“'Devotion' is about how a lonely coastal childhood filters into a contemporary adult life built hundreds of miles away. I wrote this album for my mum, middle sister and myself as we were at that time - eccentric, romantically-unfulfilled teens and a stressed out single mum trying to have a love life.” - Laura Jean
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Melbourne artist Laura Jean's new LP Devotion sees the acclaimed folk auteur dipping into synth-pop terrain.  Critically acclaimed for her piercing and intimate albums, Laura has worked with producer John Lee on Devotion (Beaches, Lost Animal) to create an enveloping album, singular in its vision and scope. Laura's previous release, her self-titled 2014 LP, was recorded in the UK with John Parish (Perfume Genius, Aldous Harding, Sonic Youth, PJ Harvey) and featured Norwegian avant-gardist Jenny Hval throughout on backing vocals. On her latest release, Laura found herself tinkering with a 90s Kawai keyboard, enjoying its built-in drum rhythms and a crystalline synth sound. She began a series of shows performing with nothing but the keyboard, as the idea for her next album began to take shape.

Written to chronicle the vivid memory of teenage obsession filtered through Laura’s razor sharp lyrical focus, initial influences for the record took in contemporary R’n’B, 80s pop and 70s disco, but the end result is transformed into something wholly other, creating a delicate and dreamlike world.

Played entirely by Laura, John Lee and Augie March drummer Dave Williams, Devotion is both contemporary and timeless in its impressionistic portrait of the purity and endless wonder associated with adolescence.

“I see myself as the narrator, an ordinary woman wearing a shiny pink dreamcoat that signifies it’s my turn to tell a story. It doesn’t matter that my story is ordinary, what matters is that I tell my story with hard earned skill and loving sincerity. I want to show that the everyday story of a girl is important, and that seemingly inconsequential events in a girl’s life can have a huge effect on her.” says Laura Jean.

Release: June 8th, 2018, Chapter Music via Inertia
​Words: Chapter/Inertia

America’s most beloved form of escapism is through analysis. We stand convinced that the best way to wrangle onsetting dystopia is via think-pieces and historical context. This is the age of late-stage capitalism, this is the age of mass extinction, the age of inexperience, the age of whatever.
 
Oneohtrix Point Never’s Age Of, birthed from an obsession with connection-drawing, is terrifying and comforting in turns. OPN juggles eminently digestible pop riffs with demented minimalism and gut-grasping harmony, plunging into deep seas of color and tearing out threads of melody. The material may feel alien, but the scale of the thing is most decidedly and affectingly human.
 
Oneohtrix Point Never (OPN) is Daniel Lopatin, award winning musician, composer and producer whose work is meticulously conceived and obsessed with it’s own innards and corners. These are hallmarks that have made OPN a very tempting collaborator; in the time since his last studio album, his work has ranged from film scores, to art commissions and straight-up pop production.
 
“After Garden of Delete, I found myself working on collabs with other artists a lot. That became my life. So I was thinking a lot about music labor in the antiquated sense; the state or church-appointed artist. It was refreshing and funny to let that energy into my solo work, which suddenly seemed so constrained and private to me. Nothing felt more wrong than making a strictly conceptual album. It needed to be a record of little air-conditioned nightmares that reflected my life as it was.”
 
Age Of nestles in the psyche somewhere amid literal space opera, b-film, internet addiction and François Rabelais. One could list off another thirty references in that format that would make perfect sense. The whole album in fact has a kind operatic structure; it’s a set of interconnected songs that loosely address humanity’s abuse of Earth and its fetishistic obsession with understanding itself. 

Age Of should be terrifying, but it is unrelentingly gorgeous. OPN’s obsession with modernities throughout history, and our need to self-soothe through its premature lens comes, ultimately, from a place of deep affection. He views our moment from a distance and spins it into something hard and beautiful, Our air-conditioned nightmare looks pretty tantalizing from this angle.
 
Essay (excerpt) by Nadia Sirota
Release: June 1, 2018 - Warp Records

Over the course of just a few years Barnett has become internationally renowned for her distinctive and acclaimed musical lexicon. Her debut album, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit saw her top year-end lists and sell out shows to adoring audiences on five continents. She played the most iconic and revered festival stages, won the Australian Music Prize, APRA's Songwriter of the Year and four ARIA Awards. The album was even nominated for a Grammy and a BRIT Award. In the meantime she’s worked on music with the likes of Jack White, The Breeders and Jen Cloher as well as releasing last year’s masterful collaboration album with US songwriter Kurt Vile, Lotta Sea Lice. Even her label Milk! Records is revered worldwide.

So… how do you follow all that up?

In Tell Me How You Really Feel, Barnett has revealed an exhilarating shift and a bold step forward. From its title to the unsettling cover image – a blood-red tinted self-portrait in uncomfortably tight close up –Barnett reveals a new-found confidence and perspective. Whereas once she examined the world through the prism of self-analysis, Tell Me How You Really Feel shifts that focus to those she interacts with – the good ones, the bad ones, the loved ones. Those she knows intimately and those who are strangers.

There’s a muscularity to the instrumentation, a tenderness in her voice and a boldness to the lyrics. It speaks to Barnett entering a remarkable new phase of her musical evolution. 

Release: Milk! Records, May 18th 2018
Words: Milk! Records/Remote Control

To listen to Sarah's Mary Chadwick's music is to be a quiet observer to her thoughts on love, death and mental health. Sometimes this anguish bears itself in sullen, quiet moments, but more often torment manifests at the break of Sarah's voice as she sing-shouts painfully vulnerable, self-aware lyrics. This is all front and centre on Chadwick's fourth solo album Sugar Still Melts In The Rain.

Chadwick is not a new face to Melbourne's music community. After moving to Australia from her native New Zealand to pursue a career in music, Sarah spent a decade fronting the grunge band Batrider. Eventually becoming tired of the collaborative requirements intrinsic to band life, Sarah shifted her focus to songwriting independently, drawing inspiration from "weird old New Zealand musicians" like Peter Jefferies, Chris Knox, and Australia's Pip Proud and the way they tinker away and work for decades for "little to no commercial success." This inspiration is obvious in Sarah's performance as she simultaneously savours and mocks the pedestal that her creativity affords her, acknowledging that "it's a position of power being on a microphone" and how "it's a desperate demand to be seen. It's funny and really sad."

Sugar Still Melts In The Rain marks her first release since 2016's LP 'Roses Always Die' and her first for her new label Sinderlyn (home to Homeshake, Jaye Bartell and Tim Cohen). It was recorded and mixed by friend, musician and filmmaker Geoffrey O'Connor in Vanity Lair and Phaedra Studios in Melbourne. The album came together quickly partly as a result of the duo's commitment to efficiency and partly due to Sarah's lack of attachment to the idea of "the perfect vocal take." 

She knows she isn't a virtuoso; tongue firmly in check, she is quick to reference those limitations mockingly. Yet, it's within those boundaries that she thrives, disinterested in the perfect take in lieu of her best take - unique, somber and raw.

Release: Sinderlyn/Rice Is Nice, 11 May, 2018
Words: Rice Is Nice

In the Fall of 2016, Speedy Ortiz went to Brooklyn's Silent Barn to record what they thought would be their third LP, but following election day they knew they had to change course. “The songs on the album that were strictly personal or lovey dovey just didn’t mean anything to me anymore - that’s not the kind of music I’ve found healing or motivating in the past few years, and I was surprised I’d written so much of it,” explains front person Sadie Dupuis. “Social politics and protest have been a part of our music from day one, and I didn’t want to stop doing that on this album.” So the band scrapped the album they made, Dupuis wrote more songs over the course of four months, and Speedy Ortiz created the urgent, taught, and pointedly witty Twerp Verse.
 
On Twerp Verse, Speedy Ortiz accelerate the band's idiosyncrasy through the wilderness of Dupuis' heady reflections on sex, lies and audiotape while adding surprising textures like Linn drums and whirled guitar processing to their off-kilter hooks. Dupuis, whose electropop solo project Sad13 debuted in 2016 shortly after her own move to Philadelphia, has become more instinctive in her songwriting - her home-recorded demos mirror Twerp Verse's songs in a closer way than any other Speedy record. The band's camaraderie and crate-digging is evident, with diffuse reference points like Squeeze, Hop Along, Prince, Paramore, and Brenda Lee being sucked into the band's chaos. Even when Dupuis sings of alienation and political weariness, the pop maelstrom swirling around her provides a defiantly charged, mussed-but-hooky optimism.
 
"You need to employ a self-preservational sense of humor to speak truth in an increasingly baffling world," says Dupuis on the album title Twerp Verse. "I call it a ‘twerp verse' when a musician guests on a track and says something totally outlandish – like a Lil Wayne verse – but it becomes the most crucial part. I like ‘twerp’ as a diss, but in this meaning, the twerp is doing a service--shaking things up by being bold, not complacent, never silent.” Tuned smartly to the political opacity of the present, Twerp Verse rings clear as a bell.
 
Release: April 27th, 2018, Carpark Records
Words: Carpark/Stop Start