November 2025 - A Night on Which Someone Else Got Down
Albums
Walter Astral - Éclipse
I hesitated to write about Walter Astral again so soon after the last time, but this album just kicks so much ass that I couldn’t help it. And it’s not like I ran out of things to say.
Most of the time, reading interviews in translation is pretty frustrating. Musicians tend to use lots of jargon and slang, so I find myself squinting at Google translations and just sort of hoping that the things I’m saying are like, true. Walter Astral doesn’t feel like that. Not because I trust Google any more for them than for anyone else, but because there’s a weird poetry in it. Sometimes because they actually are just being poetic (“I wander through the suburbs, the boulevards, searching for the grain. The artifact. It’s often very analog. Everything will come together at the end, crystallizing on the computer to make the edits”) and sometimes it just comes out mysterious and hilarious (“It’s incredibly reassuring to be able to — and I’m not minimizing it — but at least to fight something with the personification of a — shall we say, a ridiculous creature. A mental serpent. It’s funny! It’s amusing because at the time I’d never even had a panic attack. And then Tristan shows up with the text and says to me ‘so what do you think?’ I reply, ‘Maybe, I don’t know!’”
I really like that interview I linked above. The interviewer asks some good questions about the themes of the album (mental health, nature, technology, spiritualism) and also just rolls with their silliness.
I also found an answer to a question from last time. What did they mean about their instrument being a “defective banjo?”
I found it in an attic. I brought it back to life, affectionately calling it Banjy. I don't use it in the American style (like bluegrass), but rather for its slightly off-tune, semitone sounds, which you can find in the oriental or Hungarian music that we pepper our production with. It gives us a certain originality. I would have loved to use a serpent too, that instrument from ancient Rome, an imitation of which you can see in some of our photos, but it's very rare and incredibly expensive.
I’ll leave it here for now, except to say that if anyone living in Marseille wants to put me up next time Walter Astral plays there, I’d appreciate it.
Future Utopia - Django's High
The music industry is full of people like Fraser T. Smith, who’ve been in the industry for decades, working with the biggest names around, but never with their name on the album cover. If you look at his Wikipedia, you’ll learn that he wrote and produced for Adele, Sam Smith, Stormzy, Dave, and Idris Elba. I did a quick googling and found that he’s also worked with Britney Spears, Kasabian, Gorillaz, Florence and the Machine, and Arlo Parks, and I bet if I googled a little longer I’d find a lot more.
Smith has commented many times that his goal with Django’s High was to create a “psychedelic spaghetti-Western.” Every morning, he would get up, watch a Western (not always an Italian one, but who’s counting (I am)) and go write a song for the rest of the day. I’d say he definitely achieved what he was going for. I love it. It’s like if you stuck Tame Impala with just an acoustic guitar and some hand drums. Well, and a lot of effects pedals and stuff.
I haven’t seen a whole lot written about the album in general, and Smith doesn’t seem especially interested in grabbing the spotlight. As he said,
We are still unknown at the moment and that’s cool, that’s how it is for every band. If anything, I’m out there campaigning for people to get behind record shops and small venues and the smaller stages at festivals … I’m very fortunate, I’ve been doing this for 20 years producing other people and have a catalog that brings in a wage [but] making music should not be for the middle and upper classes.
He seems like a good egg.
Daughter of Swords - Alex
If you’ve been following Alex Sauser-Monnig for a while, this album might feel pretty left-field. Up until this point, their music has been pretty planted in folk territory (see their work in Mountain Man, The A’s, and their previous album as Daughter of Swords, Daybreaker). Alex is quite a departure. It’s much poppier, much more varied, and much stranger than anything they’ve done before. As they say here:
“The earnestness of protest music in the ’60s had its place, and it was appropriate to the moment,” they say, “but there’s no way to make a record that feels totally relevant that’s acoustic-guitar-based. I mean, I’m sure that there is, but I wanted to get away from that being the basis of the record. Before recording any acoustic guitar, I would ask the question, ‘What could do that instead?’ And it opened up so much room for other sounds.”
To me, the most striking thing about it - before I even knew that it was the person from Mountain Man - is how sharp-edged the production is. All these sounds feel like they’re launching at you out of nowhere. Sudden buzzing guitars, derpy piano lines, vocal harmonies - it feels like all these things were recorded in different rooms and slapped down on top of each other, like collage art.
It tackles some big themes: late-stage capitalism, environmental collapse, gender dysphoria, and others. I think it actually makes a certain amount of sense that Sauser-Monnig would be looking for a different way to approach these songs. These are modern problems, and it makes sense that they would be looking for a modern way to comment on them.
Saigon Soul Revival - Mối Lương Duyên
What would you guess was happening in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City, officially) before the Viet Cong took over in 1975? The region had been in conflict for decades. It wasn’t just the “Vietnam War” as we call it in the US, between the Viet Cong in the North and the US-backed Republic of Vietnam in the South, it was a series of conflicts with Japan, the US, the Viet Cong, the Viet Minh, and the French colonial military all playing various roles at various times, and all of those players influenced the culture of that cosmopolitan city. It wasn’t until the fall of Saigon that everything other than Vietnamese culture was expelled.
Sadly, banning all outside influence meant that a ton of cultural output was lost. That’s what Saigon Soul Revival is about. It’s about trying to recreate the energy and the cultural heritage of pre-1975 Vietnam.
In the West, we sometimes forget that electrified sound wasn’t just changing the face of music here, it was transforming music scenes around the world. Virtually any musician that got their hands on a Jimi Hendrix album would be influenced by it; it all just depended on the avenues the music took to reaching them and how available it was. See, for example, the explosion of funk music in the Congo following the Rumble in the Jungle in 1974. For Vietnam, they had been occupied by the French for generations, so there was a steady trickle of Western music all the time, but when the US stationed troops in Saigon, suddenly there was a huge population of GIs with Western tastes filling up the clubs. If you were a musician at the time, there would have been a tremendous incentive to find a sound that the Americans would be into, and a unique (and very complicated) moment of cultural contact.
If you’re curious, here’s a good collection of Vietnamese music recorded in the era. There isn’t a ton of it out there.
Lambrini Girls - Who Let the Dogs Out
Since I’ve already written about it once, I’ll refrain from re-describing the incredible Lambrini Girls show I went to last summer, except to say that if you haven’t seen them, you need to do that immediately.
Their debut album is pretty much exactly what I hoped. It’s loud, blisteringly political, and very very funny.
Obviously intersectional feminism is the core of what they do. I won’t bother picking apart the lyrics because they’re pretty frank, but it is worth mentioning how frequently they talk about the challenges of being women in rock music. I don’t think we have an exact translation of “lad culture” in the US - it might be something akin to “bro culture” with more sexism and less chugging - but Lambrini Girls talk extensively about how it manifests in the UK music scene. The ways in which women, trans people, and queer people are made to feel unwelcome and run up against higher bars to admission are clearly a source of frustration and rage for them.
I haven’t heard this talked about quite so much in the US lately. I’m sure it’s here, we just don’t have Lambrini Girls screaming about it the way we should.
Tracks
THOT SQUAD - HOES DEPRESSED
Thot Squad came to my attention through the video game Dispatch (which totally kicks ass) in which they play Prism, a villain-turned-hero whose powers involve light duplication in a way that I never quite understood, and who is also a pop singer. Thot Squad is a fantastic, hilarious voice actor, easily keeping up with the heavyweight acting talent in the game, which includes people like Aaron Paul, Jeffrey Wright, and Yung Gravy, but the game also does a pretty good job of hiding the ball with Prism. We don’t actually hear their music until an explosive fight scene half-way through the game, which makes it even more awesome when Prism is suddenly rapping and kicking the shit out of people at the same time.
I finished the game in one sitting and immediately went to find out who this Thot Squad person is. They’re a rapper from Flint, MI, and all their music is great. I’ll be keeping an eye out for a full album because right now it’s just a few singles.
While we’re here, I want to throw out a thanks to the producers of Dispatch for making use of Yung Gravy’s incredible speaking voice without making me listen to him rap.
Smerz - Big City Life
In a similar vein to Daughter of Swords’s Alex, Smerz’s Big city life is a fascinating concept of pop music production, with lots of buzzing, hard-edged sounds that feel like a collage. I actually love all four of the first tracks on this album. After that it becomes a little bit more traditional. Still interesting, but not as striking as the first few. What the hell did they do to those piano sounds?
Glyders - Maria’s Hunt
I love what the slide guitar adds to this track. It throws in a little bit of Western flair that sets it a bit apart from all the other psych rock I listen to all the time.
Pixel Grip - Bet You Do.
I absolutely loved Pixel Grip’s 2023 album, ARENA, and was super excited to hear this one too, Percepticide: The Death of Reality. It may not hit the highs of “ALPHAPUSSY” or “Dancing on Your Grave,” but it’s a very solid album of industrial-tinged dance music.
I saw them headlining this fall and was surprised to find that they took it in a kind of intellectual direction - it was arty and seemed to be a commentary on the “fake news” society we live in, in which no one can agree on what things are actually happening in the world. It was also awesome.
billylildove - She got the bomb
I wish I had more to tell you about this. billylildove doesn’t have much of an internet presence, and Google keeps insisting that I must be thinking of Billy Idol instead. Catchy though!
Feater - Money
This Feater album - also called Money - is a weird one. Every other track sounds like this: warm synths, tropical handdrums, sensual vocals, just what we need as winter sets in and I start fantasizing about all the beach-going I forgot to do over the summer. The other tracks sound like experimental musicians jamming and not quite getting anywhere.
If you’re willing to have your finger on the skip button, though, the album is a good one to have in your rotation.
Macadam Crocodile - Walk Faster
Gotta love that groove.
Loopa Scava, Cayetano, Pelina - Bel Epoque
There seems to be some kind of Mandela effect happening here. I could’ve sworn that this song plays in one of the opening scenes of the video game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, but clearly that’s not true. How did I find this, then?
Anyway, most of this album is in more of a lo-fi hip-hop vein. Not bad, but not all that interesting. This song, however, is lovely.
Boztown - Instant Playa
Since we’re talking about hip-hop anyway. This feels a bit like it belongs on Gramatik’s Beatz & Pieces Vol. 1, which you’ve been hearing in coffee shops every day since 2011.
NEIL FRANCES - dancing
What would happen if you put on a Jungle album and listened to it underwater? Maybe something like this track. The full album, There is no Neil Frances, isn’t bad, it should be more underwater.
Blondshell - Two Times
It’s a song about a relationship that’s unambiguously positive. There aren’t many of those on this blog, so you should enjoy it while it’s here.
Oracle Sisters - Asc. Scorpio
It’s pretty cute, right? I’m not much of a Zodiac guy, but according to Elle (is Elle known for horoscopes?), if you’re ascending Scorpio, you’re supposed to have “intense emotion, profound intuition, and a constant yearning for transformative connections.” That’s not exactly what I’m getting from this song, but again, I’m not a Zodiac guy.
Bartosz Kruczyński - Dream I
If you’re into this, the album Dreams & Whispers is definitely worth a listen. It’s the kind of pretty soundscape that I’d like to experience while lying on the floor on a yoga mat, looking at crazy murals in a former Masonic Temple.
Broadcast - Come Back to Me [Demo]
Warp Records released two collections of demos by the band Broadcast last year. This one, Distant Call - Collected Demos 2000-2006, and another, Spell Blanket - Collected Demos 2006-2009. It’s haunting and beautiful, and I think the lo-fi recording adds some intimacy to the sound.
Silas Short - L-TRAIN
That piano line is so great.
Σtella - Omorfo Mou
If you had to guess, what would you think Σtella’s bangs look like? It seems like she’s best known for a collaboration she did with Redinho called Up and Away, but I think her best tracks are her own. See also “Girl Supreme.”
The Voidz - Blue Demon
Until recently, Julian Casablancas’s side project, The Voidz, sounded pretty similar to what you’d expect from the former vocalist of The Strokes. Not this album, though.
Hyperpop can be tough business for me, and MęĞż øF rÅm is an EP that I can only listen to in bits and chunks, even though it’s great. I like this track a lot, and I don’t mind the word salad lyrics, but it’s so distracting when he says “Like a brother, different mother.”
Etran De L'Aïr - Imouha
I haven’t had any West African music in here in a while, so here’s a reminder that there’s a fantastic electric guitar sound happening over there.
Kumo 99 - Four Point Steel Star
There’s a lot of good stuff on the album Body N. Will, but I can only take so much. I bet it slays live though. See also, “Gelus” from Headplate.
Molly Tuttle - Everything Burns
There aren’t enough bluegrass songs out there about arson.
Saya Gray - SHELL ( OF A MAN )
Based on the song title, I would never have guessed that this is an acoustic guitar song. Go figure. Saya Gray is weird, but I wish she was still as weird as when she did 19 Masters.
Starwolf - Get Down Tonight
As I write this, alone at my desk at 5pm on a Sunday in late November, headphones on, merely hoping that someone will read this blog tomorrow morning and listen to 20 seconds of the first 3 recommendations I’m making here before Todd in Product Management sends them a message on Microsoft Teams asking for help because he can’t figure out how to send a pdf on Microsoft Teams, I consider how someone else out there is likely preparing to get down tonight, and they probably aren’t listening to this space-disco track. Alas. Would that we could trade places, but I suppose we all have our role to play: them, Todd in Product Management, my readers, and me. I can but take some small solace in that tonight I wrote the blog while someone else got down. I suppose that we will all have our turn eventually.