Chasing Fridays: fakemink, Feeble Little Horse, Slide Away L.A. recap, more

At last, I've concluded my Slide Away 2026 journey. I am exhausted, but I am immensely grateful for the opportunity to travel to every date of the fest and meet so many awesome people – bands, fans, industry peeps, and more. I already can't wait for Slide Away 2027, but in the meantime, I have a shit-ton of work to do. I'll be putting the finishing touches on my forthcoming shoegaze book over the next month, and I'll have much more info to share about that in the not-too-distant future. I'll also be ramping up the amount of writing I'm publishing on Chasing Sundays. Late last year, I was running a lot of longform interviews in addition to my weekly Chasing Fridays columns, and I'd like to regenerate that pace this summer and beyond.

In order to do that, I need my paid subscribers, so please consider subbing for just $5/month to help keep the lights on over here. I'll have a few bigger pieces dropping June, and I'm continuing to put a lot of time into these weekly dispatches, including the subscriber-only Q&A's. I can't stress enough how much valuable information is sitting behind the Chasing Sundays paywall for all of you to enjoy, so please do smash subscribe so you can access all of that good stuff. This week, I don't actually have a Q&A. Instead, I have a shit-ton of writing. I recapped Slide Away L.A., reviewed the new fakemink and Feeble Little Horse records, and spotlighted an underground hardcore gem. Chasing Sundays type shit.

Slide Away L.A. recap: 5/29 and 5/30

And just like that, Slide Away season is over. I traveled with the multi-generational shoegaze fest to Brooklyn, Chicago, and finally L.A., where the celebrations concluded last weekend with two nights at the historic Hollywood Palladium. Like in the previous cities, the audiences at Slide Away L.A. were young, rowdy, and predominantly fixated on the festival headliners, Hum. I had a great time seeing Ovlov on back to back nights, who I hadn't caught live since 2017, and who now feel like a properly respected cult act with a deep discography of rippers to pull from. People were stoked on them and the band were visibly moved by the warm reception.

The openers for each day, Seko and Terraplana, also really impressed me, and I knocked around in the pit for Nothing on both nights. That was was a blissfully chaotic time, especially on Friday when some teens sparked cigs during the quiet opening tracks and then struggled not to burn people while the pit subsumed them during "Vertigo Flowers." All great Nothing shows are a little dangerous, and that was a great one. But let's just get to the beating, buzzing, humming heart of this year's Slide Away. This was a shoegaze festival spotlighting many great bands, yes, but for most attendees it basically functioned as a reunion for Hum.

I know this because I asked dozens of people in line at each stop who they were here for, and "Hum" was almost always the answer. And also because I watched – or even heard from backstage, with no visuals needed – how the crowd roared every night when Hum came out. A roar that didn't cease until they finished their encore after midnight and the house lights flipped on. As I wrote in the previous two Slide Away dispatches, I don't really like Hum. I realize how important they are and I love many of their musical offspring and I can obviously admit that they have some bangers in their catalog. But I've never gotten over that hump of, "eh, they're fine."

For most nights of Slide Away, I either skipped their set or watched some of it from the back, admiring the enthusiasm of the audience and acknowledging the weight of their riffs and wishing that my indifference would melt away. And then it finally did. On the final night of Slide Away, I slithered down into the crowd and let their opening song, "The Summoning," batter my senses while my eyes were mesmerized by the slow-motion wave crashing on the screen behind them. The only production Hum had for these shows was National Geographic-style b-roll of oceanic opuses consuming coastlines. I thought the visuals were a little lackluster at previous Slide Away stops, where I felt their performances needed some more pizazz to make up for the aging band's fairly placid stage presence. But by the end of their set that night in L.A., I felt differently.

For the last few songs, I perched on a railing all the way to the right of the stage, directly parallel with the barricade so I could watch every crowd surfer pour over the barrier, dash out the narrow security moat, and then disappear into the raging sea of fans. The youthful audience overpowered Matt Talbot's achey mutters during the quiet intro of "I Hate It Too," one of Hum's biggest songs. And once the distortion kicked in, it was an endless cascade of teenagers swimming atop heads and rolling into the arms of sweaty security guards, who kindly handed water bottles to all of the staggering bodies who appeared on the verge of collapse.

The frothing crest of the 4,000-person maw was an uncanny mirror to the gigantic tidal waves lapping behind Hum. The crowd surfers didn't stop coming until the band exited for a few moments before returning to encore with "Stars," which brought the sea beyond its boiling point again. I don't care to revisit You'd Prefer an Astronaut for the dozenth time because it'll never rival that experience. Simply hearing those quasi-shoegaze/post-grunge quakes won't provide the physical spectacle of that bubbling crowd. Nor will it re-spark the joy I felt watching those – mostly teenage – fans throw themselves into Hum's music with a reckless passion. There's polite indifference and then there's outright ignorance. I'll probably never love Hum's music, but to deny the life-affirming power of that Slide Away crowd would be irresponsible.

fakemink - Terrified .

I realized a few weeks back that I don't give a fuck about fakemink. And then I realized last week that I actually do, even if he's an obnoxious blowhard with an unearned ego and a grating tendency to cloak his White Claw party music in pseudo-intellectual pretense. The reason I threw my arms up at fakemink was because he went on this demented rant after his shoddy Rolling Loud set where he insisted that none of his haters can comprehend the many nuances in his high-brow performances. "Watching people with the musical imagination of drywall explain performance to me, world building to me, tension to me, when every single thing I do is intentional," fakemink wrote. "Every movement is intentional. Every uncomfortable moment is intentional. Some of you are confusing discomfort with bad art."

Although I'm typically charmed by celebrities who talk down to their fans, and am generally supportive of more intention and care being put into rap shows of the Rolling Loud variety, nothing fakemink has ever done warrants that sort of defensive posturing. fakemink, the English rapper-producer who crashed into the mainstream last year with a series of big internet singles, makes hedonistic party music that flits between rage-curious jerk rap and glassy-eyed electro-pop (indie sleaze or whatever). His big breakout single, "Easter Pink," was one of my favorite tracks of last year, and his hook on EsDeeKid's even more popular 2025 single, "LV Sandals," is endlessly infectious.

Basically everything else fakemink did in 2025 was either inoffensively unmemorable or almost awesome, but not quite, and then his EP from earlier this was a complete huff of hot air. I thought it was so boring, so lifeless, so redundant that I no longer felt a pang of anticipation for his long-awaited new album, Terrified ., and once he made those self-aggrandizing comments post-Rolling Loud, I completely wrote him off. And now I'm writing him back on. Terrified . is not a perfect record and it's not an album that comports with fakemink's flattering interpretation of his own artistic products. Terrified . is a fun, dark, sexy, narcissistic, boorish, hilarious, and frequently irksome album where fakemink leans into his best and worst instincts.

At the record's highest points, fakemink has never sounded better. The first proper track, "All Eyes On Me," finds his pitched-up chirp gliding atop synths that buzz and growl with the fluctuating tonality of a lawn mower engine. The noise is kinetic enough that its minor key chord progression never grows tiring, and fakemink's boasts about banging Vogue models and celebrating his newly achieved access to Hollywood wealth sounds both cheerful and cursed. Terrified . is supposed to be a caricature of fakemink's time partying in L.A. and all the grossness and glamor that defines that city's debauched culture. However, the record is less of a wallflower gonzo report than it is an uncritical exhibition of fakemink's assimilation into the world of celebrity excess.

That's not a bad thing because fakemink is very good at making sex, drugs, and money sound both desirable and corrupting. But fakemink would like to think that Terrified . is more than that. That it's some kind of high-concept thriller with a subliminal storyline, and that all of the limp tension in the multitude of tedious interludes is actually fakemink's four-dimensional genius at work. These spoken-word interstitials, which amount to roughly a quarter of the album's runtime, feature a woman's voice reciting gibberish over damp ambience that sounds like stock music for video game cut scenes. They completely hijack the record's slick flow for no reason other than fakemink probably thinks they're a worthwhile exercise for his screenager audience to suffer through.

These sophisticated gestures break up an album that also contains a song titled "Rétard Angel," which features such brilliant prose as, "You're the retard angel I never deserved/You're the retard angel I see in my dreams." Uh huh. fakemink is clever within the bounds of candied dance-rap. "I make money off your bitch cause I live in her playlist," is an incredible quip he smirks out in "Playlist .", and the way he says, "Got the baddest bitch alive dancin' for me naked" in "All Eyes On Me" is deviously charismatic. There're enough oddly pleasing vocal ticks and primally urgent beats on Terrified . for me to certify fakemink's hype as valid, but don't confuse his horned-up trash-rap for anything more than bottle service bangers funded by your girlfriend's pregame playlist. And now my playlist, too.

Feeble Little Horse - bitknot

I'm still kind of shocked that there's a new Feeble Little Horse album hovering on my phone screen right now. For a while, I wasn't sure when – or if – we'd ever get it. The Pittsburgh band's 2023 sophomore album, Girl With Fish, was an instant hit that remains one of the decade's best indie-rock records, and then a month after its triumphant release they abruptly scrapped their tour and went on indefinite hiatus. The band re-emerged the following year to play Coachella, but still weren't touring consistently and the mystery surrounding their absence was growing. In 2025, we got one new song and a bunch more shows, but still no new album. And now – poof! bitknot, released late last month with only a week's notice, is here. And I think I like it!

bitknot is different than the last couple FLH records. To the extent that they were ever a shoegaze band (I'd say they were), this is not a shoegaze album. There are a few fuzz-blasted songs like "Doorway" and "Guts" that are anchored by the band's familiar appeals: crackling distortion, blown-out drums, Lydia Slocum's semi-audible murmurs. But most of this album, which whizzes by in a swift 25 minutes, is more subdued and articulate than shoegaze allows for. Slocum's sticky, snotty hooks are a little more cryptically suppressed on these songs, and Sebastian Kinsler's glitchy production takes a more prominent role in the arrangements. Feeble Little Horse are no longer a scrappy noise-pop band with a winking appreciation for "internet pop." The best songs on bitknot are wholly indietronic.

"Upside Down" is a bouncing cloud-rocker replete with chipmunk soul samples that remind me of Jim Legxacy, and auto-tuned singing from both Kinsler and Slocum that give the music a suave iciness. "Dior" also employs light auto-tune during the motorik final verse where Slocum's staccato "oh-oh-oh-oh"'s are threaded with the type of snaking synth lead you'd hear in a Grandaddy song. These subtle digitizations aren't reinventing FLH's sound, but rather revamping it so that they now sit somewhere between ear and TAGABOW, as opposed to Pavement and TAGABOW. Although little choices like the woodwind sound effect in "Poison" and the juddering outro of "Doorway" retain the band's signature quirks, the slacker sweetness of Girl With Fish and Hayday is missing on bitknot.

The record doesn't have a "Freak" or a "Chores" in its tracklist. There aren't any earworm choruses that invite finger-point scream-alongs, and Slocum's sassiness, both lyrically and verbally, is toned down. "Shopping" is a song I saw them debut at a house show last year, but the track's hook – "And would you fuck with these shoes?/I wanna look just like you" – went much harder live than it does on recording, where Slocum's vocals are lacking her usual pizazz. Closer "DMT" ends with shredded screamo yells, but by that point in the album's flow, the urgency feels too little too late. If that same verve was sprinkled all throughout its tracklist, then bitknot would be dangerously close to surpassing the high bar set by Girl With Fish. Instead, I think this is a very solid third LP that will likely shed some older fans but probably also pick up some new ones. Me? I'm staying put.

Humiliate - Earthly Bounds

The dudes shooting and editing my Slide Away videos, company car, put me onto this band Humiliate a couple weeks back and I think they're dope as fuck. The NYC group's Bandcamp bio makes it very clear that they're pulling from Candiria, the kings of jazzy, unexpectedly groovy hardcore, who are also influencing similar upstarts like Unmoved and Savage Primal Impulse. The company car guys heartily agreed with my suspicion that djent is about to seep its way into hardcore, and I definitely hear some of that in the crooked rhythms and noodly transitions that permeate Humiliate's 2025 EP, Earthly Bounds.

This is heavy hardcore made by very competent musicians who are obviously versed in all sorts of music ("Buh..." is a straight-up ambient techno track) yet also understand the science behind a perfect mosh part. Personally, I'm not exactly thrilled for "hardcore" bands to start covering old Born of Osiris songs at DIY shows, but a band like Humiliate inch in that direction – a couple of these bridges remind me of Animals As Leaders, for instance – without any of the corniness that's inherent to djenty deathcore. This is just technical hardcore with a moshy edge to it, and I'll gladly take another handful of bands like Humiliate and Unmoved over another wave of Sunami clones.