2020s 90 Items

With members of Schntzl, this is the jazzfunkglitchpop band everyone in Belgium is raving about

With their Debut „Everything Went Down As Planned“ A Tale Of Golden Keys made it to numerous club and festival stages, into the good radios and Spotify playlists. Their sophomore album continued their way of releasing beautiful songs for the indie pop crowd. „Shrimp“ is a critically acclaimed record and was one of the most successful indie pop albums from Germany in 2018. In 2019 the band released the soundtrack for the adventure documentary "Tyry" called "Tyry (Music for the Film)".

The 3Js' new studio album was produced entirely by the band this time. In the run-up to album release of de Aard Van Het Beest, the Volendammers released the second single from the album 'Wat Je Mist'. The line that has already been carefully mapped out with the single released last year 'De Toekomst', the first with the talented Robin in the ranks, is continued on the new album. 'We decided from the first moment to make our most positive record ever', says Dulles. A spontaneous musical idea by Robin resulted in this spring-fresh song, in which the sound of 3JS is combined with gospel and hip-hop influences. The 3JS therefore asked SO! Gospel Choir to sing along to the song.The album is available as a limited on coloured (transparent & green mixed) vinyl.

The Way of Union and Being” is born from the sometimes-unavoidable necessity of reinterpreting the perception of the spaces around us and the outside world in general, in order to have a truer and clearer vision of the inner spaces and the inner-self.

Welcome to Roseville, the 7th studio album by Har Mar Superstar. Sean Tillmann’s latest collection of songs is career defining culmination of life and musical experiences that were heavily influenced by 70s AM gold artists including Todd Rundgren, Elton John, Carole King, David Bowie, Paul McCartney, Genesis, Hall and Oates, Meat Loaf, Dory Previn, and ELO. The album came together in the late months of 2020 and is the first true collaborative effort of the whole touring band. It was distance recorded by all of the members in their home studios and the band’s home base, Mid City Studio, in Minneapolis. It has been described as an “existential homecoming” that chronicles Tillmann’s return to life as a Minnesotan over the last 5 years.

Most of the album was produced by bandmates Aaron Baum and Ryan Mach. John Fields (Jonas Brothers, Andrew WK, Har Mar’s 2004 album “The Handler”) returned to Team Har Mar producing “Solid Ghost” and “Hearts Have Misspoken”, and Ryan Olson (Poliça, Gayngs, Swamp Dogg) dropped in to produce “Patchwork Prisms”. Texas musical legends in the making Kam Franklin (The Suffers) and Jackie Venson (one of the greatest guitarists alive) popped by to elevate “Another Century” into a soul duet masterpiece. Denver Dalley (Desaparecidos) and T. Macey Taylor (Bright Eyes, Jenny Lewis, Amanda Shires) appear on “Where We Began” which they helped write on the road while supporting Afghan Whigs a few years back. The band is Nelson Devereaux, Jake Baldwin, Adam Hurlburt, Ethan Elseth, Aaron Baum, and Ryan Mach, and everyone had a hand in co-writing to help make this album a united, genre hopping masterpiece.

The whole album is a cohesive journey designed to be listened to front to back, but each track is strong enough to stand on its own.

Record Store Day 2021 Release.

Record Store Day Japan 2021 Release.

The new release of Rap Kayou song series presentedby P-Vine! Kayou (KayouKyoku) franklymeans pop songs in Japanese, and are songs mainly from 70's~90's Japan. P-vine has been releasing a lot of works from "Phantom Masterpiece Liberation Union", "Disco Kayou", "Techno Kayou" which were released as a series reflecting the times, and a number of these raps quickly worked their way into general society. With its origins lying in historical mixes that explored combinations of Hip Hop / rap and Kayokyoku, "Rap Kayou" emerged in 2010. This 7 inch will present the track that kickstarted the revolutionary music genre! A-side "HAGE=RAP-Bald Revolution ★ Beginning signal" by Yurioka ChoutoQ's own gag rap that's not only wrapped up in Japanese comedy, there's high quality trackmaking at its base once your stylus meets the groove. The B-side includes a full-scale track and exquisite coupling "Gyutan Rap", a tribute to the local activity of Sendai, the largest cityin north eastern Japan where the lyrics expressed in flow are also wonderful!

Yellow vinyl seems unplayed. Limited edition. Original inner sleeve.

Basque artist Elena Setién shapes the ethereal into immediate on the stunningly pristine songs of Unfamiliar Minds. Her command of melody and resolute voice are complemented by lush arrangements that surround the listener in a world of intimate beauty. Setién is an accomplished multiinstrumentalist, collaborator and improviser, having worked with artists like Mary Lattimore and Steve Gunn as well as composing for film and television. On Unfamiliar Minds, Setién reflects on isolation, confusion and harnesses uncertainty with optimism on ten ghostly wonders that capture ineffable feelings in radiant detail. After completing her Basque language album Mirande in collaboration with composer Xabier Erikizia (released on Forbidden Colors in October of 2020), Setién began composing Unfamiliar Minds during the height of lockdown, starting with songs she had begun in pre-pandemic times. As days turned to months Setién grew disconnected from the incomplete pieces made in a different reality. The paralyzing tension of those disorienting early months eventually gave way to new inspiration. Romantic poetry by Emily Dickinson served as a refuge and a springboard for Setién to ground herself in writing new songs in English. She drew inspiration from conversations with composers Gyan and Terry Riley as well as her collaboration with Xabier Erkizia for the Basque television series Altsasu. Erkizia and Setién extended their remote collaborations beyond the series as the two began focusing on their own reconfigured sense of mood and perspective after a year of so much pain and drastic change. Elena Setién's chameleonic songcraft effortlessly bends songs into immersive realms. Her music illuminates the fragilities and ephemeral nature of life with exceptional poise. Unfamiliar Minds is a palatial guide through trial and exaltation, a meditation on disquiet and hope for uncovering what lies ahead.

Though Emily Moales first envisioned "Camelot" as a way to escape her reality, the record equally provided a way to address it head on. As a prime example, album highlight “Not My Heart” takes a tale of unrequited love on a Casiotone waltz before bursting into a classic AM pop jangle, the imagery of Camelot swirling through the mix like a fluttering banner. Moales’ bronzed vocals sit front and center on the track and album at large, surrounded by a robust instrumental tapestry--though much like the album cover’s blend of Medieval font and shag carpeting, every bit of regal clarity is matched with warmly retro tones. While she’s spent the last few years recording and releasing handfuls of Star Moles albums digitally, "Camelot" felt like a big step for Moales, a realization of the project’s potential, making it especially fitting to be her first physical release.

Transculent Vinyl edition, limited to 1000 copies.

Limited to 100 white copies that are only available at HHV.

Limited to 500 red copies.

Superorganism return with their second album World Wide Pop in July, their first new music since 2018’s self-titled debut.

Blasting back with thirteen tracks that explore the infinite versus the intimate, taking in friendship, time, connectedness, and the universe; World Wide Pop contemplates the contradiction of being hopeful and curious when faced with relentless consumerism and overwhelming noise. However choosing optimism, Superorganism believe in the power of pop music and all the things it can do. World Wide Pop bridges the personal and existential whilst delivering a bag full of tunes laced with deadpan humour.

World Wide Pop also brings in an international set of collaborators including Stephen Malkmus, Chai, Pi Ja Ma, Dylan Cartlidge & legendary musician and actor Gen Hoshino.

Limited to 100 copies.

The millennium was one long bad prank / we looked at each other and knew right away: that's it." The world out there is going to the dogs. Well, not just since yesterday. And it won't be over tomorrow either. Shitty times, then. Of course, you could meet them with cynicism. Or with despair. But maybe not. Maybe we could also draw hope, precisely because it would be so much easier to lapse into doom and gloom and bitter laughter now. And maybe it's okay to need something to keep our spirits up in the midst of the apocalypse.

And that's how WIR SIND SCHÖN came to be, Jens Friebe's ninth album, which, like the previous albums, is also released on Staatsakt, punctually four years after the last one (2018's FUCK PENETRATION). It is a cheerful-melancholic, ironic-serious, nonchalant piece of music, which just has no desire for staleness and contemplation. The hymn-like, beautiful title track "Wir sind schön" (We are beautiful), which embraces kitsch with self-deprecating seriousness and is above all comforting, gets to the point: the better world out there, we can build it ourselves. Despite everything. "It's an anti-nihilist album," Friebe says. No Future is already not wrong, but not so funny anymore, if the Future really rather scorching earth in prospect. But it's not that the problematic is erased. It appears on the record in the most diverse forms: In the almost socially realistic depiction of a youth friendship destroyed by the multi-tiered education system with the beautiful title - shimmering between urban sociological treatise and fairy tale - "The Shrinking City", in the devastating protocol of failed self-care ("Das Nichtmehrkönnen") or the enigmatically gloomy fantasy "What Have We Done". But the listener never gets bogged down in these low points of mood, but is always pulled out and up into the euphoric, utopian. Or, as in the rousing protest song "Sing it to the Converted", into the militant. But what sounds at first like the sheer repetition of banal slogans, turns out in the next moment to be a reflection on the necessity of repeating banal slogans. Because, as the last few years have shown, even the seemingly self-evident must be reminded again and again. Or, as Friebe puts it, "Doesn't the priestess preach to the converted / How long would they be converted if they never heard her?"

Similarly immediately poignant and intricate at the same time is "Free": what is freedom? Neoliberal exploitation, a privilege of the better-off, as preached by certain federal finance ministers? Or naked skin in the sunlight, partying, wind in the treetops, rage unleashed? Yes, this is somehow also satire, but not only: Friebe does not leave it at simply denouncing a grievance like a tired cabaret artist. Between the shifted drums, minimalist instrumentation and velvety grooves and background vocals (as on other tracks by Elektrik Diva MALONDA and Pola Lia Schulten), the actual, truthful longing for a freedom that is not characterized by anti-social economic order and commercial exploitation also comes through.

Should we laugh or cry? Maybe just both, as on "Ende aller Feiern," a sixties-poppy, subtly queer love triangle, with probably one of the best lines ever to make it into a German-language break-up song: "Wir haben uns alles erzählt/Nur zuletzt wollt' ich nicht alles wissen/I think you noticed that/And bit me goodbye."

Standing still has never been Jens Friebe's thing, but this time it's musically a bit further from the indie rock habitus that still made up FUCK PENETRATION or NACKTE ANGST ZIEH DICH AN WIR GEHEN AUS (2014). Yes, a penchant for anthems, crooner-like and storyteller is always part of Jens Friebe, but this time Afrodiasporic musical styles play a bigger role. More soul, more grooves, a certain smoothness that suits the hope that flashes again and again between ironic distance and realistic description of the present on WIR SIND SCHÖN.

Although the real drums have been almost entirely replaced by the drum computer, Staatsakt colleague Chris Imler again has a style-defining role on this album with synths and additional percussion. On "Die Schrumpfende Stadt" (where Herman Herrmann can also be heard on bass) he programmed the beat. Mense Reents (Goldene Zitronen, Sophia Kennedy) mixed "Der Wahn" and "Ende aller Feiern". As with all albums since DAS MIT DEM AUTO IST EGAL (2007), Berend Intelmann was again responsible for the production.

WIR SIND SCHÖN is an antidote to our times, an embrace of all the ambivalences we have to endure every day and an adrenaline injection into the heart of apathy. The world is complicated, but that's okay. Because, "When our eyes get used to the dark / Look at us and you'll see: We are beautiful!"

Lyrics: Aida Baghernejad

Voted as the best Greek indie album of 2022 by local music portals, the 180 gram heavy vinyl comes with a gatefold design by worldwide known illustrator Montero (who has co-writtend the lead single) and has gained support from NTS Radio, as well as blogs as We All Want Someone To Shout For in NYC.

Clear vinyl!

Dark Entries and Papi Juice Records team up for No Jack Swing, the solo electronic debut of multi-hype man Brontez Purnell. The Southern-raised, Oakland-based musician and writer has centered his queerness and Blackness in projects Gravy Train and Younger Lovers as well as in his award-winning books 100 Boyfriends and Since I Laid My Burden Down. On No Jack Swing, Purnell gives us a love letter to the most beloved (and secularized) of drum patterns - that is, the electronic 808 “Amen Break”. Beginning recording in 2020, Purnell conceived of No Jack Swing as an audio zine of found sound materials: chain letters of instrumentals recorded in bedrooms, poems from boys in France, found gospel tapes from his childhood family Baptist Choir, and the sound of records skipping on his bedroom turntable. No Jack Swing is as much a homage to No Wave and New Jack Swing as it is an answering to the gods of Indie, Electroclash, Disco, and Gospel. Amidst all this background noise, the unexpected occurs: all the niche pretensions collapse to a singularity - the sound of High Pop! No Jack Swing was produced by Nightfeelings. Each copy of includes a lyric sheet with a photo of Brontez.

New EP by Salima, electro pop rap

Berlin Blue is the highly anticipated new LP from Beyondré, the alias of singer, songwriter, and musician André Baum, an artist who's known for his innovative pop-electronic productions.