Chasing Fridays: Oral, my NYC escapades, Cicada Q&A, more

This is a very long issue of Chasing Fridays so I'm not going to belabor you with an intro. This week I wrote about an art-damaged screamo album that blows my fucking mind, a very good cloud-rock droplet, and a chain-rattling rave ripper. Then, I blogged about my adventures seeing all sorts of music in NYC over the past weekend, including in a building where I never expected to set foot in. Lastly, I interviewed Cicada, a laptop-twee duo whose new EP, out today, contains some of the best indie-pop I've heard all year. They're so, so good, and below you'll learn why.

Oral - Line of Jewels

This is one of the most staggering albums I've heard all year. I've never heard anything like this, to be honest. I think something significant is going to happen either to the band Oral or because of them, because records like Line of Jewels don't just disintegrate into the ether. They calcify as landmarks. This album reminds me of Bassvictim's Forever, not musically, but in the sense that Oral are yanking at a multitude of different threads – corroded bedroom screamo, mutilated noise-rock, frayed indietronica, noxious cloud-rock – and stitching them into a patchwork of contemporary sounds that have never, until now, been intertwined with such complexity.

You don't know what you're in for even after hearing the opener "Casket"; looped acoustic strums, cat-scratches of redlined bass, and vocalist Navarro Dodge's lopsided mutters rolling around their mouth like a spinning top wobbling to a standstill. Oral are a band from the Bard College scene in New York's Hudson Valley, and yes, they recently opened for ear, who share the same fondness for vacuum-sealed home production that sounds like it was labored over in Ableton on a crud-coated Macbook. "Casket" even sounds a little bit like Jonah Paz's Sacred Holes project (murmury internet rap mutilated by art-rock esoterrorism), which I mostly mention to draw contrast to the far more extreme tracks that follow.

Line of Jewels is a screamo record where every song sounds like it's actively being crushed up and crinkled like a candy wrapper. In "Only the Silence is True," Dodge's choked cries glitch and stutter over a twitchy loop of Microphonesy acoustic chords. It's my favorite song on here because it's so raw, so bloodied, but also so craftily digitized. I also love "Silver," where Dodge hisses like the Sigilkore critter Sellasouls over a docile arrangement of beeps and sputters that, if not for the searing feedback, could turn up on a Blithe Field album. Not every song, though, is premised on such whimsical/wanton juxtapositions.

"Esther's Pulse," one of several full-band live recordings on here, is a blazing cacophony of merry-go-round music being smoked out by a torrent of sooty distortion and feral shrieks. Perhaps the more memorable blaze of fury is "Harvest," where Dodge screams to "sodomize yourself with [unintelligible]" amid a din of chiming clocks. These violent fits aren't what make Oral so riveting, even though, to me, they're more interesting than all the groups they'll inevitably be compared to: Your Arms Are My Cocoon, Fire-Toolz, Xiu Xiu, YHWH Nailgun. Rather, it's the way Oral dress those noise-damaged rock sounds in the garments of the modern underground that makes Line of Jewels glimmer so brightly.

innerinnerlife - "no safeguard"

I've been waiting for innerinnerlife to release another great song since "hold me, kiss me," his contribution to last summer's genre-defining Satellite compilation. I was underwhelmed by the Polish singer-producer's late 2025 EP, IfOnly, but "no safeguard" is the exact type of cloud-rock that I'm a sucker for. That is: a weary indie-folk song with a deliriously simple chord progression, a mistily crooned hook, and a string of ornamental synths that gleam with the artificial whiteness of a freshly cleaned Apple Store.

Like his Satellite compadre Cleaver Blue, innerinnerlife is sticking to the same script that Horse Vision first memorized with their run of 2024 singles. Which of course adds another mile to the long tail of influence that Alex G's House of Sugar has had on modern indie-rock. Sure, the novelty of this sound is beginning to wear thin. But, like the robotic producer tag announces at the top of "no safeguard," every cloud-rock song that meets this threshold is a "brand new banger" to my ears.

Torture Methods - "Ripper, Reaper"

Torture Methods is the project of NYC artist Grant Chapman, an abrasive electrician who released a self-titled album earlier this year that didn't do much for me. This new song, "Ripper, Reaper," does something for me. It's a sidewinding dance track with bulbous bass and alarm-sound synths and creepy black-metal snarls and a cosmic disco vocal and a really insistent drum beat that builds and dissolves, builds and dissolves, builds – and then breaks. Permanently. If I heard this at a rave I'd probably start to question whether I was on drugs or simply being exposed to black magic.

All the music I saw during my crazy-ass weekend in Brooklyn

I went to Brooklyn last weekend, and like everyone who goes to Brooklyn for a weekend, I feel obligated to tell you about everything I did there. Well, not everything, but all the music-related hijinks I got up to. The first night I arrived in Bushwick I shot over to Elsewhere, a multi-room club 15 minutes from where I was staying, and saw Tommy Fleece open for Tiffany Day. Chasing Sundays loyalists know that I've been obsessed with Tommy Fleece for the last couple months, so it felt serendipitous that I just happened to be in New York when the Michigan hyperclash savant was playing 15 minutes from where I was staying.

To make matters even more cosmic, two of my favorite artists in the electro-pop underground, The Femcels and ideasforconversations, were playing the exact same venue that night in one of the smaller rooms. Sadly, ideas and Tommy both went on at 8, so I chose to see the neon pop-punk-tinged singer do his damndest to win over a crowd that didn't give a fuck about him. He succeeded. When Tommy lumbered out onstage in a beanie and saggy blue jeans, looking like the cool older brother in a Johnny Test cartoon, a Tiffany Day fan beside me audibly scoffed and proceeded to nitpick Tommy's faux-valley kid steeze in between his first few songs. By the end of his set, that person was grinning and dancing like an idiot.

The crowd was predominantly made up of Asian zoomer girls – not the demographic I usually see at hyperpop shows, which felt meaningful considering Day is one of the few Chinese-American stars in that scene – and other college-age kids who seemed a little too chic for Tommy hooks like, "Dubstep! Sex toys! Edibles! Hello Kitty bong!" But as the set progressed, Tommy got the crowd jumping to his gargantuan bass drops and giggling at his goofy banter. His DJ looked straight out of the Juno casting call: shaggy hair, striped headband, skin-tight tee, and an affable bounciness that made Tommy's auto-tuned wails over programmed beats feel like more of a spectacle. He's not a star yet, but I think he will be.

After Tommy's set I lingered in the back of the venue scheming how I could possibly make it into the other room at Elsewhere to catch The Femcels. Eventually, I heard someone mention a smoking courtyard, so I weaseled my way through the squished-together crowd until I was out the exit and inhaling fresh air from the surprisingly serene enclosure. After a few seconds I heard The Femcels leaking out of a door to my left, and upon checking my peripherals for any security presence, I darted inside just in time to hear...I don't remember what song. The Femcels' song titles are ridiculous, but I witnessed 90% of their first-ever American show in the 200-cap sweatbox and was thoroughly entertained. Everything I wrote about that band earlier this year remains true.

I took Friday night off from shows but ended up catching three on Saturday. A tapped-in scenester from the NYC underground invited me out to see his screamo band, so I walked a couple blocks to Gold Sounds and watched Elegy for Lenore play to a strange amalgamation of old-heads and young-heads standing stock still. The dancefloor sparked up a bit for .stential, a New Jersey metalcore band who sounded like Every Time I Die crossed with Saetia, and then I bounced halfway through the next set (a mediocre Snapcase-ish band) to follow my scenester guru and his partner – also in their early 20s – to a couple more gigs on the down-low.

The first was somewhere in Queens (I think? I was letting these kids lead me everywhere like a blind dog) in a house venue called Skinny Apartment. It was indeed a very skinny apartment where a band with three guitars and a bassist spent way too long tuning before playing a couple songs that sounded nothing like what I expected (the Glenn Branca poster on the wall was deceiving). Multiple Death By Audio employees were shouted out by name, if that gives you an idea of what was happening there, and my liaisons gestured for us to split before the yawns kicked in. We took the subway into Manhattan, where a renegade punk show was supposed to be going down at an abandoned mall.

Before we even got there, though, the gig was busted, so the promoters quickly scrambled to get it set up in a different location on Canal Street. I stood awkwardly off to the side while a gaggle of NYC art-type caricatures unloaded gear from a beat-up pickup, and eventually I decided to wander off and explore the space. The main room downstairs had decor indicating that it was a functioning store during the day time, but there was also an upstairs room where a DJ wearing a cow snout and a cowprint bikini blared EDM songs to nobody. There were a couple other rooms upstairs, too, and I know this because a row of TVs were screening live footage of the entire building right above where the band ended up playing on the ground floor.

It took me a while to notice the sign next to the front entrance that said anyone who enters the building is consenting to being livestreamed, and it wasn't until someone told me that I learned this peculiar little mercantile I was inquisitively texting my friends about was actually a set for Fishtank, the livestream reality web series created by the infamous right-wing comedian Sam Hyde. It was after midnight, I was running on four hours of sleep max, and I was about to see a no-wave band called Faith play to 70 hipsters in a livestreamed boutique while finance bros strutted past gawking through the windows at the drunken moshers. It was the most quintessentially "this is what someone who doesn't live in NYC thinks people in NYC do every night" experience I could've asked for. And when Faith's singer told everyone watching the stream at home to "go to hell," I felt right at home.

The impetus for my trip was technically to see Whirr, who were playing their last show for the foreseeable future on Sunday with Luster at the Brooklyn Paramount. It was funny to be back at the Slide Away venue just a couple months after I was last there, and it felt kind of like deja vu seeing Whirr in that space again after seeing their first show back on that very stage in April 2025. I've never been shy about not really liking Whirr's music, even though I acknowledge their fundamental importance to the trajectory of shoegaze in the 21st century. I was more interested in seeing Luster, who blew my ear drums out the year before at Market Hotel. They sounded great at the Paramount, but shoegaze always sounds better in a small space where the decibels have nowhere to go but into your pores. I wish Paramount's sound hurt more.

Whirr were very tight. They really are a very dialed-in band with a very specific sound that people just go absolutely apeshit for for reasons that I'll probably never fully grasp. I can't say that their performance changed my perspective on their catalog, but I loved seeing them give their audience exactly what they felt like giving and nothing more. A two-band bill at a venue of that size is a little skimpy, but I respected them eschewing an opener just because they could. I also love that they still don't say a word onstage, and that they walked off to an ambient backing track that indicated an encore was coming that never actually did. Whirr were done. Maybe forever. Maybe until next Slide Away. Maybe until the next time I'm looking for a reason to travel to Brooklyn.

Chasing Down

Lucas Matthews and Violet Beller
of
Cicada

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

There's too much great music coming out of the indietronica underground right now for even the most tippy-tapped-in of bloggers to keep up with. Most of my favorite discoveries from the last calendar year have been fished out of the teeming ear canal, but I'm also aware that many of these miniature-istic pop tinkerers will be forgotten once the trends shift. Cicada's music, however, won't be forgotten. The songs on their new EP, Crystal Teeth World Tour, are too durably catchy, too delightfully quirky, too emotionally palpable to get lost in the laptop-twee turnover. Just listen to lead single "Happy You're Here" and you'll get what I mean: real singing, real harmonies, really good oblique production.

Cicada are the duo of singer-songwriters Lucas Matthews and Violet Beller. The former releases music as Luko M, including the great collab album he made with b7lanket earlier this year, while Beller sings in the Brooklyn-via-Miami band rug in addition to dropping under her own name. Both of them come from different backgrounds – Beller songwriterly indie, Matthews fried digi-pop – and together they sound at once vascular and virtually distorted. For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked Matthews and Beller about Cicada's origins, their emphasis on great vocals, the increasing industry presence in the laptop-twee scene, their favorite underground gems, and much more.

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