photo credit: Julian Burgeño

Filipino-American singer Yeek (aka Sebastian Carandang) shares a new music video for “Lumbago,” a track from his latest album Valencia.

The track begins with a deceptively cheesy-sounding electric organ intro, the kind of organ music you’d hear in your grandmother’s house. But before long, the track blossoms into a luxurious bed of steadily grooving drums, deep bass, and Yeek’s delicate yet soulful vocals. It’s a simple combination, but Yeek makes the most of the minimalism and fills the spaces in-between with deep wistfulness. Lyrically, it’s a mellow ode to family vid memories of the back pain Yeek experienced as a young boy. As such, it's appropriate that his mother, his brothers, and his cousins are all embedded in the lyrics, making this a truly family affair.

The video, meanwhile, is a homespun collage of slice-of-life scenes, shot with a “Super 8” film look, and with many of the shots crossfading over each other, lending a slightly psychedelic vibe to the work, and enhancing the languid, melancholy, but deeply funky atmosphere of the track. Gabe Hernandez

photo courtesy artist's bandcamp page

Out this week is the single “Loser,” by New Jersey-born, L.A.-based artist CARR (Carly McClellan), along with an accompanying music video that takes on the perils of modern dating, the art of indecisiveness, and the disillusion behind today’s gut-wrenching romantic expectations.

The track begins with a stuttering hybrid electro-acoustic drum rhythm before CARR’s slightly languid, pleasingly vulnerable double-tracked vocal enters, along with muscular, ever-so-slightly distorted rhythm guitars, immediately evocative of early 2000s pop punk. They offer CARR’s vocal an interestingly muscular counterpoint, delivering the right amount of barely-contained aggression and spite. The pre-chorus adds a bit of hauntingly airy synth pads for emphasis, before the explosion of the chorus unleashes full, crunchy guitars and cacophonous drums, complete with cymbal bell clangs. Meanwhile her lyrics viciously call out an archetypal douchebag boyfriend, attacking everything from his lack of talent for lying, lack of friends, history of broken promises, and even his small penis.

It’s a throwback pop-punk sound in the vein of Avril Lavigne and All-American rejects, to be sure, but it’s more insular in its sound, and refreshingly free of the clichéd rock posing and guitar-slinging those acts performed. Here, the genre is used as a perfect aesthetic vehicle to express CARR’s disgust with partners who lie, cheat, or otherwise shatter her romantic hopes and expectations. In the process, she somehow miraculously transcends the tropes of the genre while being an exemplary example of the punk-pop genre.

Meanwhile, the video (directed by Natalie Leonard & Rachel Cabitt of POND Creative) is a comical—if slightly gonzo—affair, with CARR portraying a blood-soaked serial killer disposing of her most recent victim: a young man who has apparently done something to earn her ire, just one name on a list of the many male victims she’s killed an dismembered. it’s bold, but never overtly graphic, and evokes the sound and spirit of the song expertly. Here’s to hoping CARR keeps delivering top-notch, catchy guitar-powered anthems in the future. Gabe Hernandez

photo credit: Isabel Damberg

L.A.-raised artist Jordi Up Late (aka Jordan Tager) grew up around filmmaking and music production, picking things up here and there as the years passed. Eventually, her passion for visual art took her to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) to earn her BA. With a unique visual style and musical influences ranging from Daft Punk to Little Dragon and James Blake, Jordi seems to be cresting at the right time, as the video for her song “Back in LA” demonstrates.

The track opens with piercing, club-ready synth pianos banging out syncopated chords, while Jordi confidently belts her vocals in between the empty spaces. Soon after, tight electronic drums and a gooey synth bass come tumbling in, laying down a funky, instantly catchy dance groove, reminiscent of some of the 80s-90s best dance-pop tracks, but with a 2020s vibe of her own. The choruses, though, when she delivers an assertive kiss-off to the lover whose spell she’s finally broken free of (“two is for you/ and three for me/ fuck you / ‘cause I love me”) offers an ethereal, muted oasis from the previous electronic cacophony. They seem to represent, in music, the relief and freedom she feels upon regaining her sense of agency after an emotionally-trying romance.

The video itself is a pastel, Day-Glo, multi-textured, Memphis Group-inspired moving tableau of simple, looping animations that provide both evocative and humorous counterpoint to the track. It’s an impressive feat that Jordi is able to do so much with so little, and demonstrates her confidence as a modern animator. Both track and video seem to co-exist with each other, and one should experience both to understand Jordi’s full talents. Gabe Hernandez

photo credit @jeralddjohnson 

L.A.-based singer-songwriter Angelnumber 8 today releases “Habit,” the first single from his upcoming project Digital Tribal, along with an accompanying music video, released via CashApp Studios.

The track begins with Angelnumber 8’s crisp, double-tracked vocals accompanied for a couple measures by echoing synth keyboards, until the beat (complete with itchy-sounding snare) enters, alongside delicately arpeggiated, tropical-sounding electric guitar and deep, rounded synth bass. At points, Angelnumber 8’s voice is transformed with clever use of tremolo, lending a hypnotic quality to his voice and blurring the lines between vocal and instrument. When he chooses to bypass the effect, it’s in favor of double-tracking his vocals using the low bass range of his voice, which lends an additional pleasant depth to the soundscape. The track ends just as quickly as it starts, with mischievous vocal hiccups and gentle yelps seeing the drums and bass out until, at last, all that’s left is the electric guitar.

Lyrically, Angelnumber 8 seems to address some unnamed romantic interest in terms of his addiction to them, but also laments their neglect of him in favor of other distractions, including those that earn them money, but not artistic or creative output. “Breathless/I am again,/Like jeans ripped from the hem/Holding on to a thread/Bending,/Twisting,/With limbs,” he sings, describing his strung-out state of mind after bing neglected by the person he’s addressing.

The ingenious music video (directed by the artist and with visual effects by Zach Beech) finds Angelnumber 8 in an idyllic romance with a glitch-ridden, technicolor digital moth. They cavort together in the wilderness, they have dinner at a “fancy” restaurant (although she goes unnoticed, at first, by the waiter), but their time together takes an unfortunate turn toward the morbid, as well as the surreal. The final sequence is startlingly Lynchian in both its banality and its chilling effect. This writer expects bigger and better work to come soon from this artist on the rise. Gabe Hernandez