New music, new artists and Hard Of Hearing firsts.
FIRSTS | NEW MUSIC | WORDS BY KARL JOHNSON
There’s so much exciting new music released everyday that it’s hard to find space for it all. Firsts is a weekly round up of spellbinding new tracks and first features that have occupied the HOH stereo. Tracks featured here find their way to our new music list on Spotify, which you can follow here here.
DISCHAAAGEEE
‘I Want Her to Hate Me’
Fukuoka sits on the northern shore of Japan’s Kyushu Island and is home to our favourite Japanese artist at the moment, DISCHAAAGEEE.
New single ‘I Want Her to Hate Me’ exhibits the rigid bass grooves of ESG and a combination of space age synthesizers that fizz and gurgle as the track descends into the cold waters of early new wave.
DISCHAAAGEEE’s 2020 releases so far have been mesmerising, sounding like a darker version of NYC’s Porches one minute to picking up where Late Of The Pier left off the next.
ttypes/ Pawl
‘Newspaper Mountains’
Hailing from the Midwest of the United States, ttypes/ Pawl like to play with genre as much as they do instrumental arrangement. Which in the case of their new single is a damn good thing.
‘Newspaper Mountains’ comes on like early Cold War Kids with a distinct piano sound and a Beatles-esque bop. The single is cut from their latest album ‘Motel’, a glorious celebration of atmospheric and well-crafted pop music. Fans of quirky pop outfits such as The Shins or Local Natives may find an intriguing listen within.
Kluster B
‘Backseat Liberty’
Kluster B know how to keep you on your tiptoes. Instrumental builds, sharp left field turns, simmering interchanging co-vocals and angular guitar lines keep the Swedish outfit two steps left of the curve.
The Malmö-based band have a history as academic jazz players, before freeing themselves from “the strict playbooks and academic rules” to form Kluster B. It’ll be no surprise for you to read that they’ve shared a stage with new Sub Pop signees and leaders of the American guitar pack Omni, with both bands sharing a love of pushing the guitar music envelope.
Kluster B’s sophomore album, entitled ‘b’, is must listen for those wishing to challenge their outlook of modern guitar music.
XIII
‘My Josephine’
If you’ve been searching for the perfect apocalyptic ballad to play as the credits roll on the critically-real horror movie that is human existence currently, look no further.
Heavy-hitting Australian rock ensemble XIII recently took over an old log studio called The Cabin that lines the Swan River in Perth, Western Australia. The result of their stay was the creation of new EP ‘Heard of Cows?’, a gloom-laden, grunge-filled screaming rock opera. A body of work that contains stand out piece and recent single ‘My Josephine’, a delicate yet skin-crawling effort.
hardofhearingmagazine.com 