New Music Friday: Stream projects from MJ Lenderman, Molchat Doma, Hinds, and more

It’s not hard to decipher the influences behind MJ Lenderman’s fourth solo album, Manning Fireworks, out today via ANTI-: Jason Molina and David Berman, the late greats of alt-country songwriting; Cooley and Patterson Hood, who wrote troubled and troubling characters in their own conflicted South; and his Wednesday bandmate Karly Hartzman. In interviews, he’s referenced the hard-boiled southern writers Harry Crews and Larry Brown, the funnier and weirder Richard Brautigan, and the pitch-black comic film director Todd Solondz. Lenderman resonates with art that takes an absurd approach to everyday misery, and it shows on Manning Fireworks. — Alex Robert Ross

Read our full article on Manning Fireworks.

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

Belaya Polosa begins with a swell of Prophet-sized synths on “Ty Zhe Ne Znaesh Kto Ya” (translated: “You Don’t Know Who I Am”), its filters opening into a yawn that suggests some kind of barrier melting away. A new and shinier fidelity boosts the dancefloor ambitions of tracks like “Kolesom” and “Belaya Polosa,” songs indebted to Violator-era Depeche Mode down to the ruinous electric guitar twang and Shkutko’s vocals, studiously modeled on Dave Gahan. As much as the band cop to their influences, they stress that they wanted to stretch these sounds to their limits. Sampling became a tool for the first time, with sounds from the legendary Zero-G sample libraries appearing in the music. You can hear them prevalently in “Chernye Tsvety,” where the band’s flickering drum machines are replaced with a broken break that takes the song into the realm of trip-hop. — Jordan Darville

Read the full interview with Molchat Doma.



Hear it: Spotfy | Apple Music | Bandcamp

Goonies never say die, and so do Hinds. For the Madrid indie rock group, it would have been way too easy to just call it quits after the pandemic devastated their band, reducing them to a duo without a label or management. But Hinds never chose the easy path. Stripped down to Carlotta Cosials, Ana Perrote, and their guitars, they went back to their DIY roots and found themselves back where they started in 2011. VIVA HINDS!, their fourth album, is the most adventurous and sonically diverse record the group have put out: Being reduced to bare bones forced the band to experiment and step out of their comfort zone, asking for outside help with instrumentation and musical arrangements for the first time in their careers. “Coffee” is lo-fi garage-pop, Hinds at their most classic, whereas “Stranger” feat. Grian Chatten and “On My Own” show the band’s darker, more vulnerable side. “You get old and you get weird, right?” quipped Cosials in our interview with the band. Hear, hear. — Cady Siregar

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

Since 2016, unsung electronic innovator Laetitia Sonami has worked on an instrument called the Spring Spyre. According to Sonami, the instrument takes the vibrations from three springs and uses real-time machine learning models to turn them into new sounds. Her new project comprises the first-ever piece composed for the Spring Spyre alongside the latest. “a Song For Two Mothers” documents Sonami’s early conversations with the machine — drifting, atemporal, at times coldly mechanical, at others eerily human. For “OCCAM IX,” she called on her former professor, minimalist legend Éliane Radigue. Like the rest of Radigue’s OCCAM series, it was written for not only the instrument but also the piece’s performer. Crafted through collaborative dialogue and grounded in an image that, like the Spyre’s springs, is never revealed to the listener, “OCCAM IX” demonstrates another facet of the mechanism. While far from strictly tonal or temporal, it’s more structured and sonorous here, moving in pulsing waves instead of strewn clusters. — Raphael Helfand

Hear it: Bandcamp | Boomkat

The debut album from Montreal rock band Knitting pulls liberally from ’90s alternative rock and indie grunge, building songs on anxious chords at a laconic pace, with Polvo and Helium as obvious reference points. Lead singer Mischa Dempsey’s lyrics read claustrophobic, feeling around the sharp edges of non-binary identity for hooks: “I’ve been scolding myself with my dead name / it’s hanging on with the ring of a catchphrase.” The most interesting song here, though, is the most wistful “Family Tree,” which taps into the quiet drama of Heatmiser and early Foo Fighters in search of a disappeared innocence: “You’ll never be that small again / And you’re longing for what no longer exists.” Interesting new footsteps on a well-worn path. — Alex Robert Ross

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

“We are all just dogs gnashing our teeth at the moon,” Joe Love sings on the opening track of Fat Dog’s maximalist debut album. Occupying a role more akin to ringleader than rock band frontman, Love spends the majority of WOOF. whipping up the energy levels to near pandemonium with similarly feral imagery and ideas. Fat Dog are the latest group to emerge from the dank rooms of the productive south London toilet circuit, treading a similar path to bands as disparate as black midi and The Last Dinner Party before them. As such, much of WOOF.‘s success lies in translating their rambunctious stage presence into something equally exhilarating. Producer James Ford helped them achieve this, beefing up tracks such as “Closer To God” and “Running” into unbridled synth-rock romps. Love strides across Nine Inch Nail-style techno-punk (“King of the Slugs”), and the manic, sax-laced “Wither” has a vibe somewhere between a barfly and a WWE heel cutting promos into the bottom of a pint glass. WOOF. never takes itself too seriously, trading on scuzzy pleasures and a wrecking-ball approach to making an impression. Resistance is futile. — David Renshaw

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp