Laibach "Musick"
The legendary Slovenian group’s first original studio album since 2014’s Spectre, Musick – intensely pop, yet intensely Laibach.
This record simultaneously celebrates and critiques the current era of warped reality and AI imitation. The title reflects a duality: an oversaturation, being “sick of music” in an age where over 100,000 new tracks, many AI-generated, are uploaded daily, making us question reality; and a “pathological devotion” that continues to drive the band.
The maximalist creation process in their Ljubljana studio involved analogue synths, toys, computers with sound apps, and collaborators like Donna Marina Mårtensson and Richard X. They drew influences from K-pop, J-pop, and ‘90s Eurodance, yet maintained that their “primary influence and reference point remained Laibach itself.”
K Á R Y Y N "PHYSICS UNIVERSAL LOVE LANGUAGE (PULL)"
KÁRYYN creates music at the intersection of sound, spirit, and physics – sonic worlds that don’t just describe emotion, they conduct it. PHYSICS UNIVERSAL LOVE LANGUAGE exemplifies this, with a title that encapsulates her lifelong endeavor to translate love into systems of energy and truth. At its heart, PULL is a left of center pop album about courage: the courage to collapse, to love, to surrender, and to emerge.
Built from voice, strings, modular synths, and gravitational rhythms tuned to 432Hz, the album incorporates arrangements informed by Armenian and Middle Eastern musical traditions, woven subtly through rhythm and melody. KÁRYYN’s voice remains the centre throughout, shifting between fragility, intensity, and control as the music moves between intimate and expansive states.
PULL is a bold, transcendent journey through KÁRYYN’s own human revolution. It is about gravity. About the collapse and coherence that define human experience. It is, in every way, a gravitational pull toward the truth: a sonic architecture of love, rupture, and rebirth.
Koyo "Barely Here"
From Pitchfork…
Barely Here’s an immediate, deeply earnest album; the members of Koyo seem to really believe in the power of this sound, and they want you to believe, too. Joey Chiaramonte’s impassioned vocals cut through the shimmering crunch of “Jet Stream Wish,” elevating what should sound like Hot Topic pastiche into a tight-sounding throwback anthem. The singles are clear highlights: the pit-ready “You Hate Me”; “Irreversible,” which recalls The Movielife with the spite dialed way up. The pummeling riff that powers “It Happens to the Best Of Us” sounds primed for either the KROQ Weenie Roast stage or an American Pie sequel trailer. In the wrong hands, those points of reference could land like an affectation, but instead, the band’s embrace of them feels genuine.
Sharkswimmer "Course Correcting"
Written over several months and recorded with producer/engineer Brian Dimeglio (Bartees Strange, Pinkshift, Superbloom) and mastered by Jon Markson (Drug Church, Koyo, Soul Blind), Course Correcting is, at its core, a remarkably well-crafted, aggressive alt-rock EP that befit the band’s DIY roots. Disarmingly earnest lyricism that evokes the most heart-wrenching ballads of ‘90s emo serves as a perfect counterbalance to the record’s sonic aggression, anchoring it to the humanity that makes up the record’s spiritual center. Largely a vehicle for vocalist/guitarist and principle songwriter Justin Buschardt to exercise the emotional trauma of divorce, Course Correcting explores the universality of heartbreak against a backdrop of anthemic, guitar-driven tracks that would be as at home on the Jade Tree catalogue of the 90s as they are next to contemporary acts such as Drug Church or Militarie Gun.