The October Essentials guides you to some of Negative White’s favourite new tracks of the month—with the lovechild of Kate Bush and New Order, psychedelic devilry, Alps-shaking beats, vocal acrobatics, and magnificently imploring despair.
MAIKA – Levitate
With her new single Levitate, the artist is pulling off a stunning handbrake turn, pressing the pedal to the metal, and racing full throttle into synthpop. It sounds like the lovechild of Kate Bush and New Order. In other words: bloody brilliant! A highly infectious anthem about anger catalysing change and movement, rising up unstopably. Maika’s vocal presence inevitably captivates everyone’s attention.
MAQUINA. – misfit
As if possessed by demons, the Lisbon trio MAQUINA. plays its way into a deep frenzy, as steadily as it is insidiously. The new single misfit is an almost nine-minute epic that spirals into the depths and carves a breathtaking catacomb of dark industrial Krautrock out of the rock in the menacing underground. The unyielding beat, the sawing guitars, the endless reverb, they all create this outstanding, psychedelic devilry.
Alma Muñeca – Anhelo
When you listen to Anhelo, the second single from Texan band Alma Muñeca, their self-proclaimed label of „art pop“ seems a little bold. Here, the beat thumps relentlessly, the electronic tension builds darkly and escalates into a screeching crescendo. A glorious, aggressive chaos over which Cocó Allegra’s voice floats and vibrates. Anhelo has little to do with what we generally understand as pop, and that’s undoubtedly for the best.
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THYMIAN – Worst Enemy
With uncompromising candour, the „sad dancy boy“ THYMIAN dissects how he often stands in his own way in Worst Enemy. With his familiar, powerful voice and self-confidence, the Swiss artist with Croatian roots slams the next dark hit onto the dance floor, characterised by airy verses and a rebellious chorus. THYMIAN delivers a track that feels musically light-hearted and groovy despite its thematic gravitas.
LUM – HEELS
With brazen self-confidence, Swiss rapper LUM swings her wrecking ball right through conventions, pulverises stylistic boundaries and constructs fireworks from the rubble. HEELS, sung and rapped in French and Spanish, escalates magnificently between hip-hop, baile funk and tech house. This beat shakes not only your lungs, but the very core of the Alps.
Leon Wiesmann – Spätsommer
With surgical precision and razor-sharp intensity, Spätsommer by 21-year-old Leon Wiesmann from Schaffhausen penetrates the body. The newcomer combines the melodic catchiness of pop with the introspective world-weariness of the Neue Neue Deutsche Welle. Wiesmann repeatedly scratches at the boundaries of kitsch, but the passion-fuelled and poetic vocal acrobatics that this young man performs in Spätsommer deserve the deepest admiration.
Lone Assembly – My Life’s Solid
Slowly, the sound swells, ebbs and flows, dark and powerful, through the catacombs of this cathedral of sound. My Life’s Solid by Swiss band Lone Assembly causes certainties to crash down and assumptions to dissolve into thin air, and it sounds absolutely magnificent in its imploring despair. This is a gothic anthem that is entirely devoted to the genre while also developing its own character.
