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Psychedelic Anxiety, as a mood, goes something like this: overwhelming, existential, vertigoic, arising when we stare into the void. This metaphysical unease also serves as the title for Brooklyn-based musician Frances Chang’s second album, and as a feeling it’s present throughout, charged by all things occultish. Recorded by Chang and engineer Andrea Schiavelli, featuring a cast of revered NYC DIY players, including Schiavelli (Eyes of Love) and Liza Winter (Birthing Hips), Psychedelic Anxiety relishes in the refining of aesthetic, in the electricity of improvisation, in balancing bleakness with humor. It embodies an idiosyncratic genre Chang calls slacker prog — offbeat, but brimming with spiritual and emotional resonance. The record infuses artifacts of the mundane with otherworldliness— even the love songs live more in the realm of fantasy (or horror) than the romantic. The psychic twin and mirror image of Chang’s 2022 debut full-length Support Your Local Nihilist, Psychedelic Anxiety by comparison is less urgent, leaving space for more nuance and storytelling. Together, these albums represent a new cycle of creativity for Chang, a reset to zero. “Eye Land,” captures Chang on a tour around the Irish and English countryside, in a moment of major life change. “Lying around your spare room,” she sings, “Sky is cloudy here in June.” Around her, guitar sputters and stops. Vocals branch off like vines on the side of an old house. It is a profoundly lovely song, a freaky miniature in the way that a Broadcast song is a freaky miniature. “Darkside” opens up with a particularly memorable narrative moment. “Last night I saw Parasite,” sings Chang, describing how she saw it alone, how regular life that week was acute, weird, intense. How she found comfort in resignation. After all: Psychedelic Anxiety is a serene, bizarre record full of alien sounds and big introspection.

Turbo World is the sunny and shady brainchild of co-conspirators Stephe Cooper and Caroline Bennett. Best known as the mastermind behind avant-prog boppers Cloud Becomes Your Hand and a member of Guerilla Toss, Cooper continues to stand out for his madcap compositions that embody the spirit and ethos of avant rock groups Aksak Maboul & Slapp Happy. Joining forces with Bennett, the manic scribe, singer, and multimedia wizard of digital hardcore duo Stice, their debut album, My Challenger, is an experimental prog-opera that leads listeners on a surreal, animated jaunt through the world of organized crime. The album’s north star is Joey the Hitman aka Max Kurschner, whose 1973 interview on The David Susskind Show, forever immortalized on YouTube, serves as inspiration and source material.

Rising from the underground river of primordial goo that runs between New York City and Philadelphia and ascending toward some unknown ethereal plane beyond our comprehension, comes to us the revelatory debut of music and mythos from Godcaster, Long Haired Locusts.

The venerated and shining troupe of David Mcfaul (keys), Von Lee (flute, vox), Lindsay Dobbs (trombone, vox), Bruce Ebersole (bass guitar), Sam Pickard (drums), and Judson Kolk (vox, guitar) transmit a brand of devout, sassy rock and pop that thrashes through stages of blissful, comforting highs and devastating lows, preaching the convergence of the holy and the heretical. This is best displayed on songs like 'Apparation of Mother Mary in My Neighborhood,' where the anxious exertion of sharp, jittery guitars and cutting drums follow the increasingly quickening pace of Kolk's narrative of trepidation before the tension grows too tight and snaps into violent, cathartic outbursts. Similar nerves are addressed and released throughout Long Haired Locusts'the navigation of celestial beauty and corporeal rot is omnipresent and important. 'Serpentine Carcus Crux Birth' and 'Christ in Capsule Form' are both bouncing and vibrant, while 'Blister Intercom' is lush with rejoicing choruses that accompany the marching guitars and drums, and songs like 'All the Feral Girls in the Universe' naturally builds upon an undeniably danceable composition until it reaches, like the album as a whole reaches, a phenomenally euphoric peak.

Long Haired Locusts, recorded live to tape by pop-mysticist Ryan Power in a Philadelphia basement, is a no-frills showcase of Godcaster's essence and best consumed at high volume with as few breakable objects as possible within a flailing extremities reach. And as well as Long Haired Locusts captures the exultant frenzy of Godcaster, it is best to see for yourself the type of magic that bubbles even further beneath the surface that no physical recording could possibly capture. The visceral intensity of any of Godcaster's public ceremonies of performance, small or large, further highlights the immediacy and impact of their guttural, primal expression and unveils more of their enigmatic presence. The thunderous crash of symbols, the slicing guitars, the driving bass, and the angelic cacophony of keys, flute, and voice'especially that of Von Lee, whose crystalline falsetto has a particularly paralyzing magnificence live'leave very few non-believers in their wake. Godcaster creates their own kind of protean piety based on the exaltation of movement and sound and Long Haired Locusts is the first of their sacred texts. It is a statement of purpose and acknowledgment of future growth beyond the limits of these sounds or any others. Whether you praise be or shutter in fear, we must all bear witness to the mythic rise of the music and the movement that is Godcaster.

Loving You Backwards, the debut album from Blood, flourishes in the subtle, the ambiguous, the shades of gray. In winter of 2021, longtime Austin residents Blood made a fresh start, using a move into a house together in Philadelphia as a chance to reorient and spend time writing music around the clock. As they wrote, the sound of the band began to shift. Blood, in the past, made huge, angry, grandiose, operatic songs. Loving You Backwards, was not that. Instead, this debut record is quieter, less reactive, but no less powerful. As an organism, Blood circa Loving You Backwards, was a six piece. Tim O'Brien is the lyric writer, but the song writing and arrangement is a painstakingly collaborative process in which the band aims for democracy over swiftness. The record also features the band’s first major work with the producer Daniel Enrique Howard, whom the band recorded with at his studio in Brooklyn. Howard helped guide Blood into this new sonic territory. It is not a bedroom project, but instead fully realized, somehow sounding both intimate like Liz Harris’ Grouper feels intimate and totally vast in the way that a Talk Talk record feels vast. It’s in the same universe as Ought in its earlier iterations. The songs on Loving You Backwards exist in the realm of ballads, heart-wrenching and weird pop with a post rock sensibility. It explores, as the title implies, approaching a relationship in the reverse, dealing with your past while you try to stay in the present. Loving You Backwards is a record of ideas and big honesty, but it’s also a record of genuinely pristine pop. A definitive statement from a band that is more than on the rise as truly excellent songwriters and performers.

Something happened on No. The early EPs from Baltimore’s Tomato Flower were pretty, dreamy psychedelia. Warm to the touch, like looking up at the trees on a cloudless day. On No, the four-piece’s debut album, those trees, that cloudless sky, have become haunted, thorny, stormy. It takes Tomato Flower from buttoned-up, almost technically formalist psych pop to something more urgent, raw, emotionally immediate. No is messier, more expansive, and through all of its chaos, the band’s most rigorous artistic statement to date.

No is the band’s first effort made entirely in person, the first thing tracked in a studio instead of in a bedroom. It is a highly collaborative record written and recorded by everyone, partially made live. It is very much the byproduct of a band that has done some serious touring, following a coast-to-coast tour with Animal Collective in the summer of 2022.

Lead single “Destroyer,” has Jamison Murphy practically screaming over angular guitars, oscillating in a sonic space somewhere between the prettiness of Broadcast and the sludge of Jesus Lizard. It also presents an early entry point to one of No’s major conceptual underpinnings: that of the breakup between Murphy and fellow co-lead vocalist and guitarist Austyn Wohlers, which occurred during the composition of the album.

It wouldn’t be fair to just call No a break up album. It’s far more complicated with that. No is a record about negation: I will not do this, you cannot tell me what to do, we are not living in a utopia, don’t be delusional. No embraces a kind of brutal realism, a confrontation of life that only happens when you wizen up a little bit. All of it is a brutal delight, a departure from the past, a nod to a startling present.

Tallahassee, FL singer-songwriter Sarah Morrison’s debut studio album Attachment Figure depicts the strangeness of exploring new relationships with subtle and spacious electronic production. As a former live keyboardist in Locate S,1, Morrison co-produced Attachment Figure with fellow bandmates Ross Brand and Clayton Rychlik, both of whom also play in Of Montreal's backing band. She was motivated to experiment with looser song structures and more unconventional chord progressions by her collaborators’ fondness for avant-garde jazz, as well as Locate S,1 frontwoman Christina Schneider’s idiosyncratic writing style. Throughout the album, echoing keys, woodwinds, and guitar ripple like a moonlit lake from which Morrison’s voice emerges. Her presence is spectral, yet conversational, willing to conjure concrete imagery of mango-flavored vitamins and the warmth of phone chargers alongside ghost stories of mannequin corpses and epistolary curses, a balance shaped by an obsession with the theatrical sincerity of Kate Bush and Mark Hollis. Lyrically, Attachment Figure meditates on questions about identity, personal growth, and helplessness – whether within a relationship or the oppressive structures of society itself – often rooted in Morrison’s experiences growing up in the South. “There’s a connection between Southern hospitality and femininity and just allowing things to happen,” Morrison says. "I've been in many relationships with people who have used that 'southern charm' to their advantage. I think a lot of people, non-men in particular, put on this charm instinctively. It's a defense mechanism that I was interested in studying." Attachment Figure is perpetually suspended between states of being, harmony and dissonance, and contradictory sentiments we all hold as we enter into the arms of someone new, but ultimately, it’s guided by a desire for authentic love—and a flair for intricate, intuitive songcraft.