Katie Von Schleicher Shitty Hits

Katie Von Schleicher’s Bleaksploitation was an accident, years in the making. While interning at Ba Da Bing Records, owner Ben Goldberg offered to release a cassette of anything of hers, demos or a live performance, but she took it a bit more seriously than Goldberg intended. The result was her first self-produced and engineered effort, a strange, hazy, pop-laden tape. Doing her own press under a pseudonym and referring to it as an “album,” it garnered enough attention for it to be released on vinyl in Spring 2016.

On her debut full-length, Von Schleicher strikes again on the magic that comes from her warped and uncompromising sound. Shitty Hits channels the bright, sunny radio burners of the 1970s, songs you drive to, carefree, and songs you can cry to. From start to finish, this album confronts isolation and powerlessness—it doesn’t tackle grandiosity, but mediocrity: the struggle of being deeply flawed and unmistakably human.