What the Bandcamp Daily editors are listening to right now.
Allysha Joy
The Making of Silk
Vinyl LP
In her interview with Andrew Jervis on this week’s Bandcamp Weekly, Melbourne vocalist Allysha Joy talks about the immediacy of the writing process for her new record, The Making of Silk. “A lot of the music comes in one sitting,” she said. “I wrote ‘Stay’ in one evening. It’s building up the language and then just moving quickly.” That sense of instinctiveness is evident in the final product—not a moment of Silk feels calculated or overthought. Instead, its songs feel like they follow a natural course, flowing downriver from Joy’s heart, out through her pen, and on to the page. As such, the emotions remain close to the surface: On “Hold On,” Joy influses the shopworn notion “If you love someone, set them free” with genuine, palpable humanity, the bittersweetness evident in the way she sings the song’s hook: “the true gift of love is letting you be you and me be me.” Musically, Joy pulls from across a host of genres. The most apparent, on first listen, are jazz and R&B; but the more time you spend with Silk, the more you notice other ingredients in the mix—a peppering of samba in the percussion, a hint of Tropicalia in the woozy strings. It all adds up to a record that feels distinctly lived-in—songs about love lifted from a diary, not a greeting card.
–J. Edward Keyes
Nyesui Loe & Loman
THE BALLAD OF LOESPERADO
Cassette
Nyeusi Loe first came across my radar back in 2022 via MSCLN DST, his collaboration with Lynn, MA production duo The Mellos. As its title indicates, that album was a delightfully psychedelic affair, in line with the tripped-out aesthetic I’d come to associate with that region’s rap scene. So I was caught entirely off-guard when I found myself with a lump in my throat midway through the heartbreaking “4EVA23” on The Ballad of Loesperado. The song details the death of Loe’s brother, and is written in such strikingly immediate language it catches you off-guard. “I look in the sky to feel your vibe, ‘cuz you’re no longer with us/ I felt the warmth of your smile through our last pictures/ I miss you, your brother miss you, your father miss you/ your son miss you/ your mother miss you/ your sister miss you.” About a minute and a half into the song, Loe’s voice audibly cracks, and the palpable feeling of pain is almost too much to bear. It’s a striking moment that reflects how fully Loe commits to Loesperado, pouring every ounce of himself into every second of material. He makes a meal of even lighter songs like “Sinful,” a buoyant number with twinking marimba on which his 20-syllables-a-second flow feels charmingly freewheeling; or “BIRDMANHANDRUB” a sex jam Loe murmurs his way through as if he’s sharing a secret. Michael Christmas, Kaleo Jacobs and DATKIDBRAVO show up to turn in strong features, but make no mistake: If MSCLN DST merely parted the curtain for Loe, Loesperado is the moment he strides confidently center stage and commands the crowd.
–J. Edward Keyes
Nídia & Valentina
Estradas
Vinyl LP
To everyone who likes to nerd out about percussion, you won’t want to miss Estrada, the new collaborative effort from two polymaths we’ve covered on the Daily previously, UK multi-instrumentalist Valentina Magaletti and Afro-Portuguese producer Nídea. Produced by Tom Halstead, one-half of the London post-industrial duo Raime and Magaletti’s compatriot in the experimental rock project Moin, it’s the merger of two boundless, perhaps even infinite, rhythmic universes: one aligned with the avant-garde, the other with the club. Magaletti has described their fluid approach as “being promiscuous with music,” wanderlust in every sense of the word; Nídea’s ultra-tactile kuduro beats and exaggerated samples betray a similar carnal restlessness that occasionally borders on salacious. The abyssal bass grooves on “Nasty” are built for bump-and-grind, and the syncopated, pornographic moans on “Rapido,” are all but guaranteed to draw some confused stares from passerby if you play it in public. These steamy moments are balanced with more subdued, atmospheric cuts, such as the icy, orchestral-infused “Sicilia” and the lush, marimba-lead “Estradas,” leaving us with a borderless club record suitable for any mood. Let’s hope they link up again!
–Zoe Camp
Pyrrhon
Exhaust
2 x Vinyl LP, Cassette, Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), T-Shirt/Shirt, Sweater/Hoodie
Pyrrhon’s last album, Abscess Time, dropped in mid-2020 during the pandemic’s first wave; they had to cut the accompanying tour short due to the Delta variant and struggled to come up with new material. The New York metallurgists’ solution was to proclaim “fuck it,” rent a cabin in rural Pennsylvania and do their thing—binge-watching bad movies, noshing on magic mushrooms, and banging out the improvised jams that would eventually gestate into Exhaust, their fifth album. Released suddenly last week as a Bandcamp Friday surprise, it’s the sound of one of the intricate, artful death-metal bands in recent memory ditching infernal calculus for raw, animalistic instinct; songs you can actually mosh to on beat. The arrangements on Exhaust are by no means dumbed-down; you’ve still got your free-jazz guitars and grinding polyrhythmic grooves, your mutated time signatures, and your sepulchral dynamics. Still, those first-thought-best-thought practices yield some insidiously catchy rippers, like the scorched-earth hard rock of “Strange Pains,” as well as the wry, muscular hardcore of “Stress Fractures,” which torches Petitioning The Empty Sky-era Converge to a blackened crisp. Another notch in the belt for a talented circle of metalheads who always keep us guessing.
–Zoe Camp
t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者
アンドロメダ
2 x Vinyl LP
Before we get to the music, a quick word about the label: For years now, Pittsburgh’s Geometric Lullaby has been doing the Lord’s work, wandering vaporwave’s abandoned shopping mall and excavating select treasures to bless with vinyl reissues of the highest quality. The latest: two beloved, decade-old albums from t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者. Both of them have their charms (you can check out the other one here), but the one I’ve been most taken by is アンドロメダ, which Google translate informs me is Andromeda in English. The name is apt: The whole album drifts dizzily by, vaporous as stardust, and utterly hypnotic throughout. Its songs are built from a few mesmerizing melodic patterns—clusters of notes that repeat slowly, over and over, occasionally buttressed by long, pastel-colored bands of sound. Occasionally, a fully-fleshed concrete melody will materialize, as one does on “あなたとの短い瞬間” (a musical dead-ringer for Terry Taylor’s “Capture Me”—which I’m confident is not intentional, but which also makes me realize the album from whence it comes would probably be catnip for vaporwave fans). But more often t e l e p a t h allows his little phrases to just hover in the ether, as distant and tantalizing as a mirage. Tranquil, soothing, and comforting as an embrace, アンドロメダ casts a spell that doesn’t quit.
–J. Edward Keyes
Nilufer Yanya
My Method Actor
Vinyl LP, 2 x Vinyl LP, Cassette
Perhaps London singer-songwriter Nilyufer Yanya’s greatest strength is her unpredictability. With a tone and a soul attributable to a contemporary R&B artist, Yanya’s existential pop songs are never what they first seem. In fact, My Method Actor, her third studio album, is a record worth taking in over multiple listens as each one yields some new lyric, new meaning, or new texture to appreciate. Using method acting as a metaphor for the practice of songwriting, of dredging up difficult memories to be reenacted on stage, Yanya paints a violent picture of internal struggle with lyrics like “You should pull that trigger, aim it at my liver/ Losin’ a pulse and all my problems/ I love to dance in my new costume.” With a skittering drum beat and sudden dirges of reverb-heavy guitar, the titular single is indicative of the sound Yanya and collaborator Wilma Archer explore across the rest of the album, one which pulls from the singer’s early alt-rock influences in The Strokes and The Pixies. On “Like I Say (I Run Away)” Yanya feels like she’s living on borrowed time as she struggles with decision paralysis in her relationships, singing “The minute I’m not in control/ I’m tearing up inside/ And I can’t stop you leaving/ Is the biggest fear of mine.” This track, too, features a steady tempo and knocking percussion that drives towards a chorus of fuzzed-out guitar à la The Breeders. Meanwhile, “Ready for Sun (touch)” is a pretty, acoustic ballad sung to her own shadow, another metaphor for performing, that ends with a gorgeous swell of strings and guitar distortion. My Method Actor is pop music for those of us with an alt-rock phase and an interior world riddled with question marks.
