Chasing Fridays: The Femcels, Clothesline From Hell, GUV Q&A, more

Hello, whattup, a couple things up top.

1) I reviewed the new and final Megadeth album for Pitchfork. I haven't had an opportunity to write about old-school metal in a long time, so this was a fun assignment and my editors let me keep a couple zingers in there that I'm rather proud of. More Pitchfork writing from me is on the way soon, so stay tuned on that front.

Otto Benson talks Memo Boy, TikTok trauma, and healing by singing to strangers

“This machine kind of plucked my music, without my knowing, and used it to create these weird pockets that I feel feed on depressed youth.”

Chasing SundaysEli Enis

2) Speaking of Pitchfork, they awarded their first "Best New Music" of 2026 to Peanut by Otto Benson, and serendipitously, my super in-depth career-spanning interview with Benson just so happened to go live on the same day. I spent a lot of time researching and preparing and transcribing that conversation, and the second half – which is chock full of juicy information about this cult-adored musician, who all Chasing Sundays readers should be aware of – is for paid subscribers only. Upgrade accordingly.

And that brings us to this week's Chasing Fridays. I went long on one of my most anticipated albums of 2026, which is by a band who you probably haven't heard of, but who are about to (probably) be everywhere. Then, I reviewed some digitized guitar music, some proggy shoegaze, and some barbarically noisy indie-rock. Lastly, I got some amazingly insightful, funny, and charismatic answers from a Q&A with GUV, the Toronto songwriter (and No Warning frontman) who evolved into a Madchester renaissance man on his bleary and blissful new album, Warmer Than Gold.

The Femcels - I Have to Get Hotter

Maybe it's already happened by the time you're reading this. Maybe it won't until next week or next month. But it's coming. Everyone's going to have an opinion on The Femcels. And these opinions​ will be polarizing. People are going to use this band as straw women to project upon their own misgivings with certain types of girls and guys, some real and others imagined. ​Haters are going to decry them as talentless, irony-damaged fashionistas who are symptomatic of some kind of new, unsavory cultural shift. Lovers are going to scold the haters for being joyless and/or misogynistic and/or out of touch, and hopefully emphasize that The Femcels are, if anything, sincerity-damaged, a far more noble shortcoming than irony-induced apathy. ​​​It'll be an exhausting discourse cycle – akin to The Dare's takeoff in 2022 – of people talking about and around The Femcels without actually discussing The Femcels themselves. So before that happens, allow me to actually talk (see: write) about The Femcels.

The Femcels are Rowan Miles and Gabriella Turton, a pair of London-based twenty-somethings who began releasing music in early 2025 and just dropped their debut album, I Have to Get Hotter, last week. The producer and co-writer on all of their songs is Ike Clateman, one-half of the UK electro-pop/indie-tweeze breakouts Bassvictim. Until this album arrived, The Femcels earned their hype among tapped-in metropolites by playing shows with Esdeekid, dabbling in fashion, and having a bulletproof discography. Granted, it was only two songs, but they were both perfect. The first was "He Needs Me," a jaunty electro-twee romp that's kind of a cover of Shelley Duvall's 1980 Popeye soundtrack highlight, but mostly a spoken-word skit about being down-bad for guys who couldn't care less. Turton's hysterical timing steals the show on that track, while Miles' creepy-doll croons on the electroclash banger "Not ur friend" reveal The Femcels' ample capacity for club-pop gratification.

Given how wildly different those singles were, it was anyone's guess what The Femcels would actually sound like on their long-awaited debut album. That spirit of guessing, of going in blind and seeing what comes out on the other side, is true to the spontaneous M.O. of The Femcels. The duo entered the studio for the first time with no songs, just a band name and their chemistry as two friends who dated the same guys and shared the same zany humor. That humor – proudly self-deprecating, shamelessly crude, often irritating, just as often hilarious – is what animates their music more than anything else. "It’s quite cathartic to make music about being crazy in a funny way, not in an earnest way," Turton recently told Interview Magazine.

I Have to Get Hotter is indeed crazy. And not the nerdy crazy of 100 gecs or the dangerous crazy of Bassvictim or the intellectual crazy of Black Midi or the clinically unwell crazy of – you get the point. They're crazy in a "yipppeeeee!!! We don't eeeverrr have sex!" way. In the, to quote some lyrics, "I like this guy who lives on the moon / He always comes way too soon / His wigs are made of cream cheese / But good cream cheese" way. In the "[shrillest shriek you've ever heard during the quietest possible moment of an otherwise tuneful song]" way. They're craAAazy. They're kooky. They have eye-catching style and brilliant artwork. But none of that really matters if the music isn't good. So is I Have to Get Hotter a good album? Almost. Is it an important cultural document? Remains to be seen. Is it one of the most joyfully demented and genuinely button-pushing indie-pop releases in recent memory? Absolutely.

The Femcels make scaring the bros music. Two women with a vivid idea of what their band could be, but without the raw talent to manifest it in the way natural-born musicians would, nor the interest in comporting to the pop conventions that they, as diehard Beatles and Beach Boys fans, are quite apparently fluent in. Instead, like so many great slapdash punks before them, The Femcels use pop as their pissing ground, desecrating Clateman's simplistic instrumentals – readymade for quirky yet orderly earworms – with un-playlistable choruses and undanceable spoken-word verses and patently unsexy lyrical odes to girls with dirty hair who don't brush their teeth before dates. While most indie saplings grovel for any nibble of critical clout they can get, The Femcels told Interview that they hope Pitchfork pans their record. They aim to antagonize. They want to be hated. If only they weren't so damn likeable.

If "Come Let Us Adore Him" sounds like two women yelping and babbling with little to no foresight over a dinky electroclash instrumental that might've been cooked up in 40 seconds, that's because it is. It's hard to pick one song on here that represents the album's full scope, but that one's a good enough showcase of the pair's typical vocal dichotomy: Turton's terminally out-of-key yelps and caffeinated rambles, and Miles' fatigued gasp-croons where she sounds like she's singing from the cushions of a fainting couch. Miles can be animated, too, and when the pair are both bouncing off the walls, it yields bewildering results like "Please Don't Stab Yourself (Like Elliott Smith)," a throttling noise-pop comet that finds The Femcels stimming and squealing over the hilarity of the word "guppies" and praising the diverse functionality of JavaScript.

Going into I Have to Get Hotter, I half-expected that "He Needs Me" would be the batshit outlier on a record that otherwise leans into the sensual electro-pop of "Not ur friend," a track that wouldn't sound out of place in a mix between Shygirl and Cowgirl Clue. I was wrong. "Monster In You" is the only song on here that revisits that mode, except in a way that's more brooding than grooving. Miles' vampiric hisses are backgrounded by samples of a grinding drill and gulping mouth sounds that curse the haunting piano riff with an evil aura. There's a suppressed darkness lurking in the corners of The Femcels' Crayola-box brightness, and without it, I Have to Get Hotter would be too uniformly jokey. There's a glint of genuine insecurity simmering beneath the ex-boyfriend barbs in "I'm So Fat," and in "He Needs Me," the nervous justifications for why he's not texting back only land because you can hear in Turton's voice that she's riffing on lived experience.

Turton was a big screamo head in the years leading up to The Femcels' takeoff, and you can hear her channeling – under the guise of satire, but with an unshakeable scholarship – that genre's pained melodrama on "Is Loser An Emotion You Feel Too?," an acoustic emo track that sounds like a toned-down take on the shambling bedroom screamo of their scene-mate 300SkullsAndCounting. Miles is the chiller, more confident counterweight to her nervy best friend, and she brings the same melodic flair to her own band that she brought to Worldpeace DMT's 2025 laptop twee lodestar The Velvet Underground and Rowan, on which she plays the one-man band's resident Nico. Like Nico, Miles doesn't trade in docile femininity, but in a more ruggedly expressive dialect of exotic yips and apparitional whispers. No "pop" singer from this decade sounds quite like her.

Turton and Miles' voices are The Femcels. The duo haven't yet developed an instrumental identity of their own, so a lot of I Have to Get Hotter sounds like the singers squatting on their producer's own musical property. Likewise, "Indiest Girl at School" and "A & Arnold" are co-written by Worldpeace DMT, but neither achieve the whizz-bang whimsy of last year's "Love Yourself," which is so far the best track Miles has ever sung on. I want to believe that The Femcels are more than just the brainrot era's response to the filthy synth-pop of The Teenagers, but I Have to Get Hotter, with its haphazard execution and flimsy continuity, struggles to advocate for its own longevity. Are these songs just musical inside jokes that The Femcels are releasing with the end goal of rage-baiting Pitchfork writers? Or are The Femcels, despite their brazen anti-commerciality, actually London's next indie-pop breakouts, as the fashion magazines and hypebeast Instagram accounts are predicting?

I don't know if The Femcels even have an answer to that question. I don't think it's that serious for them. And for better or worse, I think that's kind of the point. What I am sure of after listening to I Have to Get Hotter for a week straight is that the album's tension is a double-edged sword. In their quest to prod indie-pop out of its waifish sadboy/girl era by ruining a bunch of perfectly good pop songs with borderline unbearable sing-shrieking and inscrutable non-sequiturs – attributes that they pray Pitchfork and the class of taste-making aesthetes the brand represents will despise – The Femcels all but ensure their own relegation to the fringes (there's no way that average fakemink and Bassvictim fans can actually vibe with this shit), which is right where the critics want their pop to linger. In essence, The Femcels are too charming to hate but too off-putting to love. So, much to their probable chagrin, I like them quite a bit.

Clothesline From Hell - Slather on the Honey

Chasing Sundays consultant James from friends& sent me this album a couple weeks ago and billed it as his favorite rock record in a minute. Knowing James's astute yet shall we say...tolerant taste for niche internet artists, I figured this was going to be a lot nuttier than it actually is. Not to say Clothesline From Hell isn't nutty, because there's no easy way to classify this album's bulging suitcase of reference points: late-period Elliott Smith psych-pop gloom, OK Computer's electroni-rock precision, and just the looming shadow – not the actual physical figure – of heady alt-metal. I wasn't particularly moved by Slather on the Honey during my first and second go-arounds, but the more I listen to this record, the more addicted I've become to its savvy hooks and quirky nuances.

I'll describe its sound with two more music writerly hypotheticals: Imagine Why?'s Alopecia without the rapping, or This Is Lorelei if Nate Amos was more cryptic and tightly-wound than he is openly pathetic (complimentary). The introductory title-track is punchy in both the forceful and delirious senses of the word, but the tracks that really sold me are the wiry "Whoever You Are..." and the pleading "Girl Music." The former is mixed really loudly and cleanly so the snare thwacks right against your temple and the saucy acoustic lick wraps around your ear like guitar strings curling into a bouquet of razors. The latter pulses with the same kneading frustration, but there's this delightfully hopeful piano vamp that cuts through the fracas and makes me want to tickle the dashboard like John Candy in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.

I'm sure that Clothesline From Hell had much different influences in mind while making this record, and that's so much of what excites me about it. Pop-rock that's so well-crafted that I can't even crack it. And so it remains just out of reach and beyond comprehension, right where it's all the more alluring to admire.

Horse Vision - "You Could Have It"

I think something that got downplayed on Horse Vision's debut LP/singles compilation Another Life was the band's ability to write bangers. Sure, they can do cryptic indie-folk just fine, but there's a reason why their most-streamed songs are "Partly Get By," "YSL," and "Back of My Hand." Those are the Horse Vision tracks that essentially have drops in them. Moments where the big, dumb, squeaky synth comes in atop the clattering drums, and the simple chord progression they've been mumbling over suddenly has the untamed power of 2,000 sweaty college students flinging themselves around at a paint party. That's the spirit Horse Vision conjure on on their new joint "You Could Have It." It's the most upbeat and exhilarating song in their catalog thus far, a laptop pop banger that gets much closer to whatever sorcery MGMT were fucking with on Oracular Spectacular than I ever thought Horse Vision would or could.

Gollylagging - "Bronco"

Gollylagging actually remind of me Horse Vision in the sense that the opening riff of "Bronco" is reminiscent of Alex G, and the first time I heard this song I exclaimed aloud, "holy shit that's good." Otherwise, this Boston quartet are on a much different tip. Gollylagging's older material is a little bit more in the Ovlov-gone-emo lane, and while the guitars on 2024's Dry Rot EP sound utterly electrocuting, the vocal delivery is a little yelpy for my current tastes. The singing on "Bronco," however, is more suitable for the band's obliterating instrumentation, which harnesses the superior electrical currents of their native region – Dinosaur Jr., Swirlies, Pile – to produce the musical equivalent of a bomb going off in Wile E. Coyote's face. This is an absolute scorcher of a song. High-decibel degenerates, take note.

bill. - WIMMER

WIMMER, by bill.

7 track album

Rope Bridge RecordsBandcamp New & Notable Sep 11, 2022

"Another Julia's War shoegaze band with a weird name channeling They Are Gutting a Body of Water?" Yeah. "Don't you have shoegaze fatigue at this point?" Sometimes, yeah. "Aren't you bored by loud guitars?" Huh? "Yeah, aren't you sick of distorted guitars being molded into cascading chasms of transcendent noise?" Are ​you hearing yourself right now? "Haven't you heard enough impressionistic maelstroms to last a lifetime?" Haven't you had enough ice cream cones to last a lifetime? "Haven't you had enough ice cream cones to last a lifetime?" You're mocking me because you have no legitimate rebuttal. "Nuh-uh." Because you can't actually come up with any valid criticisms about bill.'s admittedly familiar yet also slightly more fluid and almost sorta proggy tweak to the post-Blue Smiley shoegaze formula. "Are you hearing yourself right now?" No. Because I'm listening to bill. Why aren't you?

Chasing Down

Ben Cook
of
GUV, No Warning

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

I don't have a good excuse for sleeping on GUV (fka Young Guv, Young Governor, Guvnor), the long-running melodic rock band helmed by No Warning frontman and former Fucked Up guitarist Ben Cook. I say "melodic rock" because GUV's sound has mutated quite a lot over the last decade, beginning as new-wavey power-pop and then adapting a C86-ish jangle and then going back in time even further via some Fab Four Ouija boarding. I love No Warning, but I never really gave GUV's music a proper chance until his latest record, Warmer Than Gold, which marks yet another nominal (Young Guv --> GUV) and musical reinvention. This time, GUV's blurring his love of classic twee with elements of baggy, proto-punk, and even early shoegaze (mostly Chapterhouse, but a little bit of Automatic-era JAMC, too), resulting in a sound that refines the band's core identity while also offering the perfect opportunity for newcomers like me to jump onboard.

I was a little skeptical of this album at first because I think the Madchester sound is so specific and time-capsuled that it's difficult to mine influence from without ceding to straightforward replication. However, I'm really impressed with how successful GUV is at putting his own stamp on early 90s British rock while still retaining a contemporary urgency. The first half of the record is sweet, but as Cook says below, the second side is when he really turns up the heat (Stooges influence) and lets the more electronic flourishes come to the fore. It's a breezily engaging listen, and I had fun asking Cook about GUV's new era, his lifelong interest in these sounds, some of his favorite contemporary bands, the enduring joys of fronting No Warning, and more. Read the full interview below.