Victims of the New Math Make The Stories That You Weave Feel Like a Box of Old Tapes With Fresh Batteries
Victims of the New Math’s The Stories That You Weave opens with “The Run Up,” and the album starts like somebody shoving a blown-out amp into the room. A filtered distorted guitar fills the spectrum, heavy and fried, before the sample appears. It is a rough opening, but useful: it tells the record where the…
Trond Flaata Lets “Ide 1A” Hold One Clear Thought
Trond Flaata’s “Ide 1A” stays close to the piano. The playing is soft, emotional, and expressive, keeping a calm mood through the piece. Its repeating melody gives the track a warm feel-good pull, with a romantic tint and a quiet sense of arrival underneath. Flaata is a Norway-based musician working on a modern piano project…
Dan Szyller Turns “The Eyes of a Child” Into a Grunge-Metal Fight With Fear
Dan Szyller’s “The Eyes of a Child” starts in soft light, guitar and atmospheric pads setting a brief calm before gritty distorted guitars take over. The switch is the point: the song does not ease into its heaviness, it drops the floor. Szyller, a singer-songwriter from Metz, is joined by Yanick Horner on guitar and…
Mary Knoblock Lets Peach Stay Blurred
Mary Knoblock’s Peach opens with “Mustang Clover,” and the album immediately feels close, damp, and emotional. The piano has a soft touch but a sharp taste in the notes. Her vocal enters almost right away, wet and atmospheric, pulling the song into a cinematic place before the strings arrive. When they do, they follow the…
Ivelisse Del Carmen Lets “Before I’m Done” Glow Through the Damage
Ivelisse Del Carmen’s “Before I’m Done” opens with organ-like pads giving the song a warm, suspended floor. The first feeling is stillness, but not safety. Her vocal enters slowly, emotional and exposed, with the kind of force that does not need volume right away. It sounds like someone returning to a room they once had…
John Arter Gives “Homegirl” a Bookish Country-Folk Spark
John Arter’s “Homegirl” starts with acoustic guitar that pulls the song open immediately. The playing has a country tint, but the track still feels current, with Arter’s vocal stepping forward strong enough to give it personality right away. “Homegirl” is playful by design. The song looks at wanderlust through books, imagined travel, far-off places, and…
Uinu Gives “Running” a Dark Northern Glow
Uinu’s “Running” starts with chords that already feel haunted. The mood is not introduced slowly. It is there from the first seconds, with keys tracing a dark melody and wet, atmospheric vocals hanging above the track like fog over cold water. The song has a cinematic pop shape, but its power is in the way…
karkinoma Makes façades Feel Like a Mask That Keeps Moving
karkinoma’s façades has the nervous energy of a record made after the polite version of life stopped working. Dimitri Turlotte made it alone in a home studio, writing, recording, producing, mixing, and mastering the album himself, and that solitude gives the music a strange pressure. Nothing here sounds social. Even the brighter songs seem to…
Lucija Grabovac Gives Smile a Warm Country-Rock Heart
Lucija Grabovac’s Smile sounds close to the ground: guitars, vocal warmth, soft percussion, keys, and songs that move through love, healing, nature, and the quiet after a breakup. The Croatian singer-songwriter wrote the lyrics and music across the album, with Renato Babić handling arrangements and production, and that personal authorship matters. These songs do not…
AnnaBelle Swift Finds Her Footing on “Belong”
AnnaBelle Swift’s “Belong” has the sound of someone stepping into a new room and deciding not to leave. There is a country-folk tint in the writing, with enough Americana color to give the song a warm, open feel. The percussion keeps a steady groove, alive but not crowded, while the strings bring a wider cinematic…
