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8 hours ago
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From Los Angeles via Virginia
Recommended if you like PinkPantheress, Kylie Minogue, Daniel Lopatin’s Chuck Person alias
Up next Album She Comes from Nowhere, released 20 June
Neggy Gemmy has quietly spent the past decade building one of the strongest catalogues in underground pop. Born Lindsey French – and previously known as Negative Gemini – Neggy Gemmy’s music spans coldwave, shoegaze, trance, vaporwave and capital-P pop; her records can be icily aggressive or hedonistic and seductive, often in the span of the same song. Although her work is always distinctive, she’s also canny with iconoclastic references. On 2016’s Body Work, she sampled Britney Spears’ Everytime one song before her own masterpiece of emotional desolation, the breakbeat ballad You Never Knew; the highlight from her underrated 2023 club odyssey CBD Reiki Moonbeam, titled On the Floor, sounds like – and, in a just world, would have been – a 2000s Kylie Minogue single. French’s forthcoming album She Comes from Nowhere still foregrounds her distinctive voice, which can be both breathy and appealingly harsh, but it also incorporates touches of gauzy, gallic bands such as Stereolab and Air, adding appealing new textures to her work.
Despite the relative pop appeal of her music, French is also stridently independent: She is the co-founder of the influential cult vaporwave label 100% Electronica with her husband George Clanton, and has rarely released music through an outside label. During a time when conversations about ownership and rights dominate pop music, French, Clanton and the artists they work with represent the internet’s potential to foster a self-sustaining scene without gatekeepers or big money. With any luck, She Comes from Nowhere will find an even larger stage to spread the sound (and the message). Shaad D’Souza
This week’s best new tracks
Sofia Kourtesis – Unidos (with Daphni)
As if two of dance’s warmest producers collaborating would be anything other than radiantly uplifting: “You never let them get you down!” a voice declares, as the relentless beat crushes desolation to dust. LS
Alan Sparhawk – Not Broken
Sparhawk’s daughter Hollis joins him on this banjo-laced lament about resisting anger in the face of loss, her vocals a disarming echo of her late mother Mimi Parker’s muted hymnals. LS
DJ Dadaman and Moscow Dollar – Matlatsi
This pair were at the heart of the “Bacardi house” scene of 00s South Africa that gave the world Township Funk, and now they’re back with this spry, sinewy hybrid of piano-house and amapiano. BBT
The None – At Hope
Named for a senator’s suggestion that “at-risk” kids should be called “at-hope”, the post-hardcore band’s latest thrashes against inequality. “To make a living, you’ve got to give in,” taunts fearless Kai Whyte. LS
Claire Rousay and Gretchen Korsmo – Find Yourself in a Hole on the Beach
Rousay never stops, here joining with a fellow US sound artist for an intensely blissful wash of field recordings, balmy vocalisations and acoustic guitar that spreads like ink in water. LS
Pile – Born at Night
Shades of Protomartyr to this dynamic art-rock anthem from the Boston DIY mainstays, tumbling in a torrent of rolling drums but held aloft by strident violin. BBT
Celestial – Mermaid Boulevard (ft Romance)
The ambient-folk Mancunians turn in a wildly beautiful instrumental, with a longform Vini Reilly-ish Balearic guitar solo over a looped, reversed waltzing motif. BBT
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