Deep Voices 130: March 2025
The 20 best songs from an incredible month for music
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An embarrassment of riches for music lovers this March. The most consistently excellent new music in a given month that I can remember. YHWH Nailgun’s album 45 Pounds is maybe my favorite release of the month, a blistering and buoyant arty grunge rock record. This month also had great techno of all stripes, dispatches from the far edges of indie, blissed out pop, and flashes of ambient brilliance. Notes on highlights below. But first…
Deep Voices is a newsletter featuring a one-hour playlist from me, Matthew Schnipper. I work hard to feature artists across time and genre that may not otherwise be getting the attention I think they should. A dozen times a year—right now—I put together a playlist of the best songs of the month. These playlists and their accompanying text are always free. On the weekends, I publish an additional newsletter, Down the Wormhole—musical revelations, recommendations—just for paying subscribers. I’m obsessed with this stuff and I want to bring you along.
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DJ Python, perennial favorite, has a new EP, i was put on this earth. The opening track, “Marry Me Maia,” is my favorite. He sings on it, as he did on his duet album with Ana Roxanne. The beat is subdued, as is his voice. He’s always been a gentle musician, but he’s been a gentle maker of techno. I’m not sure his music qualifies for that genre anymore. “Marry Me Maia” is a lullaby. I follow DJ Python on Instagram, where he’ll often take photos of music he’s listening to. It’ll be a trippy IDM album or a ’70s folk record. This song, with its sweet bleeps and husky vocals, feels like a good amalgam of his disparate tastes. This is music made by a lover of lush sounds. I am curious to see if this EP is the beginning of a new direction towards quietude or a quirk, a sidestep, as he pursues a bigger sound on future singles and albums.
Footwork is a Chicago-based electronic music subgenre categorized by repetitive vocal samples and rapidfire drumwork. The music is an evolution of juke, a previous Chicago genre with similar components of palpitating drums. Footwork takes juke’s building blocks, throws them up in the air, and watches them smash into the ground. DJ Elmoe, in particular, makes songs that thrive on destruction. In 2011, Elmoe led off the classic footwork compilation Bangs and Works and now, 14 years later, he has an album out. His music feels barely cohesive, totally manic, and proudly lo-fi. “Whea Yo Ghost At, Whea Yo Dead Man” from Bangs and Works, amazed me when I first heard it, with the title phrase rippling like a tattered flag in the wind. Battle Zone, the new Elmoe collection, is best listened to as a single entity, a deluge of disjointed drums and vocal samples. Sometimes there’s one element in a song that strikes me as hitting a sour note—a video game noise, perhaps—but it will soon dissipate, replaced by some other bit of sonic abrasion more to my liking, like glass breaking. A hailstorm of sound.
Love the new Horsepower single. Have a soft spot for a plaintive indie crush song. This one, the debut single from the group, is self-assured thanks to its particularly robust production. The same could be said of the Real Lies track here, “Finding Money” (I love that title.) The band is British, but their music reminds me of the Scandanavian pop of groups like The Radio Dept and Tough Alliance, groups who found romance in the biggest synth moments of the ’80s but were raised on the drama and risk of electronic music in the ’90s. On “Finding Money,” Real Lies collaborate with the vocalist Jessica Barden who speaks her way through the song, a nonchalant narrator who makes the song particularly cinematic.
JakoJako is a synth obsessive whose music sounds like a New Age-y take on rumbling techno. What makes her music great how it feels. The music is clean, refreshing, crystalline. It feels like a perfectly baked pastry. It feels epic but not indulgent, pristine but not untouchable. This type of music is often talked about having very good “sound design,” which, as a concept, I find to be something that puts the cart before the horse (ie the sheen before the substance). But it works for JakoJako, whose music moves fast and is economically written. The song I included here, “Kumquat,” along with another new track, are from an upcoming album on Mute. She seems still under the radar to me and I hope with the push of a stalwart label like Mute she’ll be introduced to the larger audience she deserves.
YHWH Nailgun, I think, are my new favorite band. Not that new, though, they’ve been around for five years. Despite being half-decade in, their debut album, 45 Pounds was just released and it is very, very good. It’s rock music that is sharp, fierce, weird. The guitar playing is wiry and anxious, the keys are catchy and unsettling, the singing is clipped and animalistic, the drumming is frenetic and beastly. It sounds like traditional prog rock meets the louche brand of post-hardcore of the ’90s. It sounds like something Red Hot Chili Peppers fans would like as much as Bad Brains fans. It sounds like they could collaborate with a singer as intense and exacting as Fiona Apple. It sounds very fresh, which is not essential but always welcome.
I have yet to see them live (which is killing me) but I have started to watch a lot of videos, specifically so I can see how their drummer does it. Unfortunately, watching videos has not clarified that. He does it by hitting a lot of the drums in quick succession. It’s like he’s doing sleight of hand and you can’t quite catch the trick. The mystery isn’t the point on the album, though, the buoyancy of the pummeling is. They may be one of those rare bands that has been able to bottle their onstage ferocity and fine tune it on tape. 45 Pounds is expansive, but it’s tight. “Castrato Raw” starts with a seasick guitar line while the drums play pingpong and the vocals careen across the top. It’s two minutes long and a whole world of push and pull. There are 20 seconds that are basically a drum circle with a synth drone. It ends with a coda, the singer spitting out the word “weakness” like a chewed up confession. A fantastic song from a fantastic band.I love Judith Hamman who can accurately be described as a cellist and whisperer. There’s an automatic pull to describe her music as Arthur Russell-like, as those are the key elements of his monumental work World of Echo and, indeed, Hamman’s new album Aunes does recall Russell’s work for me. It scares me to make that comparison, as he’s such a sacred musician, but Hamman is not a copycat. Her music is not as spiritual as his; it’s much more haunted. Moments on Aunes have the texture of screeching wind or scared crows. It often feels like ASMR if you were interested in hearing the netherworld up close. “by the line,” Aunes’ opening track, is my favorite, a buoyantly meditative piece featuring Hamman’s hum and a wavering synth drone. It has a real vulnerability that I find disarming, like music you might make after recovering from an injury. It feels like intimate music as much as ambient music. You cannot fake closeness.
I just saw YHWH Nailgun (also my new fav. band) live and if you get the chance I highly recommend it. Lives up to the hype, exceeded really high expectations. Left me awestruck. Haven’t been that riled up since seeing Black Eyes live like 25 years ago.