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LP is Gatefold Jacket + Download Card.

CD is 4 Panel Digipack.

Rotterdam’s Iguana Death Cult hasn’t exactly been shy about causing havoc on whatever stage they set foot. That’s likely been the one constant since establishing their giddy brand of protopunk and garage rock on debut LP The First Stirrings Of Insect Life. Iguana’s pending follow-up Nude Casino marks a swift and sobering departure from the miasma of psychedelics they purvey so fervently. But no less intense: this band has been sharpening their tools, reemerging from their concrete cavern with a ragged and convulsive post-punk attack akin to Devo, The Gun Club, and Richard Hell.

Nude Casino sporadically evokes Iguana Death Cult’s more hedonistic tendencies, but the album’s crisper, more unvarnished sonic makeup illustrates a seething skepticism as a counterbalance. Frontman Jeroen Reek finds himself teetering in demented neurosis between vivid dream states and stark reality. The album’s beating heart is ‘Tuesday’s Lament’, an arresting five-chapter monologue that wrestles with the strains of mortality and belief. As Reek narrates the invasion of existing evils into his phantasmagorical, aquatic dream world, somehow, Iguana Death Cult manage to jam it all into a belter of a melodic hook: “Swimming upstream for the sake of paradise, it’s up there still.” A bashful resolution, albeit one that balances on the edge of fatalism.

Adding a touch of sobriety, both sonically and lyrically, hasn’t stifled Iguana Death Cult daredevil ways the slightest. The mighty triptych of ‘Nude Casino’, ‘Bright Lights’ and ‘Lorraine’ was pretty much written simultaneously, a testament to the off-the-chain chemistry the Dutch quintet has developed over the years. Axe-wielder Tobias Opschoor once again brandishes his resourcefulness for licks that penetrate the skull with charm and impertinence. He is the brains behind Nude Casino’s manic, climax-building pinnacle ‘Nature Calls’, a juggernaut of a track that ironically captures a yearning to drift away from the civilized world. Though more grounded in reality, sonically speaking, ‘Nature Calls’ might be the closest kin to the more surrealist pronouncements of First Stirrings.

Playing an abundance of shows – at small clubs, squats and festivals such as The Great Escape, Lowlands, c/o pop, Plissken and Reeperbahn – has whipped Iguana into even more ferocious live band, and that experience carries over in the recordings. The tandem of Justin Boer (bass) and Arjen van Opstal (drums) is still the engine that drives the group’s helter-skelter horsepower. Jimmy de Kok adds a new melodic dynamic, assaulting the neurons with feverish organs and synths. With yet another erratic element in the fold, Nude Casino invokes something more claustrophobic and barren, tackling themes like sleep paralysis (‘Half Frisian’) and lost innocence (‘Castle In The Sky’).

Indeed, Iguana Death Cult isn’t gleefully surfing that mighty tidal wave anymore, but giving in to destructive currents that enwrap everything in chaos. Nude Casino is an intrusive, spastic affair, streamlined into a propellant, hook-heavy yomps, never more obvious than the cadaverous disco pulse of ‘Carnal Beat Machine’. Like The Clash and Minutemen before them, Iguana Death Cult have embraced the art of rocking the fuck out with all senses and impulses up to eleven. Rapturously sinking in their claws, and never letting go.

2LP is Gatefold Jacket, Custom Inner Sleeves + Download Card.

CD is Jewel Case.

In a world where art is compromised and commodified, shrunk down and boxed in, Vicktor Taiwò wants us to open up. The vibrant young singer-songwriter traffics in subtle hints and soaring melodies, slow creeps and grand climaxes. Taiwò is on a mission to collect something from himself, and it’s a journey worth following.

It is the frigid winter of the year 2000 and Vicktor Taiwò, an eight year old, accompanied by his mother and siblings, arrive in East London after leaving behind the visceral warmth of Abeokuta, Nigeria behind. Raised in a Christian home, his exposure to performing music came as it does for many with gifted vocal ability; honing skills and crafting harmonies in church choirs.

Years forward and disillusioned by his decision to study Law & Business at university, Vicktor Taiwò makes a choice that alters the course of his life permanently. After encouragement from friends and a brief stint as a frustrated photographer, Taiwò decides on January 1, 2012 precisely - as he does with most things - that he would make music his medium.

Once he started uploading his songs online, listeners caught on quickly. Without label or publisher, he found himself synced on shows like Girls and Dear White People. JUNO, Vicktor’s self-released debut EP, was met with praise by the likes of Vice, Billboard, and Okayplayer for its lean, focused approach to song structure, and for its withering, poetic lyrics.

Even at such an early stage in his development, Taiwò was finding angles that most songwriters would neglect. “At this point, all I really think there is for humans to do is to explore detail,” he says. “To see how infinite an infinitely expanding universe really is, and how small the smallest particle really is.”

His debut album, Joy Comes in Spirit, is at once experimental and comforting – collected shards of soul and style reassembled into something entirely new. Due out on Innovative Leisure, the record introduces a bold new artist willing to take musical and lyrical risks, and to bare himself to an international audience. The result is an arresting, unforgettable work that shrugs off the expectations we have that musicians fit easily into recognizable molds.

A fearless writer, on “Letters I Wrote,” Taiwò opens with a remarkable scene: “If you never see sunlight again / And the sun turns black and makes you so afraid / Can you find the light within to fight the night?” It’s a note to self of course; from Joy Comes in Spirit’s first note, Vicktor is mining his own psyche for its dark depths and hidden crevices, demanding from himself the sort of emotional reaction his work incites in others.

Songs like “Subducta. Psalm 69,” a seven-minute, multi-part epic, echo contemporary hip-hop; “tDS (Surf)” seems designed to be sung around campfires in the distant future; “Supernatural Women” traces 808s & Heartbreak back to its Zappian roots. And “Summon,” one of the record’s highlights, is like if you trapped a troubled spirit in a GameBoy Colour.

Vicktor Taiwò is emotionally complex. His album’s beautiful closer, “Morning Joy,” is redemptive, an optimistic look toward better days. It’s hard not to be optimistic in the face of Taiwò’s talent, the kind of which is rarely harnessed so seamlessly, and at such a young age. He’ll be an artist of consequence for years to come, no matter what outside forces threaten to block his path.

LP is Standard Jacket, Custom Inner Sleeve & Download Card.

CD is 4 Panel Digipack.

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Dennis Gabor once claimed that, “the future can’t be predicted, but it can be invented.” He died right as the synthesizer came into vogue, but still somehow aptly described Zoospa, the first full-length innovation from J-E-T-S.

J-E-T-S is Jimmy Edgar and Travis Stewart (Machinedrum), two of the past decade’s most versatile and protean producers, who have artfully glided through techno, house, IDM, bass, hip-hop, R&B, and pop without being pinned down to any one of them. Their only

commitment has been to lucidly fuse the mutant strains of the past into the vaguelyfamiliar present. No ideas are original, but they’re singularly creative artists who could only comfortably exist in modern chaos, the strange invented future.

Released on Innovative Leisure, Zoospa is fiercely cohesive but wildly varied. It’s a group effort casting a wide net of brilliant collaborators (DAWN, Mykki Blanco, KingJet,

Rochelle Jordan, Tkay Maidza), but ultimately guided by the auteur visions of Edgar and Machinedrum. If many all-time great duos are guided by a competitive rivalry, J-E-T-S discard that sensibility to form a unified whole. If not in sound, they channel the two-heads-one-brain spirit of a more danceable Autechre or Outkast raised on the Belleville Three and first wave IDM. If you heard Timbaland and The Neptunes in 1999, this is what you’d expect pop music to sound like 20 years later.

The genesis of J-E-T-S fittingly dates back nearly two full decades. Machinedrum and Edgar first meet as teenagers on a pivotal trip to Miami, one of their first-ever gigs outside of the places they were raised (Edgar originally hails from Detroit, Machinedrum

from rural North Carolina). They immediately bonded over a mutual love of Warp, Schematic Records, and Chocolate Industries. A tight friendship was forged when both lived in New York, but their first self-titled EP wouldn’t drop until 2012, by the time the pair had independently decamped to Berlin.

Eventually, they relocated to Los Angeles where their second EP was recorded in 2015. The idea was always to record something bigger and more expansive, but it wouldn’t become a reality until Edgar headed up the coast, eventually settling and building a home studio in Portland. That’s where Machinedrum headed in the late summer of 2017 to cook up the tracks that eventually became Zoospa.

In the first three days of recording, the pair wrote four songs and expanded their conception of what they were capable of. The spontaneous alchemical ease with which they created could only come from being long-time kindred spirits. Zoospa is the product of a constant search to discover the new. Whenever a session became rote, they’d experiment with a unique format or a different process—whether it was spending an entire day making samples, tinkering with a modular synth, or processing and building drum kits. The result is an album that sounds like little else: an organic creation of sacred rituals and wild, ungovernable energy.

There is “Potions,” which chops and warps the militaristic funk that Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis once supplied for Janet Jackson. It’s what Rihanna should be asking her A&Rs for her next album: 32nd Century bass music with huge drums offering the propulsion and thrust that SpaceX is permanently seeking. “Fire Fly” is both gothic and gauzy, with pop synthesizers crushed into purple cosmic dust. The album was produced in layers, starting with basic tracks that sounded like futuristic R&B, but then deconstructed and assembled with vintage instruments—encoded with a new DNA that can’t be decrypted.

“Look Out” is a slice of post-trap futuristic R&B with a traditional hip-hop breakdown that almost recalls vintage turntablism. “Play” features exotic percussion and Mykki Blanco breathing fire like the ideal soundtrack to a reboot of Paris is Burning. “Ocean PPL” answers the question what would Aaliyah sound like in 2019. While “Real Truth” synthesizes jerkin’, ratchet, hyphy and dance music into something that resembles the avant-garde hip-hop beats that Edgar and Machinedrum have made for Vince Staples and Azealia Banks.

Yet the proceedings feel quintessentially different and skewed from anything past or present. 808 drum rolls are warped and bent. Old samples offer a gritty sound. The melodies incorporate ambient and new age synths. Effects from the ‘70s and ‘80s offer welcomed scuffs and creases. This is the world of J-E-T-S, a hybridization of different and distinct ideas, fearless, fast-paced and full of telepathic communication, but playful and without pretension. The future we’d dreamed about, not the one that we deserved.