Trupa Trupa — Of the Sun

A self-described poet, Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is careful with his words. This care oozes through every second of Trupa Trupa's music. Unwaveringly fair and thoughtful, Trupa Trupa dodge the brattiness can dog modern punk and post-punk.

Songs on Of the Sun are little loops. Lyrics and musical phrases repeat like mantras, and thud like horses' hooves. They are direct enough to suggest ideas, but swerve proselytisation and condescension. This doesn't feel like spinelessness. It feels like Trupa Trupa's fear of becoming didacts, overcomplicating things into a mansplain-y and dictatorial mess.

The simplicity of their songs mean joy springs from the smallest changes. More impressive than stadium-filling bands are those who make marvels with very little. The switch-up of energy that occurs half way through 'Mangle' is brilliant in its subtlety. A little goes a long way, in a mid-song twist that goes toe-to-toe with Swans' 'The Seer Returns'.

The band go some way to matching Swans in sheer power, too, with some punchy recording and production. It's rare and gratifying to hear a studio recording of a bass drum which actually possesses the fury of one (it’s too easy to get used to equalised drips of barely-audible bass drum piss).

Despite inspiring posturing paragraphs about bass drums, Of the Sun has more to offer than traditional rock'n'roll. There is plenty of space for stuff to get weird. The album's title track is a gorgeous piece which sounds like the machinery of a factory trying to vocalise.

The album's most psychedelic track, 'Angle' is like a quasi-religious encounter. It’s wonky and solemn, the estranged child of Sister Irene O'Connor and Pink Floyd's 'The Gnome'. Imagine seeing the burning bush while stumbling back from the pub. It's transubstantiated, appeared in a sicky bin far from Saint Catherine's Monastery. A skeptic would say it’s just the song's title inspiring Freudian slips.

But a sense of rusted-over ecclesiasticism underlines all of Of the Sun, whether intentionally or not. It's in its pomp, its Benedictine close harmonies and its immanence — its willingness to pan for gold in the world's gutter. And this confluence of gold and shit perfectly summarises an album which kneads the sun into the clouds. This is music for an uncertain future, exploring deep in the valley of our disunity, panning mistakes from history's river.

Of the Sun will be released on September 13th. Pre-order and stream tracks from the album here. Read No-Wave’s interview with frontman Grzegorz here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Jenny Hval — The Practice of Love

Jenny Hval's albums are often like manifestos. Her free-verse lyrics, on a page, read like paragraphs of some pontificating, noncommittal dissertation. But Hval's delivery has always granted them magic. A wave of sensuality crushes all that is ostentatious in her work.

She is the hub that houses her own spokes, the point at which all her antithetical ideas collide. In anyone else's hands, her material would be treading on its own toes. But she has a knack for carrying it all off. Hval, if not an intellectual, has always been a juggler of ideas.

And in recent years, Hval the songwriter has come to the fore. With last year's The Long Sleep, she released 'Spells' — her most warm and welcoming track to date. The EP as a whole represented Hval's most successful marriage of concept and material, seizing the mantle from its vampiric predecessor Blood Bitch. It even found space for one of her trademark spoken-word sections in a touching coda.

The Practice of Love further emphasises this talent for songwriting. Eschewing extended drones and sound collages, it instead unveils hit after hit of electro-inflected art-pop. Hval has also drawn in a crew of collaborators, most notably the striking and powerful vocals of Vivian Wang. Hval’s now-fragmented voice swells the album beyond vanity-project-chinstroking, and into cabbalistic beauty.

But things haven't leapt completely off-world. Hval's admirable, slightly clumsy, directness is still present. Discussion is sometimes so frank it touches embarrassment — like overhearing arguments or sex through the wall. She is an artist who can make you blush, shake your head in confusion and laugh while being overwhelmed by beauty.

On The Practice of Love, Hval says she took influence from 'trashy, mainstream trance music from the 90s'. But this album adopts the spectre of vaporwave, and contorts its influences into something full of yearning. The ancient, artifacted JPEGs; the jumble of disconnected visual noise. It has the airiness and wonder of nostalgia, but feels fiercely contemporary.

Hval probes further into herself with every release, exploring, revealing, peeling back layers of identity to find new masks beneath. And after every internal expedition, she returns with a greater treasure. The Practice of Love is her greatest yet.

The Practice of Love is released on Sept. 13th. Pre-order the album and stream its singles here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

The Paranoyds — Carnage Bargain

Even for the uninitiated, it's easy to tell The Paranoyds are from Los Angeles. Carnage Bargain is a day-glo modernisation of the punk rock that's defined the city for decades; contemporary femininity explored through vocals that channel Alice Bag and Exene Cervenka. It’s a throwback to the classic acts of the 1970s.

The band also manage to swerve the dick-measuring swagger of so many punk instrumentalists since those times, painting a jaunty, involving but unobtrusive backdrop for their pointed lyrics. The tone of this album is hinted at by its garish cover, bright, hyperactive and full of life. And its production avoids dirgey grossness, favouring overdriven garage-punk jubilance. The only way you'd miss a word in this mix is by not listening.

But these words aren't preachy, Idles-style diatribes. Lyrics are generous enough to suggest answers, but wise enough to leave questions open. And the whole album has a playful looseness, refusing to patronise listeners by positioning itself as an educator. It's more like a friend; hearing, understanding and sharing your exasperated questions.

Carnage Bargain knows you're on the same page as it. How could you not be? Only the wilfully dense aren't keyed in to the modern world's absurdity. But this album just gives you an opportunity to dance with it for a half hour or so, laugh in life's face, and find kinship in anger.

Carnage Bargain will be released on the 13th September. Pre-order the album and stream its first three singles here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Zamilska — Uncovered

Uncovered, the third album from Polish producer Zamilska, sounds like a night gone sour. This is music for the bloodbath that opens Blade — for a club whose sprinkler system is ready to paint the dancefloor red. But there's something more atavistic at play, too.

Shamisens, chimes and throat singing lend the LP a lurid sense of ritualistic power. They're littered over dark rhythms and mantra-like lyrics; words as function, spat by unfeeling mouths. For a staunchly electronic album, Uncovered evokes a surprising amount of folk tradition, of monsters with long-dead names. Dark magic and Gauguin's spirit of the dead, hovering in the more ineffable corners of primativism.

Uncovered is eerily difficult to place - flitting from second to second between the futuristic and ancient. Zamilska's ability to draw the album's disparate elements together is impressive. What's more impressive is that she makes it sound effortless.

The tracks on this album are slight, but this reflects its wealth of ideas. You get the impression Zamilska is too inventive to settle, snatching phrases away just as you're used to them. Any slower and she'd be boring herself. As the album goes on it feels like a jenga tower of invention; 'surely it can't keep this up'. But, miraculously, Uncovered punches just as hard in its final moments as its first.

Uncovered is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Blanck Mass — Animated Violence Mild

At this point, you know what to expect from a Blanck Mass record. For years now, Benjamin John Power has been producing tunes for the clubs in hell, coalescing dance and doom.

From out of the gate, Animated Violence Mild follows suit. A somewhat perfunctory skit precedes this album's true intro, the monstrous 'Death Drop'. An anime theme with necro production, this track feels like getting your ears hoovered. It's as relentless and grimy a re-introduction as you could hope for — and even finds time for a playful synth ditty towards its tail end.

But don't think that means you can catch your breath. A seamless transition into 'House vs. House' retains the album's hypercaffeinated pace while allowing some softer, poppier elements to seep in. It's a triumphant track that bops like a carnival. The beat barely changes up for seven minutes, but it's so infectious you won't mind.

In its cheap-thrill energy, Animated Violence Mild seems at least semi-parodic. Each track feels like an assimilation or piss-take of an existing genre. 'Love is a Parasite' has a glam rock feeling to its instrumentals, but retains previous tracks' ice-cold production and introduces some extreme vocals. The result is as compelling as it is absurd; half Norwegian black metal, half Toto.

And on 'No Dice', the glitzy Watch the Throne Kanye and emotionally volatile Yeezus Kanye get into a gory car accident. But it's so out-there, you'll be rubbernecking from start to finish.

The slight frustration with this album is that it's too much of a good thing. Animated Violence Mild is saved by a surprising moment of quiet in the second half of 'Creature/West Fuqua'. Without this, it would almost completely lack variation. But this quiet moment is made even more beautiful by its brevity; restrained in its restraint.

Like a kid running down a hill, arms flailing, feet lifting off from beneath them, Animated Violence Mild is an album on the brink of eating concrete. But it's all the more exhilarating for it.

Animated Violence Mild is released on the 16th August, and is available for streaming and pre-order here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe