For anyone who can remember, Arca’s &&&&& was a moment. It’s 25-minute stretch of coiling, contorted grime and glitch; dub and hip hop dropped with the buzz of an impending co-production credit on Kanye West’s Yeezus in 2013. It included cuts of sound and beats that were too weird for that pop project, while becoming a piece of experimental art that what would come to define what is by now broadly known as a ‘post-club’ sound. It’s music that is as visceral as it is experimental; made as much for the mind, as it is for the body.Released with no warning seven years ago, &&&&& became a bridge between Alejandra Ghersi’s time partying and collaborating with her queer peers, while still living in New York to the next stage of her career releasing on Mute in London. She’d go from making beats for rapper Mykki Blanco and fashion label Hood By Air, posting lurching bass reworkings of pop hits on YouTube, and producing her first fluid mixtapes with DIS Magazine, to finishing off this seminal mixtape on the synths in Daniel Miller’s studio.After dropping three impressive EPs the year before, &&&&& marked a transition. Continuations and extrapolations of material from Stretch 1 and Stretch 2 appeared in the mangled RnB sam- pling of “Century” and Arca’s signature vocal layering in the pitched flow of “Waste”. Along with the fluttering, muted heartbeat of “Obelisk”, and the lumbering piano chords of “Mother”, fourteen sonic sketches were elegantly woven together into a single, downloadable whole.As Alejandra’s course turned toward moving to Europe from the United States, &&&&& became a remarkable challenge to the form of the mixtape, which was a relatively new trend taking hold of the online-oriented underground at the turn of the 2010s. But where many, if not most mixtapes where treated simply as a showcase of individual tracks presaging a more ‘official’ release to come, &&&&& was a complete piece in it’s own right. “I wanted to make something that was my best work,” Alejandra says about a record that has stood the test of time, “I listen to it very fondly today.”Now, with the lifespan of the Arca project nearing a decade, Alejandra has entered a new era of ‘non-binary pop’ with her fourth album, KiCk i, out on XL Recordings. It’s more important than ever to look back while forging ahead, and &&&&&’s ground-breaking hybrid dance music is a good place to start:”A sense of possibility, a sense of the unknown; punk attitude, respect for classical music and formality; cyberpunk, anime, sexual tension; trauma, innocence, fear of death; kink, lots of weed, and wanting to connect with people, but not on the terms of a status quo. That kind of sums up &&&&& for me.”

Limited neon green colored vinyl LP pressing. Willow’s fifth album deals with heartbreak the best way she knows how: through catchy hooks rife with angst against crashing cymbals and sharp bass riffs, leaning into a grittier sound than it’s predecessor. Co-produced by Chris Greatti, it features “It’s My Fault,” “Hover Like A Goddess” and more.

Eric Church – “&” – Eric Church will release his & album on August 19, 2022. It was previously only available through the Church Fan Vinyl LP pressing. Commercial release of this EP that was previously only available through the Church Fan Club as part of the Heart & Soul album collection released in 2021. This 6-track CD is a must-have album for fans and completes the Heart & Soul collection.

2019 finds veteran indie label Graveface Records (home to Casket Girls, Xiu Xiu, Appleseed Cast and more) charting some new/old territory. They’re starting a subsidiary of Graveface called NEVERNOTGOTH. NNG will be home to many reissues of obscure darkwave/goth LPs but also will showcase some new talent making waves in the genre today. The first release on this new sub-imprint (GOTH001) is by Atlanta’s Shouldies. Attention all goth kids, pop princesses, darkwave divas: the new sound still isn’t rock and roll. At least not to Shouldies, a synth punk trio consisting of Yancey Ballard, John Pierce, and Daniel Eberlein, on a mission to fuse dance with a relatable dose of realness – but make it goth. The group rose from the ashes of the Atlanta music scene in 2017 to serve darkwave to the buttcracks and crevices of the city’s sprawling highways and bigots, dance on the ghost of your face as you sit in the 5 o’clock traffic, whisper in your ear when you frequent, yet again, that bar with the shitty men. With lyrics that sound like the most profound page of your emo phase (but make it political), Shouldies layer earnest pacing over a soft fury of synth.You’ll have a chance to let that sink in, as the alluring synthscape works in tandem with direct message – Eberlein and Pierce can be seen onstage focused intently on creating the backdrop for Ballard’s delivery. Introspective ideas manifest into broader themes. Ballard recently commented on Atlanta’s deceptively close proximity to homophobia and transphobia in Kerrang!: “A lot of the time, it’s a fight to be heard because it’s not ‘as dangerous’ as it is outside [Atlanta’s perimeters]. People don’t care about microaggressions. People don’t care about discomfort. People care less than they should about full-on aggression because at least it’s ‘safer’ here. ‘At least it happens less’. ‘It could be worse’.”Life-long friends Ballard and Pierce collaborated on a number of projects before forming Shouldies with Eberlein, who they barely knew prior to, in summer of 2017. All three agreed that if they were going to make music, they wanted it to be accessible, relatable, and fluid. As Eberlein told Creative Loafing “We just wanna make songs that you can dance to, and with lyrics that are really meaningful… something that gets stuck in your head,” he says. “It feels way more powerful than making some art statement that’s supposed to be vague… People want to relate to music and dance and be happy.” Shouldies first took the stage at Irrelevant Music Fest 2017 with Eberlein on drum machine and synths, Pierce on guitar and synths, and Ballard at the front. The rest is a history of sordid love affairs with pop and punk. Eberlein’s background is mostly in techno and noise, and he tells Wussy Mag his dream concert would be “Arca perform[ing] in a giant old building, like a church or something.” Pierce would rather meet you in the pit: his dream show is “Fugazi and Dead Kennedys at 529.” Shouldies is both a surreal and austere union, not to be taken lightly, though the music feels as natural as jokes thrown around a group of friends. Then comes the Darth Vader synth: monotone lyrics materialize on the dance floor as exorcism, and the audience feels the echoes. Wherever Shouldies draw their edge, live shows draw cross-genre crowds and promise an experience with very little internet tracing.They must be cooking up something. If you ask them, they’ll shrug their shoulders and tell you that you missed tea time. Now serving: shiny, hard, synth pop.