Altin Gün have been like the Led Zeppelin of my 2020s — the gold standard, the best party anywhere, releasing a string of excellently brilliant albums. They’ve been a genre unto themselves, melding traditional Turkish music with retro-dance and psych. But now Dar Disku, Bristol-based Bahrainians Mazen Al Maskati and Vish Matre, have manifested, mining a similar vein on their debut self-titled album, dreaming up new, thumping hybrids of dance and Araboiserie, casting a wider net that extends from India to Sudan.
Molina (secret first name Rebecca) is part of a vibrant scene of female artists in Copenhagen, sharing a studio with slowgraffitti Spotify playlist denizen Erika de Casier. Molina exploded unexpectedly on TikTok back in 2017 when “Hey Kids” ended up getting hundreds of millions of plays, which threw her into a bit of an identity crisis, but then she figured it out while she was pregnant and came up with the tasty When you wake up which is a bit less pop but honestly not a huge departure from what captured all those TikToking hearts. She reminds me of the early ’90s and the nearly forgotten shoegaze-adjacent pleasures of Lush. Final track “Organs” is quite the charmer:
In the post-summer
The organs begin to blush
They’re blushing and bursting
Blushing and bursting
In the post-summer
The skin begins to fade
It fades and mourns
Fades and mourns
Just like a heart attack
Where’s the light at?
OK so all you guuuuuhly men might want to skip ahead whilst we discuss Kevin Martin, who has been around for a hot minute, originally in a band cutely named GOD. Under his The Bug moniker he captured my heart with the onomatopoeic metal baton violence of “Skeng,” and now he’s hitting an all new bludgeoning stride. Machines is weaponized dub with exquisitely layered production, equally suitable for catatonic deep baked pleasure and for banging your head against marble statues.
Quelle tour de force!
How about shifting into something a bit warm and feathery yet urgently contemporary? urika’s bedroom (driver’s license name Tchad Cousins, if you must know) is a vortex of gentle, pained power, drilling down into emotion with raw poetry, drawing you close with trancey, loungey rhythms and hypnotic post-folk-rock guitar patterns. On “Junkie” he muses,
You’re dipping your feet in the brine pool
How it feels, I wonder, to be new
Is it real? Is it true? Pure energy
Fingerprints on the screen, are you missing me?
Distortion, it’s a shifting reality
But so sweet, you talk to me with clarity
It’s a birdsong, or a siren, or a cavity
Is it real? Is it true? Pure energy
In these troubled times, it’s important to keep up with what’s keeping moody after-hours scenes chilled and hypnotized. Ireland’s own Or:la first came to prominence with the tasty track “UK Lonely,” and she’s been tearing shit up on the jagged edges of dance ever since. Her debut album Trusting Theta sees her moving through minimalist, electroclashy architecture. She serves ice and she serves sex; her delivery is haute drag queen couture. On “Slay the Beast” she navigates a resonant lyric or two:
Eyes like arrows
Flying through the night
Pinned on me
But my curves swerve
Shaking to the shimmy of a beat
Electric fire pulsing at my feet
I’m fire, I rage
Ash and iris black
Eyes rush to the back
The sweat beads that roll like pearls
Through the smoke we’re living for the girls…
Oh shit, I’m getting vacuumed back into the vortex of warped indie women of Denmark yumminess. This time it’s Fine Glindvad Jensen — you can call her Fine — spinning dreamy, heartfelt webs. Her Rocky Top Ballads album is a bangers-heavy assortment of sweet and sour mid-tempo indie bonbons — what to choose? “Days Incomplete” is a beckoning point of entry, Fine letting her Hope Sandoval-esque drawl drip down the sides of her sketch of a botched love affair:
Your eyes are telling stories
Our city from a bathroom floor
[…]
Would you get lost with me my love?
Feel ageless, watch it from above?
The big blue sky 101
How did you come to fear holding on?
I’ve come to lighten this heart of mine
A flame still burns from time to time…
DJ Lycox has been one of the stars of the rather thrilling Afro-Portuguese Batida scene, and on his new Guetto Star album he slows things down a bit and gets soulful, ever within an exotic world that sounds modern and urban as well as the opposite of all that — folky and tribal you might say. I’m dying to know what the lyrics to “Edson no Uige” are, but it comes at you with a powerful sense of longing and gets reprised later in the album, on the instrumental “Staring at the Moon.” Elsewhere, Lycox delivers straight up driving, hypnotic beats flavored with unfamiliar sonic spices that pry one’s palate open to unknown pleasure.
I don’t know about you, but I’m always on the look out for the perfect song to lip synch if I should need to perform in drag. British girl group FLO have a new one called “Walk Like This,” a little pop masterpiece in which the inciting incident is “My baby, he be lovin’ on this.” The lyrics can be interpreted in delightfully vulgar and borderline disturbing ways as one wonders how much damage her baby might have caused with his lovin’. “There’s a reason I walk like this…”
slowgraffitti has been worshipping at the temple of Two Shell ever since being blessed by the miraculous ecstasy of “home” back in ’22, followed by the spiritual transcendence of “love him” last year. They’ve done their best to keep themselves anonymous and are known for their prank-filled anti-marketing marketing — they love sending out decoys and once, famously, had four simultaneous gigs around London. The point being, they have their first proper album out and it’s self-titled, brilliant and important, stretching their sculpted sugar hyperpop into new forms — myriad ones in fact. It exists in a realm far above music reviews, packaging the entire history of sound into 13 Pez candies that you must dance to.
I might be repeating myself, but part of the allure of Italo Disco is that there’s no official or reliable canon of “best songs” — there seems to be a bottomless trove of material, and decades into exploring it you can find a new best song ever in there. “Pretty Face” by Styloo essentializes everything that was shallow, glamorous and acute-angle poetic about the Italian ’80s, with remarkably absurd, camp, fierce and possibly even profound lyrics.
When the dreams
Run in my mind
Then I forget
My second life
But look at me
In my pinky times
I don’t care
If you think of me
That I’m guilty
I know my face
Is looking right
All this could be
Alright for me
Never can kill my pretty face
Never can shoot me in the back
Nothing can kill my younger dreams
‘Cause a dream is hard to die