photo credit: Athena Merry

Liily are four Los Angeles musicians—Dylan Nash, Sam De La Torre, Charlie Anastasis & Maxx Morando—who, up until now, were mostly known for their manic and cacophonous live shows. Those performances, alongside a couple of early singles packaged together into an EP entitled I Can Fool Anybody In This Town, drove the band to some surprising early successes. Now, Lilly have returned from the sonic depths with a new track, “Anvil,” taken from their eagerly-awaited debut long-player TV or Not TV and an accompanying music video. And it must be said that the shoegazey vibe they’re sending out with this latest work is both hard-hitting and compelling. 

The track begins with sedate drums and slightly overdriven but gently-strummed electrics guitars, woozy with vibrato, with bass and vocals gradually entering (“I’ve made my death bed a lifetime too short / I like my hands on the steering wheel, already on course”). When the band unleashes the full shoegaze onslaught of massively distorted guitars, searing drums and ride cymbals, and mountainous bass, it’s a real punch to the face, even if you’re only listening through earbuds. The minimal chord changes during the chorus are tasteful and an impressive example of the “less is more” school of songwriting. 

The video for “Anvil” (directed by De La Torre), meanwhile, chooses to contrast the sonic heft of the track with an odd choice of imagery: various snails are filmed interacting with each other in a doll house that seamlessly melds into a sort of wooded wonderland, complete with color-changing lights, offering an incongruous picture of the shelled gastropods interacting with common domestic amenities, like chairs, sofas, and desks. it’s a surreal, vivid collection of scenes that gain no small amount of added emotional weight form the muscle of the music. 

Lilly has just begun a month-long tour that will end with them playing The Troubadour on Friday October 29th. Gabe Hernandez

photo credit: Daniel Yoon

Sunshine Boysclub, the new solo project by Sam Martin (lead singer and songwriter of local indie-pop veterans Youngblood Hawke), has released “Right Out The Window,” the latest single from his self-produced solo debut Hut on The Hill, out independently on all major streaming services.  

The “hut” referred to in the title of the album is an abandoned shack on the side of a hill behind Martin’s suburban L.A. house, which he cleaned out and renovated, making it into a small studio which witnessed the creation of the Sunshine Boysclub debut. Consider it a more temperate West Coast version of Bon Iver’s legendary cabin in the Wisconsin woods. The music’s also much more energetic and uplifting, if the lyrics are less so, according to Martin: “…The one theme that runs through this album is failure, as dark as that may seem. These songs are me working through the past, trying to close that door and move into a new space with new thoughts. I spent years struggling with depression, I stopped making music and was ready to quit. Writing these songs helped me work through those years of struggle and taught me valuable lessons about creativity and happiness, and how connected those two things are for me.”

It sounds like Martin connected creativity and happiness almost perfectly. Take the new single “Right Out The Window,” for instance. It’s a thick, syrupy cut that recalls 70s Eurodisco through a 21st Century set of ears. The bass is nimble and insistent, the compressed “four-on-the-floor” drums are locked-in and ooze with vintage squash. and Martin’s vocals recall the falsetto acrobatics of the Bee Gees with a hint of distortion tucked into the mix for some added edge. The little whistling synth touches scattered throughout the track also add a wee bit of late-70s ABBA flavor to the proceedings.

Meanwhile, the music video (directed by Kate Hollowell) is a nifty one-shot production that finds Martin lip-syncing the song while coasting down the sunny hills of Mount Washington on a mountain bike, outfitted in retro blue baseball cap and jersey, living out some sort of second childhood. According to the artist, "I wanted to capture the ease and energy of the song and felt like one long, continuous ride would help display that. The giant hill I rode down in this video is the hill I looked up at everyday while writing this album."

Hut On The Hill is out now. Gabe Hernandez

photo credit: Lissyelle Laricchia 

L.A.-based electro indie pop duo Magdalena Bay (Mika Tenenbaum & Matthew Lewin) have released a frenetic music video for “You Lose,” the latest single from their debut album, Mercurial World.  

The band describes the track as being about “trying to be a musician and feeling like time for success is always running out. It’s definitely melodramatic, describing ourselves as aging and nearing death, but sometimes it really feels that way.”

Fully written, produced, performed, mixed and mastered by the duo, The track begins with a short loungy section, complete with VHS-detuned vaporwave synth pads that sound like the background music for some retro afterlife suburban mall, before it’s taken over by a hyper-digital soundscape of buzzy synth bass, jagged sawtooth lead lines, and sampled late 20th century video game sounds. Tenenbaum’s beyond breathy vocal manages to sound weightless, jaded and in-your-face at the same time during the verse, while during the pre-chorus, the edginess gives way to a highly melodic, more angelic tone that adds good contrast to the rest of the track. By the time the chorus comes crashing in, the musical release, with shouted vocals and full-on synth and grunge sounds, is exhilarating. 

The quickly-edited, colorful music video, meanwhile, takes on the premise of the duo looking for their lost “dog” (in reality a Pokemon-like creature), in between their binges of video gaming and performing music in front of a wall of old-school TV screens that resemble a Nam June Paik video art piece, if it were commissioned by Atari or Nintendo. It’s a subtle but biting commentary on both the retromania that much of the music scene finds itself trapped in, as well the state of near-perpetual digital adolescence that social media seems to foster, to the detriment of society at large. 

Mercurial World is scheduled to be released on October 8 via Luminelle. Gabe Hernandez

photo credit: Miwah Lee

L.A.-based singer/songwriter/producer Mia Carucci has released their latest self-produced single, the hypnotic slow-burn “Pomba Gira,” along with an accompanying video. 

The track begins with a sparse but insistent Afro-Latin drum rhythm, regularly punctuated by an echoing “whoop!” that effectively creates an atmosphere of both unease and anticipation, before Carucci’s breathy, siren-like vocals inquire “what is your reflection in the ever-firing mirror of this life,” subtly referencing the titular Pomba Gira, a central figure of the Afro-Indigenous religion of Quimbanda, who represents the many and different facets of the feminine, including those who have freed themselves from the confines of sexual identity. 

Meanwhile, the video amps up the mystical aspects only hinted at in the track. It begins with Carucci, dressed only in a chainmail bikini, seductively dancing amid rows of votive candles in the dark, balancing themself on a rock in the middle of a roiling ocean, and performing devotional worship to Pomba Gira (played here—complete with devil horns— by previous DELI artist Star Amerasu). Throw in a python coiled around a belly-dancing Carucci toward the later parts of the video, and you have a perfect spooky-seductive track and visual to be played in the background at an upcoming Halloween party. 

Mia Carucci has an upcoming EP in the works, release date TBA. Gabe Hernandez