Courtesy of Tricky FM

Artist: Tricky FM, the moniker of songwriter Hannah Freed

Location: San Francisco, FM

Buzz: “I’m fucking rich electronica star,” proclaims Tricky FM on “Cut The Check”, one of many highlights from the San Francisco-based “computercore” songwriter Hannah Freed’s newly released sophomore effort, Twin Star Fantasy. Perhaps you’re not yet familiar with her game or name, but that’s alright — she’s making art that sounds like a million bucks even with its rough and uneven self-produced surface compared to the rest of what passes through the pop realm these days that’s working with a much bigger budget behind it. Rest assured, her success story is a thing of all DIY ethos and being exploded from the heart as far out as possible.

As with her promising 2023 debut, Peace, Love, Unity, Rave, Tricky FM’s stylus of experimental electronic pop often hits you at hyperspeed unlimited. If trip-hop and shoegaze’s heart palpitations were sent racing through a collision with modern techno and a post-Pinkpantheress world of hyper-pop, it’d probably sound a lot like what Freed does throughout the course of many of her songs.

There’s something to be appreciated, though, when she allows herself room to breathe. On Twin Star Fantasy, we’re hearing Freed discovering these moments to exhale while sitting with her own reflection in your apartment, just as she does when she sips on the lush elixir of presence on “Sugar in my Drink” or parses the end of a relationship through memories together on “Thread to Pull”. In looking in the mirror, she kickstarts looped and spliced sound bits into their own bursts of fantastical energy to counter the rush that once held firmly gridlocked on the opposite end stymied by compression-glitched impulses.

Sound: A self-guided therapy session by an over-thinker synced up to the mashed-up currents of Aughts-era electronic pop, 2010s EDM, and 2020s hyperpop

Recommended: “Apartment”, “Sugar in my Drink”, and “Cut the Check” from her newly-released sophomore album, Twin Star Fantasy

Tricky FM’s Twin Star Fantasy is available now on Cherub Dream Records.