Chasing Fridays: Fleshwater, Scarab, Aunt Katrina Q&A, more

I've been sinking into a nice groove the last couple weeks to escape the summer heat: reading in the a/c, listening to Jan Jelinek's Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records on repeat, and going to local hardcore shows where I get all sweaty while preserving my pasty-white complexion. In between all that, I've been using the slower July release schedule to catch up on music I missed from the last couple months. This week, I wrote about brand new drops from Fleshwater and Scarab, and then plugged a few sleeper gems across the Chasing Sundays spectrum: ambient, noise-rock, hardcore, and shoegaze. Lastly, I did a fun little Q&A with Aunt Katrina's Ryan Walchonski, who made one of the most enduring indie-rock releases of the year.

Fleshwater - "Jetpack"

Fleshwater's new album has been one of my most anticipated releases of 2025. Not because I'm expecting to love it, but because I think Fleshwater are a fascinating case study for all of the shoegaze-related trends I've been covering throughout the decade thus far. The band came from the hardcore scene (three of their current members are in Vein, arguably the tightest, and inarguably one of the most cult-adored, hardcore bands of the 2010s) which further stabilized the hardcore-to-shoegaze bridge that's been shoegaze's primary thoroughfare over the last 15 years. They sound like Deftones – and recently toured with Deftones – and are probably the most direct beneficiary of Deftones' Gen-Z rejuvenation. Moreover, Fleshwater's organic internet virality and savvy aesthetic branding have made them both recipients and purveyors of what shoegaze sounds, looks, and feels like in the mid-2020s.

If there's one defining feature of shoegaze this decade, it's bands that challenge the very definition of what shoegaze is. And in that sense, Fleshwater might be more emblematic of the current shoegaze epoch than even more "traditional" shoegaze bands like Wisp, Julie, and TAGABOW. Whether or not Fleshwater consider themselves a shoegaze band (I doubt they do) is irrelevant. Their passionate young fanbase have embraced them under the modern shoegaze umbrella, and in my mind, any success or failure they experience is relevant to the way scholars like myself will examine this era of shoegaze history years down the line.

So, is this new song "Jetpack," the lead single from Fleshwater's sophomore album, 2000: In Search of the Endless Sky, any good? Like most Fleshwater songs, I think it's fine. There's a lot going on: dueling vocal melodies, swooshy guitars, convulsive guitars, rugged bass, showy drum fills, drippy keyboard flourishes, defeatist cries, agitated peaks, moody valleys. Something's happening during every restless moment, yet the song never coheres into a conclusive whole. For four minutes, I feel like I'm staring through binoculars that refuse to focus on the subject in front of me. There's so much imagery but the greater picture is never visible.

Very little about this song – a blurry guitar maelstrom here, a weary vocal lamentation there – registers to me as shoegaze, although the quaint English windmill setting and flashy Jazzmasters in the music video wink to several of the genre's signature motifs. To me, the most obvious reference point is Code Orange's 2023 flop, The Above, a brash conglomerate of mid-90s grunge and prickly alt-metal that includes several, far more effective versions of the sound Fleshwater are aiming for with "Jetpack." Alas, I suspect Fleshwater's innate coolness (their visual swag is hard to deny) will carry "Jetpack"'s boring busyness across the finish line that Code Orange fell short of. What that says/doesn't say about shoegaze's trajectory going into the decade's second half will be assessed once the album drops.

Scarab - Burn After Listening

In the seconds after Scarab's set at FYA earlier this year, I pronounced to my friend that they're the best hardcore band running. I knew at the time, as I know now, that I wasn't merely drunk on the intoxicating sight of a great crowd reaction. I had seen Scarab four times prior to then, and every set was more viscerally moving than the last. By the fifth time, the Philly band had entered a higher – or perhaps lower, infernally speaking – plane of consciousness. It was hard to imagine the band sounding angrier than they did on their demo, but their live show made the demo – and its equally misanthropic, possibly even angrier follow-up EP – sound cheerful. Through playing more shows and writing more songs, Scarab could've worked through the anger on those early releases and, whether they wanted to or not, shed some of the vitriol that oozed uncontrollably from singer Tyler Mully's pores.

That hasn't happened. Mully hasn't fixed shit. Scarab have never sounded more scornful to be alive than they do on Burn After Listening, their ferocious, wrathful, contemptuous debut LP. In the especially spiteful invective "Everybody in the Way," Mully spends the first minute mowing over his enemies, but the most impactful phrase arrives when he takes a step back to gawk in abject horror at the world he bears witness to: "What a mess, what a terrible place," he laments as the guitars ring out, and then an incinerating mosh part clears the wreckage. All hardcore music expresses some degree of pain or anger, but I can't think of any modern bands whose blood boils at Scarab's internal temperature. This isn't theater. This isn't artistic exaggeration. Heed Scarab's warning: Burn After Listening or risk being engulfed in their searing flames.

Starr 67 - Wyoming Good Luck (Demo)

I've been seeing this band pop up on Instagram stories of the tapped-in. The one song I had previously checked out suggested that Starr 67 were a crude slowcore band, but this eight-song demo from last October suggests otherwise. Wyoming Good Luck is a blown-out amalgamation of Unwound-ish post-hardcore, Oh Sees-ian psych-punk, Lightning Bolt-y noise-rock, and other varieties of acidic electronic fuckery and craggy bedroom-pop whimsy. While each song deviates stylistically from the one before it, the whole project is unified by a tattered production quality that sounds rusted-over like a bicycle that's been left out in the rain for months yet miraculously still functions. I like hearing Starr 67 crunch the derailer as they shift from one corroded gear to the next.

Charbel Haber, Nicolas Jaar, Sary Moussa - Crashing waves dance to the rhythm of the broadcast journalist revealing the tragedies of the day

Crashing waves dance to the rhythm set by the broadcast journalist revealing the tragedies of the day, by Charbel Haber, Nicolás Jaar and Sary Moussa

5 track album

Ruptured RecordsOtto Reitano

I'm a Nicolas Jaar super-fan, but I somehow went unaware of this record's existence until two weeks after it dropped. Since catching up, it's quickly become one of my most-played albums of 2025. Crashing Waves... is a collaboration between Jaar and two Lebanese ambient artists, Charbel Haber and Sary Moussa, who've both released music on Jaar's label Other People. The four-part record was recorded live in Beirut during last August, amid intensifying Israeli attacks against Lebanon, and the music's mournful tranquility captures both the gravity of the political struggle and the resilient dignity of the Lebanese population resisting against Israeli terror. It's a beautifully sentient record that's among the most musically and emotionally engaging releases I've heard all year.

By My Blood - Clearfield Demo

I've been on a beatdown hardcore kick lately, and no state produces a finer product than Pennsylvania. This two-song demo from Western PA upstarts By My Blood has all the assets I look for within this idiom of fight music. Production that sounds like it was tracked in an old shed where the rattling tools on the wall made it into the mix. A snare that pings like a sledge hammer connecting with buried rocks. Guitars that roar with the deafening howl of a gasoline chainsaw. And vocals that are so apoplectically hateful that the frontman can barely annunciate his words through the muffled filter. This band have hype in Pittsburgh right now and I think if they release another demo or EP with this exact combination of lo-fi scrappiness and demonic vitality, then we can begin seriously discussing a nascent PA beatdown renaissance.

Highspire - Crushed

Remember shoegaze? Remember Ride's Nowhere? Remember spacious, well-equipped rock songs that sprawl out into the ether and then snap back to earth with the mesmerizing elasticity of a rubber band? Well, in case you forgot, Highspire are here to jog your memory. On their understatedly lavish new LP, Crushed, the Lancaster, PA band root through the artifacts of shoegaze's yesteryear – decades before TAGABOW's crumpled chip back abrasiveness and Nothing's ground-rumbling ploughs – and come away with a lovingly nostalgic take on the golden years of Creation Records.

Of the many bands who've attempted this type of pastiche over the last 20 years, what I love about Highspire is how natural and unforced their sound is. Instead of spending a disproportionate amount of time laboring over the exact tones and chord shapes, Crushed songs like "She Talks in Maybes" and "Crushed" are just well-written tunes draped in shoegaze's lackadaisical garb. The foundations of these songs are imbued with the floaty stoniness of the Jesus and Mary Chain and Spacemen 3, while the exteriors – the advanced pedal-stomping, the supple vocal harmonies, the bleary riffs – pinpoint the gentle fuminess of early Slowdive, mid-period Lush, and peak MBV. Nostalgic shoegaze often sounds desperate to me. Highspire sound delightful.

Chasing Down

RYAN WALCHONSKI
of
Aunt Katrina, ex-Feeble Little Horse

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

Aunt Katrina's This Heat Is Killing Me is addictive. I already wrote about the D.C./Baltimore band's sophomore album on two occasions, but I keep returning to the breezy, 22-minute indie-pop smorgasbord because it's simply too well-crafted to resist. Aunt Katrina began as the solo offshoot of Feeble Little Horse co-founder Ryan Walchonski, who issued the band's chipper, fizzy debut, Hot, in late 2023. Since leaving FLH last year, Aunt Katrina, now a six-piece band, have become Walchonski's full-time project, and This Heat Is Killing Me marks a significant musical evolution. The homespun tweeness of Hot has matured into a clearer, more full-bodied sound that accentuates the band's lilting pop hooks and strengthens their Elephant Six-ian quirks.

For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked Walchonski about his love of Wilco, finding Pinback, distinguishing Aunt Katrina from Feeble Little Horse, the meaning behind This Heat Is Slowly Killing Me, and more. Read the full interview below.

What was the last song/album you heard that opened your eyes to an entirely new-to-you approach to making music? 

The song is probably “Up” by Rob Crow (of Pinback), but maybe Pinback broadly. I found Pinback after Connor Murray (of Crafted Sounds) kept pestering me to listen to them. I was really into this Baltimore band Lean Tee (more on them later) and Connor said if you like them. you would like Pinback. I ignored his pestering for several months until it got too overwhelming.

When I first heard Pinback, it was like a lightbulb went off. Pinback was one half of the equation for the music I aspire to make (the other half largely being The Radio Dept.). It’s interesting as an artist to have a vision for music and suddenly find a band who was so (seemingly) effortlessly mastering that same vision but 20-plus years earlier. The catchy vocals, arpeggiated guitars, killer drum and bass combos.  “Up,” to me, is a song I wish I could’ve written.

Who're your three favorite DC/Baltimore bands at the moment? 

1. Nourished by Time: (does this count?) I think they just moved to New York, but they’re from Baltimore. Genre-bending, novel, catchy. 
2. Tosser: (conflict of interest, Eric from Tosser is in Aunt Katrina). Just some of the best guitarwork I’ve ever heard. It’s loud and complex and, most importantly, fun.
3. Lean Tee: Catchy, interesting guitarwork, fun live set with great musicians.