Brutal Euphoria Wave: The Incredibly Weird Musical Direction of 2023
I've been listening to as much new music as I can find this year, and it's been as rewarding as it is incredibly bizarre.
1/17 of our way into 2023, if everything continues as-is, I think it will be impossible to discuss musical genre in the same way that we did in years prior.
Within the last week I’ve been introduced to four of the strangest albums that I’ve ever heard; all of which are unique from one-another, but also weird for a lot of the same reasons, and each whose musical lineage makes perfect sense to me, even though none has ever manifested into something which sounded like these before.
Ada Rook and Ash Nerve of Angel Electronics have insisted on “brutal euphoria wave” for describing the results of their collaboration; and while I think there’s a cloud of more recognizable genre tags which could also be used to describe their sound (indie electronic blackened hardcore power/color-pop?) the more broad emotional descriptor of “brutal euphoria wave” better-encompasses a sonic trend which has been accidentally developing amid bands with totally different influences and which have nothing at all to do with one-another.
ULTRA PARADISE, the nine-track, 32-minute debut album from Angel Electronics released on the day of this writing, has been teased for a while with pre-release singles and music videos; and to me it’s like a nostalgic false memory of how I always wanted brony music to sound like.
More than a decade ago, my favorite self-produced musician with songs about ponies had been Cats Millionaire—who finally has started achieving notoriety in the indie music world as one half of a group called Black Dresses, along with industrial-hardcore punk princess Ada Rook. Their music together is twisted and dark in a way that I’ve been running from lately, though. Whereas Devi’s sound influenced my own output heavily over the decade+ that I’ve been making music, Ada’s work outside of that collaboration tends toward fun catharsis—which makes it easier for me to connect with positively and listen to more often.
Last year, Ada Rook’s UGLY DEATH NO REDEMPTION ANGEL CURSE I LOVE YOU was among my favorite albums—a throbbing, angry, abrasively loud blast of screaming over heavy dance music, designed to completely drown out all thought with waves of apocalyptically-emotional feminine fury. It’s intense; party music only for people like Andrew WK, who consider it a “party” when you get pissed-off and have a one-person mosh pit in the middle of your room.
In total contrast with UDNRACILY, ULTRA PARADISE is dorkily uplifting and cutesy. Though the album opens with a vicious blast beat, and occasionally rips open into metalcore breakdowns dubbed by Ada’s full-throated screaming, that kind of thing happens right before Ash’s voice cuts back in with clean, innocent, lightly-tuned singing, “I wanna know where the rainbow ends.”
It’s suitably ADHD-friendly, maximal pop music which is heavier and more-modern than what, say, Weezer is still doing. There’s shoegazey guitars, black metal tremolo-picked riffs, and high-flying pop hooks backed with heavy-metal screaming all at once—creating something like a cross between Anamanaguchi’s uplifting chiptune speed-metal, and the nigh-religious post-black-metal emotional wash that’s been popular over the last decade through albums like Sunbather from Deafheaven; at least when it’s not doing much more normal dance-pop.
Back in the brony days, an artist called All Levels At Once released a song called Kupo which I always liked and wanted to hear the sound of it expanded on—and somehow, ULTRA PARADISE seems to have finally scratched that itch. It’s an Ada Rook album that I can listen to with other people around—as long as they’re the same kind of people who will let me listen to my favorite anime songs.
(Before I move on to the next example of crazy 2023 music, I’ve also gotta shoutout cover artist serotines, whom I’ve loved following on Twitter for their adorably trippy Adventure Island-core visuals. )
I was “prepared” for Angel Electronics in a sense, since I subscribe to Ada Rook on YouTube (although I enjoyed the album a lot more than expected); but by the time the thing actually released, I had also been introduced to a number of totally left-field surprises by Spotify’s recommendation algorithm and by digging through the best-sellers on Bandcamp from the past month or so—some of which seem to have been aiming for similar pockets of emotional content.
Prepared to Die by Rat Jesu starts off with kind-of generic nu-metal on Rat Judah; nothing awful, but not polished to the level of the genre classics it wants to sound like. The next track is similarly-unremarkable industrial shoegaze—inoffensive again, but lacking polish in its attempt at a ‘large’ sound.
Heaven Invert is the song that was actually pushed to me by Spotify, and is unmistakably 100 gecs-inspired hyper-pop, with some wildly blown-out dirge-rock bass and guitars backed by manic arpeggiating keyboards—almost approximating the gain-blasted madness of Sematary. That’s the reason I’d investigated the album in the first place; and while I don’t think that even that song or the next one (which is some straight-up 90s pop-rock) would’ve compelled me to write about this album, you can at least start to see what makes it fascinating in the fact that no two songs have been from the same genre so far. Rat Jesu is unified only by its washed-out, noisy sound (even if it’s limited by the bedroom production). It combines many sonic elements and influences with upbeat, enthusiastic sing-song hooks and verses which I like (even if the singer isn’t the most memorable).
My favorite track on this fifteen-minute album is definitely The Doom Fulfilled, produced by The Blind Equation. It starts off in a chaotic maelstrom of metalcore, before blasting up into a high-flying verse not unlike the best moments on Illusory Walls by The World Is A Beautiful Place And I Am No Longer Afraid To Die—for about a minute; and then it abruptly drops out into a bass drone before the ultra-short track is over. I can’t see playing this whole album for myself much in the future, but this song at least is going to get a lot of play from me.
There’s a hardcore dance song I’d like more if the screamed vocals weren’t so repetitive, but the final track is my second-favorite on the project—even in spite of some shakiness in the vocal melodies. It’s got a high-pitched, ringtone-style key melody roaring above nostalgic guitars, a hyperactive jungle beat, and a sweet melody about just simply getting the hell out of town and driving fast. This one I connect with in a personal way, and can see getting a lot of play out of, especially when hitting the speeds described in the lyrics; and it’s also the song which most-easily could’ve appeared on ULTRA PARADISE without my questioning it.
Both of the albums I’ve described so far notably can’t be pinned down to a single genre—less so because each song completely defies genre individually, but rather because the projects as wholes are unified by their feelings—and by the sonic palettes that they draw from—rather than by sharing similar structures or styles. Rat Jesu isn’t quite aiming for the same feelings of ‘euphoria’ that Angel Electronics targets, but certainly has a similar approach to maximal, genre-defiant pop-metal songwriting.
Acheulean Forests and Trha, on the other hand, perfectly capture the emotional concept of “brutal euphoria wave” without any inkling of pop sensibility whatsoever on one of the weirdest split albums I’ve ever heard, Die Macht Der Fleenflamme.
When you fire this thing up, you’re immediately greeted by what sounds like Christmas BGM from a free-to-play MMORPG overlaying a roaring digital blast-beat—creating either the most-soothing black metal, or most-chaotic holiday music, ever made. From there, track-for-track you’re taken between similarly-constructed, fuck-awful-sounding hardcore punk-tronic tracks using Pachabel’s Canon chord structures, and then droning dungeon synth tracks, for the rest of the Acheulean Forests half of the split. It’s a taste I’m not sure that it’s possible to have acquired.
Trha’s part of the album opens with a faint, wintery electro-pop song that sounds like it’s coming out of a nearby Game Boy, and has a tiny, reverb-soaked gremlin sometimes screaming over it. When the black metal guitars kick in, it turns into like an ultra low-fi Coaltar of the Deepers, or a washed-out anime opening—which is kind of the direction the rest of the tracks are going in.
While the tinny, barely-audible production which sounds like it’s coming out of a ten-dollar speaker you found on the beach, and also certain parts of the song structures are unmistakably black metal, there’s also this odd math-rock cross-influence, and then all these heavenly synths that bring it into that Sunbather/Alcest/Liturgy realm of transcendent black metal. On Dlhasmen, shoegaze guitar drones lightly underneath what sounds like the BGM of some snowboarding level from an old video game, while someone who accidentally sounds like a kid from South Park shreds his throat shouting over it.
I like the first track on this album and I think most of Trha’s part is fun to listen to from the perspective of a fascinated music fan always in search of something new, tho emotionally I’ve honestly got no idea how to place this album. If it didn’t happen that there were two other albums I could think of which combined influences from extreme metal and upbeat pop and dance music, I think there’d be very little context to ever talk about anything as thoroughly strange as this split.
Asian Glow & sonhos tomam conta aren’t quite going for the same feelings of euphoric exaltation or upbeat catharsis on their latest collaborative post-hardcore/screamo album, Dreamglow; but their massively washed-out and chaotic undercarriage of sound has a lot of similarity to the other artists I’ve discussed. The ten-minute album closer, desencontros, builds into one of those epic, syrupy crescendos that post-rock is so beloved for, while not really sounding quite like anything else.
This release goes just a little too-hard on the reverb and with vocals that aren’t the most inviting for me, but I wanted to talk about it anyways both because I think some people will love it, and because, even if it is a bit more in-line with its genre than the other albums I’ve talked about in this post, it still has moments in which I think it can be categorized under the label of “brutal euphoria wave.”
What intrigues me about this emergent sound is that it feels very natural to me. Between the existences of hyper-pop and experimental black metal, and the blending of electronic pop with metal which already happened in metalcore, it was kind of only a matter of time before all of that started melting into one-another and making something new. I’m very excited to see this compression of hyper-aggressive noise and exalted emotional states expanded on musically as the year continues.