Inspired by Miles Davis‘ In a Silent Way, Nick Schofield‘s Blue Hour comes along just when we need it most. In a time when everyone is screaming (inward and outward, for right and wrong reasons depending on the individual) and everyone could use some grounding, Schofield helps us all stand still for a bit.
As the story goes, Schofield improvised and recorded the drum and synthesizer parts for the album in one day as he made his own riff of Davis’ classic album. Schofield then teamed up with trumpeter Scott Bevins who also improvised and recorded his parts in one day and without hearing anything Schofield had made beforehand.
The result is another stunning, beautiful record from Schofield. “Sky Cafe” and “Magic Touch” swell, soar, and soothe. The snappy, crisp beats of “Dream On” and its bright synths belong in a meet-cute scene from your favorite lost 1980s romantic comedy. “Goodnight Sun” and “Imagine Space” are almost krautrock-jazz with their looping synths and echoing trumpet.
“Natural Wonder” is like a lone trumpeter is playing across the street from a New Age bookstore that’s playing meditative synth music through their outdoor speakers. “Hidden Corner” will make you want to curl up in one with the song in your ears and a good book. The looping synths of “Hotel Cloud” relax you as Bevins’ trumpet carries your luggage while you chill out at the bar. “Kyoto Kiss” sends you from a hotel in the sky to a nice, modern spa in Japan where you’re in hurry to leave.
The album ends with the simply named “Times” to remind us that time can stretch if we let it. Time can become meaningless and nothing to worry about if we let it. The whole album reminds us of this in a time when we’re all rushed, grumpy, or just plain exhausted. We need albums like this to settle us.
Keep your mind open.
[I dream about you subscribing.]
[Thanks to Gabriel at Clandestine Label Services.]
OHYUNG, the solo project of Brooklyn artist, DJ, and film composer Lia Ouyang Rusli, today shares “nevada,” the second single from her forthcoming album IOWA, arriving March 6. The track opens with a massive boom—”whether thunder or gunshots, the sound is an awakening of the spirit,” Rusli says. The field-recorded sample loops throughout the piece as a glacial melody pulses and swells beneath, intertwined with choral voices and wailing synths.
Of “nevada,” Rusli says the track evokes “open land and a holy reverence for space and openness. And in that space there may be a painful memory, but that memory is softened by time, letting beauty in.” The track is paired with a one-take visual that picks up where the video for lead single “all dolls go to heaven” left off. Among its early praise, Paste recognized that track as one of their “5 Songs You Need to Hear This Week,” describing it as music that “sweeps through the sea-level holy, uncouples from its textures, and climbs into the mouth of a liberated afterlife.” Together, these tracks signal OHYUNG’s anticipated return to ambient music—cinematic snapshots of their year in the Midwest.
IOWA follows last year’s You Are Always On My Mind, praised by Pitchfork as “an extraordinary burst of pop,” and marks Rusli’s first ambient album since her 2022 breakout imagine naked!, which was named one of NPR Music’s Best Albums of the Year. An evocation of Rusli’s year living in Iowa City between 2023 and 2024, the album documents a time when she became embedded in the local DIY music scene and made between composing scores for the acclaimed films Happyend (dir. Neo Sora) and Sorry, Baby (dir. Eva Victor).
Rusli describes IOWA as “an ode to the vast beauty of the Midwest, fields of corn, rolling hills, harsh winters, tornado sirens, and the trans people that survive despite the threat of right-wing christofascism. IOWA is my love letter to Iowa City and the Midwest, my experimental trans Bruce Springsteen Nebraska.” The album is a stripped-down, self-produced album that foregrounds atmosphere and restraint. The record pares back earlier maximalism to reveal ghostly textures built from field recordings, manipulated devotional samples, and restrained synth pads, with moments of rupture interrupting otherwise serene compositions.
Following upcoming DJ sets in Tokyo, Japan, and Seoul, South Korea, OHYUNG will celebrate the album’s release with a performance at Stone Circle Theatre in Ridgewood, New York, on March 6. Presented in partnership with Trans Music Archive, the event will feature an opening performance by YATTA, a DJ set from Bitepoint, and food by Jessie Yuchen, and will serve as a fundraiser for the Iowa Trans Mutual Aid Fund. A physical vinyl edition of IOWA will also be released via Trans Music Archive, with all proceeds benefiting the fund.
Check out “nevada” above, and stay tuned for more music from IOWA ahead of its March 6 release.
At first listen to Mandy, Indiana‘s new album, URGH, you’re not sure what’s happening. The first track, “Sevastopol,” hits you with industrial synths, robot vocals, thudding drums, and warped orchestral sounds all in the same track.
URGH, like all Mandy, Indiana (who actually hail from Manchester in the UK) records, is multi-layered (like the album’s cover) with its instrumentation and subjects, but the overall theme seems to be rage. Mandy, Indiana are, like most of us, just pissed off right now and not afraid to call people out on their bullshit. The album’s title could be spoken as a tired sigh, a guttural growl, a response to a gut punch, or a grunt of hard effort.
“Magazine” tackles one of their favorite subjects – the objectification of women and the impossible standards women are expected to meet. “try saying” mixes video game bloops with wild processed drum sounds from Alex Macdougall and looped French vocals from Valentine Caulfield.
“Dodecahedron,” believe it or not, reminds me of early, heavier Art of Noise tracks. “A Brighter Tomorrow” could be a rallying call or a warning, depending on which side of history you’re choosing. I lean more toward it being a warning of sorts since Scott Fair‘s guitars sound like alarms blaring in the distance. “Life Hex” is a rager and feels like the bubbling anger under the surface of so many of us.
“ist halt so” combines big drums hits with guitars that sound like a belt sander on its last bits of battery charge while Caulfield commands your attention with her snarled vocal delivery. “Sicko” throbs with thick synths and electro-bass and includes guest bars from Billy Woods. “Cursive” is a bumping and bubbling techno track with beats that blend industrial pulse with tribal dance rhythms.
URGH ends with “I’ll Ask Her,” a wicked takedown of toxic masculinity, women’s beauty standards, and dudes who are such pricks that they don’t even realize their own friends are calling them out on it. Caulfield has made it no secret that she was dealing with the aftermath of a sexual assault (and other health issues, along with Macdougall having his own health problems) while writing this album. She and the rest of her bandmates pull no punches on the song or anywhere else on the record.
It’s an urgent record, a powerful record, a cathartic record, an inspiring record. It’s a record we need right now to get us out of the housefire, get our friends, family, and neighbors, out of theirs, and then find the bastards who lit the matches.
I’m not sure how to accurately describe Scattered Purgatory‘s new album, Post Purgatory, but I’m also not sure it’s possible. The Taipei duo blend multiple genres well: Trip-hop, industrial, motorik, synthwave, a bit of goth. The cover looks like an upside-down photo of a flooded underpass with a city (Taipei?) in the background. The world was turned upside-down for the band during the pandemic, and they emerged from it, like all of us, a bit puzzled by how time and space worked and what was certain. Human relationships and airy expanses craved during isolation now felt kind of weird. Time felt like “it can heal or it can destroy,” as they mention in the notes for the album.
“Atata Naraka” has wild tenor saxophone (courtesy of Minyen Hsieh) that blasts like its being played in that flooded underpass while you cruise over the floodwaters in a sleek Miami Vice-era boat. The thick bass and fuzzy guitar chords of “Wunai” sound like the set-up to a seduction sequence in a vampire thriller.
“Ephemeral Mind” is a good name for a good track that describes how most of the world felt during and after the pandemic. Our minds, preoccupied with distractions before the pandemic, and calmness of mind, became ephemeral to our doom-scrolling. Emerging from our cocoons made some of us realize we need to put the phone down, while others rushed to fill the silence of the world and our heads with even more distractions. The 1980s goth guitar chords on it are damn cool.
“Thundering Dream” is heavy with low bass and synth stabs that sound like they’re played by robots underwater. dotzio‘s guest vocals on “Moonquake” create a gorgeous trip-hop / chillwave track that you’ll probably put on romantic playlists all year. “Above the Clouds” has heavy metal guitar chords combined with soft vocal sounds and tripped-out synths to make something unpredictable…as is the short “KL20,” which is like Blade Runner background music.
“Ocean City, Mirage Tower” would also fit into a science fiction film as the lead character slurps noodles in a tiny place off a neon-lit alley waiting for robot bounty hunters to show up and ruin everything. It floats along like lotus petal along the rain-filled underpass, drifting from synthwave to dark funk to cinematic piano paranoia.
Time is weird. Scattered Purgatory figured this out years ago and made an album that has a title symbolizing multiple things: Emerging from the weird time of the pandemic (which felt like purgatory for many), becoming new versions of themselves (Post “Scattered” Purgatory), no longer dwelling on the past, mistakes, and regrets (essentially what purgatory is).
Time constantly happens, and yet it doesn’t. No is one really sure what the hell it is. It heals all wounds and also withers away everything. Now is the only part of it that exists. I’m writing this in my present and in your past. You’re reading it in my future and your present. All of those things are now, like this record.
Eve Maret (sounds like “muh-ray”) is a Nashville-based experimental artist and composer who employs a wide array of electronic media and techniques in her various disciplines, exploring the possibilities of personal and communal healing through creative action. She has been praised by the likes of WIRE Magazine, Chicago Tribune, DJ Mag, Bandcamp, and more.
Drawing inspiration from nineteenth-century orchestral and choral works, the Fluxus movement, Kosmische Musik and funk, Eve makes use of digital and modular synthesizers, a vocoder, clarinet, electric bass, guitar, and field recordings to create works that range from lush cinematic compositions to space disco. Eve’s music practice is a conversation with her numerous curiosities, manifested in the form of video art, drawing, dance, ritual, and cymatics.
Today, Maret announces her latest release Diamond Cutter. The twelve tracks are out April 17th, 2026. Diamond Cutter is an exploration of the space where strength meets vulnerability. The title comes from an ancient Buddhist text of the same name.
“A diamond represents the invisible potential within everything. Diamonds are perfectly clear, while also being the hardest substance in the universe,” Eve describes. “With this body of work, I endeavored to create music that was both strong and honest. I set aside any genre-specific limitations to allow the pure expression to come through directly. Each song is a commitment to using my authentic voice, to embodying my highest potential by singing the truth.”
Eve is also sharing the fearless, synth-soaked new single “Break the Chain,”out today. It’s a track about processing grief — feeling it, and letting it pass through. Check out the new track via YouTube and pre-order the album here.
“I made the beat when my cat Shrimpy didn’t have much time left. He sat on my lap, purring while I worked. I made it for him, and it was the last time he would be a witness to my creativity while he was alive. I think that every loss I’ve experienced gives me space to process all the previous losses, big and small, personal and collective,” Eve says. “When another being’s presence reveals to you the love you have within, that experience is never lost. I am forever changed by the love I’ve felt, and I can break the chain of suffering by giving myself love and appreciating everything around me, knowing that love is the only thing that never goes away.”
Eve’s music has been featured on Echoes Radio and Iggy Pop’s BBC radio show Iggy Confidential. “Synthesizer Hearts,” off of Eve’s 2020 release, Stars Aligned, appeared on BBC Radio 6 Music’s B-List in December 2020 and premiered on Mary Anne Hobbs’ BBC Radio show “Music From The Near Future.” In 2021, Eve contributed to Moebius Strips, an audio installation and companion album honoring the work of electronic music pioneer Dieter Moebius. Other contributors include Geoff Barrow (Portishead, Beak), Sarah Davachi, Jean-Benoît Dunckel (Air), Mark Mothersbaugh (Devo), Phew, Hans-Joachim Roedelius (Cluster, Harmonia), Michael Rother (Harmonia, NEU!) and Yuri Suzuki.
In 2022 and 2023, Eve and her collaborators Dream Chambers and Belly Full Of Stars composed a live-score for FW Murnau’s 1922 film, Nosferatu, which they performed in theatres across the United States. Collaborating is an important aspect of Eve’s creative path, and she has an on-going dance music project called GLAZIER with her partner Scott Glazier, as well as a synth-rock duo, Eardrummer, with longtime friend Adrienne Franke.
Eve has performed across the United States and internationally, alongside artists such as William Tyler, Guerilla Toss, MATMOS, JEFF the Brotherhood, and Lydia Lunch.
In addition to her personal creative practices, Eve is committed to providing avenues for others to create and uplift one another. In 2018, She, Jess Chambers, Deli Paloma-Sisk, and Arlene Sparacia founded Hyasynth House, an electronic music collective and education center for female and LGBTQIA+ artists. Together they facilitated workshops, performances, and community-wide conversations in an effort to support and empower marginalized groups. The founders went their separate ways in 2019, but Eve continues to lead electronic music workshops and to organize live music events in Nashville and beyond, including her work co-producing Nashville Drone, a 6-hour music experience featuring 13 regional artists across genres, in an effort to create an immersive space for the community to connect and recharge.
ADULT. is not cooperating. For over 25 years, the dystopian Detroit synth-punk institution founded by Nicola Kuperus and Adam Lee Miller has embodied steadfast frustration, distrust, and apprehension. One might expect the edges to soften with time, but ADULT. is not interested in the comforts of legacy. The duo’s music has never sounded as visceral, urgent, and downright angry as it does on the culminating, uncompromising Kissing Luck Goodbye, their scorched-earth 10th LP and fourth with Dais Records.
Built with upgraded gear and a whole new library of sounds, the material is crushingly dynamic, louder yet clearer, with Kuperus’ commanding delivery given greater prominence in the mix, outlining an arsenal of vivid, caustic calls, chants, and musings. Laughter, whether in the lyrics or as a possessed presence, serves as a leitmotif that speaks to the menacing absurdity of modern times.
“No One is Coming”, the album’s lead single is a poignant, bassline-driven industrial anthem that turns feedback into melody, the track attacks inaction in the face of fascism —
NO ONE IS COMING TO YOUR RESCUE… A lyric that was written in early 2025 and is even more relevant on its release date a year later. A song speaking to moral collapse and political corruption “to a T”. These subhumans attempting to run the show are more concerned with cashing in and political cosplay than the well being of mankind. While working on this album, I read an article from an esteemed environmental scientist about “what’s coming in the future”. What stuck with me was their point that we are entering a new phase in existence where the most important thing we can do is know our neighbors and know the strengths of each other and what resources everyone has. Who needs extra care? Who is on their own? This song was written as a call to arms. Be alert. Be aware. Be prepared. Stand up for yourself and look out for your community. We are better when we are united. Social media is wearing us down. Deluding us. The political landscape is horrifying, distracting, deranged and unhinged. We are seeing this go down in real time right now in Minneapolis… NO ONE IS COMING TO YOUR RESCUE… except ALL OF US! Keep speaking up! Keep using your right to protest and most importantly keep showing kindness to one another.
ADULT. is known for high-stakes catharsis on stage, and recently deployed their back catalog of bass guitar songs from the 2000s, retracing the prescient Anxiety Always era partially out of necessity given the temperature of today’s political and technological dread. The response was instant and palpable: “We were in Paris, and the kids were stage diving. And I was like, this is rad. This is kind of the energy I want to get back into,” Kuperus says. The epiphany coincided with a series of setbacks — Kuperus’ bouts with chronic vertigo, the loss of their close friend and collaborator Douglas McCarthy of Nitzer Ebb, whom the album is dedicated to — all made profoundly worse under the looming regime. “We were stuck in the mud for quite a while after the election,” Miller says. “We had all the concepts, but we would just be like, ‘What’s the point?’” With failing studio air conditioners and dead car batteries (their sacred space for listening back to recordings), they often joked that the album might be cursed. Kuperus adds, “We’re just like everything’s breaking. We’re breaking. We’re broken.”
The sentiment didn’t stick, however, as they found themselves ultimately too super-charged by fury to sit still. From watching Musk’s disgusting nazi salute to seeing their community struggle under the new regime to waiting months for a tariff-inflated replacement subwoofer, the vibe heading into Kissing Luck Goodbye was four middle fingers pointed straight up.
Rather than retreat, ADULT. focused on the process, revisiting their setup, complete with their first new mics in 20 years. They obsessed over textures, amassing a massive sample library taken from old thrift-store albums, previously used and unused ADULT. ingredients and new field recordings, running myriad items, including the buzz of shop vacs, through various pedals. Pause Kissing Luck Goodbye at any moment, and you’re likely to count a dozen things happening at once in strange, dizzying, and dissonant harmony. Together with producer Nolan Gray, whose involvement resulted from a chance encounter (he happened to be the host of the short-term rental property where the two stayed — maybe there is still some luck, after all), the band pushed themselves harder than ever before to build a world with this record.
Songs took shape from unusual places: “No One Is Coming” got its tempo from a skipping record they captured through a cell phone during a bnb stay for Kuperus’ 50th birthday. “None of It’s Fun” blitzes with breathless urgency, high-speed glissades, and pointed lines like “OH I AM TEARING MY GUTS OUT / LOOK AT ME…DO YOU THINK THAT THIS IS AMUSING?” The closer, “Destroyers”, was the last song they recorded and encompasses the techniques that ADULT. has learned not just throughout the making of Kissing Luck Goodbye, but across their quarter-century as a pioneering collaborative project.
ADULT. Live Dates:
Apr 10: Pittsburgh, PA – Spirit Lodge Apr 11: Baltimore, MD – Ottobar Apr 12: Brooklyn, NY – Good Room Apr 14: Raleigh, NC – Kings Apr 15: Atlanta, GA – The Earl Apr 16: Jacksonville, FL – Jack Rabbits Apr 17: Orlando, FL – The Social Apr 18: Miami, FL – TBD Apr 21: New Orleans, LA – Gasa Gasa Apr 22: Houston, TX – White Oak Music Hall (Upstairs) Apr 23: Austin, TX – 29th Street Ballroom Apr 24: San Antonio, TX – Paper Tiger Apr 25: Denton, TX – Rubber Gloves Apr 28: Albuquerque, NM – Sister Apr 29: Phoenix, AZ – Rebel Lounge Apr 30: San Diego, CA – The Casbah May 01: Los Angeles, CA – Hollywood Forever (Masonic Lodge) May 02: San Francisco, CA – Rickshaw Stop May 04: Portland, OR – Mississippi Studios May 05: Seattle, WA – Barboza May 08: Minneapolis, MN – 7th St. Entry May 09: Cudahy, WI – X-Ray Arcade
Miss Grit—the New York-based, Korean-American musician Margaret Sohn (they/she)—announces their new album, Under My Umbrella, will be released April 24th via Mute, and shares the magnetic new single, “Stranger.” Sohn is a bold experimentalist and architect of sculptural texture, known for deftly moving between analogue and digital, guitar and synths, and creating an immersive cosmos of sound with futuristic frameworks for their searching introspection. For their second full-length album, they’ve lifted the lid on their internal world, lasering in on the anxieties and heartbreak of the past two years. It’s an album that is as immersive and expansive as it is intimate, channeling the noirish atmosphere of classic trip-hop bands, while adding a hefty dose of maximalism and a dream-pop sensibility.
Last year, Miss Grit released a preview of Under My Umbrella with “Tourist Mind.” It was the first taste of new music since Miss Grit’s debut, 2023’s Follow The Cyborg, a concept album in which they built a fluid future beyond the gender and genre binaries, where a non-human machine goes in pursuit of liberation. They were recognized by i-D as a “singular talent” for their “compelling ideas and freewheeling creativity” and by Rolling Stone for their “elliptical, hooky songs that take unexpected turns.” Surrounding its release, Miss Grit was named an “Artist to Watch” by Brooklyn Vegan, a “Breaking” artist by FLOOD, profiled by Rolling Stone as an “Artist You Need To Know,” and beyond. Additionally, they performed for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’s LateShowMeMusic series, and toured supporting Nation of Language, Bartees Strange and The Last Dinner Party.
Under My Umbrella began to take shape when Sohn returned from an intense touring schedule where they’d driven themself around North America totally alone. When they returned home, Sohn found themselves yearning to capture that specific, less restrained energy of playing live. Like Follow The Cyborg, its creation mostly took place in Sohn’s Queens apartment. The music came to them quickly, streams of consciousness with one new guiding principle: don’t overthink it. “I tried not to edit too much or force a moment to happen,” they explain, leaning into big choruses where it felt right. Some guitar sounds were first takes, ditto vocals, thus preserving the immediacy and authenticity of the emotion. As such, it’s a densely layered album, charged with electric crescendos that build to moments of unbridled catharsis. “It feels truer to myself, and more of a representation of what is actually coming out of me,” says Sohn.
With its all-engulfing chorus about trying to out-run feeling betrayed, new single “Stranger” is Sohn’s most ambitious song yet. Ethereal and intense, its gritty breakbeat backbone and sparkly synths give way to emphatic industrial-pop. With this track, Sohn’s long-time mix engineer, Aron Kobayashi Ritch of Momma, stepped up to co-produce. “Usually collaboration is a little bit hard for me – there has to be a deeper connection there,” says Sohn. “But really trusting the people I was working with to put their fingerprint on the music, and them also being close friends, was liberating.” Other collaborators include friends from New York City and Los Angeles: electronic visionary and film scorer Sae Heum Han (mmph), bassist Margaux Bouchegnies (Margaux), singer Eva Liu (Mui Zyu), producer Luciano Rossi (Mui Zyu), drummer Preston Fulks (Momma) and violinist Zachary Mezzo (Catcher).
Watch the Visualizer for “Stranger” Under My Umbrella not only presents Sohn’s gift for complex production, but also the boldness of finding your voice. Many of the songs speak to the idea of trying to wrestle free–of expectations, of being caught up in other people and losing yourself, and of the social anxiety that comes with being overwhelmed by others. “Before, I was really timid about what I said and didn’t say, and that all ended up being molded into something that didn’t feel as relatable to me as it once did,” comments Sohn. “Part of it is due to honoring my feelings and trying to be more honest in my writing. I feel a deep connection to this record that I haven’t felt about my music until now.”
Under My Umbrella will be available digitally and on limited-edition crystal clear vinyl and CD. Miss Grit will play record release shows in NYC on Friday, April 24th at Nightclub 101 and Los Angeles on Saturday, May 2nd at Scribble. Prior, Sohn will appear at Rough Trade in NYC for an acoustic set and signing with free entry along with a pre-order of the album. Fans can RSVP here.
Miss Grit Tour Dates: Sat. Feb. 7 – Los Angeles, CA @ Banned From Eden Fri. April 24 – New York, NY @ Nightclub 101 Sat. May 2 – Los Angeles, CA @ Scribble
Today the voice and songwriter of Fear of Men, Jessica Weiss, announces details of her debut solo album under the moniker New German Cinema. Set for release on March 27th via Felte, her new album ‘Pain Will Polish Me’ is preceded today with lead single “My Mistake”, which features guest vocals from Merchandise’s Carson Cox.
Weiss carries lyrical precision and emotional intensity into the stormy dark-pop gems on her debut solo album. ‘Pain Will Polish Me’ has been five years in the making, stretched between London and LA, built from late-night files, long silences and the quiet persistence of trying to finish something beautiful. Produced with Alex DeGroot (Zola Jesus, Cate Le Bon), it feels both forensic and devotional, the product of someone who doesn’t rush catharsis. It presents both solitary and connective, as if built from long-distance transmissions between two dream states.
Weiss calls the album a meditation on pop and European art-house auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder. It tracks the ways intimacy and control fold into one another until it’s impossible to tell where one ends. The songs are about the parts of yourself that dissolve in love, and the small acts of violence that come with being known. They move through claustrophobic relationships, obsession, surrender, cycles of suffering that start to feel like devotion. The language is pop but the feeling is something stranger, colder, more interior.
The album’s lead track, online today, is “My Mistake” – a collaboration with Carson Cox of Merchandise, who comments “I was going to produce Fear of Men and instead we made something totally different I think. True collaboration which is my preferred way to work on music”. What began as an Italo disco experiment evolved into a goth club anthem, charged and restless. It captures the push and pull of Weiss’s themes – devotion as both destruction and release. Weiss has a knack for making pain feel both exquisite and familiar.
Speaking on the accompanying video, Weiss comments: “The video sets the emotional tone for the record, suspended between eroticism and nightmare. It draws on cropped mirror framing – a favourite device of Douglas Sirk used to explore themes of emotional and physical entrapment and characters’ inner psychological conflicts – moments of dissociation, and the television as a symbol of alienation, inspired by my perennial inspiration, RW Fassbinder.”
Video director Luke Bather adds: “Our initial starting point was, predictably, the New German Cinema movement. However, when we discussed the themes of the song in more depth, the video evolved into its own beast. Sex, death, repressed desire, and good old-fashioned Catholic Guilt all loom large in the video through a series of performance vignettes inspired by everything from the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder through to the paintings of Francis Bacon and everything in between. Adding to this, we have the spectre of Carson haunting the video as a ghostly analogue broadcast interspersed with archival footage of Berlin in the 1970s; an inescapable reminder of the past and a nod to the original New German Cinema movement.”
The songs on ‘Pain Will Polish Me’ move in shadow. Layers of synth, vocal and guitar fold over one another, drawing from the cinematic tension of Fassbinder’s New German Cinema and the quiet dissonance of modern Berlin, where Weiss recorded fragments of the record, drifting between places that carry uneasy ghosts. Between dinner conversations about the city’s buried history and the surreal comfort of its present, she found herself tracing the outlines of love and loss, identity and dissolution. “Germany’s history is everywhere but it’s unsaid,” she notes. “Fassbinder brought it into view. I wanted to approach the same sense of unease through sound.”
The album artwork picks up these themes, hovering between the everyday mundanity of a Fassbinder domestic scene, and something less recognisable, punctuated by surreal elements that move us into dreamscape, both familiar and disquieting. The shell and sea reference Botticelli’s Venus: a figure born from sea foam created when Uranus’s severed genitals fell into the ocean – an image of creation through destruction. The shell becomes her vessel of birth, representing transformation, protection and fertility – the bridge between divine creation and human life. Weiss extends this theme of renewal to the personal; her baby daughter’s babbles feature on the record.
Weiss has long been fascinated by the seam between pop and theory, art and feeling. While Fear of Men continue to work on their next record, this solo project opens up her own private language- a collection that feels at once personal and archival, haunted and alive. Between finishing a Masters in Early Modern Literature at Oxford, starting a PhD, moving countries and jobs many times, she’s been piecing together a body of work that sits somewhere between diary, research and séance.
It’s an album about losing yourself in order to see what’s left. A document of love as obsession, repetition, survival. A meditation on love as both mirror and undoing, crafted in fragments, then pieced together into something whole.
New German Cinema live dates: 28 February – London, UK @ Sebright Arms 15 April – Brighton, UK @ The Folklore Rooms
Los Angeles-based musician Lee Lewis presents his new single, “White Flag.” Today’s single marks the first taste of new music from Lewis since his striking reimagining of Nelly Furtado’s “Maneater,” praised by FLOOD as a “stirring, soulful examination of queer Black identity.” “White Flag” is atmospheric, guided by a smooth bassline, and inspired by Bond films. The track is Lewis’ most personal song to date, expressing the built-up resentment when his relationship was reaching its breaking point and finds him declaring “enough is enough.”
“In many ways, ‘White Flag’ serves as the preamble to the slow death of something chaotic and toxic, a moment where self-worth finally begins to outweigh the emotional cat chase,” Lewis reflects. “It marks the point where I start to recognize that love should not cost me myself. In the song the chorus sings ‘I’m waving my white flag.’ It’s me saying, ‘I surrender, you win, I lose, I have to let this go.’ Sonically, it’s my take on Bond music: luxurious, sultry, and powerful. The song sits in the richest part of my voice, allowing it to feel warm, buttery, and intimate. ‘White Flag’ is about surrender, not as defeat, but as self-preservation. It’s the sound of laying down my armor after a battle that took far too much from me.”
Lee Lewis, raised in the historically Black neighborhood of Ladera Heights, discovered his musical talent early. He trained at the Colburn School of Performing Arts and later at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music, studying classical voice.
Transitioning to pop music, Lewis overcame the challenge of adapting from classical precision to expressive, varied textures. His emotional delivery, marked by smooth riffs and runs, have captivated listeners and led to sold out shows in Brooklyn and Los Angeles.
As a rising star during a time when Black artists are reclaiming genres they pioneered, Lewis believes Black musicians should freely occupy both mainstream pop and R&B spaces. “I just want to exist in both worlds. Black artists should be accepted in both.”
“Destinies and Melodies” is a cinematic, electro-acoustic pop ballad featuring a cool Madonna-esque bassline and dramatic string sequences. The beat-driven progression gives the song a sense of motion, yet within the interplay of harmony and melody lingers an unresolved tension, a question left open; is there a direction to this movement? Where does it lead? Is the movement itself the destination?
On the track, Melodi Ghazal [Gra-zal] muses: “I’ve been inspired by the red thread connecting the Sufis’ whirling meditation and Britney Spears spinning around herself on Instagram. Maybe we’re all just spinning around ourselves in search of the same thing? This track is a reflection of this movement to me.”
Lyrically, “Destinies and Melodies” explores being in the midst of transformation and the act of learning to lose yourself. It contemplates the feeling of time as vertical rather than linear. “For me, the track is about surrendering, following the melodies that arise when you let go of control,” she elaborates. “This music came into being during a deeply transformative period when much of my life was changing. Forces stronger than my intellect or awareness led me down unfamiliar paths, and all I could do was follow.”
Melodi Ghazal is a Copenhagen-born singer, songwriter, and producer of Iranian descent. Her left-field pop sound blends elements of R&B and folk, marked by a distinctive tonal language and a strong melodic sensibility. In her productions, she fuses electronic and acoustic textures where MIDI strings, subtle daf drum rhythms, and lush guitar layers intertwine. Her music balances melancholy and hope, woven together by her evocative vocals and lyrics that shift seamlessly between English and Persian.
Melodi has quickly established herself as one of Denmark’s most intriguing new voices. A graduate of the acclaimed Rhythmic Music Conservatory (RMC) in Copenhagen, she studied alongside peers such as Fine, Erika de Casier, and Clarissa Connelly. Her debut EP, released in 2023, was praised as a bold artistic statement and named one of the “15 best releases of the year” by Danish music magazine Soundvenue.
Melodi has since performed at some of Denmark’s most prominent stages, including Roskilde Festival, as well as being a part of the Copenhagen underground scene.
