Chasing Fridays: kuru, mishmish, World I Hate Q&A, more

Nothing of my own to promote at the top this week, but I will promote something by someone else: my dad, who now has a weekly radio show on WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio stream. My father, a.k.a. DJ Cal Zone, is as obsessed with music as I am, as evidenced by a record collection that far surpasses 10,000 discs at this point – and that doesn't even include all the CD's, cassettes, 8-tracks, and phonograph cylinders that line my parent's living room walls. In the early 80s, he was a locally renowned college DJ at Buffalo State's WBNY, and after working in the music business in the second half of the 80s – for CMJ and various indie labels including Celluloid, where he promoted De La Soul's seminal 3 Feet High and Rising to college radio – he exited the volatile music biz to raise me and my siblings.

He was off the airwaves for most of my childhood, save for a few reunion sets during WBNY's alumni weekend events, but a few years back he finally returned behind the decks on a weekly capacity, presenting his show Magic Records on Rochester's local freeform radio channel WAYO. But late last year, he was connected with some bigwigs at WFMU, the country's premier freeform radio station, which he'd been a loyal listener of since before I was breathing, who enlisted him for their coveted online stream, Give the Drummer Radio. Last week, Cal Zone did his debut show on WFMU, which you can listen to here if you want to know more about the stock I come from. My dad and I have pretty different music tastes, but also a fair amount of overlap (Stooges, power-pop, krautrock, Yo La Tengo, Ty Segall, etc. etc.), but we share the same enthusiasm for left-of-center gems, and I aspire to one day have the breadth of musical knowledge that he does.

One thing you won't hear about on Magic Records is cloud-rock. You'll have to read Chasing Sundays for that shit, which brings me to this week's newsletter. I wrote about four terrific singles – some shoegaze, some digicore, some ear-core, and some art-battered electropop. Then, I praised the scathing new album from Milwaukee hardcore heavyweights World I Hate, and interviewed their vocalist Hal Crossno about everything the band are doing to stand out in a crowded hardcore zeitgeist. If you're not giving me a measly $5/month to read all of the thoughtful Q&A's I'm publishing on a weekly basis, which are loaded with music recommendations, colorful anecdotes, and fascinating tidbits....I don't know, you're missin' out! Make it right.

mishmish - "Bayez"

Just when I was beginning to question if the shoegaze revival had already peaked, just when I was ready to concede that the best we'll hear this decade has already arrived, just when I was preparing to feel grateful for what we were given, and hopeful for what we might receive again sometime down the line, I heard "Bayez" by mishmish. This is what I was hoping shoegaze 5.0 would lead to. This is why there's no amount of grunge-gaze septic runoff – and lord knows there's a lot of it right now – that can ruin shoegaze's most productive decade since Creation was in business. This is what the last 20-plus years of electro-gaze intermingling has been building towards. This is it: shoegaze's future has become shoegaze's now.

The debut single by mishmish, a Syrian-Palestinian artist based out Amman, Jordan, is shoegaze put through the P.C. Music ringer. Aqueous rumblings of distorted guitar topped with diced-up, pitched-up, glitched-out, simmered-down vocals that chitter and trill like robotic birdsong. For years now, I've been yearning for someone with mishmish's agility in the DAW to figure out how to meld elysian auto-tune with ethereal guitar noise, and she's finally done it. And she makes it sound easy. And she calls it "cloud-rock," which I disagree with because this is not faint, phantasmic pop with a mild cataracts blur. This is a chromatic overload of suffocating distortion suffused with cryptic, calligraphic murmurs. This is shoegaze – at its best, at its boldest, at its most angelically beautiful.

Bassvictim, Worldpeace DMT - "Year of the Dragon"

I know I just wrote about Bassvictim's new EP ?, which I like quite a bit, but it seems like the track they released a couple days prior, "Year of the Dragon," has been trampled over by that larger project's rollout, and I won't stand for that. "Year of the Dragon" is probably the best song I've heard all year. If I were to select one song that encapsulates what "indie music" sounds like in 2026, I'd choose this one. The collaboration with fellow London laptop twee-ker Worldpeace DMT is exactly how I want my pop to sound right now: shambling, pitchy, precious, over-enthused, underfunded, completely unsuitable for mainstream consumption, but also harboring the dormant potential for such an unlikely crossover, should the tides of virality shift in these guys' favor.

Something I really like about this song is that it's obviously a team effort. Bassvictim's Maria Manow yelps the staccato hook – "drop! that! top! for the radio star!" — with the exaggerated, kidlike excitement of someone doing the B-52s at karaoke night. She's undoubtedly the song's fireworks, but they wouldn't be capable of detonating without Ike Clateman's insistent bassline or Leo "Worldpeace DMT" Fincham's fizzy acoustic guitar strums or any of the surrounding ruckus; grinding electrical malfunctioning in the left channel, a trickling glockenspiel counter-melody in the center, and is that a fife I hear tweeting warmly during the swelling bridge? "Year of the Dragon" sounds ancient, mystical, pure – everything Bassvictim themselves aren't, but that their music increasingly, and delightfully, is.

cratre - "cannonball 〇〇〇〇〇〇〇〇〇〇〇〇〇〇〇〇〇〇〇〇〇〇〇〇〇"

As Chasing Sundays noted many months before the fashion mag industrial complex caught on, ear are one of the coolest bands in the world right now, and their ongoing run of sold-out shows look like future "I was there" moments in the making. I'm happy for ear, and I'm also happy to be living in a post-ear world where artists are beginning to resemble them. During a recent Nina binge, I stumbled into this obnoxiously titled song by this artist cratre, who tags his music "laptop twee" and sounds a helluva lot like ear in a way I find endearing. "cannonball" has the maximalist/minimalist mish-mashing ear perfected on "Theorem," where the vocals are passively muttered like whispers in the back of a library, while the surrounding production oscillates between spartan bloops and spongey synth deluges. File under: blue-light bangers.

kuru - "FW19"

It seems like kuru is about to have his breakout moment. The digicore rapper is gearing up to drop a new album, Backstage Hologram, that'll feature guest spots from xaviersobased and Lucy Bedroque, both of whom sit at the forefront of the underground rap gestalt. I've been keen on kuru since his lockdown-era digicore days, and his last two projects, 2024's Re:Wired and 2025's Stay true forever, were among my favorite net-native rap releases of their respective years. I'm happy to hear that he sounds suaver and more confident than ever on his hot new single "FW19," a jerky monologue where kuru eschews the emo vulnerability of Stay true forever to instead brag about his money-making abilities. His featherweight trills are still his music's defining feature, but here they're employed with more energy and focus than I've ever heard him give on a single track. You can tell that he wants fame, and you can hear that he's earned it.

Chasing Down

Hal Crossno
of
World I Hate

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

For as terrible as current events were just a couple years back, the threat of Total Nuclear Annihilation still seemed unlikely. A vestige of the cold war era when all the foundational d-beat bands were angrily – and reasonably – bemoaning the looming threat of world-ending atomic warfare. But in 2026, all thanks to Israel and the U.S.'s deranged war of aggression against Iran, the threat of nuclear annihilation is back in the gulping throat of the public consciousness, and World I Hate have packaged those fears into the most prescient hardcore LP in recent memory. Total Nuclear Annihilation follows the Milwaukee band's viciously heavy (and equally doomy) 2023 album, Years of Lead, except this one's even nastier and more unrelenting than the last. The songs are fast and fuming, but also sufficiently bulky for the modern hardcore hatemosher.

If you want a politically conscious alternative to C4's nihilistically scornful Payback's a Bitch, another hardcore LP that lands right in that 2000s Boston zone of Think I Care/Mind Eraser worship, then Total Nuclear Annihilation is that record. For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I had a substantial e-chat with World I Hate singer Hal Crossno, who talked about being on the periphery of capital-"H" fest-core, their antagonizing ethos, the technological inspiration behind their anti-imperialist lyrics, all the Wisconsin hardcore bands you need to know, and much more. Read the full interview below.