Pressing Concerns: Slake/Thirst, Old Amica, The Narcotix, Porcine

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It’s a brand-new week! It’ll be something of an odds-and-ends collection today and tomorrow in Pressing Concerns: today’s looks at three records from early March and mid-February, including new EPs from Slake/Thirst and Old Amica and new LPs from The Narcotix and Porcine.

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Slake/Thirst – Hunting Dust

Release date: March 2nd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: 90s indie rock, slowcore, lo-fi indie rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Cut It.

The past few weeks, I’ve found myself quite impressed with Hunting Dust, the debut EP from Brooklyn trio Slake/Thirst. Aside from appearing on a benefit compilation for Palestine organized by Gunk last year, the six songs from Hunting Dust are the first taste of the band, made up of “old friends” Bobby Cardos (guitar/vocals/drums), Kaitlyn Flanagan (bass/vocals), and Ian Donohue (guitar). Flanagan made a joke about “beat[ing] the ‘sounds like Pavement’ allegations” upon sending this record to me, and while that band is definitely an ingredient in Hunting Dust (Cardos does sound a bit like Stephen Malkmus, yes) as well as several of their contemporaries, it impresses me just how confident Slake/Thirst are in their explorations of 90s-inspired indie rock. The trio microgenre-hop across the 22-minute EP, stretching their sound into the cosmos and truncating it for quick hitting, but they find melody in just about everything they do. Slake/Thirst really sound like they’ve hit on something already–I even wish the long songs went on a bit longer here.

Hunting Dust starts with something I don’t even think I can call a “fake-out”; yes, “Ditty” is a 45-second piece of indie pop that doesn’t end up sounding like the rest of the EP, but the song’s title is very forthright about what the song is (and forget Malkmus, “Step into the silence how we cherish the refrain / Stumble down the sidewalk with the wasted and the vain” is some Doug Martsch-level beautiful nonsense). As successful as “Ditty” is at being what it describes, “Cut It.” might be the catchier song, a simple but effective piece of fuzzy noise pop that has just a bit of chilliness in its grin. At this point, you’re probably thinking “alright, where’s the slowcore?”–and that’s where “High Strung” comes in. Everything gets quiet, harmonics start echoing in the distance, and Flanagan and Cardos whisper along with the five-minute instrumental. The six-minute “Future Tense” mines similar territory, although that one at least has a rhythm section (slow as it is, it at the very least feels like it’s crawling somewhere rather than being suspended in amber). Hunting Dust ends where it began in the form of a brief guitar pop tune–sort of. “Different Fr.” is tired where “Ditty” was caffeinated, bemoaning having to get out of bed where the opening track was raring to get out of the house. “If you need to, you can communicate truly,” sings Cardos in the record’s final moments; “You need to,” replies Flanagan. It’s the sound of a band that’s mastering walking and talking simultaneously, and I wonder where Slake/Thirst will go next. (Bandcamp link)

Old Amica – Debris Sides

Release date: February 16th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie folk, chamber folk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: The Nightmare

Old Amica are a Swedish duo who have been around for over a decade now, with their debut album, Debris, coming out back in 2011. The Old Amica of Debris and their other early releases had an expansive but delicate folk rock sound that was nevertheless marked by a studio-pop experimentalist side. The band, helmed by Stockholm’s Johan Kisro and Umeå’s Linus Johansson, weren’t content to stay where they started, however–they continued to turn the sound of Old Amica in on itself, to the point where last year’s Fyr was closer to ambient and post-rock than anything else. Interestingly, Old Amica’s latest release is a rare look backwards from the band–with Debris turning twelve years old, Kisro and Johansson decided to revisit the songs that were recorded around this time but ended up “slowly disintegrating on forgotten harddrives”. A dozen years later, the five songs of Debris Sides finally see the light of day as a standalone EP. Unsurprisingly, the skeletal folk music of Debris Sides doesn’t have a whole lot in common with Fyr on the surface, but what’s more notable is that this EP also doesn’t quite have the polished, electronic-curious attitude that Debris had either. 

The songs on Debris Sides are more sparse, more insular–whether or not Old Amica knew it at the time, they had created a completely separate second record alongside their debut full-length, one that fits together just as easily as Debris did. Even as Debris Sides is relatively muted, Kisro and Johansson still create beautiful, harmony-laden pop music in this context–when their vocals are accompanied by relatively little else, as they are in opening track “Everyone We Know”, it just enhances their power. The acoustic strumming of “The Place to Be” and “The Nightmare” are both simple at their core, but not too simple–Old Amica find more than enough to develop within each of their contexts. The instrumental, noise-snippet-featuring “Lillsand” is Debris Sides at its most “ambient”, but the guitar line that runs through it is a strong a melody as any of the vocal tracks, while “Until I Move On” subtly shapes the band into nostalgic Flotation Toy Warning-esque chamber-y, drone-y indie pop to close the EP. Old Amica have spent their entire time together moving forward–even though these songs aren’t “new”, advancing far enough to be able to release these early recordings feels like another example of that. (Bandcamp link)

The Narcotix – Dying

Release date: March 1st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Art pop, folk rock, psych-folk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: The Lamb

The Narcotix are a Brooklyn-based art-folk group led by singer/composer/multi-instrumentalists Esther Quansah and Becky Foinchas, two children of West African immigrants who met as elementary schoolers in northern Virginia. The Narcotix took shape at the University of Virginia, where the duo met guitarist Adam Turay, and their debut record, 2021’s Mommy Issues EP, showed up about four years after the trio moved to Brooklyn. Mommy Issues, which combined Quansah, Foinchas, and Turay’s West African heritage with influences like Western/European folk music and even a bit of math rock, got the group some attention, but they didn’t rush the follow up, taking a couple of years to put together Dying, their first full-length. With the addition of drummer Matt Bent and bassist Jesse Heasly, The Narcotix are now a five-piece, and they bring in plenty of outside help throughout the record as well (trumpet from Geraldo Marshall, George Winstone’s piano and saxophone, Ledah Finck’s violin, Murphy Aucamp’s percussion, Ross Mayfield on piano).

Although it’s only nine minutes longer than Mommy Issues, Dying is a deep record that more than earns “LP” status. For a start, opening track “The Mother” is a swirling art-pop song, built off the intricate rhythms, Quansah and Foinchas’s intertwining vocals, and some surprising but still quite fitting piano work. Dealing in polyrhythms and a wide cast of instrumentation, The Narcotix have quite a bit of space in which to move around–the skipping drumbeat and rippling guitar lines of “The Sun”, jerky psych-funk movement of “The Lamb”, and the (relatively) clear-sounding math-pop of “The Lovers” all take the ingredients of Dying to different endpoints. Dying is both a folk album and a rock album (and more than that, yes)–listening to second half highlight “The Child”, I hear a complex but still thundering drumbeat, intricate guitar work that nevertheless fits perfectly into the context of the song, and lyrics and vocals that are drawn from the faded but still palpable past despite Quansah and Foinchas sounding like they’re right here in the present tense, too. Aided by piano and saxophone, closing track “The Magician” begins to drift off in a jazz-y epilogue–but then the drums kick in in the song’s second half, giving Dying one last rousing moment before drawing to a close. (Bandcamp link)

Porcine – Porcine

Release date: March 1st
Record label: Safe Suburban Home
Genre: Indie pop, dream pop, jangle pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Stop the World

After a strong 2023 featuring highlights from Teenage Tom Petties, Sumos, and Dignan Porch, among others, Safe Suburban Home Records is set to continue their streak into 2024 with their first full-length of the year, Porcine by Porcine. Unsurprisingly (in a welcome way), it’s yet another solid collection of British guitar pop from the imprint–this trio are from Barnsley, and Porcine is their third album, but the first one to come out under their new name (until last year, they were known as Regional Creeps). Perhaps befitting of the name change, it’s also Porcine’s first album without one of the two bandleaders in Zach Duvall–they’re now a trio, with longtime guitarist/vocalist Giannis Kipreos and bassist Sam Horton being joined by new member Georgia Murphy. Porcine is made up of melodic, slightly distorted guitars and melodic, slightly distorted vocals–it’s a dream pop record with a strong foundation both in its songwriting and in the band backing these songs up.

The dreamy opening track “Stop the World” opens Porcine on an incredibly friendly note, sounding like a lost college rock hit in the way it takes vintage dream pop and blows it up into something gigantic-sounding. The songs following “Stop the World” in the first half are a little more laid-back, but that doesn’t mean that the aching pop-ballad verses of “Layaway”, the shoegaze-y noisy rave-ups in “Eject”, and the C86-ish reverb-y jangle of “5am” aren’t strong, too. Although Porcine is a brief record, coming in at under 25 minutes, it makes the most of its limited time, with the trio stretching out into sharp, quick post-punk (“Work It Out for Yourself”) and acoustic-led swirling psychedelic folk pop (“Time Never Moves”) in the album’s second half. Although Porcine are clearly a shoegaze-inspired band, Kipreos’ vocals are always high in the mix (at least, high enough to be heard over the music), and while the guitars might get cranked up here and there, they are, for the most part, as bright and poppy as the songs they’re interpreting. The result is an album that isn’t overly showy or assertive, but with plenty to recommend in its own little world. (Bandcamp link)

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