Sui Zhen — Losing, Linda

In Losing, Linda, Sui Zhen probes animism in the immaterial world. 'Linda' is the subject of the album's cover, a grotesque and rubberised approximation of Zhen. She impresses a dark, half-formed online identity — the ghost that we, the living, assemble to leave here. This is something marketers tellingly call a 'presence'.

Behind the mask is choreographer Megan Payne, in a further explosion of identity. Identity crises are no new ground in music, but Zhen explores them with refreshing contemporaneity. If Death Grips were the first post-internet band, propelled upwards by memes and ARGs, Zhen goes a step further. She is among the first to so fully discuss the internet’s Derridean spectrality, its power to fragment the individual.

Opener 'Another Life' gets the most often-discussed existential terror of the internet out of the way. It's a slow, ethereal, exploration of the innate FOMO of the online experience. Its chorus hook, 'all I see are things that I could be missing / all I know are things from another life', ought to hit home for any one of facebook's 2.41 billion monthly active users.

The effects of this phenomenon extend into the real world, too. Gig attendees will be familiar with the obsessive documentation of the 21st century. They've either craned their neck around a hovering device, its bright screen a smear of the world, or filmed a performance on one. Whatever one's perspective on this practice, it has inarguably altered our relationship with the present. This is epitomised in the sinister online aphorism 'pics or it didn't happen'.

And throughout Losing, Linda, Sui Zhen emphasises this incorporeal floatiness that physical reality has caught. 'Different Places' is a wistful, dub-inflected piece that feels adrift in the air. It lives in and explores distances between people, with koan-like lyrics that reveal as much as they mystify. 'I Could Be There' is a ballad with one foot in the past; like a strange, sorrowful piece of city pop remixed by Clams Casino. It feels like something that would stalk the quiet halls of youtube, awaiting the day it’s recommended to millions, heaved back from the forgotten past into new life.

Anti-natalism and biodegradable coffins betray a modern desire to leave no physical trace. Yet we are increasingly commemorated by our online presences, doppelgängers which will breathe as long as the servers do. Losing, Linda is, then, a ghost story for 2019; the story of our collective self-haunting. It's a generous work which deepens in meaning and grows in beauty with every listen.

Pre-order and stream tracks from Losing, Linda here. Album due September 27th.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Not Your Friends — Constructing a Mental Breakdown

Constructing a Mental Breakdown traverses the knife's edge of the abject and ecstatic. It's loud to the point of extremity, but not 'heavy' in a traditional sense. The power of this sound is in its invigorating lightness. Where others would mimic a lion's roar, Not Your Friends adopt the acidic hiss of snakes.

Like a mathcore-inflected Nails, this band perform with an absurd level of aggression. Nails' machismo is here, however, subbed out in favour of a brutal feminine howl. This inversion is actualised in the lyrics of 'Abort', the album's opener. 'Abort' aims for both a spiritual and physical castration of male bullshit merchants. If the English language had a word without the judgement inherent in shrew, harpy, hag, or witch, it would be embodied here.

In its first half, Constructing a Mental Breakdown heaps on the distressing content. It's corporeal, caustic, and draws in images of abuse, violence, and bodily fluids and functions. There's a stop off to the town of Twin Peaks with 'It Is Happening Again', exploring the show's darkest and most arresting scene, in which a character is driven into Missoula, Montana. That the song manages to recreate this scene's horrific lack of staginess, while retaining its tact and sympathy, is hugely impressive.

And from 'Sebastian No' onwards, the album's tone lightens. Violence is still present, but it's exaggerated; played for laughs. And the two penultimate tracks, especially when contrasted with what comes before them, are both incredibly sweet. The tail end of this album is like a decompression chamber. Not Your Friends let you sink to the bed of depravity and avoid nitrogen sickness on the ascent.

Constructing a Mental Breakdown is available for streaming and purchase here. Proceeds of every album sale to Pittsburgh Action Against Rape. Donations can also be made to this worthy cause at paar.net.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

sirWas — Holding On To A Dream

sirWas' Holding On To A Dream, in its titling and its first few moments, threatens forty minutes of mawkish cheese. The album, out of the gate, has an easy affability, with unchallenging compositions. But it's not long before that surface slips.

A wave of melancholy recontextualises the album's title. ‘Holding On To A Dream’ isn't a faux-inspirational Instragram truism. It's the sigh of someone at the end of their tether, ready to leave the dream outside, shake themselves dry of it, and move on.

The album's arrival at the end of summer enriches its doleful beauty. The beach barbecue is over. This is for the last dying embers under the grill, lonely beacons in the sunset. Holding On To A Dream is uncommonly self-aware. The album's suggestion it will soon fade, crumble, and be erased by time is, ironically, the very thing that keeps it stuck in your head.

It shares DNA and gloom-driven grooviness with Frank Ocean's blond. Stand-out track 'Somewhere' features some distorted vocals reminiscent of blond's 'Self Control', in a liminal space between voice and guitar; between two sets of strings running down two necks, the organic and the artificial. 'Somewhere' has a refreshing sense of progression and hope that many of the static jams of Holding On To A Dream lack.

Holding On To A Dream is a work both personable and personal. Its lyrics are confessions, and like many confessions they are obscured behind qualifiers, distractions, bids for approval and friendliness. But that doesn't make them any less compelling. It just makes them easier to hear.

Holding On To A Dream will be released on September 20th. Pre-order and stream tracks here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Trupa Trupa — Of the Sun

A self-described poet, Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is careful with his words. This care oozes through every second of Trupa Trupa's music. Unwaveringly fair and thoughtful, Trupa Trupa dodge the brattiness can dog modern punk and post-punk.

Songs on Of the Sun are little loops. Lyrics and musical phrases repeat like mantras, and thud like horses' hooves. They are direct enough to suggest ideas, but swerve proselytisation and condescension. This doesn't feel like spinelessness. It feels like Trupa Trupa's fear of becoming didacts, overcomplicating things into a mansplain-y and dictatorial mess.

The simplicity of their songs mean joy springs from the smallest changes. More impressive than stadium-filling bands are those who make marvels with very little. The switch-up of energy that occurs half way through 'Mangle' is brilliant in its subtlety. A little goes a long way, in a mid-song twist that goes toe-to-toe with Swans' 'The Seer Returns'.

The band go some way to matching Swans in sheer power, too, with some punchy recording and production. It's rare and gratifying to hear a studio recording of a bass drum which actually possesses the fury of one (it’s too easy to get used to equalised drips of barely-audible bass drum piss).

Despite inspiring posturing paragraphs about bass drums, Of the Sun has more to offer than traditional rock'n'roll. There is plenty of space for stuff to get weird. The album's title track is a gorgeous piece which sounds like the machinery of a factory trying to vocalise.

The album's most psychedelic track, 'Angle' is like a quasi-religious encounter. It’s wonky and solemn, the estranged child of Sister Irene O'Connor and Pink Floyd's 'The Gnome'. Imagine seeing the burning bush while stumbling back from the pub. It's transubstantiated, appeared in a sicky bin far from Saint Catherine's Monastery. A skeptic would say it’s just the song's title inspiring Freudian slips.

But a sense of rusted-over ecclesiasticism underlines all of Of the Sun, whether intentionally or not. It's in its pomp, its Benedictine close harmonies and its immanence — its willingness to pan for gold in the world's gutter. And this confluence of gold and shit perfectly summarises an album which kneads the sun into the clouds. This is music for an uncertain future, exploring deep in the valley of our disunity, panning mistakes from history's river.

Of the Sun will be released on September 13th. Pre-order and stream tracks from the album here. Read No-Wave’s interview with frontman Grzegorz here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Jenny Hval — The Practice of Love

Jenny Hval's albums are often like manifestos. Her free-verse lyrics, on a page, read like paragraphs of some pontificating, noncommittal dissertation. But Hval's delivery has always granted them magic. A wave of sensuality crushes all that is ostentatious in her work.

She is the hub that houses her own spokes, the point at which all her antithetical ideas collide. In anyone else's hands, her material would be treading on its own toes. But she has a knack for carrying it all off. Hval, if not an intellectual, has always been a juggler of ideas.

And in recent years, Hval the songwriter has come to the fore. With last year's The Long Sleep, she released 'Spells' — her most warm and welcoming track to date. The EP as a whole represented Hval's most successful marriage of concept and material, seizing the mantle from its vampiric predecessor Blood Bitch. It even found space for one of her trademark spoken-word sections in a touching coda.

The Practice of Love further emphasises this talent for songwriting. Eschewing extended drones and sound collages, it instead unveils hit after hit of electro-inflected art-pop. Hval has also drawn in a crew of collaborators, most notably the striking and powerful vocals of Vivian Wang. Hval’s now-fragmented voice swells the album beyond vanity-project-chinstroking, and into cabbalistic beauty.

But things haven't leapt completely off-world. Hval's admirable, slightly clumsy, directness is still present. Discussion is sometimes so frank it touches embarrassment — like overhearing arguments or sex through the wall. She is an artist who can make you blush, shake your head in confusion and laugh while being overwhelmed by beauty.

On The Practice of Love, Hval says she took influence from 'trashy, mainstream trance music from the 90s'. But this album adopts the spectre of vaporwave, and contorts its influences into something full of yearning. The ancient, artifacted JPEGs; the jumble of disconnected visual noise. It has the airiness and wonder of nostalgia, but feels fiercely contemporary.

Hval probes further into herself with every release, exploring, revealing, peeling back layers of identity to find new masks beneath. And after every internal expedition, she returns with a greater treasure. The Practice of Love is her greatest yet.

The Practice of Love is released on Sept. 13th. Pre-order the album and stream its singles here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe