Chasing Fridays: Laptop twee roundup, brakence, novelty Q&A, more

First of all, I'd like to thank all the new subscribers who signed up after last week's free promotional issue of Chasing Fridays. This week's edition is back behind the paywall like usual, but I think you're getting a damn good deal. I decided to give myself a fun prompt and write about a bunch of laptop twee artists I saw grouped together in a prominent Instagram post. Then I wrote about why I think brakence sucks, and why I think the new 17sport single rules. Lastly, I interviewed novelty, a young London trio who just dropped one of the year's best indietronica songs. When they're getting posted on welcome.jpeg in six months just remember who blogged 'em first :D

Reviewing the Trending Raps laptop twee artists I've never heard before:

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I doubt all my Chasing Sundays readers know what Trending Raps is, but they should. The Instagram page is one of the better IG-based blogs that's dedicated to covering internet-native rap, electro-pop, and indie – the amorphous, and increasingly eclectic, sub-mainstream ecosystem that people under 25 call "underground," which is basically the internet music version of what "alternative" meant in the 90s and 2000s. Trending Raps posts newsy updates and streaming stats about artists in that orbit (2hollis, fakemink, Nettspend, xaviersobased), but they also post curated carousels that focus on specific genres and trends that are emerging from the contemporary substrata.

Last week, the nominal rap page posted a carousel about laptop twee, writing in the caption that "for anyone following the underground’s growing crossover between indie and electronic music, these are names to start digging into." I knew most of the artists on this list already, and have covered many of them on Chasing Sundays before any other blogs – IG-native or otherwise – were posting about them. But there were also a bunch of names on Trending Raps' list of supposedly crucial laptop twee figures who I didn't know, so I decided to tap in and give my first impressions on all the ones I wasn't familiar with below. It was a fun excuse to blog, to check out some new shit, and to weigh in on how this increasingly popular subgenre is being defined.

horse laugh

I don't believe in the idea of industry plants and frankly don't care if artists benefit from economic privilege so long as the music is good. But I still have to crinkle my nose and roll my eyes a bit at this band with two songs (three as of this week) getting booked for the trendy And Always Forever festival in L.A., which began as a shoegaze/electronica fest and is now branching out into laptop twee and other adjacent iterations of 'net music. I don't know horse laugh's personal circumstances, and again, I don't really care one way or the other. But I do think the increased professionalization of artists in this sphere is a bit silly.

Anyways, horse laugh's first two songs, "bedroom eyes" and "better," are fine, but their latest, "gold teeth," is the hit. The old Lana/new Slayyyter trash-Americana steeze of its music video is gratingly performative and the lyrics are moronic (and not in the cheeky way they think they're being), but the music is an entertaining spectacle of garishly ecstatic hyperclash with a tweeish ebullience in that final hook. Bassvictim but dopier, essentially. I'm a little hesitant to call horse laugh "laptop twee," but more on that below.

Atum Bruit

This is my favorite artist I found in this list, and also the most paradigmatically laptop twee of the bunch. Atum Bruit, whose music lives exclusively on SoundCloud, makes collagey, often instrumental pop songs that have the papery textures and picture book kiddiness that I associate with laptop twee paragons like b7lanket and Luko M. Their song "little mosaic" has the cyclical motion and droll sound effects of a crank-operated jack-in-the-box; acoustic strums, pitter-pattering percussion, and auto-tuned whimpers set to a backdrop of playground field recordings and pencil-tip notebook scribbles. "panda panda, try something new," Bruit's best song, nails what is, in my mind, the laptop twee bullseye: Kitty Craft, but made by someone who learned to produce from the Surf Gang catalog.

Grolth

Grolth is certainly the weirdest and most abrasive artist in this list, and while the scope of her recent album, i won't 'live like i'm dying, is by no means limited to laptop twee, some of its tracks definitely fit into this taxonomy. "don't tell me we've grown apart" is a good example. The core of the track is a sensitive pop song that's constantly being turned askew by disorderly production that flips the composition topsy-turvy like a camper rolling down a cliffside. The essence of twee isn't necessarily innocence, but a longing to return to a lost innocence, and that's what Grolth's music scrapes and claws its way toward recovering.

Seven Blair Angels

Seven Blair Angels is my second favorite artist I found in this list. The singer-producer is supposedly the "best friend" of London-based laptop twee ravestar the sound chalk makes, but Seven's songs are a lot more lowkey and wistful, using empty space, weary guitars, and understated samples to build digital twee ditties that delicately unfurl. His newest song, "One Dedicated to New Cross," is a tweemo rap cut of the katmoji variety, and another popular track, "Palma de Mallorca," encases Charli XCX's "club classics" in a pensive twee packaging. However, his terrific April album, Sevenblairangels, blurs quirky twee synths and coy hooks with the fatigued psychedelia of Dean Blunt. No one else in this genre sounds like Seven Blair Angels, but more people should.

Eeari

Eeari? Really? What's next, a new UK rapper named "fakeminky?" Putting that moniker-related grievance aside, Eeari is an affiliate of the Le Citadell rap collective whose most notable project is a collab album with Massi, a producer also appears on the Trending Raps laptop twee list. Eeari's Bladee-indebted fairy chirps are irritating after a little while, but there are some cool tracks on Morgana, which is an album that raises a point worth clarifying in this article: the distinction between laptop twee and tweemo rap. These are two adjacent subgenres with increasing scene overlap, but nonetheless register to my ears as separate sounds.

As I've discussed in my coverage of sevenmillion, katmoji, and Sacred Holes, there's a swelling outgrowth of the plugg/emo-rap underworld where rappers are recording over indietronica beats. Some of these artists, including Eeari, are also plastering their releases with cutesy drawings that lift directly from the twee aesthetic. However, despite all the ways this milieu of artists are collapsing the visual and sonic borders between rap, indie, pop, and electronic music, I still think laptop twee – tweaked pop songs with sung vocals – is a rap-influenced offshoot of indie, whereas tweemo rap – quirked rap songs with rapped vocals – is an indie-influenced offshoot of rap.

Maybe those distinctions will become impossibly difficult to parse as these scenes continue to blur, but if we're going to be using terms like "laptop twee" at all, then I think there's value in clarification. So in conclusion, I don't think Eeari is laptop twee, but I do think he's relevant to the broader conversation about laptop twee.

Maxyne

There are several other artists in Trending Raps' primer who I wouldn't call laptop twee, such as cleo walks through glass (too dark and jagged) and Pallet Radio (too slick and maximalist). Maxyne is another. Once again, this is pluggy emo rap that occasionally has some tweeish production and frequently looks like third grade classroom art. If you told me Maxyne was collaborating with blackwinterwells circa 2020, I would believe it. Which isn't to say Maxyne's music sounds dated, necessarily, but it doesn't have the hallmark identity of twee, which Merriam-Webster defines as "affectedly or excessively dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint." Tweemo rap like Maxyne feels depressively dainty and reluctantly, rather than contentedly, quaint. The cuteness is a foil. True laptop twee flies it like a flag.

brakence - "death rolL"

I never found a way into brakence's older music, and I don't like this new stuff either. At all. I'll concede that in 2022, his sleek digicore was a big-brained elevation of what glaive and ericdoa were doing during COVID lockdown, which was of course a more poptimized version of what d0llywood1 and osquinn were pioneering with far more grit and pathos. The difference is, ericdoa at least wrote a couple bangers with snotty hooks that rolled off the tongue. brakence's music is so cumbersome, so strenuous, so kinetic without the will to harness that energy for anything productive. It's the alt-pop equivalent of jogging in place: all motion but no movement.

Of the four singles brakence has dropped from his new album marroW, "death rolL" isn't the worst (that would be "crystallized") but it is the best representation of his flaws. Of the contemporaries he's most often compared to, brakence's affected groans share in the maudlin sentimentality of his onetime collaborator Quadeca, but "death rolL" has none of Jane Remover's venomous swag. Production-wise, his technical chops rival 2hollis's art-house polish, but brakence's instincts trend toward the overwrought and sexlessly proggy. His compositions are bendy but edgeless, and his rappity-rap flows have the pep rally hamminess of Twenty One Pilots.

It took me a few listens to place that the deepened voice he puts on at this song's conclusion literally sounds like Sleep Token. Now, I'm not saying brakence stoops to that level, but "death rolL" is closer than many of this guy's critical champions would care to admit.

17sport- "La fin du monde"

There are a lot of artists out there right now pulling from Salem visually and spiritually, but few are repurposing the band's phantasmal sound as effectively as 17sport do here. The Montreal duo dropped an album last year, Blue Heaven White Horse, that recalled the murky drift of Grouper, but their latest cut from a forthcoming follow-up has more to latch onto. "La fin du monde" is a club song that sounds like it's already half disintegrated by the time it's traveled from the speakers to your ears. The drums sound like rolling thunder booming in the distance, while the barely-there mews and stretched-out synths stir a tingling feeling that's both liminal and libidinal.

Chasing Down

Ben, Dylan, and Chantelle
of
novelty

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

novelty are a London trio who caught my attention over the summer when I found their music in a random Spotify playlist. As I wrote a couple months back, their June EP, Missing the World, is a curiously cryptic take on the modern indietronica sound. Ethereal electro-pop songs that lurk in the shadows, but with melodies that glimmer in the reflection of their metallic synths, and digital gauze that wafts like shower steam curling up under a doorway. novelty's last single "nosebleeds" was pretty forgettable, but their new tune "Dots" is an amazing upgrade of their developing sound: bassier, stickier, sexier, and more physically engrossing. This band are onto something special.

For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked novelty's three members about their backstory, their influences, the concept of novelty in this day and age, their forthcoming debut album Glück-Rüt, and much more.

Read the full interview below – and the 70-plus others in the archive, with a new one added each week.