A Boston bedroom studio, a Los Angeles debut EP follow-up, and a London solo artist who started making jewellery during lockdown: indie pop this week travels light and arrives somewhere interesting.
Fanta Vibez x Gasoline Monk – Keep You Close
Fanta Vibez x Gasoline Monk’s “Keep You Close” is a gorgeous bedroom pop love song: intimate, sepia-tinged, and an absolute R&B stunner
“Keep You Close” was recorded partly in Gasoline Monk’s home studio and partly at Record Co in Boston, the regular workspace for Monk’s Temple Records, and the split environment is audible in the best way: the track has the the perfect warmth of something made in a bedroom and the focus of a proper session. It’s produced in a genuinely beautiful way, channeling indie stuff like Bloc Party but also tasteful neo-soul vibes too. The vocal is the standout here though, it’s beautiful, unique and absolutely compelling, the whole thing deserves to do really well.
Fanta Vibez x Gasoline Monk are Boston-based collaborators and co-owners of Monk’s Temple Records. Gasoline Monk plays bass, keys and guitars across his productions while handling drum programming, and Fanta Vibez brings a vocal range that moves easily between neo-soul, R&B and indie pop. Their reference points include Frank Ocean, Smino, SZA and Willow Smith. “Keep You Close” follows Fanta’s solo EP Project RED and the collaborative single “Could Be The Problem”. It’s one of our favourite singles this month, and we’re really excited for what happens next for this pair.
Stefanie Michaela – Let Me See the Real You
Stefanie Michaela’s “Let Me See the Real You” is an excellent cinematic pop single: polished, direct, and a genuinely strong follow-up to a stunning debut EP
“Let Me See the Real You” follows Turning Pages, Stefanie Michaela’s debut EP, and takes a direct line on authenticity and vulnerability as its subject. Vocally it’s great, and the euphoric vibes really work here, supported by production that’s modern and cinematic. The track sits happily in the electronic pop and indie pop space, giving it a lovely danceable feel but this one will also work on the radio. The hook is the standout of course, and it shows an artist who clearly understands how to build a song around a specific feeling.
Michaela is a Los Angeles-based pop and R&B artist and a mother of five, including two sets of twins. She came to songwriting through the specific pressures and perspectives that shape a life lived at that scale, and the resilience and self-discovery that run through her work are rooted in that experience rather than borrowed from convention. “Let Me See the Real You” is a stunning pop indie single, and we can’t wait for more.
Pocket Lint – Amethyst Cameo
Pocket Lint’s “Amethyst Cameo” is a brilliant piece of new wave indie pop: a heady mix of synths and vintage drum machines confronting obsessive creativity
“Amethyst Cameo” is taken from the album Wunderkammer and is about the compulsive need to make things. Its origin story says something about that compulsion: in summer 2020, Mark Heffernan spent three weeks on his balcony teaching himself to carve cameos from amethyst by hand, accumulating piles of purple dust and increasingly sore hands before finally abandoning the project and going into the studio instead. It’s quite the backdrop to a song, and the results are wonderfully vibey. It’s all hazy synths, guitars and vintage drum machines, sitting in the lineage of The Smiths and synth-pop with enough of its own character to very much sit in it’s lane. The production is a dream too.
Pocket Lint is the solo project of London-based Mark Heffernan, whose approach to songwriting centres on slices of music, specific moments rendered in sound rather than narrative. The album reflects that instinct on a larger scale, assembling a cabinet of curiosities from Heffernan’s genre-hopping influences and self-taught instrument work. “Amethyst Cameo” is a real banger, and we’ll be digging into the rest of the album this weekend. Essential stuff.