Five acts, five bangers, five flavours of guitar-driven indie: Paris soul-funk energy, West London DIY grit, Ottawa dream-pop drift, Ayr anthemic Britpop, and Chicago lo-fi electronica. Not a combination you hear all the time, right? But all worth your time.
The Hypnotiks (featuring Wolfgang Valbrun) – Stone Cold Sober
The Hypnotiks deliver a soul-funk masterclass on Stone Cold Sober: tight, alive, and impossible to sit still to
“Stone Cold Sober” is what happens when a nine-piece band that plays Paris venues every week takes that live energy into a recording. There’s nothing tentative about it: the brass section locks in, the rhythm section drives hard, and Wolfgang Valbrun has exactly the kind of voice that can hold its own above all of it. Which is no mean feat. It sounds like a room full of people who have played together long enough to stop thinking about it.
The Hypnotiks are one of Paris’s leading soul and funk outfits, built around a core band of eight musicians and a rotating roster of guest vocalists. The model, inviting the city’s best singers to perform rare gems and forgotten classics at top venues, has made them something unusual: a collective that gets tighter the more variables you introduce. James Startt leads on guitar, with Anthony Honnet on keys, Gérard Berruet on bass, and a full brass section rounding out the sound. This is genuinely great, and deserves to do very well.
Sparky’s Magic Piano – Orange Juice
Orange Juice is Sparky’s Magic Piano at their most quietly brilliant: a song that starts one place and ends somewhere far better
“Orange Juice” starts exactly where you’d expect: open-string riff, a lovely indie energy, heading somewhere loud, and then quietly goes somewhere else entirely. The Hanwell five-piece recorded it partly live in their homes, building it up over weeks of visits, each member adding and subtracting until the song found its own shape. What it lands on is lonelier and stranger than the opening suggests, and all the better for it.
Sparky’s Magic Piano are Pob Bartlett, Marion Bartlett, Alex Carter, Jill Majumdar, and Terence Martin. The Beach Boys and Smashing Pumpkins don’t sound like an obvious pairing until you hear a band using both as permission: permission to layer, permission to be abrasive, permission to let a song become something its opening riff never promised. “Orange Juice” is released as a double A-side with “Chaos,” the band’s first output in over a year. London locals can catch them at Hanwell Hootie on 9th May. And if I hadn’t left London a few years back, I’d be there like a shot. A great single.
Wotts – ALOHA!
ALOHA! is a genuinely gorgeous piece of dream-pop that earns its place as the closing track on Wotts’ debut EP
“ALOHA!” closes out the COPE EP in no particular hurry, which turns out to be exactly right way to do it. The Ottawa artist sits comfortably in Tame Impala and Pond territory: hazy, melodic and tapey-vibes, more interested in mood and texture than serving up the momentum. But Wotts feels very much in their own lane too, the track does a great job of using spaciousness to let the melody do the work. The production is a dream, and basically I’m just ready for the next EP right away.
Wotts has played RBC Bluesfest, Canadian Music Week, and Junofest, and picked up coverage from CBC Radio, The Luna Collective, and EARMILK: serious platform for an artist still on debut EP material. COPE was recorded as a duo project; “ALOHA!” is the first track released as a solo act. The step down in headcount hasn’t cost anything. If anything the focus is sharper. A real stunner.
Sbob – Lonely People
Sbob’s Lonely People is a quietly devastating indie anthem that builds from a whisper into something you’ll be humming for days
“Lonely People” opens quietly: acoustic, melodic, the kind of song that doesn’t announce itself too strongly. But it builds into a lovely and jangly indie classic. The refrain “why don’t you come back round” is blunt without being simple, a genuine plea for real connection over the hollow substitute that social media offers. Stuart Stevenson isn’t being clever about the diagnosis. He just thinks it’s true and has made a real banger out of it.
Sbob is Stevenson’s solo project, and “Lonely People” is his fourth single, the fourth track on his album Revelation. He plays every instrument and co-produces alongside Ayr-based collaborator Sam Rae. Before this he fronted Glasgow band Bob Cuba and recorded as one half of Stelar77, so the craft is well established. The solo format strips away the collaborative filter and lets the songs make their case directly. It’s a real indie bop, and on the strength of this one, I’ll be digging into the rest of the album. A great single.
Justin Sconza – What a Beautiful Day
Justin Sconza’s “What a Beautiful Day” is a brilliant piece of home-recorded indie pop: hand-played synth arpeggios, a Chicago attic, and a Tascam four-track doing the work of a whole studio.
“What a Beautiful Day” is the second single from Fantasy, and the production method is inseparable from what the song feels like. Sconza played the synth arpeggios by hand rather than programming them, running them fast against the chord changes in a way that introduces a slight human imprecision into the arrangement. The result sits between indie rock and ambient electronica without fully committing to either, which turns out to be a wonderful call when it sound this great. The whole track was captured on a Tascam analog cassette four-track and a Tascam digital multitrack, with Sconza deliberately avoiding a DAW beyond basic storage.
Justin Sconza is a Chicago multi-instrumentalist on his sixth self-recorded album, and the consistency of that working method is worth pausing on: every song written, every instrument played, every part captured alone, across six full records. Fantasy was recorded mostly in a sunny attic, piano parts tracked in the living room, the process shaped by influences that span Erik Satie and Duke Ellington at one end and Kurt Cobain and Elliott Smith at the other. That range shouldn’t cohere as well as it does, but six albums of sole-charge recording builds its own kind of discipline. It’s essential indie to check out this week.