There is a lot of great new music being released these days, and not enough time in the world for one person to write about it all at length. Instead of falling into the trappings of messy playlists or content drops with no storytelling narratives or cohesion behind them, +rcmndedlisten is taking the time to curate a selection of recently released albums and EPs you should listen to that have been on regular rotation on this end over the past days, weeks, or even months for that matter.
The latest edition peers into the artsier sides of punk with the latest by Boy Harsher, Downtown Boys, Iceage, and Sweeping Promises.
Boy Harsher – GET MEAN [Atlantic Records / Nude Club]
There’s always the risk of running its course even when the baseline of your sound is built around the timelessly cool framework of minimalist synth-pop and persistent EBM. Over the last decade, Boy Harsher have still been able to take that and turn it into their own cinematically maximalist magic in the dark while shrouding the underworld with it. Now that the Northampton shadow dancing duo of vocalist Jae Matthews and producer Augustus Muller are leveling up their game with a major label debut that is their fifth studio album, GET MEAN, there’s a new intensity to be found that doesn’t come with amplifying the strobe lights or hardening the beats, though there’s no depletion in that energy either.
In the wreckage of Matthews and Mullers’ demised romantic relationship, GET MEAN sharpens Boy Harsher’s teeth. The chronic synth pulse remains but as their stage grows, so does their energy resources with electric guitar currents (“Break Me”, “Ice Pick [Walk Away]”) and heart-crushed atmospherics that bend the prism (“Ronny”, “Pray 4 Me”) running through Matthews’ window into her soul. And needn’t worry about their flair for fashionably gothic synth-pop, as highlights like “Jeans” and “Coming Home” profess modernism in its best form.
Highlights: “Jeans”, “Coming Home”, “Pray 4 Me”
Downtown Boys – Public Luxury [Sub Pop]
Something which has always been admired about Downtown Boys is how the Providence punks always manage to seamlessly blend being loud and disruptively political into turning it into art that really grabs your attention to consider while the room is stirred into a celebration. Public Luxury, the band’s third full-length album, is their best sculpture of all this human-made chaos to date, refining the form on a splatter collage of urgent, bilingual rebellions united through guitar and bass riffs running at double speed.
On highlights like “No Me Jodas” and “Sirena”, they somehow manage to smash saxophones and singed keys into an already crammed frenzy without minimizing Victoria Marie’s cathartic howl — if anything, the call-to-arms only get louder just as the sax do. And also, watch out for the spots that hit you sweetly (“Viva La Rosa), harder (“Enemy Without”) and softer (“Public Luxury” than anything Downtown Boys have attempted in making their noisemaking pop.
Highlights: “No Me Jodas”, “Viva La Rosa”, “Enemy Without”
Iceage – For Love of Grace & the Hereafter [Mexican Summer]
Iceage’s romantic embers burn deeply, and on the Danish post-punks’ sixth studio album, it’s that undying kindle that keeps the fire growing in their sound through and through. Since the band evolved out of their feral state of hardcore ‘fits from their earliest work, the trajectory of their creative arc has been that of a swaggeringly and cosmically cool despite the temperature rising, especially as frontman Elias Rønnenfelt’s showmanship in a suit and as a crackling crooner has only grown in confidence.
For Love of Grace & Hereafter doesn’t depart the physical plane of the band’s apocalyptic premonitions for doomed lovers, but in these end times, they relish in the beginning and end of it, and the spiritual journey it leads them on. The listen’s 12 tracks are raucous and bar-rowdy, and yet further expands their sound into the beyondless with flourishes of priestly punk evangelisms (“Salve for Every Sole”, “Holy Water”), country-roughened ragers (“Ember”, “The Weak”,) and a euphoria reached when limerence consumes the spirit (“Star”).
Highlights: “Ember”, “Star”, “Holy Water”
Sweeping Promises – You Say I Romanticize [Sub Pop]
The world perhaps had Sweeping Promises cornered into a subset of punk which does not actually define their sound. Maybe it was that lo-fidelity veneer that made the assumed angles reeling beneath obscured enough on their 2023 breakthrough, Good Living Is Coming For You to deem them explicitly post-punk, but on the Lawrence duo’s third album and first fully-fledged release for Sub Pop, vocalist and bassist Lira Mondal and guitarist and producer Caufield Schnug are fueling the power behind their pop edges with high voltage without relinquishing the cacophony to the boards in a way that blisters outward a broader fire of garage-and-glam-indebted punk with a fiercely fashionable strut to them.
If the goal here was to transcend their live show into the room right there with you — punctuated by the very alive kit contributions of in touring drummer Spenser Gralla, they’ve succeeded. If the goal here was to express themselves without being tethered to any societal and creative dogmas, they’ve done that, too. In the choice between roaring through the rapture or staying asleep, they’re choosing to live life in bold.
Highlights: “Shooting Shadows”, “Last Man”, “Rapture Or”,
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