The Dead Bartle Sisters Saw You Coming
Affluent, ferociously over-educated, and quietly unhinged, they are the twin daughters of one of the original Sixties Weathermen. Not the nostalgic, coffee-table radicalism. The real thing. Which explains the posture. We meet them deep into a weekday night at a poetry venue that smells of old wood and newer disappointment. They perform in full Día de los Muertos make-up. During interviews, both wear brown paper bags over their heads. Eye-holes, obviously. This is not amateur hour. They live in Brookline. They work dead-end jobs. This is not a contradiction; it is the point. The songs are spare, close-harmony folk, sung with surgical precision and moral hostility. Lyrically, they circle themes of coercive intimacy, predatory kindness, and the specific evil of girlfriends who know exactly what they are doing. No metaphor is left comfortably intact. Nothing is softened for the listener’s benefit.
Die Scheisse-Merde Orkestra: Turning Pain Into Precision
At 4:00 a.m. Berlin feels like it’s holding its breath between kicks. The clubs are still lit, the streets are quieter, and the espresso tastes like a command. Die Scheisse-Merde Orkestra turns up to the coffee shop in running shoes and a black bomber, looking disarmingly normal for someone who has just finished a sold-out residency set that made a room full of serious-faced Berliners briefly believe in joy.
He’s Swedish by birth, Berlin by adoption, and German by payroll. By day he’s a chemical engineer at a large industrial firm, the kind of role where numbers are real and “close enough” is a synonym for disaster. By night he makes electronic music that sits right on the cutting edge of the current techno continuum: that hyper-detailed, kinetic zone where artists like VTSS, SPFDJ, KI/KI and Ben UFO (when he leans tough) keep the floor in a state of controlled ignition. But he’s not all teeth and pressure. There’s an urbane softness in his taste, a fondness for the deep, polite pleasures of Kruder & Dorfmeister and even the silkier end of Thievery Corporation, which means the menace never quite lands. It’s techno that can glare, but it also knows how to smirk.
Gentle Riley: Oxford’s Soft-Volume Visionary Who Keeps Accidentally Reinventing Regret
Vince Cheetam rarely introduces himself as Vince Cheetam. He prefers Gentle Riley, a stage name he once described as “a warning not to expect anything robust from me.” He says it with a straight face, which makes it funnier, and possibly truer, than intended. Oxford has always produced its share of overthinkers, and Riley is delighted to continue the tradition.
Laid Nerfon: The Quiet Beatmaker of Weed Who Hears Weather Systems in His Sleep
If you take the I-5 north until the billboards thin out and the pines get tall enough to blot out half the sky, you reach Weed. It is a small Californian town that has learned to live with the jokes, the T-shirts, and the road-trippers who stop for photos then flee. Laid Nerfon did not flee. He arrived. He stayed. And somewhere between the rumble of the freight trains and the sawmill dust drifting over toward Mount Shasta, he found the sound that has now made him the internet’s favourite introvert.
Savage Dalliance: The Manchester Mystic Who Brought Trance Back From the Brink
For all the sunsets, influencers, and sachets of powdered disappointment that clog Ibiza’s arteries every summer, there are still a few artists who keep the island weird. Savage Dalliance is one of them, and she seems faintly irritated by the fact. She moved here a decade ago, chasing the usual house gigs, the all-nighters, the off-season hustle. It was supposed to be temporary. Nothing lasts longer than something that was supposed to be temporary.
Quiet Ruin: Reading’s Fast-Talking Merchants of Beautiful Gloom
Quiet Ruin should not work. On paper they are a contradiction wrapped in a fog machine: a Reading-based trip hop collective who make downtempo elegies full of movie dialogue, deteriorated vinyl hiss, and synth lines that sound like they drifted through a dream and got lost on the way out. Yet the band themselves behave like a comedy troupe who have been accidentally assigned to soundtrack global heartbreak.
The Gentleman Futurist: Inside Julien Mercier's Mind
DAVOS, SWITZERLAND — Julien Mercier is apologizing for the coffee. Not because it's bad—we're in a private salon at the Steigenberger Grandhotel Belvédère, and the coffee is excellent—but because he's noticed I've nearly finished my cup and he hasn't offered a refill. "I'm terrible at this," he says, already signaling to the attendant. "My mother would be horrified. She always said Americans think the French are rude because we forget the small kindnesses."