Dance-punk lifers, a man with a cactus on his grave, and five minutes that refuses to end
There are twenty-two records that came out this week and you are going to hear about four of them. Charli has a new one, the Strokes have a new one, Shania Twain has a new one, and Tyla has a new one, and by Sunday night every publication with a masthead will have filed the same six paragraphs about what any of it means for pop music, and none of those paragraphs will cost the writer anything to produce. This is not a complaint about famous people. Famous people are fine and some of them are even good. It is a complaint about the shape of a week, about the way twenty-two things get released and the machinery only has an opinion about four of them, and about the eighteen that go into the hole.
So here are three things from the hole. I have not heard the albums. Nobody has heard the albums except the people who made them and a handful of publicists who listened at half volume while answering email. What I have heard about is the singles, which is all anybody ever actually has when they tell you to look out for something, and I would rather admit that up front than pretend I have been living inside these records for a month.
Go Public, “Becoming A Stranger”
Four guys from Atlanta named Sean Rawls, Adrian Finch, Sam Gunn and Jay Domingo, all of whom have been in other bands, none of which you can name. Their debut EP came out in 2022. The debut album, You Are Traffic, comes out today on HHBTM, which is a label in Athens, Georgia that has been putting out records since 1999 and has never once been anybody’s ticket to anywhere.
Four years between an EP and a full-length is the least romantic fact in music. It is the sound of grown men with jobs finding Tuesday nights, and it is also, and I want to be careful here because I am about to say something that will get me accused of nostalgia, the only correct way to arrive at this particular genre. Dance-punk punishes the young. It is a music made entirely out of restraint, out of a guitar player agreeing to spend four minutes playing the same figure while somebody else gets the good part, and nobody who has not already been in three bands that went nowhere possesses that kind of humility. You have to have failed at something first. You have to have stood in a rehearsal space at thirty-four and understood, finally, that the riff is not the point.
The reporting on the single says the guitars pull double duty as rhythm and that the beat lives somewhere between A Certain Ratio and a straightforward rock fill, and if you know what A Certain Ratio means as a reference point then you already know exactly which door these four have chosen to walk through. It is the Factory Records door, the one where the funk is played by white men who have decided that pleasure is a discipline. That is either the most thrilling proposition in guitar music or the most exhausted one, depending entirely on execution, and execution is the thing nobody can tell you about from a press release.
Here is the risk, and I say this with affection. “Local veterans form new project, make competent art-punk” is a sentence that gets written four hundred times a year in this country and it is almost never a lie and almost never worth anything. The record has to beat that sentence. Everything I have read suggests it might. It is nine dollars on Bandcamp and the label is real and the vinyl exists, which in 2026 is roughly the definition of an artistic gamble.
Greg Freeman, “Indu”
Freeman put out Burnover less than a year ago, which was good enough that people started using the word “hero” about him in print, and rather than take the victory lap he left Vermont, went and lived in rural
New Mexico for a while, then went to Los Angeles and made another one. All Set the Bone lands in October.
The desert retreat is the single most worn-out item in the promotional inventory. Every third songwriter in America goes to the high desert to find something, and what they find, nine times out of ten, is a slide guitar and a lot of imagery about bones. I was fully prepared to be tired about it.
Then there is the actual line in the song, which I am not going to quote because quoting a lyric is a cheap way to make a thing look better than your writing about it, but the substance of it is this: he sings about a woman who gave him the will to live, and then immediately observes that the thought arrived with its opposite attached, that the same feeling comes in a matched pair and only one of them is the good one. And then he puts himself in the ground and stands a saguaro over the spot.
That is not therapy language. That is the older, meaner tradition, the one where love is reported as a hazard rather than processed as an experience, and it has gotten scarce in guitar music because everybody has learned to be well-adjusted in public. Freeman is apparently not interested. The delivery is described as laid-back over something with punk attitude and blues swagger underneath, which is exactly the right way to sing a line like that, because if you sell it hard it becomes a poster.
So the desert worked. I would like the record to be noted that I was ready to be a jerk about it and could not manage it.
Chuck Strangers featuring billy woods and Zeroh, “Breaking Atoms”
You do not name a song after Breaking Atoms by accident. That is Main Source, 1991, Large Professor doing things to soul records that people are still failing to copy, and Nas’s first recorded verse sitting in the middle of it like a fuse. Naming your song after it is a bet you have placed against yourself in public. Either you clear the bar or you become the guy who tried to clear the bar, and there is no third result.
By every account, Strangers clears it. The track sits at five minutes on an album where most things quit before three, which in the current economy is a genuinely aggressive act, because the streaming payout structure is engineered to reward you for making short things and making a lot of them, and a five-minute centerpiece is a man deliberately leaving money on the table in exchange for having somewhere to put an idea. It is built on a live jam from a band called Human Error Club, with a Fender Rhodes that wanders off and comes back rather than looping, which is the difference between musicians in a room and a producer with a mouse.
Strangers raps about East Flatbush and about his own ascent with a receipt attached to every boast, which is the trick that separates the ones who last from the ones who don’t. There is a line about what the internet did to television that works as a shrug and as an obituary in the same breath. billy woods shows up and does what woods does, which is take something that was intimate and make it enormous and slightly frightening, and the fact that Strangers can stand next to him without disappearing is the actual news here.
And then it does not resolve. Zeroh comes in where the hook is supposed to be and dissolves the whole thing instead, and it hangs there unfinished. Every incentive in music right now says do not do that. Do the hook, close the loop, make it satisfying, make it loopable, give the algorithm something to grab. They left it open on purpose. Good.
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