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Peel have shared “Cycle,” the latest preview off their debut album Acid Star, out March 29th. The creative partnership of Sean Cimino and Isom Innis, their bond was initially formed as touring members of Foster The People (now both official members live & on record). The two developed a musical language all their own over the years, ideas coalescing organically until the eventual birth of Peel. Inspired in part by genre-bending Creation Records bands like Primal Scream and Madchester groups like Happy Mondays, Acid Star expands on the industrial edge of early Peel, adding layers of psychedelia, electronica, and even reverb soaked freak folk.
Over an interlocking matrix of arpeggiating synths and a hooky bassline, the band repeat the mantra “cycle, only one that I know, only one in my head” before slipping into a hauntingly beautiful, pitched down outro.
For Acid Star, the duo began by tapping into the music that they liked as kids. That is, the music they gravitated toward before they had “any taste or judgment,” as Innis puts it. “If you think too hard, and you try too hard, you can kind of ruin the expression that comes out,” he adds. “But there’s something about trying to recreate a song that was in my DNA before taste came into it that just sounded, listening back, like it had a lot of energy and life.”
The opener, “Y2J,” was one of the results of that childhood-song experiment, and is, appropriately enough, named in reference to Y2K. “Climax,” a song inspired by the 2018 Gaspar Noé movie of the same name, is a rocket-ship ride of a tune, as much within Nile Rodgers’ wheelhouse as Spoon’s.
Each side of the album is bookmarked by ghostly ballads—“Acid Star” and “The Cloak”—both driven by acoustic guitar and gentle vocals that push home the crucially melodic underbelly of Peel itself. “You’re smiling, laughing there, my acid star,” sings Cimino on the former song, an ode to an idea of a certain ephemeral and untouchable type of rock god. “That lyric is a tribute to the power of words beyond our everyday use,” Cimino says. “I was thinking of a term for someone, something, or an idea that is so meaningful—almost too important.” When it came time to decide what to name the album itself, it was right there in front of them.
Check Metal Magazine for more information on the upcoming album.
Serebii shares a live performance of the new single "Lost Your Breath" from the forthcoming project Inside.
Inside is the debut solo album from Kiwi composer, producer, mixing engineer, and multi-instrumentalist Serebii. Having mostly worked on collaborative projects in the past, the record reflects his innate connection with music as a vehicle for communication and expression. For Serebii, ‘Inside’ is an introspective body of work and an invitation for listeners to take a glimpse inside the artist’s musical prowess. Written, recorded, and mixed himself in 2022, it was birthed between the artist’s home studio in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and his travels in Germany. Following hypnotic first offering "Really You" and tender second single "±," Serebii unveils gorgeous new track "Lost Your Breath. The artist had this to say on it:
"This song is a gift to my youngest brother in hope that It would help him confront a family member that died in his presence, I wrote the song from his experience. I wanted it to feel gentle and warm while having a blunt narrative.”