Albums are described in alphabetical order.
AD4PTION by Woob
AD4PTION is the follow up to the exceptional 2020 release Xvious_exe by Woob, an artist known for creating richly textured beats, bass lines, and rhythmic melodies. On AD4PTION, Woob tells us a thrilling story during which digital and human worlds collide, with a horrifying ending. The mood is dark and grim and, not coincidentally, elicit a feeling of empty arcades residing in the graveyards of abandoned malls of the 1980s. Each song tells a part of the developing story through deep bass lines, swirling lead synth melodies, and vocal arrangements that loop in infinite glitch. The soundtrack nature of the album has a coming and going quality as the characters move through the story, which amplifies feelings of fear, confusion, disorientation, and time warping. Woob invites the listener into the characters’ first-person experience as the story unfolds, such as the frightening realization nothing will ever be the same and the frantic feeling that a horrifying ending is inevitable. AD4PTION is meant to be listened to in its entirety. Read more about the story here.
Alchemy by DATAGIRL
I first discovered DATAGIRL at Flamingo Fest, the two-day vaporwave bash hosted by the good folks at UK-based label My Pet Flamingo. At the Fest, DATAGIRL featured music from her latest concept album, Destination Spa, with a dreamy mood and soundscape that elicits feelings of rejuvenation, relaxation, and renewal. The mood on her latest release, Alchemy, is love after midnight, and it’s full of fire and passion. The scene on the cover art plays out on the opening tack, “Rendezvous,” where we hear the sound of strangers connecting, a woman who’s lighter won’t fire up her smoke and a man who has the spark she needs, a moment that grows into something much bigger as the album evolves. Immediately, the soundscape is engrossing, big and full of richly textured beats and intoxicating melodies that sweep across the soundscape as the love story ensues. The sound on Alchemy is timeless, and is chocked full of old school bass lines, beats, and dynamic, passion-infused melodies. There are pop undertones in the rhythms, percussion, and vocals, as well as an undeniable dance quality, all which poke and ultimately hook you with nostalgia, inviting you to get into the sound, begging you to get into the mood. Every moment on Alchemy feels in its right place. It’s simply elegant.
Cutting Moments by Brian Sangmeister
Cutting Moments by Brian Sangmeister plays like the soundtrack you’ll hear as you sit back and watch your story unfold up on the big screen. Cutting Moments opens with “Empty solace in an Abandoned Church,” which sounds just as it is titled, an organ playing above while we sit alone, no solace, and as the atmospheric notes are played and sustained, they gently possess you and a somber feeling of emptiness consumes you. The album is built around atmospheric synth melodies that persist, poke, and prod and, despite your resistance, you will surrender willfully or not, a feature salient on songs such as “Unfold” and “Cellar Door.” The songwriting often creates great tension, such as on “We Buried Innocence Behind the Old Tool Shed” during which notes lightly tap across the forefront like drops of rain, eliciting a sense of sadness and loss, whereas the wavering darker sounds paint a much grimmer picture. The album closes with “No Way Home” during which atmospheric synth set the stage for the piano melody to play across the top with foundation rattling vibration, while string melodies slowly begin to dominate the space, playing like the final passage to unknown places and, though there is no fear, there is also no liberation.
Furbidden Planet by Cat Temper
Hey Sexy by Oceanside85
Oceanside85 has brought the sexy back! Hey Sexy is sexy in the, well, sexual way. But it’s sexy in so many ways. The mood is sexy. It has a late-night, bedroom vibe. The songwriting is sexy. It’s never in a hurry. The soundscape invites you to get into what’s happening right now, in the present. The sound is sexy. It’s chocked full of old school sticky, elastic synth melodies and bass lines written in hot, neon pink across a black backdrop, never overdone, never underdone. The lyricism is sexy. It’s bold, self-expressive, and liberating, a daring breaking down of any and all barriers. The integration of styles is sexy. The sound brings together a wide array of styles, including synthpunk with the help of Cat Temper on “Sexy Back,” rap on “So Wet,” pop on “Goddess,” and fuses classic synthwave sounds to create an entirely new sound on “Heat.” The vocals are sexy. They’re richly textured, dynamic, powerful, vulgar, inviting, vulnerable, and playful. Hey Sexy does what sexy is supposed to do. It makes you look twice. It makes you think twice. And it keeps you coming back for more.
Mainframe by Waveshaper
On Mainframe, Waveshaper transports you to a sci-fi based destination in a future landscape, where one is left to wander and explore digital alleyways through the motherboard. The drama and emotion on Mainframe are high, and the sound and arrangements are elegant and polished. Melodies so purposefully enter the soundscape, captivate and pique interest, such as on “The Phantom Machine” or “Friends Again.” Waveshaper constructs rich percussion elements and bends oscillations through time, layering atmospheric and lead synth melodies that harmoniously work together. Mainframe is loaded with sticky synth sounds with great elasticity and depth, a dark atmosphere in places and light in others, sometimes as neighboring segments with a song, such as “Save Room” or “The Hive.” The soundscapes Waveshaper creates across the track list on Mainframe are varied, yet the album feels entirely coherent. Mainframe is easy to get lost in. So, go get lost. Read our story about Waveshaper’s 2020 EP, The Disk Hunter, here.
Shores of Quiddity by Burial Grid
Burial Grid creates soundscapes for listeners to roam through, which stand out on releases such as We’ve Come for Your Flesh and Negative Space, and so as soon as I learned Shores of Quiddity was to be released, I knew it was an album to sit down and fully digest. What I would find is more than I anticipated. The opening moments of “Blanketed” create a physical sensation of great tension. Initially, there’s a sense of instability before all pieces begin to function together harmoniously, yet something disruptive is lurking. This sense of instability continues on “4 am Knows My Secrets,” which elicits a feeling of direct connection to thought and emotion with no barriers, a frightening sensation. The songwriting is noticeably present, evolving fluidly, with no sense of what’s next until you have arrived. “Biphasic” is an excellent example, during which sounds just moments ago were chirping in the background have suddenly consumed the whole space. This quality resurfaces on “Caput Mortuum” which is patient, sulking in anxiety built around a digital, dreamy soundscape, yet grounded in the mud of Earth, and as it evolves, atmospheric synth melodies grow in strength, create great imagery of emotions, which have no discernable shape and no face and are pitch black in color. How Burial Grid brought emotions and mental states to life on Shores of Quiddity cannot be overstated. On “Windsor Hum,” for example, the artist locks onto the circling of consciousness, looping around on itself, and brings broken feelings of loneliness and defeat to the forefront. The album closes with “Small as Sleep” which has a graceful feeling, as bright light peeks through in the distance, and there’s a sense the darkness will begin to loosen its grip. Burial Grid’s Shores of Quidditiy is psychologically engaging. Just a few moments in real time can be quite distant travel in mental time, if you give yourself to it, and you should. Don’t jump ship. Stay the course. The nearly lifeless unconscious feeling of crashing against the rocky shores is the ride you signed up for when you pressed play.
Straight Ballin' The Left Hand Path by JNNY COBRA
Straight Ballin’ The Left Hand Path by JNNY COBRA elicits excitement from the opening notes, which inject electrifying life into your blood before strapping you in for the ensuing exhilarating rollercoaster ride. The songwriting is built around break downs, winding down different roads and varied soundscapes. The nuance and fusion of sounds, styles, and emotions is quite noticeable. For example, “A Virgins Severed Head Two Fries and a Coke” plays like a romantic dance through a graveyard with big ominous melodies of gritty distortion, screaming in horror, and sounds of switch blades and death. On Straight Ballin’, the listener is just as likely to experience big, numbing bass that rattles the windows and synth melodies grinding with millisecond precision as they are to experience lovely ballads of the sky collapsing and life crumbling before our very eyes. The energy on Straight Ballin’ is high, but as the album evolves, the tone becomes more serious and somber, closing epically in a meditative journey, a triumphant one at that, yet when we stop and look around, we find ourselves alone in a vast empty landscape. What a sensation. On Straight Ballin’, JNNY COBRA took the left hand path indeed
The Dark by Starfarer
The Dark tells a tale of memories during a period of incapacitation Starfarer time spent in “The Dark.” The cover art sets the stage for songs that were written against a black backdrop and a soundscape that elicits feelings of chaos, panic, and fear alongside melodies that warn and alarm. As The Dark opens, the listener hears the screaming, and a feeling of conversion from human to non-human digitized lifeform settles in as Starfarer’s life flashes before his eyes and he enters “The Dark.” The soundscape on The Dark is built from big, gritty synth lines and raving beats, with haunting synth melodies sometimes leading the way and sometimes looming in the background. Feelings of fear and danger are also conveyed through gothic vocals, such as those by Seersha on “Save Yourself.” Each song feels like a page from the book of memories during time spent in the “The Dark.” For example, “Braindance” elicits a feeling of awakening, locked in and beating on the walls of a cage inside the brain, with a big synth melody barreling through the synapses and lead melodies injecting electricity up axons to wake the beast. On “Highrider” there’s a sense of glitching, quickly jolting to another dimension. “The Fear” featuring Magnavolt elicits imagery of puzzle pieces of sound moving toward each other through space and time, but once together, they split apart again, and “Deep Space” featuring Stilz elicits a feeling of tumbling through space, unsuccessfully trying to latch onto something, anything to stop yourself from falling into the black abyss. “Medusa” brings the album to a close, which eerily feels like the awakening to tell the story of memories spent in the “The Dark.” Read our in-depth story about Starfarer here.
The Data Drug by Tengushee
Tengushee sits squarely in a space by himself. As the first sounds on The Data Drug enter your consciousness, it immediately elicits a feeling of plugging in and teleporting to a new place. When you arrive, you are the star of a film where everything around you is moving at different speeds while onlookers gawk. This feeling is, in part, due to the breakbeat core, bass lines, and intermittent moments of chaos, such as on “Echoe and the Data Drug” or “Intruders,” but also, in part, due to the coming and going of melodies, entering the soundscape, leaving, and returning just as you noticed they had gone. The Data Drug conveys great emotion, wandering through minimalist soundscapes with raw, ungreased sounds and melodies that feel incredibly organic. Tengushee’s less is more approach is most striking. The melodies are set against empty spaces and lead with great patience. You get to follow, and that’s the beauty, exemplified on “Faith in the Heartless” and “I Only Smile in the Dark.” There’s something else happening on The Data Drug, though. When “Nothing in the Shadows” plays, we hear a voice say, God ain’t real, and there’s a noticeable sensation that each song is a chapter and only through reading the book can we know its story. Sit down with The Data Drug. Follow its lead.
The Sorcerer by The Astral Stereo Project
The Sorcerer by The Astral Stereo Project was written in isolation, in the dark, immersed in visions of an old country estate, dazzling dinner parties, and, of course, horror. This imagery certainly plays through in the songwriting and sound that has a late 1960’s psychedelic progressive rock quality, a time when use of synthesizers was just beginning to blossom for artists, such as Pink Floyd. The album opens with “Voices in the Wind” which has a vintage quality and foreshadows what’s to come. “The House Looms in the Evening Haze” plays like the beginning, where what is about to unfold feels like it is coming into focus, unbeknownst to the guests who will arrive shortly. It also has a vintage quality, with a dose of horror, but the terror has not yet settled in. It feels dark, cold and wet, yet bass and guitar sounds give it warmth and brightness. During “Driving Up the Path/The Guests Arrive” we hear whispering, chattering, and there is a noticeable stark contrast between a light dreaminess and darkness. The madness begins to creep in on “Sir Ravenstone Plays His Tricks,” with spell casting melodies and visions of witchcraft. The terror begins to dominate the mood on “Summoning of the Daimon” and a feeling no possible escape is salient on “The Candle Flickers.” When the album nears its end with “…And Then There Were None” there’s a solemn feeling of aftermath and disorientation. The Astral Stereo Project has told a beautifully dark story on The Sorcerer that is classic in sound and character. It’s meant to be digested fully in one sitting.
Unholy by Masked
Unholy is the latest release from Masked, and its relentless, aggressive, character plays like bone on bone, meant for raving deep into the night with a sound as big as beasts. The artist wrote on the Unholy Bandcamp page there’s no story here. It’s a direct connection to thought and emotion manifested in music, and it shows. Masked has cultivated a signature dark synth sound, but on Unholy, there are no boundaries. It’s a new frontier built on exploration and experimental fusion of sounds. It’s brimming with buzzing, energetic, distorted sounds, built around dark, haunting, and tantalizing melodies with grinding, gritty distorted humming of the synth and bass that maul from beginning to end. There are plenty of hard-hitting beats, heavy bass lines, guitar solos, and funky disco. Though the atmosphere is often so dominating it absorbs the entire space, the album is quite nuanced, with breathing room and time to pause and look around, just before the horror, terror, and fear settle in and get you moving again. Unholy also features several collaborations, including a hard-core punk, dark synth fusion with powerful vocals from Hayley Victoria Leeson on “Bled Out!” who also collaborated with Aeronexus and Masked on a cover of Beastie Boy classic “Sabotage.” Watch Masked live at Synth Valley Stream Fest XII here.
Vaporbass by CARB CAP
Vaporbass is the latest release from Madison, WI based producer CARB CAP. It’s got a big ‘70s vibe on the cover art and big sound oozing with distorted and atmospheric textures to match. The sound is built around funky grooves, digitally sticky beats, and layers of distorted melodies in the foreground with atmospheric undertones. Vaporbass has the high energy, dance club character of CARB CAP’s sound, yet the artist exhibits a willingness to settle into a groove and let it do its job to create mood, emotion, and is patient before making a move to a new space in the soundscape. Sometimes CARB CAP latches onto a sound it lets it do the driving, allowing the listener to hang on while the layers accumulate, such as on “Global Consciousness,” and other times the artist settles into a funky groove before detouring into infectious break downs, such as on “Dumb As Hell.” The track listing on Vaporbass is well thought out, entering with a hard-hitter, such as “CARBURETOR CAPTAIN,” setting the tone, but as the album approaches its end, what were once emotional undertones on earlier tracks have now risen to the surface, gripping the listener, beginning with “Hardcore Special Report,” and the “Artifact” co-produced by SkyYAMAHA. Vaporbass closes with “Dream Malfunction” which invites you to get lost in a tacky, elastic beat and a dreamy atmosphere.
Young & In Love by Bunny X
New York duo Bunny X have made a splash with their debut LP, Young & In Love, and for good reason. It’s got a classic sound and intangible quality that just feels good. It also dons one of the freshest cover art designs to grace the scene in 2021 that instantly breathes life into the album’s concept, which is built around timeless themes of love, hope, and youth, soaking wet with nostalgia. Young & In Love is a feeling Bunny X invite you to indulge in, handing you the key, and it’s a door we should all unlock and step into. From the beginning of “Perfect Paradise” it turns back time, and what follows are dreamy lyrics and vocals, danceable beats, bass, and classic pop melodies. There’s a heavy dose of nostalgia in the lyrics throughout, tapping into those feelings of not wanting the moment to end, as well as themes salient in ‘80s pop, such as hope for a brighter future on “Can’t Wait,” or wanting summer love to last and, sometimes, it does, such as on “Young & In Love.” There’s a time traveling element on Young & In Love, too, stories of the past told from the present, such as on “Diamonds” and the aptly titled closer, “Still On My Mind.” Young & In Love captures a feeling where the universe seemingly centers around falling in love, where nothing else matters, such as “Who Cares What They Say,” and this taps into a truly unique and magical piece of the human experience, and Bunny X captured it perfectly.