Method of Places is the beguiling debut album from Lewis Coleman, and an encapsulation of the depth and artistry of the Melbourne musician.


The fruits of Lewis’s labour are on brilliant display on Method of Places. It’s an album which effortlessly straddles the worlds of indie rock, electronica, jazz and soul, bristling with big ideas and artfully arranged songs that are both abstract and melodic, shifting and morphing around you, pulsing with a hushed intensity, but always grounded by a rhythm section so spartanly groovy that your head can’t help but nod along in assent. 

Written, played and self-produced across five years, in five bedrooms, the record has a big kind of history in it, both sonically and lyrically. Ask Coleman and he’ll unassumingly tell you that for him each song is a micro-world containing multiple moments in time, each one swimming with memories and pieces of himself that span the last half-decade. “Some of these songs have like a 21-year-old version of me playing bass, and like a 22-year-old version of me playing the guitar line and a 24-year-old version of me singing vocals and a 26-year-old version of me adding some other elements to it,” he says. “And I hear it and I can kind of remember where I was at those times in those songs.”


In ‘Good Side’ he is a 15-year-old kid in Year 9, trying on corduroy pants at Savers (Melbourne’s much-loved Mecca for secondhand clothes), developing a personality, finding friends, having crushes. In ‘Going Your Way’ he’s six wines in, a piano stool creaking beneath him as he idly plays the keys. In ‘Is This Me Now’ he’s accidentally out of his mind on hallucinogens, as synths warp and crash around his distant voice, convinced he’s broken his brain forever.  When taken as a whole, Method of Places becomes a history of his young adulthood up till now. A Memory Palace, where all the songs are different rooms, co-existing under the album’s roof.


While recording the album in his bedroom wasn’t so much a “cool” choice (“It was more about convenience to me,” he says), it did help him capture that real, lived-in warmth. Listening closely, you can hear a lot of ambient sounds left in the mix. “I love being able to hear a room or physical space someone’s in at a time, not just a complete artificial reverb world. A phone turning off or getting moved, a piano stool creaking, when you can actually hear those kinds of things, it makes it more of a visceral experience.” 

It’s these kinds of details that give the impression of Coleman physically moving around inside the album, his Memory Palace. But while the album is often introspective, Coleman doesn’t want it to feel exclusive, but rather inviting to the listener. “I really hope it isn’t something that’s just in my brain that no one can connect to,” he says. “I would love it to be a world that other people can exist in as well.”


Release: November 20th, 2020, Ivy League Records
Words: Ivy League/Mushroom

Daniel Lopatin's name has become synonymous with era-defining art. At the end of 2019 Lopatin soundtracked one of the most unanimously critically acclaimed film scores of recent history, an anxiety-driven joyride paired to the Safdie Brothers’ noir thriller Uncut Gems - cult studio A24’s biggest commercial film to date.

Magic Oneohtrix Point Never is a truly career-defining release for Oneohtrix Point Never. The eponymous title is taken from Lopatin’s original Oneohtrix Point Never moniker - a misheard play on the Boston soft-rock radio station Magic 106.7

Sonically, Magic Oneohtrix Point Never takes is an amagamation of OPN’s output of the last 10-12 years. From the deconstructed New Age plunderphonics of Replica and R Plus Seven, to the alt-rock and chamber pop songwriting of Garden Of Delete and Age Of and the symphonic, cinematic nature of the scores for Uncut Gems, Good Time and his production work for other artists.  Magic Oneohtrix Point Never synthesizes all elements of his previous material to craft a cohesive humanistic masterwork, rendering the self-titling of the album as much a reference to his roots as to his entrenchment in the present moment.

An eponymous album is a symbolic highlight in an artist’s career. Though often reserved for the beginning of a catalogue, the tradition has also been evoked to designate a celebratory body of work that looks back and epitomizes a defining cultural moment. Oneohtrix Point Never categorically challenges most standard notions of linear thinking in music, constantly shifting within traditional paradigms, unwinding and re-weaving digital sensory triggers into contemporary sonatas. 

Release: October 30th, 2020, Warp Records/Inertia Music
Words: Inertia

On December 26th, 2018, Emily Cross received an excited email from a friend: Brian Eno was talking about her band on BBC radio. “At first I didn’t think it was real,” she admits. But then she heard a recording: Eno was praising “Black Willow” from Loma’s self-titled debut; he said he’d had it on repeat.


At the time, a second Loma album seemed unlikely. The band began as a serendipitous collaboration between Cross, the multi-talented musician and recording engineer Dan Duszynski, and Shearwater frontman Jonathan Meiburg, who wanted to play a supporting role after years at the microphone. They’d capped a gruelling tour with a standout performance on a packed beach at Sub Pop’s SPF 30 festival, in which Cross leapt into the crowd, and then into the sea, while the band carried on from the stage—an emotional peak that also felt like a natural ending. “It was the biggest audience we’d ever had,” she says. “We thought, why not stop here?”   


Following the tour, Cross went to rural Mexico to work on visual art and a solo record, while Meiburg began a new Shearwater effort. But after a few months apart (and Eno’s encouraging words), the trio changed their minds and reconvened at Duszynski’s home in rural Texas, where they began to develop songs that would become Don’t Shy Away. Loma writes by consensus, and though Cross is always the singer, she, Duszynski and Meiburg often trade instruments.  Meiburg compares their process to using a ouija board, and says the songs revealed themselves slowly, over many months. “Each of us is a very strong flavour,” he says, “but in Loma, nobody wears the crown, so we have to trust each other—and we end up in places none of us would have gone on our own. I think we all wanted to experience that again.” The album that emerged is gently spectacular—a vivid work whose light touch belies its timely themes of solitude, impermanence, and finding light in deep darkness.

Release: October 23rd, 2020, Sub Pop
Words: Sub Pop