Editor’s Note: Anyone who says there isn’t good music coming out these days — and quite literally, every day — simply isn’t paying attention. Vanyaland’s new compilation feature The V List highlights the best in new music over the past month, pulling together the sounds that have soundtracked the website in recent weeks from our wide-ranging series of features. It’s all the stuff we’re bumping here at Vanyaland HQ, one new bop at a time.
Unto Others, ‘Butterfly’
Band comparisons are the laziest form of music journalism, but when a song makes a listener think of certain beloved band they grew up with, it makes some sense to relay that sentiment to those who may feel the same. Unto Others‘ hypnotic new single “Butterfly” brings us back to when we first heard bands like Type O Negative and H.I.M., and it put us in beautiful chokehold from first listen. This symphonic crush of melody from the Portland goth metal band, formerly known as Idle Hands, is their first musical offering of 2024, and suggests something transcendent is brewing. “The choices we make everyday, do we create or destroy, do we lift up or put down? Do we do this to ourselves, or others?” the band asks. “The listener can decide.” What’s certain is that this one went right into our Best of ’24 list.
Charly Bliss, ‘Nineteen’
Any day with new music from Charly Bliss is a good one. The Brooklyn indie-pop band welcomed May in grand fashion with a sweeping single called “Nineteen,” and it finds Eva Hendricks and the boys reflecting back on young love. It’s one hell of a tune, and feels like a creative peak is on the horizon (which is not too shabby for a band that wrote 2019’s forever unfuckwithable “Capacity”).
“I’ll always be fascinated by love and relationships that don’t quite work and bring tsunamis of heartbreak,” Hendricks says. “The further away I am from it, the kind of love that bashes you against the rocks just as often as it carries you over waves of manic joy, the easier it is to see the full scope of it. First love is crazy.” The epic “Nineteen” is the first taste of the band’s new album FOREVER, due out August 16 on Lucky Number Music. It’ll probably be the highlight of the summer.
CARSICK, ‘Gig Tax’
There’s a been a lot of discussion lately about indie musicians and their survival in a fucked up music industry. Having experienced the darker side of the industry, CARSICK provide a new soundtrack for the struggles of young artists with the punchy “Gig Tax,” the genre-bending English indie punk band’s single that hit the streams May 1 via Alcopop! Records.
“Gig Tax’ is our heartfelt tribute to the trials and tribulations of being a young(ish) band on the great British touring circuit,” CARSICK declare. “There’s nothing we love more than playing shows and the UK is absolutely blessed to have such a vibrant independent music scene, full of incredible bands, promoters, venue staff and punters who live and breathe music. We’re lucky enough to have experienced it all first hand — but we’ve also very familiar with the other side of that coin: Dodgy geezers down the local who want to pay musicians in ‘exposure’; bands in a tiny green room acting like they’re Oasis; hecklers and haters either in a live crowd or on the other side of a screen. This one goes out to those lot, and to everyone dealing with them on a regular basis.”
Hard-Fi, ‘Don’t Go Making Plans’
Few English bands over the past 20 years or so kept it as real as Hard-Fi. Richard Archer and the boys made their name from a street-smart style of indie, relaying the grittier side of life and doing it whilst canvassing a seedy underground from here to Surrey. Every Hard-Fi track was fit for both fighting or fucking, and each felt like a mini-chapter in an ongoing storyline. Here we are a decade on from the last jolt of Hard-Fi sweetness, which makes new joint “Don’t Go Making Plans” all the more tasty; the buoyant groove-pop track proves the band hasn’t missed a beat as Hard-Fi take it back to the streets.
“‘Don’t Go Making Plans’ is sort of a protest song about protest, but I wanted to encapsulate that message into something that was still a pop song,” says Archer. “A track that you can still dance to in a club or play on the radio, because a song like that you can make a real connection to and circumnavigates the pointless restrictions being put in our way. Governments passing laws to stop protests that ’cause more than minor disruption feels like something out of a dystopian film. The whole point of protest is disruption. You’re trying to interrupt the inevitable flow of things, to encourage the people running the country to think again, especially when you have a government that doesn’t seem to be bothered by what people actually need.”
Velvet Dreaming, ‘Velvet Dreaming’
We close out this month’s V List with a dance party — and the beat is coming from inside Boston’s house. Last week Victoria Wasylak hyped Velvet Dreaming’s beautiful and chaotic new EP Spiraling, which dropped just ahead of Pride month. Since this feature is song-driven, we’ll lean in on Velvet Dreaming’s self-titled “theme song”, but at nine minutes total runtime, the full EP is worth a spin as Boston “freak-pop” artist born Kade Thibodeau “nails a woozy collision of hyper-pop and electroclash… a maximalist rave guided by inspiration from artists like Miss Kittin, Crystal Castles, M.I.A., and Uffie.”
Wasylak adds: “The EP grows increasingly menacing as Thibodeau dabbles in a darker approach to pop, leaving them singing ‘you make me feel like I’m somebody else’ on ‘Spiraling’, just a few tracks removed from their assertive introduction. The confession feels an endorsement for losing yourself in the project — and with such an expansive sound, free-falling into Spiraling comes fairly naturally.” Velvet Dreaming performs live this weekend at Bellforge Arts Center’s Pride celebration on Sunday (June 9) in Medfield.