Watch: Button by Hockitay

On hitting the play button on Button, the latest release from Hockitay, I found myself really back in the headspace I occupied when I first heard Clairo’s beautiful, heartbreaking song Bags. Claire Cottrill has since gone on to become the kind of artist they would sell in a supermarket if people still bought music. Which isn’t to necessarily create a similar pressure on Hockitay.

All of which is to say, Hockitay’s new single occupies a certain loose and hungover space. Guitars are strummed, but only gingerly, baggy drums kick more or less to time, and Hockitay’s layered vocal feels compressed, two plates of glass smearing his emotions into a microscope slide for your inspection.

I have a playlist for this sort of music, called Loose and Losing, full of this kind of beautiful emotional freewheeling. It’s the sort of thing I would listen to on the way to a self-help group for people who feel things too much. Which, for the record, is me.

Born in Guatemala, Hockitay is now based in Montreal. Button concerned with our age of AI, where the sense self feels under threat, sees Hockitay observing, and asking us, ‘The task of living is all consuming, don’t you find that I’ve consumed enough?’

Listen: Suki by Desperately Seeking Suki

Opening with spectral synths, warm chords and an intimate vocal, the debut single from Desperately Seeking Suki wears its heart proudly on its sleeve.

Desperately Seeking Suki are sibling duo Natassa Zoë and Danny Pugh, who also goes by the pseudonym SIG SALI. Whilst Danny is based in Bristol, Natassa divides her time between Australia and the UK. The pair started making music together remotely, sending their work back and forth around the globe, before reuniting to launch their debut EP.

With influences that include Wolf Alice, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Arcade fire, Desperately Seeking Suki have created a sound that has a distinct emotional urgency. Natassa’s spoken word performance in the verse betrays a sense of feeling deeper that the deadpan delivery might suggest, before removing the gloves in a chorus that is immediate and insistent. In that moment, she declares an unconditional love for Suki, who gets billing here as the song’s title, but also a permanent fixture within the band name.

Whether Suki is a real person or not is left to the listener to decide, but the duo confirm that they represent the experience of meeting someone who truly sees you, and enables you to be yourself. As Natassa describes, ‘Suki is about embracing the light and dark in yourself and finding love that holds through the chaos.’

It’s a promising and exciting debut, and I’m looking forward to hearing more. Check out Suki below, and add to your streaming service of choice here:

Listen: Enchanted by Sebastian Fluent

Enchanted is the latest release from Hamburg-based artist Sebastian Fluent.

With a crackly aesthetic derived from the sound of aging vinyl, Fluent’s track combines a retro-aesthetic with buoyant synths and damaged-sounding vocals. The result captures a sense of deep longing — the kind of attraction that borders on painful.

As a musician, Sebastian derives his sound from a combination of house, hip-hop, and soul, ‘with occasional sprinkles of slackerish indie rock.’ With an aim to make music that is a ‘mixture of polished and dirty’, his sound is textural and yet refined.

Enchanted is lifted from Fluent’s latest LP, On, which was released last year. The aforementioned vinyl crackle is captured from the run out groove of a record that was playing in his studio as he was cleaning up. Riffing off the natural rhythm the record produced, Sebastian recorded the sound there and then, triggering a further round of inspiration that manifested in the final track.

The final piece is a spellbinding creation. Chunky bass and melodic refrains are blended with insistent guitar melodies, creating a simple yet seductive piece of garage-influenced soul. Check it out below, and find links to the album here.

Watch: Hypnotherapy by Nik Brinkman

Having appeared on BlackPlastic back in December, New Zealand artist Nik Brinkman is mainly focused on guitar-based dream pop, but he is building a reputation on these pages for something a little different. In December, it was a warm and elastic electronic remix of his song Heavy World, but now we have an original dance track, Hypnotherapy, described as a ‘high-energy detour into electronic territory’.

Where Heavy World (Remix) was still ultimately an indie pop song at its core, Hypnotherapy is a full on embrace of the hedonistic experience of losing yourself in both the music and a throng of people dancing. The song itself is inspired by a combination of personal memories—Brinkman’s uncle blasting techno from his car—and the nostalgia of rave filtered through a modern lens, by the likes of Underworld, early Jesus Jones, and System7. Brinkman had previously explored electronic, technicolor soundscapes through his Bright Music artist project, but Hypnotherapy pushes further into the darkness.

The resulting soundscape is a gloriously energising slab of acid tinged tech house. Bass bubbles as tweaking synths squelch, building towards the track’s warm embrace of a drop, ambient pads surrounding a heavily filtered vocal. It is a moment of love before Brinkman pulls you by the hand back into the swirling cacophony inside his own mind. The result is transcendent — the kind of thing Dan Snaith has made a career out of. Just give me a version twice as long, please.

Listen: Little of Me by Ffogg

Opening with a hushed vocal and muted guitars, on their latest single Ffogg draw subtle inspiration from The Cure, The Drums and Metronomy and combine in a loose, electronic yet slightly punky and percussive sound. The result is emotionally vulnerable yet propulsive.

Originally written five years ago, Little of Me is a song that has been with Ffogg since the beginning, something to be realised as and when the band reached the right moment. Self-produced, with mixing by Charlie Hugall (who has worked with Florence and the Machine, and CMAT), the sound has a beautiful sense of warmth and nostalgia to it. It switches between a sense of intimacy in the verse, to something more rousing and excited in the chorus. It is an appreciation of connection.

Describing the song, Ffogg’s George Khan says:

‘It’s about when you’re apart from someone you love and how they take a small piece of you with them, the feeling that you’re not quite whole until they return. Sometimes it’s better to stay still for a little bit and enjoy your time together rather than constantly moving. Whether you find the song happy or sad, it’s a bit of a Rorschach test.’

Personally, I think the idea of having a bit of yourself invested in someone else, and getting to enjoy and share that with them when you get together, sounds pretty wonderful.