Welcome to the 2SER New Music Report – featuring all the new music hitting your 2SER airwaves over the coming week across your 2SER Breakfast, The Daily and Drive programs

ALBUMS:

Ducks LTD – Harm’s Way (OS)
Fluxa – Sonder (L)
Magic Number – Badly Written Songs (OS)
ORGONE – Chimera (OS)
Pylon Reenactment Society – Magnet Factory (OS)
Sons of Zoku – Endless (AU)
The Slims – The Slims (L)
Velvet Trip – Harmony Blooms (L)

SINGLES:

Camera Obscura – Big Love (OS)
Claudia Forever – When it gets late (L)
Double Happiness – Electric Sheep (AU)
JEMBAA GROOVE – Dabia (OS)
Jess RIberio – Everything is now (AU)
JLotu$ – JLotu$ Daily (AU)
Maxine Gillon – Lipstick (AU)
Sun Dress – Lifting up the pavement (L)

The very beginning of 2024 has been overflowing with great music.

Starting right here at home, the debut studio album from Sydney trio Velvet Trip is out now and will be right your alley if you’re a fan of the likes of Tame Impala, Memory Motel or Air. Written and recorded between here and Berlin, Harmony Blooms is an immersive trip through kaleidoscopic pop that draws you in via watery guitar melodies and finely honed synthscapes. Velvet Trip are touring the album on a national tour right now (appearing at Mary’s Underground on March 16, as well as Blues Fest later in the year) .

Up next, from Athens, GA, is Pylon Re-enactment Society, with their debut (sort of) on Strolling Bones Records. Pylon Re-Enactment began as a tribute/covers band by Vanessa Briscoe Hay, performing many of the songs of legendary Athens new wave group Pylon, a group Hay also fronted in the 1980s. However, this is mostly made of new material, and it’s a firecracker record, which is bursting with wonky hooks and it’s infectious stomping energy. It also features a cameo duet with Kate Pierson of the B-52’s. The album is called Magnet Factory. 

This week also saw the release of Harm’s Way from the Toronto tearaways Ducks Ltd. The 2SER feature album this week, and a lushly recorded, swaggering jangle-pop that is bursting with heart and energy as well as an underlying electronic pulse. Lead singer and songwriter Tom McGreevy has an innate ability to write lyrics that are loaded with reference and metaphor, and it’s a hugely likable album that encaptures melancholy and catharsis in perfect combination and bears more than a passing comparison to The Go-Betweens and Reds, Pinks and Purples.

Chimera, the latest album from Californian outfit Orgone has also landed this week and it’s a heavy slab of  wobbly psych-funk that draws on a range of multicultural influences. Orgone were also the backing band for Say She She, so if you dug their Silver record last year, or just Afrobeat and Southern soul generally, this is for you.

A digital-only release that really jumped out this week was, Sonder, the debut EP from north-coast based producer and vocalist Fluxa. At four tracks, it’s a brief one, but a high quality piece of spunout cosmic electronica and RnB, that bubbles along on trippy electronic beats and abstracted, breathy vocals. It’s an unusual sound, in the best way possible. While we’re loath in applying the cliche “one-to-watch” tag, this is one that you possibly should.

Local four-piece The Slims just sidled into the saloon with their first official EP, a self-titled cocktail of spaghetti western motifs and smoky alt-folk. If you’re a close-to-regular listener of 2SER you’ll no doubt have heard some of this EP via the singles, which have featured on our music programs since 2022, but there are a couple of new cuts on the EP, such as Sirens, which really stand out. The Slims popped by on The Band Next Door to talk the EP about the EP, and it’s a great interview with a much-loved local live group.