Today, we are happy to debut his crepuscular new single “sun7”, before it officially goes live tomorrow. Led once again by e.v.a, a fictional avatar he introduced on previous releases, the track begins with scattered vocal chops and glowing synths, then slowly blooms into something brighter and more physical. There is a strong Y2K feeling in the way the voices flicker and bend, but “sun7” also carries house warmth, lo fi vibes, and a subtle touch of French House nostalgia. As Charly puts it, the track was imagined as a summer soundtrack: “warm, nostalgic and melancholic, like the end of a day at the beach or the last track of a rave at sunrise.” Listen and support below.

The video is awash with those whimsical, homespun qualities that characterise Usbeck’s impressive catalogue as a multi-disciplinary artist. Depicting her walking through New York dressed like a Manta Ray, it’s a lovely watch; one bound to place at least the smallest of grins on your face and inspired, the artist says, by a trip to an Ecuadorian island…

“I remember walking along the beach on Floreana Island, the sound of the waves surrounding me,” says Usbeck. “As I watched, manta rays emerged and disappeared with the current, their graceful movements captivating. It was a rare moment of perfect harmony, and there are few times I’ve felt so at peace.

The single itself, “Mantarraya,” exemplifies that balance of sincerity and synthy experimentalism which has made Maria a favoured artist of HighClouds over the years. Through the song, she sings in Spanish about the titular animal, delivering concise, simple and infinitely sweet lyrics about manta rays move through the ocean “without any problem”, like “jewels of the sea,” over a wash of synths that make the track sound like a warm bath or a cosy hug.

“Mantarraya” is the first release from Naturaleza: a record that, like her previous, sticks with a concept, this time focusing in on nature and our relationship to it.

“Each song on my new album, Naturaleza, tells a layered story of moments in nature, reflecting on the contrast between how we live and how we should,” she explains, adding, “And, of course, it touches on the usual existential dread. Are humans the true invasive species? How can we cultivate a more symbiotic relationship with our ecosystem?”

Maria Usbeck has always been a boundary-less and shapeshifting kind of artist, influenced both by the Brooklyn electronic pop scene and her Latin American background. After fronting the New Wave band Selebrities, she recorded her debut Amparo in 2016 with her friend, alt-pop royalty Caroline Polacheck, and followed it up with Envejeciendo, a highly conceptual, meditation on aging. Out in April, Naturaleza will definitely be an exciting new chapter in her journey…

Today, Discovery Zone is premiering the animated video for ‘Operating System,’ a standout track from Quantum Web. Created with French filmmaker Pacôme Henry, this Clipart extravaganza perfectly complements the song’s synth work, bright computer sounds, and flute, courtesy of TOPS‘ Jane Penny. “‘Operating System’ tells the story of a rebellious computer folder that defies its destined purpose and embarks on a journey through different layers of reality, questioning the authenticity of its own existence. Is it truly alive or just following code?” Henry detailed. “Where does computing end, and where does life begin?” added Weihl.

The aesthetic also pays homage to the early days of computer science and the infinite doors it opened—from the birth of modern simulation theories to the rise of new art forms like computer-generated animation. For the video, Henry and Weihl drew inspiration from early CGI commercials, iconic Animusic videos (with some parts synced to the MIDI version of the track), and nostalgic Linux terminal ASCII art. The video also references The Twilight Zone show and Conway’s Game of Life — a fascinating, zero-player game from the 1970’s where evolution depends solely on its initial state.

Another exciting news for Discovery Zone fans: JJ Weihl is currently touring to support Quantum Web. Check the itinerary below.

28.10.24 UK Glasgow – The Glad Cafe
30.10.24 UK Coventry – The Tin Music & Art
31.10.24 UK Manchester – YES Basement
01.11.24 UK London – Corsica Studios w/ Freak Heat Waves
06.11.24 DE Offenbach – Kapelle
07.11.24 BE Liege – KulturA
08.11.24 NL Utrecht – Le Guess Who?
09.11.24 NL Amsterdam – Cinetol
14.11.24 DE Leipzig – Transcentury Update Festival

Pearly Drops are unique in their ability to draw inspiration from their own earlier work. Compared to “Breathless,” the lyrics to “Lost In The Dark” still draw on the same themes of dissociation and dismalness. In a distorted voice, Tervonen sings, “All that’s sweet / And prime in me / Hides somewhere inside so deep / Hibernating / I’m hibernating.” The chorus solidifies this feeling of stuckness and remove, with the deceptively sweet vocals continuing, “Lost n the dark / I couldn’t breathe.” Against a background of bouncing synths, the bleak lyrics feel like an invitation to dance away (or perhaps toward) the darkness. “Lost In The Dark” shows proof of development from the group– While “Breathless” was catchy and cute, this new track contains a depth that is perhaps less apparent in earlier releases.

Pearly Drops‘ “Lost in The Dark” video is creepy, strange, and stunning

“Lost In The Dark” comes with a short film directed by Joonas Lind. The video is creepy, strange, and absolutely stunning, with Andrea Villarreal confidently leading the macabre ordeal in her role as The Bride. The film depicts a dangerous and devilish relationship between a bride and her groom, with Villarreal dancing and writhing beside a deliciously menacing Sebastian Freiberg as The Man. Lind‘s direction brings a creative edge that amplifies and adds onto the otherworldly texture of Tervonen and Malin‘s work. In a music landscape that is increasingly focused on short form video content and clickable short clips, it’s refreshing to see artists create a more involved narrative that will really engage the audience.

This release is part of Pearly Drops‘ release of a deluxe vinyl edition of their 2020 album Call For Help. For now, get lost in “Lost In The Dark” below.

I don’t know anyone who feels caught up with music right now. And just as much as fans feel the pressure to consume, artists wobble under the pressure to create. While we live in an incredible time of technological innovation and social communication, it’s lately felt like some of the care, thoughtfulness, and joy of music making and listening has taken a backseat role.

It’s refreshing, then, to listen to a release like Jensen Sportag‘s A New Anthology, slated to come out early next month. The record is 12 tracks, handpicked from a treasure trove of 150 homemade, unpublished demos by Cascine owner Jeff Bratton. If you can’t quite place Jensen Sportag, that’s because they’ve been on a hiatus since 2013, following a flurry of critical success, performances with the likes of LCD Soundsystem and Girl Talk, and their debut LP Stealth of Days. The group– composed of old high school friends turned longtime and prolific collaborators—took a step back to pause, all while recording music to form this impressive and mighty glut of unreleased material.

Wilkinson and Craig grew up together in Tennessee, and there’s a sense of love and familiarity that only comes from friends messing around that emanates from every Jensen Sportag release. When compounding this dynamic with the curation expertise of Bratton, the resulting album is just plain good. It’s a triumphant return—no, a homecoming—from a group that is constantly surprising and delighting without feeding into riffraff or gimmicks.

This makes it all seem sober and serious, but A New Anthology is as fun, funky, and fresh as Jensen Sportag‘s previous releases. “Beige,” the latest single from the project, premiering today exclusively on HighClouds, is a prime example of everything that makes Jensen Sportag worth dancing to. The track makes this clear from its first sputters, opening with a soft knocking and glimmery synth which quickly collides into the bouncing beat, smooth guitar, and grooving keys that form the body of “Beige.”

The lyrics are casually lovelorn, portraying a relationship that has just never been able to find solid footing. This story is told through vocals that unfurl like a fan, sometimes presenting as one tone and other times expressed through a chorus of voices. Like their prior releases, Jensen Sportag sounds like a Scandinavian version of Cut Copy or a more chilled out Hot Chip—Made even funnier by the fact that the music is made by two guys from Southern America. Take it from us, “Beige” is a true delight, and just one track from the album that is certain to be your chill & groove go-to for months to come.

Listen to the previously released single “Zaeta” below.

Originally formed in Lima, Peru by Adele Fournet and Felipe Wurst, Brooklyn-based group Tipa Tipo isn’t afraid to mix sounds, textures, and ideas. Their music melds genres and melodies, breaking new ground as they fuse older pop conventions with Latin-inspired rhythms. On their latest release, “Grifo,” Tipa Tipo even blends languages. In the multilingual track, the group reflects on the connection between life and death, ruminating on the dead that live among us, from the animal carcasses that make the gas that fuels our cars to the bodies that sit in the graveyards in our communities. With its groovy baseline, Fournet‘s smooth vocals, and drummer Jordan Auber collaborated with funky drums, the track perfectly balances fun and fatalism in a flamboyant fashion.

But the buck doesn’t stop there for Tipa Tipo. The group has also released a visually and artistically astute music video, directed by the band’s very own Adele Fournet. The video features dynamic dancing and eye-catching backdrops. It’s a visual spectacular that romanticizes the dirty and wasteful, a dance that finds choreography in both natural and mechanical movement.

The resulting product is a track and accompanying video that are both meaningful and catchy. HighClouds was lucky enough to catch up with Tipa Tipo to discuss the process that went into creating “Grifo,” their headspace as they look toward releasing their first full-length LP, and the challenges and triumphs they’ve experienced since transitioning from Lima to the Brooklyn music scene. Read our entire conversation below, and don’t forget to stream “Grifo” as soon as humanly possible.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

HighClouds: Talk us through the process of writing and recording “Grifo.”

I wrote this song while in quarantine with the Omicron variant of COVID, and my window overlooked two gas stations at a big intersection in South Brooklyn. I wrote the opening lyrics in a feverish state while looking at the throbbing lights of those desolate stations. I saw the gas stations as homing beacons, calling all survivors after the apocalypse. The song grew into a meditation about life running on death, especially in the form of the liquid fossils that we pump into our vehicles for fuel. The second verse develops this theme further, but this time in the context of The Green-Wood Cemetery. This cemetery is very close to my house, and is one of my favorite places to spend hours admiring the enormous trees and imagining past lives of the people who nourish them.

We recorded “Grifo” at our studio in Brooklyn. Like many of our tracks, it was a process of reconstructing the Logic demo by replacing and augmenting the MIDI arrangements with real instruments. I knew that I wanted the instrumentation to juxtapose the mosquito-like electric guitars of old chicha recordings with the luscious electric pianos and synths of disco in order to conjure this hybrid genre we’ve been going for that we’re calling “tropical disco.” Highlights from the studio include recording with our Tipa Tipo drummer, Jordan Auber— Who really took the drums and percussion to a whole new level on this track– and recording a real vibraphone with our friend Erica Mancini. Getting Felipe‘s lead guitars to sound both danceable and annoying was also a fun challenge. We had a lot of fun creating the ambient disco vocal stabs that occur throughout the track by running many layers of harmonies through our SurfyBear spring reverb pedal. SurfyBear is definitely a big part of this track.

“Grifo” is a multilingual track, featuring both Spanish and English. Does your songwriting approach change when you compose in different languages?

We are a bilingual band, so in a way writing bilingual songs is the most intuitive and natural outcome. Felipe‘s native language is Spanish, my native language is English, and we talk all day in Spanglish. However, I’ve often feared that writing in two languages could alienate a listener – if the song starts in English, and then switches to Spanish, maybe the English-speaking listener could feel lost or confused, or vice versa? But with “Grifo,” the verses came to me so clearly in English, and the choruses in Spanglish, that it felt like the only way to do justice to the song was to write it in both languages.

The video for “Grifo” is super engaging with its unique shooting locations, trippy effects, and imaginative choreography. Where did the idea for the video come from? What was the shooting and editing process like?

The music video for “Grifo” takes place in three different Brooklyn locations that contrast the industrial and organic elements of the city—The gas stations that originally inspired the song, The Green-Wood Cemetery, and a scrap metal processing plant in Gowanus right next to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. I have a longstanding collaboration with the Peruvian choreographer and multidisciplinary artist Moyra Silva, in which we create site-specific dance pieces and installations that interrogate the relationship between human bodies and urban spaces. We did a site-specific videodance piece in Perú right before the pandemic, called “Limas Utópicas,” and were excited to have the opportunity to work together again after so many years. Moyra and I developed the movements for “Grifo” in response to the locations and the music, while implementing the imagery of oil pumps, machinery, connection, and running. I really like the aesthetic and feeling tone of non-narrative experimental films like Godfrey Reggio‘s Koyaanisqatsi, so we decided to blend the shots of our choreography with a collage of archival footage to create a series of tableaus portraying the relationship between fossil fuel consumption, death, and human connection.

While “Grifo” is an upbeat and dancey track, the video and lyrics certainly have fatalistic undertones. What is it like to create art when it feels like the world is ending?

The end of the world as we know it has always been a subject matter that interests me as a songwriter, but with a twist and a sense of humor. I love writing upbeat dance tracks about the world ending and fleshing out a lyrical portrayal of what that might look like. I think it makes me feel existentially better to sing about hard topics while everyone is dancing—It’s a catharsis in which we can hold opposing feelings at the same time. I love the science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin, in part because much of her world-building occurs in post-disaster scenarios. What do we do once the world as we know it ends? In “Grifo,” we have a dance party at the gas station as everyone stocks up on provisions.

Tipa Tipo was originally formed in Peru. Can you tell us more about your origin story as a band? What was it like adjusting to the scene in Brooklyn?

Felipe and I met in Lima in 2010 and started collaborating on original music soon thereafter. We played in a band called Humanimals and were in a small but blossoming experimental pop scene in Lima, with bands like Alejandro y María Laura, La Lá, and Kanaku y El Tigre. I got an opportunity to do a PhD program in Ethnomusicology at NYU, so we moved to New York and basically started over as musicians and artists in the US in 2013. The music scene in Brooklyn was enormous in comparison, and a lot more competitive and demoralizing. We stopped playing original music as a duo for many years and only played as supporting musicians for other people’s projects and worked on our own solo projects. Notably, I released a solo instrumental album in that time under my own name called Foremothers and Felipe was playing with the Latin experimental band La Mecanica Popular. In that time, we also started learning about production and engineering and slowly started to experiment more with analog recording techniques. We bought a Tascam cassette recorder and recorded our first EP as Tipa Tipo, which reignited our passion for creating original music despite the challenges of the New York scene. While living in Brooklyn we also developed a passion for Peruvian bands from the 60s, 70s, and 80s that were developing their a unique cumbia sound, including Los Orientales de Paramonga, Los Mirlos, and Los Destellos. These bands have gone on to influence our sound as we explore this nexus between tropical and disco.

Your new first full-length LP Cintas will be released early next year. What should listeners look forward to hearing on the record? What has been the biggest challenge in preparing for the release? What part of the process has been most joyous?

This record is an inflection point between the yacht rock en español we were doing with our previous EP, El Chari, and the dance-oriented tropical disco we’ve started pursuing more recently. The new album has songs that fall all along that spectrum. It’s taken two years to write and record Cintas, and we’ve especially enjoyed honing our process and techniques as producers and engineers. We’ve overcome a lot of creative fears when it comes to writing and recording, and are more fluid with our flow working individually and together. Some of the album was recorded to tape, some of it is digital—We just did whatever felt right for each song in each moment.

Now for a few quickfire questions. If you could open for any band or artist (alive, dead, active, broken up— everyone is fair game) on tour, what band or artist would it be?

Wings.

If you had to create a cocktail to pair with “Grifo,” what would the drink be?

Definitely a Chilcano with gas station ginger ale.

What will 2024 bring for Tipa Tipo?

Our album release, more shows, and more new music on the way!

Hailing from Helsinki, the innovative duo known as Pearly Drops crafts softly blurred pop music, where modern and vintage sonic landscapes intertwine. After the release of their LP, A Little Disaster, earlier this year, Sandra Tervonen and Juuso Malin are back with some exciting news. They’ve recently announced their Haunted Expansion Pack EP, set to drop soon through our good friends at Cascine.

The project features two brand new songs, “Haunted” and “Heather,” as well as two remixes from the album. So far, we already heard the Dream, Ivory‘s rendition of “I Cry While You Sleep” and today, we’re thrilled to be premiering the Nourished by Time version of “Take Me Down.”

In the hands of the Baltimore singer-songwriter and producer Nourished by Time (whose real name is Marcus Brown), the pulsating synth-pop of “Take Me Down” ventures into uncharted musical territories. In line with Pearly Drops’ style, Nourished by Time often injects retro sounds into their forward-thinking music [as exemplified in their exceptional album, Erotic Probiotic 2, which has earned a spot as one of our top favorites in 2023]. Guided by a DIY ethos and a punk freedom, their reimagination of “Take Me Down” takes on a grainy and gritty quality. It doesn’t seek to erase or replace the original but rather serves as a harmonious extension, akin to a collaboration that has always been meant to be. Echoing Tervonen‘s ethereal and icy singing, Brown‘s croon anchors the title to the ground, or rather, to the underground. Listen below.

Music is often cited as the ultimate cure to loneliness, and visionary newcomer Deirdre puts this to the test on new track “Only You,” debuting exclusively today on HighClouds (stream it everywhere tomorrow). Deirdre is the musical alias of Copenhagen-based singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Joakim Johnsen. His debut release from his first (ever!) full-length album, “Only You” is a beautiful introduction to a musician who is certain to contribute to and even redefine the indie space in Denmark and beyond.

“Only You” begins with deceptively simplistic lyrics, as Deirdre sings, “Don’t know why / Everything I imply / Slips your mind / Like I’m constantly waiting in line.” Suddenly, the singer-songwriter puts a cap on the verse by posing a blunt yet melancholic question, asking, “Am I being left behind?” The song continues, with verses describing increasingly solitary scenes—Quarantining behind closed blinds, simply waiting for time to pass, and even feeling the desire to explore new things but not knowing how. The accompanying video for the release reflects these lonely tasks in beautiful detail, trailing Johnsen IRL as he wakes up alone, prepares breakfast for one, wanders around a muted Copenhagen by subway, and eventually returns back to his empty apartment. As the verse’s funky beats and lazy guitar dissolve and the buzzy, dynamic chorus pushes in, Deirdre reveals that his isolation is a choice. He confesses, “They all try to be friends with me / But it’s only you I want to see.” Ultimately, “Only You” is a compelling investigation into what happens when you fixate on one person to the detriment of forming other relationships with those around you. When that attention isn’t returned, Deirdre finds himself all alone, closing the blinds on another day of solitude.

Deirdre is an exciting newcomer to the growing Danish alt-rock scene; “Only You,” the debut track from Deirdre‘s upcoming album Heart Work, is the artist’s first full-length release. (The artist’s only other release, 2020’s EP, is an ennui-filled masterpiece.) While the track’s grungy sound and riffy sentimentality build upon what similar sweet-hearted stoner acts like Alex G and Mac DeMarco have started over in the States, “Only You” sounds so fresh and smooth that it avoids the trap of being merely derivative. While Deirdre grapples with difficult subject matter, the mellow production and easygoing sound keep the song from taking itself too seriously. This balance between light and dark requires real skill, and Johnsen’s ability to navigate this dichotomy with such deftness is impressive. Plucking Johnsen from relative obscurity is a testament to the great taste of Pink Cotton Candy Records, an independent label founded in 2021 that’s slowly building an eclectic and informed ear for what’s exciting and upcoming in Copenhagen. It will be fascinating to see how Deirdre and Pink Cotton Candy Records grow together.

Despite the singer-songwriter’s Danish heritage, the moniker Deirdre is stolen from a tragic heroine in Irish folklore. In the tale, it’s prophesized that Deirdre’s incomparable beauty will bring banishment and death to those around her. While we hope Johnsen‘s music doesn’t lead him and those around him to death and destruction like his artistic namesake, one thing is clear—Deirdre‘s music is just as gorgeous as the ill-fated figure the band is named after.