July 2025 - Druids, Nature, and Unrelatedly, Indian-Heritage Hip-Hop
Albums
Walter Astral - Hyperdruide
Man, you just never know what you’re going to find. Electronic musicians tend to be a little boring to read about, and Walter Astral is French, so I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to find anything on the English internet at all, but I read several versions of their bio and all of them conclude by saying something like this:
Walter Astral is a celestial explorer, roaming through parallel universes, and diving down wormholes hidden in gigantic sequoias. Stars living in the trees, candle-shaped men, witches and druids, these and other creatures accompany Walter Astral on his transcendental journey.
So, ok, that’s an angle. Apparently, when they were recording this EP out in the countryside, they woke up one morning and realized that they had the same dream in which a guy named Walter Astral came to visit them on his “three-masted ship” and asked them to become his apprentices. At first I thought maybe the whole thing was a bit, given the whole “Hyperdruide” thing, or that something was getting lost in translation, but as I learned from this awesome interview, they do, in fact, consider themselves Druids:
Tino : …One of the first principles of the druids is to abandon one's ego in favor of nature. The fairly basic idea of "I am not an individual at the center of nature but rather I am nature at the heart of nature." *to Tristan* By the way, I don't know if you remember your druidic sign. I'm a poplar, and in fact, there are trees with which you can develop more or less affinities depending on your Celtic sign. I'm a poplar.
Tristan : I think I'm pine.
Tino : Aren't you an ash?
Tristan : Oh no, I'm a pine tree. I loved it because I really like this tree.
Tino : And yeah, so you can have a special relationship with this type of tree, this species of tree. And have more dialogue. That's why druids do a lot of... either hugging trees or talking. People will say... but what I'm saying is serious!
So I don’t think it is a joke after all, or at least not completely. They talk about druidism and astrology fairly seriously, even though they clearly have a sense of humor about it (which, come to think of it, is true of most neo-pagans I’ve met). I would recommend that everyone go to their Instagram immediately and check out their entire “How to Druide” series. You don’t need to know French to get it.
Before I started researching these guys, I loved this album, but now I love their whole deal, so, so much. All their music videos are incredible, and they’ve got a full length album called Éclipse that I haven’t even heard yet, apart from yet another hilarious music video. I can’t wait to see what else Walter has going on on his three-masted ship.
Haley Heynderickx - Seed of a Seed
The imagery running through Seed of a Seed - and the previous album, I Need to Start a Garden - is plant and earth juxtaposed with modern tech. It makes sense as a language for a folk artist to talk about modern life, and I find the mentions of texting and social media both melancholy and funny. I won’t give you too much more flowery language about the content of this album because her official website already does way more than enough of that. It’s a folk album about the complexities of being a simple human in the modern world. There, done.
The vast majority of the interviews I’ve found with Heyndrickx are from her tour for I Need to Start a Garden, which is kind of unfortunate because so much of what she talks about is her own lack of confidence. Now that she’s been around for a few years, I think it would be interesting to hear about her process and how she thinks about her art in general. I did find one interesting nugget in this interview, however:
“…Sometimes, I feel (the audience) talking to me,” Heynderickx said. “They have more of an idea of me than noticing the person that’s in front of them. … I guess I’m beginning to see the changes (in) perception (of me by my audience) over time, but I also know it’s just reflections of how they’ve experienced music,” Heynderickx said. “Honestly, when people come up to me, I see them talking to themselves, talking to ideas that they’ve had with music, and I get to view a weird medium vehicle of them reflecting back to themselves.
There’s a lot to unpack there, and unfortunately the article doesn’t take the time to explore the way she seems to think that she disappears in front of her own audience. Is it that she thinks the audience doesn’t understand what she’s trying to say or that they don’t see her at all? Or is it more that she provides a space for them to contemplate and is happy to step away? I wish I knew.
At any rate, the world of Seed of a Seed is well worth exploring. It’s beautiful, vulnerable, and funny, and as a side-note: Heyndrickx is not a stage name. Apparently it’s the 17th most common surname in Belgium. I didn’t know!
GIFT - Illuminator
The themes of Illuminator make a lot of sense for the music: dreams, memory, and the desire to stop time. “Wish Me Away” in particular, was written when vocalist-guitarist TJ Freda’s sister was in a car crash. It wasn’t deadly, but it shook everyone involved. He drove from New York to Boston to be with her, thinking about impermanence and wondering whether he was doing the things with his life that he cared about. Shortly thereafter, he quit his day job (literally).
Between GIFT’s first album, Momentary Presence, and this one, the band went from being more or less a solo project to a quintet, and I think you can hear the complexity of the music expand as a result. In terms of genre, Illuminator sits somewhere between psych-rock, dream pop, and (people have argued) shoegaze (I don’t hear it, but a lot of people do, so [shrug]). It’s at once dreamy, poppy, groovy, introspective, fuzzy, and loud. It’s such a cohesive sound that you wouldn’t think it would lead to argument about how to categorize it, but here we are.
I'm seeing a trend toward this kind of psych-rock sound, with its washed out vocals and fuzzy guitars, but I haven’t figured out if that’s a real trend or if its just where my tastes sit right now. When people talk about The Algorithm, they usually have a specific one in mind - Spotify, Netflix, Hinge - but I think we need another concept as well, for a meta-algorithmic emergent system, in which our online behaviors function in aggregate to push us into a specific taste category. There’s such a thing as “data connectivity” companies, which is kind of a grey market in which companies can purchase users’ history on other platforms in order to drive their own recommendations, but I think that as individuals we’re also ushered into a behavior/thought/cultural pattern by all of our various behaviors reinforcing one another indirectly, including social influences, both online and irl since one inevitably drives the other. It doesn’t seem like anyone has settled on a formal term for this, but there’s been some writing on the subject by people like Taina Bucher and Eli Pariser. I, uh… haven’t read it, but um… maybe I will. Someday.
Ahem. Right. Ok, why am I talking about this? Oh, it’s because I’ve been noticing a trend in psych-rock when apparently there’s a whole shoegaze renaissance going on.
As for GIFT themselves, they’re cagey about genre, but I think the psych-rock thing is there.
Last thought: in the process of researching this blurb, I watched the video for “Wish Me Away” and went down a mini-rabbit hole trying to figure out who this William SIbley guy is because he’s amazing as the butler character. I’m not sure if I’ve really figured it out, but maybe it’s as simple as he says: “I’m never booked as a dancer person but as a character who dances.”
Heems, Lapgan - LAFANDAR
I knew from the get-go that there would be too much to say about Heems. You may know him from his time in Das Racist, the band that brought us the cultural touchstone, “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.” I’ll take a moment to say that I think the mixtape Sit Down, Man is criminally underrated. That happens a lot with comedy-rap, and I guess it isn’t exact hard-hitting stuff apart from being a meta-commentary on rap itself, but you can’t argue with the flow.
From “All Tan Everything”:
All brown skin; Young Melanin
Melle Mel, melding malleable my metal shit
All tan man, Mantan Moreland
Demand more land, more ends, more land
…
Yo fool, break yourself from your Pro Tools
Plus your Fruity Loops, new dance, do the booty droop
On to the next one: now, do the booty scoop
Do the booty up, do the booty-ooty-alley-oop
Scooby-Dooby doo on the Bally so my fanny's cute
I'm my own identical cousin, just call me Patty Duke
I'm stuntin' like my daddy do
"Thug Life" right above my Natty Ice tatty too… stupid
I’ll take that over someone like Offset or Lil Yachty any day of the week.
But ok, Das Racist broke up in 2012. Let’s move on.
Heems is a 2nd generation immigrant of Punjabi-Indian descent from Queens, and since his time in Das Racist, he’s gone out of his way to incorporate elements of his heritage into his music. Most obviously, he gravitates toward producers who specialize in samples of Indian music (for an obvious example, see Swet Shop Boys’ “T5” which is also a commentary on the experience of people with brown skin in America). That heritage is essential in the lyrics, and in particular the juxtaposition of Indian cultural imagery with that of the NYC “melting pot” (I’m putting that in quotes because I’m not sure whether this album embraces the term or belies it - Is he implying that NYC is a hybrid culture or is it more of a mosaic in which the pieces retain their identity?).
Oh, you the goat? I'm eating goat biryani for dinner
Yo, I'm a winner, I'm more vain now that I'm thinner
My dough nuts, ich bin ein Berliner
I'm in a Sprinter, you just a beginner
Gwap, stretch like yoga, I flow like Vinyasa
I'm at the crib watching Pyasa with the Rasta
I'm eating pasta, a little kielbasa
With a Dominican girl named Yocasta
There are also a number of tracks that are more overtly political.
And the plans dried up and you're out of tears
And your visa ran out so you're out of years
And how does my accent sound when I'm crying?
How does my accent sound when I'm dying?
Heems has a lot of interesting things to say about the place of South Asian culture and South Asian people in hip-hop, especially in this interview with Passioneweiss. He’s done some activist work himself, like working with SEVA to set up a community center with a recording studio and publicly supporting South Asian candidates for New York offices.
There’s a lot going on with Heems and on this album in particular, but it’s also the best rapping I’ve heard him do in years, with fantastic production hooks to boot. Whether you want to think about the Indian diaspora or not, you will definitely be bobbing your head.
St. Vincent - All Born Screaming
Unlike many music journalists, I’m going to avoid the temptation to recap every album St. Vincent has ever done, one by one. There’s 10 of them, guys, c’mon.
However, it is worth pointing out the ways in which All Born Screaming is different from what came before. When I first heard it, I remember commenting that some of her music is a little too intellectual for me, and that this album feels a bit more immediate and powerful. As it turns out, that’s not an accident. It’s the first album she’s written without a character to perform through. As she says:
On previous records, I was dissecting the idea of persona and using persona to liberate my subconscious from whatever, which I've realized makes perfect sense because I'm queer. I know how to code switch. I've been aware that gender is performance and all that, since I was a child. This record, it's not about persona or anything, it's just kind of life and death, and life is impossible, but we get to live it. And it's really fucking short, and we are all we got, and people we love are all we got. So it's in some ways easier to talk about because it's kind of dead simple.
It’s not surprising that the album was written and recorded during the height of the pandemic and shortly thereafter. A lot of us were dealing with isolation, grief, and fear at that time, and the idea of her sitting by herself for hours trying to get the right take of a vocal line from “Hell Is Near” resonates with the tone of the album. As she says: “I was dealing with a lot of loss and literal life and death. … Death is very clarifying because you go, ‘This matters, this doesn’t’. To me, the first half of the record is base – whether it’s death or destruction or your own inner monologue of brutal self-loathing where you’re staring into the void, like, ‘Life is impossible’ – and then the second half is, ‘Well we get to fucking live it, so let’s grab it by the jugular.’”
All that said, it’s also one of her most listenable albums. It’s heavy and dark, for sure, but it also has a simplicity and directness that the previous albums didn’t. Or to put it as my partner did as we were driving around listening to it, “It’s makeout music. Very pretentious makeout music.”
Tracks
Yame, Arsanit - I Love You Fantomas
For a long time I was very confused because I would listen to this song and the few snatches of lyrics I caught seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with the band Fantômas. I still haven’t managed to find the lyrics written down anywhere, but I did learn that Fantômas actually refers to an arch-villain in French fiction who appeared in 32 novels from 1911-1963, as well as 3 films from 1964-1967. As you can surmise from those numbers, it was a hugely popular franchise, and is thought to represent a transition from the Gothic novels of 19th century fiction to modern day fictional serial killers and supervillains. I’ll note that even though the films have a lighter tone than the novels, he’s not like our modern anti-heroes, who resort to questionable methods to pursue noble goals; he’s a ruthless, merciless, self-serving murderer.
Ok, well… I’m still not sure what that tells us about this track, which is wonderfully silly and catchy, but it does give me another movie to put on my list.
Jessica Winter - Nirvana
When I first put on Jessica Winter’s new album My First Album, “Nirvana” made me think I was in for a wildly ambitious debut that would blow me away. It turns out that it’s more of an electropop affair, a la Jesse Ware or early Lady Gaga. There’s nothing wrong with that (I actually loved The Fame, Born This Way, and What’s Your Pleasure?), and “L.O.V.E.” is pretty fun, but I wish it reached the highs of her seasick “Do You Do You” or the pumping “All I Need.” Nonetheless, this track slaps, and we can hope that there’s more like this to come.
corook, Olivia Barton - if i were a fish
corook has the distinction of having gone viral on TikTok twice. First for “It’s OK!” and again for this song, “if i were a fish” (I’m linking to YouTube instead of TikTok because that’s where the full-length videos live, and because a lot of people say “TikTok, ew”). It’s pretty adorable both as a song and because you see her sing it with her girlfriend in her living room. And honestly, I just kinda like her kindercore vibe.
Party Dozen - Coup de Gronk
Crime in Australia is a weird album, full of fantastic grooves that only sometimes go anywhere, and often go on so long that they become downright annoying. Sometimes it sounds like some guys screwing around and publishing the 3rd draft instead of the final one, and I’m not sure exactly what the situation would be in which you listen to it. It’s way too hard to put on at a party, too repetitive to sit and listen to alone, too distracting for a late-night drive. That said, every track on the album has at least one section that I love, and the grooves are undeniable, especially on “Coup de Gronk,” “Wake in Might,” and “Money & Drugs.”
Killer Mike, Anthony Hamilton - NOBODY KNOWS
A few months ago, I was chatting with a bartender about Killer Mike (who you may know from Run the Jewels - if you don’t, you should), and he commented, “Yeah, I mean, he’s great, but I find it tough to take him seriously now that he’s all about that ‘pull yourself up by your bootsraps’ shit. Like ‘oh yeah, anyone can become a millionaire just like me, just don’t sell crack like I did.’ Or maybe he does think you should do that? I don’t know. Sure, Mike, whatever.” I can’t disagree, but hey, the man can rap.
Kutiman, Elif Çağlar - Remotely Close: Silkyway
Kutiman has a lot of great stuff out there - check out his YouTube mashup series “Thru-you” and his track “Mix Tel Aviv.” I don’t know much about Elif Çağlar, except that she’s a very accomplished Turkish jazz musician who won the Radyo Boğaziçi Music Award for best jazz singer at ages 11 and 13. I won’t lie to you, I have no idea what the Radyo Boğaziçi Music Awards are, but it certainly sounds impressive, and she’s worked with some very cool musicians that I do recognize, like Aaron Parks, Harish Raghavan and Eric Harland. This track is funky, sultry, and a little psychedelic, which is what I’m coming to expect out of the contemporary Turkish music that comes to the West. See: Kit Sebastian, Gaye Su Akyol.
TEED, Moulinex - So Alive
I just love these sounds. I think I’m on a major-chord modular synth kick these days.
DARKSIDE - Graucha Max
DARKSIDE is one of those bands - they have a TON of good stuff, but I just can’t find an entire album I like. Gotta love that crunchy keyboard though.
Les Big Byrd - Curved Light
I was surprised to learn that Les Big Byrd has two of the former members of Caesars (aka Caesar’s Palace), who gave us a ton of great singles like “Jerk It Out” and “Crackin’ Up,” and who sound absolutely nothing like this. Those tracks are masterpieces of short-form alt-rock/pop but “Curved Light” is a slow burn, hypnotic and lovely.
Wunderhorse - Rain
It feels like Wunderhorse is moving away from the more indie rock-y sound they had on their first album, Cub. This track is a great example of where I’d like to see them go. Grunge, basically. I think maybe we need more grunge, just in general.
Chinese American Bear - Kids Go Down (孩子们的时光)
A lot of my favorite pop tracks have this quality in which I’m completely sure that I’ve heard them before, except where could that possibly have been?
Chinese American Bear’s vocalist, Anne Tong, breaks it down as much as I ever could: “It’s meant to be bright, happy, child-like, and fun to dance to, with nonsensical lyrics that doesn’t have deep meaning. The verses actually reference a Chinese children’s nursery rhyme and it means ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5, climb a mountain to kill a tiger, count with me, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.’ I thought it would be fun to share a very familiar childhood nursery rhyme with a western audience and connect with the Chinese diaspora who may have heard this when they were younger.”
WOOZE - Sabre Tooth Spider
Someday, I swear, WOOZE will make a full album that I can go to bat for. It’s not their self-titled, but given the strength of “Hello Can You Go,” “I’ll Have What She’s Having,” and this indie-sleaze bop, that moment will definitely come. You know, probably.
Backxwash - Wake Up
Only Dust Remains is not an easy album to love. It’s a challenging experience, with verses that touch on death, personal pain, and political trauma. It’s well worth the journey, and surprisingly warms up as it goes along, but it takes a brave ear to reach the end.
Rialto - No One Leaves This Discotheque Alive
I don’t have a lot to say about this track beyond what the title promises, but what else do you need? The history of Western music has had few better titles than this.
Project Gemini - Colours & Light
70’s psych-rock revival rules, especially during the relentless summer heatwaves we’ve got going right now.
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Joe Goddard - Neptunes
It would be an exaggeration to say that modular synth goddess Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith has turned a corner - her stuff is still pretty freakin’ weird - but this collaboration with Joe Goddard (from Hot Chip) is considerably more accessible that anything she’s done before. The breakdown in the middle of the track is very KAS, and the central groove is very Goddard, so together it’s pretty well-balanced.
Glowal - Open the Gate
If you liked “I Love You Fantomas,” you’ll also like this Glowal track, but maybe a little bit less.
TOROZEBU - Ox
This is a collaboration between the percussionist Domenico Candellori and Clap! Clap!, a producer who seems to really like percussion. The result is a lot of percussion. In a good way, though.
Silverbacks - Selling Shovels
According to vocalist Daniel O’Kelly, this song is about his tendency to jump straight to the part of wikipedia articles about how historical figures died. I guess the line “I always jumped straight to the part about how they died” kinda gives that away. Silverbacks is kind of a hybrid art-rock/indie band, a lot of which I find a little too gentle, but I love this twanging guitar line.
Alice Longyu Gao - Little Piggy
Assembling Symbols Into My Own Poetry surprised me. Typically, Alice Longyu Gao’s hyperpop is a little too abrasive for me, but a lot of this album is the opposite - not nearly abrasive enough. However, Gao does nail the balance on this track and “<3 Korean Girls.” I also like “yAPPER,” but it’s for a completely different set of reasons. If nothing else, it’s an album that makes me curious about the next one.
Bloto - Shiitake
Not to be confused with the many bands named Bluto, Bloto is a Polish contemporary jazz band with a lot of hip-hop influence. This track comes from an album called Grzybnia, which translates as “Mycelium.” I’ll summarize the 6-paragraph blurb on the album’s bandcamp page:
[Grzybnia] emphasizes the importance of cooperation as a fundamental skill that can yield various results (fruits, fungi)—both good and bad. Above all, it underscores the power of collective action beyond divisions. … In a complex, unstable modern world that is breaking apart into pieces, the concept of mycelium offers a powerful model. … A single mushroom, like a person, dies, but mycelium endures, much like humanity itself. Thus, similar to culture, it is immortal. … The Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk noted in her book Primeval and Other Times that… … In the same way, Latarnik, Cancer G, Wuja HZG, and OlafSaxx, through their collaboration, process cultural products to create… … The result of this work is both edible and poisonous mushrooms, manifested in the form of fat beats, house, spiritual jazz, improvised music, illbient, organic techno, and genre-defying electronics. … The peak mushroom season in Poland occurs in autumn, which is why Grzybnia will be released on October 10, 2024, via Astigmatic Records.
K. Gonna go look up “illbient” now tho.
Pixey - Give a Little of Your Love
I find this combination of dreamy production and sugary melody lines pretty charming. I also like “Man Power” from the same album, Million Dollar Baby.
iskwē, Nina Hagen - I Get High
Oom, bala-boom-ba boom-oom-oom.
Sofi Tukker, Kah-Lo - Woof
Sofi Tukker is probably the only band that came to my attention because they were on a billboard. It’s surprising that a band with such wonky, angular grooves would reach that level of fame, but I guess that’s what happens when you’re featured in FIFA 18 and an iPhone commercial. They even won a Grammy for “Drinkee,” a tropical house track sung entirely in Portugese, based on a poem by a Brazilian poet named Chacal. Idk man, the world is weird these days.
But, if someone is going to hit that level of fame, I’m glad it’s someone with an interesting aesthetic, doing music I actually like. See also: “Purple Hat,” “Best Friend.”
TOKiMONSTA - Corazón / Death by Disco Pt 2
Disco house!
Gotta love TOKiMONSTA. I haven’t been following her very closely these last few years, but she’s always done great stuff. Personally, I have very fond memories of “The Center,” which was one of my favorite tracks to listen to in 2013 or so, while tripping on mushrooms with my ex.
HanuMankind, Kalmi - Big Dawgs
It’s not a complicated song, but that beat is killer. HanuMankind is a portmanteau of “mankind” and the Hindu deity “Hanuman.” HanuMankind is on the rise right now, and his album Monsoon Season features people like Fred Again…, A$AP Rocky, and Denzel Curry. I… don’t like it very much, but it’s got this track on it, and who know what he’ll do next.
Thumpasaurus - Struttin’
Yep. Fight me.