South London trio Stolen Velour, Floco and Aria SL have released their debut album Underlight, a shapeshifting collection of fluid club deconstructions. The album follows last year's ambient EP Holdfast and finds a fuller spectrum of movement while maintaining a carefully created atmosphere.
Housesharing origins
The trio began as housemates in southeast London, where sounds bleeding into one another was less a creative choice and more a reality of housesharing. To create their sound, they pooled their ideas as producers before adding individual touches: Floco's violin, Aria SL's bel canto vocals, and Stolen Velour's clubbier production chops. Their shapeshifting approach to live club music has meant an unusual spread of support slots, complementing both Jabu's dubby shoegaze and the hardcore horror rave of Yya.
Underlight album details
Lead single Caught Myself bobs between sunken drawls and airy, keening vocalisations, like a swimmer in a cycle of submerging and reappearing. The trip-hop of Moment wobbles and pulses. Transfigured moments of busier club styles such as amapiano and gqom appear on I Want and Loch. According to the review, the album's strength is the balance between these states of immersion. Cutscene, at the LP's midpoint, is a formless, full-body plunge, followed immediately by a cover of Lilium, the Puccini-like main theme from Japanese manga series Elfen Lied. From this high, the vocal line tumbles ever downwards, and the process of immersion begins again.
This week's best new tracks
Radie Peat of Lankum releases solo debut Still I Love Him, a song of eternal loving devotion where the narrator's lover “knocks me about”. The sadness and horror is carried like a current of icy water through the warm, lovely arrangement.
Biita Houdei's The Ground Here channels Joni Mitchell's open-hearted “chords of inquiry” but powers this acoustic sunbeam with her own appealingly rangy energy.
Kelela and PinkPantheress collaborate on The Bridge, with Kelela bringing luxury and PinkPantheress harmonising gorgeously on a story of a crush so overwhelming that this aqueous ballad sounds drowned by it.
RenzNiro's Save Me features a drill-leaning beat with snares flitting past bass rumbles that lurk in the shadows, as the Manchester rapper-producer recites self-worth mantras. It is a highlight from world-building mixtape No Weapon Shall Prosper.
Gilla Band's Placeholder is some of the Irish band's most diabolical work yet: an arid, sucking riff, catchy to the point of torment, coils around Dara Kiely's vocals before a frenzied constriction and manic, whacked-out high.
Edgar's Sígueme, from the Oakland-and-Guadalajara musician's new album Pavor, is a Spanish-language cover of Amanda Lear's Italo disco classic Follow Me, glittering like a black mirrorball in a goth club.
Slow Pulp's Not for Nothing is a piano-driven ballad from the Chicago band, with Emily Massey singing of the gulf between someone and their ex who has already moved on, evoking Bonnie Raitt's 1990s heartbreakers.
