Chasing Fridays: Bassvictim, laptop twee, Empty Shell Casing Q&A, more

Call it "drawing connections," call it "near-schizophrenic pattern recognition" – whatever it is, that's just how my brain works. This week, I had a lot of fun thinking about yet another new music trend that's been bubbling throughout the underground in 2025. The website Nina, which has become my go-to destination for discovering new internet music, published a piece about "laptop twee" last week, and the article tied together so many loose threads that have been flapping around my noggin for the last few months. In fact, I found the contents of the piece so inspiring that I used the majority of this week's Chasing Fridays to expand on their laptop twee thesis, and explain how it relates to one of the coolest records I've heard in a long time, Bassvictim's Forever.

In addition to that long essay, I also let a bunch of nu-metalcore mavericks mob my newsletter this week. In other words, I interviewed all six members of Empty Shell Casing for this week's Chasing Down Q&A, and it's definitely the liveliest and laugh-out-loud funniest edition of that column yet. Check that all out below, and also check out this interview I did with the metal website Lambgoat (pictured above), in which I talk about my background in writing, my recent Emmure essay, and why I think metalheads deserve a more principled media ecosystem.

Bassvictim's Forever, laptop twee, and dodging boilerplate nostalgia

Over the weekend, I was listening to the new Bassvictim record, Forever, and began thinking to myself, "Damn, some of this actually sounds a lot like...early Girlpool?" I'd never noticed the whimsically childish twee throughline in the music of Bassvictim, a British electroclash duo who I'd previously located in the "indie-sleaze"-meets-EDM milieu alongside Snow Strippers, Frost Children, and The Hellp. I think Bassvictim's first two mixtapes, 2024's Basspunk and 2025's Basspunk 2, were promising contributions to that ongoing wave of recession-era electro-pop mishmashing, but I think the duo really found their own identity on Forever. An album that I predict will be regarded in two years' time as a crucial lodestar for the oncoming twee revival.

The re-emergence of twee is not a Chasing Sundays original pitch in the sport of trend forecasting. However, it is something that I've been subconsciously cataloging throughout my 2025 coverage, and after reading a brilliant articulation of the trend over the weekend while playing Forever on repeat, I felt like my third eye had been pried open wide. My eureka moment was spurred by this Nina article in which blogger/musician friends& laid out their manifesto for "laptop twee," an emerging regeneration of twee that's being spearheaded by internet-native bands like ear, cootie catcher, Worldpeace DMT/Rowan Please, and Amigos Imaginarios. Even Frost Children's 2023 album Hearth Room – a warm, dulcet break from their usual sleaze-pop stunts – fits into friends&'s laptop twee playpen.

friends& describes laptop twee as such: "when a traditional twee pop song is produced in a way that feels distinctly post-hyperpop." They theorize that a generation of "Zoomers raised by Wilco moms" are about to throw "every guitar-based 'Best New Music' from 2005-2012" into a blender and reinterpret that era of twee pop within an "internet music" (my words) framework. My understanding of what friends& is putting down is this: what if Belle & Sebastian were really into Bladee in high-school? What if The Radio Dept. handed their unmixed album over to Jane Remover and let her finish the job? What if someone who played The Moldy Peaches and The Dare during the same college radio set started making music in their dorm room?

It's not so much the inclusion of contemporary instrumentation into twee, as Kero Kero Bonito famously did in the late 2010s, that makes this feel like a new development. Rather, "laptop twee" – especially the music of ear and Worldpeace DMT – is characterized by the open-source philosophy of the songwriting and production. Where the production is the songwriting, and any sound that's ever existed, any cut or paste you could ever imagine, is available to try on your computer's advanced DAW. The self-proclaimed twee band ear, who I've been obsessed with for months, treat twee the way those cloud-rock artists treat indie-rock: not as a structurally sound pillar of guitar-bass-drums Rock Music, but a pliable musical sensibility that can, and should, be manipulated with glee.

Moreover, "laptop twee" is the product of a specific cultural moment. One when the mere rediscovery of older twee among younger listeners has morphed into an actual creative reawakening. Worldpeace DMT and Rowan Please's seminal The Velvet Underground and Rowan sounds like 100 gecs remixing the Juno soundtrack. Screamo bands like 300SkullsAndCounting and Cash Only Tony's are threading twee pop into their cacophonous blitzes. And a violent, irony-damaged, fakemink-adjacent electroclash duo like Bassvictim are, as friends& notes, addicted to posting Kimya Dawson songs on their Instagram stories.

I don't think Bassvictim fit neatly into friends&'s definition of laptop twee. But Worldpeace DMT is one of 12 accounts that Bassvictim follow on Instagram. Another is Gud, the Swedish Yung Lean producer whose new rap album as Rooster, Rooster Slipped, is playfully macabre and woozily tuneful. Bassvictim's music exists somewhere in between those two contemporaries, and they've never sounded more joyfully damaged than they do on Forever. A surrealist playground where springy, kidlike twee vocals rattle and rave atop caustic, hedonistic dance beats.

The tonal dissonance of a druggy, edgy electronic duo revealing their love of earnest, tender twee songs (through posting Kimya Dawson) is actually a terrific personification of Bassvictim's refined sound. It's the musical equivalent of the most evil person you know posting cute animal memes on Twitter with the caption, "me." Those emotional contradictions, which Forever so cunningly exploits, feel especially prescient during a year when the Labubu – a grimacing, devilishly cute little demon – has become our cultural avatar. I think Forever taps into that confluence of toy-ish innocence and monstrous guile in a way no other 2025 album has. And much like a Labubu, Bassvictim's music is sure to garner one of two polar reactions: either eye-rolling disgust or inexplicable attraction.

There're a handful of spectacular songs across Bassvictim's first two projects, but Forever succeeds by dropping most of the RBF club-rat schtick (Fcukers do that better anyways) and reveling in a weirder, more nuanced style of wholesome discordance. Ike Clateman's production is atmospherically indebted to the likes of Clams Casino and Salem, but rhythmically inspired by the distorted quakes of early 2010s dubstep and the wacky psych squelches of Dan Deacon. Maria Manow sings in a fractured dialect of yippy shrieks and ethereal deadpans, and her strong Polish accent only enhances the peculiar verbal quality of her alternately cheery, dreary sing-songs.

Snow Strippers, a duo Bassvictim are frequently compared to, communicate their chic nostalgia through a dull, deadpan recitation of phrases that were first coined 15 years ago by Crystal Castles and Skrillex. The conceit of their music – "Remember this? Yeah, we're making this cool again" – is easily digestible and just as easily disposable. With Forever, Bassvictim sound like they're translating their library of millennial music texts into their own form of sonic Pig Latin. It's not just a regurgitation of reference points, but a re-imagination of what 2006 might sound like if 2012 and 2025 preceded it.

In "Grass Is Greener" – a song with whiffs of The Go! Team, Sleigh Bells, and Black Dresses – Manow sounds like ​she's singing while actively bouncing on a trampoline. Her blissful exclamations are so buoyant, her voice so strained from excitedly yelping the mush-mouthed hook, that she nearly sounds out of breath. On the hazier, cloud-rappier "Dog Tag freestyle" Manow fires off an exuberant taunt – "you're a little bitch, you're boring" – with such bratty glee that you expect her to follow it with a raspberry sound. The nursery rhyme-esque "Grow Up!!!" is the one that reminded me of Girlpool vocally, but production-wise, Clateman sounds like his nose was deep in The Books. "Mr. President" is constructed with the same Rube Goldberg machine quirkiness, except that tune is bolstered by the kind of buzzing, distorted synths that 2hollis might reach for.

To the extent that you could call Forever "indie-pop," and I do think that's a more fitting classification than "electroclash" or even the band's own preferred category, "basspunk," Bassvictim are harkening back to a time when indie-pop wasn't so sullen and self-serious. Specifically, the period between Animal Collective's Feels ​​and Tune-Yards' W H O K I L L (2005-2011) that Worldpeace DMT is so invigorated by, and which Bassvictim are filtering through their own lexicon of abrasive dance music. There's plenty to shake your ass to on Forever (the witch-housey "Wolves Howling," the clattering "27a Pitfield St"), but the most gratifying moments arrive when Bassvictim are lost in the twee sauce.

Indeed, Forever's greatest strength is what I enjoy so much about their laptop twee contemporaries: the record never sounds like an exact rendering of its inspirations. The entirety of Forever is coated in a filmic haze that pervades much of the production on this year's U.K. underground (fakemink, Feng), and aligns with Bassvictim's obsession with iPhone 5-era camera quality that so many current rappers have folded into their aesthetics. Between the overbearing bass on "Its Me Maria" and squealing synths on "I'm sorry, King," Bassvictim always keep my ear grounded in the decade of rage-rap and hyperpop. I'm never lulled into thinking I'm hearing some undiscovered gem from 2007, or revisiting my dorm room pre-game anthems from 2013. That type of boilerplate nostalgia won't last long. Bassvictim want to last Forever.

Chasing Down

JAKAREE, BEN, ZAIN, ZATCH, ADEN, CHRISTIAN
of
Empty Shell Casing

Chasing Down is a Q&A series with artists, friends, and others of good taste.

Empty Shell Casing are the only "nu-metal revival" band that I like. As I wrote earlier this year, the Fort Worth, Texas sextet – who describe themselves as "thug metal" – are one of the most refreshing and exciting young groups in all of heavy music. They're a bunch of hardcore and metalcore weirdos coming out of Texas's burgeoning DIY scene who aren't just doing a stale, uninspired retread of Korn and Slipknot. Empty Shell Casing's ballistic energy, eclectic music tastes, and swagged-out fashion amount to a genuine re-imagination of what rap-metal could be, and their new single, "Grasp" – one-half of an EP out next week – is their most infectious track yet. If you're not paying attention to ESC...you're dusty.

For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked all six members of Empty Shell Casing about nu-metal, the Texas hotbed they sprung from, their influences, and the direction they took their new music. Read the full interview below.

So many bands have tried to do "nu-metal revival" over the last decade, but in my opinion, you guys are one of the only bands doing that sound in a way that feels authentic and fresh. What's the ESC secret sauce? 

Jakaree: It’s genuine. There’re no gimmicks, we’re not trying to be anything. It’s just the music we all fuck with and want to do it in the dopest style ya know? Nothing that we do for the band feels forced. We’re all best friends. We all have our individual personalities but we all fuck with the same stuff so everything we do is pretty natural ya know? 

Ben: I think contemporary metal production will kill any band’s finesse that’s trying to sound rap-metal.

Zain: We’re all best friends who enjoy hanging out outside of music. I think that helps a lot, it makes band practice more fun, there’s more passion for the music because you want to play what you like and come up with your bros. It also helps we’re all kind of tapped into a shared energy. Nobody tells each other how to dress or what to do musically everybody shows up and does their own thing and it’s like intuitive, which is dope.

Zatch: If you want to make romantic music; you gotta work your sexy. If you wanna make chaotic music; you gotta be crazy. If you wanna make dope friends hanging out having fun thug rap metal then...you do the math.

Aden: The swag is the sauce. Most of those bands don’t dress as hard as we do.

Christian: A lot of these bands will try to wrap you into thinking that they are Jesus Christ and that their music is like...some perfectly executed genre pushing shit that was curated completely void of any outside influence, when in reality they just shit out Errorzone part 500. (side note: Vein is dope).

I think people are over the stone cold expressionless “nu metal core” bullshit, and that it’s always gonna be easier for people to connect with more candid and emotional music. More passion, and more swag. 

The Texas scene you guys are coming out of is one of the most mindblowing scenes in the world right now. Why are you guys built so differently down there?

Jakaree: community. love. hardcore. Ozone. <3

Ben: It’s an amalgamation of all different kinds of music, since we’re kind of isolated from other areas geographically. We have the blessing of kinda not fitting in anywhere, so we can kinda be thrown many different kinds of bills and apply ourselves because we just want people to move up and jump.

Zain: There’s tons of love down here, coming up as a band there was nothing but love from other bands around us, there was always this silent competition of who’s shows popped off harder or who’s music hit harder. But it was between all the bros and I think that pushed all of us to be our best. Big shoutout to I Promised the World and Ozone.

Zatch: Could just be the fact that we have a larger pool of talent, if you took a landmass the size of Texas. In the northeast, I think they would have a similar level of talent and swag, but it definitely gets concentrated with populated cities that are close to each other like DFW.

Aden: The scene right now is bigger than ever.

Christian: I think the overall theme of the Texas scene right now is you just have to do it different. Kids making bands are starting to want to stand out, and they realize they can’t just be I Promise the World and they can’t be Since My Beloved. Everybody’s doing it under the same umbrella and all for the same love of hardcore, but it’s kind of like an arms race for who can make it the most interesting.