Homework are a band that never really set out to be a band in the traditional sense. They didn’t emerge from a polished plan or a scene with capital letters. No, Homework began as two blokes playing acoustic guitars in a public park during lockdown. It was lo-fi from day one. An act of quiet rebellion wrapped in rusted strings and awkward rhythms. Yet, what started as a pandemic pastime has grown into one of Glasgow’s most thrilling new indie outfits.
The group consists of Michael Newton (guitar and vocals), Santiago Taberna (guitar and vocals), Andrew Gordon (bass and vocals) and Lizzie Quirke (drums and percussion). They’re all fully committed slackers with proper jobs, and that tension, between the everyday and the transcendental, is written into every riff and rhythm. Theirs is a sound carved out in cramped practice spaces with cherished guitars and gear that works when it feels like it. This is fuzz pop held together with duct tape and dreams. It is volatile and warm, heartfelt and sarcastic. A band built by hand, in every sense.
Homework wear their love of Pavement, Yo La Tengo, Sonic Youth and Teenage Fanclub proudly. These are reference points, sure, but they’re never just pastiche. This is not homage. It is inheritance. And for a band made up of adopted Glaswegians, that connection to the city is crucial. Glasgow is in the jokes, the gear failures, the offhand lyrics and the community. Their New Year’s Eve support slot for none other than Norman Blake of the Fanclub wasn’t just a gig. It was a quiet, weird triumph.
They are now two EPs deep and I think it’s fair to say Homework have created a world that feels immediately familiar but never boring. They have a very democratic band structure with no one claiming frontperson title and Santiago, Michael and Andrew all writing songs. No frontperson. No ego. Just beautifully democratic DIY chaos.
I asked the band what first brought them together.
“Pavement and our drummer friend Forbes who brought together the first band iteration, which included Michael and Santiago. After Covid hit, they both kept the project alive and eventually, through a series of connections via our web of Glasgow music, Lizzie and Andrew joined in consolidating the current quartet.”
“We’re also first and foremost pretty good friends that get along and love music, collaborating creatively and having a pint. Our sense of humour is shared, as is our drive to keep things scrappy, loose, yet heartfelt and fun. Slacker ethos we suppose.”
Their first release was an expression of that very ethos. The Homework EP was released back in 2023. Let’s dive in and give it a spin.
The opener ‘If You Believe Me is the perfect introduction to the band. Immediately you get the sense they’re not trying to impress anyone — but somehow, they do anyway. A woozy rhythm guitar lays the groundwork for a half-sung vocal that is all charm and feeling. The song feels intimate without being precious. The melodies wander slightly but never get lost. There’s real warmth here, the kind that lingers long after the last note fades. Not so much a handshake greeting but a big drunken hug of a song.
There’s something gloriously aimless about ‘Paper’, and I mean that in the best way. It lopes rather than drives, jangling along on a mid-tempo groove that feels like it might dissolve at any moment but never does. The guitars chime and curl lazily around each other, loose but locked in, giving off that slightly woozy quality that slacker pop thrives on. You can feel the Pavement influence but it doesn’t feel like mimicry. It’s more like they’ve soaked it in over years of late-night listening and let it seep into their bloodstream. What really stands out is the band’s restraint. ‘Paper’ doesn’t chase a payoff. It doesn’t build to a huge chorus or collapse into noise. Instead, it sits comfortably in its own skin, spinning its wheels just enough to let the atmosphere settle.
The closer ‘Don’t Tell Me To Sit’ is packed with attitude but still friendly enough to shout along with. The delivery has bite, but the overall tone is more playful than pissed off. The drumming drives this one forward with just the right amount of swing, punch and punctuation. The title feels like a mission statement and the hook is undeniable. There’s also that magic balance between fun and fury that makes great slacker pop so addictive.
So, one year later the band dropped the Easy Money EP. I asked them what they differently when recording this one.
“Easy Money is the first EP in which all the current members wrote all parts and felt very collaborative. The Homework EP included bass parts written by Tom (our first bassist) but played by Andrew. And in Easy Money we even got Andrew’s banging song Marina Bay Sands in, bringing more variety to just Santiago and Michael singing.”
“We also spent a bit more time in the little details like harmonies, trying to get weird cool sounds and experimenting with song structure. The first EP was probably closer to a live session whilst this EP feels more constructed and a conscious effort to expand the band’s sound palette. It was the first time we collaborated with Melissa Brisbane, who recorded us and is an absolute delight to work with.”
With those words ringing in our ears lets dive in to the Easy Money EP.
From the first note of ‘Dummy Run’ it lets you know that Homework are stepping it up. Not in a flashy way. They are still unpolished and charming, but the confidence is different now. The guitars hit harder, the vocals are more assured, and the groove sits just right. There is a sense of forward motion throughout this track. The chorus is proper catchy without ever feeling too composed. It is a song that tumbles forward with a grin on its face. You can feel the camaraderie through the speakers. This one is a winner.
Next ‘How Can You’ slows things down and opens a softer side of the band. Dreamy and a bit sad in that deeply satisfying way. It feels like a late-night walk with your thoughts. There is a real feeling of space and room in the mix here that gives the song a new kind of power. The vocals are on it and genuine. There are three killer melodies on show and each plays its part. Almost like if The Libertines were covering a lost ballad from The Pastels. Beautiful stuff.
Final track ‘Marina Bay Sands’ is easily one of the most intriguing songs in their catalogue so far. There’s a woozy sun drunk quality to this track. The melody is hazy and the production feels just a little off kilter, like it is leaning sideways. It is both escapist and grounded, like dreaming of holidays from the kitchen sink. The chorus is understated but earwormy. A brilliant closer that shows the full range of what Homework can do. You’ll hit repeat without even realising.
It’s rare to find a band this early in their life who already sound this comfortable in their own skin. Homework aren’t chasing trends. They’re not crafting songs for algorithm playlists or trying to go viral. What they are doing is building a discography filled with sincerity, humour, fuzz and heart. They are one of those rare groups that make you want to pick up a guitar and start your own band. Not because it looks easy, but because it looks like so much fun.
You can hear the rehearsal room in these tracks. The in jokes. The shared glances. The mistakes that turn into magic. There is no studio polish, no industry sheen — just four people making music they believe in, with just enough chaos to keep it thrilling. Isn’t that what it’s all about.
Scotland’s experimental undercurrents have never been short of strange brilliance, but Because, everyone is wrong about everything all the time, the debut full-length from Lo-Fi Melancholia for Kids (LFMFK), finds a way to thread that well-worn seam with a needle dipped in something entirely new. The man behind the moniker, Adam O’Sullivan, is no stranger to sonic trickery. His past work with Japan Review was already pricking up ears with its gauzy textures and spectral edges, but this latest venture pushes even further into leftfield territory. Here, O’Sullivan doesn’t just blur genre lines — he wanders off the page entirely, and the result is a treasure map that’s half-smeared in noise, half-glowing in neon.
From the outset, LFMFK strikes a deeply personal tone without ever tipping into the confessional. It’s an album built on contradictions — hazy yet focused, melancholic yet playfully weird, fractured but utterly danceable — and it carries the sort of experimental pop sensibility that owes a debt to the likes of The Notwist and Broadcast, while still sounding stubbornly like its own thing. It’s not trying to impress you; it’s just trying to get something across before it disappears in a puff of drum-machine smoke.
Let’s dive in and go track by track.
Opener ‘Energetic Midfield Player’ kicks things off like a clunky Casio waking up in the middle of a lucid dream. There’s something almost comic in its title, but what unfolds is a murky, hyper-melodic loopfest. Skittering percussion that feels like it’s about to fall apart at any moment, propped up by scuzzy guitar that towers over the mix. O’Sullivan layers glitchy fragments like he’s scoring a crumbling VHS memory of a lost Strokes track. There’s a warmth in the wooziness, and the track sets the tone perfectly: this is music made by a human being for other slightly-broken human beings.
With ‘The Dark Outside’, things shift towards something more atmospheric, edging into ambient-pop territory. The intro vocals are ghosted in, distant and spectral, never quite letting you in but inviting you to hover just outside the window. When the drums come in there’s an emotional core that feels quietly devastating. It’s not so much sad as it is overwhelmed, capturing that late-night loneliness when your own thoughts are too loud.
‘The Arrow’ injects a jolt of energy back into the mix. It’s twitchy and fragmented, hopping between ideas like it’s trying on jackets in a vintage shop. There’s a tactile quality to the production — drum machines clatter like toy robots on linoleum floors, while rubbery synth lines swoop in and out like startled birds. It’s a burst of anxious energy that vanishes just as you start to dance along.
Up next ‘Smog’ trades the album’s scattershot energy for something far more stripped back. An open, slow-burning meditation built around acoustic guitar, whispery vocals, and a soft undercurrent of droning synth. There’s an almost eerie stillness to it, like stepping into a quiet room after leaving a chaotic street. The guitar loops gently, hypnotically, while Adam’s voice hovers just above a whisper — cracked, close-miked and half-swallowed, like it’s unsure whether it wants to be heard at all. It’s intimate to the point of discomfort, but beautiful in its restraint. It’s one of the most vulnerable pieces on the record, quietly devastating in its simplicity, and it lingers long after it’s gone.
As its title suggests, ‘Isolate’ strips things back. It opens with a tinny, clattering drum machine and jangly guitars that feel like they’ve been left out in the rain — brittle, chiming, and just slightly out of sync. There’s a lo-fi tension from the start, a feeling that everything is holding itself together with frayed tape. Adam’s vocals come through washed in distortion, not quite buried but definitely blurred — a voice pushed through a busted amp, more texture than lyric. As the track progresses, a pulsing bassline begins to assert itself underneath, grounding the shimmer in something darker and more determined. Guitars start to clang and clash, turning from jangle to something harsher, more metallic. The whole song gradually mutates into a hypnotic, propulsive march, like it’s gathering static and weight with every passing bar. What begins as a fragile bedroom recording morphs into something much more forceful and unrelenting. It’s a stunning shift — subtle at first, but by the time it peaks, you’re completely caught in its momentum. ‘Isolate’ captures a very specific kind of emotional drift
Possibly the album’s most cinematic moment, ‘Under Green Discount Light’ feels like a detour into haunted supermarket dream pop. The textures here are lush, smeared with synth pads and static crackle, and the track unfolds slowly, like someone watching their youth play out on a security monitor. O’Sullivan taps into a sense of cultural detritus. Discount culture, old advertising aesthetics, half-remembered slogans and somehow turns it into something beautiful. It’s both nostalgic and alien, a lost signal from a world that never quite existed.
‘Ragland’ pares things right back to their emotional core. Gone are the glitches and clatter — in their place is a lo-fi piano that sounds like it’s being played in an abandoned room, half-lit and dust-coated. Each note feels fragile, deliberate, and deeply human, as though it might fall apart if pressed any harder. An organ hums gently underneath, woozy and warm, like the last rays of sunlight creeping through a window at the end of the day. The vocals are drenched in reverb, ghostlike and soft, more felt than clearly heard. They drift across the track like distant thoughts, lost in the mix but never aimless. There’s a real sense of space here — not emptiness, but intimacy. You’re placed inside the song, close enough to hear the fingers lift from keys, close enough to feel the air shift when the chords change. I absolutely love this track.
Closer ‘Spare Century’ is the album’s quiet exit. Built around a gently played acoustic guitar, it unfolds at an unhurried pace, each note given space to breathe. Over the top, a fuzz-drenched lead guitar drips out single, deliberate notes. Slow and mournful, almost like it’s remembering a melody rather than playing it. The contrast between the clean acoustic and the scorched electric creates a beautiful tension, tender and raw at once. A lo-fi organ floats just beneath, barely rising above a hum, but it gives the track a quiet warmth. There are no drums, no rhythm section, just a feeling of time stretching out and dissolving. It’s an anti-anthem, a song that refuses resolution, content instead to drift slowly toward silence.
There’s something very special about Because, everyone is wrong about everything all the time. It’s not just that it’s a strong debut, it’s the way it invites you to peer into its strange and beautiful mess without ever holding your hand. O’Sullivan has managed to fuse the scrappy charm of lo-fi indie with the expansive curiosity of electronic exploration, and he’s done it with a wink rather than a sermon. At a time when so much music feels pre-polished and algorithmic, LFMFK offers something looser, weirder, and far more alive. This is the sound of someone throwing sonic ideas at the wall not to impress, but to see what kind of shadows they cast when the light hits just right.
Well now! Here we are again—back in the surreal sanctuary of Black Market Karma’s mind palace. If you caught my last blog on previous album Wobble, you’ll know I was completely spellbound by Stanley Belton’s knack for weaving woozy nostalgia with modern muscle. That album was a faded photograph brought to life, stitched together with decaying tape loops, vintage mellotron ghosts and heartfelt weirdness. And now, like some glimmering twin birthed from the same dream state, arrives Mellowmaker—album number twelve, and the second part of Belton’s two-album odyssey with Fuzz Club.
Where Wobble offered us a psychedelic hug and a mushroom-scented warm bath, Mellowmaker turns the dial just a smidge. It’s still steeped in Belton’s signature aesthetic. Dusty, saturated textures, reverbed vocals curling like incense smoke but here we find a more direct, beat-driven energy pulsing through the haze. The album oozes a strange lo-fi clarity, the bones of breakbeat hip-hop buried under layers of 60s melancholia, 90s neo-psych, and dreamlike experimentation. Belton said it himself: “They’re two sides of each other.” And he’s spot on. Mellowmaker is the yang to Wobble’s yin.
“With these two albums I’ve attempted to crystallise how it feels to be stuck between a feeling of amnesia of the soul and the earthly experience of piloting a meat suit… I’m still chasing that longing intangible ‘hiraeth’ feeling. The sense of wanting to find our way home to a place that maybe doesn’t exist.”
Let’s find our way to the turntable and get into this.
The title track sets the tone perfectly. It opens with an irresistible shuffle, sampled from a 60s hip-hop breakbeat compilation. Belton layers in Mellotron flutes and laconic guitar phrases before re-amping his own live drums into this thick, crunchy thud. The vocal floats above like a sigh on tape, gently haunted. Lyrically, it’s an anthem for the under-confident, a message to the quietly brilliant among us crippled by self-doubt. “The best of us often struggle,” Belton muses, and the melancholy defiance of that sentiment permeates every note.
‘Soft & Heavy’ is a standout from the off. That title captures the vibe neatly, swooning yet weighty, delicate but determined. The drums shuffle along gently like a roiling river of rhythm, while a woozy bass burrows deep into your ribs. Belton’s vocals really project and carry immense emotional heft. I keep coming back to that woozy cyclical bass motif that feels like it’s forever folding in on itself, warped and spinning. I’m hearing faint echoes of early Beck, mixed with the wall-of-sound production of Spectoresque proportions. The juxtaposition is disarming. And totally addictive.
Belton indulges his inner loop-obsessive next on ‘The Sound of Repetition’. The track spirals hypnotically, leaning into motorik territory without ever going full Krautrock. It’s got a trance-like tick tock propulsion, driven by repeating motifs that slowly evolve through subtle changes in texture and tone. The guitar work is sublime. Delay-drenched and daisy-chained into itself. This song burrows deep into your subconscious like a good mantra. A song to get lost in.
We go on a whimsical wee detour with ‘Flutterbug’. Light on its feet, with fluttery glockenspiel-like synths and a shuffling beat that recalls early Broadcast. There’s an almost tropical shimmer here, yet Belton grounds it with a bittersweet vocal that tugs at something deeply nostalgic. If ‘Waterbaby’ from Wobble was the a-side of your childhood memories, ‘Flutterbug’ is the B-side, the strange, forgotten half-formed dreams.
If you’re a follower of this blog you’ll know how much I love music that takes you away in your head. That’s exactly what Belton does here with ‘Coasting in Aquatica’. All aqueous textures and submerged sonics, it sounds like it was recorded inside a lava lamp. The guitars jangle with an underwater shimmer while the bassline undulates like seaweed in a current. There’s no urgency here, just a sense of fluid surrender. A track to float away on.
‘Jellylegger’ comes in claiming its instant classic status. This one grooves hard. The drum loop hits with that signature saturated slap, and the guitar riff has a syrupy swagger to it. Think Revolver era Beatles mixed with The Avalanches on downers. There’s a delicious stickiness to the whole thing. Belton’s voice oozes through the mix like honey, layered with harmonies that sound beamed in from a warped radio broadcast.
We pause for a short instrumental break with ‘Recalled by The Rays’. A haunting lullaby for space cowboys. The mellotron melodies here are achingly pretty. There’s a Lynchian quality on show like something playing on a jukebox in a parallel dimension.
As the name suggests, ‘Nautodelia’ is pure underwater psychedelia. The vibe is aquatic and narcotic in equal measure. Guitar’s tremble and melt, Mellotron drones ebb and flow like tides. There’s a murky dub influence at play here too, especially in the low-end sculpting. It’s music that evokes memory, decay, beauty—and the feeling that you’re swimming through all three.
‘Looper’ moves back into breakbeat territory. The beat hits hard and loops with surgical precision. Belton layers on fuzz-toned guitars and that signature mellotron haze. There’s a woozy sample-snare interplay that gives the track its hypnotic pulse. One for the headphone freaks and crate diggers alike.
Up next comes ‘Lagging Through The Soup Of Yesterday’. The title alone deserves applause. Sonically, this is like Boards of Canada if they grew up on LSD and sunshine pop. Tape hiss, detuned synths, warbly guitar and that signature Belton nostalgic haze over it all. It’s haunting, warm, and deeply human. A tone poem about time slippage, memory drift, and existential wobbles.
The album closes out with ‘Adoration’. A gentle shimmer of affection and melancholy, built around a potent guitar line and a sleepy backbeat. Belton’s vocals are full of quiet devotion, but also that hiraeth he keeps chasing—that longing for a home that might never have existed. As the final notes dissolve, we’re left in that liminal space Belton so expertly evokes: not quite awake, not quite dreaming.
Where Wobble was a postcard from the past, Mellowmaker feels like a photo negative—less playful perhaps, more contemplative, and shot through with a quiet, steady confidence. Belton continues to explore the boundaries of lo-fi psychedelia not just as a sound but as an emotion. These are albums to feel, not just hear. Albums that reach inside you and play your memories back through a broken tape machine. With Mellowmaker, Black Market Karma have deepened the rabbit hole. Two records made side by side, yet each casting its own shadow. Belton is crafting his own mythos now, one album at a time, and Mellowmaker is another crucial chapter. If you’re new to the world of BMK, now is the perfect time to dive in. Just bring your headphones, your heart, and maybe a half-forgotten dream or two.
I love me a bit of psych rock. Particularly when the band playing said psych rock are pushing at the edges of the genre, trying new things and moving the whole thing forward. Frankie and the Witch Fingers have never been ones to sit still. Over the past decade, they’ve evolved from California psych-rock freakouts into a bonafide genre-mutant beast. With Trash Classic, their latest long-player, they double down on the chaos. They twist it, melt it, and launch it through a wormhole of synthetic slime and industrial-grade bile. The result is an album that feels like it’s been stitched together from broken machines, bad dreams, and manic sugar highs.
This is a record born not in some pastoral studio retreat but in the real-deal grit of Vernon, Los Angeles. That rawness drips into every second of Trash Classic but it’s in the studio alchemy of Oakland’s Tiny Telephone with producer Maryam Qudus where the band crackled into new forms. There’s a messiness here, but it’s purposeful. The sound of a band gleefully breaking their own toys to build something new.
The band had a lot of fun making the album, listen to this.
“Every day of recording began with cartoons blaring at full volume—a Looney Tunes ritual that turned the madness of the recording process into something childlike. Late at night, sugar-fuelled candy binges kept the energy spiking, pushing the sessions into a fever dream of jittery playfulness.”
They must have been wired for weeks! Let’s drop the needle and see how much of that energy was transferred to the grooves.
The album opens with ‘Channel Rot’. A snarling opening salvo that feels like stumbling through a glitching transmission. With a screech of tyres and an assortment of TV shows coming at us, we are off! This is the sound of collapsing signals and sensory overload, where the song’s structure seems to warp around the stop start guitar stabs and skittering synths. A mere taste of the technicolour madness to come.
We are then straight into ‘T.V. Baby’, a satirical screed aimed at screen addiction and information rot. The groove here is furious and feels like its coming at you from every angle. The lyrics are both comic and ominous: “Gimme gimme toxic sugar / I’m a sucker for that fit.” It’s mutant punk with a burnt-out VHS aesthetic, capturing the eerie intimacy of modern media’s brain-melt. If the whole album is at this pace I’m going to need a wee lie down after side A alone.
‘Dead Silence’ next is possibly the album’s emotional nadir. A spiralling descent into noise fatigue and internal static. Vocals echo like thoughts bouncing off concrete walls, while delivering a stark existential punch: “Everything is dead.” It’s bleak at times, but weirdly cathartic. Searching for the escape that saves you from the final escape, the one you can’t come back from. The track keeps tapping that metaphorical elevator button, waiting for something to change, knowing it probably won’t. In this day and age with this epidemic of mental illness and anxiety this is an incredibly well observed track.
Up next is the weaponised frustration of ‘Fucksake’. The rhythm is jagged, the vocal delivery more spit than speech. “What do you think what do you get, for fuck’s sake?” becomes a mantra for digital burnout and bodily disintegration. The track has the swagger of Roxy Music and the industrial punk energy of the MC5. Pure adrenaline and absurdist apocalypse. I can imagine this will get a great call and response at their live shows!
The robot energy is palpable next with ‘Economy’. “This has got to be the best economy,” is almost spat out, dripping with sarcasm. The synths are particularly cool here, sputtering and gurgling like corrupted cash registers. The beat, on the other hand, marches forward with mechanical insistence, mimicking the inescapable churn of the market machine. It’s a dystopian dance-punk commentary on capitalism’s failure to nourish the soul and it cuts like a knife.
We leave the robot energy behind for ‘Eggs Laid Brain’. This is possibly the most surreal cut on the record and that’s saying something. Lyrically it reads like a Lovecraftian satire of human thought. “Sucking out the fun, how tasty,” repeats like a warped nursery rhyme, while the instrumentation slinks and squirms with insectoid menace. It’s psychedelic in the most visceral, bodily sense—a track that feels like it’s crawling inside your skull.
We plummet headlong into ‘Out Of The Flesh’ next. Emotionally raw and vocally twisted. “Come find me curled up like a dying worm” sets the tone. This is self-excavation through noise and melody. Guitars pummel us relentlessly; synths soar and swell. This has amazing energy encapsulating everything I love about Frankie and the Witch Fingers. Riffs, call and response vocals and knowing wink to the audience!
A pixelated war cry from the AI uprising. ‘Total Reset’ is the album’s most explosive track—robotic voices chant apocalyptic prophecies over pounding drums and gleaming synth stabs. It imagines a world where our digital offspring have had enough, where extermination becomes the only resolution. Think Kraftwerk by way of Slayer. Genius! Bonkers but fricken genius.
The band channels their inner B-52s on this sly, sexy romp through power, performance and perception. ‘Conducting Experiments’ is psychedelic disco-punk that plays with gender, identity and authority. “These two women are conducting experiments,” entranced and adrift. The track’s got swagger and sass to spare, and the chorus is an all-timer. Clear the dancefloor Frankie and the Witch Fingers are coming through.
‘Gutter Priestess’ is just pure sleaze and shadow. Think of a Lynchian fever dream involving rituals, spoons, and motel rooms soaked in amber light. The bassline prowls like a predator, vocals are pure menace. The gutter priestess is a mythical avatar of the album’s themes—decay, indulgence, transformation. You’ll feel the leather bite. Down boy!
The title track is a final baptism in the sludge. By this point, you’re just a bit frayed but grinning and loving it, lost in static and slime. “Yet another hole in my head” we hear sung, almost jubilantly, as if trauma has become transcendence. The track oscillates between feral and euphoric, tying things up in an ecstatic roar of warped hope.
Trash Classic is a full-body immersion into chaos, commentary and catharsis. This is a band who’ve always flirted with the edge, but now they’ve leapt right off it, arms flailing, laughing as they fall. Every track on this record pulses with intent. It’s messy, magnetic and malevolent in all the right ways. What Frankie and the Witch Fingers have made here is an album that is both a sonic experiment and an emotional exorcism. It forces you to confront the rot while dancing in it. It mocks our obsession with consumption while sounding like the inside of a melting vending machine. It offers no salvation, just glorious collapse. If you’re ready to rip out the circuits and get weird with the witches, then Trash Classic is the record you’ve been waiting for.
Since their emergence in 2020 with debut single Public Service, Last Tourist have been quietly — but very deliberately — building a discography that reads like a lost volume from the alternative rock archives of a parallel universe. With 2021’s ‘Black Raven’ (featuring the mighty Simon Scott of Slowdive on drums), the spectral ‘Cave in the Hills’, the magnetic ‘Lust’, and a 2023 reimagining of The Cure’s ‘Lullaby’, they’ve mapped out a world that’s as much tethered to the stars as it is to the foundations of noise-rock, post-punk and synth-laced shoegaze.
Their self-titled debut album Last Tourist in 2023 was the culmination of that early journey — a dense, delirious and deeply impressive statement of intent. And now, with ‘Slowly Fade’, they’ve hit escape velocity.
On this release the band have this to say.
“‘Slowly Fade’ shows a darker side of the band leaning towards the darkwave combined with shoegaze reverberating guitars and featuring extract of Ian Curtis last interview before his tragic death.”
Let’s dive in and see where Last Tourist are taking us with this one.
The track begins with what sounds like a transmission from a dying satellite, Curtis’s ghostly voice barely coming through. From the first breathy, echo-drenched vocal line, ‘Slowly Fade’ announces itself as something grander than anything they’ve released before. This isn’t just a new track; it’s the band stepping through the veil into widescreen territory.
The addition of Paul Kehoe (of Peter Hook & The Light) on drums injects a propulsive urgency into the song’s shimmering murk. His playing is all texture and tension — pulsing like an anxious heartbeat beneath the layers of synth and delay.
‘Slowly Fade’ is a stargazer’s delight. There’s a clear lineage to their influences: you hear the moodiness of The Jesus and Mary Chain, the cold pulse of Gary Numan, the layered hypnosis of My Bloody Valentine, the astral ache of Spiritualized, and even the crystalline dread of Suicide. But this isn’t some shoegaze tribute band. Last Tourist aren’t imitating — they’re channelling, mutating, and pushing forward. Oh and let’s talk about the atmosphere — because, this track is thick with it. The fuzz here isn’t just texture — it’s emotion. The synths don’t just sparkle — they mourn. There’s a sadness in this song, but it’s the beautiful kind. The kind you lean into. The kind that makes the dark feel inviting.
The song title itself — ‘Slowly Fade’ — feels like both a threat and a promise. You get the sense that the track is collapsing in on itself, drifting further into space with every passing second.
What’s most exciting about ‘Slowly Fade’ is what it signals. This is a band not content to bask in the cult glow of their early successes. This is a band evolving — leaning harder into ambience, pushing further into abstraction, and yet still anchoring everything with structure, hooks, and feeling.
‘Slowly Fade’ is a deeply impressive track that manages to feel both carefully constructed and utterly effortless. With an upcoming album on the way, ‘Slowly Fade’ feels like the calm before the (beautiful) storm. If this is the direction Last Tourist are heading in, then buckle up, because we’re in for a journey of cosmic proportions.
‘Slowly Fade’ is out on 6th June 2025 on all major digital platforms via 1991 Recordings. Vinyl collectors — keep your eyes peeled for a physical release on their next full-length. You’re going to want this one on wax.
You can follow Last Tourist on social media here …
There’s a certain magic that happens when a band with a reputation for sprawling cosmic grandeur pares things down to their essence. When the incense clears, and the fog machines sputter out, all that’s left is groove, atmosphere, and instinct. With their latest seven inch offering, ‘Bongo Express’ backed with ‘Afternoon Sniper’, The Hologram People have traded their mountaintop ceremonies and starward gazes for something a little more grounded — but no less transporting.
This is a different flavour of trip. Less sacred rite, more international psych-funk caper. Imagine slipping through a late-60s psychedelic heist flick, dubbed straight from reel-to-reel onto wax. There’s a swagger here, a louche confidence that doesn’t shout but smirks from across the room. If Sacred Ritual to Unlock the Mountain Portal was about elevation — spiritual, sonic, stratospheric — then this new double-header is all about the sway. The sway of hips. The sway of shadows. The sway of palm fronds in a sultry breeze that smells faintly of vinyl and vermouth.
And still, unmistakably, this is The Hologram People. Dom Keen and Jonathan Parkes are carving new grooves into the wax, but the hands guiding the stylus are the same — deft, knowing, and gently mischievous. The textures are intact. The attention to sonic detail is all here. But now, the ritual space is a mysterious smoke filled lounge instead of a misty mountain.
On Side A ‘Bongo Express’ is a laid-back, fuzz-fuelled exotic jam that’s thick with Eastern promise. Strutting in like a mirage over hot sands, shimmering guitars dipped in delay, bongo rhythms bubbling beneath like heat from a cracked desert floor. This track isn’t about propulsion — it’s about suspension. You don’t race down the rails here, you glide along them, hypnotised by the swirling blend of eastern-inflected melody and cosmic cool. There’s a narcotic quality to the repetition, something trance-inducing in the way the melody drifts and curls. And that production — lo-fi in all the right places, like it’s being broadcast from a lost psych-funk archive deep beneath Marrakesh. It’s smooth. It’s sensual. It’s The Hologram People doing what they do best: evoking landscapes of the mind.
The flipside slinks in with attitude. ‘Afternoon Sniper’ rides a funky wave of laid-back bass grooves, bouncy bongo, and locked-in drums that carry an irresistible strut. There’s a noirish energy here — playful but a little dangerous. It’s music for the psychic cat burglar in all of us. Where ‘Bongo Express’ conjured dusty sun-soaked travels, ‘Afternoon Sniper’ lives in the twilight. Its groove is loose yet exact, with guitar stabs and echo-drenched melodies dancing in and out of earshot like shadows slipping behind alleyway corners.
What’s so glorious about this release is how effortless it feels. These are two short tracks — modest in scale, yet bursting with atmosphere. With this seven inch, The Hologram People shift from shamanic space travellers to jet-setting psych-groovers, all without missing a beat. They’ve always had the ability to soundtrack journeys both real and imagined, but with ‘Bongo Express’ and ‘Afternoon Sniper’, they invite you not on a pilgrimage, but a holiday — albeit one scored by mystics, draped in incense, and set to tape on a vintage reel-to-reel player in a sun-bleached villa.
So, my fellow psychonauts: grab this one while you can. Limited pressings like this have a habit of vanishing into the ether before you’ve had your morning coffee.
‘Bongo Express’ is out on 27th May 2025 via the ever-amazing Feral Child Label (note to self: they warrant a blog all to themselves). Make sure and head over to The Hologram People Bandcamp Page and give em a follow!
You can follow The Hologram People on social media here….
There’s something truly otherworldly about Marina Yozora. You feel it from the first note, like you’ve walked through a mirror into a dreamscape where the air itself shimmers. If you’ve been following her journey — and if you haven’t, now’s the time to catch up — you’ll know she’s a singular voice in the current wave of dream pop revivalists. Born in Tokyo, seasoned by time in America and Vietnam, and now casting spells from London, Marina’s background weaves its way into everything she touches. Her music is multicultural, multicoloured, and multi-sensory — a shimmering sonic cocktail stirred with wistfulness, identity, and a quiet, aching beauty.
Her debut single ‘Watermelon Pink Blue Skies’ floated into our lives back in February 2024, and now, a year later, Marina returns with ‘Daffodils’. A haunting, heartbreakingly tender moment.
Marina opens the song with reverb-drenched guitar lines. Her voice, that seraphic cascade she’s already become known for, floats in gently — barely above a whisper. ‘Daffodils’ is sparse, elliptical — yet every word lands like it’s been chosen from a poem. It’s melancholic but never bleak; it’s sadness held with softness. The titular daffodils become metaphors for both fragility and endurance — nature’s quiet survivors. And in that duality lies the emotional weight of the song: this is about loss, yes, but also about learning to hold that loss gently.
Sonically, it’s gorgeously self-produced. There’s an airy, almost translucent quality to the track, as if it might dissolve if played too loud. The production choices are as deliberate as the lyrics — every delay tail, every shimmer of synth, every hush between phrases is crafted for emotional impact. It reminds me in spirit of Grouper, Cocteau Twins, or even Castelebeat, but with Marina’s very specific softness and world-weary wonder.
The official music video is a diaphanous visual poem. Marina stands alone in windswept fields, barefoot among the daffodils, eyes closed, hair blown by a soft breeze — a visual echo of the song’s themes of longing and lightness. There are fleeting glimpses of other places: the neon of Tokyo, the fog of a London street, a faded Polaroid of a Vietnamese garden. It’s beautifully constructed, playing like a memory collage — a Third Culture Kid’s heart folded into almost four minutes of visual poetry.
Yozora doesn’t yell to be heard — she whispers, and we lean in. She doesn’t overwhelm you with layers, but lets each element breathe. In a music world obsessed with overstimulation and instant payoff, this is a track that rewards patience and presence.
This is dream pop for the deeply feeling. For those who know that beauty is often tinged with sadness, and that fragility can be a form of strength. For the ones who write letters to the sky and mean every word.
‘Daffodils’ is out now on all the usual streaming platforms. Make sure and head over to the Marina Yozora Bandcamp page and give her a follow.
You can follow Marina Yozora on social media here …….
Marina will be playing live in Glasgow in June. Also on the bill will be Pat’s Soundhouse, Dayydream and Westbound Foxes. Check out the flyer below and make sure and get along to support her and these amazing bands.
As the 90s shoegaze revival continues to spiral out in all directions — from clean nostalgia acts to full-blown noise experiments — Austin’s Farmer’s Wife have carved out their own spectral niche. Their debut EP Faint Illusions blends the gloom of grunge, the moodiness of slowcore, and the fantastical weirdness of art-pop into something unique: a haunted, heartsick landscape where every melody is wrapped in gauze and every lyric is a spell. It’s a record that feels simultaneously out of time and right on cue — a bold first step that already places them at the fringes of the underground’s most exciting spaces.
In the ever-shifting dreamworld of shoegaze revivalism, it’s easy to get swept up in texture and forget about soul. But that’s what sets Farmer’s Wife apart — they don’t just bathe in reverb; they bleed into it.
Frontwoman and guitarist Molly Masson is the band’s emotional compass. Her voice — fragile, spectral, yet commanding — narrates twisted fables and desaturated dreams like a post-grunge Persephone. Her lyrics ache with decay and desire, full of gothic poetry and fantastical menace. Alongside her, Jaelyn Valero (drums), Jacob Masson (bass), and dual guitarists Jude Hill and Derek Ivy create an atmosphere that’s rich, volatile, and often unsettling — like Slowdive raised in the desert on a diet of Tool, Mazzy Star, and Siamese Dream.
Across these five tracks, Farmer’s Wife craft a vivid, decaying fairy tale — a world where wilted roses and alien lovers coexist, where passion and putrefaction are impossible to tell apart. Let’s take a walk through their haunted garden.
The EP opens with the fuzzy, scuzzy sound of ‘Dirty Shirley’. The almost metallic guitar riffs contrast beautifully with Molly Masson’s angelic vocal delivery. Right from the get-go, Farmer’s Wife set the tone for the EP’s collision of beauty and rot. The track lurches forward with a dirty glamour but there’s a playful sleaze to it. It’s woozy, disoriented, like the morning after something you can’t quite piece together. The guitar tones are thick with grime, ringing out in bent, bending dissonance — part Smashing Pumpkins, part stoner-psych. The rhythm section, especially the bass, keeps things grounded in a narcotic pulse that feels both lazy and tightly coiled, dragging its feet but ready to pounce. You get the grime and gloss, the sweet and the sick. It’s a song that exists in dualities — intoxication and revulsion, seduction and decay — and it sets the stage for everything to come.
‘Seethe’ turns up the tension — and the menace. It’s the most rhythmically aggressive song on Faint Illusions, and it wastes no time establishing its sense of unease. A tightly wound bassline slithers underneath, almost serpentine in its movement, while brittle, anxious percussion ticks like a warning clock. The whole track feels like it’s pacing the perimeter of something dangerous — never quite breaking in, but constantly pressing at the edges. Guitars don’t explode — they stalk. There are no blissed-out walls of reverb here, no dreamy haze. Instead, they coil around each other like razor wire, feeding the song’s simmering hostility. There’s a sinister clarity to the playing, as if the band wanted you to feel every scratch and scrape with vivid precision. There’s no catharsis. Just tension, and more tension, until the song finally dissolves into a low rumble of guitar noise and unease. ‘Seethe’ feels like a pressure cooker that never gets the release — and that’s entirely the point. It’s a study in restraint and rage, and it shows Farmer’s Wife are as comfortable dragging you through discomfort as they are seducing you into dream states.
Up next is not just my stand-out track on this EP, but one of my favourite songs of 2025 so far. ‘Mildew’ demonstrates that Farmer’s Wife are able to write at the very top tier — the kind of songwriting that doesn’t just impress, it haunts. I loved it so much I played it on my DKFM Shoegaze Radio Show this month, and honestly, it hasn’t left my rotation since. It’s the kind of track that gets its hooks in you without ever raising its voice. The intro is pure atmosphere — woozy, watery guitars that seem to drip from the ceiling, joined by a sluggish but purposeful rhythm section that pulls the whole track down into subterranean depths. Masson’s vocals are next-level here. She’s never sounded more eerily serene. It’s poetry by way of decomposition, sensual in a way that feels totally unclean — like something beautiful left too long in the sun. This is the most expansive and textured piece on the EP. The dual guitars are in full telepathic conversation here — one spiralling off into dreamy melodies while the other drags its heels with growling, pitch-shifted menace. But what makes ‘Mildew’ so special — and why I’ll keep playing it on air and shouting about it from rooftops — is how it manages to be both deeply unsettling and totally gorgeous. It’s rare to find a song that exists so completely in its own atmosphere. This is Farmer’s Wife at their most confident, most strange, and most sublime.
Up next, ‘The Ballet’ is a fever dream waltz — a ghostly dance through twilight streets, stitched together with equal parts beauty and dread. This track begins with a sort of lullaby twang, a childlike melody perched on a skeletal drumbeat. It teeters on the edge of innocence, but there’s something off-kilter lurking beneath the surface. That whimsical intro frays at the edges as the chorus blooms. The guitars sway gently, almost sweetly, but they carry a sour undertone — detuned and slightly warped, like a memory remembered wrong. The rhythm is loose, like it’s been drugged or disoriented, giving the entire song a woozy, waltzing motion that feels just one step away from collapsing entirely. There’s a theatricality to ‘The Ballet’ that sets it apart. It doesn’t obey typical dynamics or structure expectations. Instead, it unfolds like a scene from a tragic opera — dream logic, strange pacing, an atmosphere that’s soaked in decay and glitter. It’s also one of the finest showcases for the entire band’s ability to move as a single, expressive organism — loose but locked in, melodic but menacing. By the time it fades out, ‘The Ballet’ leaves you feeling slightly disoriented, like waking from a dream you’re not sure you wanted to end. It’s unsettling and beautiful in equal measure — and proof that Farmer’s Wife aren’t just making songs, they’re building haunted houses you can live in.
The closer, ‘Discount Roses’, is a perfect finale. It’s softer, more resigned — the sound of crumpled valentines and half-remembered dreams. After the tension and spectral unease of the preceding tracks, this one lets the dust settle. But rather than offering catharsis, it leaves us with something more fragile and fractured — a fading photograph of love’s debris. The opening is delicate, with plucked, plaintive guitar lines that feel like they’re coming from another room. There’s a gentleness here, a slowing of breath, as if the band is finally letting the light back in — but not without the long shadows that come with it. The rhythm is loose-limbed and hazy, swaying more than it moves forward, and there’s a notable vulnerability in the space between the notes. There’s no irony here, no posturing. Just that ache — the one you feel when love slips through your fingers and you can’t quite decide if it was ever real to begin with. The “discount” in the title stings. These aren’t grand gestures or cinematic heartbreaks. These are love’s leftovers — bruised petals, sour candy, kisses that came too late. The track slowly opens out into a wash of ambient fuzz, the guitars gently lifting Molly’s voice into a dreamlike drift. There are touches of Red House Painters and even Grouper in the way the song blurs into abstraction at the end, fading not with a bang but with a long, exhausted exhale. As a closer, it’s devastatingly right. It gathers all the themes of the EP — decay, beauty, dreams, loss — and lets them dissolve into the ether. Nothing is resolved, but everything lingers.
Faint Illusions isn’t interested in being a polished calling card or a crowd-pleasing debut. Instead, it’s a work of vision — raw, unkempt, and gorgeously grotesque. It leans into discomfort, into decay, into all the strange little shadows most bands shy away from. It’s romantic, yes, but the kind of romance that leaves bruises. The kind that sticks under your nails.
What’s thrilling is how confidently Farmer’s Wife play in this space — there’s no hesitation, no hedging. They’re not interested in sounding like everyone else. They want to build a world, burn it down, and invite you to dance in the ashes. And somehow, they make it all sound beautiful.
For fans of slowcore, gaze, goth, and the underbelly of grunge, Faint Illusions is a debut that will leave fingerprints on your bones. It may be called an illusion, but this is very, very real.
After several years spent mapping the outer fringes of modern psychedelia, Los Angeles collective Hooveriii (pronounced “Hoover Three”) return with Manhunter — a rich and expansive fifth album that smartly ties together the raw urgency of their earlier work with the more cinematic ambitions they’ve been gradually embracing. If their self-titled debut in 2018 introduced a lo-fi garage-psych outfit with a taste for sci-fi aesthetics and fuzzy repetition, it was 2021’s Water for the Frogs that marked a pivot toward a broader, more kosmische-inflected sound.
That shift continued with A Round of Applause in 2022 — a bright, synth-heavy, glam-adjacent set that pushed the band’s melodic instincts to the fore — and again with Pointe in 2023, a somewhat more introspective affair that explored mood and atmosphere over immediacy. Each of these records showed a band in transition, growing more confident in their ability to fuse Motorik rhythms, space rock textures, and big pop hooks into something uniquely theirs.
Now, with Manhunter, have Hooveriii fully arrived — drawing together all those disparate threads into a coherent, fully-formed vision? A casual first listen tells me that it’s a record that reaches backward as much as it pushes forward, tapping into 70s prog, glam, krautrock, post-punk, and new age to build something dense but not impenetrable, ambitious but never overwrought. It’s also, at its core, a rock record — unafraid of riffage, melody, or swagger.
This newfound cohesion comes in part thanks to the band’s consistent core. Frontman Bert Hoover remains the gravitational centre, delivering vocals and guitar lines with an unmistakable sense of style and intent. He’s flanked by Kaz Mirblouk (bass, vocals, synth), Jon Modaff (drums, bongos, percussion), Paco Casanova (synth, organ, piano), and Matthew Zuk (guitars), a locked-in unit that gives the record its shape and pulse. Adding further texture are Gabriel “Baby Gabe” Salomon on saxophone and Anna Wallace on backing vocals, both of whom lend key moments a deeper emotional resonance. And there’s even a cameo from Kyle Seely, who drops in a scorching guitar solo on ‘Heaven at the Gates’.
My whistle has been well and truly whetted, let’s drop the needle and dig in.
The album opens with ‘Melody’, a glam stomp that sets a frantic pace right out the gate. It arrives with a strut and a snarl — sharp-edged and swaggering. The beat hits hard and deliberate, a kind of locomotive groove that feels both mechanical and sleazy, while the guitars jangle and screech in wiry bursts, leaning into the friction with glee. There’s an urgency here that’s impossible to ignore — a manic pulse that pushes the track forward without giving you time to settle. The vocals come in hot, clipped and rhythmic, all dramatic flair and icy detachment, while the bass coils and pivots underneath like a rattlesnake on amphetamines. Everything about the arrangement is tight, a perfectly poised chaos. As an opening salvo, ‘Melody’ throws the doors wide open. It’s loud, fast, and thrillingly disorienting. But more than that, it sets the tone for an album that’s not content to settle into one gear.
‘Tin Lips’ is next and immediately it hits like a lost Stranglers track. It’s got that same paranoid pulse, that itchy, neurotic twitch — all clipped, tense verses that feel like they’re constantly on the verge of snapping. There’s a simmering sense of control in the rhythm section, almost mechanical in its precision, but there’s also something deeply human in the way it resists the rigidity, pulling at the seams with every bar. The track builds like a pressure cooker, verses hissing with compressed menace before exploding into those expansive choruses. It’s a brilliant sleight of hand — one moment you’re boxed in by post-punk claustrophobia, the next you’re launched into something sweeping and sky-bound. It’s bold, tightly wound and deceptively emotional.
‘In The Rain’ delivers a surprise — an almost blink-and-you-miss-it haunted psych-folk ballad that conjures Gene Clark wandering through a nuclear wasteland. It’s a sudden drop in tempo and tone, a moment of eerie stillness in the midst of the album’s otherwise pulsing momentum. Everything feels stripped back, spectral. The instrumentation is minimal but laced with texture — distant reverb-drenched guitar lines hang in the air like radioactive mist, while a gently crumbling rhythm moves just slow enough to make you lean in closer. The vocals are hushed and slightly decayed, almost murmured like a secret over the wreckage. There’s a fragility to the delivery, like the song might disintegrate if you breathe on it too hard. That melancholic shimmer gives the track a distinctly after the fall feeling — the kind of song you imagine playing from a dusty jukebox in a derelict roadhouse at the end of the world.
It’s no sooner over than we’re off at full pelt into ‘Westside Pavilion of Dreams’. Like Bryan Ferry fronting the band for a moment, this track feels positively opulent in its swagger — all art-school gloss and metropolitan cool, but shot through with a pulse that’s pure motorik momentum. It’s a dramatic gear shift from the last track and that contrast is what makes it land so hard. The pace is breathless — drums pushing things forward with insistent propulsion while synths swirl and shimmer. There’s an almost cinematic sleaze to the whole thing, the kind of louche, forward-glancing energy that Roxy Music mastered in their imperial phase, repurposed here into something spacier and more hypnotic. Guitar riffs come in bursts — flickering, tasteful, restrained — giving the track a glittering polish without tipping into indulgence. And the vocals, smooth and arch, ride just above the mix, delivering lines with the kind of detached cool that suggests menace dressed as charm.
The band tap into that kosmische sound next with ‘Heaven at the Gates’. Bass and drums locked in and keeping us in focus, it’s one of those tracks where the rhythm section isn’t just holding it down — it is the engine room. There’s an unmistakable motorik heartbeat here, a hypnotic groove that brings to mind Neu! or Harmonia at their most mesmeric — but with a distinctly modern shimmer. The guitar work is restrained but expressive, adding texture more than riffs, until it suddenly lets loose with a soaring solo courtesy of Seely — a moment of unguarded ecstasy that cuts through the repetition like a lightning strike. There’s a sense of control here, but not confinement. The band stretch out and explore without ever losing the thread — each looped phrase subtly shifting, evolving, tightening. What’s striking is how cosmic it feels without ever tipping into cliché. This isn’t a retro-futurist nod or a throwback — it’s kosmische reinterpreted through the Hooveriii lens: taut, deliberate, deeply felt.
‘Cul-De-Sac’ next is a short intermission, a tone poem of experimental cosmic noise and degenerating static. It’s less a song in the traditional sense and more a transmission — intercepted rather than performed. Clocking in under a minute, it functions like a torn page from a notebook full of half-remembered dreams and decaying analogue tape. Sonic detritus drifts through the speakers — warbling frequencies, bent tones, fractured echoes — as if someone accidentally tuned into a lost space station’s dying signal.
That leads us nicely into the psychedelic riff storm that is ‘The Fly’. The glam stomp returns in fine fashion, but this time it’s more feral, untamed. The track charges in like a bolt of lightning — all shredded guitars, booming drums, and a tempo that seems determined to burn itself out before the track finishes. It’s a reinvention of the swaggering glam energy that kicked off the album, but with a harder edge, a scuzzier, more untethered feel. The riff is a beast, a slithering, repetitive groove that threatens to fall apart but never quite does. The rhythm section kicks in with a frenetic energy, bass lines growling just beneath the surface, pushing everything forward with force. There’s a moment of blissful abandon midway through, where the track falls into a swirling, phased-out breakdown, letting the rhythm section lead the charge while the guitars spiral into a dizzying crescendo. It proves once again that Hooveriii are masters at fusing both chaos and precision in a way that’s utterly irresistible.
Time slows next with the synth-led mood piece ‘Night Walks in Montreux’. This slowly pulsing instrumental is barely a whisper in the roar of the overall album — but it’s a whisper that lingers, drawing you in with its quiet, persistent shimmer. The band dial everything back here, not just in volume but in intent. Gone are the glam riffs and chaotic stomp; in their place, a muted, late-night drift that feels like ambient moonlight music beamed in from a parallel dimension. Placed here in the running order, it acts as a sort of psychic breather — a calm harbour after the storm, a quiet triumph of tone and space.
Here comes the bruiser. ‘Isolation’ brings with it a snarling energy, echoing early King Gizzard or even Thee Oh Sees with its psych-punk punch. But Hooveriii don’t just bash things out — they modulate it with bursts of synth and off-kilter rhythm, turning what could be a straightforward rager into something far more interesting and strangely cerebral. The guitars are gritty and serrated, biting through the mix with a garage-born rawness. But beneath the fuzz and fury, there’s a complex machine at work — one built on a groovy lick that catches your ear every time. There’s a sense of barely controlled mania here. It’s a song that seems to be gritting its teeth as it barrels forward, pulsing with nervous energy. Think frantic house party in a collapsing warehouse — walls shaking, strobes flashing, everyone losing their minds but somehow still in sync. ‘Isolation’ captures a very specific kind of anxious euphoria — it’s adrenalised, paranoid, and exhilarating.
‘Manhunter’ sets the bass front and centre, driving this mellow instrumental with a steady, head-nodding pulse that feels both grounded and exploratory. It’s a track that moves with quiet assurance, guided by groove rather than force, giving the rest of the band space to sketch out a dreamscape that’s as expansive as it is understated. This is the sound of Hooveriii fully leaning into their cosmic side. Guitars drift in and out of focus, treated with layers of delay and reverb, more texture than riff. They shimmer like starlight across a vast and unknowable void, never dominating but always colouring the space. Synth pads hover above the mix like clouds of interstellar dust, creating a deep, spacious atmosphere that invites you to simply float along. As a title track, it’s a bold choice — not a climax, but a centre of gravity. It doesn’t shout for your attention, but slowly pulls you into its orbit.
Angular, twitchy, and straight-up weird. ‘Tarantula Eye’ is the sonic equivalent of a spider scuttling across your ceiling at 3am — disorienting, unpredictable, and impossible to ignore. Built on a gnarly, looping groove that feels like it’s chewing its own tail, this track veers hard into the experimental zone, with synths that squeal and spiral like malfunctioning machinery and a rhythm section that seems to lurch just slightly out of step on purpose. There’s an unsettling, insectoid energy to it — appropriate given the title. Everything here is skittering, agitated, constantly shifting. The drums jab rather than groove, the synths chirp and divebomb like vintage arcade hardware possessed by ghosts, and the guitars chop at the edges like they’re trying to cut their way out of the mix. It’s manic and minimal all at once, built on repetition but never quite settling. In the context of Manhunter, ‘Tarantula Eye’ is a crucial curveball — a reminder that beneath all the spacey grooves and glam stomps lies a band with a taste for the truly strange. It’s confrontational, abrasive, and more than a little demented. And yet, somehow, it still grooves.
The riffs are back with a vengeance on ‘Question’. The guitars dominate here, drenched in phased-out psych fuzz, drawing clear influence from the late-period Spirit albums and that unmistakable Randy California tone: liquid, expressive, and just a little unhinged. There’s a swagger to this track, a kind of sneering playfulness in the way it unfolds. It’s not a song in a hurry — it knows it sounds good, and it lets that groove stretch and breathe. The riff loops like a mantra, thick with attitude but never overbearing. It feels like a jam that’s been shaved down just enough to keep it tight, but still rough around the edges in all the right ways. What’s striking is how the band manage to make something so riff-forward feel so psychedelic. It’s heady stuff, rooted in the 70s but presented with a modern, nervy energy that keeps it from falling into retro cosplay. It’s groove, grit, mood, and mystery, all wrapped around a riff that feels like it’s been unearthed from some forgotten crate of proto-psych gold. One of the most straight-up satisfying moments on the record, and a late-album standout that proves they’ve still got plenty of fuel in the tank.
There’s a deliberate, more measured pace to ‘Me King’. After the riff-heavy propulsion of ‘Question’, this track feels like the band stepping back to let things breathe — but that doesn’t mean it’s lacking in power. Quite the opposite. The restraint here is its strength, and it’s all the more affecting for it. The bass locks in on a monotone pulse, holding the track steady like a tightrope wire. It’s minimalist, almost robotic, but that flatline groove becomes the bedrock for everything else to rise and fall. The drums are equally patient — not flashy, but perfectly placed — allowing the track to simmer, smoulder and bloom in just the right moments. That contrast between the steady, grounding rhythm section and the soaring choruses is what gives the song its emotional weight. The vocals are melancholic but clear-eyed, rising in those big, echo-laden refrains with a quiet desperation that sticks with you. When the guitars enter full bloom in the chorus, they shimmer with a kind of bittersweet grandeur — psychedelic, yes, but rooted in something deeply human. There’s a feeling of trying to reach for something just out of grasp. A longing threaded through the noise.
We are treated to another woozy, spacey moment with ‘Awful Planet’, a late-album curveball that dials things back into minimalism just when you think the band might be ready to rev things up again. There’s no fanfare here, no big dramatic push — instead, it arrives like a fog, slow and deliberate, casting long shadows and shifting the tone with quiet force. Every note played feels essential. There’s no fat here, no clutter — just a slow, deliberate progression where space is as important as sound. What makes ‘Awful Planet’ so affecting is its restraint. The textures are weightless, almost ambient at times, yet emotionally loaded. There’s a kind of cosmic loneliness baked into its DNA — a track that seems to hover between exhaustion and transcendence. A deep breath before the curtain falls.
The album comes to a close with the 60’s sway of ‘Stage’, and it’s a beautifully bruised finale. From the very first strum, the parallels to The Velvet Underground are undeniable — that chugging, melancholic chord progression, the unfussy rhythm guitar, and a vocal delivery that’s deadpan but deeply felt. There’s a simplicity here that feels almost confrontational in the context of the kaleidoscopic sprawl that came before. Gone are the synth freak-outs, the motorik grooves, the spiralling cosmic jams. What’s left is bare and human. A few chords, a steady beat, and a voice that seems to be taking stock of the wreckage — emotional, personal, maybe planetary. But don’t mistake it for slight. ‘Stage’ carries a weight precisely because of its restraint. It feels like the album looking itself in the mirror, asking what it all meant. The guitar tones are warm but slightly frayed, and the production leaves enough air in the mix to make each strum feel tactile. It feels like the band is walking off into the sunset with a shrug and a half-smile, knowing full well they’ve said everything they needed to — but not everything they could.
So, what exactly is Manhunter? Well for it’s not just Hooveriii’s most accomplished release to date — it’s a kaleidoscopic map of where psych-rock can go when you refuse to be hemmed in by nostalgia or genre convention. Across fifteen tracks, the band expertly balance grit with grace, pastiche with progression. It’s an album that knows its references — Bowie, The Velvets, Can, Spirit, Gene Clark — but never relies on them. Instead, it builds something new from the fragments of the old, each track its own world but still connected to a broader vision. The production is full of texture, but it never feels overworked. The performances are tight but raw where they need to be. And there’s a real sense of play running through it all — like a band that still gets a thrill from following their own curiosity into the unknown. In a time when so many psych and garage acts either chase fidelity to a bygone era or lean too heavily on fuzzed-out clichés, Manhunter feels like a breath of fresh air. It’s the sound of a band pushing themselves, trying things, stretching out, and — crucially — having fun doing it.
Every now and then a release arrives in my inbox that feels like it already knows what I like to listen to. It doesn’t shout. Deciduous, the debut EP from Austin-based singer-songwriter Paige Morton aka Ellum, is exactly that kind of record. A quiet stunner. A bruised and beautiful hybrid of indie rock, shoegaze, slowcore and post-hardcore. It doesn’t chase genre—it kinda just bleeds through them.
Ellum, still cloaked in a bit of mystery, wears influence like a second skin. The palette is fascinating: the emotional turbulence of Converge, the bare fragility of Nick Drake, the noir elegance of Interpol—all running like veins through this deeply personal and richly textured six-track release. Production duties come courtesy of Carson Pace of The Callous Daoboys, a pairing that makes perfect sense once you hear the results. These songs ache in unexpected directions. And the further you go in, the harder they hit.
Let’s dive into it.
The EP opens with the bittersweet ‘Macy’, a song of two halves. It begins with disarming simplicity: a single, gently strummed guitar lays the foundation, wide open and raw, while Morton’s voice—delicate, exposed—trickles in like the ghost of an apology. There’s a deep sense of stillness in this first section, but it’s not peaceful. It’s the kind of quiet that trembles with tension, as though the track is waiting for something to break. And then, without warning, the second half crashes in. A sudden swell of fuzzed-out guitars and reverb-heavy distortion flips the emotional tone completely. This isn’t a slow build or a gentle shift—it’s a rupture. The track lurches from introspective singer-songwriter territory into full-blown shoegaze melancholy, guitars howling like they’re trying to outrun the weight of the words just sung. It’s cathartic but never messy—each layer of sound precisely placed to elevate the emotional stakes.
Up next, ‘Deciduous’ slips into something more fragile, more haunted. After the emotional rupture of ‘Macy’, this track feels like stepping through the smouldering wreckage. The guitars are cleaner here, bathed in chorus and delay—a glistening shoegaze shimmer that calls to mindthe more subdued corners of Whirr’s catalogue. But unlike their sprawling soundscapes, Ellum keeps things close and compressed. Everything here feels deliberate, tight, wound like a spring. Lyrically, the song plays like a quiet unravelling. The title itself—Deciduous—evokes ideas of shedding, of letting go as a seasonal necessity. There’s a suggestion of growth through loss, but also a fear of what remains after the fall. The emotional restraint is chilling—this isn’t melodrama, it’s the real thing. One of the standout features here is the way the instrumentation mirrors that emotional unease. Guitar’s chime and quiver, notes occasionally bending out of key, like nerves fraying at the edge. There’s a sense that everything might fall apart if held too tightly—and that tension gives the song a heartbreaking edge.
That quiet-then-profoundly-loud format continues into ‘Papercuts’, but here it’s distilled into its sharpest, most urgent form. This is the shortest track on the EP, but don’t let the runtime fool you—’Papercuts’ stings. It arrives like a whisper and leaves a bruise. The intro is skeletal—barely there. Morton’s voice comes in low and close, almost conspiratorial, riding a single repetitive guitar phrase that feels like it might vanish if you blink too hard. But it’s the restraint that’s so unnerving. You can hear the song tightening its grip from the first bar. And when it goes off, it really goes off. Guitars explode into the foreground in great shuddering waves, distorted just enough to give the edges that satisfying blur. The shift isn’t just dynamic—it’s physical. Your chest tightens. It’s the sonic equivalent of a paper cut: small, sudden, deceptively deep.
‘Easy’ arrives almost fully formed. There’s no coy build-up, no tentative lean-in—it kicks the door open with purpose. Drums pound with ritualistic insistence over a sublime, slow-burning chord progression that feels both familiar and otherworldly. Right from the off, there’s a gravity to it. The chord changes unfold patiently giving the song a grounded, almost meditative weight. As the bass slides in beneath the surface and harmony vocals begin to bloom around Morton’s lead, the track settles into a kind of hypnotic, head-nodding pulse. The arrangement breathes; it trusts the listener to sit inside the pocket, to feel the weight of each pause and swell. It’s a reminder that ease doesn’t mean absence of struggle, but maybe, just maybe, the ability to move through it with grace.
We settle back into that peaceful insistence of guitar and voice on ‘Sick’. It’s a gentle return to Ellum’s core sonic motif—Morton’s voice, calm but cracked around the edges, floating over cyclical guitar patterns that seem to breathe in and out. There’s a deceptive stillness here, like the kind that lingers just before a fever breaks. The title suggests discomfort, but what we get is something more quietly unsettling: exhaustion, perhaps, or the strange calm that comes from surrendering to what you can’t control. There’s a tension just under the surface, a kind of emotional drone that never resolves. The bass pulses like a second heartbeat and pared back drum pattern gives the track a sense of space and unease. The mix leaves just enough room for silence to become a character—one that presses in between each phrase, demanding to be felt. ‘Sick’ is a slow burn, a quietly devastating track that doesn’t demand attention but absolutely rewards it.
The closer is Morton at her most vulnerable. ‘Moonlight’ strips things down again—warm, lo-fi textures but with a vocal that’s in control and leading the song. It’s intimate and spectral, with the feel of a demo that was too pure to overwork. There’s a quiet confidence in the delivery, like she knows exactly where she’s taking us, even if we’re drifting through fog. From the outset, there’s a dreamlike stillness to the track. The guitar is hushed, slightly detuned, almost feeling like it’s been recorded to cassette—warped around the edges in that beautiful way where tone becomes texture. But instead of crumbling under its own fragility, the song holds its shape. Morton’s voice does the heavy lifting here, clear and grounded, threading purposefully through the mist. That shoegaze shimmer is dialled right back, but the influence is still there—in the reverb-drenched guitar tails, in the way the chords seem to hover rather than land. As the song begins to dissolve, there’s no grand finale. Just a slow fade, as if she’s walking out of frame, still singing. No resolution. No punctuation mark. It ends the way real emotion often does: mid-thought, still reverberating.
Deciduous is a stunning debut—not just for what it does, but for what it doesn’t do. It refuses to settle. It holds space for vulnerability without demanding resolution. These songs feel lived in and raw, like pages torn from an overstuffed journal. There’s an emotional precision here that makes each track land differently depending on when and how you hear it. Across six tracks, Ellum delivers a stunningly cohesive debut that feels like it was grown rather than written—rooted in emotional honesty and nurtured by a melting pot of influences that never overwhelm her own voice. Morton strips her sound back without ever losing complexity; every layer feels intentional, every moment of quiet carries as much weight as the loudest passages. Morton has built something special here. The leaves are falling, but spring is already humming underneath.
Deciduous is out now and available over on the Ellum Bandcamp Page.
Static Sounds Club 