New Music Friday: Stream projects from Amyl + The Sniffers, Ruthven, & more

Amyl and The Sniffers’s Amy Taylor wields a ferocity and straight-talking vigor few can match. Taylor is backed by her bandmates who give the Australian band's third album, Cartoon Darkness, an indelibly trashy energy — rarely does a minute go by without a proto-punk riff perfect for crushing beers arriving overhead. Huge and home and in the U.K., The Sniffers tackle the end of their plucky underdog status with force. Such a shift in a band's fortunes can be tricky to handle, but Taylor uses her elevated status to dismiss a litany of enemies with a sharp tongue and alpha energy. "Wipe your mouth after you speak 'cause it's an asshole," she fires on album standout "Jerkin'," before scything down sexist rock fans on "U Should Not Be Doing That." There are introspective moments (the new wave-y "Bailing On Me"), too, suggesting Cartoon Darkness signals maturation for a band who once wrote a song titled, simply, " Blowjobs." Cartoon Darkness could have been the album to trip up a band of newly-minted punk rock heroes. Instead, it's a project that marks them out as a band who should never be underestimated. —David Renshaw

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Like his label boss Jai Paul, Ruthven has a deep affection for sincere pop music and, by his own admission, a flair for the nostalgic: Prince, strains of sleazy funk, and neo-soul passion run through his music’s veins like neon-colored plasma. Rough & Ready, Ruthven’s debut album, expands on that pallet without leaving it behind. The project puts singles released as early as 2021 shoulder-to-shoulder with brand new songs. They come together to form a detailed picture of Ruthven as an artist with an approach to R&B that’s as etymological as it is progressive, with new tunings and possibilities unfurling moment to moment. In an interview with The FADER, Ruthven said of the project, "It is slightly nostalgic, but it feels like it's me." —Jordan Darville

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In MUNA, songwriter Katie Gavin writes for a community. Alone, she writes for herself. Her debut solo album, What A Relief, is just like her band work: anthemic. But it’s full of the kind of anthems we sing to ourselves: “I like you”; “I’m so traumatized;” “Why am I doing drugs again?”; “What kind of parent will I be?” These all stemmed from her own private ruminations, but she writes in a way that makes them feel like your own — because sometimes they are. And just like the way we should be speaking to ourselves, she looks on not with judgment nor a harsh eye, but with grace and understanding. We may all be “inconsolable,” but “I’ve seen baby lizards running in the river when they open their eyes,” she sings with a twang. “If we keep going by the feeling, we can get by.” —Steffanee Wang

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On Soccer Mommy’s latest record, evergreen, frontwoman Sophie Allison decided to take herself back to her roots. Foregoing complex production and wanting the songs to sound like their early demos, she crafted an album about the desolation and sadness that comes with grieving the loss of someone in her close circle, and what it takes to escape that darkness — even if that means going through it. For Soccer Mommy, there is no such thing as feeling too much of something. "I think, particularly with loss, I’m really interested in seeing the beauty in things," she told The FADER of the album in an interview. —Cady Siregar

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Carmen Villain’s 2022 LP Only Love From Now On is a harmonically lush, though structurally minimalist, journey into the cosmos of the soul and the intimate reaches of the universe. 2023’s Music From the Living Monument, a selection of deeply textured sounds she created for a dance piece, explores positive and negative space, ebbing and flowing like an ocean tide over a sentient seabed. Her new EP Nutrition is tonally skeletal compared to her past two projects, but it never sounds undernourished. In fact, Villain finds some of her most fertile ground yet on the tape’s three tracks, which she describes as "dub studies born out of my continued fascination with the form.” The heaving synth tones that set the scene for “Disig” become a muted drawing of breaths as a lattice of percussion enters the frame. “Nutrition” is pure rhythm, with Villain deflating a bassline until only its atonal elements remain. On “Marka,” the final chapter of the trilogy, a voice-like synth returns as a death rattle over a disturbed skittering sound. It’s the barest of the bunch, its hollow drums vibrating like pulsars at the outer limits of deep space. —Raphael Helfand

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For her fifth album as Cali Bellow, Agriculture bassist and screamer Leah B. Levinson gave herself a nonnegotiable constraint: no real instruments. Alone in an uncanny valley of samples and MIDI, her vocals crystalize; whether she’s crooning, shouting, or speaking, her presence within the album’s self-contained world is undeniable. “I stopped feeling like I was trying on different clothes musically and did something that was exactly myself as an artist,” she told The FADER, speaking on the state of mind that inspired Ciao Bella, a project feels like a new chapter in her career. Read our interview with Bellow. —RH

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Elias Rønnenfelt, best known as the frontman of Danish hardcore band Iceage, delivers his country-tinged debut solo album. Heavy Glory originated while Rønnenfelt was on a solo tour, with new songs written on the road and debuted immediately on stage. There is an understandably ramshackle nature to the whole project, with songs such as "Like Lovers Do" and "No One Else" capturing that feeling of unvarnished creativity. Two covers that featured on his setlist at the time ("No Place to Fall" by Townes Van Zandt and Spaceman 3's "Sound of Confusion") also appear, while fans of Iceage's gothic nihilism will welcome murder ballads "Stalker" and "River of Madeleine." —DR

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Fievel Is Glauque’s first studio album, Flaming Swords, was recorded in a marathon session one evening in Brussels. For its follow-up, singer Ma Clément and keyboardist/arranger Zach Phillips had the resources to spread the process out across a week at Outlier Inn, a favorite studio and retreat of left-field artists, nestled in New York’s Catskill Mountains. With all of this extra time on their hands, Clément and Phillips brought together a familiar eight-piece ensemble to record live in triplicate — laying down a first, foundational take, followed by a refined duplicate, and finishing with a more improvisatory, “antagonistic” version. The tracks that appear on the album were chiseled by Phillips and engineer Steve Vealey from these three dense strata, a daunting task but one that ultimately paid dividends.

On Rong Weicknes, Phillips’s complex compositions jump off the wax as never before, heaving with head-spinning harmonies and palpitating with polyrhythmic grooves, while Clément soars above like the sovereign saint of the mix. There are moments on the album when Phillips gets a bit too clever for his own good, overplaying the role of cheeky genius. But these winking misses are overshadowed by passages of jazzy nirvana, like the second half of the title track, where Thom Gill’s guitar sputters into a glitchy solo that gives way to a Wayne Shorter-indebted sax outro from André Sacalxot, evoking the fusioneers of yesteryear. If Fievel Is Glauque are Steely Dan minus the mountains of premium cocaine in the studio, Rong Weicknes is Aja for proud music nerds who prefer eight hours in the practice room to a day on the boat. —RH

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Assembling Symbols Into My Own Poetry is the third and last entry of a trio of projects by hyperpop trailblazer Alice Longyu Gao and is decidedly not hyperpop. Instead, it was crafted with live instrumentation and strong rock influences. Songs like “Clingy” and the Danny Brown-featuring “Bird W/O Nest” are rich ballads that benefit from washes of guitar and thunderous drums. And even Gao’s more clubby and idiosyncratically chaotic songs like “Lesbians <3” and “<3 Korean Girls” feel more spacious and three-dimensional. Traversing themes of body image, immigration, and relationship woes, the tracks are also notably some of their most personal. Read our interview with Gao about the project. —SW

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New Bayonet Records signing Grumpy were featured in NYLON's story on “dirtybag twee” last year, a compliment of sorts that doesn’t quite get to what makes the New York-via-Nashville band so endlessly listenable. Wolfed is only six tracks long but encompasses Postal Service-style electro-emo, bedroom folk, straight-up anthemic grunge pop, and a delightfully creepy track called “Beach Towel.” Lead singer Heaven Schmitt knows when to indulge their strangest impulses. That’s no small talent, and it’ll make Grumpy a band to watch next year. —Alex Robert Ross

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I’d not heard of fling ii — a.k.a. Ann Arbor’s Brad Gowland — until this, his sophomore album, dropped into my inbox last month. In my defense, he isn’t making music for the masses. Fling ii’s self-titled debut was described by Gowland himself, in the only press materials, as “the neokraut psych odyssey you’ve been dreaming of” and “a loving ode to the living legend, the BOSS Super Phaser PH-2… proudly featuring the finest gear, wielded with the most acceptable musicianship.” Both that album and its aptly titled follow-up are worth spending time with though. This is blissed-out, kraut-adjacent ambient music that recalls NEU!, Pink Floyd, and Spiritualized but eventually goes off down its own path to nirvana. Close your eyes and listen to the seven-minute “fenn” when you clock off from work today. You’re welcome. —ARR

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