Genre: Rock

Nation of Language

Brooklyn-based synth auteurs Nation of Language first arrived to most in 2020 as one of the most heralded new acts of recent memory, having only released a handful of singles but already earning high-praise from the likes of NME, FADER, Stereogum, Pitchfork, etc.. Inspired by the early new-wave and punk movements, the band quickly earned a reputation for delivering frenzied nights of unconventional bliss to rapt audiences, and established themselves as bright young stars emerging from a crowded NYC landscape prior to their release of one of the most critically acclaimed debut albums of the year — Introduction, Presence. The band’s ability to blend the upbeat with a healthy dose of sardonic melancholy made it a staple on year-end ‘Best of’ lists, led PASTE magazine to dub the album ‘The most exciting synth-pop debut in years’ , and landed the band major radio play from the BBC, KCRW, KEXP, SiriusXM and countless others.

Their 2021 follow up, A Way Forward then saw the band pushing even further into analog electronic landscapes while channeling a ferocious energy on singles like ‘Across that Fine Line’ & ‘This Fractured Mind.’ With NME now dubbing their sophomore album ‘A true modern-day classic’ and Rough Trade tabbing it as one of its Top Albums of the year, the band has gone on to headline a string of packed shows both domestically and Internationally in ’22 and well into 2023.

Miss Grit

“For the way out, I think, we have to follow the cyborg. We have to be willing to be disloyal, to undermine. The cyborg is powerful because she grasps the potential in her own artificiality, because she accepts without question how deeply it is embedded in her.” — Jia Tolentino (Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, “Athleisure, barre and kale: the tyranny of the ideal woman”)

To be a cyborg means to have been manufactured; to have been downloaded with information, characteristics, and abilities meant to carry out a function which will serve its creator. It is to have stepped into the world with very little control under an all-powerful hand. Miss Grit knows that to be a cyborg also means to have potential beyond your creator; to inevitably grow a hand even more powerful.

New York-based musician Margaret Sohn (they/she) created Miss Grit to function as an outlet for their own analysis and expression of self. Called a “polymath” by NME in early 2019, their process is introspective, their vision precise. Sohn produced Follow The Cyborg, her debut fulllength album, entirely in her home studio, and mostly in solitude with several guest collaborators joining — Stella Mozgawa of Warpaint, Aron Kobayashi Ritch of Momma, and close friend and fellow songwriter Pearla.

Miss Grit has released two acclaimed EPs over the past three years, Talk, Talk (2019), about the complexities of relationships, and Impostor (2021) about their grappling with identity. On Follow The Cyborg, Sohn pursues the path of a non-human machine, as it moves from its helpless origin to awareness and liberation. “I’ll be all I’ve consumed,” Miss Grit sings on the album’s opener. A nod to Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue, the track sets the tone for an album that is rich with ideas, ambition, complex layering and a seamless ability to glide between countless genres. On ‘Perfect Blue,’ Miss Grit is not claiming to be a victim of such consumption; but one with the ability to take it all in stride, to use it as a map of knowledge, equipping them to spit in the face of their oppressor. The album is a communication from the cyborg to its human; at times gentle and sparse, at times volatile and explosive. Occupying a sonic world of chaotic electronic experimentation and stirring electric guitars, our cyborg moves at first timidly, and then at full force towards its own actualization.

Miss Grit subtly and overtly refers to films throughout the album (including Her, Ex Machina, and Ghost in the Shell) in their exploration of the life of a cyborg, as well as essays by Jia Tolentino and Donna Horroway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1985). Their impetus to conceive an album about the life of a cyborg stems from their own connection to this way of existing. As a mixed-race, non-binary artist, they have always rejected the limits of identity that are thrust upon them by the outside world, in favor of embracing a more fluid and complex understanding of the self. Miss Grit as an artist is like a cyborg themselves, intent on creating a way of being that is fully and completely their own.

On ‘Lain (phone clone),’ a track that manages to seamlessly balance vast pop elements, cinematic atmospherics and textures with audacious blasts of squealing guitar that make the song unpredictable in its journey, Miss Grit is inspired by the anime ‘Serial Experiments Lain’ (Yasuyuki Ueda), a story about a girl who becomes entranced with the online world. They sing, “I don’t want to see everything anymore,” perhaps one of the most relatable moments of the album. Immediately we recognize the overwhelm; that which comes from the mini-cyborg we keep in our pockets and by our bedsides. The rush of information we receive daily from our phones causes all of us to recoil, though we continue to drink its sweet nectar as if our lives depended on it. The album also features the title track performed in English as well as in Korean (‘사이보그를 따라와’), Miss Grit’s second language-in-progress. This moment represents their reclaiming of both cultural identities; neither of which feel exactly like home without the other intertwined.

A cyborg must be aware of the self to a higher extent than their human counterparts. They must detect what has been implemented inside of them and what has truly come about on their own accord. What of themselves was forced upon them by the outside world, and what was there to begin with? Which voices are leading to self-sabotage and which are leading towards liberation? Miss Grit has wondered the same, and poses a potential answer with this album: there may not be a difference. On ‘Like You’ — which opens out from pulsing electronics to a pleasingly bouncy electro-rock skip, with blasts of snaking guitar, as well as a bass that throttles and rattles with a palpable hum, merging wonderfully with the jolting blasts of synth — Sohn sings, “Bore new, everything is see-through. Confused, they might see they’re like you.” Perhaps what we’ve sprung and what has been sprung upon us is all equally us; it should all be held in its multiplicity, so we can catch a glimpse of the bigger picture of ourselves, and see just how it relates to the many ‘selves’ surrounding us.

Throughout the album, we hear our cyborg reaching for bits of humanity; from its human’s eyes and hands, to their voice and their clothes. In album closer, the heartbreaking ‘Syncing’ — a fitting end to an album that is filled with moments of tenderness, and production that allows the rich textures at play to glisten — Miss Grit sings about the departure of the cyborg, as it leaves its human behind. “I’ve never felt my own toes holding me entirely,” they sing. At this moment, our robot suddenly feels human, reaching for a sense of physicality, a body to stand beneath it that feels like its own. It brings upon us the idea that maybe our wants are not far off from the wants of a cyborg. To feel whole inside of our bodies; to feel ourselves moving freely and fluidly through the world without being splintered by its expectations of us.

Since their 2012 debut No Passion All Technique, the Detroit post-punk band Protomartyr have mastered the art of evoking place: the grinding Midwest humility of their hometown, as well as the x-rayed elucidation of America that comes with their vantage. Protomartyr—vocalist Joe Casey, guitarist Greg Ahee, drummer Alex Leonard, and bassist Scott Davidson—have become synonymous with caustic, impressionistic assemblages of politics and poetry, the literal and oblique.

The group’s sixth album, recorded at Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas, is called Formal Growth In The Desert. And though frontman Joe Casey did have a humbling experience staring at awe-inspiring Sonoran rock formations and reckoning with his own smallness in the scheme of things – as recounted in the single “Elimination Dances” – the title is not necessarily a nod to the sandy expanses of the southwest. Detroit, too, is like a desert. “The desert is more of a metaphor or symbol,” Casey says, “of emotional deserts, or a place or time that seems to lack life.” The desert brings an existential awareness that is ultimately internal.

The “growth” came from a period of colossal transition for Casey, including the death of his mother. Now 45, Casey had lived in the family home in northwest Detroit all his life until 2021, when a surge of break-ins signaled that it was time to move out. As with all touring artists, the pandemic years also brought on other inner quandaries about the purpose and feasibility of a musician’s life.

But life does go on, and Casey describes the great theme of Formal Growth In The Desert as an embrace and acknowledgment of that fact: a 12-song testament to “getting on with life,” even when it feels impossibly hard. “I was trying to find a way forward after some pretty heavy things, without lyrically resorting to, Oh my god, my life sucks,” Casey says. “I was trying to see what was beyond the trouble.” The titles of the two opening songs—the moody “Make Way” followed by the charging ennui of “For Tomorrow”—complete that thought.

The band’s music—more spacious and dynamic than ever—pulled him up, too. Guitarist Greg Ahee, who co-produced Formal Growth In The Desert alongside Jake Aron (Snail Mail, L’Rain), knew what Casey was going through. Conceptualizing the music, he considered how to make it all “like a narrative film.” Having recently scored a pair of short films, Ahee found himself immersed in the cinematic Spaghetti Western music of Ennio Morricone. “I started to write at home on a piano and on a keyboard and then play along to short films, and watch how you can affect and heighten moods as you play,” Ahee explains.

The filmic sensibility is manifest in Casey’s storytelling, too, whether he’s critiquing ominous techno-capitalism or processing aging, the future, and the possibility of love. Casey calls the centerpiece, “Graft Vs. Host,” written in the immediate wake of his mother’s death, the heaviest song on the record, but it is also among Protomartyr’s most beautiful. It opens with an ominous sprawl before Casey’s sweet, coiling melody buoys the subject matter: “Sadness running through my mind/She wouldn’t want to see me live this way,” he sings, an earnest inquiry into how grief manages to eventually make way for other emotions. “My mom wouldn’t want me to be depressed about her passing for the rest of my life,” Casey explains. “Everybody wants to be happy, but how do you get there? Is it just a surgery that you have, and one day you are allowed? After someone dies, you don’t want to necessarily associate their life with their death.” It was the first Formal Growth In The Desert song that came together for the band in a room—an emblem of “trying to put sadness behind me, to see if I can let love into my life.” It culminates on a pummeling loop, which for Casey felt fitting: “I really like that idea: the band keeps going.”