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Iguana Death Cult x Pacino in Heat

Iguana Death Cult release a new 7" with the A Side "Tiny Tears" and the B Side the newly released "Pacino in Heat."  The band describes the new single as thus: "I must have been having a manic episode when I wrote this because I don’t have a clue what I’m talking about here to be honest. I like it a lot though. It’s like I’m losing my mind in real time. Musically it’s more or less our take on the funky new wave of the late seventies. Something we’ve been flirting with on and off."

Jonah Yano x The Heavy Loop

"it’s a nesting egg of an album, seven songs concluding with the 30-minute improvisation that inspired the album. The majority of the album traverses jazzy climes, where Feist-era Canadian indie and Prince demos are part of the same ecosystem and love in all its forms is the life-giving sun" - THE FADER

Jonah Yano is always shifting the unstable ground his songs rest on, revising it, making it anew. Often his compositions are warm, soulful, and hazily impressionistic, but Yano prefers to resist easy genre categorization, flitting, instead, between jazz and folk traditions, R&B and hip-hop, rock and ambient and electronic. On portrait of a dog — the 2023 LP he made with frequent collaborators BADBADNOTGOOD, praised in Pitchfork for its “cryptic, diaristic intimacy” — the Japanese-Canadian musician weaved his lilting, wistful voice into a harvest-hued mosaic of heartbreak and family memory, for which he recorded hours of conversations and digitized thousands of old photographs to wrestle with his grandfather’s encroaching dementia. The album featured guest contributions from Slauson Malone and Sea Oleena, with string arrangements by Eliza Niemi, Leland Whitty, and Yano. On Jonah Yano & the Heavy Loop, his forthcoming record out Oct. 4, Yano has once again upended his musical direction, crafting an experimental, chimerical album with the live ensemble-turned-studio band (Christopher Edmonson, Benjamin Maclean, Leighton Harrell, Felix Fox-Pappas, and Raiden Louie) that he’s been painstakingly scouting for the last three years. Yano has conceived of this as a kind of double-record; the anchoring song, The Heavy Loop, is a 30-minute feat of improvisation that sees the band leaning into noise music and free sound, and constitutes the “raw materials” of the album’s freewheeling soundscapes. “Concentrate,” the lead single, smoulders over subdued keys, bright guitar arpeggios, jazzy drums, and clarinet work from Clairo, whom Yano and his band opened for during her 2022 EU/UK tour. “If souvenir is about what I feel, and portrait of a dog is about what I remember or want to remember, then this album is about what I think,” says Yano. “And maybe that’s the difference.”

Though he now resides in Montreal, Yano was born in Hiroshima in 1994, and emigrated to Vancouver when he was four. He grew up listening to blues guitar players and classic rock music, and after learning the piano under his grandmother’s tutelage as a child, picked up the guitar in a “School of Rock-esque” middle school program. He started recording demos on his cellphone in 2016, when he moved to Toronto and joined up with the city’s burgeoning underground music scene. Many of the people he met and jammed with there — Monsune, Jacques Greene, Joseph L’Étranger, BBNG — became his eventual collaborators, and taught him technical skills he would use to record his first real songs. His friendship with the Toronto-based experimental music duo MONEYPHONE culminated with a song they made together called “On Lock,” his first ever feature, and Yano released his first solo single later that year, “Rolex, the Ocean.” “It’s important for me to interface with what’s happening in whichever localized area I’m in,” says Yano. “I always want my music to reflect where I am as much as what I’m trying to say.” 

In his room and the home studios of friends, he began working on a suite of songs that would form his début project, the breezy, six-track Nervous EP (2019), which blended jazz, hip-hop, and R&B influences with subtle electronica. It introduced Yano as a soulful, genre-agnostic talent with an ear for melody and intimate songwriting, and he followed it up later that year with a lush cover of The Majestics’ “Key to Love (Is Understanding),” which the original Memphis funk/soul band praised as “well done with [a] slight personal twist.” Yano’s well-reviewed début album, souvenir, expanded the panoramic sonic landscape of his first EP, seamlessly weaving together drum’n’bass, rock, ambient, soul, jazz, and more. His free association-based songwriting introduced many of the themes that would prove central to his work — memory, family histories, the nuances of interpersonal relationships, identity fractured by diaspora — and the record included a reworked version of a song called “shoes,” which Yano’s then-estranged father, Tatsuya Muraoka, had recorded 25 years before their reconciliation. In Japanese, Muraoka sang about a pair of shoes he bought for his child son, and Yano, now older, filled it in by questioning his father’s absence from his childhood due to his parents’ separation: a duet traversing oceans and decades. He released the album on Father’s Day in 2020.

Since then, Yano’s work has earned praise in major international music publications, including Billboard, The Fader, CLASH, Exclaim, Complex, and Pitchfork. He’s been featured on NTS Radio, CBC Music’s The Intro, NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday, and performed on COLORS twice. He was twice nominated for the SOCAN Songwriting Prize, and has garnered the attention of Gilles Peterson, Benji B, and the late Virgil Abloh. He’s played the Montreal International Jazz Festival, the EFG London Jazz Festival, and toured Japan for ten solo shows in 2023. In 2024, he released the little italy demos, a three-song tape he made with his neighbour in Montreal, Le Ren. His forthcoming record features contributions from Helena Deland, Ouri, and Clairo.

Stream or purchase the album.

Wahid x ILLUMINATED!

Rising Florida rapper Wahid shares his new single “ILLUMINATED”, taken from his upcoming EP THEY ALL GO MAD!. Following his recent EP feast, by ravens, THEY ALL GO MAD! continues with Wahid’s gift in merging classic MC traditions with forward-thinking cadences and melodies. In his double-time acrobatic flows, he’s distinctly post-Kendrick Lamar, and Lil Wayne – blessed with a novelist’s eye for minor detail and a virtuoso’s gift for ransacking hidden pockets of a beat. He can turn a warped post-Dilla instrumental to ashes with 16 bars and croon a plaintive falsetto wail on the hook that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Jeremih album.

Speaking on his new single "ILLUMINATED!," Wahid shares, "This song probably has my favorite hook on the entire project. I loved how my producer Vitamn approached/wrote it. This song is just fun to me. It’s also piercing, lyrically. The verse I wrote on this was the first ‘I’m about to prove a point’ moment for this project. And that point is… no one can really f**k with me.” 

Nothing was a given in Orlando, Florida, a city best culturally known for its theme parks and boy bands. Wahid had lived here since the age of five, when his parents relocated the family from the Bronx. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, there were no real local role models for success. He and his best friend would try to find open mics and shows, but they were few and far between. It wasn’t until Wahid attended Florida A&M in Tallahassee when he became fully immersed in a flourishing hip-hop community. And by the time he returned home in the middle years of the last decade, Orlando had finally incubated a diverse scene that encompassed rap, folk, electronic music and indie-slanting guitar rock.

Earlier this year saw the release of his EP, feast, by ravens, which saw him garner praise from Dazed’s Only Tracks You Need To HearCOLORSxSTUDIOS, CLASH Magazine’s Astral Realm and landed him in Complex-Pigeons and Planes’ highly respected Best New Artists feature for their October edition.
Jonah Yano x Snowpath (feat. Clairo)

Montreal’s Jonah Yano recruits frequent collaborator Clairo for the final offering ahead of his forthcoming album out this Friday, with new single “Snowpath.” Having toured together and collaborated several times over the past few years, Jonah and Clairo embody the nature of their collaborative relationship on the song. The song details the warmth of time spent with friends, bringing listeners into the setting in which it was recorded - a snowed-in studio in rural Ontario with two sets of fresh footprints in the snow.

Jonah’s new album, Jonah Yano & The Heavy Loop, came together with intimate collaboration in mind, as a departure from his previous two albums - both of which were intimate portraits of his personal and family life. His third album, out on October 4, 2024, is one open to improvisation and melding the collective visions of each member of his band, which has been years in the making: Christopher Edmonson, Benjamin Maclean, Leighton Harrell, Felix Fox-Pappas and Raiden Louis. Jonah remains at the helm as the record’s conductor and central figure, but draws on the strengths and inspirations of each member of the band to craft an album that still dives into personal experience through its tender lyrics, but evolves musically as the band feeds off of one another in the fruitful exchange of ideas in the studio and lively bouts of improvisation. 

Check out more on Stereogum

Sam Blasucci x Flower

While remaining quite elusive to genre or category, a few of Blasucci’s deepest influences can still be spotted throughout the musical and lyrical shape of his new album. New literary and musical discoveries seem to be constant for Sam, but shades of Leonard Cohen, Prince, and Bjork peak out behind this batch of songs as well as the writings of Ariana Reines, John O’Donohue, and Edgar Allen Poe.

On the newest single, "Flower," from the forthcoming LP Real Life Thing - Blasucci notes: "Inspired by the harmony of Italian-American vocal groups from the 70s as well as a Motown feel, Flower is one of the more existential songs on the album. There are shades of Marvin Gaye in its rhythm and Frankie Valli in its vocal arrangements. It was originally written in an entirely different rhythm and style, almost more of an oldies song, but it evolved over time and slowed itself down a bit to feel more laid back. It seemed more and more evident that slowness and space were important in this song so that all of its parts could fully stretch out. With the addition of Randal Fisher on tenor saxophone and Andres Renteria on Congas, it morphed into a fusion of soul, jazz, and pop."

For more info, check out Raven Sings The Blues.