Frank's 5 Under 50k (06/13)
#1--Club, Post-PC, Reverb, Gestures, and Pocket Games.
Argentina-based vocalist and producer roro spits over TEYKO, his producer’s burgeoning stems, like a rogue pink Gatling gun. Like a theoretical lovechild of Chase Icon and COBRAH, you turn on tracks like “Furcoat” or the trilingual techno standout “Bonjour, Ce Soir, Bonsoir” and come to understand that he already knows he’s got the sauce. “Hot Hits,” Roro’s first release in 2025, sees a continuation of such feeling, tracks like “100x100” warranting a blackout or “La-Uk-Ar,” which upon first listen serves a sort of CAKE “Short Skirt Long Jacket” swagger if the original song was dipped in glitter glue and slipped on a pair of knee-high Demonia boots.
DMV represent. Maryland native producer and vocalist Warpstr is hoisting a post-PC Music sting back to the surface of electropop. The Nate Sib renaissance is slowly becoming more and more evident, and “Every Little Thing,” his latest single is a testament to his candidacy as a Sib disciple. This is my verbal petition for good vocalists to keep doing cool things! On a completely separate note, “Matter of Time” in collaboration with Umru could rip through a four-foot sheet of plexiglass. What an absolute wizard that dude is.
A friend of mine put me onto this Welsh group a couple of months ago in the middle of that fake spring when it gets warm for 42 seconds, then reverts back to subarctic. The psychedelic, pop-ambient sounds that they bring serve as a reflection of their hometown surroundings—space for plenty of reverb and a sense of certainty that the sun will come back out soon enough. There are pockets of playfulness to the synths and other building blocks that make up for the Welsh lyrics I can’t understand, like a granulated, high-pitched “woo-hoo” scattered around the track “Lay Buy” or the egg shaker that never once lets up in “Y Môr,” to name a few. It’s been just over a year since we’ve got new music from the quartet, but their stuff has such a pull, and I’m eager for more goodies.
Coder, producer, hand-and-finger instrumentalist extraordinaire Jewel Posniak, professionally Julip has outgrown Garage Band. As the creator and engineer of the gestural and facial MIDI software magicHands, she harnesses control over digital audio workspaces with her hands, eyes, and mouth. One Instagram comment cosign from Imogen Heap (notorious for her own gestural production gloves MiMU) and millions of TikTok views later, Julip’s latest release “Worm Song,” is another building block into her growing 2009 iTunes gift card silhouette pop legacy.
If there was a venue the size of Madison Square Garden on Tamagochi Planet, Vin0 would headline and sell out fifteen nights. The summer of 2024 I remember this kid was shoveling some of the most awe-inspiring 2 minute pluggnb arrangements on the daily until he sort of dropped off the face of the earth. “##LoveStory<3” is a majestic re-wire of the Swiftie classic only if it was off a zoloft and some super heavy ludes.