Pickle Darling has always existed just outside of the periphery. In a heightened time of fast music, algorithmic consumption and rapid virality, Lukas Mayo (they/them) has remained focused on the album. Their discography is a reflection of their creative evolution, and they deliberately look for ways to push sonic boundaries from release to release. Since debuting with 'Bigness' in 2019 followed by 'Cosmonaut' in 2021, Mayo has curated a catalog that is deeply personal and strangely tactile, where tiny, unexpected details—an off-kilter loop, a whispered aside, the warmth of an old Casio—become as crucial as melody itself. Their 2023 LP 'Laundromat' was a precise and polished expansion of that world, a record that felt like it had been carefully placed behind glass.

Their fourth album, 'Bots', by contrast, is unruly and full of static: a collection of songs that feel like they could only ever exist on scratched CD-Rs passed between friends. Self-recorded in their home studio in Christchurch, New Zealand, it finds Mayo taking a scalpel to their own songwriting. Songs were stretched, chopped, reversed. Some ideas started as “unlistenable garbage” before morphing into something unexpectedly beautiful. If a song felt too straightforward, Mayo had to mess it up. That friction of old and new, organic and digital, melody and noise is what drives 'Bots'. Drawing inspiration from a strange, scattered lineage: Four Tet’s 'Rounds', The Books, Neneh Cherry’s 'Broken Politics', The Wrens’ 'Three Types of Reading Ambiguity', but also the emotional directness of 2000s pop like Madonna’s 'Ray of Light' and Robyn’s 'Body Talk', the result is an album that feels like a glitch in the system, pushing against past constraints while embracing the weird, beautiful mess of making something new.

TRACK LISTING

1. Obsolete
2. Violence Voyager
3. Earthshaped
4. Congratulations Champion
5. Human Bean Instruction Manual
6. Steps
7. Massive Everything
8. Infinite Trolley

On Giver Taker, the gorgeous debut album by Anjimile, death and life are always entwined, wrapping around each other in a dance of reverence, reciprocity, and, ultimately, rebirth. Giver Taker is confident, intentional and introspective. Anjimile Chithambo (they/them, he/him) wrote much of the album while in treatment for drug and alcohol abuse, as well as while in the process of living more fully as a nonbinary trans person. Loss hovers over the album, whose songs grieve for lost friends (“Giver Taker”) and family members (“1978”) along with lost selves (“Maker,” “Baby No More,” “In Your Eyes.”) But here, grief yields an opening: a chance for new growth.

“A lot of the album was written when I was literally in the process of improving my mental health, so there’s a lot of hopefulness and wonder at the fact that I was able to survive,” says Chithambo. “Not only survive but restart my life and work towards becoming the person I was meant to be.” Each song on the album is its own micro-journey, adding up to a transformative epic cycle created in collaboration with bandmate Justine Bowe of Photocomfort and New-York based artist/producer Gabe Goodman. “1978” and “Maker” both begin as Su an Stevens-esque pastoral ballads with Chithambo’s mesmerizing voice foregrounded against minimal instrumentation and swell into the realm of the majestic through the addition of warm, steady instrumentation (informed by the mix of 80’s pop and African music Chithambo’s Malawi-born parents played around the house) and harmonies by Bowe. “In Your Eyes” starts out hushed and builds to a crescendo via a mighty chorus inspired by none other than The Lion King. The allusion is fitting: each song encapsulates a heroic voyage, walked alone until accompanied by kindred souls. The choirs present throughout are equally deliberate. Chithambo grew up as a choir boy himself, and several songs (notably “Maker”) grasp not only towards reconciliation between his trans identity and his parents’ strong religious beliefs, but towards reclaiming his trans identity as an essential part of his own spirituality. (“[Less] Judeo-Christian, more ‘Colors of the Wind.’”) There is a boldness to this borrowing and shaping, a resoluteness that results from passing through hardship and emerging brighter, steadier. As a closing refrain on “To Meet You There” might sum it up: “Catalyst light of mine / now is your time.” 

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. Your Tree
2. Baby No More
3. In Your Eyes
4. 1978
5. Not Another Word

SIDE B:
6. Maker
7. Ndimakukonda
8. Giver Taker
9. To Meet You There

Body Parts mobilizes a singularly elegant experimental pop idiom to explore the contours of modern devotion and doctrines of self-improvement alongside the immoderate reverberations of remembrance. Fire Dream delivers a delightful mix of brightly ominous and sensitively textured, biomechanical dance tracks and more earthly, emotive ballads. Trying to resist the tidal pull of Fire Dream's peculiarly beautiful world would be like trying to beat fate. Weaving together influences as varied as the rationalist prescriptions of the self-made seeker-healer- Scientology mastermind L. Ron Hubbard, the sensual guitar-scapes of Prince, and the haunting vocals and surrealist melodrama of Kate Bush, Ryder Bach and Alina Cutrono form the group’s core.

TRACK LISTING

1. Desperation
2. Past Is Coming
3. Be A God
4. Interlude A
5. Unavoidable Things
6. Helpless Child
7. People
8. Interlude B
9. You Inside My Head
10. Reprise, Prelude
11. Wash Over Me