Discover Blogly: Listen to new music from Aunty Razor, Quade, and more

I couldn’t tell you how I first came across the debut album from Aunty Razor, a Nigeria-based artist — I first heard it in the closing days of December, when the flurry of music discovery and rediscovery that defines the end-of-year round-up season had wrapped up. Still, Viral Wreckage managed to stand out among the endless releases I heard, and stands out as one of the most wildly creative albums of 2023.

Its title alludes to the burst of internet fame that Razor tasted with 2021’s “Kuku Corona,” a blistering cut of Afrohouse that displayed her cobra-like delivery, her words twisting themselves around the beat and constricting the life out of it. All of the pressures, disappointments, sugar highs, and precious momentum Razor experienced from “Kuku Corona” are channeled into Viral Wreckage. The tracks that favor industrial rap production (eg “Stuttrap,” the “Work”-sampling “Nina,” and “Never”) are the attention-grabbers bolstered by Razor’s ventures elsewhere — these journeys’ waypoints include dancehall, where desire melts her voice into unrecognizable shapes (“You Are Not Worthy Of My Love”) and an experimental, Kelela-flavored R&B casting-off of a lover into a cloud of ambient techno melody (“Tobaya”). “Sise,” a song combining Congolose pop courtesy of Titi Bakorta and a beat two kicks away from being Jersey club, is the frantic final indication of Razor’s unquenchable thirst to transcend the whims of the internet and to land somewhere more soulful. — Jordan Darville

Quade make sounds that are suffocated yet suffused with vitality. Nacre, the Bristol band’s debut LP, draws on the British varietals of post-punk and -rock, but also weepy goth and traditional chamber folk. It’s an album that lends itself to solitary listening — equally apt for an evening of indoor chain smoking and a weird walk through the English countryside.

Barney Matthews has a malleable voice that modulates between ghastly moans and sedated crooning, like an apparition that’s too depressed to fully commit to the haunt. Tom Connoly’s creaking violin and Matt Griffiths’ staticky tape machines are similarly phantasmal, conspiring to cloud Quade’s otherwise crystalline instrumentals: Leo Fini’s precise, jazz-leaning drums; Matthews’ quietly dominating bass lines; and Connoly’s skronky guitar.

Nacre’s opener, “The Balance,” is a slow-stirring beast that rises from a centuries-long sleep to terrifying heights. “Of the Source” grows from its intro’s inchoate bowing into a ritualistic, wordless dance. The project’s refreshingly brief centerpiece, “Circles,” on the other hand, is full of words, splicing samples of the late, legendary DJ Andrew Weatherall discussing his young adulthood between Matthews’ semi-intelligible phrases. From there, the album settles into a more reflective mode that carries through its tender, melancholic closer, “Technicolour.” — Raphael Helfand

Hauntological art, in Adam Harper’s definition, has two layers. The first is an “idealized” section often rooted in the past and projecting some sense of confidence or security; the second layer clashes with the first, conjuring doubt and despair, and drags us back into our rotten present. We have heard it in Burial’s first two albums and their elegiac permutations of dubstep, and in the cathode ray-blistered electronica of Boards of Canada. In an ironic, glaringly postmodern twist, most contemporary hauntological art is content to merely conjure the pioneering artists rather than a different era (that is, if the new music can be properly called “hauntological” at all, which isn’t always the case).

Yungwebster, a rapper whose debut album was released in July through the Manchester-based experimental label sferic, offers a hauntological take on some of the most revelatory developments in rap in the last decade and a half. The first layer of Harper’s definition comes from Yungwebster’s vocal presence. Its AutoTuned rattle and freestyle energy channels peak mixtape Future; his lyrics may be borderline indecipherable, sounding traced into the fogged-up windows of a Maserati, but even the laments come from a place of stoned empowerment. The second layer is the production, an inversion of cloud rap. In that subgenre, artists like Main Attrakionz, Friendzone, and Clams Casino chased dreamy and utopian atmospheres. Here, those melodies are stretched out into the kind of aqueous, mournful ambient techno mastered by Brock Van Wey. A deeply engaging listen from start to finish, Yungwebster offers a pioneering emotional journey within contemporary hip-hop. — Jordan Darville

Last month U.K. DJ and producer Mia Koden made her debut on the German label Ilian Tape. Formerly one half of Sicaria Sound, Koden’s solo material dives into the murky recesses of grime and dubstep with tracks like “Racket” and “10easy” conjuring memories of the sadly shuttered London club Plastic People. “Après Vous,” meanwhile, adds a little funk to the dark textures found elsewhere. The vocal sample used in the track belongs to Congolese artist Kanda Bongo Man, who was beloved by Mia Koden’s late grandfather and became a fixture in her home as her family, refugees who fled Sudan in the ’80s, keeping her in touch with their heritage. These layers of nostalgia combine to create a deep-seated connection to the music. — David Renshaw

Everything is indie today, or at least that’s what it sometimes seems like. The term has become a vague way to label uniqueness onto a sound even where there is none. And so, in the age of polythene vocals, synthetic instrumental everything, and lyrics chiseled dull by TikTok algorithms, Fenne Lily is startlingly simple, lyrically blunt, and just plain quality. Unfazed by saccharine, ersatz (indie) pop perfection, Lily embraces the subtle appeal of her breathy low timbre, a steady patterned layering of guitar-led drive, and a promise to always return to the part everybody likes the most anyway — a quality hook. Her 2023 album Big Picture shows a real refusal to pander to these trends or give in to overstimulation, actually leaning into its slowcore groove. Like an insomniac’s sweet sedative release, the unrushed album allows itself the time and space necessary to stew in Fenne’s musings — “You came to me at the speed of a bad decision / Just the speed, the bad not so much / We held each other while everything burned up ‘round us / And inside of me, too / That’s called love.” Through wandering chordal scapes, a potently conversational tone, and solid band performance, Fenne Lily does the radical thing of simply staying in her lane, doing what she does best, and serving true indie delicacies. — Lila Dubois