Search:surreal

Inspired by the Buddhist sutras, Blitzen Trapper’s radiant new album, 100's of 1000's, Millions of Billions, offers a captivating take on rebirth and transcendence, navigating its way through the space beyond dreams and reality, beyond gods and mortals, beyond life and death. The songs here are as sincere as they are surreal, rooted in rich character studies and deep reflection, and the production is intoxicating to match, blending lo-fi intimacy and trippy psychedelia into a mesmerizing swirl of analog and electronic sounds. Add it all together and you’ve got a gorgeous collection of stripped-down bedroom folk wrapped in lush layers of synthesizers and washed out electric guitars, a poignant, expansive exploration of perception and purpose that manages to look both forwards and backwards all at once. This LP is pressed on clear blue vinyl and limited to 1,000 copies worldwide. Launched roughly two decades ago in Portland, OR, Blitzen Trapper broke out internationally with 2008’s Furr, which cemented their status at the forefront of the modern indie folk revival. Rolling Stone hailed the band’s “hazy, psychedelic Americana,” while NPR praised their “explosive live performances and infectious roots-rock swagger.” Dates with Fleet Foxes, Wilco, and Dawes followed, as did festival appearances at Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Newport Folk, and Coachella, among others. The band would go on to release six more similarly lauded studio albums, culminating with 2020’s Holy Smokes Future Jokes, which Mojo proclaimed “sounds like the Beatles at Big Pink.”

LUMBEROB has always strived for maximalist sonic vaudeville, always hoped for real electro gabber hardcore noise art, always grabbed for frenzied illegibility, always lurched loosely improvised from a psych-swamp of love. On the new album, HUNTER GATHER, LUMBEROB swings swanky as proper pop deviance. Built from the same loopy logic which drives the stomping slaphappy force of his live show, these tunes are crafted out of lovely and weirdly thunk out loud and large soundscapes. Mixed and mastered by Shimmy-Disc founder Kramer (Daniel Johnston, JD Pinkus, Pan American), the album surprises, estranged from obvious categorization. These slippery little bouncy bangers are bold exercises in genre discovery. It sounds like nothing and it goes with everything. LUMBEROB is a tough act to follow, a surreally inventive performer who spins giddy with excitement, dancing dumb and banging hard. That's just what he does, and HUNTER GATHER is a refined encapsulation of that energy. There's truly a beautiful stupidity to be found here. HUNTER GATHER is noise-pop, art-rock, psych-primitive, dumb-dance. The album teams with bright sounds, spinning visions, and brut poetics. It curves furiously like a naughty noodle and, yes, it spins you dizzy at times. Nothing is old in that feeling ever. Listen loudly.

In the penultimate episode of his widely popular and critically acclaimed HBO series, Painting with John, its creator, John Lurie, sat in a Manhattan recording studio, working out musical parts for the show’s soundtrack. “After the illness started, I didn’t think I’d ever be able to do this again,” said Lurie.

Even as he occupies an enigmatic, multi-faceted, five-decade career characterized by the unexpected, perhaps even Lurie is surprised by this new release of a double-album collection of music, Painting with John, extracted from the series.

Go back a quarter-century or so: As an exotic saxophonist and composer whose pieces alternately recalled cracked-mirror reflections of Thelonious Monk, or Fela Kuti, or Raymond Chandler, Lurie led the vastly influential, downtown NYC jazz ensemble, The Lounge Lizards, through dazzling albums and tours across the globe. He scored indie films and Hollywood hits, collecting a Grammy nomination for Get Shorty along the way and releasing his own surreality-TV series, Fishing with John.

“Featuring appearances from: Special Guest DJ, Ben Bondy, Hysterical Love Project and some other people we can't name for legal reasons"

The holographic swarm that is Downstairs People returns with their latest collection of subconscious songwriting. Simply titled ‘DSP’, Downstairs People’s sophomore album expands on their surreal horoscope of Top 40 musings, with nine works that explore the altered states of pop.

DSP reimagines the FM radio spectrum with distorted hooks, sour candy production and cascading vocal harmonies with no lyrics. Sung to us in an unknown language, it’s an archive of warped transmissions from beyond our solar system, conveniently recorded and presented as a flat, spinning monolith.

A brief history of having no time, and an ode to the subversive power of pop music.

*REMASTERED ROUGH TRADE DEBUT LP LIMITED TO JUST 500 COPIES WITH EMBOSSED OUTER SLEEVE AND ORIGINAL INNER SLEEVE ON BLACK VINYL*

Dream POP, they called it. Given AR Kane’s Alex Ayuli once worked for advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, it’s no surprise that he and collaborator Rudy Tambala invented their own genre before critics could stick their oar in. It was a canny move, but more importantly, it was accurate: the music of AR Kane was made for dreamers, by dreamers, and its languor and longing made it particularly bewitching listening; their music is often smeared and blurry, happily lost in its own indefinable pleasures. “We wanted dream pop,” Tambala says, “that feeling of a dream where the rules are different. Dream logic.”
-UNCUT REISSUE OF THE MONTH

"A.R. Kane carved out a unique musical path, welding elements of pop, psych, dub, electronica, funk, noise, jazz, ambient and more in a way that had never been done before. Or since. Their debut in particular is a work of unbridled brilliance."
*Electronic Sound*

‘Sixty Nine’ the group’s debut LP that emerged in 1988 had critics and listeners struggling to fit language around A.R. Kane’s sound. As a title it was telling - the year of ‘Bitches Brew’, the year of ‘In A Silent Way’, the erotic möbius between two lovers - and as originally coined by the band themselves,
‘dream pop’ (before it became a free-floating signifier of vague import) was entirely apposite for the music A.R. Kane were making. Crafted in a dark small basement studio in which Tambala recalls the duo had “complete freedom - We wanted to go as far out as we could, and in doing so we discovered the point where it stops being music”. There was an irresistibly dreamy, somnambulant, sensual and almost surreal flow to ‘sixty nine’s sound, but also real darkness/dankness, the ruptures of the primordial and the reverberations of the subconscious, within the grooves of remarkable songs like ‘Dizzy’ and ‘Crazy Blue’. Alex’s plangent vocals floated and surged amidst exquisite peals of refracted feedback but crucially there was BASS here, lugubrious and funky and full of dread, sonic pleasure and sonic disturbance crushed together to make music with a center so deep it felt subcutaneous, music constructed from both the accidental and the deliberate, generous enough to dance with both serendipity and chaos. ‘sixty nine’ remains - especially in this remastered iteration - ravishing, revolutionary – Neil Kulkarni


"A.R. Kane made some of the most exciting, forward-thinking, and science fictional music of their era".
*Reissue Of The Week In The Quietus*

LIMITED REPRINT .Introductions by David Fricke and Adrian Shaughnessy. 224 pages, comes in a tactile Geltex hardcover and is beautifully designed by Hiorthøy. Includes a 7" single with exclusive tracks from Fire! Orchestra, The Last Hurrah!! and Maja S. K. Ratkje. It´s no secret that Rune Grammofon founder Rune Kristoffersen is a big admirer of labels like Blue Note, Impulse, ECM, 4AD and Factory, to mention some labels with strong visual identities. But we can´t recall another label that has worked with one designer exclusively for 25 years and some 250 releases. A singular visual language that's as distinctive as Hipgnosis' 1970s surreal juxtapositions, or the brooding portraiture gracing ECM Records' output. Prog (UK) As well as being a piece of guaranteed coffee table eye-candy for music lovers, the book promises an insight into the fascinating process of bringing a record and its cover to life. Creative Review (UK) RG feels like a dream vision of a record label - fuelled by passion, irreverent in tone yet serious in execution, somehow miraculously buffered from corporate industry expectations. The sound and visuals here cover two decades of inspiration and unpredictability, but they also bristle with creative possibilities for a long time to come.Elephant (UK)

Two brand new tracks by The Courettes on RED coloured vinyl. The A-side will also feature on the band's next album! The B-side exclusive to this release! Both tracks feature guest vocals by La La Brooks of The Crystals! 'California' is a song we wrote on our first tour in California last year. We wanted to bring all the sunshine and some psychedelic vibes from The Byrds, the Laurel Canyon, and tons of 12-string guitars to our songwriting. But somehow the lyrics kept some black clouds. It talks about traveling and leaving your loved ones behind. Any musician on the road can relate to this. Although you can have a great time around the world, you're always missing someone. Home is really where your love is. We are very proud of this track, and on top of it we have a guest vocalist. The legendary singer La La Brooks - yes, from The Crystals, the lead voice on the classic 'Da Doo Ron Ron', one of our favourite Phil Spector produced songs of all time. To have La La singing with us is an absolute delight and honour. It's so surreal that we haven't even realised it has really happened! For the mixing our producer Soren Christensen has teamed up with the fantastic Darian Sahanaja (who produced and mixed no less than Brian Wilson's SMiLE album) to enlighten even more the Californian good vibrations. So open up your windows, let the sunshine in and play this one to the max!

All Again. That's the title of the upcoming full-length record from Philadelphia's Queen of Jeans. The LP tracks an entire arc that, by the final hazy vibrato wash of "Do It All Again," bleeds back into the ambient first seconds of the record. "Thought I'd call tonight, hear how you're dealing," Miriam Devora sings to a distant lover on opener "All My Friends" in a neon-lit, melancholy tenor, the precise sound of lonesome love. The full band joins her in a beautiful night time sway, but it's still no use: "I got all my friends around, but I'm not home til I'm alone with you."The rest of the record follows this relationship as it tumbles through loneliness and longing, to elation and joy, to pain and anger, and finally to its foggy close, where Devora admits, "If I got to do it all again, I'd find you there like I did back then."Releasing on Memory Music, All Again is principally an enveloping, rich indie-rock record, changing dance partners between cheek-to-cheek '60s pop sweetness, '90s alt-rock dirt, spacious and pained emo, and the songcraft and melodicism of the sharpest acoustic singer-songwriter acts. Devora (vocals, guitar, keys) and Matheson Glass (lead guitar, piano) took extra care this time to create a Queen of Jeans full-length that reflected in sound and structure the emotional depths they were exploring.It's the first time since their 2015 debut, Dig Yourself, that they've had a full band, with drummer Patrick Wall and bassist Andrew Nitz, to build with. Where on releases like 2022's sparkling lockdown-pop Hiding In Place Devora and Glass had gone into producer and mix/master engineer Will Yip's Studio 4 with sketches and worked with Yip to arrange the songs in studio, this time, they went in with a complete vision for the record. That allowed them to use studio time to expand the record's sonic boundaries. "We had a lot more room to play with some of the ear candy we've always wanted to explore and get weirder in the studio," says Glass.Those elements lend a physicality and playfulness to the memory and emotions that unfurl through All Again. "We're trying to tell the story of when you look back at an important relationship," says Glass. "Years go by, and the more you reflect on it, it becomes more warped and the facts become a little bit more murky. We wanted to play with that and get surreal with the story." (Literally: listen for a "monster" voice in the already-released banger "Karaoke.") The record's artwork, conceptualized by Devora, renders this idea with devastating clarity.

Building on forty years years of GBV history, the majestic and triumphant Strut Of Kings is the forty-first album by indie rock royalty Guided By Voices. Largely recorded in Kings County, New York (Brooklyn), the album is perhaps a gesture towards the malevolent “kings” on the world stage. As the “Serene King” waltzes across the battlefield, Emperor Pollard evokes castles, King Kong and strutting roosters, a surreal yet regal journey.

Timelash is the evolution of Embassador Dulgoon’s cryptozoological sci-fi opus ‘Hydrorion Remnants’ converging with Corum’s surreal sonic mapping as ‘Beguiling Isles’. The combined cinematic vision jettisons listeners through a psychedelic wormhole far beyond the usual perception of known audio latitude.

Aguirre Records has gone all out to inject this tribal dino DNA double slab of wax presented as twelve expansive and mesmerizing tracks of historical mutations linking early communication developments with speculative astrobiological impressions heard as mysterious & riveting melodies that wash over dizzying percussive styles and suspenseful ambience.

A variety of unexampled sounds take shape throughout as tectonic tablature, reptilian choral movements, bubbling bioluminescence, tube calls, orogenic bells, crustacean chatter, lost continent scales, high plains drifting riffs, and primordial soup lapping splashes revealing to listeners a living mural that is ’A Morphology of Wonders'.

The conjuring of cratonic creature harmonics resonate wildly from this interdimensional duet, emerging as Neopangaea music of now

Mick Harris is one of the world's greatest compositional treasures. Starting his career as the energy dynamo behind the drum kit of the UK's Napalm Death, he made the term Blastbeat a household reference, wrote the band's music on his mother's one string guitar, and joined the Guinness Book of World Records for composing the world's shortest song. In the decades succeeding, he has re-inventedmusic several more times, from the wild abstract jazz of Painkiller with John Zorn and Bill Laswell, to the drowning ambience of his Lull project, all while continuing to build a world that he can truly call his own - the dark post-dub of SCORN. "Reaching 54 this year - this won't stop the challenge, driving me more so now than ever" - says Mick Harris, commenting on the recent phase in his creativity. The pandemic isolation and lockdown pushed the work of the maestro more than anything else could have. In 2021, his output is ever-increasing, releasing the newest collabs with Justin K. Broadrick and the single "Distortion", featuring one of the most outstanding voices of hip-hop - Kool Keith - his closest collaborator, Ohm Resistance founder - Submerged. Commenting on the release of "Distortion", Mick Harris said to mxdwn: "I enjoy collabs - they bring something different to the swim." Working on his own and collaborating with everyone from Sleaford Mods' James Williamson, on the previous SCORN release or with Kool Keith and Submerged on "Distortion", Mick Harris never had problems with putting energy into beats and sound landscapes, combining various surreal elements with three basic elements that always push Harris further, that are extremely crucial for both Mick Harris and SCORN as a project - frustration, anger and anxiety. Combining the signature soundscapes of Scorn with tartareous textures, the newest album "The Only Place" reaches a psychedelic groove, based on what Harris calls "Pushing an original idea further" with his own shades of light and dark and celestial electricity of what SCORN is. These 10 new tracks add elements unheard in Scorn since Evanescense and Gyral - ethereal ambiences and floating, near-melodic-but-not-quite moments, a signature of Harris' abilities to generate feelings in a lost world of his own creation. 2024 vinyl version on orange coloured vinyl!

"The Red Room Crystal-Ruby Splatter Vinyl". Netherworld marks a considerable step onwards from the territory that Louise Patricia Crane explored on her debut long player Deep Blue, crafting audial landscapes that go further into both inner and outer space; hallucinatory and surrealistic yet also grittier and more direct. For all that this stemmed in part from early Genesis and The Beatles, Netherworld also sits in alignment with the luxurious but oddly intimate realm of modern classics, by the likes of Tears For Fears, Tori Amos and Joni Mitchell, with passionate intensity set in a bold, cinematic vista. In realising these romantic and expansive visions, Crane not only wrote or co-wrote the entire album, but arranged, co-produced and played a wide variety of instruments on it. Yet as a supporting cast, she has surrounded herself with a formidable selection of mercurial contributors. Once again, Jakko M. Jakszyk (King Crimson) brings his fiery and mellifluous solo guitar work, as well as contributing backing vocals, keyboards and co-production. Elsewhere, the flute soliloquies of Tiny Bard are the work of Jethro Tull's Ian Andersonwhile saxophone duties are handled by Mel Collins, whose work with King Crimson marks only one chapter in an incredibly storied life in music. Providing violin and viola across the stylistic expanse of the album, Shir-Ran Yinon (New Model Army / Eluveitie) returns as a collaborator. The rhythm section for the lion's share of the record consists of the dream team of Tony Levin (King Crimson / Peter Gabriel) and Gary Husband (John McLaughlin / Billy Cobham / Allan Holdsworth) with Nick Beggs stepping in on bass for Dance With The Devil and upright bass on Long Kiss Goodnight. Crucially however, even amidst this kind of company, Louise's voice and vision is never remotely overshadowed-with the talents on offer only serving to make the backdrop to her songs still more vivid, sharp and intense. In as much as Netherworld is a work that exists on a lineage of progressive music and the visionary artists who've expanded their boundaries of exploration to form sound-worlds as big as their imagination, it's also a work of magical realism in the tradition of Pan's Labyrinth, The Company Of Wolves or the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Haruki Murakami-in which the supernatural and otherworldly, lead to a shortcut to the essence of being human. In this World, Louise Patricia Crane is our Storyteller.

Netherworld Double Gatefold Vinyl in 'Celestial Dust' transparent gold CD / DVD - 5.1 Surround mixed by Jakko M. Jakszyk: 'Storybook' Edition 'Ladies' Double A-Side 7" Single - Ladies Of The Road / Dirty (Black Vinyl) Netherworld A6 illustrated 'Little Stories' book All housed in a Black Textured Box with Gold Hot Foil Embossing Netherworld marks a considerable step onwards from the territory that Louise Patricia Crane explored on her debut long player Deep Blue, crafting audial landscapes that go further into both inner and outer space; hallucinatory and surrealistic yet also grittier and more direct. For all that this stemmed in part from early Genesis and The Beatles, Netherworld also sits in alignment with the luxurious but oddly intimate realm of modern classics, by the likes of Tears For Fears, Tori Amos and Joni Mitchell, with passionate intensity set in a bold, cinematic vista. In realising these romantic and expansive visions, Crane not only wrote or co-wrote the entire album, but arranged, co-produced and played a wide variety of instruments on it. Yet as a supporting cast, she has surrounded herself with a formidable selection of mercurial contributors. Once again, Jakko M. Jakszyk (King Crimson) brings his fiery and mellifluous solo guitar work, as well as contributing backing vocals, keyboards and co-production. Elsewhere, the flute soliloquies of Tiny Bard are the work of Jethro Tull's Ian Andersonwhile saxophone duties are handled by Mel Collins, whose work with King Crimson marks only one chapter in an incredibly storied life in music. Providing violin and viola across the stylistic expanse of the album, Shir-Ran Yinon (New Model Army / Eluveitie) returns as a collaborator. The rhythm section for the lion's share of the record consists of the dream team of Tony Levin (King Crimson / Peter Gabriel) and Gary Husband (John McLaughlin / Billy Cobham / Allan Holdsworth) with Nick Beggs stepping in on bass for Dance With The Devil and upright bass on Long Kiss Goodnight. Crucially however, even amidst this kind of company, Louise's voice and vision is never remotely overshadowed_with the talents on offer only serving to make the backdrop to her songs still more vivid, sharp and intense.

2024 Reissue

Restaurierte 'Original Gold Sleeve Edition' auf klassischem schwarzem Vinyl. Ein intensives neo-psychedelisches Juwel, das eine Reise durch die Gelassenheit unternimmt, bevor es in seinem eigenen, zuckenden Comedown zusammenbricht. Eine glorreiche Verschmelzung von dissonanter Psyche, Lou-Reed-Getöse und Gospel-Surrealismus. Eine kaleidoskopische Blaupause für alles, was danach kam, mit einem liebevoll restaurierten Artwork. Das zweite Album von Spacemen 3 ist eine bemerkenswerte Abkehr vom Debüt Sound Of Confusion von 1986. Reduziert auf ein Trio (die Gitarristen/Keyboarder Pete ,Sonic Boom" Kember, Jason ,Spaceman" Pierce und der Bassist Pete Bassman), nutzen Spacemen 3 den neu entdeckten Mangel an Perkussion und verleihen The Perfect Prescription einen deutlich weniger rockorientierten Sound mit viel mehr Freiraum in ihren abwechslungsreichen, subtilen Arrangements. "Like taking an acid bath in the dungeon of the mind." Pitchfork //

Antibody presents this new opus by Berlin based Japanese artist Tot Onyx (Tommi Tokyo, formerly of group A).» Satire Of Desire« is her second solo album to date. Here, performance and sound art meet post-industrial deconstructivism. It’s radical, ferocious, wonderfully free and powerful.

Written under the covid-19 pandemic, "Satire Of Desire" is her radical criticism on the man-made catastrophe and sonic response to the cacotopic world that seemed less realistic than the surreal dreams of flying turtles. »My dreams started to become more realistic than the empty streets of Berlin. That's when I began wondering the difference between dream and reality, conscious and subconscious, how we distinguish them and what that even means. That was the beginning of creating this album. The beginning of the future i was unwillingly stepping into.«

Colored edition : Black & Silver vinyl. Standard edition is sold out.

Official reissue. New remastering vinyl of the 1979 LP by Colin Potter + "silver edition" Gatefold cover + complete NWW list on Gatefold inner


Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella is the debut album by British experimental unusual and absurd music group Nurse With Wound, released on their own United Dairies label in 1979. An unusual record which blends noise and jamming.

The album's equally unusual title is a quote from the surreal, poetic novel Les Chants de Maldoror by Uruguayan-born French author Isidore-Lucien Ducasse, written under the pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont.It has been included in the "100 Records That Set the World on Fire (While No One Was Listening)" by TheWire in 1998, and is one of the records that have had a lasting impact on avant-garde, experimental and psychedelic music.It was on this record that the famous "NWW list" appeared for the first time, featuring dozens of names of musicians and groups who had influenced Nurse With Wound - a list that now serves as a treasure map for many collectors of the genre and fans of outsider music. It's been replicated here in the innersleeve of the gatefold.

A kaleidoscopic sonic riot, Nandakke? is the hotly anticipated debut album from Japanese-Belgian duo Aili. Featuring 10 tracks of surreal electro-pop, joyful electronica, house music and more, Nandakke? is a euphoric album that sees Aili Maruyama and Orson Wouters more than fulfil the promise of their acclaimed debut EP.

Recorded over the course of six months in Orson's studio, packed full of vintage synths, Nandakke? captures the spontaneous spirit and creativity of those sessions. Exchanging riffs and rhythms, bouncing sounds and samples off each other, Aili and Orson would let the music take them where it wanted. The result,an album full of wild ideas and bold, playful experimentation.

More than anything an exhilarating feeling of discovery courses through Nandakke?, leaving you never sure where it will go next. One minute a pulsing electro-pop number featuring Aili's dad discussing his takoyaki (battered octopus) recipe, the next an explosive high energy workout song like Up & Down.

Certainly Aili was surprised to find herself singing in her own unique version of Japanese again.

"I thought that I was done with that after our debut EP, but apparently not as I speak even more Japanese on the album!" said Maruyama. "Every time we were in the studio these words would just tumble out. It's a complicated language but I just love to play with it.

"In many ways I'm an outsider, I left Tokyo aged 7, so there's a lot I notice as someone who is not a native speaker and it doesn't always make sense, there's a lot of mistakes in it.But in a way that sums up the whole philosophy of the album and how Orson and I work together."

That notion of duality, a sense of belonging but feeling apart, of being between two worlds and inventing your own captures the spirit of Nandakke?, itself a Japanese word that roughly translates to "Well, what was it?".

"It's something you say when you're looking for a word, like you know it but have forgotten how to say it. That's literally how I communicate with my dad the whole time," Maruyama explains. "The main feeling I have when I go to Japan is that I know the language, I can speak it, but part of me still feels like it doesn't have all the vocabulary. There's a gap there that nandakke has always filled for me. All the lyrics come from that place, that seven-year old trying to speak Japanese."

Whether Aili's singing about the language she invented with her father over the years to bridge the gap between them (Nandakke?), the idiosyncratic Japanese relationship to fashion (Fashion) or riffing on children's playground songs (Yubikiri) the result is a remarkable album that defies easy categorisation.

Bursting onto the Belgian scene in 2021 with their acclaimed debut EP, Dansu, its lead track spent 8 consecutive weeks at the #1 spot of Radio 1's VOX list and saw the band nominated for Studio Brussel's De Nieuwe Lichting ('New Generation') award. Since then Aili have appeared playing live on the Belgian TV show Roomies, been tipped by the likes of Rolling Stone, become regulars on tastemaker stations like KEXP and KCRW in the US and Nova in France, toured across Europe and, just recently, played their first sell out shows in Japan.

What Is Not Strange? is the first full-length album by Los Angeles-based composer Tashi Wada in over five years, comprising his most far-reaching and impassioned music to date. Written and recorded over a period that encompassed the death of his father and the birth of his daughter, the album sees Wada reflecting inward to explore broad narratives - being alive, mortality, finding one's place in the world - through new modes of ecstatic, song-based expression. While the denser forms, stark contrasts, and overt surreality may carry a different weight than Wada's earlier work, which elicited perceptual effects with minimal means, the heart of What Is Not Strange? is still in experimentation and unforeseen outcomes.

Nach ihrem angstgetriebenen, selbstbetitelten Debüt von 2018 und der geradezu eskapistischen Welt des zweiten Albums "On All Fours" (2021) tritt das Trio aus dem Süden Londons, bestehend aus Rosy Jones, Lottie Pendlebury und Holly Mullineaux, im Jahr 2024 in eine neue Ära ein. Gemeinsam mit Co-Produzent John "Spud" Murphy (black midi "Cavalcade", Lankum "False Lankum") ist Goat Girls Ansatz auf "Below the Waste" selbstbewusst und reif, während sie ihren Sinn für spielerische Neugier bewahren. Spuds Wissen, sein Enthusiasmus und seine Geduld haben Goat Girls ambitionierte Ziele im Studio zum Leben erweckt und einen unverwechselbaren Sound erzeugt. Die einzigartige Kombination von Stilen und unorthodoxen Aufnahmemethoden, die mühelos zwischen ausladendem Noise-Rock, delikaten Folk-Experimenten und befriedigendem Synth-Pop hin- und herpendelt, sind der Beweis. Wie eine Collage wurde die Instrumentierung größtenteils während eines 10-tägigen Aufenthalts in Irland in den Hellfire Studios aufgenommen, die im Schatten des berüchtigten Hellfire Clubs liegen. Zusätzliche Streicher (Reuben Kyriakides und Nic Pendlebury), Holzblasinstrumente (Alex McKenzie) und Gesang (einschließlich eines Chors aus Familie und Freunden) wurden den Tracks an verschiedenen Orten hinzugefügt, von einer Scheune in Essex bis zu Goat Girls eigenem Studio in Südlondon. Dieser Luxus an Zeit gab der Band die Freiheit zu produzieren, zu schreiben und zu arrangieren, so dass die Songs ihr volles Potenzial entfalten konnten. Thematisch wird die Absurdität unserer zunehmend dystopischeren Umwelt durch den entwaffnenden Realismus von Lotties Texten entlarvt, die oft das Surreale und das schmerzlich Erfahrbare nebeneinanderstellen. Wenn man einen tieferen Blick in die Lyrics wirft, kommen die Dinge zum Vorschein, die man im Leben schätzen sollte - die Schönheit und Freude, nach der diese Platte strebt. Es besteht kein Zweifel daran, dass "Below the Waste" das bisher größte Album von Goat Girl ist und gleichzeitig ihr kraftvollstes und authentischstes Statement geworden ist.