Chasing Fridays: Frost Children, Wednesday, Nyxy Nyx, more

Eagle-eyed Chasing Sundays readers might've noticed something fishy in the above headline. That's correct, there's no Chasing Down Q&A in this week's edition of Chasing Fridays. I was on a 16-week streak since I first launched that interview series back in May, and I finally had one fall through last minute that I was unable to recover from in a timely fashion. So it goes. I persist, and hopefully you'll still be able to read that interview when it lands on my desk next week.

In the meantime, never fear. This edition of Chasing Fridays is still packed to the brim with all kinds of critical goodies. I've got my rather dense thoughts on the new Frost Children album and where I see that duo within the broader "electroclash" zeitgeist. I went in on new records from Nyxy Nyx, C4, and The Goin' Nowheres. And then I jotted some thoughts down on three songs with varying degrees of quality. Plenty to read, plenty to hear. Onward.

Frost Children - Sister

Five years ago, I wrote an article about how 100 gecs and some of their hyperpop comrades were calling back to late-2000s scene-core pop in a bizarre way. While people my age who had Good Taste in high-school might've heard Sleigh Bells in 1000 gecs' anarchic flurry, my ears perked up at the trace elements of 3OH!3, Breathe Carolina, and even Brokencyde in their sound. An epoch of snotty electro-pop artists who dressed for Warped Tour parking lots but were musically in dialogue with where mainstream pop was at the time (dubstep, Kesha, Lil Wayne, etc.). I thought it was fascinating that a critically adored band like 100 gecs were referencing music that was so uniformly derided by critics just a decade earlier, and in 2020, I thought gecs' music presaged an imminent reappraisal of that scene-pop milieu.

In retrospect, I think my analysis was spot-on, if a little bit premature. 100 gecs did do a song with 3OH!3 later in 2020, but they dropped most of the Emo Raver >⩊< elements on 2023's 10,000 gecs, leaning more into big beat nu-metal than Attack Attack! dubstep remixes. It's gecs' post-hyperpop offspring – their Frost Children, specifically – who've taken the mantle of straight-up sounding like Breathe Carolina. Not on every song, but on enough to make me do the Leo DiCaprio point and shout, "rawr!" Frost Children emerged a couple years ago from the same "Dimes Square"-adjacent NYC scene as Blaketheman1000 and The Dare. Their breakthrough 2023 album, Speed Run, felt like a transition between hyperpop and what people now call "indie sleaze" (a modern version of what people once called "electroclash"): edgier and more aesthetically chic than 100 gecs, but too post-ironically brainrotten to jibe with LCD Soundsystem's white label 12" sophistication. ​

Frost Children's new album, Sister, benefits from a zeitgeist that didn't exist when their last album dropped. Since Speed Run, artists like Ninajirachi, Snow Strippers, Bassvictim, and The Hellp have all risen to prominence by trafficking in similar mish-mashes of late-aughts electro-pop and early '10s EDM. I like those other acts, and though I didn't like Speed Run at all, I was hopeful that Sister would make sense to me within this newly formed post-hyperpop context. I think Sister is a more refined and interesting record than Speed Run, which was bratty and obnoxious and almost clever in its Cool Kid reinterpretation of brutally uncool music from 15 years ago – but never actually clever enough to hold my interest. I think there are clever moments on Sister. Unfortunately, they're outweighed many duller ones.

The main issue I have with Sister is the same issue I have with the new 2hollis album. The music that Frost Children are trying to subversively reimagine – Zedd, Martin Garrix, "#SELFIE"-era Chainsmokers – through a quirked-up modern filter doesn't actually sound fresh or subversive. Sister, for all its efforts to blend mainstream millennial EDM-pop with slightly weirder, more abrasive sub-genres (Hot Topic emo, synth-punk, electroclash), still sounds nearly as generic and tacky as the dregs it's "winkingly" referencing. "Position Famous" opens the record with a boastful synth-punk chant about chasing fame and putting imitators to shame. The buildup swells with the ticking intensity of a bomb vest countdown, but the eventual drop is a limp, pedestrian house beat that sounds like the commercial score for a hotel waterslide.

Most of Sister suffers from that fundamental flaw: Frost Children simply aren't the zany radicals that they fancy themselves to be. Intriguing ideas are routinely bungled by boring executions. For instance, the nasally emo-rapping and neon wubs of "Falling" sound like Sophie remixing a Cobra Starship song that was produced by Porter Robinson. Somehow, Frost Children found a way to make that wacked-out premise feel forgettable. "WHAT IS FOREVER FOR" sounds like they plugged "Dillon Francis type beat" into YouTube and then yawped over it like The Ready Set. Once again, Frost Children's implicit absurdity is an empty threat. I wish the song actually sounded as garish and/or offensively catchy as it posits to be.

"Wait...they did WHAT?!" is the response that Frost Children so desperately want their audiences to cry. Instead, I found myself mumbling, "wait...what did they do?" while struggling to recall almost any of these tracks by the time the next one began. The moments where Frost Children contend with the high-velocity thrills of Ninajirachi, the woozy hooks of Bassvictim, the madcap writing of The Hellp, or even the empty calorie dopamine rush of Snow Strippers are few and far between. The urgency of "ELECTRIC"'s grating refrain is at least matched by a house drop that fucking bangs, and the glitchy 3OH!3 worship of "CONTROL" is sporadically amusing. My favorite song is the title-track, an outlier that builds from an acoustic emo ballad to a giant sheet of juddering noise-pop. It's bold, messy, earnest, caustic, sexy – everything Frost Children promise Sister to be yet so rarely deliver on.

Nyxy Nyx - Cult Classics Vol. 1

I'm kind of stunned by how amazing this Nyxy Nyx album is. The long-running Philly band are pioneers of the dreary, down-and-out shoegaze sound that's become synonymous with the city they hail from. TAGABOW ringleader Doug Dulgarian considers them a crucial influence. They did a split with Midwife, released music on Exploding In Sound, and feature current/former members of Spirit of the Beehive, Knifeplay, and Sun Organ in their lineup. However, despite their prolific output and numerous accolades, they've always remained a secret handshake among the heads of Philly-gaze. I know I wax rhapsodically about many 'a band on the Julia's War roster, but Cult Classics Vol. 1 is genuinely one of the best records the label has ever released.

Real Life, the album Nyxy Nyx dropped last year (and just put onto streaming earlier this year), is also amazing, but Cult Classics Vol. 1 is better. This is the band's first album to be recorded in a proper studio, and they make full use of those resources. Not to make their songs cleaner, but to make this batch of doomy, dirgey sludge-gaze sound as gravel-crushingly heavy and angelically pretty as it deserves to be. "they called u -Wild-" is a piano-laden duet with Midwife that sounds like Neil Young processed through the entire Kranky catalog. "I don't know much about luv" reminds me of the new Friendship album crossed with the first – and only the first! – Spirit of the Beehive record. Loping, busted-heart slowcore adorned with haunted guitar moans and despairingly beautiful lines about "cruel, cruel love."

Then, Nyxy Nyx do what I've been pining for other bands in this ongoing 'gaze wave to do: write long-ass songs. The two standouts on Cult Classics Vol. 1 are the seven-minute "endless hex" and the eight-minute "hold me (i'm shaking)." Towering cathedrals of scuzzy noise that beckon us listeners up, one pick-axe chisel at a time, to their majestic peaks and then generously provide us with a peerless view. I suppose the sound Nyxy Nyx achieve with Cult Classics Vol. 1 isn't a world away from the wistful doom-gaze of Cloakroom and Greet Death. Except Nyxy Nyx are more concerned with delivering aching emotion than beefy riffage, and there's an intangible urban smudginess to their approach that feels distinctly different from any other "doom-gaze" band I've ever heard. I know Nyxy Nyx are manifesting their own minimization with this record's title, but these songs should be treated like genuine classics – sans the Cult.

The Goin' Nowheres - Gag Reflection Record

The Goin' Nowheres are a band led by Mat Cothran of Coma Cinema and Elvis Depressedly. Cothran loves to start and end projects that are all variations on his signature sound, and this is supposedly the third and final Goin' Nowheres record. The two prior albums under this moniker, 2020's Curse Rotted Record and 2024's Hot Moonlight Record, are two of the weaker releases in Cothran's multi-moniker output, whereas the Coma Cinema album he dropped back in June stands among his best work ever. This week's Gag Reflection Record, my favorite of the Goin' Nowheres material, is something of a B-sides and rarities comp. It reworks six songs from a YouTube-only EP the band released in 2020, offers up a stack of unheard B-sides from Hot Moonlight Record, and also boasts a few newly-written tracks.

Humor, despair, survival: A long talk with Coma Cinema’s Mathew Cothran

The grand delusions of an indie-rock auteur living in exile.

Chasing SundaysEli Enis

The thing that distinguishes The Goin' Nowheres from Cothran's other solo projects is that this is technically a band with two other members, drummer Paul Eliott and guitarist Timothy Patrick. Songs like "Cackling (Gag)" and "Underneath the Ugly Moon (Reflection)" are noisier and livelier than most of Cothran's typical fare, and it's fun to hear him and the boys in ear-tattering rock-out mode. Elsewhere, Gag Reflection hits all the Cothran marks: morbidly funny folk-rock ("As Written on the Tomb of the Earth"), surrealist chillwave ("Stained Glass in the Mud"), cosmically poignant indie-rock ("Cartoons"), and brain-leaking insanity ("Feeling Down at the Gun Range"). "Karen Carpenter's Curse Rotted World" is the best of the bunch: tragic, psychedelic, gorgeous, pained, uncanny. At Cothran's greatest, few are better.

Wednesday - "Townies"

I'll echo what almost everyone on my feed is saying about Wednesday's new album Bleeds: it's great. They did it again. Smart, funny, scorching, human. (Revisit my Chasing Down Q&A with Karly Hartzman from a couple months ago if you want to know more.). Right now, my favorite song on Bleeds is "Townies." To me, this is the platonic ideal of a Wednesday song. It starts in one place and ends at a totally different one. The hook is on a loop in your head by the three-second mark. Hartzman sings her visceral scenes of teenage debauchery with that rickety tunefulness. And when the chorus buckles and splinters under the weight of those honking, skronking gales of distorted guitar, she lets her voice flap raggedly like a porch flag convulsing in hurricane winds. Whenever Wednesday fully give into themselves like that, that's when the magic happens.

C4 - Payback's a Bitch

A selection of song titles: "Bomb the Scene," "Cry About It," "Bring Back the Hate."

A selection of lyrics: "Stay away from me / kill yourself." "Every second I'm awake is a second I hate." "You think I'm sorry? I laugh when you cry/ Expect remorse? You can try suicide."

This is one of the most hateful hardcore records I've ever heard. And not hateful in a fascist way. Hateful in the psychotically anti-social, fantastically violent, fuck you AND your mutha way. Just like how Marvin Gaye and The Beatles transmitted the almighty power of love in their music, C4's music radiates the potent intoxicant of hate. An identically noble creative pursuit that explores the other, equally pervasive though so often misrepresented, side of our nuanced human condition. Hating shit is natural. Feeling apoplectic rage at things you see online is normal. Daydreaming – not actually plotting or seriously considering, but harmlessly imagining – about committing acts of barbaric cruelty against others is part of what makes us mortal.

Channeling that anger – reining in that savage impulse – by playing and/or listening to hardcore music alongside other people who also sometimes (or maybe in C4's case, all of the time) feel that burning hatred is what makes us social creatures with the capacity for camaraderie and, through that, empathy. Listening to C4's new album Payback's a Bitch with my windows down and my fist pumping and my face gnarled into a permanent grimace of joy makes me feel alive in a way that's truly incomparable. The unrepentant fury in the vocal delivery, the cartoonishly diabolical misanthropy in the lyrics, and the savvy craftsmanship of the riffs amount to some of the greatest, most affecting – perhaps the most emotionally moving, in its own way – music I've heard all year. Hatred is life-affirming. C4 animates my soul.

fawn - "Paper Thin"

Texas shoegazers fawn put out a split in 2023 with another band called cement diver that I included in my big 'ole AOTY list from that year. I wasn't sure if either band were even active anymore, and I somehow missed that fawn had signed to Sunday Drive Records last month. They have a new EP called Paper Thin out today, and I was listening to the title-track a bunch this week. It's an absolutely gigantic shoegaze tune that has the widescreen breadth of Slowdive's most intense songs, the crushing guitar girth of fellow Texans like Glare and Trauma Ray, and the sparkling synthiness of 2000s Japanese 'gazers like Walrus and Cruyff in the Bedroom. Whether you're a Creation Records purist or someone who got into the genre via Wisp and Whirr TikToks, "Paper Thin" will make you point and proclaim, "that's shoegaze." The good kind.

Jutes - "Paradise"

Did you know that Demi Lovato is married to a onetime aspiring basketball star turned emo-rapper turned Deftones-core pop singer named Jutes? Me neither. Until this week, when my morbid curiosity got the best of me and I clicked some links that most people wouldn't dareth click. That's how I ended up listening to "Parasite," a self-described "sex jam" where the guy who sounded like Mod Sun in 2021 pulls out his best Sleep Token voice in the verses and sounds like Chino Moreno for beige Chino wearers in the chorus. Back in my day, normie rockstars like Jutes used to make raunchy "sex jams" like Buckcherry's "Crazy Bitch." Gaudy and offensive, sure, but at least the music had blood in its veins. Now, guys who are aiming to be Chris Daughtry for Zoomers are forced into making faux-sensitive nu-djent-pop birdshit like "Parasite." This is bad in all the ways Amira Elfeky is bad, except worse.