Creature Comfort’s "Woke Up Drunk" begins as a simple, feel-good indie folk track. Lighthearted, tuneful arpeggiations twinkle like the stars just before dawn. The lyrics balance deliberate rhyme schemes and stream-of-consciousness quips. Strung together, the words tend to wander down unmarked trails as much as they sit ruminating. Harmonies swirl around the central image of the song: taking a hike to process all the thoughts dripping through your brain, slightly hungover and itching to move. They’re not all bad thoughts, but they’re not all good ones. You’re holding love and resentment in your chest and hoping it’s just a matter of sweating it out. It almost is — but then the bridge hints that you end up letting in as many emotions as you release. After a few listens on repeat, you notice the seeds that build to that final climax. Drums that nudge the tempo ever-so-slightly forward. Vocal chorus harmonies that dip into suspended resolutions. The introduction of an electric lead guitar that slowly becomes more distorted, coiling around a violin melody until they become intertwined. It’s a divine texture shift that’s surprising and perfectly foreshadowed.

Syrup's "Turn" is a throwback to the dance pop rhythms that ignited spirits and hushed boredom back in the 1980s. The vocal is melodramatic enough to invoke some kind of contemplation mid-twirl-or-boogie out there on the dance floor. The song is ultimately about finding some comfort in moving at a pace fit for you and you alone. If you're in need of a song to be as forgiving as your most understanding friend, "Turn" by Syrup is exactly what the doctor ordered. "Turn away... take a break... you can take your time..."

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I was ready to leave the ice skating rink when "Turn" by Syrup came on. I almost broke my neck looking at the DJ who in turn flashed me two thumbs up and smiled wide enough to make me smile in return. Her teeth were whiter than the ice's central rotating disco ball's inner, glowing light. I said fuck it and put my skates back on and hit the rink just to feel the cold air press against my green Nike windbreaker. The DJ started dancing behind the booth to "Turn." Everyone was smiling. Nothing hurt. After I made it around the rink five times, I felt okay about taking the night from studying and socializing to unwind here in the rink.

Sydney, Australia's merci, mercy is a budding act defined by edgy pizazz, emotional vulnerability and intuitive writing that acknowledges the high stakes of bad romantic and social habits. After kicking off with a haunting confession, an infectious groove takes over to carry a dialogue on the importance of self-affirmation and authenticity. For the empath, there’s no greater threat than the pull to fix a loved one at all costs, yet “Something You Like” presents the heartbreak of letting go as an almost enticing experience. The instrumental momentum gives listeners a sense of excitement for the future while validating the clingy, cumbersome needs of the old self at the heart of the story. This is a much needed reminder to commit to love that feels like swimming together, not drowning together. 

“Something You Like” is merci, mercy's third release of 2020 and will appear on her debut EP, no thank you, no thanks, which is out tomorrow, Oct 16. Photo by She Is Aphrodite.

Fresh-pressed from the likes of Nashville, Riley Moore is a bonafide man, in his lyrics as well as his life. “Mansion” is the pure and earnest result of Moore’s meeting a young woman while performing a show in her quaint Pennsylvania living room. The track is a tip-toe through the ruminations of Moore’s mind while he wandered through the streets of Boulder, Colorado with little money and the yearning for a girl he thought he may never meet again. Sewn into the fabric of this track are nods to early 2000's indie folk pop band, Page France, with glistening chimes and whimsy as plain as a pikestaff. “Mansion” is the introduction to Moore’s EP, sweet boy, which will be released in March 2021.

The track tells a charming story, Moore shares: “This is a song about me buying a t-shirt with a drawing of an anteater eating some ants for a girl I had a deep crush on, and longing for the day I may see her again to deliver the shirt. From the moment that I met her I became more and more enthralled, drifting further and further down the avenue of enchantment — a street with no turns and no outlet.” Photo by Lauren Lundy.

“Debris”, off of Brooklyn-based Iris Lune’s 2020 album lovelosslove, immersively rolls into your ears, softly drawing you into its contemplative mood. Her lyrics are tactile, singing of “shiver(s) slipping down my spine, your mouth pressing gently to mine, and the waves beneath us crashed”; these words are perfectly paired with production elements like the plucky guitar line, whose attack with each note is just as physical to the listener as the pictures Lune paints. She leans into the bittersweetness and the melancholy with this single, and it’s a tone perfectly suited for her voice — there’s just a hint of Björk here in Lune’s earnest, soft vocal, and in the expert balancing of the mix itself, which takes care never to overpower her performance. It’s a gorgeous track that goes naturally with the fall season, which carries with it a bit heavier of a sense of loss than usual; as we catch ourselves wading into memories of more metaphorically "spring-like" days, or of pre-COVID days, like Lune sings, “it’s okay to let ‘em hold you, hold you down.” Brighter days will come, and ‘til then, we’ll put on “Debris,” and feel a little less alone in our yearning. Photo by Julia Barrett-Mitchell.

“It’s nice to feel happy all the time” is the main refrain from “Bad,” the debut single from indie rock songwriter Wilby. Sincere, emotive and crisp, this track addresses one of our most fundamental human experiences: the pursuit of happiness. According to her Spotify bio Wilby has no issue addressing "the value of tenderness, resilience and mental health." While this is Maria Crawford's first single under the moniker Wilby, it's evident she'll quickly solidify herself as a key player in the Nashville indie rock scene. Her musical style leaves space for her fresh and intricate vocals to take shape in her songs. Be expecting honest, crystal-clear lyricism from this artist. I'm particularly excited to see what this artist creates in the months to come. 

Endlessly floating between Brooklyn, NY, and Burlington, VT, Chazzy Lake, a.k.a. Charlie Hill of J Bengoy, has met many a person and admittedly, in the process, been many a person himself. “Fake Friends” is an easygoing, congenial melody making a commentary on the temperaments that people often feign in their interactions with one another. Over the elasticity of a rising and falling, pleasantly folky bassline, Hill’s voice gleams amongst warm-strung riffs. When he sings, “Falling in love and clutching my heart, until I see you cast your line right back where you had found mine,” Hill, with great honesty, presses into the duplicity of connection, as well as the selfishness that, much of the time, lives within attempts to connect. “Fake Friends” is a part of Chazzy Lake’s first full-length LP, Sup, Circumstance, which promises beauty in its likeness. He has been releasing one song each week on Spotify, and the album will be available there in its entirety at the end of October.

Tripping over yourself has never been as sweet as it is in Miloe’s new release "Winona." The tune opens with a simple guitar arpeggio, backed by a programmed drum and expanding to include a fuzzy synth in the chorus. Bobby Kabeya, the force behind Miloe, gives us simple vocals as he sings, "My mind reader [...] My Winona Ryder, I wanna find her." His voice is doubled over and over, like the sonic version of looking at yourself in an endless mirror, versions of your own reflection refracting out into eternity. By creating this trick of the mind, he’s bringing us into the ultimate mind-mess: falling for someone, chasing after them desperately. The song breaks down: "hasn’t rained in so long, pleasant pain when you’re gone," repeats, layering guitar over synth over vocal over drums until a sudden stop. An echo. A breath. Maybe they found each other after all.

Miloe's sophomore EP, Greenhouse, comes out on October 30.

Almost nine months after the January release of his charming Borderline album, the multifaceted artist Christian Kuria has returned, this time wielding a sonically pleasing new single to start those fall playlists with. “Enemy” flows together and settles into the ears of the listener with ease and cohesion, similarly to the way the song was created. As Kuria shared with vacancy. magazine, “My process is usually pretty meticulous. It often takes me several days or even weeks to complete a song, but it’s really exciting when a tune comes together without a struggle. 'Enemy' was one of those songs; I wrote and produced it in a day. Everything just worked, and I wasn’t afraid to try a new approach stylistically.” 

“Enemy” is a harmonious sensory experience of its own, carrying colorful guitar riffs, a dreamy soundscape and a celestial vocal palette that will uplift listeners into the clouds. The alternative R&B track spoils us with its excellent production, just like that of his well-loved renditions of contemporary music on YouTube. Yet Kuria is an artist whose own music and sound is ever-growing and will therefore be everlasting.

Ritual Talk’s newest offering “relate2” has a soft and soothing groove that builds to a gentle fullness in the last third. “You want someone to relate to / you got more than that coming 'round,” Alex DeSimine repeats with layered vocals over a bright but sparse guitar, before it’s joined by laid-back and gentle drums. The Brooklyn-based indie psych-soul band slowly layers synths and vocals to create a landscape of sound that feels thick and almost tangible like a morning fog. It never breaks out or builds to a climax. Instead, it explores every inch of its pocket, leaving no space untouched by the end. The simplicity of the repeated two-line chorus keeps the track grounded, allowing for expansion sonically while the verses take the message of yearning for connection a little deeper. But maybe you don’t need other people to find the wholeness you desire; as the last line of the second verse suggests, “you want love and you want safety / shouldn’t that start inside?”

What happens when the present painfully collides with the future you imagined? It’s a question that Portland-based artist Tuesday Faust explores on her latest single, "Grace." Launching with a clanging train bell, the track establishes itself as an incredibly vivid storybook of a song. The lyrical narrative begins at the end of another story, with the opening line, “when she walked away, the train came.” The way it’s phrased, it almost sounds like she chose to walk away, and that somehow caused the train to arrive. Or perhaps it was a random coincidence of timing. Either way, one thing appeared as the other disappeared. Throughout the rest of the song, the narrator tries to reconcile the two and bring them back into the same space, even as she chooses to get onboard the train that carries her away. A synthetic whistle reminiscent of Thomas the Tank Engine begins to punctuate the end of phrases as soon as the figurative train arrives. The ironically tuneful whistle juxtaposed against viscerally visual, serious lyrics makes the story feel both dreamlike and achingly real. At the tail end of the track, the texture shifts to something minor and vaguely modal, resolving somewhere unexpected and open-ended. Charmingly existential, "Grace" straddles the line between literal and metaphorical, and takes up space in the back of your brain for days.