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Star of STMPD records, Spinnin’ Records, Protocol Recordings, DIM MAK, Musical Freedom Records and Mixmash Records, Florian Picasso is a powerhouse in the world of dance music. He now reveals his biggest news to date: a label deal with the mighty Universal.
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Title: Mixtape 1
Label: BROHOUSE
Swedish trio BROHUG is back with their newest release “Mixtape 1,” a four-track bundle that perfectly represents their signature bass house sound. The sonic style ranges from more tech influenced tracks like “Party Out“, which they’ve debuted in live sets earlier this year, and released as a single back in February, to the tribal infused “Detox” and the hard-hitting “Say My Name.” However, if you are ever in need of euphonious vocals, BROHUG has you covered with “Trouble,” which still kicks with a heavy drop and driving basslines. “Mixtape 1” follows BROHUG‘s “1990” with Kaskade and recently released “Preacher” with Loge21, out on Spinnin’ Records. “Mixtape 1” is out on their own BROHOUSE imprint.
Regardless of their satirical stage name, BROHUG is not here to play games. Since John Dahlbäck and the Lunde brothers formed BROHUG in 2016, the trio has worked with Ghastly, remixed Steve Angello, and released on labels such as Confession, Spinnin’ Records, Dim Mak, Musical Freedom, and their label BROHOUSE. In 2019, their release schedule was packed with relentless hit after hit. Virtually unrivaled, their touring has been intense since the start. BROHUG has really put their name out, with sets on festivals like Ultra Music Festival in Miami and Tomorrowland in Belgium, touring Australia and several tours in the US and Asia. A new decade brings with it new possibilities, so stay tuned to hear more from BROHUG coming soon.
Three composers of the Italian label INRI – Gian Marco Castro, Matthew S and Pietro Roffi joined their talent and creativity to compose a track, to give an important message: music never stops.
Daydream, combines different worlds and atmospheres but related to each other, it was spontaneously composed by three artists: the pianist Gian Marco Castro, the producer Matthew S and the accordionist Pietro Roffi.
From their home while self-
A mirror in our present but with a look for hope in the future, a belief that music might be a further cure for the tough times.
“The Daydream we’re living right now, a sad dream we want to wake up from but we end up in it every moment. But from the other side it is dreaming for hope, a bright dream we would like to be in.”
The single’s cover has a minimal impact: it represents the little and helpless man in his solitude and immersed in the chaos of the universe. A charming black and white video, directed by Luca Kudu Anello, shows the artists’s creative process, framments of the artists’s everyday life during the lockdown: creating a contrast of the inside and outside of their home, framed by the unaware progress of nature.
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“Across 14 tracks, and at just over 28minutes, the Queensland trio get straight to the point – with raw, no holds barred, Aussie punk rock.” – triple J, Feature Album
“The Chats crank out 28 minutes of no-holds-barred blistering pub rock here.” – The Age EG, Album of The Week
“A relentless volley of riotous thrills and beer-splattered spills. – Q ★★★★
“An irresistibly raucous entrée to their word”- MOJO ★★★★
The Chats have released their debut album High Risk Behaviour, available now on Bargain Bin Records/Cooking Vinyl Australia.
“I don’t want to make the songs boring, so I just keep them short and sweet,” shrugs the man whose mullet became an international talking point following the success of 2017 viral hit “Smoko”. “We try not to think about it or complicate it too much. You don’t want to force it or the song’s going to turn out crap.”
The band have also revealed a new animated lyric video for their latest single Drunk N Disorderly, view below.
If they didn’t keep hassling drummer Matt Boggis about skating in places he shouldn’t – and giving him tickets listing that as the offence – who knows what idiotic title the self-proclaimed “dropkick drongos from the Sunshine Coast of Australia” would have come up with.
And yet it’s the perfect name for an album that does not fuck around. An album that sounds like Aussie greats the Cosmic Psychos downing beers with The Saints before doing shots with the Buzzcocks and then spewing it all up behind the kebab van. An album that’s over in 28 blistering, funny, sweaty, unforgettable minutes, with half of its 14 songs failing to reach the two-minute mark. Some might call the Queensland trio lazy. Singer-bassist Eamon Sandwith sees it differently.
“I don’t want to make the songs boring, so I just keep them short and sweet,” shrugs the man whose mullet became an international talking point following the success of 2017 viral hit “Smoko”. “We try not to think about it or complicate it too much. You don’t want to force it or the song’s going to turn out crap.”
Since forming in their mate’s bong shed in 2016 while still at high school, that attitude has taken The Chats – completed by guitarist Josh Price, who once wrote a song called How Many Do You Do? in which he boasted of doing 52 “dingers” in a night – from the sleepy coastal village of Coolum (located roughly two hours north of Brisbane) to venues around the world. Their fanbase includes Dave Grohl, who loved the video for Smoko so much he showed it to Josh Homme, who then asked the trio to support Queens of the Stone Age on their 2018 Australian tour. Iggy Pop is also a card-carrying member of The Chats’ fanclub, requesting that they support him in Australia in early 2019 and peppering them with questions like, “What’s a smoko?” and “What’s a dart?”
The rest of 2019 was spent taking the world by storm armed with nothing more than guitars, drums, shorts, shirts and thongs (or, if it was a formal occasion, sandals and socks). Shows across Australia and the UK were sold out, and they performed their first gigs in America (the LA show was attended by Homme, Grohl and Arctic Monkeys’ frontman Alex Turner). The band capped off the year with a return visit to Britain, selling out venues such as London’s 2,300-capacity 02 Forum.
Suffice it to say, life has changed a fair bit for The Chats over the past two years.
“Well, I don’t have to work at the supermarket anymore,” says Sandwith.
That he does not. In fact Sandwith and his mates have been too busy touring, writing songs and, when their gigs took them to Victoria, dropping into engineer Billy Gardner’s studio in the coastal city of Geelong for a day of recording. That they chose this piecemeal approach explains why the album took 18 months to finish – a luxury considering 2017 EP Get This In Ya took four hours to record one hungover afternoon.
“If we’d just done a week and slogged it out we could have had an album before now but we just kept going in there and making newer and better songs so it’s hard to put a stop on it,” says Sandwith.
The sessions were fast. “Some of the songs were first-take and we were like, ‘That’s good, whatever’,” says Sandwith. “We’re really not perfectionists.”
Remarkably, they still found time to experiment with exotic instruments such as… a tambourine.
The end product is an album that buzzes like an out-of-control chainsaw, propelled by Sandwith’s spoken-spit-sung vocals, their three-chords-is-one-too-many approach, and an exacting combination of youth, vigour and drunkenness. But don’t mistake simple for stupid – if it was easy to make songs this short, this catchy and this downright brilliant, everyone would be doing it.
“I think they’re good songs,” says Sandwith. “And at the end of the day, if I like it then fuck it, who cares if other people do?”
Despite being the subject of a record label bidding war, The Chats are releasing High Risk Behaviour on their own label, Bargain Bin Records. It’s indicative of a band that have embraced DIY culture since day one, to the point where Sandwith used to spend his days at the post office sending out merch orders.
“We thought, if we just do it ourselves we don’t have to worry about getting swindled,” says Sandwith. “We’ve always done it our way.”
Their determination to do things “our way” extends to their music, which is why High Risk Behaviour delivers everything you’ve come to love from The Chats – only more of it – and confirms their status as Queensland’s greatest ever export (apart from Bundy Rum).
“I just want people to have a good time,” says Sandwith of the album. “I want them to dance around and have a beer and enjoy it. We don’t make songs for people to look at in a fucking emotional or intellectual way. We just make songs for people to jump around and have fun to.”
Montreal-based indie trio Braids are postponing the release of their new album Shadow Offering to June 19th. The record will be out via Secret City Records / Remote Control Records. Produced by Chris Walla (Death Cab For Cutie), the new album finds the band at their most personal, unabashedly flexing a new sense of confidence through songs that reach a higher level of artistry and collaboration. Today they shared a brand new video for the song ‘Snow Angel,’ a powerful opus that features singer Raphaelle Standell-Preston‘s most visceral performance to date as she leans passionately into her anger, diving deeper into frustrations and anxieties about her internal and external worlds.
Watch the “Snow Angel” video here.
Of the track, Braids said: “‘Snow Angel’ was written in the immediate wake of the 2016 US election, as our collective conscience took a sharp inhale. It’s a diary entry of sorts – a snapshot of the mind grappling with our era’s endless barrage of content and destruction, continents away and close to home. *This* moment, with our world in the midst of a pandemic, is admittedly a new context. But I can’t help but sense the song speaks to feelings many of us are experiencing – uncertainty, angst and a desperate desire to make sense of it all.
For me, it was deeply therapeutic to write and sing this song; saying things out loud can help us to not feel so alone, can help validate our natural fears about the future of our world, and can bring to light some of the hard questions that many of us are asking ourselves. I believe that art can change our relationship to fear. We hope this song can offer you a moment of catharsis and relief, in the same way writing and performing it has for us
‘Snow Angel’ first debuted on The Fader who stated “Producer Chris Walla (Death Cab For Cutie) lets the band breathe throughout the epic track, letting the energy ebb and flow as Raphaelle Standell-Preston switches her vocals between singing and spoken-word. The whole thing builds to a frantic final third in which the chaos and confusion is palpable.”
A luscious and expansive release, Shadow Offering leads us through a sonic tapestry of narrative. With heartbreaking honesty and precision, listeners traverse a nuanced and complicated world: one full of beautiful contradictions. Although the album directs itself at the failures of people to love and be loved, it also seeks to restore justice and attain blissful union. It’s arc crests through the dark towards the light and learns how to dance with the dizzying rhythms of the heart. The songs bubble, sustain, dissolve, expand, and retract.
Lead single ‘Young Buck’ is also out now, an effervescent ode to impossible love that exudes an undeniable magnetism. It was praised by Pitchfork, The New York Times, The FADER, MTV, Stereogum, and Consequence of Sound who called it “a bouncy good time; in the tug-of-war between mind and matter, these pulsing synths are clearly on the side of the body.”
Last Spring they released ‘Eclipse (Ashley),’ a song dedicated to Standell-Preston’s best friend that sinks deep into a feeling of reverie for nature, the love found in friendship, and the vital essence of personal reflection. The New York Times raved “Raphaelle Standell-Preston sings with openhearted earnestness” while Stereogum named it “one of the best Braids songs ever, a power ballad built from cascading pianos, off-kilter rhythms, and a rising surge of atmospheric strings.”
Keeping true to form Moonbase has once again commanded some big talent for ‘BIG BAGS’ this time recruiting vocals from Que & Reese LaFlare – the infamous Atlanta rappers whom Moonbase has always been a big fan of. The vocal style brings a gravel like texture and southern swagger to the track, while adding a new dimension to the Sydney producer’s signature baselines and atmospheric approach.
Part two of the release sees Moonbase flex his international cred once again on ‘SPINS,’ as he features yet another collaboration – this time up to bat is celebrated Baltimore rapper, Ghostie. Moonbase become aware of Ghostie more recently and reached out via Instagram. The result SPINS, it is short, sweet and packs a big old punch.
The ‘BIG BAGS’ / ‘SPINS’ combo A-side is the first taste of Moonbase since he extended his repertoire to the world of Grime throughout 2019 with the EP’s EP’s Heathen & Avalanche. For this release Moonbase says “as a challenge to myself, I wrote Spins and Big Bags using a pretty restricted palette – drawing inspiration from producers such as Brodinski and Kenny Beats.” These new tracks find the producer once again changing lanes, whilst still supremely driving his own race – the only way Moonbase knows how.
Having overcome profound setbacks with his health in the last few years, Moonbase has officially been back in full force for a minute now and the muscles he is flexing on his new music are unlike anything he has shown to the world so far. Considering 2020 is a year that is going to be laced with so much uncertainty and stress, it is comforting to know an artist like Moonbase, who has legit been through more than most of us could imagine, can still be out here pumping the pedal and producing great art, helping the rest of us navigate our way through the darkness.
Dew Process / TRENCH Records / Universal Music AustraliaFollow Moonbase:
“An intoxicating slice of house” – Purple Sneakers
It is with much jubilation that Soothsayer release, Soft Expression – the debut EP from Sydney musician, DJ and Retiree band member Body Corp (aka Marco Vella) out today on vinyl and all digital platforms.
With previous releases on Pelvis Records, and Plastic World as well as UK powerhouse Rhythm Section International (with Retiree), the club-ready EP was released exclusively on a 12” earlier this month via soothsayeronline.com, Bandcamp and select record stores, and allowed fans to hold the wax in their hands ahead of the EP’s full digital release today.
Born out of a necessity to intersect Marco’s love of the club while also focusing energy as one third of Retiree, Body Corp turns his attention to the dancefloor, while retaining the intrinsic groove that peppers his band’s composition. Across the aptly titled Soft Expression, there are smudgy fingerprints of introspection and self-observation.
Latest single ‘Negative Reaction’ is more tech than no, more push than pull, and more bizarre than the norm. An aural equivalent to having an existential crisis on the dancefloor to the greatest sounding kick drum you’ve heard (we’ve all been there).Sound recordings captured on a trip to Japan back in 2012 was where the EP began, although the project laid dormant until 2019 when Marco returned to Japan’s shores and discovered the unique sounds still resonated. Nowhere is Japan’s influence more apparent than on the EP’s title track, where soft pads and eloquently pulsating synth lines demand the listener’s attention.
Support of the EP so far comes from the likes of FBi who added ‘You Don’t Know’, Spotify playlist House Special and Apple Music’s New Music Daily, Loops (US, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Denmark, Sweden, Norway + more). Body Corp was also named one of Band Camp’s New and Notable artists.
The EP was also heavily inspired by Marco’s long winding DJ sets that have become renowned in Sydney and Melbourne. While there won’t be any sets until it’s safe to do so, Marco will bring his magic to FBi today for their Midday Mix and triple j’s Mix Up next month – be sure to tune in.
A special gift for on the vinyl release comes in the form of a hard and fast remix from one of Marco’s favourite producers, in the form of Francis Inferno Orchestra’s ‘Goblin Magick Mix’, which takes the original up a few notches on the BPM counter and into a smoke-hazed Rotterdam club.
Body Corp has gifted us with Soft Expression. Stream it today.
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Punk rock supergroup Fake Names – which includes Brian Baker (Minor Threat, Dag Nasty, Bad Religion), Michael Hampton (S.O.A., Embrace, One Last Wish), Dennis Lyxzén (Refused), and Johnny Temple (Girls Against Boys, Soulside) – will release their self-titled debut record on May 8 via Epitaph.
Fake Names first came to form in early 2016 when Brian Baker and Michael Hampton met up at Hampton’s Brooklyn home to play music together, with no intentions beyond possibly writing a song or two. Friends since first grade, the two guitarists ended up writing a handful of songs that day, and then closed out the session with a spontaneous decision to start a band. When it came to finding a bassist, Baker and Hampton looked to Johnny Temple, a fellow classmate from their elementary school. Later that year at Chicago’s Riot Fest, both Baker and Temple were struck with the sudden inspiration to recruit Refused frontman Dennis Lyxzén as their singer.
On their self-titled debut, Fake Names bring their collective history to a 28-minute burst of unbridled energy. Co-produced by Hampton and Geoff Sanoff and recorded at Renegade Studios (a New York City facility owned by Little Steven Van Zandt), the album augments their bare-bones breed of punk with a heavy dose of power-pop, cleanly manifested in the band’s bittersweet melodies and abundant backup harmonies.
Today, Fake Names share their energetic single “Brick,” a classic punk anthem complete with chant-along chorus and revolution-minded lyrics.
Fake Names is Brian Baker (guitar/vocals), Michael Hampton (guitar/vocals), Dennis Lyxzén (vocals), and Johnny Temple (bass).
| “Kymie just exudes attitude and confidence…” – Dave Ruby Howe, triple j“…there’s no better time to jump on the Kymie train than now..” – Cool Accidents “Kymie leans more into the trappy R&B side of things with her playful, feminist jams and positive stage presence…” |
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