CL – Doctor Pepper

Managed by Scooter Braun (Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande), CL is the biggest star in South Korea – her pop group 2NE1 are bigger out there than One Direction. And now she is going solo, with an album due out later this year. Doctor Pepper is one of her first English-language releases, with a similar line in cartoonish flow to Nicki Minaj. Production is courtesy of Diplo, his intention being to present CL as “the baddest, coolest female out right now”. K-pop it ain’t. “Feeling so clean it don’t get no fresher,” the 24-year-old declares over Atlanta trap heavy on spaciousness and sci-fi sonics. “You gon’ bounce to this shit,” she warns. This is probably true. As paeans to beverages go, it’s addictive stuff, with extra fizz provided by rappers Riff Raff and OG Maco.

The Walking Who – My Future Wife

The Walking Who are a trio of bearded longhairs from Sydney, but they don’t do bog-standard grunge or indie rock. This is powered by a steady, albeit muffled, electronic beat that sounds as though it’s been treated and tweaked and overlaid with all manner of woozy, reverb-heavy effects. Then the frontman starts rapping, rhyming “Latina” with “emphysema”, and disorientation sets in. It’s Aussie psych rap-rock, Tame Impala meets TI on Neptune. Flaming Lips with a dose of Waka Flocka Flame. Well worth checking out on 22 July at London’s Old Blue Last or, if you happen to be passing, the Citadel festival in Victoria Park, east London. Or you could just play My Future Wife on Soundcloud and be transported to whatever fantastical places the track conjures.

Shades – Time Back

Step this way if you miss Neon Indian, Millionyoung and those other purveyors of echo-drenched chillwave/glo-fi from the class of 2009 to 2010. Shades are a four-piece from Boise, Idaho, but they sound like a lonely laptop boy from a bedroom, wherever. If you’re into lush, wan electronic dreampop, you’ll love Shades’ self-released album Common Desire, due out next month. The group’s name has something to do with synaesthesia – the condition that has sufferers hearing colours or tasting sounds – while lead track Time Back pangs with the pain of nostalgia, where “memories serve as a sweet but dark fix”. There is a toughness to the beats and tensile strength to the bass that contrasts nicely with the billowing synths and sad, spaced-out vocals: one of the tracks on the album sounds like ethereal EDM, another like disco having a heart attack. Toro Y who?

Green Buzzard – Zoo Fly

Green Buzzard offer nostalgia of a different kind: think back, way back, to the halcyon days of Mock Turtles, Northside et al, to baggy with a haze of shoegaze, to fuzzy guitars and a rhythm designed for head-nodding and bobbing. Unexpectedly, they’re not from Manchester or the Thames Valley, or any point in between. No, they’re this column’s second act from Sydney, and they’ve just signed to I Oh You, the Aussie label who brought us DMA’s, those Antipodean Oasis admirers. Clearly there is something in the water down under making their twentysomethings want to replicate the look and sound of early-90s indie, the stuff that was happening in that brief window ahead of grunge and Britpop. Taxi to Syndrome!



Sextile - Can’t Take It



LA four-piece Sextile are Cramps-alikes, offering a scuzzy psychotronic take on rockabilly. Can’t Take It is taken from their debut album, A Thousand Hands, released in August via Felte. Expect lots of yelping, howling and pummelling of instruments both electronic and organic. If the frenzied mood of the single grabs you, you’ll want to investigate the LP, where surf punk, industrial and throbbing jostle for soundspace and whose title alludes to all manner of strangeness: it was inspired by the occult experiments of guitarist Eddie Wuebben, who was doing “open-eye meditation” when he felt thousands of hands reaching down towards him, a vision that he found “frightening and exhilarating”. Maybe he should try some Dr Pepper.