Chasing Fridays: Worldpeace DMT, Panchiko, Seven Blair Angels Q&A, more

Welcome to phase two of Chasing Sundays' revamp. Last week, I announced that I'd be doubling the site's output by publishing one longform piece every week in addition to my weekly issue of Chasing Fridays. This week's longform piece was a revealing interview with the influential Instagram blog Trending Raps. Paid subscribers can read it here – and you'll want to be a paid subscriber, because going forward I'm putting ~85% of Chasing Sundays' content behind the paywall. This is my job, and it's time to grow this thing into something sustainable.

From the time I began monetizing Chasing Sundays back in early 2024, I've been experimenting with various methods for attracting paid subscribers. Those methods have worked some of the time, but not enough of the time. To everyone who's already been a paid subscriber, I thank you tremendously for allowing me to be compensated for the hours of labor I put into writing Chasing Sundays every week. To everyone who's been reading my site for free, I thank you tremendously for enjoying my work, but if you wish to continue enjoying my work, you'll need to pay me $5/month. In return, you can read everything I publish on Chasing Sundays. And from here on out, there will be a lot to read.

Here's the gist. Going forward, I'll be paywalling every longform interview, essay, playlist, year-end list, and artist guide (more on that soon) that I publish on Chasing Sundays. You'll be able to read the intros to my interviews and get a short preview of those other pieces, but 90% of those articles will be for paid subscribers. As for Chasing Fridays, I'm flipping the format I've been rocking with for the last year-and-a-half. Instead of 85% of the newsletter being free and the mini-Q&A I do at the end being for paid subscribers, the Q&A will be the only free segment and the rest of the newsletter – the music criticism, live reports, bloggy essays, and recommendations that most people actually visit my site for – will be for paid subscribers only.

I realize that this sudden paywall switch-up will be disappointing to some of you who believe articles should be free to read. I wish that were the case, but that's fundamentally not how the media industry works anymore. Most music media institutions – the outlets that have historically paid freelancers like me to write for them – are on the brink of extinction. AI is ruining the internet. The algorithms are fucked, Google search is unusable, and most of what passes for "music journalism" these days is illiterate Instagram slop. There's hardly anywhere left to read music criticism for free that's written by paid professionals, so if you want to read that sort of thing, then you need to pay for it.

This is how the media industry worked pre-internet (buying newspapers and magazines), and it's how the media industry will work post-Web 2.0 (paying a small fee to Substack-style outlets like mine). I will do everything I can to make your $5/month contribution a worthwhile purchase. For instance, this edition of Chasing Fridays is loaded with writing about new music from Worldpeace DMT, Panchiko, Dylan Thom, Mackeeper, and another band who nobody's written about yet. Some of this music I like, some of it I strongly dislike. Find out where I stand below. I also scribbled a few thoughts on the lineup for Hellfest West and why it indicates that the metalcore revival has reached the point of no return.

And at the top of the newsletter, which anyone can read, I have a (rather lengthy) mini-Q&A with the brilliant laptop twee innovator Seven Blair Angels. I make a point to interview young and/or under the radar artists in my Chasing Down segments, and I'll continue to do so as Chasing Sundays enters this new phase. Last thing I'll say: there are many talented music writers out there doing great work. I don't claim to be the best, and I never will. But I also know, because I know, that there isn't another Chasing Sundays out there. To those who get it: thank you. To everyone else: tap in or die = subscribe or get left behind.

Chasing Down

Benjamin Joseph-Taylor
of
Seven Blair Angels

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

I'm not going to waste any time litigating whether or not Seven Blair Angels is laptop-twee. Some of his songs, like the John Hughes script-worthy "Scene II: Breakthrough," justify his inclusion in this cluster, but others, like the Blond(e)-via-Grandaddy "IONGAF.mp3," are on a completely different tip. Every new song the London-via-NYC artist drops makes him more difficult to condense into an easy elevator pitch, so I'll resolve to broad hyperbole like, "The first time I heard Sevenblairangels I knew this dude had a classic in him." Or, "his acoustic reupholstering of Charli XCX's 'club classics' should've been on the Brat remix album." Or, "his song 'iPhone' is brilliant and, come to think of it, actually pretty damn twee."

As far as I can tell, Seven Blair Angels has never done an interview, so for this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked him some simple questions and got some long, winding answers. Which was great, because his responses are filled with personality and detail about his musical backstory, his eclectic influences, his close friend group in London, his collaborations with the sound chalk makes, and more. Read the full interview below.

Tell me about your background as a musician. When did you start making/releasing stuff? What type of music were you trying to make at that point? When did you start Seven Blair Angels? 

So I grew up making music, my dad was really into the New York hip-hop scene in the 90s and he wanted to start his own label when he was my age, but he never did. As a result, he passed my down a bunch of instruments and gadgets and I by began learning piano and making shitty beats on a DAW called reason (or maybe it was pro-tools). I had always been into music, and grew up playing bass, drums, and ukulele in my free time, but for my 8th grade graduation my dad agreed to buy me a guitar.

And this was around the same time of [Tyler's] Flower Boy and COVID, so naturally I was inside all day everyday for some months straight just learning Rex Orange County songs and Steve Lacy basslines, and also around the time I thought of the prospects of making my own music. In high school I wrote a bunch of songs, "Dawgie" being the only one of which to see the light of day, but I had been very reserved with my music. It was a pretty vulnerable craft to me and I was just naturally pretty reluctant to show the world this part of me, as I think a lot of teenagers are.

When I moved to London for university I was actually classmates with this kid zuko (he was there for like one term before he dropped out), but he introduced me to this artist Pretty V who i was a pretty big fan of at the time. V put me on to so many ways of thinking that got me in the artist mindset. I remember I asked him how he made his songs and he told me "iMovie," and it was from that point I realized how unserious this whole music thing really is.

That weekend I returned to my dorm and released my first project under Seven Blair Angels, a three-track ep titled someone you had sex with died last night. At this point I don't even know what type of music I was going for, it was very indie and guitar-driven, but also quite raw and abrasive sounding. My influences for this ep were probably Cherrybomb by Tyler, Absolutely by Dijon, and Standing on the Corner's self titled album.

I think your album Sevenblairangels is so amazing. Just the amount of ground you cover on there, the wooziness of your production, the subtle melodies, the way it's both minimal and also playful/eccentric. Truly next level stuff. Tell me about the creative headspace you were in while making those songs and what you were trying to convey with them. 

So I started Sevenblairangels back home in New York for break. There was this week or two straight where I was making a full new song almost once a day, and I feel like I'll always have a backlog of music, but at this point the music I was making during this two week span in December really spoke to what I was feeling at the moment so I decided to prioritize it.

A lot of the music written for that album is concerned with some sort of aspect of growing into, not just an adult, but an actual person in London. If anything I was just trying to convey my own sort of ground rules for living life to my definition of the fullest. I think the album definitely concerns itself with the idea of there being more to life than what we directly experience. It could be comparable to how some may think of god but I think god is a quite intimidating word that puts some people off.

Your latest single "One Dedicated to New Cross" is a little different than your previous few releases, a little more rap-based I guess. Is that an indication of where you want to take your sound going forward or do you have other ideas for how you want to develop your music? 

I'll start by saying this, no song I ever post will ever be an indication of the direction I go, just 'cause i want to go everywhere all at once. I don't think there are era's in Seven Blair Angels; I like to think of the project as one continuous story and each upload is just more context to the same world. But this song, "One Dedicated to New Cross"...I had just been in my room and I wanted to make a song. I loved "Sober" by In53ct, I think that is a fucking awesome song and i just wanted a song of my own that gave me the same feeling.

But there is also this kind of feeling as an artist that is: "I want to let these people know that I am still tough," so I made this song to give a sonic update on what I have the capacity to do and make at this current moment. Think of it like a basketball player shooting a three from deep so you know he can do that. This song basically skipped a bunch of other songs in my backlog queue of music to upload just to make me feel good, and shit... the song makes me feel good when i listen to it, so its doing its job.

I also wanna shoutout New X. It's a makeshift collective comprised of a bunch of friends in London, we got Chalk, Funny Games, Pato making fucking sick music and then we've also got Griffin Johnson who does a lot of artwork for all of us, Moses Ohalloran who shoots a lot of our photos and videos, he shot the video for "CSM for Bullshit." I'm basically just surrounded by these insanely talented guys who are all also just great kids at their core. Everyone is so talented as individuals but also so brilliant to work with when we do all collaborate. I wanted to put a song out dedicated to them cuz I love 'em.

I read that you're best friends with the sound chalk makes. Tell me about your friendship with him, how he inspires you, and if you two are cooking on anything else right now. 

Bro, I love Kabir. We met through a mutual friend my first year of uni, and we just bonded as homies, not as musicians or anything like that. But at the start of my second year of uni we linked up to work on one of my songs and then I realized this kid is cracked. There's no other word better to describe Kabir other than cracked. We're just always out together and with the rest of New X. We like to get lost around very familiar parts of London and talk about life and creation.

But for me, Kabir's like any other homie; if I'm having a shit day I can call him and if I'm having the best day of my life I can also call him and vice versa. As for collaborations, we'll work on each other's music pretty consistently. A lot of it won't see the light of day, but maybe it doesn't need to, we have our fun regardless.

Who are your biggest musical influences right now? 

My biggest musical influences right now are Standing on The Corner, Pretty V, and Jonah Paz. I think all of these artist have the quality to them where their songs fit into my ear canal like a missing puzzle piece. I wanna shout out the newlyweds, though. I grew up skating with Matthew from the band, we've been friends for the last like 7-8 years and he's been like the cooler older brother to me growing up.

I swear to god this kid put me onto everything that was cool at 13. but Matthew inspires me all the time, growing up watching him start like four different bands, putting on shows, recording albums, making full-length skate videos, etc. Matthew from the newlyweds is my goat.

You're in the underground but I'm curious: who do you think is the best mainstream artist of the 2020s?

No one wants to hear this but Drake will always be a GOAT. He knows what the people wanna hear. But i recently returned to Joji, and I think we need to collectively revisit this man's catalog and give him his flowers. The production of "Wanted U" is something that I think has stood the test of time, and the fucking emotion in this man's voice is absolutely insane. I think the man and the image of Joji was consumed by the sadboy aesthetic and it's hard to detach the two now, but once you detach them it becomes the best thing ever.