Chasing Fridays: Single Print Index, cleo walks through glass, RIP Magic Q&A, more

A few notes before I get into the meat of this week's newsletter.

1) I wrote a profile on the Pittsburgh hardcore band Pain Clinic for the Pittsburgh City Paper, which recently relaunched after tragically shutting down earlier this year. A lot of my favorite stories I've ever written have been for City Paper because I get to do in-depth profiles about local artists who don't have a national media platform, but are absolutely deserving of a thoughtful feature on their music. That's certainly the case for Pain Clinic, who are the best active hardcore band in Pittsburgh and one of the realest in the genre. Give it a read.

2) I used to do a bi-weekly hardcore podcast with my friend Hugo called Violent Treatment. It stopped being a podcast last year and is now a print-only zine that Hugo produces and designs. I contribute some interviews/writing to each issue, and for our latest, I did an interview with Philly hardcore legend Bob Wilson, who runs Rebirth Records, does FYA Fest, books hella shows in Philly, and has played in many bands over the years: Mother of Mercy, Let Down, Malice at the Palace, Beware. I talked to Bob at length about Philly hardcore, his thoughts on the genre's current state, his bands, his label, and much more.

Hugo and I also did an interview with No Warning frontman Ben Cook (aka recent Chasing Down guest GUV) about No Warning's history, with specific attention paid to their polarizing major label swerve, Suffer, Survive (2004). Ben told us some genuinely bonkers lore about that era of the band, and most of this shit can't be found anywhere on the internet, so you have to buy the zine to get the knowledge. I'm not exaggerating: anyone who vaguely knows No Warning (one of the best 2000s hc bands, duh) will want to read this shit. Buy the zine here before they're gone for good.

3) I have an awesome longform interview running on Chasing Sundays next week. I've been too busy with my book (almost done, I swear) to do consistent longform interviews in the first half of this year, but that will change from the summer onward, when I plan to run at least one or two a month – and you need to be a paid Chasing Sundays subscriber (just $5/month) to read the full convos. I also have two other posts going up in the coming weeks that only paid subscribers will reap the full benefits of, so now's a great time to give me your money in exchange for oodles of music writing/artist interviews that you can't get anywhere else on the dying internet.

Which brings me to this week's Chasing Fridays. Now that Slide Away 2026 is out of the way, I have more time to listen to new shit, so this week I wrote about some new shit. I went in on the first single from the new Code Orange side-project Single Print Index, highlighted a new double-single from internet pop weirdo cleo walks through glass, recommended my friend's weird-ass experimental album, and then did one of the first Q&A's with the rising indie-dance band RIP Magic, who I'm totally onboard for and who seem destined to become huge. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Chasing Sundays type shit.

Single Print Index - "Recover the Mindset"

It's been a good month for Pittsburgh hardcore. We got the great new Pain Clinic album, the grim debut from a new Nails-core band called Possum, and now the debut song from Single Print Index. SPI are the new hardcore band fronted by Jami Morgan of Code Orange, whose all-star lineup also features Code Orange guitarist Dom Landolina, as well as members of Pain Clinic. Code Orange haven't been an active band since 2023, and like most hardcore bands who get really big, evolve their sound beyond hardcore, and try some risky conceptual swings that don't quite land with their old-school fans, Code Orange's credibility within hardcore took a massive hit. Single Print Index is their way of hitting back.

In fact, this band basically exist for the purposes of violence. Their first single, "Recover the Mindset," is more ignorantly heavy than any Code Orange-affiliated band have sounded in over a decade. The track is essentially one long string of chugs that relentlessly batter your ears like that face-mauling scene in Obsession. The beatdown parts are merciless. The hits just keep coming. The first time I heard this track I kept waiting for a reprieve that simply never arrived. Even the hook, which is slyly catchy in the way Morgan's screamed vocals often are, is designed for beating ass to.

Anyone who follows hardcore has seen the online discourse about Code Orange's supposed fall-off, and also the near-universal praise for their I Am King-era material. Hardcore kids loved Code Orange when they were an evil, viciously heavy hardcore band. Part of that is because "the early stuff" is almost always preferred in a subculture that overvalues obscurity and the perceived authenticity of a band's germinal years. And part of that is because Code Orange's mid-2010s music was extremely well-crafted and singularly intense, and people like hardcore that sounds like that. Code Orange aren't a band right now, and they'll probably never again be the band they were in 2014. But that's OK because we have Single Print Index right now, and they're arguably heavier than Code Orange ever were.

cleo walks through glass - Written Red Drowning Happyy

cleo walks through glass is an artist I first wrote about two years ago to the exact week, when I discovered them on the now-defunct Nina Protocol (RIP) platform. At the time, cleo walks through glass were one of the only artists I knew of who were making oblique, glitchy, lo-fi electro-pop, but now they very much feel like part of a greater universe of tweaked internet music. They already released a great album earlier this year with their duo the <3, which leans a little bit more melodic than cleo's solo music typically does. I think that's why I liked it more than cleo's 2025 solo album, Wilt, and that's probably why I also love their new song "Drowning Happy" so much.

It's the second of two tracks on this new double single they just dropped, which begins with a corroded emo-pop song called "Written Red" that I'd queue in a mix alongside bbpue's Ready Set cover from last year's Dal 2 comp. Although I'm personally here for the neon pop-punk-ification of outré electronica, I think the maudlin techno of "Drowning Happy" is a better fit for cleo walks through glass's sensibilities. There's a beatific pop song at the heart of this track, but it's obscured by overgrown foliage that muddies the lyrics and cruddens the synth progression. That's exactly what gives "Drowning Happy" its charmingly ratty curb appeal. cleo's music keeps the riff-raff in and the well-adjusted out.

Dittocrush - Limon Skyullz

Dittocrush is the solo project of my friend Trever Hadley, who I've started referring to in conversation as "my ambient barber." That moniker is true in the sense that Trever is my actual barber and he also likes ambient music, but it's not the most accurate way of describing the sound of Dittocrush, whose new album, Limon Skyullz, is a weird assembly of frayed tape loops and downtempo beats that fans of The Books and Oneohtrix Point Never need to hear. Last weekend, I saw Dittocrush perform most of the record in an attic space where Trever was stationed behind three TVs playing colorized footage of seabirds, bleeding forests, and other weird shit.

Limon Skyullz is definitely weird shit, but not so weird that a melody-seeker like me can't hang. The rhythmic crescendos in "broke the seal (nosedive)" make me feel like I'm falling backwards and forwards at the same time, and "Debt Metal" is a minimalist death march that Moor Mother would have a lot of fun rapping over. The whole record is both warmly immersive and eerily spacious. I don't know what a Limon Skyull is, but the adjectives that come to mind – sweet, sour, cerebral – apply to this album's sound and vibe. Give it a squeeze.

Chasing Down

Marco Pini and Felix Bayley-Higgins
of
RIP Magic

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

Last month I wrote about RIP Magic, the somewhat mysterious indie-dance band from the UK who had an enormous amount of hype behind them before they'd even released a single song. Now they've released several, including the epic James Murphy-produced "5words" back in January, and the sultry, grinding "Screwdark" back in May. I'm a big fan of both those tracks, and I'm waiting rather impatiently for whatever RIP Magic are planning to drop next. There are a lot of exciting bands crossing "indie-rock" and "dance music" right now, but nobody's doing it quite like this gang. You can really feel the humid air of the club in their songs, and I was keen to interview them to see where that tactility comes from.

For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked members Marco Pini and Felix Bayley-Higgins about working with LCD Soundsystem, touring with Tame Impala, the mortal status of the dancefloor, their favorite pre-game music, and much more. Read the full interview below – and the 60-plus others in the archive, with a new one added each week.