Chasing Fridays: Snõõper, MGNA Crrrta, High. Q&A, more

I've got nothing to promo at the top this week's newsletter so let's just get right to it. This is a pretty standard-issue edition of Chasing Fridays. I've got a live review of an invigorating punk show, and then some blurbs on a few new releases I've been jamming: a loud indie band, a raunchy electro-house duo, and an uncommonly emotive electronica producer. Then, I interview the New Jersey shoegaze band High. about their music, the most underrated American shoegazers, the bands who've made them want to step their live game up, featuring on a gnarly hardcore record, and much more. It's another great Chasing Down, and paid subscribers get to read it. Act accordingly.

bleac - rollercoaster pass out comp vol 1

This EP is one of my favorite things I've heard all year, and I've been racking my noggin for the last couple weeks to try and figure out how to write about it. Sometimes, I like something in such a way that the critic part of my brain just isn't able to articulate why this music is good. But this music is so fucking good. There's the production, of course, which fuses fairly elastic synths with super taut drums and occasional singing that's ethereal in a shoegazey way. But this isn't shoegaze. In a post on Nina, bleac said that he was specifically influenced by Four Tet's Rounds while making this EP, and when I read that I exclaimed, "yes! That makes so much sense!"

Like Rounds, there's a certain emotionality in these songs that really resonates with me. They're not precious, exactly, but there's a tenderness in a song like "Now and Forever" that feels really palpable to me. It's electronic music that's clearly written from the perspective of a rock fan. That was pretty apparent to me on the first time I heard the baggy rumble of "Anyways (Welcome Home)," which has this springy rhythm that always makes me want to stand up and go for a walk so I can ponder all that I'm grateful for. "Similar Joy" also has a chord progression that's really fluid and affecting. If it was made on more lo-fi equipment in 2009 then it would've sounded like chillwave, but bleac's production is crisp, icy, and clean. I don't know what genre to file rollercoaster pass out vol 1 into. I'm too busy enjoying it to think about something so frivolous.

MGNA Crrrta - Beautiful Disaster

I was skeptical of this record at first because I haven't really loved any of MGNA Crrrta's older releases, and on my initial listen-through, I found these songs to be the kind of empty-calorie electro-house that only Ninajirachi knows how to durably construct. Then I came around. The NY duo aren't advancing any forms with this batch of high-energy, cotton-candy-colored club fodder, but I can't pretend like these nine tracks aren't loads of fun. "Heels broke = died" features vocals that are so fried that they make Kesha's voice on Animal sound as cordial as your ninth grade English teacher. I kept waiting for 6arelyhuman to turn up for a verse, and while I'm sure MGNA Crrrta wouldn't take that as a compliment, I mean it as one. "Pür Love" is the track that treads closest to the roof-raising pop splendor of Ninajirachi, who included MGNA Crrrta on her promising-yet-unfulfilled 2024 mixtape, girl EDM.

That's the stage of development where MGNA Crrrta are currently lingering. They have the production chops to make every synth stream like a vector of confetti, and their lyrics about "cyrstals and Bugattis" and "trashed 2 a.m. pics" living on digicam sim cards are the exact kind of fare their fans are looking to grow their bangs out to. But the songwriting is just a few steps shy of where they need to be in order to run with the big dogs like Frost Children and Snow Strippers – who they sound like on "Gimme it All," my favorite track on Beautiful Disaster. I definitely like this record better than Frost Children's Sister, but that's mainly because MGNA Crrrta's whiffs are easier to tune out than Frost Children's awkward fumbles. Right now, being anonymous instead of clumsy is working in MGNA Crrrta's favor, but they're going to have to swing harder than this on their next project if they want to make it to the other side of indie-sleaze.

Cashier - "Like I Do"

I think Cashier are going to be the next big Julia's War band. Whether you've been obsessed or bored by the last few years of American shoegaze, I think the Louisiana quartet are just different enough from how the genre has sounded that everyone can agree they're a breath of fresh air. "Like I Do" has perturbed-slacker vocals (kinda emo, kinda Albini-core) that recall Attack on Memory-era Cloud Nothings, and then the surrounding instrumentation is fuzzily scorching in a way that's obviously Dino Jr. inspired and perhaps less obviously reminiscent of Primal Scream's XTRMNTR ("Accelerator" in particular).

"Part From Me," the other single from their forthcoming EP, The Weight, once again has singing that verges on second-wave emo wails, but they're juxtaposed by firm drum grooves and blurry down-stroke chords that give the music a sort of arch coolness. I'd slot Cashier into the shoegaze-adjace lane alongside Hotline TNT and Wishy, where basically everything about the music is definitionally shoegaze except the vocals – dry, upfront, more raggedly irritated than rapturously imbibed. I think people are ready to sing along to their guitar-centric rock again, and with songs like these in their register, Cashier feel like a guaranteed cha-ching.

Snõõper, Shrudd, Sorry Face @ Bottle Rocket

I had seen Snõõper a couple years ago at this very same venue and they were wonderful, so when my girlfriend said we should go to this show I didn't think twice. I prepared the way I often do for punk gigs of this nature, which is to not prepare at all. I don't think I'd listened to Snõõper since the summer of 2024, I'd never heard of their tourmates Shrudd, and Sorry Face are a local Pittsburgh band who I somehow hadn't seen live yet. I went in with neutral expectations and came away buzzing. Sorry Face sound kind of like The Birthday Party if they were a new-wave band. The singer stood on the floor in front of the stage with sunglasses over his eyes and his bangs swooping from side to side, and my friend said he looked like every member of Brian Jonestown Massacre at once, which is accurate. They were an energetic bunch and the crowd responded positively with some playful push moshing.

Shrudd were up next, and in the middle of their set I thought to myself, "I'm going to write on my blog tomorrow that this is the best live band I've seen in a while." So there ya go. I could go on for paragraphs about their look, which included matching gray outfits from head to toe, amazing haircuts, dope sunglasses, and perfect facial expressions. The six-foot-five-ish bassist stood stock still in his trench coat looking out into the crowd and never smiling once, while the androgynous keyboardist half his size started out the set wearing a gas mask but eventually lost that for just a pair of bug-eye glasses. During a bridge of one of their songs, they stepped back from the keyboard, glared wide-eyed out into the room, and then skittered their legs like a marionette right in time with the music before leaning back over to tend to their synth.

The whole gang looked and moved like Wes Anderson's idea of an egg-punk band, but what was even more remarkable is that they sounded phenomenal. A little bit more psychedelic and rock 'n' roll than your average egg-punkers, with some especially shreddy (or maybe shruddy) guitar solos that sounded like Iron Maiden leads. The whole front half of the room was a gelatinous clump of college-age bodies shoving from side to side but mostly just dancing in place or swinging their friends or doing hippy arm wiggles with their eyes closed and smiling a lot and sweating visibly and living in the moment in a the way older people say kids aren't capable of doing anymore. Not here. There was a boomer-age guy in a Devo cap off to the side and I'd bet money that the gigs he saw in Akron back in '78 looked just like this.

Snõõper shut the place down. You can tell by my hazy photos how much fog was sifting through every corner of the tiny venue, and also how difficult it was to get a clean shot of Snooper singer Blair Tramel. She didn't stop moving once, twisting and marching and leaping and climbing around the stage, and singing all of her band's songs with the breathless pace of a YouTube lecture set at 1.5 speed. Her bandmates all wore dirt bike racing shirts, and they, too, took every opportunity they could go step on top of an amp or climb into the crowd or jog around the stage to try and keep up with Tramel's pace. The dance pit had grown twice as dense and unruly, but no one was shoving violently. It was all love, all family, all peaceful release of violent anxieties. ​Snooper closed with a lightning-fast cover of The Beatles' "Come Together." Need I say more?

Chasing Down

Bridget Bakie and Christian Castan
of
High.

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

High. are a shoegaze band from New Jersey who I've written about several times at this point. I was a big fan of their 2025 mini-album/compilation Come Back Down, where the quartet explored a wide range of gazey sounds, some heavier, some dreamier than others. They also were one of my favorite sets at last year's Slide Away festival in NYC, and seeing them up close during a blaringly loud night at Market Hotel solidified in my mind that High. have the juice. I've been patiently waiting for this band to put together a proper debut LP, which they confirmed is indeed on its way in the following interview. In the meantime, they dropped a loosie last week called "George" that lands on the prettier side of their spectrum. It's technically a "remix" of a song on Come Back Down, except this one features vocals from sweet93 singer Chloe Kohanski, whose ethereal croon fits perfectly into High.'s foggy guitar contrails and aching rhythms

For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked High. singer-guitarist Christian Castan and bassist Bridget Bakie about their new single, their next record, their surprising feature on the great new Negative Force album, being an honorary NYC band, and much more. Read the full interview below.