Discover Blogly: Listen to new music from Knowso, KUMO 99, CCL, and more

KUMO 99 are technically an electronic pop duo but often find themselves playing on bills with hardcore bands, which should indicate how much energy and intensity they put into their music. HeadPlate, the LA-based duo's second album, rattles through underground club sounds with breakneck speed and a relentless gusto akin to being pinned against a wall. Ami Komai, often singing in Japanese, acts as the focus point with Nate Donmoyer's breakbeats and crashing percussion ensuring the pace never drops below highly caffeinated. The glitchy and industrial "Dopamine Chaser" is probably the standout track, like rattling through the Matrix rave scene at 2x speed. This is matched throughout the opening stages of HeadPlate with "Gelus," "Plume," and "Gomi" all pushing the band's maximalist sound to new heights. There is also room for experimentation, too. "Solitaire" represents a new texture to KUMO 99's sound, a breezier and more cushioned sound that maintains a high BPM but feels lighter than some of the more energetic workouts found elsewhere. "Sorosoro," meanwhile, throws grungy guitars into the mix to create a bedroom pop club banger. HeadPlate might not fit easily into a genre box but as far as a reliable source of power goes, it feels like strapping yourself into the mainframe and watching the sparks fly. — David Renshaw

To quote a great philosopher: “Works sucks / I know.” It’s hard to understand where punk and music intersect in modern times: The concept of “selling out” is moot under the doomed umbrella of late-stage capitalism in 2024; musicians need to do what they can in order to survive as they pick up pennies from streaming revenue, exhausting themselves mentally and physically as they embark on grueling tours. Raleigh, North Carolina-based garage punk band Knowso’s latest release on Sorry State Records, Pulsating Gore, is glib eye-roll and shrug directed at The World At Large, where heavy guitars and rollicking drums soundtrack multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Nathan Ward’s quick-witted anti-work doctrine. Ward narrates his life working his day job as a trucker, making observations about a life spent on highways and rest stops, while commenting about the intersection of work, labor, and capitalism; he does not get disparaged by the sordid nature of working to live, but bitterly spits out his reality and his frustrations with an intensity that feels cathartic. There’s a sense of A. Savage’s lyrical stylings on Parquet Courts’ Total Football throughout the record, and both bands share the kind of restless, mathy post-punk that’s still upbeat and fun enough to dance to at a party; the influence of British punk and the sinister sing-talk of Mark. E. Smith and The Fall are also apparent. If not for its gritty realness, Ward’s soliloquies might come off as trite and banal; from him, though, it’s clear that he is just as frustrated as the rest of us: “The government it means nothing / It’s all documents and papers.” The final track of Pulsating Gore is the final middle-finger that Ward flips on behalf of all of us, a nervous, existential crisis trip of a song where he questions the pressure to conform to the, god forbid, mid-ness of society as we know it: “I wish they liked the circle but they only like the square,” he anxiously professes. “Where do you fit, fit in the grid? What if I told you that the universe is mid? They only like the square!!!” — Cady Siregar

It feels reductive to call the new release from CCL merely a “DJ mix.” Inspired by Eris Drew’s titanic 2019 release Raving Disco Breaks Vol. 1, the Berlin-based artist and producer sought to create another project where “old records… create new styles out of fragments,” combing through “proto-dubstep sounds from the late 1970s through the year 2000.” Their exploration of the significant yet often overlooked chapter in electronic music history is thorough to the point of scholarship — each sampled layer on top of sampled layer feels like a joyful, seamless sourcing — but a loyalty to the dancefloor is never sacrificed. Over the course of an hour, CCL blends decades of music as though they’ve unlocked some new plane of motion on their fader, collapsing false sonic borders with an effortless glide of their wrist. — Jordan Darville