#14: I’ve only got record shops left

What a difference a day makes

Andrew Womack

Apr 16, 2024 — 6 min read

“Differ,” KRM & KMRU [Bandcamp]

I’m trying something new this week—or last week, I suppose, since I pushed Saturday’s playlist to today. And it feels right to me to keep doing it this way. There are a couple of very (not especially) important reasons for this: First, I always associate Tuesdays with new release day at record stores, and while that’s no longer the case, I carry a very strong nostalgia for shopping excursions on Tuesday nights—or early mornings, if something really important was coming out that day.

What are your favorite “dead wax” etchings? from r/vinyl

The other reason for switching away from Saturdays is that a day doesn’t give me adequate time to sit with the Friday new releases. To do that, I need to run errands in the car, do projects with my headphones, hang out in the evenings with the speakers on. And except for a couple of late additions this week, that’s exactly what I did with this week’s new music, and I’m really, really happy with how this turned out—all that, plus an extra-heavy dose of drum and bass in the latter half. (Spotify, Apple Music)

“Forsythia,” Mandy

I don’t want to hear this for its ’90s-ness, or more specifically its Pixies-ness, but instead for why it’s so much that—what I love are those needle-y chromatics in the chorus, on the more harmonic side of discordant, though I’m happy on either side of that.

“Psychedelic Orgasm,” Kim Gordon

What a fantastic mixture of genres here, with the distorted, bass-rattling beats—which no circa-2024 Kim Gordon song would be complete without—alongside a shoegaze/autotune chorus and Gordon’s signature detached vocals.

“Night of the Living Dad,” Bill Baird

New music from the ever-prolific Bill Baird, formerly of Sound Team, and someone whose discography I cannot keep up with. Whenever I hear of something new he’s just done, it’s never a single song, but an entire album, or two, or a condiment. And it’s always good—as is the case here, with this Eno-ish pop tune.

“Glass Island,” Tara Jane O’Neil

The mood swings in this piece floor me, the way it wavers between sullen and hopeful, and explores all the half-notes in between. It’s stunning.

“I Walk After You,” Pink Milk

“A duo making occult music inspired by the 80s” is how Pink Milk describes themselves, and I’m not sure I can do much better than that, except to say that I love the way they evoke a smoky-nightclub-torch-song vibe here.

“Knife Like a Spile,” Kira McSpice

I was predisposed to not like this, even though it checks so many of my boxes. Goth, but is it too goth? Is the voice overly polished—is it too, well, good? That’s a lot to balance out into a song that’s worth hearing again and again, and the way it’s solved here is with this fascinating, layered instrumentation, a mix of distorted guitar lines, warbly horns, and a palette of strings, forming this odd bed of sound to reign it all in.

“HENRY’S REVENGE,” SHERELLE

Dark, broody drum and bass done to perfection, and a return to making music that was fueled by “frustration and a lot of anger” from a mugging last year in which SHERELLE lost her album in progress.

“Non Human Things,” Christoph de Babalon

More drum and bass, except not really, because tracks like this are where terms like “drum and bass” fail. Even though it’s the general musical territory this works in, it’s more than that, and more of the wild experimentalism that Christoph de Babalon is known for.

“Differ,” KRM & KMRU

Kevin Richard Martin (better known as the Bug) and Joseph Kamaru (better known as KMRU) combine their initials—and also their extraordinary skills—for this lovely, echoing-into-infinity soundscape.

“Faux Pas,” Bastian Benjamin

Genre-spanning breakbeat, with smatterings of drum and bass and ambient and everything nice. Love it.

“DROOPER,” Container

Squelchy noise from Ren Schofield, and I honestly got to the point in this week’s picks where I realized that, unlike previous installments, this was turning into a DJ set. And this is what I’m putting on to clear the floor.

“Rain Boundaries,” Tomotsugu Nakamura

A little over a week ago, a single song set my subsequent listening habits in motion, and this was it—not that it sounds like much else here. But it felt like the goal, which is why it’s here at the end, an organic, human point of calm, reverberating.