Now Hear This! #017 – leisure fm, Crystal Coffin, Monster Wave, dery

Now Hear This! After digging through the seemingly inexhaustible array of recently released music, we offer the following artists for your listening pleasure and evaluation: Moody dream-pop from leisure fm, Crystal Coffin’s melodic black metal, the surf-rock of Monster Wave, and bewitching indie-pop from dery.

We’ll bring you a new post each week, songs from which will regularly be added to our accompanying “Now Hear This” Spotify playlist.

Find all past Now Hear This! installments right here: https://v13.net/features/now-hear-this/.

leisure fm – fables

Polish twins Milena and Weronika Szymanek, aka leisure fm, release their debut EP, fables, a four-track collection of Gothic dream-pop produced by the twins and Charlie Allen. Milena and Weronika moved to Wales as children and now call Southeast London home.

Draped in Eastern European shadows of gloominess reflecting the wretchedness of lost love, profound sadness, and existential disquiet, the vocals ride over a matrix of hazy, mesmerizing guitars, pulsating percussion, and fainting strings. Talking about the EP, the sisters say,

“Making ‘fables’ has helped us work through some difficult feelings, and we hope it has a similar cathartic effect on anyone who listens to it. We’ve been working on this project for a while now and are excited to share it with the world, premiering the leisure fm sound!”

Entry points include “statuesque” and “cold blow lane.” The self-directed video for “statuesque” draws inspiration from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, as well as 1970s cinema classics, such as Picnic at Hanging Rock, utilizing found archive footage to give it an unending otherworldly feel.

Crystal Coffin – The Curse of Immortality

Vancouver, B.C.’s melodic black metal trio Crystal Coffin recently released their long player, The Curse of Immortality, a quasi-conceptual album.

The protagonist, having failed to commit suicide, finds himself in rehab, where instead of undergoing psychotherapy, he is experimented upon by Mengele-like doctors who eventually transform him into the world’s first immortal.

Formed in 2017, Crystal Coffin’s sound merges black metal, prog-rock, and ambient/electronic music into dark, heavy surfaces suffused by muscular, atmospheric textures.

Monster Wave – Pazuzu Luau

Instrumental surf-rock from Asheville, North Carolina, courtesy of Monster Wave, who dropped their debut album, Pazuzu Luau, on November 3.

Musicians on the album include Casey Willis (guitar, bass, drums, percussion), Brett Spivey (Moog synthesizer, theremin, keyboards), Michael Seng, who plays lead guitar on “Wolfman Stomp,” Fabian Hernandez (saxophone), and Michael Berry, keyboards on “The Great Rinaldi.”

Brimming with retro flavors from the ’50s and ’60s, as well as tints of swing, Monster Wave’s sound delivers dynamic beats topped by the lush ostentation of tropical guitar licks.

dery – “iron” (feat. Colin Smith)

“Iron,” featuring Colin Smith, the recently released track from indie-pop singer-songwriter dery, is a track from her upcoming album, chapter three.

Smith’s voice blends well with dery’s, imbuing the lyrics with the sore ache of heartbreak as she tries to pull herself together despite feelings of vulnerability and emotional wounds barely scabbed over. Numb, she moves as if in a dream, seeking the iron required to brace her up.

“iron veins to keep holding me over / until i can take the wheel / muster courage to enter each room / filled with something i can’t feel.”

After having listened to the entire forthcoming album, “iron” is a personal favorite because of its shimmering layers of glowing resonance and pushing rhythmic flow.