Listen: Movie Stars by Wallners

I saw the Strokes perform at the O2 in London recently. During their set they performed the track The Adults Are Talking, which throbs with a kind of stringy krautrock-influenced thrill. Sharp percussion and fuzzy bass propel the song as a pair of guitars create a kind of aloof yearning unique to the Strokes. Julian Casablancas retains his cool even as his vocal nears a kind glasslike fragility more familiar to Thom Yorke.

I’ve listened to that song about 40 times since that concert, and every time it ends I still want to hear it again. Hitting play on the new single from Wallners, Movie Stars, I found myself pouring into my brain what feels like the same song but craft out of some sort of galactic space rock from an alternative galaxy. Familiarly angular drums combine with evocative guitar melodies, and yet where the Strokes channel their distinctive New York aesthetic, Wallners have something that is more shoegaze in nature, yet just as thrilling.

Crystalline guitars hover as vocals shift and mutate, instrument-like in their aesthetic. The taut percussion, functional and grounded, only highlights the sense of altitude that opens up elsewhere here. Reverb kicks in like a rush of blood to the head, guitars screeching and howling, and yet never anything but angelic and beautiful. Movie Stars sounds like seeing everyone you love slipping away for the last time as you look back at the earth shrink to a dot. It is both beautiful and terrifying.

Accompanied by a music video directed by award-winning filmmaker Rupert Höller. Shot entirely on 16mm film, it accentuates the feeling of the song through the use of handmade sets, without the use of any AI.

Wallner are comprised of four siblings from Vienna, and Movie Stars follows on from the group’s debut album, End of Circles, and a 29-date headline tour. Marking the start of their work on a second album, Movie Stars was influenced by a set of old microphones from the 1960s discovered in their basement. The group describe the resulting sound as being somewhere between Mazzy Star and Daft Punk, which is a fantastic description if ever I heard one. Beyond the Strokes, I have spent much of my summer listening to Olivia Rodrigo’s You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl so in Love, and there feels like a commonality in inspiration here, even where the end products differ. But maybe I’m just floating in a Petri dish of similar emotions…

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Listen: Start Over by Hunjiya

The latest release from Korean musician Hunjiya, Start Over emerges like a hazy filtered memory. Guitars, spoken snippets, and wisp-like vocal harmonies float against a textural percussion line.

The sense of nostalgia and reflection at play here feels apt, given Start Over’s position as part of Hunjiya’s forthcoming six song project, Memory Box. Loose guitars create a playfulness in the song, even as you sense frustration build. Start Over is concerned with the repeated act of beginning again — a new place, new connections, moving for different reasons searching for something that feels like a fit, like home.

Start Over moves through two cycles of itself starting over. The song’s structure vibe-shifts between a playful sense of contentment before sounding frustrated and lost, and back again. After moving through these movements a couple of times, however, there is a starry eyed and spellbound moment where everything feels like it hangs in space, free of gravity for a moment, before kicking into a cacophonous heavy grunge bridge. The impact of all that weightlessness from moving around is a sudden crash of gravity.

Hunjiya is the musical project of Seoul-born, New York-raised Alice Kim. With Memory Box, she looks to root through old snapshots and recollections to pull out moments from her past that have stayed with her. In Korean, attaching ‘ya’ to the end of someone’s name generally conveys a sense of closeness — whether via friendship or for old friends, familiar faces, or siblings. That sense of familiarity and closeness is something Kim looks to channel through her music and lyricism. Describing the inspiration for both Start Over and Memory Box, Hunjiya says:

“Over the past four years, I've lived through moments that shook my sense of self such as moving between homes, rebuilding communities from scratch, losing myself in one person, feeling trapped in a controlling environment. Each of these was its own specific time and place, and each one felt like ‘home’ to me, if only for a while.”

Check out Start Over below, and look for Memory Box from late November.

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Listen: It’s Only Fiction by Yann Cleary and Neus

Following five years in Japan, culminating in his 2016 mini-album Tokyo, Cleary now resides in France, and the impact of his surroundings is evidence in the sound here on It’s Only Fiction. Having worked as a protégé to the legendary Laurent Garnier, French-Irish artist Yann Cleary is focused on creating a crisp take on electronic pop, channeling the straight lines and understated production of Phoenix and french indie.

Clear vocals, gentle organs and snappy drums come together in the opening bars of It’s Only Fiction to create a vulnerable sense of introspection. History has seen a long-term movement away from the subjectivity of isolated communities, of magic, gods, witches, and curses as explanations for what we didn’t yet understand, towards science and objective truth. The past ten years, more than perhaps any time in history, however, have seen our sense of what is real being eroded. Whether in politics, the news, or through interactions with AI, the notion of what is fact has actively become less certain than it was.

Working together with producer Neus, Yann Cleary’s new single reflects this sense of unreality. Depicting relationships in a digital age, It’s Only Fiction feels like a response to the growing trend for a kind of faux-intimacy struck up with a large-language model. At the same time, the song is as relevant to our relationships with real people through social media, or the para-social sense of connection to celebrities and influencers. Cleary slides closer to the subject of his affection whilst reminding himself, “It’s only fiction”, the side note that “there are no consequences” perhaps the song’s most telling line. Connection without potential to be impacted by another person is ultimately not real connection.

Check out It’s Only Fiction below.

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Listen: Point of No Return by Sarah Smith

With crystalline vocals, saw wave synths and crisp percussion, the latest release from Sarah Smith is a stark slice of electronic pop carved from the same materials as the music of Chvrches and Robyn.

Based in New York, and still in the formative beginnings of her music career, Sarah began her relationship with performance far in advance of writing her own songs, dancing at the age of four. She went on to perform professionally on projects for the Brooklyn Nets and Nickelodeon. Her real focus on music followed her time at college, as she started writing. A partnership with producer Carlos Ruiz has led to Smith finding her voice, channeling a combination of 80s new wave, together with early social era pop.

Point of No Return is Smith’s second single, following on from her debut single, No Hard Feelings. Working with Carlos Ruiz, she looked to imbue an anxious restlessness into the song — something that you can feel in the propulsive percussion that underpins it. The result takes Smith into a darker synth pop direction than her previous release.

That sense of restlessness stems from Point of No Return’s thematic embrace of avoidant behaviours — both wanting love and security, yet simultaneously rejecting it. Throughout the song, Smith’s vocals purposefully switch between describing the main character as ‘she’ and ‘I’, a further reflection of disassociation, and the song’s own narrative dissonance. Describing the song, Sarah says:

“It’s a song for the anxious-avoidant girlies. I’m drawn to big, nostalgic pop that can make sadness and anxiety feel cinematic and beautiful. I grew up on the Tumblr and recession-pop eras, and I love that melodramatic world-building, where escapism and anxiety can coexist.”

Overall, Smith has created a dramatic narrative underpinned by a crisp, distinctive synth pop aesthetic. Check out Point of No Return below.

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Listen: Get Better by Amm

We are on the cusp of October as I write this. The nights are beginning to feel longer, and you can sense a collective desire for cosy, even whilst the temperature outside remains a steadfast 20 degrees.

Into this context slides the syrupy Get Better but Amm. The San Diego dream pop musician was inspired to create the song after hearing her husband, Lee, playing the guitar. Something about his playing that day made Amm emotional, and she set about recording his performance, before wrapping her lyrics around his performance. Rather than working with a third person, on production duties, Amm took the reins herself, so as to preserve the intimate nature of the song.

The result is a song that gently bubbles with emotion. That guitar sound acts as a human counterpart to Amm’s vocals, whilst thick synthesisers carve out a reflective melody amidst a textured soundscape. Towards the song’s end the guitar fades away, as Amm delivers a heart-wrenching vocal dealing with a sense of not being enough. Her vocal is accompanied by a simple piano refrain that manages to highlight the simple vulnerability at play on Get Better.

Describing the nature of the song, Amm says:

“This song — born from a moment of pain and honesty — is a self-reflective piece on shame/depression and the way it has informed my life on my worst days. It is deeply personal, and when I wrote it, I wasn't completely sure I would ever release it. I decided to release it in the end because I truly do feel like the overall topic of this song is universal to many other people. In the same breath, I have also decided that I don't really care if people like it as much as I do. This song has brought me so much healing through the honesty and vulnerability of its contents, and it will always mean something to me even in no one else resonates. So with that in mind, releasing it felt like a really healthy thing to do …”

Check out Get Better below.

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