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Ryan Walchonski was writing a lot of songs when he first moved to Washington D.C. in 2021. Some went to the Pittsburgh-based noise pop group Feeble Little Horse while others were tucked away for Aunt Katrina, a solo project and a communal leap of faith into a strain of guitar-driven music that is noisy and ephemeral, digital and raw, polished and playful. After releasing an off-kilter noise pop EP called Hot in 2023, Walchonski spent early 2024 writing Aunt Katrina’s full-length debut. He later brought the demos to Alex Bass (Snail Mail) who helped flesh out their production, mixing and engineering these nine tracks to bring them over the finish line. These songs delight in taking two disparate parts and exploring how they interact, resulting in a beautifully unexpected third thing. Descriptors that come to mind are “slowcore” or “dream pop” or “electronica” as do thoughts like “has anyone coined ‘laptopgaze’ as a genre yet?; “Could a house of cards be blown away by guitar feedback?”; And “what if Oasis traded their anoraks for Orioles gear?”
The circumstances of recording inspired the album’s title, This Heat Is Slowly Killing Me. “The van I was driving at the time had no air conditioning and I was driving to record at Alex’s house in College Park, Maryland 2-3 days a week in the absolutely brutal D.C. summer weather, ” he explains. “I was listening to the band This Heat and feeling like their music was killing me. ” These days, Walchonski lives in Baltimore and no longer plays in feeble little horse. This Heat Is Slowly Killing Me further nods to D.C. by channeling the collaborative energy of the city’s legendary punk scene. “This album and band was created with the help, support and love from so many people,” Walchonski (songwriting, guitars, synths, etc.) says, noting creative contributions from Ray Brown (Snail Mail; drums), Eric Zidar (Tosser; guitar) Nick Miller (live bass), Laney Ackley (lyrics, live guitar), and Emma Banks (lyrics, art direction, live keys).
As for the songs, they touch on loss, disillusion, and impermanence. “A great many of my personal relationships had completely changed, and my writing was struggling to find a way to grapple with this,” Walchonski says. A desire for stability is apparent on “Peace of Mind,” which blends finger picked guitar with electronic samples and synthesizers into woozy recognition: “Got caught in the rainstorm/I’m falling apart/Got cut into pieces/I’m falling apart. ” Walchonski’s lyrics are relatively straightforward and This Heat… prefers the emotive power of melodic textures.
“As someone who may struggle to express myself in more conventional ways it is a freeing experience to be able to say things that I don't know if I could say otherwise, ” he says. The tightly layered anguish of “Ran Out of Time” is interrupted by a digital sample that repeatedly slices through the tension before the outro collapses open into a rush of noise. “Four Corners” wanders in a trance, lost in confusion until a wave of noise offers a cathartic wallop. “I don't think I could ever make music and have it sound like one thing," Walchonski says, and This Heat… dabbles in la-la-la English guitar pop, bittersweet fuzz, and shapeshifting electronica, like the interlude “Bait, ” an ambient breakbeat collage made with Pittsburgh’s Alvin Row. As a whole, This Heat Is Slowly Killing Me edges into the unknown and explores the limits of expressiveness. - Quinn Moreland
Toronto-based quartet Cootie Catcher hypercharges the tenderness of twee pop with high-energy electronics and an unabashedly direct lyrical presence. On melodic, uptempo, and overpoweringly joyous songs, the band investigates raw feelings and vulnerable situations, pulling no emotional punches but basking in major key jangle and ecstatic synth tones the entire time. Their newest album and Carpark debut, Something We All Got, is the most high definition of their sound yet, graduating from the basement-born recordings that came before it without losing the saturated excitement of those lo-fi roots.
Cootie Catcher began as a duo of songwriters Anita Fowl and Nolan Jakupovski in 2021. This early version of the band made two rough-hewn releases, their 1234 EP and the album-length project stupid is as stupid does before expanding to include Sophia Chavez and drummer Brendan Cooke when they began playing live around 2022. In Feb 2024, Joseph Shemoun took over on drums and the band recorded their first studio album Shy At First. The band grew both as a studio entity with the release of several more singles and miscellaneous tracks, as well maturing as a performance vehicle with touring, local shows, and gigs with contemporaries like Kiwi Jr. and Alvvays.
Now several years into finding their sound, Cootie Catcher shares their sophomore album Something We All Got, a fast-changing network of glitchy electronic bubble pops, collisions of loops and live drums, and bracingly straightforward emotional expressions. These songs are complex but always fun, alive with dichotomous energy and inspired by lived experiences with navigating tricky relationships, social topographies, and challenges in the microcosm of being a band as well as the zoomed-out perspectives of a larger shared reality. - Colin Medley