Chasing Fridays: Discontent, god of war, Melaina Kol Q&A, more

It's been a big week for Chasing Sundays, so let's start with a quick recap.

1) On Monday I announced that my first book, "When the Sun Hits: The High-Volume History of Shoegaze", will be released March 30, 2027. Pre-orders are live right now, and I'd really appreciate if you supported me by picking it up! Pre-order sales are crucial for emerging authors to get their books in stores worldwide. The more pre-orders, the more likely it is that bookstores will stock it. If you have even a passing interest in shoegaze, I think you'll find something to like about this book, which you can read more about here. Thank you to everyone who's bought/said nice things about it thus far. It means so much!

2) Chasing Sundays published its first-ever contributor article the other day. My good friend Danielle Chelosky (Stereogum staff writer and prolific fiction author) wrote a heavily-researched deep dive into the vast trove of unreleased 2hollis music floating around the internet. It's a really interesting piece that not only shines a light on some of 2hollis's mysterious backstory, but also weighs in on the way artist lore is digested and dispersed on the contemporary internet. I highly recommend giving it a read.

And now for this week's Chasing Fridays roundup. I didn't intend to write about two different Julia's War releases in the same issue, but the label just so happened to drop two of the best records of the year on back-to-back weeks, and those albums – by god of war and Melaina Kol – encompassed the bulk of my listening over the last week. The other project I can't stopping listening to is the new Discontent double-single, which is a remarkable step-up for a death-metallized hardcore band that I've historically been casually warm on. After plugging my latest obscure electro-pop act, I get into a Q&A with Melaina Kol songwriter Logan Hornyak, and it's a good'n.

Discontent - Poised for Human Emergence

Earlier this year, I wrote about the spate of brutal death metal-influenced hardcore bands that have been flooding the hardcore zeitgeist since early 2024. In January, I saw many of these groups – Fatal Realm, Final Resting Place, Discontent, Cross of Disbelief – all play a fest in Pittsburgh, and I walked away feeling like I had witnessed a time capsule that future hardcore historians will look back on to understand what early 2026 was like. In my post-show report, I predicted that Fatal Realm are the band from that milieu who will most successfully outlive this ephemeral trend, whereas I felt like Discontent and Final Resting Place had reached the creative plateau of their murky, moshy BDM sound. I was wrong.

This week, Discontent dropped a new two-song single called Poised for Human Emergence that's totally changed my perception of what they're capable of. They're far and away the best tracks in the Northeast band's chameleonic catalogue, and I'd go so far as to say they're two of my favorite "heavy" songs of 2026. Discontent are no strangers to evolving their music. They began back in 2023 as an unremarkably straightforward heavy hardcore band, then revamped their lineup and sound in 2024 (still hardcore, but more sinister), and then changed their whole identity once again in 2025. Last year's Processing Upheaval LP was their big breakthrough: a hyperbolically brutal "hardcore" album with a ridiculously pingy snare tone and gleefully polarizing lo-fi production.

The record landed right when Discontent's sibling band, the slightly more popular Final Resting Place, were occupying the throne as hardcore's token Cool Guy Mosher band. Anything related to FRP and their Mass Casualty label/merch company was considered – and still is, for a lot of people – hype as fuck, and Discontent's relentless dancefloor fodder immediately struck a chord. I liked Processing Upheaval quite a bit when it dropped, but as time goes on, it feels more like a novelty experiment than an album with actual longevity. The artfully shitty production smothers the songs in gobs of muck to create a different textural resonance than other modern extreme-metal records, which is the same schtick that Final Resting Place have been running with for three years now. At this point, it feels played out.

Whereas FRP's recent debut album, Third World Tribunal, offers more of the same, Discontent sound newly reinvigorated on Poised for Human Emergence. The muddy production is gone and the added clarity not only bulks up their noticeably more complex instrumentation, but also translates the ferocious power of their frontman, whose vocal range steals the show. In opener "Human Emergence," he alternates between thunderous tyrannosaurus growls and terrifying pterodactyl shrieks with a stylish agility. There's actually a clean guitar solo in the middle of the track, which works better than I'd expect it to, and the array of grooves in its back-half are more vascular than Discontent have ever sounded. "Time Consumes" is also a beast: chuggy yet curvy in structure, foreboding yet flesh-ripping in sound. Fatal Realm have met their match.

god of war - molly picture

Few albums from 2026 have grown on me in the way this one has. god of war is the joint project of They Are Gutting a Body of Water mastermind Doug Dulgarian and Hooky, the Philly chill-gaze duo of Scott Turner and Sam Silbert. The first god of war album, 2023's Serotonin, is one of my favorite deep cuts in the Julia's War discography; a lightly corroded, occasionally shoegazey, mostly instrumental trip-hop album – of sorts – that felt more like an electronic offshoot of TAGABOW than a project with its own singular identity. I loved it because I tend to appreciate the more digitally frazzled side of Dulgarian's oeuvre, but I can understand why it didn't take on a life of its own in the way god of war's new album deserves to.

The first time I heard molly picture earlier this year I thought it was pretty good. Coming after TAGABOW's scorching and raw 2025 LP, LOTTO, it initially sounded a bit sedentary to my ears, but each subsequent listen has revealed the record's nuances and allowed it to unfurl into a truly extraordinary collection of songs. Unlike its predecessor, molly picture sounds like a natural hybrid of TAGABOW and Hooky's best attributes. The corkscrewed scuzz-gaze of Dulgarian's main band is more apparent on standouts like "Lindas" and "raphael Bad as shit," the former containing gushes of fuzz laced with jagged synth shards, and the latter jury-rigging a worn-down guitar lick to a springy beat that bounces like mud-caked shoes on a curbside mattress.

Serotonin had a bunch of cool sounds, but molly picture is a wealth of cool songs. In the slow-crawling "defeater," Dulgarian intones about a personified "she" (seemingly a drug) who "speaks in a visual braille," which is an incredibly psychedelic piece of imagery that I still haven't fully deciphered. Even the more instrumental songs on the Hooky end of the spectrum, such as the chipper "new deal," are littered with sticky melodies that provide more than just momentary aural pleasures. As their World Music beat tape from earlier this year demonstrated, Hooky are now operating at the top of their game as producers, and their chemistry with Dulgarian has grown tremendously since Serotonin. Right now, god of war is surely functioning as a side project to these member's other main endeavors, but that doesn't mean its any less essential.

novelty - Missing the World

I have no idea where this band novelty are from (I think London?) but I like where their music is going. Similar to the latest EP from NYC producer celebritysuicide, novelty's June EP, Missing the World, fuses the sounds of the contemporary electro-pop underground (waifish murmurs, blaringly loud saw waves, simplistic beats that glitch and stutter) with an 80s synth-pop palette. Some of it sounds like Salem without the Southern trap influence (so, spectral dream-pop, basically) and some of it's perky enough to land in "blog house revival" playlists and some of it sounds like a less debauched Bassvictim and some of it will surely register, to someone five years older than me, like a dozen different artists from the late 2000s whose legacy amounted to one Pitchfork track review. But compared to a lot of the music surrounding them right now, I think novelty live up to their name. Something just different enough to stand out.

Chasing Down

Logan Hornyak
of
Melaina Kol

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

Melaina Kol is a name I've been familiar with for a long time. If you were in the bedroom-pop trenches in the mid-2010s, scouring for anything that sounded like Alex G or Elvis Depressedly, then you probably stumbled upon the Nashville band helmed by producer-songwriter Logan Hornyak. Melaina Kol never took off in that world in the way some of their contemporaries did, and over the years the project has drifted in a more experimental and electronic direction. When I saw them play a house show with Her New Knife and Hooky at the top of 2025, they still sounded like a traditional slowcore band, but Melaina Kol's staggeringly amazing new album, Okay that's a great idea because if I do that then, is completely unbound from the confines of Bandcamp-era indie-rock.

The nine-song set features spellbinding production, tactile sound design, gossamer pianos, dewy falsetto vocals, and occasionally some acoustic guitars that are used in very un-guitar ways. I'm not even going to reference any similar sounding bands, partly because I think this record should be experienced without prejudice, and partly because I'm genuinely at a loss for what to compare it to. For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked Hornyak about moving out of bedroom-pop, being percussive with sparse beats, his electronic producer GOATS, the Nashville underground, and much more.

Read the full interview below – and the 60-plus others in the archive, with a new one added each week.