Chasing Fridays: Knifeplay, a gud comp, Madman Q&A, more

This week's Chasing Fridays dispatch is a little different. Well, not too different. I still wrote about a bunch of new releases – from Knifeplay, swallowtail, and a guy named qwizzz – and I still interviewed an artist I like for the Chasing Down Q&A. That artist this week is Michael McMahon of the Pittsburgh hardcore band Madman, who are probably my favorite hardcore band on earth right now. What's different is that that Q&A is FREE for anyone to read this week. All you need to do is subscribe to Chasing Sundays at either the paid or unpaid tier and you can read it. Which means all you need to do is plug in your email and then get reading.

I'm making this week's newsletter free for two reasons. One, Michael Madman's answers were extremely thoughtful, moving, and entertaining to read, and I want as many people as possible to get to see them. Two, those thoughtful, moving, and entertaining answers are representative of the interviews that I publish on Chasing Sundays EVERY SINGLE WEEK, and for just $5/month you can read all of those interviews – including the 70+ stacking up in the archive – whenever you please.

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Knifeplay - "Love Song"

Knifeplay might, at this point, be the most underrated band of the entire shoegaze revival. That's not to say they're the least popular, because they certainly have their shooters, and have been a known quantity in the scene for the better part of a decade. However, I think that the gulf between the quality of their output and the quantity of said shooters is more egregiously wide than that of any other band in their class. But hopefully not for much longer. "Love Song," Knifeplay's spellbinding new single, is a 10-minute epic I first heard them unveil at Slide Away 2024, when they played a decidedly quiet, fuzz-free set at the noisenik shoegaze festival. It gave me chills then, and many more now.

Are Knifeplay still a shoegaze band? Sort of. The Philly-based sextet began as one of many dark, dysphoric groups who populated the city's basement scene in the late 2010s, but even the seedy scuzz-gaze of 2019's Pearlty, their fans' favorite album, was imbued with a lacey elegance that foreshadowed their eventual overhaul. With 2022's elegiac Animal Drowning, Knifeplay polished their mildewy exterior with gossamer string arrangements and even more weightlessly spectral croons, creating a sound that was both overpowering and tender. Since then, Knifeplay have added another voice to their ensemble (singer, multi-instrumentalist, and engineer Johanna Baumann) while simultaneously paring back their sound.

"Love Song" embodies the next, and quite possibly the best, evolution in Knifeplay's development. Everything about their sound is slowed down, not just the lagging tempo, but also the steadier playing and more focused, less shakily blurry production. TJ Strohmer's lyrics are closer and rawer. The climactic build from the song's beginning to end is as grand as Knifeplay have always been, but the dynamic shifts in between are more severe and restrained. The track's forlorn prettiness is steeped in the lineage of tear-trickling slowcore – Red House Painters, Low, Mojave 3 – but "Love Song"'s payoff, when the guitars swirl upward into a twister of bleeding distortion and cosmic pain, retains the snowblinding might of their shoegaze days. Oof, there's those chills again...

Various Artists - GUD LUCK !!

I had fun trekking through this 30-song comp by the Milan label gud serben, who released the spectacular Lembrete album that I reviewed last week. I don't think I recognized a single other artist in this collection, which mostly consists of cerebral electronic music, some unnervingly high-speed and some placidly stretched-out. However, don't let GUD LUCK !!'s third song, Motel Cecil's irritating folk-punk sendup about great dope, throw you off the album's enchanting scent. Just skip that one and start with Lembrete's "marè-cheia," a Salem-like transmission with clattering hi-hats and muzzy shoegaze contrails.

From there, you can cruise uninterrupted for the next hour-and-change, but if you want to jump around, I'd recommend Alice V's gaseous ambient drone, "Sunlight," which serves as a nice counterweight to Andy Loeb's rambunctious club deconstructions on "Kinetic Etching." You can't skip out on Doppio Esilio's nail-bitingly contemplative "Before," and you definitely can't miss my personal favorite find, omis elegia's "stress," a foreboding latticework of streaky synths that evokes the tactile friction of running a sweaty hand down a wooden handrail. Rainer Monaco's "CONFAL" has bass quakes that literally make my eyes vibrate, and if you make it all the way down to Stef 5k's "Ho Perso Qualcosa Al Parco," then you're rewarded with a hypnagogic funk strut made for poolside escapades. Gud shit.

swallowtail - You're so Great

cleo walks through glass has had a busy year. The NYC musician released a couple great solo tracks, a clamorous indietronica album from their duo with Anna Heisterkamp, THE <3, and now a slightly less clamorous indietronica album with their new band swallowtail, the brainchild of cleo and NYC musician Maddie Breeden. All of these projects are a little bit different, but the common denominator is cleo's increasingly identifiable signature: brisk, bubbly electro-pop songs that are zonked and zooted from the disorienting effects of a witch-housey spell. Take "sometime soon," where crushed synths alternately flutter and sputter above a zombiefied drum thud, all while Breeden murmurs a depressed hyperpop musing about a party that just won't end.

The music sounds apathetic, clouded, a little more introverted than much of the indietronica flooding the East Coast underground right now. On tracks like the fractured laptop-twee of "Rabbits Run," cleo continues to sharpen their pop songwriting instincts, which Breeden's presence certainly amplifies. But I'm almost more intrigued by the You're so Great outlier "La La London," an abstract instrumental where swallowtail sound like if the Safdie Bros. hired Dan Deacon rather than Daniel Lopatin for their next OST. But then I hear the narcotic jingle of EP closer "Am I brave" and want more of that, too.

qwizzz - tender tangles

This is an interesting album that I'm kind of surprised no one on my timeline seems to be talking about? I don't know much about the L.A. musician qwizzz, but I do know that tender tangles is the kind of record that both my indie-rock readers and my "internet music" readers would get a kick out of. He's playing a style of dusky, psych-tinged, occasionally even a little gazey indie-folk that sometimes reminds me of early Four Tet, other times Spacemen 3, other times Kevin Morby? These are not reference points that I'd anticipate hearing on the same project, but qwizzz manages to weave those sounds together into a 30-minute record that's snappy, immediate, and intriguingly textured.

Chasing Down

Michael McMahon
of
Madman

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

It's good form to gas up your local scene by referring to your favorite act in town as "the best," but Madman might actually be the best hardcore band in the world right now. The Pittsburgh quartet started playing in early 2025 and dropped their demo later that summer, quickly grabbing the attention of Rebirth Records, who issued it on cassette. The demo was well-received among hardcore heads online, but it took a while for Madman to earn a reputation in Pittsburgh, where the scene is pretty rigidly divided between punk hc and metal hc – and Madman sit smack dab in the center of that spectrum. Throughout 2026, their shows have only gotten wilder, and the reception, both locally and nationally, to their new EP, Sickened, indicates that the world has finally gone maaaad.

These are quite honestly the four greatest hardcore songs I've heard this year. The riffs, the fury, the grooves, the craftsmanship, the ineffable aura that can only be captured on recording by genuine students of the game who love and understand hardcore better than 99% of the population ever will. Madman are the full package, and it's incredibly fucking exciting to watch their glow-up in Pittsburgh and beyond. For this week's Chasing Down Q&A I asked Madman frontman Michael McMahon about writing better lyrics, the best mosh parts in PAHC history, why Madman aim to unite, his favorite/least favorite undercurrents in hardcore right now, and much more.

This is a special FREE PREVIEW of Chasing Down that anyone can read by subscribing to Chasing Sundays below at any tier, paid or unpaid. Each week, I publish one of these Q&A's for paid subscribers only, which costs a mere $5/month. You get access 70-plus other interviews in the archive, exclusive playlists, lists, and other paywalled writing. Please consider subscribing to keep Chasing Sundays going.