Chasing Fridays: This Is Lorelei, $quib, b7lanket Q&A, more

In case you missed it, I published my latest 100-song playlist, "Shit I Like 35.0," on the site earlier this week. I've been making these playlists for 10 years now as a means to organize my favorite discoveries on streaming, and I've been publishing them for subscribers on Chasing Sundays for the last couple years. For this edition, I wrote 10 hefty blurbs about 10 standout songs from the whole mix, half of which are behind the paywall along with the actual 100-song playlist on Spotify and Apple Music. These playlists are the most comprehensive reflection of my taste that exist, and they're always loaded with tons of deep cuts that I otherwise don't get a chance to write about on Chasing Sundays. Check it out.

100-song playlist: Seefeel, Salem, Namasenda, more

Plus: cryptic shoegaze, dancey laptop twee, neurotic pop, fuck-up pop-punk, etc.

Chasing SundaysEli Enis

And in case you've been really off the grid, I published a long-ass interview with the band ear last week that I've been getting a lot of good feedback on. Thanks to everyone who subscribed to read. Next week I'm publishing a list of my 25 favorite albums of 2026 so far, and my top 10 – ranked – will be for subscribers' eyes only, so now's a great time to toss me $5/month to make sure you don't miss out. You'll also get to read the incredible Q&A I did this week with laptop twee star b7lanket, which is located down below. Additionally, I wrote about new music from This Is Lorelei, Tiffany Day, and $quib. No one else is writing about these artists in the same pages (or at all), so know that your money is funding real music criticism about real artists making real shit. Anyyyywayyyys...

This Is Lorelei - "Billy Came Back"

A thought I've been voicing to friends lately is that This Is Lorelei's Box For Buddy, Box for Star is one of my favorite albums of the decade. In fact, I'd say it's among the three best records I've heard in the last six years. Standouts like "I'm All Fucked Up," "Dancing in the Club" and "Where's Your Love Now" feel like songs that have been with me all my life, and I guarantee they'll feel the same way 10, 20 years down the line when I throw them on to recalibrate my love for indie-rock. I think I'll always have a soft spot for guitar-based pop songs, but right now I'm less interested in that lineage of songwriting than I've ever been.

Most of my favorite music from this decade is electronic, rap, electro-pop, or a variety of guitar music where the instrument is either suffocating the singer (shoegaze, hardcore) or used sparingly within the composition (cloud-rock, laptop twee). This Is Lorelei is the "traditional" indie-rocker from the 2020s who I'm most enamored by. I've still only heard a fraction of his unwieldy catalog, and a lot of his pre-Box for Buddy material that I have engaged with doesn't speak to me in the way his newer stuff does. The fact that I still feel so strongly about him is a testament to just how good I think his recent work is, including his latest single "Billy Came Back."

"Billy Came Back" is the first taste of This Is Lorelei's forthcoming album, The Singer in My Band, and to me it sounds like the platonic ideal of a lead single. I doubt it's the strongest song on the tracklist, and to be sure, it doesn't reach the melodic and emotional highs that his best Box for Buddy tunes do. But it's still an exceptionally well-crafted track that squeezes all of Nate Amos' appeals into a tight three minutes. It's got the plucky, simplistic drum beat, a lightly twangy guitar lick, cozily rustling acoustic chords, and a tunefully muttered singing performance where Amos' voice reclines into the back of his throat, allowing his register to dip casually into a gravelly drawl.

Lyrically, "Billy Came Back" isn't the type of stream-of-conscious crashout or wounded love ballad that encompassed Box for Buddy. It's a pretty compact, by This Is Lorelei's loquacious standards, ode to a karaoke king named Billy who gives everything he's got when he steps into the barroom spotlight. It actually reminds me of the quirky character portraits that noted This Is Lorelei fan MJ Lenderman is known for. Except MJ Lenderman – whose 2024 LP, Manning Fireworks, I've come fully around to after initially feeling rather ambivalent towards, for those who were wondering – would never write a song this jaunty, this clap-along-worthy, or this briskly catchy. Because no one's writing songs quite like This Is Lorelei.

$quib - Erring

With a name like $quib, you know you're in for some esoteric bullshit. And unlike the esoteric bullshit I covered last week, $quib align more closely with my personal preferences. Mostly. I'm not going to pretend that I love everything I'm hearing on Erring, the "indietronic" version of a medieval torture rack that stretches "pop" as long as its legs will go and then keeps pulling until the limbs tear, at which point $quib sew them back together and then contract the disfigured appendages back to normal length. Good as new! And Erring certainly is new, in the sense that music has never sounded like this until this very moment in time. Which doesn't make this album inherently good, but it does make Erring a worthwhile thrill.

It's worth mentioning that $quib are the "duo" of musician Brock Bierly and a fictional cyclops collaborator named Krotida Satyra. Form-breaking humor is baked into this project's core, and that lack of stuffy self-seriousness is what makes even the most annoyingly zonked-out sections on Erring relatively easy to endure. The record is a dizzying collage of unsteady beats, digitally warped croons, jagged synth stabs, and more than a few passages of unexpectedly abrasive guitars. At no point during its 40-minute runtime does the album settle into a particular style, causing my brain to flip violently through a rolodex of references without ever being able to make a confident selection.

At some moments there are flashes of cloud-rock in the vein of Chanel Beads and Threshold, but overall this album is far too disorienting and eclectic to live under those overcast skies. One of my favorite tracks, "ER," sounds kind of like Los Thuthanaka by way of Evanora Unlimited; a crookedly cyclical stomp that Bierly yammers over, his voice fluttering in and out of tune like a TV suffering from a bad signal. He can't commit to a key on Erring's most straightforward "pop" song, either, the melodically busted jangle-rock jive "Whelp (from Kiljester)."

These "flaws" in $quib's execution are what make the album both engaging and energy-draining, but if you can stick it out until closer "Warning (if i had a hammer) 2," the payoff is grand. That capstone track is an amazing 12-minute voyage through abstracted guitar squalls, pulsing IDM rhythms, and Cameron Winter-ish croons. In all of the preceding tracks, Bierly stubbornly refuses to let his songs breathe or recline, always vibrating from one cracked idea to the next with a madcap restlessness. He finally stops bolting on the spacious and slow-building "Warning," and Erring's persistent tenseness evolves into actual tension. And thus the album completes its journey from esoterrorism to esoterrific.

Tiffany Day, Slayr - "Constantly"

I was pretty cool on Tiffany Day's album from earlier this year, a post-Brat batch of confessional hyperpop that was too #radically #vulnerable for its own good. Meanwhile, I started off the year feeling very hot on Slayr's late-2025 rage-rap revamp, which injected the genre with a vital shot of levity and melody to combat the deadening thuds of Che and Osamason. I didn't expect the two of them to team up for a single, but the collaboration actually makes a lot of sense. It's also the best song Day has released all year. Her anxiously unspooling lyrics dwell on a defunct friendship in a way that feels genuinely affecting without soggying up the song.

And that's good because "Constantly" is an absolute earworm that resembles 2hollis without attempting to replicate anything he – or anyone else – has done. Day's co-production is the perfect blend of glitchy and glamorous, and I love the way her voice is robotically mangled in the verses yet crisp and clear in the chorus, which I must emphasize is tremendously catchy. Slayr's verse feels a tad tertiary in terms of the song's musical concept, but he's so good at rapping on this kind of beat that after a few bars I'm lulled into a sugar-induced trance. "Constantly" does everything I wish Day's album HALO did, well, constantly.

Chasing Down

Zeke Reiss
of
b7lanket

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

My girlfriend rolls her eyes when I tell her that I'm writing about artists named $quib and b7lanket ("blanket with a 7," as I always qualify), but as someone who's traveling to NYC this weekend for a Moldy Peaches show, she's honestly the ideal audience for a record like Seven Ate Nine. That's the new album that b7lanket just dropped earlier this week, and it's 18 minutes of delightfully saccharine, cunningly cutesy laptop twee; i.e. classic lo-fi twee-pop pushed through a digital vector by someone who grew up on Alex G and loves SoundCloud rap (as b7lanket testifies below). b7lanket's collab album with fellow laptop twee luminary Luko M is one of my faves of the year, but the writing on Seven Ate Nine is even better, and b7lanket's production is improving. These tracks are great.

For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked b7lanket what attracts them to the twee philosophy, their thoughts on laptop twee, how they build their songs out, their fave twee records, "discovering the power in being small," and much more. b7lanket's answers were substantial and illuminating. Read the full interview below – and the 60-plus others in the archive, with a new one added each week.