The Friday Dispatch
Crack Cloud, G! Festival, The Japanese House, Alcest and They Are Gutting A Body Of Water
Punk in perpetual freefall
With a mission to rehabilitate through creativity and community, Crack Cloud’s third record Red Mile marks a new era of maturity. For this week’s cover feature, Sophie Leigh Walker meets the Canadian art-punk collective to chronicle their decade-long journey to stability and peace.
The piercing absence of human interruption in the Mojave Desert afforded Crack Cloud something they hadn’t felt in a long time as they decamped to California to record their third album. “Change is inevitable, and this has been a big reset for us,” Bryce Cloghesy, the band’s saxophonist and guitarist explains. “There’s been a lot of questioning in this period of our lives and as a group, a lot to process. The desert is a great place to do that, it has a great influence on your psyche, being in this endless expanse. There’s a minimalism and certain rawness to Red Mile which the desert drew out of us.”
A realisation that drummer, vocalist, chief lyricist and founding member, Zach Choy is constantly trying to reinforce is that for Crack Cloud, it’s all about the process. “I don’t know how I would describe the phenomena of the band and the longevity it’s had,” Choy contemplates. “Time went by, and this idealism we were born out of just wasn’t sustainable. It started out as a mechanism of recovery and trying to be a more complete person, to be more lucid and understand myself through creativity more – and at this point, it almost feels like the inverse. The more engaged I am with the art, it’s like I’m re-entering a kind of trauma zone.”
“Any kind of online legacy, or however you would describe Crack Cloud in another 10 or 20 years, is so trivial compared to the moments that we share together actually creating these things,” Choy adds. “I feel it more than ever, as time goes by, the transience of how many people’s hands have been involved with this project; how many people have come and gone, the friendships that have ended and begun. The landscape is always changing in life and in the microcosm of Crack Cloud as a platform.”
Read the full feature now over on Best Fit.
In the island of maybe, G! Festival is a must
The Faroe Islands may be home to more sheep than people, but, as G! Festival proves, it is also home to more heart than hubris. Since its founding in 2000, G! Festival has been an essential part of the summer calendar for thousands of Faroese and a dedicated following of foreigners, taking place in the village of Syðrugøta (Gøta to its friends). Not a maybe, but a must.
For the last 20 years, the festival has run annually, no matter the weather or the state of the world. Only a global pandemic could stop it. Along the way, it has operated at the heart of a broader cultural transformation in the North Atlantic nation of around 55,000 people, alongside other vital institutions in the capital Tórshavn like pioneering alternative venue Sirkus, the musician and composer-owned TUTL record label and shop, the beautiful Nordic House, and, since 2019, a dedicated Faroe Music Export office.
“When there’s nothing, it feels like you can create anything,” says Sunneva Eysturstein, who opened the doors to Sirkus on her 25th birthday, 15 years ago, kickstarting a wave of entrepreneurship and bringing a new vitality to downtown Tórshavn, a stone’s throw from the city cathedral on a small hill overlooking the harbour. The knock-on effect has been huge. Today, the Faroe Islands hosts hundreds of music festivals and events throughout the year, from the longest-running programme of contemporary and classical composers, Summartónar, to the newest festival Skrapt, conceived by Eysturstein to shine a light on artists from the thriving Faroese underground. There’s something that caters for everyone, and G! has been among those leading the charge for a more pluralistic and inclusive scene that people can be proud of.
“A lot of young Faroese people would go to Denmark to study and then stay there,” Eysturstein explains. “Now they have a reason to move back.” Musician Høgni Lisberg, who recently stepped up to head the booking arm of G!, agrees. “I don’t feel so much oppression in this country as when I was a kid,” he says. “We still have that old soul, but the general feel here is ‘everything is possible.’ People are more open for weirdness now.”
The Japanese House on Frankie Valli
“When I was a kid I was obsessed with Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, which I think is really funny: a six-year-old, being really obsessed with this 60s band. We were driving to Cornwall - me, my Dad, my brother, and my Mum - and I remember my Dad buying the CD in a service station. The only thing we’d listened to before in the car was Blondie, so I was very apprehensive, like, “I dunno, am I going like it as much as Blondie?” And then it came on, and I absolutely loved it.
I really associate “Dawn (Go Away)” with driving back from that trip. We were getting a puppy and I remember being so excited and listening to Best of Frankie Valli on repeat on the way home. I must have been five or six, but it’s a very vivid memory, probably much clearer than my memories of the last year!
We had a CD player in the cottage were staying in - it sounds like all I did with my family was go to cottages! - and I remember listening to that song over and over and over. I think I was obsessed with it at first because my Mum’s called Dawn. I was like, “Oh my God, my Mum’s name is in a song!” I wasn’t really thinking about the meaning of it.
The reason that I like Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons so much is the same reason that I like The Beach Boys, it’s the harmony that goes on. The use of several voices at all times really appeals to me and obviously has inspired me, because all of my songs are filled with harmony. I’ve always been drawn to that.”
As told to Pip Williams
Three things to get excited about this week
The tribute: A blockbuster collection of artists have come together to pay tribute to Margo Guryan, the legendary artist who passed away in 2021. Clairo, Empress Of, June McDoom and Frankie Cosmos will all feature on the new record, Like Someone I Know: A Celebration of Margo Guryan. It’s set for released on 8 November via Sub Pop.
The podcast: For all those participating in Brat summer, a history lesson is in order. While Charli may now be a global, mainstream star, this wasn’t the case for most of her career. Rather, she’s spent over a decade flirting with the limelight but never quite having her own blockbuster moment. On a new podcast released this week, Nicky Reardon chronicles these touch points, tracing the rise of music’s latest titan.
The session: In an exclusive live session for Best Fit, Brighton band Lime Garden covered “Von Dutch” this week at Crouch End Studios.
Something Old, Something New
Every week, one of our writers or editors share their recommendations of two records they love - one from the past, one from the present. This week, writer Will Yarbrough reflects on Alcest’s Souvenirs d’un autre monde (2007) and They Are Gutting a Body of Water’s swanlike (loosies 2020-2023) (2024).
Despite fronting one of the friendliest bands in metal, Stéphane Paut has always been an outcast among outcasts. After all, his stage name was plucked from the pages of a misanthropic 17th century playwright. The artist now known as Neige grew up in the sunny South of France with one ear turned toward the cold, raw black metal that was sweeping in from the north. Just like his beloved Emperor, Niege wanted an escape from a godless society. But as the leading man of Alcest, his fantasies were an awful far cry from hell.
His memories are still fuzzy, but around age four or five, Niege had a vision. He would be riding in his parents' car or studying at school when suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, he would catch a glimpse of something magical — a musical fragrance, entire constellations of impossible color or perhaps a tiny mythical creature flying just beyond the window.
Souvenirs d'un autre monde was his first crack at communicating with this so-called "fairy land", though Alcest had already undergone a serious transformation. What grew into a full band had shrunk back down to a garage-dwelling solo project after one EP. By the next album, Neige would find a permanent drummer, but on this one, the muffled blast beats are hammered out by his own handy footwork. His new label ensured the production quality maintained enough low fidelity to keep the occultists at bay. "Le iris" drowns out the clean singing with a maelstrom of grainy, atonal thrashing. But Alcest weren't conjuring evil spirits. Like true heretics, they were using the most basic elements of black metal as a force for good. With its grand, surging minor chord melody, "Printemps émeraude" whisks the underground up, up and away into the light.
"Navigue longuement par-delà la brume", Neige calls out over choppy seas of distortion. Even his elongated sighs are steeled with quiet reassurance, as if he's waving from the opposite shoreline. Twinkles of tremolo picking light the way, guiding us toward an enchanted realm that's reminiscent of Explosions, not A Blaze Across the Northern Sky.
Whether you buy into this fantasy depends on how much melancholy one metalhead can withstand. "Ciel sur" is overcome by softly crushing waves of reverb that would turn Billy Corgan a paler shade of Loveless. The corpse paint crowd weren't wrong to point the ringed finger at Alcest for opening the blackgaze floodgate, but the magic of this album is undeniable. Real or not, Neige was gifted with the eyes of an eternal child. Souvenirs reminds us of a time before were were disillusioned by our own failings, when we could not only envision but believe in a better world.
I have to hand it to Brits. As with Beatlemania, heavy metal and rave culture, London's music rags beat my compatriot nerds to the proverbial punch when shoegaze washed ashore during the 90s. But now that the sub-genre is more popular than ever, it's the Americans who are making the biggest splash.
The new wave of American shoegaze is propelled by streaming and TikTok, which makes it hard to pin on a map, but my hometown has kept its grubby foam finger on the pulse thanks to transplants like Douglas Dulgarian. Along with one member of Parquet Courts, both Crutchfield sisters and every other artist who's been priced out of New York, around 2016, Dulgarian moved to Philadelphia, where he started Julia's War. The fiercely independent label was an early champion of Glixen, feeble little horse, MJ Lenderman and Wednesday, though the scene owes more to his own band.
They Are Gutting a Body of Water can wring oceans of noise out of a duct-taped pedalboard. Even the demos on swanlike are flooded with enough reddish-pink distortion to drown out the unintelligible lyrics. But Dulgarian and his inner circle aren't recycling the same old tricks of the trade. Instead, what they're doing reminds me of tie-dying a favorite t-shirt. In true DIY fashion, they apply their homespun magic to shoegaze's trademark effects, soaking those faint, familiar textures in a digital bubble bath.
Typically, I don't dive into stuff like swanlike. Besides Radiohead, bands have a good sense for which songs should be left off an album. But this loose compilation of SoundCloud beats, YouTube rarities and other ephemera is the perfect vessel for TAGABOW. For a bunch of throwaway ideas, the hit rate is alarmingly high. You can listen to all 22 songs in order and the band still sound like they're on shuffle, ebbing and flowing between lo-fi power-pop ("glittering too"), lush folktronica ("heavy vegetable"), booty-bumping techno ("clit eastwood") and post-hardcore blowouts that kept them from getting crowdkilled at this year's Sound and Fury.
Still, TAGABOW are a shoegaze band in spirit. Swirling beneath all the warm and fuzzy feedback is a heavy undercurrent of nostalgia. swanlike includes not one but two nearly unrecognizable covers of iconic TV theme songs. I was too young and missed the boat on Dawson's Creek, but hearing Paula Cole's wordless refrain filtered through a chipmunk vocal processor feels oddly familiar to us older millennials, who've grown up searching the Internet for a version of our past that we can only vaguely remember.
Listen to the week in new music by following our Discovery playlist
Dropping at midnight every Thursday, follow our playlist for a taste of the best new music from the most exciting breaking artists – 20 new tracks, top-loaded from the last five days in music and on repeat in the Best Fit office right now.
Leading the selection this week are new tracks from Uma, Radio Free Alice, Kasien, Ashaine White and coverstar Lucy Tun.