Cie‘s newest EP, Adventures II, contains four rock solid tracks of booming, bumping deep house that you’ll want to throw on at your next party or anytime you need to feel like a bad-azz mofo.
The opening, swirling, pulsing, grooving bass of “Reichenstein” grabs hold of you and doesn’t let go for the next six minutes and fifteen seconds. “Der Turm” (“The Tower”) has cool tribal beats that put a neat spin on this house track. It’s a well-crafted blend of house, jungle, and a bit of synthwave. Nicely done, Mr. Cie.
Side B of the album contains two versions of “Stenzelberg” — the original and a remix by Mar io. The original’s funky bass groove is enough to sell you on the entire EP, and the rest of it is a flat-out house banger (Do I sound ancient using that term?). The remix is almost a minute longer and swaps out the house funk for more jungle flavor and darkness along the edges.
This is one of the best house music EPs I’ve heard so far this year. Go snag it.
Pascal Hetzel‘s 2022 album, ASLM, gets an update three years down the road and becomes ASLM Remixes – featuring a lot of sharp talent and enough beats to power your next workout or dark afterparty.
Starting with JakoJako‘s remix of “RBBRMN” (“Rubberman?”), the album drops snappy electric percussion and throbbing sub-bass that gets into the back of your brain. GAEL‘s remix of “TWST” (“Twist?”) pulses like the heart of a final girl in a slasher film.
Up next is Kaiser‘s remix of “SLT” (“Salt?” “Slit?”), which you’ll want for your next HIIT workout because the bass on this makes you feel like you could either dance all night long or kickbox a dozen opponents. It’s followed by another remix of the same track, but this one by Projekt Gestalten. Their version adds an underlying sense of menace, almost like you’re dancing in a club with hornet nests hanging from the ceiling that might drop at any moment if the beats get too heavy.
The record ends with Luis Flores‘ remix of “PPPR” (“Pepper,” right?) throws you into some sort of futuristic, slightly dystopian sci-fi movie battle sequence with its buzzsaw synths, mechanical beats, and orbiting war machine bass. Good stuff, really.
Recorded in an abandoned warehouse on a banana farm, and named after a towable tractor plough made by the Bunyip company (“…a revolutionary ripper of great strength.”), Babe Rainbow‘s new album, slipper imp and shakaerator, is a trippy affair that blends psych-rock with surf vibes.
The album starts with a question: “What is ashwagandha?” Elliot O’Reilly‘s bass groove hooks you right away as you “swim around like yin and yang” and “plunge into oblivion” with them. “Long Live the Wilderness” encourages us (with great yacht rock guitar riffs from Jack Crowther) to take it easy and get outside now and then. Or maybe it’s “Now and Zen,” as the next track adds in some vocal echoes and warps the instruments to produce a neat effect.
“Sunday” dips into astrological themes and spacey, jangly guitar chords backed by Miles Myjavec‘s zero gravity-drifting drums. The instrumental “Apollonia” is a lovely transition to “Like Cleopatra” – a fun love song about taking your girl to outer space and treating her like a queen.
“When the milk flows” (featuring King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard‘s Stu Mackenzie – who mixed the album) is a bouncy track designed to get you to shake off your troubles. Mackenzie returns on “Mt dub” – which seems to be a song about surfing in Australia (which Babe Rainbow do often, as well as in other parts of the world) and learning that “You’re more loved than you know.”
“Aquarium cowgirl” has a fun beat and sounds ready for radio play as the band sings about how amazing it is to be alive, despite what many others would tell you. It’s interesting that there’s no apostrophe in the title of “Rainbows end.” It’s a sentence, and song (featuring Camille Jansen on guest spoken word vocals), about impermanence with dreamy synths to help you relax with the idea that all things pass. The album ends with “re-ju-ven-ate,” in which Angus Dowling asks the bold question, “What are you paying for?…Abundance, abundance for everyone.”
This is a fun record, possibly the most fun one I’ve heard so far in 2025. Have a good time with it.
Ramon Narvaez is also known as j.o.y.s., which stands for “Jump Out of Your Skin.” It’s an acronym for stepping out of your comfort zone and trying on something new. For Narvaez, that meant teaming up with has pedal steel-playing pal Justin Gaynor to finally put the musical improvisations they’d been creating into a self-titled album of intriguing ambience.
“dastardly” opens the album with simple synth chords and guitar drone notes that swirl like a vortex opening in space and time. The bending of time was a central theme while Narvaez and and Gaynor were creating the album, and they nailed the feel of it right away. “yucca valley” is perfect for desert meditations, as it seems to stretch beyond your senses and center you in stillness.
“river / road” curls along for over eight minutes, with Gaynor’s pedal steel helping your brain drift like a leaf on the water and your hand sway up and down outside the car window as you drive at a leisurely pace. Speaking of water, “blue water prison” is something you won’t mind being in, as it washes over you and then drains away tension.
The guitars on “lee & leo” are reminiscent of lonely border towns or nearly empty roadside diners on a side highway. “heights” almost fades out before sliding back in to bring you back to Earth. The long title track is a back-and-forth conversation between Narvaez and Gaynor’s guitars while quiet synths moderate them. By the time we get to “96 (jumping cholla),” we’re either falling into or awakening from a dream.
It’s a lovely record, and a nice meditative journey if you’re looking for one.
Black Moth Super Rainbow – now two decades into their candied up career – emerges from the technicolor pollen puckered Pennsylvania landscape with a new and reformulated fructose-blasted seventh album. Soft New Magic Dream is announced today for a June 6th release via Rad Cult, and it comes that familiar rush of flavors that pump directly from the BMSR soda fountain; that signature blend of strange neon nostalgia, sweetly melancholic synth pop wizardry, hip hop head bobbing, and citric acid tinged freak out flourish.
Today they share the new single “Open the Fucking Fantasy,”alongside an announcement of a North American tour in summer 2025. Check out the new searing new single via YouTube(as well as the video for the previously released “All 2 of Us”), and see below for the full list of tour dates. Pre-order the album here.
It’s been seven years since the more sinister Panic Blooms, and in that time plenty has happened in the house of Rad Cult, but with Soft New Magic Dream, we are invited to bask in the analog sweet and sour embrace of that classic and here notably chilled out and snoozled up BMSR sensibility.
Soft New Magic Dream has a nuanced flavor profile; these are freaky love songs, they funk up crunchy and rattle the speakers here and there, they melt down gelatinous at the right temperatures, and even go full ballad in a few extra-soft spots. The album balances sugar kinked romance with their distinctive and here notably downtempo funky production. Never fully eschewing BMSR’s signature strange liquid centers, these songs still flirt with the uncanny while honing in on the deeply melodic and approachably groovy tendencies they’ve have been exploring in their twenty years of lid flipping. Soaring synth leads ribbon through taffy colored chord changes and highly tactile and fractured drum programming and breaks.
Tobacco’s classic vocoder vocals, puckish as ever, burble fawning tenderness and body horror quasi erotic double dares in the fizzy saturated mist. These gummy serenades will leave you blissed out with a cavity-crumbled ear to ear grin.
As the BMSR project has evolved, from the scuzzier and folk-tinged backwoods leaf worship of the first albums into the more anthemic roller disco fog machine scenes of their mid-career, and then darker turns in the last few recent albums, Soft New Magic Dream feels like another subtle and surprisingly tender twist on that now-classic sound you’ve come to expect from BMSR. A turn towards something more serene, more direct, playfully wooing us without totally ditching that enigmatic crooked smile.
Lose your toothbrush in the clouds and get ready to guzzle down this potent marshmallow cloudscape concoction optimized for falling into face first.
Black Moth Super Rainbow
Upcoming Tour Dates
8.7.25 – Pittsburgh, PA @ Spirit Hall
8.8.25 – Cleveland, OH @ Mahall’s
8.9.25 – Chicago, IL @ Metro
9.11.25 – New York, NY @ Le Poisson Rouge
9.12.25 – Philadelphia, PA @ Underground Arts
9.13.25 – Cambridge, MA @ The Sinclair
10.9.25 – Nashville, TN @ Main Stage at Eastside Bowl
10.10.25 – Asheville, NC @ The Grey Eagle Tavern & Music Hall
10.11.25 – Atlanta, GA @ The Masquerade – Purgatory
Keep your mind open.
[Open your e-mail inbox to news and reviews by subscribing today.]
The Ophelias unveil a new single/video, “Salome,” off of Spring Grove, their new album produced by Julien Baker, out April 4th via Get Better Records. As first heard on lead single “Cumulonimbus,” a “bruiser of a ‘f*ck-you’ song” (AV Club), there are “zero songs about break-ups” on Spring Grove. Today’s teeth-gnashing “Salome” uses a Biblical story as a lens through which to view the experience of getting involved with an older man: “The knife // Swings heavy in // My hands // Maybe this was a mistake // I want your head on a platter.” It’s an album standout, emanating swagger through rousing guitar and precise, machine-like drumming. In the accompanying video, directed by the band’s Spencer Peppet and Jo Shaffer, shows the band wandering around a city to gather magic objects.
“‘Salome’ loosely follows the biblical story of (you guessed it) Salome, who danced for King Herod at his birthday celebration and was told she could ask for anything in return,” says Peppet. “She asked for the head of John the Baptist. While I personally have never facilitated someone’s beheading, I find the story and the way it has resonated with playwrights, filmmakers, and artists fascinating — a real depiction of ‘female biblical rage,’ as the TikTok girlies would say. The video is our campy camcorder take on that.”
While writing Spring Grove, old ghosts were popping up from Peppet’s past. She heard from people she hadn’t heard from in years, reached out to people she didn’t talk to anymore, and found herself dreaming vividly of ex-lovers, ex-friends, co-workers and acquaintances. At a similar time, she was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder, which she says created “a hyper-awareness of the body, a sense of removal where I could see myself from outside.” As a result, the album’s lyrics abound with references to premonitions, future-telling, and prophetic dreams. It’s a luminous document of facing the visages that haunt us, whether those of others or our own. Across thirteen tracks that alternately rage and soothe, Spring Grove picks at the nuanced textures of relationships and the multifaceted nature of personhood, smashing through the infinite refractions of the self to find clarity and new perspectives. The lyrics abound with references to premonitions, future-telling, and prophetic dreams.
While The Ophelias – Spencer Peppet (vocals/guitar, she/her), Mic Adams (drums, he/him), Andrea Gutmann Fuentes (violin, she/her), and Jo Shaffer (bass, they/she) – began as an “all-girl” band, they have since shed the reductive mantle of that label. With one queer and two trans members, these four individuals have collectively explored a vast terrain of womanhood, dancing around the center of that identity and what it means to move through the world. To that end, Spring Grove is primed to tackle a wide array of relationship dynamics, emotional negotiations, and power imbalances. There’s a simultaneous intensity and delicacy in its dynamics, and it’s a marked evolution in The Ophelias’ sound and storytelling.
The Ophelias Tour Dates Fri. April 4 – Philadelphia, PA @ MilkBoy Sat. April 5 – Brooklyn, NY @ The Broadway – record release show Sun. April 6 – Vienna, VA @ Jammin’ Java Tue. April 8 – Boston, MA @ The Rockwell Wed. April 9 – Portsmouth, NH @ Press Room Sat. May 10 – Lansing, MI @ Stoopfest Sun. May 11 – Toronto, ON @ The Baby G Tue. May 13 – Montréal, QC @ Casa Del Popolo Wed. May 14 – Burlington, VT @ Radio Bean
Keep your mind open.
[Dance over to the subscription box while you’re here.]
When you hear music like Glare‘s—the wild, loose and woozy drags of guitar; the impossible beauty of it all—what kind of landscape presents itself in your mind? Vistas big enough to be forgotten in. Deserts which stretch back to the beginning of time. Infinite horizons melting into pink bokehs. It’s Texas, isn’t it?
Sunset Funeral, the band’s debut LP (out April 4 on Deathwish Inc. + Sunday Drive Records) is a fog of dreamy grief, where feeling supersedes language. On first listen, the album—which scans as vast as desert sand—may overwhelm the senses. But look closer, and you’ll find a multiplicity of heavily crushed textures, treasures.
Their latest single, “Nü Burn,” is a crunchy and lilting number that harkens back to the band’s grittier hardcore roots. But even when they deign to go hard, you can hear a softening in Glare’s sound compared to any of their previous releases, as well as an attempt to lean into more traditional pop song structures. The music drifts heavenward, to be sure, though it’s still tethered down by steady foundations. It’s beautiful. It’s humid. It’s delirious. It’s music made by people whose feelings speak louder than their words.
The band shares: “‘Nü Burn’ is about how it feels like the world stops when you’re grieving. ‘I’ll find you in a new sun, feel a new burn’ means finding those we lost in the warmth we feel… it’s a big, explosive song and probably our heaviest. When we finished writing it we immediately knew it’d be a single.”
Formed in 2017 in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, Glare aren’t so much genre traditionalists as they are painters of wide realms and intense moods. The four-piece band has already accumulated a large audience, both in the flesh with their reputation for sell-out shows, and on the internet, a place where people go to short-circuit feelings through their screens.
An album that’s been years in the making, Sunset Funeral is a document of unspeakable grief, charting the process of mourning and how it travels through our subconscious and dreams.
Pre-order Sunset Funeralhere and see Glare on tour in North America supporting Superheaven this April and May.
Glare, on tour with Superheaven:
Apr. 26 Louisville, KY – Triple Crown Pavillion Apr. 27 St. Louis, MO – Delmar Hall Apr. 29 Denver, CO – Summit Music Hall May 01 Las Vegas, NV – Fremont Country Club May 02 Los Angeles, CA – The Belasco May 03 Berkeley, CA – The UC Theatre May 04 Pomona, CA – The Glass House May 06 Phoenix, AZ – The Nile May 08 Austin, TX – Emo’s May 09 Dallas, TX – Ferris Wheelers Backyard + BBQ May 11 Chicago, IL – Metro May 13 Detroit, MI – Majestic Theatre May 14 Toronto, ON – The Opera House May 16 Philadelphia, PA – Union Transfer May 17 Boston, MA – Royale May 20 Brooklyn, NY – Brooklyn Steel
