Chasing Fridays: EsDeeKid, georgie, katmoji Q&A, more

Allow me to begin with a couple programming notes:

1) I'm going on vacation with my family next week and will be taking a rare week off from publishing an edition of Chasing Fridays. I only miss one or two weeks a year, and this is one of those weeks. I'll be back with a new issue on July 17th.

2) In case you missed it, earlier this week I published my list of the 25 best albums of 2026 (so far). The first 15 albums in the list are organized alphabetically, while my top 10 are ranked from 10 to 1. You have to be a paid Chasing Sundays subscriber ($5/month) to read my top 10, and I encourage you to do so. In addition to paywalled lists like that, you'll get access to weekly Q&A's, regular longform interviews, subscriber-only playlists, and more. My paid supporters make this site possible, and I appreciate each and every one of you.

The 25 best albums of 2026 (so far)

“I want something for real.” You got it.

Chasing SundaysEli Enis

Now, let's get down to business. For this week's Chasing Fridays, I wrote about a phenomenal new album by an artist very little people know outside of Rochester, NY – though not for long. I also raved about the new @ single, said my piece on EsDeeKid's new track, and plugged some weird internet shit that needs to be heard. Lastly, I did an interview with rising indie rapper katmoji, who blurs elements of emo-rap and twee-pop into a highly addicting elixir of cloudy cuteness. This is one of katmoji's first Q&A's and her responses were both generous and thoughtful. I learned a lot and you will, too.

georgie - Scratching At the Door Until It Opens and Running Outside and Rolling In The Grass

There's something gurgling in the murky waters of the Genesee River. My home city of Rochester, NY has always had a modestly vibrant indie scene, but right now there are three acts in particular who should be putting the Western, NY locale on the national map. There's Kitchen, who you should already know, and then Bugcatcher, who you should definitely get to know, and now there's georgie, who you absolutely need to know. The band helmed by songwriter Claire McClusky appeared on a split with Kitchen and Bugcatcher a couple years back, but they just released a staggering new album last month called (take a breath, it's a mouthful) Scratching At the Door Until It Opens and Running Outside and Rolling in the Grass. It's a really special record.

Though georgie's music sits congenially alongside Kitchen's sprawling slowcore and Bugcatcher's rustling indie-rock, their sound is expansive in ways I certainly didn't expect. Scratching compiles the solemn twee of prime-era Epoch folk (Florist, Told Slant), the living, breathing post-rock of Caroline, the string-laden slowcore of Carissa's Wierd, and then stitches that all together with threads of musique concrète, spoken-word prose, a rap verse by Rochester MC Shola, and a hodge-podge of other vocal samples. It's a heftily ambitious album that amazingly never topples under its own weight, not only because of McClusky's astute attention to arrangement and flow, but also because of the trembling sincerity in her lyrics and delivery.

There's a psychic and spiritual heaviness to these songs that isn't tempered for the sake of chicly tender posturing. georgie tackles themes of gentrification, sexual assault, the decaying social fabric of our cities, and fantasizing about direct action – including violence – against the ruling class with an unbridled earnestness that spares no pangs of discomfort. The sonic motifs she's assembling here, typified by lilting tempos and unobtrusive vocals chirped with a hushed intensity, aren't utilized to convey placid serenity, but to repurpose McClusky's simmering rage into a more productive form of artistic expression. georgie's music doesn't so much wield softness as power as it does confront the limits of quietude in a world where peace, liberty, and the very prospect of a decent life are facing extinction.

In the album's quivering climax (the one-two punch of "What's Legal Now?" into "Shame"), McClusky gestures frightfully at the thoughts she's too scared to speak aloud and frets over the shame she guilty keeps locked up tight. Perhaps those are the record's titular scratches – anxieties that claw and scrape until the veins finally burst. But then what's the release? The promise of fresh air and green grass on the other side? That arrives in the pointedly brief 56-second closer, "Swimming," where the idea of "living with nothing to hold onto" is depicted through a life-reaffirming dip in the water. It's a tranquil blip that's buried under foreboding helicopter growls ("Limits"), cacophonous noise jams ("Distance, Rationalization, Intoxication") and prickly raps about class warfare ("The Propaganda and the Pesticides").

This isn't picnic music. This isn't self-centered twee-folk. I think georgie wishes it could be, but as this album urgently argues, there are far more pressing matters at hand. Maybe one day we'll have something sturdy to grip onto, but not yet.

EsDeeKid - "RockWave"

My feelings on EsDeeKid have been intensifying lately. On the one hand, his 2025 debut, Rebel, is an album I've listened to more times this year than basically anything that actually dropped in 2026. What initially struck me as a shallow yet stylized dispatch from the bubbling U.K. rap renaissance has gradually become one of the most reliably gratifying club-rap records I've heard in a minute. At the top of the year, I proclaimed that EsDeeKid is several tiers more compelling than his U.K. peer fakemink, and while that remains true, especially since my enjoyment of fakemink's debut album diminishes each time I return, EsDeeKid hasn't exactly had a banger 2026. The singles he drizzled out since Rebel, including his dreadfully sloppy Yeat collab "Made It on Our Own," have been let-downs, and I don't think his new song "RockWave" is very good either.

I liked Rebel specifically because it was an upbeat, coarse, and clattering rap record with its own regional flair. It didn't sound like EsDeeKid was aping anyone from across the pond, and it certainly didn't mimic the increasingly boring rage-rap tropes that have now saturated the Rolling Loud "underground." "RockWave" isn't a full-on rage song, but its booming, brawny beat – produced by Ken Carson/Destroy Lonely collaborator Bhristo, no less – would slot seamlessly into Playboi Carti's rage capstone MUSIC. Like EsDee's bland February single, a mid-2010s Future rip called "Omens," "RockWave" is a very clear stab at the now-universalized Atlanta trap sound. That broad milieu of post-Gucci Mane music encompasses most of my favorite rap ever made, but it's just not a style that suits EsDeeKid's artistic personality.

I don't think "RockWave" would nag at me so much if it wasn't such a forced crossover into metallurgic rock music that artists like City Morgue were doing (compellingly at first, and very quickly cornily) nearly 10 years ago. And what Yeat did a couple years back by sampling Superheaven's "Youngest Daughter." Maybe EsDeeKid really is a Rock Dude and the viral Crowbar song he posted on Instagram earlier this week wasn't just an opportunistic grasp at aura farming. Frankly, his authenticity in this area wouldn't matter to me if the song was any good. "RockWave," with its grinding guitars and bludgeoning bass, is dense and domineering but it doesn't sound dirty. It sounds uncannily clean, and it's decorated with cheesy "I'm not a rapper" posturing, like when EsDee boasts that he's "the first kid on this rock wave" – a full six years after Carti's "Rockstar Made" spawned whole a tsunami of "rock"-coded trap. A sea swell that I hope "RockWave" gets drowned and forgotten under.

@ - "Autosmile"

The first time I heard this song, I had the same thought that I did when I first heard Sword II's "Even if it's Just a Dream": "Wow, what a staggering level up from a band I was previously cool on." The Philadelphia guitar duo @ (pronounced "at") dropped a cultishly appreciated album a few years ago, Mind Palace Music, that Pitchfork's Nina Corcoran wisely compared to Animal Collective's Sung Tongs. At that time, there were a few bands (Bruiser and Bicycle come to mind) who were beginning to root through the archives of early-2000s freak-folk, which is a sphere of music that I appreciatively nod toward from a distance yet rarely feel compelled to approach. @'s new song "Autosmile," on the other hand, is reeling me in at warp speed.

The central draw here is obviously the ebullient chorus, which sprawls upward and out like the gleaming horizon of an endless sunset. According to a press release, "Autosmile" is a breakup song, but the line, "I don't know how I belong to you/but I do somehow," resonates with me as being achingly romantic. Especially the way Victoria Rose sings it – brightly and with sturdy conviction – as the song's energy builds during its magnificent second half. In some of the verses there are twinges of the misty cloud-rock in the style of Ivy Knight and Quiet Light, but "Autosmile" is far too vascular and chromatic to get shuffled into that stream. This is trend-less, drum-less psych-folk at its most affecting, addictive, and fucking awesome.

stag and wren - all (4 Means Stability)

I already know I'll be burnt out on this type of music by this time next year, but for now, I'll take as many great artists channeling ear and ideasforconversations as I can find. stag and wren is seemingly the project of one individual, and their debut album turned up in some random playlist I was browsing last week that I can no longer find on Spotify. No matter, because I doubt anything in that mix will hit harder than this delightful clutch of twee-ish electronica that sounds like Dan Deacon and The Books slathered in zoomer anomie.

The vocals in "kissing my knees" replicate ear's Jonah Paz doing his Sacred Holes rap voice (wow, what a sentence), but the rest of all (4 Means Stability) is mostly instrumental and occasionally quite bizarre. Closer "a proper exit" is a bulbous sound collage dotted with pitch-adjusted baby babbles that's already worn out its welcome after my first couple play-throughs. However, the hits on here – "L.O.V.E." and the title-track, especially – are thrumming electro-pop chunes that are somehow both seductive and sexless. These songs aren't doing anything new, they're just really damn good.

Chasing Down

Kira Onodera
of
katmoji

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

katmoji is one of my favorite discoveries of the year. The young tweemo rapper grew up in Tokyo and currently lives in New York City, where she's been recording a boatload of material that first landed on my radar via her charming late-2025 debut Into the Tall Grass. That album was a collection of soft, poignant emo-plugg with beats assembled with ukulele strums and 2010s pop-punk hits. Since then, her music has morphed into a more fluid hybrid of languid emo-rap and sundazed laptop twee. Her recent EP card games, co-produced by the trendy underground beatmaker cranes, includes more complex beats and more instances where katmoji experiments with her papery murmur. I think she's on the brink of making something generationally special.

For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked katmoji about the state of emo-rap in 2026, the inspo behind her unique fashion choices, her pop-punk past, living solo in Tokyo, collaborating with Kuru, and much more. Read the full interview below – and the 60-plus others in the archive, with a new one added each week.