LITM Rock brings you tunes for your midweek blues, brought to you by Close To The Sun, Wastrels, mollywater, Night Enjoyer and Craigs Small Music!
Close To The Sun – "The Song of Nothing"
Close To The Sun's "The Song of Nothing" feels like stumbling home from London at 2 AM, worn out, wired, and ostensibly wiser. It's psych-rock for the disillusioned urban romantic, the one who still sees poetry in flickering streetlights and empty pint glasses. From the initial twang of guitar, you're enveloped in its smoky haze, a cinematic drift through the neon haze of compromise and studious rebellion. The words cut like a sigh you didn't know you were holding. And then there's that solo guitar: moody, weeping, and hovering on the brink of insanity, as if confessing in a shattered mirror. Close To The Sun doesn't merely perform psych-rock; they carve atmosphere. "The Song of Nothing" is a love song to the lovely uselessness of urban existence, a foggy anthem for anyone who's ever found clarity within chaos.
2. Wastrels – "Bell Jar / Devil Built a Home Where You Once Prayed"
If Sylvia Plath sat in on a post-rock séance, it would sound very much like Wastrels' "Bell Jar / Devil Built a Home Where You Once Prayed." The Minneapolis pair translates existential pain into something dense, rich, and eerily radiant. "Bell Jar" quavers with spectral guitar lines that hover between desolation and forgiveness, but "Devil Built a Home…" cranks it up, imagine cathedral-large riffs colliding with poetic despair in a dark basement. The production is dripping in atmosphere, all echo and pain, as if heard underwater as memory repeats itself. You can sense the crash of old sorrow and new expansion meeting in each note. It's the sound of something holy being broken, to be replaced with something more mortal beneath. This isn't your run-of-the-mill atmospheric rock release — it's a sermon from the ashes, a heavenly exorcism masquerading as two songs that will not go quietly into the night.
3. Mollywater – "Tea & Toast"
"Tea & Toast" by mollywater is heartbreak served in lowercase, intimate, raw, and wonderfully British. The Brighton artist succeeds in getting silence to sound like something, in making the most mundane morning routine a meditation on loss, yearning, and survival. The guitars don't strut; they sigh. The drums don't beat you over the head; they linger like an afterthought. It's all so quietly shattering that you might overlook how precise it is, each pause calculated, each word teetering on the point of falling apart. mollywater's tone is dry, understated, and poetic in the way of "I've been weeping, but I still need to go to work." You can sense the seaside sadness spreading in, not the postcard variety, but the drab, out-of-season cold where all seems nearly beautiful. "Tea & Toast" is indie rock's gentle revolution, a whisper that screams louder than any shout, a debut that sounds like someone letting the truth escape for the very first time.
4. Night Enjoyer – "Gridded Sky"
Night Enjoyer's "Gridded Sky" isn't a song, it's an alien cathedral constructed from synths, dreams, and starry heartbreak. The Geneva-based band takes the human condition, feeds it through a neon prism, and gives us something dazzlingly strange in return. Imagine if Blade Runner had a folk band; this would be their lullaby. The track glows with haunted beauty: synths shimmer like artificial stars, guitars slice the dark with mechanical precision, and somewhere between them, a voice rises, fragile, prophetic, half-human, half-signal. It's its most cinematic electronic melancholy, in which grief buzzes in computer code. "Gridded Sky" is ancient and modern, medieval minstrels hooked into contemporary despair. It's broken heart, reprogrammed; belief, redefined in neon blue. Night Enjoyer are not creating music, they're constructing digital legends for the soul. You don't hear this one, you upload yourself into it and never quite return.
5. Craig Small Music – "Sunkiss"
Craig Small's "Sunkiss" is like inserting your heart into an amp. Bursting out of Katoomba, Australia, the song shines with grit, sweat, and a dash of wild sunlight. You can almost catch the whiff of solder and coffee that stoked its two-week gestation in his home studio; every note smells lived-in. Distorted bass hums like hot pavement, guitars sweep like desert mirages, and Craig's voice sits just exactly where raw and radiant meet. It sounds as if the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Faith No More surfed together and decided to document falling in love with the horizon. But under the groove, "Sunkiss" conceals a perilous type of obsession, that addictive tug between infatuation and creative perfection. It's euphoric and slightly deranged, like looking too long at the sun but being crazy about the blister. "Sunkiss" is not merely a debut; it's a proclamation: Craig Small has arrived, aglow and unrelenting.
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