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"warm, wistful, and quaint all at once" - HYPEBEAST
"softly lit tones with a jazz influence, his fuzzy, lo-fi sense of soul touches upon the intimate at every turn" - CLASH
“dreamy soul-tinged adult alternative songs" - ALLMUSIC
On the heels of an album with BADBADNOTGOOD and working with the likes of Clairo & Mustafa, Jonah Yano returns with another collaboration. This time with fellow Canadian and next door neighbor Le Ren. "Lauren and I met in summer of 2021 when I was first living in montreal. We were introduced over text by a mutual friend of ours. A few weeks after we first met we decided to get together and try working on music together - I had just finished recording Portrait of a Dog. The first day we wrote together it went so well that we got together again the next day, and the next, and the next. I think over 2 weeks we must've spent at least 10 days writing songs together and recording onto my 4 track and computer. We've been friends ever since and are now next door neighbours. We live in Little Italy (hence the EP name) and our apartments share the same wall. The 3 demos on this are definitely the best summary of what we wrote together. And actually even though we live so close to each other, we haven't really gotten back together to write much since. I think these demos are a window into the short and special moment when we were on exactly the same page and wanted to make the same thing."
Check out the 3 song EP titled the little italy demos at this link.
Los Angeles duo Peel release their debut album Acid Star. 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.
“I look at Acid Star as a place where all of our expressions across different mediums were able to exist in the same orbit and create something new together,” shares Innis, “Lyrically I was trying to process digital mania, boredom, and joy in the present while sonically trying to make dance music through a band lens.” Cimino adds, “This album to me a tribute to the power of words and music that transcends boundaries from start to finish.”
The album is preceded by singles “Y2J,” a psychedelic dance tune with dream pop elements, “Acid Star,” a hallucinatory comedown of washed out acoustic guitars, “Climax,” which Paste Magazine praised as a “unique convergence of post-punk, electronica and psychedelia,” “OMG” & “Cycle.”
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 Paste Magazine for a band description of all tracks on the new album.
Second-generation Jamaican, Floridian rapper Wahid shares his new EP ‘feast, by ravens’, out now. The EP includes singles “SOLSTICE” and “Mezcal”, both have seen praise from Dazed’s Only Tracks You Need To Hear, COLORSxSTUDIOS, CLASH Magazine’s Astral Realm and Okay player’s Round-Up. Last year’s two-track EP “WILT/CORNERSTONE” was his debut which landed him in Complex-Pigeons and Planes’ highly respected Best New Artists feature for their October edition.
Through Wahid’s sonic storytelling he refuses to submit to negativity and fatalism. His hip-hop collective had just wrapped their first national tour. Their DMs were flooded with A&Rs offering deals and producers looking to collaborate. Then the group split up. It was over before it even began. The ensuing depression was all-consuming. There were days where Wahid didn’t budge from bed, drawing the blinds closed, and numbing the wounds with bottle after bottle of liquor. Despite his best efforts to salvage the wreckage, none of his attempts yielded anything positive. But through the duress, he discovered his inner resilience and perseverance. The results are manifest on his debut Innovative Leisure EP, feast, by ravens – an artful refusal to submit, and a testimonial to the indomitability of the human spirit. The title of the project comes from the parable of Elijah in the Book of Kings.
If you’re looking for comparisons, let’s start with if Black Thought was born two decades later and raised in Central Florida by a Jamaican DJ father who raised his progeny on a booming system of rocksteady, dancehall and reggae dubplates. As a teenager in the late 00s, his older brother exposed him to the classics of hip-hop’s second Golden Age. As Wahid describes it: “Nas made me want to rap, listening to the GZA’s Liquid Swords made me good at it, and Black Thought helped me refine my skills.”
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.
Maria Chiara Argirò’s forthcoming album Closer is a testament to her journey of self-exploration, and a manifestation of her profound connection with music. Rooted in an indescribable feeling that compelled her to create, the album transcends boundaries and tranverses the spectrum of electronic music with unparalleled depth and clarity.
Today she’s shared Closer’s opener “Light” - an alluring and infectious synth-pop hit. Argiró says, "It’s about establishing a lighter and balanced relationship with your inner self and consequently with others. Connect genuinely with yourself and others by exploring life in a 'soft' and 'lighter' way, without the need to force things to happen.” The single comes with another immersive video from director Raoul Paulet who describes it, “A mesmerising and kaleidoscopic journey made of colourful and flashy street lights at night in London.”
Argirò has been a central figure in the UK electronic, jazz and classical worlds since she moved to London from Rome over a decade ago. A skilled pianist since childhood, she’s collaborated with everyone from These New Puritans to Jono McCleery to Jamie Leeming alongside output with Moonfish. Her previous solo album, the stunning electronic jazz-fusion record Forest City, received widespread critical acclaim from the likes of The Guardian, The Fader, Vogue, Rolling Stone and Pitchfork who described Maria's sound: "Hazy, downtrodden vocal harmonies blend with aquatic synth arpeggios that mirror the tide, like Azure Ray singing over Thom Yorke compositions." Her music has featured in the Netflix series, Elite, and she can count the likes of Four Tet and Gilles Peterson as fans, with the latter describing her music as “absolutely crazy good”.
The result of this journey, both sonic and personal, can be keenly felt on Closer. While it is definitely not a concept album, the record does mirror the path of inner self-exploration that Argirò has been on. Albeit moving in unpredictable ways, as it traverses the spectrum of electronic music spanning ambient to dance music, while also retaining light touches of jazz with a leaning towards experimental pop via Argirò’s more central and up-front vocals.
On the album, Maria says: “It is about a feeling, a dreamlike feeling in motion, a feeling that we cannot describe, a dream I’m sort of walking through. Emotions/dreams/feelings that sometimes you can just imagine, a dreamlike world where we walk through to get to the core of ourselves a bit more, even if things are completely undefined and blurry. While working on the music there was this strong feeling - at times blurry and at times more defined - of getting, with every single note, closer and closer to the person I want to be. Free. Curious and consequently Aware, Connected and Closer to the people I love. There is so much noise in this world, I think being direct, gentle, light, open and connected is the key.”
See Clash for more details about the single and forthcoming project.