Browsing Tag

Electronic

From Hitmaker to Icon in His Own Right: The Ruggedly Electric Appeal of Cooper Hill’s Debut Alt-Pop LP, They Control the Volume

Posted on 8 April 2026

If it has been a while since you last heard a release sticky-sweet enough to give you goosebumps, jump on the hype amassing around Cooper Hill and his debut album, They Control the Volume. Kicking off with a folksy indie pop rap firestorm of emotion, PLAY, which screams with the same crossover appeal of Mumford & Sons through its ruggedly electric, melodically magnetic acoustic guitar chords and arresting vocal inflexions, the LP instantly pulls you in, hook, line and sinker. The Nashville-based producer evidently bypassed cheap production tricks in favour of a candied charisma and has locked fans into a total sonic sugar rush.

Don’t let the debut status of the LP fool you. Hill’s songwriting chops have been honed to the nth degree during his tenure as a hitmaker for others, including his work on gold-certified records. With a voice as sweet as honey, carrying a nuanced southern twang without ever hitting notes of saccharine insincerity, your soul would have to be stone-cold to resist its affecting propensities.

Throughout the record, Hill exhibits the dynamism of his tenderness, moving from piano-driven ballads like inevitable to the storming synth-pop vulnerability in 1D. It is a masterstroke of a release that positions this former behind-the-scenes force as an icon of alt-pop intimacy in his own right. People won’t know whether to grab a tissue or a pen and paper to write a love letter to this self-aware, genre-fluid visionary.

They Control the Volume is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify. 

Connect with Cooper Hill on Instagram.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Mythic Melodys: Broken Halo – A Neon Melancholy-Stroked Bridge into the Future of Melodic Alt-Trap

Posted on 24 March 2026

The Swiss visionary Pascal Stich has his emotive peak with the latest Mythic Melodys single, Broken Halo, providing melodic alt-trap with a definitive bridge into the future of the genre. It is production perfection for the way the angular shoegaze-esque guitar notes sting as they dance around bass-swathed beats and electronic motifs, which edge the release into a melancholic pool of new wave synth-pop.

It feels almost perverse to derive such immense pleasure from a lyrically cutting release where raw wounds bleed into the contours of the lyricism. The track touches on themes of resilience, hope, masochism, and mourning with a refreshing lack of artifice; it outpours the emotive revelations that come to us when we’re looking up from rock bottom; the kind of introspective fragments that few people would dare to air, let alone let loose on the airwaves.

Having already surpassed one million streams, this track follows the massive success of previous hits like AM I HIGH, proving that the 26-year-old artist has mastered the art of turning lyrical confessions into highly visual, pensive neon-stroked snapshots.

Created in the solitude of late-night reflection, the music invites a deep connection through its cinematic atmosphere. It is a total vibe for those who prefer their playlist staples with a side of vulnerable, inner reflection.

Broken Halo is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Musematic unravelled compositional electronica into a cosmos of texture and transcendence in Oxblood & Olive (2025 Remaster)

Posted on 26 November 2025
Oxblood & Olive (2025 Remaster) by Musematic

Musematic has long since perfected the art of aural convention before pushing beyond the arbitrary parameters that define it, resulting in his 2025 remaster of Oxblood & Olive feeling like standing in the middle of an oceanic current of leftfield ingenuity.

The soundscape ripples with a similar sense of progression found in chiptune melodies, but instead of polyphonic discordance, there’s a serene cosmology of tones, textures, and colours that spiral through the synapses, implanting heady doses of catharsis and escapism. The forward motion within the track never falters; every rhythm and motif feels magnetised towards transcendence, even as the syncopated trip-hop beats pull the listener gently back to earth.

The instrumental’s motion is tidal, evolving without urgency yet never static. Each layer builds and recedes, allowing you to drift into its compositional narrative without losing sense of direction. There’s precision in the looseness, intention in the abstraction, and an awareness of momentum that gives Oxblood & Olive its meditative gravity. The track’s remastered form doesn’t simply revisit old ground; it expands upon it, refining the alchemy that makes Musematic’s work feel simultaneously human and otherworldly.

Based in California, Musematic (the project of Evan Michael Brown) describes his sound as “compositional electronic” — music that tells stories rather than just looping ambience. After achieving immense success with over fifty million Spotify plays for his ambient work, he began this project to explore something more personal, more rhythmically alive. In Oxblood & Olive (2025 Remaster), he reaches that ideal with effortless lucidity, allowing his musemes — those minimal units of musical meaning — to collide and form constellations of sound.

Oxblood & Olive (2025 Remaster) is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Bandcamp. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast

barkou gave the Coquette generation its anthem of poetic ache in ‘sylvia plath’

Posted on 7 November 2025

barkou knew the risk she was taking in titling her standout single sylvia plath, yet what she delivered is nothing short of a sonic séance for the poet’s immortal ache. To write a track with such a name and not summon the sting of sorrow would have been sacrilege, but in her pensive, synth-driven dream pop rouse of reverie, barkou transcends homage and enters her own celestial field of expression.

Through the diaphanous layering of melody and the ether of melancholic introspection, she conjures a cosmos of emotion while excavating the darkest artefacts of her soul. Her vocal delivery moves between husky vulnerability and falsetto transcendence, wrapping you in a twilight that feels mournfully redemptive. The emotional charge is elemental, yet graceful, revealing an artist who can stretch intimacy into vastness without ever losing control of her euphonically euphoric sonic signature.

The Paris-born artist grew up surrounded by the resonant tones of piano keys and choral harmonies before shaping her own alt-electronic aesthetic. Her sound now merges classic influences such as Fleetwood Mac and David Bowie with the tender modernism of Billie Eilish and Lola Young. Through sylvia plath, barkou gives new form to the Coquette-coded melancholy that permeates a generation of dreamers clutching worn copies of The Virgin Suicides.

sylvia plath is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Eachother unleashed pure rave possession with the kinetic tech-house rush of ‘COMA’ ft Eloquor

Posted on 4 August 2025

There’s a special kind of mania running through Eachother’s latest tech-house anthem, COMA, featuring Eloquor. Some house tracks arrest, others possess; this one will take up residence in your psyche, and you might need an exorcism to get it out.

The way the grimey bars slice through the adrenalised, restless mix only stokes the energy as the track builds, breaks, and hurls you far past the brink of sonic euphoria. This is hedonism in audio form – not content with keeping you moving, COMA sinks in with intent and refuses to release you back to your senses until the final beat fades.

Eachother might have entered the tech-house arena later than most, but that’s become an accelerant for his sound rather than a handicap. After turning heads with the lush, piano-driven textures of his ‘I Want Your Loving’ EP, the Melbourne producer is now cementing his reputation with a catalogue of refined, dancefloor-ready tracks that have already drawn support from the likes of Fedde Le Grand, Sam Divine and DJ Chuckie.

Eloquor, meanwhile, injects modern-day vigilante energy into the track, pushing the momentum with verses that bristle with lived experience and never let up. Together, they’ve made a track that will infect the veins of Melbourne’s club circuit and beyond.

COMA is now available on all major streaming platforms, including YouTube. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Sharo Drifts Melancholy and Bliss Through the Synth-Pop Surf of California Sun

Posted on 31 July 2025

In the opening rays of Sharo’s latest single, California Sun, you’ll be swept into waves of Cali synth-pop, where temperate oceanic soul and retrowave shimmer are signed, sealed, and delivered straight from the shore. You can almost smell the lemon haze on the retro synths as the melody breezes in, floating between peaks of effervescent euphoria and undercurrents of melancholy left out to dry beneath the blistering aural rays. Sharo manages to pull the resonance straight from the salt air, inviting listeners to drift with the flotsam in his uniquely bittersweet sound.

If you’ve been on the hunt for the golden middle ground between moody synth-pop and euphorically kinetic earworms, this is your port of call. The scintillating synthetics shimmer around Sharo’s intimately sweet vocal style, which traces a melancholic line reminiscent of Elliott Smith, without ever settling for pastiche.

The Maryland-based producer and vocalist, who has been navigating the boundaries between EDM, chillwave, lo-fi hip hop, and pop since 2016, continues to expand his aural palette on this single. California Sun is a bright, genre-surfing testament to his evolution and proof that even in the deepest synthetic grooves, vulnerability can bask unashamed in the light.

California Sun is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Chris Juarez Sent Chaos Through the Wires of Avant-Garde IDM with ‘CARCK/////UNRIG’NALMIX:’

Posted on 30 July 2025
CARCK/////UNRIG'NALMIX: by Chris Juarez

Chris Juarez throws you headfirst into the chaos with CARCK/////UNRIG’NALMIX:, his latest single before the arrival of his new LP, Solong,suckRs., due on September 25th. After a disorientating influx of synthesised distortion, Juarez begins to reveal his stripes as an avant-garde electronica composer, drawing on the machinations of early industrial pioneers which are melted into a whirling dervish of 8-bit experimentalism.

With nods to the likes of DJ Scotch Egg and Otto Von Shirach, Juarez doesn’t deliver easily digestible aural aesthetics; he’s on an unflinching mission to orchestrate chaos that cages enough visceralism to disjoint your rhythmic pulses, bearing down on them like a juggernaut that is hellbent on bruising you with pure, undiluted escapism. The beauty is there if you’re brave enough to submerge yourself in the eye of the cataclysmic composition of a storm and surrender to the artist’s cultivated yet Machiavellian volition.

Born in Okinawa in 2007 and now based in Mesa, Arizona, Juarez pulls influence from the IDM, progressive electronic, indietronica and post-rock circuits, channelling inspirations from Oneohtrix Point Never, Autechre, and Clark. Each new release marks a push further away from convention and into unexplored territory, and CARCK/////UNRIG’NALMIX: is no exception. Juarez has made a habit of giving electronic music a pulse that feels almost too real for comfort.

CARCK/////UNRIG’NALMIX: is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Bandcamp.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Annava & Calmea delivered a hypersonic K-Pop/Hip-Hop mash-up with their infectiously fresh single, PARALLEL WORLDパラレルワールド

Posted on 8 January 2024

For his latest single, PARALLEL WORLDパラレルワールド, the US record producer and DJ Annava fused his beats with the razor-sharp bars of rapper Calmea to orchestrate a hypersonic earworm drenched in infectiously fresh K-Pop flavour. The distinction within the production was all too fitting with the titular theme; within parallel worlds, few things are completely uniform; this is inventively visualised within the arrangement and the authenticity of the track.

With Annava’s discography delivering everything from happy hardcore to hyper pop, the unleashing of PARALLEL WORLDパラレルワールド was an unexpected move, but one which notably resonated with his growing fanbase who can’t tear themselves away from the energy he brings to every release. By blending exhilaration with melodic precision, the up-and-coming artist is making a name for himself on the airwaves and beyond.

PARALLEL WORLDパラレルワールド is now available to stream on Spotify.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Don’t you tie me Down: OCILIO drops ear-opening debut track Give Me Light

Posted on 24 July 2023

Tired of being left in the dark and feeling so cold for far too long, OCILIO needs his bones to recover from all past pain via the body-grooving new single to be enthralled by, Give Me Light.

OCILIO is a Mykonos, Greece-born, Canada-based indie electronic music producer and chill house artist who assembles the kind of songs that will beam a smile on previously miserable faces.

Taking us by our hand and guiding us into a much better time and place, OCILIO has superpowers that will surely enchant everyone who takes a worthwhile listen. This is a special soundtrack which is worthy of all playlists.

Give Me Light from the Canada-based electronic music producer OCILIO is such a massive song that is monumental in nature and important in context. This is the kind of single to change moods around and strike away any frightening energy, which needs to be vanquished forever.

If you need the pulse to wake up again, this is the single you needed.

Hear the vibe manifest on Spotify.

See more of his energy come to life on IG.

Reviewed by Llewelyn Screen

Malta’s Stanley Fenech shall summon our pool-splashed spirits with Summer Time

Posted on 12 July 2023

Showing us all that 50 is the new 20, Stanley Fenech is in a happy mood and guides us deep into a much more fulfilled place with the sun-soaked ray of sunshine that is his Summer Time.

Stanley Fenech is a Malta-born electronic music producer and multi-instrumentalist who grew up in the classical music world through his family and has constantly evolved throughout his career.

Summer Time from Malta-born electronic music producer Stanley Fenech is a calming single with minimal fuss. That’s the point it appears. This is for all the humans in the world who want to forget about their lives. Splashing around is the aim. Experimental you’d say. There’s something rather joyous about this song and it might even swap a frown into a smile.

In a dark time for humanity, perhaps this will ease the worries away into the bottom of the swimming pool.

Turn this up on Spotify.

Find out more on his IG.

Reviewed by Llewelyn Screen