs. None of them had the same impact of their first single, yet they contributed to attract a young, ever growing and enthusiastic internet-based fanbase. The imagery they offered together with their songs, on their videos and on their website, did the same: a mix of memes, video games, Tumblr post-internet aesthetics and glitch art that lacked in originality but that was ultimately desirable and appealing for many.

For the whole year, it always felt like Superorganism are a band that is meant to exist only on the internet. And in a way, it also feels like they can be appreciated mostly, if not only, there. That’s why releasing a whole album—out since March 2nd via Domino Records—might sound like quite an awkward move. Even more when one notices that four of the ten tracks that compose Superorganism – the obvious name of the collective’s debut – are the same tracks they released one by one throughout 2017 as the album precisely starts with the tracks Supeorganism released after “Something For Your M.I.N.D.”, the best being the intimate yet dissonant “Nobody Cares”.

Somehow, these songs sound decent and cohesive placed one after another, yet the rest of the album doesn’t add anything to what the singles had already offered. Leaving aside the fact that eight people seem to be way too many to write and play this type of music, the collective’s new songs are a collection of sounds that Superorganism had already used on their previous tracks, reassembled in ways that don’t save them from sounding like simple fillers—and from saving their album from appearing as a mere commercial move. “Relax” is a recycled version of “Everybody Wants To Be Famous”; “Nais March” is an ambiguously rarefied and ambient slow track with a long, unnecessary interlude pausing it; “Night Time” sounds like the incomplete demo of a fast, celebratory finale—though it does make you dance.

As a whole, Superorganism feels like the unfortunate self-celebration of a year that went well, rather than being the worthy ending of a cycle—or the beginning of a new one. There’s hope, though.”Reflections On The Screen” is a delicious indie song with an Arcade Fire-like triumphant vibe in it. It gives an idea of what the record could have sounded like if Superorganism were brave enough to leave their recent past in 2017 and look forward already. Or if they had the patience to spend some more time working on their music before releasing an album. We’d be pleased to wait a little longer next time.

Two of the five songs that compose the record are already on the Bandcamp page of this Philadelphia-based project, born from the mind of Tj Strohmer, who’s been trying since 2012 to calm his restless mind by writing and self-recording simple and poignant lo-fi tracks inspired by My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth. The remaining three songs, instead, will appear as semi-exclusive bonus tracks on a yet-to-be-released tape.

It’s a sensible choice: with its analogue, rasping imperfections, tape is the perfect format for the music of Knifeplay, and “with u” proves that in an excellent way. In less than two and a half minutes, Strohmer‘s idea for a song turns into a bacchanal of lo-fi sounds, ranging from a steadily croaking drum march and a rumbling bass to euphoric, air-filling keyboards and guitars. Only towards the end they fade to leave room for an acoustic guitar and a simple piano that reveal an unexpected intimacy.

The tender vocals of Strohmer merge all of this together, and if the music carries the listener into a universe made of untidy rooms and regretful nights, his voice offers a peaceful and ethereal escape from it.

Strohmer is indubitably the soul of Knifeplay; however, since 2016, he decided to widen his project and include four more members, and eventually moved with them in a house in Philadelphia. As a result, Knifeplay has never been as prolific as now: after releasing two EPs in a considerably short amount of time (the first, no funeral, came out in July) we can certainly expect much more to come from them very soon.

On the one hand, her music evokes Nordic landscapes of unblemished meadows covered by the morning frost, with a glacial breeze blowing through thick pine trees and a grey sky reflecting on the still water of a lake. On the other hand, her biography tells us that she grew up on the sunny shores of Lake Garda, the largest lake in Italy and the favourite holiday spot for thousands of German tourists every year. However, it’s a gap that makes her work even more charming and fascinating: it suggests that the sight she authoritatively limns belongs for the most part to the sphere of magic and imagination. Hence, “The Children” can be perceived as an experiment of wintry escapism, a mystical journey inside of Fontana‘s mind, with its unique meanings and dreams made of aurora borealis-tinged nights and steaming breaths.

More than anything, though, “The Children” is a pop record, and one could have already grasped that after listening to the two tracks that anticipated the EP: “The Children” and “1986”. The two songs are pretty different from each other, a trait that had already allowed critics and early curious listeners to guess the potential heterogeneity of HÅN‘s work a few months ago. The title track could easily be thought of as the record’s centerpiece, starts as a guitar-driven ballad and fluently shifts into a faster, danceable pop tune. “1986” resumes that dance feeling and turns it into a vibrant electro pop track, where snake charmer-like synths wistfully perform a cold, calculated motion before colliding into each other like rivers in flood.

HÅN‘s debut EP “The Children” can definitely work as a calling card for an artist that has taken the right path into the saturated world of dream pop.

Giulia Fontana‘s vocals are what makes these tracks flow into each other with such a decorous coherence. That, and a subtle get-up-and-dance attitude that leaks from the dark atmosphere of the album. The first track of The Children, titled “Intro” – a debatable title for a track that lasts almost five minutes – stands as a perfect example for both statements. A series of organ-sounding vocals immediately create a cold and sacral atmosphere, made quickly riveting by a 4/4 kick that sets the tone for the rest of the album, inviting the listener to join a revealing, esoteric dance. Soon after, more guitars and synths kick in, heralding the triumphant yet delicate entrance of Fontana’s vocals. At the end of the EP – before four dance remixes of the songs – the same delicacy returns on “Hands”, where the dreamy, noninvasive softness of the synths allow for the for some of the best vocal lines of the album.

“Hands” is the ideal ending to short EP. While the two new tracks don’t add a lot of information to what we had already learned of the style of HÅN, “The Children” can definitely work as a calling card for an artist that has taken the right path into the saturated world of dream pop. In the past few months, several critics and bloggers have already compared her to a huge multitude of artists, and while it’s true that her music is still too derivative and does not come out as truly original on first play-through, there are already a lot of personal, unique elements on these four tracks. Sure, HÅN hasn’t outgrown her influences yet, but no one really expects that from the debut EP of a 21-year-old girl.

Besides, on a December that is (as usual) void of new releases, with most musicians making plans for the next year and most critics gathering their thoughts to compile lacunous end of the year lists, I dare you to find a better soundtrack for the winter. The colder it’ll get, the better “The Children” EP will sound.