KID AGAIN—Jon Bellion

A friend put me onto this track back in November after hearing my guitar noodling reminded him of the intro loop and it hasn’t left my rotation for long since. Jon Bellion’s triumphant return with a first solo track in six years is equal parts melodic and aggressive, with a driving energy that reminds me what it’s like to keep trying to get back to the feeling of being a kid again, cooking things up in my bedroom.

Red Synthetic—Zhone

My second pick of the month isn’t a new track, but I come back to Zhone’s Red Synthetic frequently. Sonically, there’s a ton to appreciate about it: huge, cinematic dynamics and sound design and that moment just past the halfway mark where the filter EQ sweeps down on the vocal refrain to yield something like a vocoder synth. This track’s release notably calls forth the spirit of this post series: music discovery through the lens of first-person experience. There’s something special about the way online music discovery in particular evolved over the decade leading up to this release in 2021. I used to usually discover music online through the blogosphere, but by the height of the pandemic, I found myself in niche online communities communicating and collaborating with artists, sharing work in its early stages.

I first heard this track when Zhone shared a pre-release version in Outskrrts, an online community that broke out of Yung Skrrt’s Twitch stream during the pandemic to organize events like stream pregames, afterparty raves, and artist showcases, all over Zoom. The release later found a home on Vol. 4 (LOVE) of the Mutants Mixtape series of benefit compilations, themselves a product of a niche online community of artists: the Mutants1000000 Discord launched by Arca right as the world went into lockdown in March of 2020. I cherish the special connections that are still in my life from my time in these communities and hold sacred the opportunity to observe artists’ nascent work as they share stories behind it.

Blue Hour—Nosaj Thing feat. Julianna Barwick

A couple of months ago, I caught a special performance featuring Nosaj Thing at the Audrey Irmas Pavilion in Koreatown. The venue itself is a marvel—geometric and imposing, yet somehow inviting, like a monument to the modern. The night was a layered experience: an exhibition upstairs featuring art and technology experiments, followed by Flux, a collaboration between Kevin Peter He and Jake Oleson that blended live music with real-time 3D cinematics and dynamic camera work. It was a fluid, maximalist vision of what’s possible at the intersection of sound and image.

Afterward, Nosaj Thing took the stage, framed by simple film projections—subtle, restrained, evocative. After the hypermodern spectacle of Flux, his set felt like a meditation, pulling attention toward nostalgia rather than novelty. Blue Hour in particular hit me in that way—like something slipping through my fingers, a fleeting warmth held just long enough to feel its absence. The visuals accompanying it had a liminal, in-between quality—scenes that could be anywhere and nowhere, the kind of images that bring to mind times caught in the cracks of a city, existing but untethered, anonymous in the early hours of the morning.

Watching Nosaj Thing in LA again some 15 years after first seeing him perform at Low End Theory was a full-circle moment. That era still lingers in my head like a half-remembered dream… and that’s exactly what the city looked like as I stepped outside into the rainy night to find some casein.

Audrey Irmas Pavillion spooky parking lot

Curves—Ivy Lab

Curves by Ivy Lab also feels like a transmission from the late aughts LA Beat Scene: Low End Theory, Shlohmo, the WEDIDIT crew, etc. The track vibes in a lush space between ambient ethereality and club weight, where textures stretch and morph into something atmospheric and trip-hop sensibilities meet sculpted bass design. This sound isn’t terribly new anymore, but here it seems to remain pure as a hypnotic loop bending time around its pulses. It’s a solid reminder of similar sounds from the past, still echoing and resonating.

Fellow Traveler—Fucked Up

Fellow Traveler kicks off with a reversing tape loop that winds back time just before the a wildly distorted riff tears through the mix. The call-and-response vocals layer in tasteful harmonies that offer a kind of rough singsong quality. It’s a song with driving force that never stops moving, bursting with a restless, youthful energy that makes me want to run outside and keep running until the last note fades.

Subversion (Brand New Love)—Touché Amoré feat. Lou Barlow

The guys in Touché are approaching (if not already within) their middle age years (frontman Jeremy Bolm now boasts 41 years of age). That’s a sobering realization. I’m not quite there yet myself, but it’s been more than half my lifetime since I started watching them play small rooms in LA and I won’t lie, I’m starting to feel the clock. What better opportunity to interpolate Sebadoh’s Brand New Love—a song about cautious hope and openness to something new (anyone could be a brand new love)—alongside original lyricist Lou Barlow. Bolm’s refrain says it best:

I can’t see
Beyond the
Years behind me
And it’s staggering

Bourbon—Gallant

Earlier this month, I had the chance to see Gallant perform at the Independent in San Francisco on tour for his latest release Zinc. His always stellar performance made for a fun show where I ran into old friends and made some new ones. Some fans I chatted with expressed a lingering preference for his debut album, Ology (2016), over the newer material (a sentiment I share). While I hope that the soaring falsettos and anthemic delivery on Bourbon gave those fans what they were looking for, I found a lot of appreciation for how the live band instrumentation added dimension to Gallant’s newer material. It was a good reminder that making room for what’s new sometimes means loosening one’s hold on the past—trust the detox.

If you’ve read this far (thanks), you probably like music quite a lot. Message me on X (Twitter) if you’d like to get some 🏓 Playlist Ping Pong going or chat about music.