New Music Friday: Stream projects from Sex Week, gyrofield, Chelsea Wolfe, and more

There is a real intimacy to the debut EP from Sex Week, the New York-based duo of Richard Orofino and Pearl Amanda Dickson. The seven songs on the project are the soundtrack to the pair’s burgeoning partnership and Dickson’s first foray into making music. Listening to scrappy indie rock songs like “Bluff” and “Toad Mode,” the latter written about a portly cat belonging to a friend, is like cupping your ear to the wall and eavesdropping on a practice session. Elsewhere, the pair show a love of the grotesque, fleshing out their bare-bones songs with lyrics that revel in the grimy side of life. “Slaughtered lambs,” “cat litter,” “innards,” and “mushy mold” are all chewed and spat into the foundations the EP is built on. Stand-out track “Angel Blessings” points most firmly to the band Sex Week may develop into, a confident stomp that slowly festers until it collapses, screaming into the abyss. — David Renshaw

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

Like all gyrofield releases, These Heavens originates from an endlessly searching impulse. Reading Stephen Hawking’s groundbreaking cosmology book A Brief History of Time gave them a newfound appreciation not just for our universe’s beauty, but our desire to know it… Opening track “Vega” announces this push-and-pull with vigor, pairing classic D&B propulsion with synthetic melodies that glitter, skronk, yell, and soothe. “Lagrange,” a song partially inspired by Hideo Kojima’s video game Death Stranding, pulls from Rephlex-era IDM alongside treacle-sweet vocals that wouldn’t be out of place at a festival on Miami Beach. Even the beefier moments like the pirate radio-ready “Occam’s Razor” and the final track — “Cold Cases,” a song gyrofield lovingly refers to as “the dumbest arrangement I’ve ever made” — resist categorization and reveal new depths to their dancefloors. — Jordan Darville, taken from our gyrofield interview

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

As far as remixes go, Chelsea Wolfe appears to have assembled a supergroup of sorts for her Undone EP. Featuring goth, darkwave, and industrial metal icons like ††† (Crosses), Boy Harsher, and Godflesh’s Justin K. Broadrick, the release takes six tracks from Wolfe’s latest album, She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She, which brought dark techno rhythms, industrial textures, and heavy trip-hop bass into her signature brand of spectral goth. So keeping in line with the record’s core theme of transformation, it only makes sense for Wolfe to give her captivating doomgaze tracks to these subgenre specialists who can tap into the dancier side of the darkness. — Sandra Song

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

Enumclaw’s Home In Another Life is a record full of love songs that totally rip. Aramis Johnson’s lyrics are earnest and heartfelt, tapping into themes of romance and its darker currents of loss and heartbreak. It’s been fun to watch the Tacoma, Washington band rise –– I was a fan of their collaboration with Tanukichan on 2023’s Thin Air — and getting to see them embrace their heavier side, all blown-own distorted guitars and crashing drums. Enumclaw’s melodies, saccharine against the abrasion of the guitars, give the album a sheen reminiscent of shoegaze-inflected emo power pop, bringing the likes of Pity Sex and Ovlov to mind. There’s a bit of Liquid Mike in the no-holds-barred indie punk rock, and it’s easy to imagine the mass of crowd-goers singing along to anthems dedicated to heartache. But for Enumclaw, the pain of the past is something to learn from, rather than a way to shield and hide yourself away from the possibility of better. — Cady Siregar

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

The Heart Pumps Kool-Aid, more eaze and Seth Graham’s first joint album under the under the unpronounceable moniker —__–___, was a soft crash. Despite occasional plumes of hyperpop and horror-score string stabs, that record was a relatively restrained affair. The addition of new full-time member recovery girl on their new project, Night of Fire, made for a much louder, three-way collision. Over Graham’s sharp song skeletons, more eaze’s Auto-Tuned croons and lush string arrangements do battle — and are often obliterated — by recovery girl’s hardcore screams. Their intersection makes sense in the context of the album’s core theme: the way the banal evil of everyday life under capitalism unleashes untold violence on our most vulnerable communities. The album is epitomized by its three pre-release singles: Its horrifying title track contains recovery girl’s darkest growls, while more eaze lets forth mangled, atonal violin skitterings. The relative softness and ample negative space of “Kill Kare” represent the complex tenderness each member of the trio feels toward their conservative hometowns. And closer “When God Released Me” is a perfect union of these two modes — a track that begins in a sea of harsh noise but ends in tranquility and laughter. — Raphael Helfand