In recent weeks on Dazed, we’ve interviewed Jeremy Pope, Towa Bird, and MICHELLE. We’ve also looked back at a conversation between Lana Del Rey and Courtney Love, looked at how Record Labels are fighting back against the Chat GPT of AI Music, dug into the story behind Kate Bush’s ‘Cloudbusting’ video, and hosted a Dazed Mix from Slim Soledad.

We’re halfway through 2024, and a lot is going on out there. Despite the sometimes unspoken uncertainties that colour the day-to-day realities of many, music continues to function as a shared communal space and a source of collective solace. In the wake of the pandemic’s lockdown years, the global music community still faces ongoing economic challenges around touring, releasing and promoting music. Regardless of the difficulty setting of the moment, however, new and under-discussed talents from the worlds of underground music continue to use community and craft to find a way.

For the second edition of our quarterly roundup for 2024, we’re continuing to reflect and acknowledge musicians, artists, producers, and DJs from across the globe, all with strong communities, real visions, and important statements to make. Here are ten essential Q2 releases, all available on Bandcamp.

AMBIENT BABESTATION MELTDOWN & BORAI, HUMAN MATERIAL

WHO: Two UK-based producers and DJs who found common ground over cyberpunk aesthetics, sci-fi and late 20th-century club music.

WHY YOU SHOULD BE LISTENING: A longstanding DJ, Ambient Babestation Meltdown (the creative director of Peckham’s Rye Wax) has a well-listened sensibility born from digging through left-of-centre retrofuturistic records. Across the Human Material EP, she teams up with Bristol dub-techno-jungle head and dubplate cutter Borai to take a rainy, neon-lit stroll through the nocturnal sounds of electro, techno, breakbeat hardcore, and UK garage. Within that specific zone, they use three posthumanist dance tracks draped in languid and alluring spoken word vocals to sketch out a gritty, neo-noir story about an underclass of sentient robot workers who stage a rebellion to heal the glitching circuitry in their electronic hearts.

FOR FANS OF: Drexciya, Marie Davidson, Tim Reaper.

BBYMUTHA, SLEEP PARALYSIS

WHO: The Tennessee rapper bringing a dirty south attitude to the basslines and breakbeat sounds of south London.

WHY YOU SHOULD BE LISTENING: Ever since the foundational days of grime, dubstep and road rap in the early 2000s, there’s been a sometimes unspoken relationship between new UK street sounds and southern hip-hop in the US. With her latest album, Sleep Paralysis, True Panther Records signed rap artist bbymutha explores her take on this transatlantic exchange with a cast of production collaborators, including J Rick, LYAM, Kilder, Foisey and Bon Vision Music. Rhyming charismatically over a mixture of hefty breakbeats, trunk-thumping bass lines and deconstructed club beats, she taps into trauma, past exploits and braggadocious bravado with effortless style. The results are compelling, cinematic and cathartically listenable.

FOR FANS OF: Three 6 Mafia, backxwash, Kelela.

MUSCLECARS, SUGAR HONEY ICED TEA!

WHO: A New New York producer/DJ duo keeping the club sounds of old New York alive and well.

WHY YOU SHOULD BE LISTENING: Throughout the thirteen tracks that make up Sugar Honey Iced!, Brandon Weems and Craig Handfield, AKA Musclecars, interweave musical gestures drawn from the rich histories of disco, house, boogie, jazz, soul, funk and ambient electronica. Moment by moment, these elements coalesce into an uptempo Afro-American-focused sound that recalls the glory days of 1980s nightlife in the Big Apple while balancing joy and heartbreak with intimacy and loss. Supported by nimble session musicians, Musclecars created Sugar Honey Iced! for the British label BBE over two years of sessions held at home and overseas. Once the groove starts, you won’t want it to stop.

FOR FANS OF: Joe Claussell, Nuyorican Soul, Marcellus Pittman.

CLAIR, SONIC SHORTS 0.3

WHO: The Glasgow-based composer, producer and vocalist exploring the liminal zones between ambient, dream pop, shoegaze and environmental music.

WHY YOU SHOULD BE LISTENING: With the release of her remarkable Earth Mothers album in 2021, CLAIR marked herself out as a singular talent through a fully formed and all-immersive psychedelic-ambient soundworld. Three years later, her new Sonic Shorts 0.3 EP offers more misty and magical forest music delights. On the first two tracks, “Acid Circus with Richard Cabut” and “Love with Jude Rogers”, she wraps spoken word from the two writers mentioned above in dreamy, gorgeously abstracted soundworlds. Afterwards, CLAIR bookends the EP with “Cally”, an unintentional shoegaze track inspired by a dream about a former long-distance lover. Together, these flights of fantasy point the way towards her forthcoming Sonic Shorts LP.

FOR FANS OF: Dead Can Dance, KMRU, Patricia Wolf.

ASTRIT ISMAILI, THE FIRST FLOWER

WHO: An expressive Amsterdam-based performance artist rethinking experimental pop songcraft for the 21st century.

WHY YOU SHOULD BE LISTENING: Opening with a sprawling 11 minutes and 44 seconds long avant-ballad of the same name, The First Flower is a transportive melange of pop classicism, cinematic lounge music, glam rock and asymmetrical club music. Hailing from Kosovo, Astrit Ismaili has built up a multi-layered reputation over the last thirteen years as a multi-disciplinary artist, performer and choreographer within Europe and North America’s modern art scenes. Across The First Flower, they address mainstream beauty standards, gender dysphoria, nature exploitation, and contemporary queer realities through memorable songcraft, sound design, and electronic abstractionism while teaming up with Mykki Blanco and Colin Self.

FOR FANS OF: Evita Manji, Björk, FKA twigs.

HOWIE LEE, AT THE DROLMA WESEL-LING MONASTERY

WHO: The Chinese producer-DJ looking at traditional Tibetan Buddhist chants and rituals through a hyper-modern footwork/bass music lens.

WHY YOU SHOULD BE LISTENING: In 2022, Beijing’s Howie Lee – one of the most popular figures in China’s 21st-century electronic music scene – travelled to Drolma Wesel-Ling Monastery in the mountains of north-eastern Tibet. There, he immersed himself in the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism while studying a library of chant recordings made by the founder, Tuga Rinpoche. After returning to the DJ scene, he blended chants and traditional Chinese instrumentation with IDM, favela funk, dubstep, UK garage, and footwork production. Equal parts ancient and futuristic, At The Drolma Wesel​-​Ling Monastery is a compelling conceptual work for both the dancefloor and the routines of daily life.

FOR FANS OF: Kode9, Foodman, Sophie.

ZSELA, BIG FOR YOU

WHO: A Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter recasting classic folk, soul and art-rock as contemporary alternative pop.

WHY YOU SHOULD BE LISTENING: Across her debut album, Big For You, Zsela locks horns with some of the big themes: love, heartbreak and navigating nuance within your daily life. As she told Dazed, “I was inspired by duality throughout the process and writing – with tension there’s release, with joy there’s ache.” Produced with Daniel Aged (Frank Ocean, Kelela) and Gabe Wax (The War On Drugs, Soccer Mommy), her songs render her themes through an arresting blend of atmospheric indie-pop and expansive electronic dreamscapes.  Big For You feels like a suite of nocturnes, but it’s also very much drenched in the warmth of the Californian sun.

FOR FANS OF: Sade, Caroline Polachek, Kate Bush.

ONRA, NOSTHAIGIA

WHO: The French beatmaker, record digger and MPC specialist reflecting on longing, introspection and loss from a vibrant vantage point in Thailand.

WHY YOU SHOULD BE LISTENING: In 2020, Onra spent the early months of the pandemic recuperating from some substantial personal losses in the French countryside. While there, he revisited a set of sample-based beats he’d created several years earlier in Bangkok with an MPC1000 production console. This time, he heard something different in the neglected Thai 7” records he’d dug out of cheap record bins for the project. Transposing their melancholy melodies and trance-inducing rhythms into a series of evocative beatscapes, Nosthaigia helped him find a way out of the darkness while emerging with a romantic homage to the beauty often foreshadowed by sadness.

FOR FANS OF: Madlib, Jitwam, XL Middleton.

TH BLISKS, ELIXA

WHO: An Australian trio mutating UK dub, post-punk and downtempo into a misty South Pacific soundscape.

WHY YOU SHOULD BE LISTENING: From the opening synth drones, slow-motion breakbeats and torch song refrains of “Enchancity”, Elixa reveals itself as the work of a group of extremely well-listened musical lifers. The collective project of the Hobart-based ambient pop duo Troth (Amelia Besseny and Cooper Bowman) and Sydney punk musician Yuta Matsumura, The Blisks, dropped their debut How So? in 2022. Since then, they’ve been hard at work mapping out a spectral soundworld that sits comfortably alongside fellow Australian acts such as Hydroplane and YL Hooi while also sharing sonic signatures with early 90s trip-hop and the dubby post-punk that proceeded it a decade earlier.

FOR FANS OF: Leslie Winner, HTRK, Hype Williams.

SALVIA PALTH, LAST CHANCE TO SEE

WHO: The cult New Zealand songwriter and producer taking his evergreen lo-fi bedroom pop sound in new directions.

WHY YOU SHOULD BE LISTENING: In 2013, Salvia Palth quietly released melanchole, an emotionally resonant collection of dream-pop, shoegaze, and ambient noise tracks that effortlessly captured something essential about the awkwardness and anxiety of adolescence. Over the years that followed, the album found a cult audience across the internet through Tumblr and streaming. A few weeks ago, he released a new album. Eleven years after melanchole, last chance to see finds Salvia Palth building new pop and avant-funk structures on top of his hazy signature sound of interiority. Loaded with masterfully catchy singalongs, it’s a glorious return from an artist who has changed while remaining the same. 

FOR FANS OF: AR Kane, Beck, Jai Paul.