An enigmatic force of the underground music scene, Jazmin Bean mesmerizes fans with the music video release of ‘Shit Show’. Self-directed alongside visionary filmmaker Zak Watson, ‘Shit Show’ brings viewers on a cinematic journey into the surreal world of Jazmin Bean, combining dazzling cityscapes, muted 90s aesthetics, and hauntingly beautiful melodies. “I always envisioned myself falling in the video since I began to make the song, since it’s about a truly unpleasant human and relationship I wanted to just be as far away from as possible when it was over. I think the falling is a good representation of that,” says Jazmin on the visual direction of the new music video. “I wanted to land on my feet, as a sort of thing, like, you can’t keep me down no matter how low you take me. I also loved the Placebo video where he walks down the building. I wanted to have a twist like that.”

Irish alt-rock band Sick Love release their latest single ‘Don’t Wait’, a powerful anthem ahead of their much-anticipated debut album release, Champagne. ‘Don’t Wait’ encapsulates the band’s message of resilience and moving forward from past heartbreaks. According to Sick Love, the song reflects the liberating feeling of letting go and embracing newfound freedom. They expand: “‘Don’t Wait’ is about realising that you’ve finally moved on from that person who broke your heart, and they no longer take up space in your head. When you realise that it wasn’t meant to be and you’ve stopped holding on to what might have been, you can finally let yourself be free.”

Toronto artist Housewife tackles heartbreak on lead single ‘Wasn’t You’, a dreamy ballad with a pop-rock edge. The track is released alongside a music video featuring Housewife surrounded by roses, idealizing love, with the artist eventually destroying everything around them in a rage. When reflecting on the track, Housewife shares: “’Wasn’t You’ is about the trials and tribulations of dating men- specifically as a queer / afab person. it can be really frustrating to find someone you like / are attracted to but know there’s a lot of patriarchal shit they need to unlearn, and it can be hard when there’s also a lot of gender envy and maybe even resentment tied up in that as well. I wrote this song in Nashville with Bobbie Allen (young summer) and Carrie K. I remember it being a lot of fun, kind of just hanging out with two old sisters and gossiping and complaining about my love life. But it ended up turning into an awesome song. I then recorded it with Gabe Simon, Carrie, and Konrad Snyder a few months ago, and we ended up taking it in this really fun fuzzy, sludgy direction. it was also one of my first songs where i felt empowered to play all the guitars myself, which was really cool!” [via Canadian Beats]

Self-categorising her music as “Nightmare Pop”, American alternative-pop artist, tiLLie has carved out a niche and unique sound by effortlessly marrying bright, ear-worm pop melodies with brooding lyrics tackling cutting subjects from the heart of her Southern American upbringing. Now, as the rising star approaches the release of her EP tiLLieverse, tiLLIe continues to blaze a trail within the music industry with latest single, ‘pray t0 god’. Opening with a set of fairytale-esque set of instrumentals, as the track unfolds, the glittering production slowly gives way to angry percussion and raucous riffs. Against the backdrop of the multi-layered and enigmatic production lies tiLLie’s angst-ridden vocals, a shining highlight of the track that appropriately addresses the track’s subject matter with a gritty intensity, perfectly emblematic of tiLLie’s bold and unapologetic musical style. Married with tiLLie’s vibrant and lurid lyricism, ‘pray t0 god’ is an uncompromising almost-punk track that is brimming with sharp edges and chaotic unpredictability. Speaking on the visuals and their inspiration, tiLLie explains, “For years there has been an abusive figure in my family who has inflicted pain on not just their partner, but all of us. Although I’ve managed to heal and build a healthy life for myself, knowing that my family is still under his control makes it hard for me to feel grounded in the newfound peace I’ve created. The music video for ‘pray t0 god’ depicts the emotional duality of feeling prisoner to the effects of this abuser while simultaneously trying to embrace this healthy, empowered era in my healing journey.” [via Wonderland]

Daphne Guinness unveils a mesmerising visual for her new single ‘Time’, created with her regular collaborator, filmmaker and photographer David LaChapelle. The video, captured in stylish and timeless monochrome, features a rare cameo appearance from the director himself. Its release marks the second single from Guinness’s forthcoming album, Sleep, to be accompanied by a video directed by LaChapelle, following ‘Volcano’ earlier this year. ‘Time’ is a song which sparkles with theatricality, melodrama and nostalgia: all qualities accentuated by Daphne’s razor-sharp enunciation and vocal elegance as she delivers lyrics primed with grandeur and consequence, yet there’s also a playfulness amongst the poignancy. The track’s production also toys between the classic and the contemporary, first blossoming as a classic torch song before a swooning, string-assisted disco beat kicks in. It’s also notable for being a song that was directly influenced by David La Chappelle. Daphne says, “David called me up and said he wanted a timeless song. So I thought, okay, I’m going to write a song about time. Time is something that fascinates me. I went to a deep mediation centre in Sedona, Arizona and they attached electrodes to my head to monitor my brainwaves, during one of these sessions the phrase ‘All of the clichés are true’ suddenly came to me. I started laughing. Apparently my brainwaves went nuts. I just had to put it in the song. Being able to own all the clichés is good, and they are true, there’s a reason for them.” LaChappelle’s video for ‘Time’ turns the clock back to Berlin in the 1930s. The setting is backstage at a cabaret and tensions are running high, leading to a violent conflict between Daphne’s character and a club boss – played by David himself. But the show must go on. Daphne’s performance is beguiling and magnetic: her star quality enamouring an audience of larger-than-life characters. Yet a little of that earlier schism remains…

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Georgia Gets By, the project of New Zealand’s Georgia Nott (BROODS), shares a video for ‘When All You Can Manage Is A Sigh,’ a gorgeous and quietly devastating new single. “I wrote this song for a friend a few years ago while they were navigating a divorce. There are those moments where thinking can’t balance out the feelings. You can rationalize all you want but you are still there, holding that enormous heavy sensation that no words can describe,” Georgia explains. “There, on the other side of falling in love, looking around at empty space and wondering whether you can bear to try it all again. This song is a parting gift of some sorts; something to fill the emptiness for a couple of minutes. As Imogen Heap says ‘there is beauty in the breakdown’.”

Gustaf, the Brooklyn no wave / post-punk band announced their debut album last month and now they are back with a double single and video for ‘Here Hair / Hard Hair.’ The first is a brooding, slow-motion growl peppered by birdsong and stabbed by pinpricks of guitar, while its chaser, ‘Hard Hair,’ is 45-second outburst of energy, invective and regret. The songs were produced and mixed by Erin Tonkon with initial production from Carlos Hernandez. Its accompanying video directed by the band’s own Lydia Gammill, features the band wigged out among heart shaped hair brushes and roses.

Manchester’s finest alt-punks The Empty Page just released a gritty new video, calling out the ‘Cock of the Fifth Year’. “Cock of the fifth year is what we called the biggest jock types when I was in high school. Cocky, brash loud and overly confident. Puffed up and swaggering and often quite intimidating. I liked the name for a song and wrote it initially about a cartoonish bloke who unselfconsciously uses up all the space available and makes others feel shoved out of the way. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of blokes like that I encounter when walking around my home city of Manchester. Swaggering, mouthy bellends who can be pretty intimidating when you’re a woman just trying to get from A to B. I was thinking about the idea that being a big deal in high school is the peak of some people’s lives. I hated school with a passion and my own life has got better and better as my school days have receded in the rearview. Seems a weird flex now to have been a big deal in high school,” says Kel, singer/guitarist/songwriter of The Empty Page. [via Loud Women]

Babehoven will return with a new album this spring. The New York-based duo of Maya Bon and Ryan Albert have announced Water’s Here In You, out April 26 via Double Double Whammy. This week sees the release of a new song called ‘Birdseye,’ following the previously released album track ‘Chariot.’ Seemingly aware of the blandness that runs through most modern indie rock, ‘Birdseye’ opts for something more ambitious and strikes a balance between melancholic and soaring, jangley and ornate. The music video, directed by Ash Kron, makes a comforting blanket out of the threads of whimsy in the song, depicting Bon as a balloon-aided bird flapping across the coast and taking advantage of the nice weather to do some human-watching. [via The FADER]

Last year, Saya Gray shared her Qwerty EP. Now, the art-pop musician announced its sequel, Qwerty II, and shared the hallucinatory single ‘AA BOUQUET FOR YOUR 180 FACE’ with a video directed by Jennifer Cheng. “180 face is my bass moment off of qwerty ii EP,” she said in a statement. “it’s about a spooky moody boy with a 180 face.” Qwerty II was made in isolation in 2023, and Gray describes it as “a collection of ideas and collages stuck together as the ying to the yang of the first half.” [via Stereogum]

The new visuals for Fever Ray‘s ‘Shiver’ come from frequent collaborator Martin Falck; Main, the trollish office drone Dreijer has portrayed in this era of visuals, falls from the sky to a red planet. They’re healed by a buff doctor, played by none other than International Fitness and Bodybuilding Federation pro bodybuilder Irene Andersen, whose office also doubles as a BDSM chamber. Some light physiotherapy ensues. The new clip was inspired by the Lovers of Valdero, a pair of Stone Age skeletons that were buried for millennia in an intimate embrace. “We fantasized about what might have happened to these two skeletons,” Dreijer says. “Were they so in love they had their mouths and noses too close to each other, or couldn’t stop kissing so they died of carbon monoxide poisoning? Or did a dinosaur kill them, and they died in fear holding each other? Was it a volcano, and they were protecting themselves from the lava burning their flesh? Maybe they weren’t in love at all; perhaps they were lifelong enemies facing their final struggle strangling each other? We felt there was a beautiful story there about the struggles of falling in love and the vulnerability you might feel being ‘examined’ by your love interest who wants to make sure you really are the one they can trust and form a relationship with, that will last for eternity.” [via The FADER]

Tierra Whack has dropped ’27 CLUB,’ the latest preview of her new album, WORLD WIDE WHACK. A reference to the infamous 27 Club of celebrities who died at the age of 27 — including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Kurt Cobain — the new single was produced by Whack’s frequent collaborator J Melodic and ProdbyBRIANNA. The track dives deep into Whack’s mental health, as she sings about losing touch with family and friends while embodying the pain of coming up against seemingly insurmountable obstacles. After explicitly mentioning thoughts of suicide, Whack sings, “Like a glass full but I’m empty/ Said, ‘I’m broken, can you fix me?’/ If I’m dreamin,’ you should pinch me/ Got a gun to the head, don’t tempt me.” Addressing the song in an Instagram post, Whack wrote, “I was in a dark place for a long time, and no one knew. I found my way out and made a choice to keep living. I wanna be completely transparent with my ‘whackos’ because I’m human just like you and we all have rough days. The key is to keep going! Be kind… you never know what someone else is going through. For the longest time, I felt like I didn’t belong, but now I know that I do, and my hope is for other people to know that, too.” [via Consequence]

Toronto-born, Los Angeles-based alternative artist Abby Sage sustains her musical momentum with an introspective new single, ‘Soak.’ This radiant track offers another peek into her creative process while heightening the anticipation for the release of her forthcoming debut album, The Rot, out March 1 via Nettwerk. Embellished with delicate vocals and complemented by upbeat guitar strums, ‘Soak’ strikes a sonic balance between melodic buoyancy and industrial undertones. Introduced by a simple drum beat, the song gradually reaches its climax in a lively and sparkling chorus. This sweeping alternative-pop track is a testament to self discovery, and an exploration of the liberation found in triviality. “‘Soak’ is the acceptance and surrender to complete unimportance.” Sage says. “It’s recognizing how insignificant everything is and how small I am. It’s celebratory in a way because there is something so beautiful and freeing about letting go of ego and self importance. It frees up a lot of space.” Regarding the video, she continues, “I wanted to focus on the ‘giving in’ aspect of that first so the set was designed to feel chaotic and crowded with the masks and the wind blowing while I struggle to let go. Later in the video, the optical illusion of the puppet ‘carrying’ me around is that manifestation of my surrender and embrace of my insignificance.” [via Broadway World]

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Directed by Alex Ross Perry (Bully, Soccer Mommy, Pavement, etc.), the video finds the band playing a house show as Gammill intensely directs everyone to “stay on my eyes”. Something is pulling her attention from the back of the crowd as the band’s facial cues become more and more intense.

Where Audio Drag for Ego Slobs confronted the struggle to deal with the narrators’ surroundings, finding ways to behave in a way where their emotions and actions didn’t alienate most everyone, Package Pt. 2 becomes self-aware, wondering what they might change to make life, relationships, and love a little more manageable presented via a dizzying post-punk dream brought with an irrepressible energy with astounding vocal performances throughout. With Package Pt. 2, Gustaf is in full command of a lineage that radiates from obvious touchstones like the B-52s and Talking Heads to DNA and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks.

Package Pt. 2:

1. Statue
2. Close
3. What Does It Mean
4. Starting And Staring
5. I Won
6. Weighing Me Down
7. Here Hair
8. Hard Hair
9. Produce
10. Happiest Thought
11. Ground
12. End Of The Year

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