Essential Releases, January 24, 2025 (2025)

ESSENTIAL RELEASES Essential Releases, January 24, 2025 By Bandcamp Daily Staff · January 24, 2025 Essential Releases, January 24, 2025 (1)

What the Bandcamp Daily editors are listening to right now.

Ale Hop & Titi Bakorta
Mapambazuko

Essential Releases, January 24, 2025 (2) Essential Releases, January 24, 2025 (3)

Nyege Nyege Tapes

Kampala, Uganda

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Mapambazuko Nyege Nyege Tapes

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Nyege Nyege Tapes

Kampala, Uganda

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Merch for this release:
Vinyl LP
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True to form, this latest release from Nyege Nyege Tapes—a Peruvian-Congolese partnership between composer Ale Hop and guitarist Titi Bakorta—sees highly localized, experimental club production in lockstep with regional folk musics. In the case of Mapambazuko,sunny Congolese soukous and Afro-Latin polyrhythms are subsumed within a densemosaic of electronic production straight from the club underground. The title track is a rambunctious throw-down of upbeat soukous finger picking back-ended by alien dispatches of squelch and bounce; a song sure to soundtrack some Afrofuturist, outer space honky-tonk. On album stand out “Bonne année,” Ale Hop marries a bright, arpeggiated melody from Bakorta to a frenetic cumbia rhythm spliced through with synth spurts and squirts. The tempo is taken down a few notches on the latter half of the album in lieu of some psychedelic blues guitar noodling and a woozy remix from Nairobi’s KMRU. But beyond all of its ecstatic maximalism, which is thrilling to be sure, there’s a curious tension at play between light and dark, the subterranean and the cosmic. It’s a tension that’s more harmonious in some parts than others (the paranoid coldwave-meets-bouncing cumbia of “Una cumbia en Kinshasa” falls in the latter category for me). Either way, Mapambazuko is music to be injected straight into the frontal lobe and stored in the spinal cord rather than just “listened to.”

Stephanie Barclay

Blacksea Não Maya
Despertar

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Príncipe

Lisbon, Portugal

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Despertar Príncipe

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Príncipe

Lisbon, Portugal

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And so we arrive at the final LP from Lisbon trio Blacksea Não Maya, always one of the more stylistically restless acts on Príncipe, a label that is itself characterized by a measure of restlessness. Only one track here, “Kirraxo,” features all three members (DJ Kolt, DJ Noronha, and DJ Perigoso), and it’s a beguilingly unsettling one, with galumphing percussion and a wormy little lead line wriggling its way through the shadowy atmospherics. For the rest of the record, it’s Kolt at the controls, and he delivers an album that’s deliciously shapeshifting—from the gnarled, cartoon-monster-entrance-music “Reborda” to the icy batida banger “Prala” to the fanged, metallic “BALEBALE,” with its walloping bass and chomping chords. Throughout, Kolt pushes even harder against the borders of dance music, filling the space between the galloping drums on “Katraps” with a tumbling pipe organ line or giving “USEICAMBO” a post-punk elasticity. According to the label, Kolt has given up making music entirely to “tend to a spiritual call.” In Despertar, he leaves a tantalizing example of where he might have gone next.

J. Edward Keyes

Fleshbore
Painted Paradise

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Painted Paradise Fleshbore

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Essential Releases, January 24, 2025 (32) Merch for this release:
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If you’ve ever wondered what ragdoll physics would sound like applied to extreme metal, the second album from rising Indiana tech-death dealers Fleshbore certainly fits the bill—hairpin tempo shifts and explosive, spontaneously mutating grooves are two of the biggest norms. Yet even in this forbidding setting, the music bursts with life: take those bass parts on “Setting Sun” and “Inadequate,” hand-plucked so high up on the fretboard they resemble soprano melodies; the whinnying guitar solos on “Setting Sun” and “The Ancient Knowledge,” gliding overhead in open defiance of the blast beats; or Michael O’Hara’s death growls, delivered with the demonically low, tightly controlled cadence of a Nosferatu impersonator and the syllable-per-second ratio of a battle rapper simultaneously. Sound construction, strong attention to detail, navigability perfectly balanced with risk: Fleshbore have it all down on Painted Paradise, making it mandatory listening for metalheads this week.

Zoe Camp

Kratzen
III

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Kratzen

Cologne, Germany

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III Kratzen

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Kratzen

Cologne, Germany

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Merch for this release:
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III is the latest album from Kratzen, a Cologne-based trio situated at the intersection of two time-honored German alternative traditions, krautrock and Neue Deutsche Welle (aka the Teutonic new wave). The resultant sound, which they’ve called “krautwave,” operates within tighter confines compared to other Can worshippers: songs average two to three minutes long as opposed to the usual six or seven, with guitar solos and side grooves frequently sidelined in favor of stark dynamics, simple choruses, and understated percussion. From the effortless cool of tracks like “Nichts und alles,” a mercurial mash-up of post-punk and reverb-drenched indie pop, to rangey motorik jams like “Reichtum” and “Nur So,” there’s plenty to admire here.

Zoe Camp

Prism Shores
Out From Underneath

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Prism Shores

Montreal, Québec

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Out From Underneath Prism Shores

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Prism Shores

Montreal, Québec

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Here’s a solid work of Teenage Fanclub-y guitar pop that can’t decide if it wants to shamble or jangle so it does both with a little help from overdubs and atmospheric studio wizardry. Reflective lyrics and a melancholy vibe further reference the feel of the Fannies, if not their propensity for keeping things semi-tight (cuz they were punk). However, this Montreal group does know their way around a hook, and there’s enough shine and shimmer to burnish once again the familiar emotional ground trodden by these Canadians.

Mariana Timony

Vanessa Amara
café LIFE

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Vanessa Amara

Copenhagen, Denmark

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café LIFE Vanessa Amara

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Vanessa Amara

Copenhagen, Denmark

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The first time I pressed play on the new record from Danish duo Vanessa Amara, I had to do a double-take to make sure I hadn’t fired up the last Caribou album by accident. I’ve been in the tank for VA for a decade now, beginning with their gorgeous 2014 ambient/drone masterpiece Both Of Us/King Machine, but I did not have an album like the giddy, fizzy, uptempo, Wilson-Phillips-sampling café LIFE anywhere on my scorecard. The shift is so severe that I had to go back and revisit 2022’s Fonetica Amara to make sure I hadn’t missed something. Every second of the album is a blast of pure joy—the way the R&B vocal sample in “I’m Only Boggin’” leaps through the waterfalls of synth and piano; the towering, pipe-organ-powered ballad “There’s More to This Than What You Say”; the worked-up, jittery “Don’t Let This Feeling” with its distant, house-y pianos and surging synth-strings. Pop music fans will be able to ID the samples, but it doesn’t matter—Birk Nielsen and Victor Juhl decontextualize them completely and emerge with something glorious and new and beautifully heartwarming. It reminds me in a way of recent work by their labelmates Croatian Amor, but where Loke Rahbek’s recent work has mined the bittersweetness of nostalgia, café LIFE is all about the rush of love in the now. It is a 700,000-watt ray of sunshine arriving in the iciest part of winter.

J. Edward Keyes
Essential Releases, January 24, 2025 (2025)

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