Essential new releases also including Classic Trucks, Cracked Lime, newbuild and Uniflora.

RIP Magic – ‘Stadium Drive’

RIP Magic announce their debut album ‘1,2,3,’ set for release on 30 October via Section1, alongside new single ‘Stadium Drive’. The track opens with a darker synth over a trap-influenced groove, its murky haze and warped electronics carrying traces of witch house before the arrangement shifts beneath it. Small electronic tones repeat with near-metronomic precision, while distorted textures breathe around them, giving the track a strange sense of movement. Nothing feels accidental; every sound seems placed exactly where it needs to be, even as the production keeps mutating. When Marco Pini’s vocals enter, they do not arrive as a focal point so much as another instrument in the machinery. His voice is stretched, distorted and folded into the rhythm, the lyrics carried through the same warped textures as the synths and bass. There are faint traces of Nine Inch Nails in the distortion, but the track feels less interested in genre boundaries than it is in seeing what happens when different textures are placed under precise control. It is a sound that feels distinctly connected to the London Underground scene RIP Magic emerged from, where industrial aesthetics sit alongside the rhythms and cadences of electronic punk without either feeling out of place. ’Stadium Drive’ moves through all of this with an unnerving precision, its delicate electronics, distorted bass and warped vocals constantly pulling against one another without ever falling apart. (Isabel Kilevold)

mary in the junkyard – ‘Jane’

mary in the junkyard open their latest single ‘Jane’ with acoustic guitar, its faint grit cutting beneath Clari Freeman-Taylor’s ethereal vocals. The two sit in delicate opposition: rough wood and soft light, the guitar keeping its feet on the ground while her voice drifts above it. On the second verse, viola and cello enter, their low, earthy tones gathering around the melody and deepening the space between each note. The song takes on a quiet melancholy, but there is a strange comfort threaded through it. The lyrics are both intimate and abstract: “You speak in such an urgent way, soft and safe.” Freeman-Taylor describes ‘Jane’ as a love song to her period, giving something bodily a name of its own. There is something tender in the idea, turning an uncomfortable intimacy into a figure that can be spoken to, held close, almost loved. ‘Jane’ lingers somewhere between ache and comfort, its stripped-back arrangement leaving the smallest details exposed, much like a bloodstain on crumpled cotton bed sheets. (Isabel Kilevold)

Classic Trucks – ‘Classic Trucks’ 

The solo project of Langkamer’s Josh Jarman – a bona fide hero of independent music who also co-runs the generational Breakfast Records (Getdown Services, The Cindys et al.) – new single ‘Classic Trucks’ from Classic Trucks is the Classic Trucks track that Classic Trucks fans were waiting for. The first song written for the project, this winding 7-minute odyssey is, put simply, astonishingly beautiful. Powered by an achingly earnest lyric about being a late blooming artist emerging in their thirties with the baggage of adulthood already on their back, ‘Classic Trucks’ opens and closes and opens out again in its winding course. From sparse, intimate verses, to panoramic breakthroughs of Sigur Ros-levels of euphoria; from pitched pop-vocals and synth strings, Classic Trucks go all in here, and everything works. It’s worth publishing Jarman’s full quote on the track in full: “I sat down and wrote it all in one go. It’s a meandering look at the life of a sapling artist, beset on all sides by traffic and capitalism. Imagine being a baby bird in the nest and you look outside and it’s all just 18-wheel trucks and cars beeping their horns and people being mean to each other and tech oligarchs contorting the world into all sorts of horrible shapes. “Imagine being that baby bird and thinking, ‘Shit, I’m going to have to jump out of this nest and try and fly and navigate my way around all this bullshit!’’ Phoebe Bridgers eat your heart out. I’m gonna cry to Classic Trucks instead. (Elvis Thirlwell)

Cracked Lime – ‘The Idiot’

Newly signed to Portsmouth-based DIY champions Strong Island Recordings – the likes of Ugly, Los Bitchos, Rosie Alena, and The New Eves’ Ella Oona Russell have darkened their welcome door in recent times – London duo Cracked Lime deliver clacking, gloomy, bass-driven dark wave on debut single ‘The Idiot’. Rushing by calmly, but with an urgent, almost helpless forward propulsion, it’s a track for the nighttime, for staring out of train windows to almost nothing-blackness, save the occasional street light, housing estate, or industrial park. ‘The Idiot’ is creepy, it’s crawly. It’s a horror movie but before the scary bit, where ‘normal’ things are happening, but the portent of terrible events is there, and the soundtrack is suggesting you should keep watch for whatever hairy beast might come lurking over your left shoulder any minute now. (Elvis Thirlwell)

newbuild – ‘dogs’

Do you have a compulsive habit you cannot kick? Biting your nails, maybe even biting others? newbuild’s new single ‘dogs’ might just provide the perfect remedy for that. Competing with Pink Floyd, that’s clear, ‘dogs’ immediately puts you under an animalistic trance, pulling you headlong into a haze of strange psychedelic imagery. The rhythm has a weird repetitive feel – it scratches at you, chews at you. The song is about animal instinct, needing to answer to your most savage impulses: biting until it punctures the skin, and despite washing your mouth out with soap, the evidence is still there. Possessing a satisfying physicality, the track’s warped textures and deep imagery are backed by sparse woodblock percussion that creates a ritualistic pulse. ‘dogs’ is a track that sinks its teeth into you and refuses to let go, lingering in your mind – leaving you caught somewhere between the urge to recoil and the irresistible urge to bite back. (Eloise Applebaum)

Uniflora – ‘Jack & Annie’

Tumbling and stumbling inside the scorching caverns of no wave, post-punk noise, a fraying discord of elements hurtling towards one screeching, blasting climax, Uniflora’s ‘Jack & Annie’ leaves virtue at the door in search of a visceral, debaucherous DIY jank. Cut from the same cloth as contemporaries such as Lifeguard or Women, the new single from the Chicago based trio – formed of Quinn Dugan, Ruby O’Brien and Theo Williams – arrives a year following the release of their compellingly raw debut record ‘More Gums Than Teeth’ and marks a clear refinement of their sound. Smouldering around taught flames of distortion until they find themselves leaping into the very centre of the blaze, Uniflora are ones to keep an eye on. (Hazel Blacher)