New Music Friday: Stream projects from Hakushi Hasegawa, Robber Robber, and more

I was first introduced to the music of Hakushi Hasegawa in 2020, when they played Porter Robinson’s pandemic-era web-streamed festival Secret Sky. Nothing about that era made any sense; intuitions were dissolving in front of our eyes, and the daily onslaught of death and political chaos threw our identities into flux. Hasegawa’s Secret Sky set was an oasis that also felt like a reflection of the tumult, a display of how that unsettled energy could be a force for good. Mahōgakkō, Hasegawa’s new album and their first for Flying Lotus’s storied electronic label Brainfeeder, sacrifices none of this power. Its most attention-grabbing moments are no doubt the most noisy and ribald ones, songs like “KYŌFUNOSHOSHI” and “GONE” that feel like they were composed with the exploded pieces of other songs, detuned and injected with rocket fuel. They’re biblically accurate electro-jazz angels, beatific creatures that will turn you into a pillar of sugar if you look too close. One doesn’t have to listen to these songs all that closely to hear Hasegawa’s genius for composing, but the gentler moments make it easy for us. Songs like the piano ballad “Forbidden Thing (Kimmotsu)” and the glitchy skip of “Boy’s Texture” lay bare the humanity that was there all along. — Jordan Darville

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

Constantly morphing London producer Klein embraces harshness on her new album, marked, dropped without notice earlier this week. The Dean Blunt/Mica Levi/MIKE collaborator’s new project is mostly characterized by noisy guitar tracks that cleverly arrange walls of feedback to create impenetrable fortresses (see the guttural “gully creepa,” the shrill “season 2,” the zany “ruthless (amnesia cleared)” and the snarling “gift of sofiat”). But there are also moments of relative calm. The record opens with muffled voices and a honkey-tonk player piano gone rogue, drifting up as if from a haunted underground speakeasy. And mid-album standout “more than like” is nearly six minutes of nothing more than naked keys, although there’s no respite for the weary listener in its echoing dissonance. For the most part, though, marked’s most interesting moments come when Klein strays from the album’s spartan core, as she does with the staticky breakbeats of “blow the whistle,” the atonal circuit-breaker synths of the super-brief “afrobeat weekender,” and the text-to-speech terror of “(breaking news).” Its most harrowing passage, however, is undoubtedly the elegiac “drugs won’t work (like mother like son),” where longing synths give way to jarring record scratches, desperate millisecond vocal samples, and grim, tuneless guitar chords as the color drains from the track and we find ourselves surrounded by a sea of endless gray. — Raphael Helfand

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

There is an unencumbered feeling to the 9 songs that make up Robber Robber’s debut album. Skipping freely between various indie rock subgenres (post-punk, shoegaze, and krautrock are all part of the Burlington, VT band’s arsenal), Wild Guess feels like a fitting title for such a variable grab bag of sounds. What Robber Robber lack in cohesion they make up for in control. “Backup Plan” builds tension around a motorik beat and vocalist Nina Cates’ nonchalant delivery, “Dial Tone,” meanwhile, stands out for its thrash guitars and lyrics about post-party anxiety. Elsewhere things are a little more free. “How We Ball” strips things back, offering up a jagged and bratty blast as the band loosen the grip a little and let loose. It all adds up to something akin to a blueprint for a group primed to make their next move unpredictable not just to the listener, but themselves as well. — David Renshaw

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp