Rising Star 88 : Smoldering Truth in Distortion's Grip

Rising Star 88 feels like the aftermath of a brush fire: still smoldering, still hazardous, but somehow cleaner in the air. This episode has stripped it all back to bone and blood; raw rock with a bit of American dust in its lungs. If Rising Star 87 was teetering on the brink of chaos, 88 is calm when the guitars are still vibrating, and your heartbeat hasn’t yet decided if it should rest or race.

These musicians are not chasing the ghosts of rock, rather dragging them into the present with a microphone. All the riffs have been earned - not engineered. The drums don’t just mark time, they push back, like somebody pounding on a locked door. Slide guitars and harmonicas seep into the distortion, giving each song that longing of the open road, somewhere between Springsteen’s blue-collar poetry and Kings of Leon’s rough sincerity before stadiums.

There is grime trapped underneath these nails. One band recorded their vocals inside an abandoned gas station—having the sound of rusted metal influence their tone. Another band turned a childhood tragedy into a southern rock anthem, reminiscent of thunder rolling across an empty field. One more layered tape hiss and old radio static beneath their solos—not to show their cleverness—but because imperfection is the only honest sound left.

Each piece of music on Rising Star 88 captures what a story sounds like when it is told from the front seat of a car at 2 a.m. with the windows down and headlights cutting through nowhere. It is unpolished and alive. The guitars bend like stains of truth under pressure, the basslines stomp through heartbreak, the lyrics go right into that space between giving a confession and facing confrontation. These songs do not shy away from their pain, they lean into it, and grin upon it and turn it into gas.

The Americana tinge is not sentimental. It is grounding. Very specific-style storytelling that reminds you that rock music was birthed out of dirt, not the algorithm. The steel strings and southern harmonies blend well enough through the grime to provide these tracks with a pulse that corporate playlists forgot to find.

Rising Star 88 doesn't pretend. It doesn't try. It simply stands, sweat-drenched, amp-warm, eyes straight ahead. The cadence of the session is purposeful rebellion—to dispel the myth that rock is dying, rock is just molting once again.

So turn it up. Let it shake your rearview mirror and awaken parts of you that you thought you had put away. Rising Star 88 isn't simply a playlist, it is proof that the truth still sounds better with distortion.

Samuel Yuri’s “Wind Before the Storm”: A Whispered Tempest in Grunge’s Shadow

You know the moment -- that fleeting moment just before the song even begins. There is something in the air, whether it be the static buzz between notes, or the gentle buzz of the strings warming up, but you know you're about to experience something real. This is precisely how it feels with "Wind Before the Storm" by Samuel Yuri. There is an atmosphere, there is pressure before the first verse ever occurs -- a breeze before the storm.

Samuel Yuri comes from São Paulo, and has always written as someone trying to translate weather into sound. These songs are not just melodies, they are about motion, texture, and environment. You can practically smell the concrete of rain in his guitar tone -- a gravelly mixture of grunge, gothic overtones, and something else spiritual. The result is ancient or immediate, like a lost transmission being pulled from the ash and static of modern rock.

In "Wind Before the Storm," he draws us into a space that is both haunting and deeply human. While minimalist, you can feel that the production choices are intentional — every note feels necessary at that time, and every absence feels appropriately weighted. A fading guitar doesn't scream for your attention; it breathes. A recalled lyric doesn't just demand — it lingers, overtly heavy with memory and pain, convinced another song will help him sing this pain out. Somewhere between Type O Negative's expressively velvet darkness and Alice in Chains' gut level, visceral, raw terrible confessions to themselves and the audience — Samuel is attempting to carve out his own sonic territory.

There is almost like an emotional architecture that builds slowly, mirroring the song title, covered in a stark yet warm musicality. The drums crack like thunder in the distance, but ground everything with grit and weight. There are shades of melodic heaviness similar to Metallica's songs of adulthood, but Samuel's delivery is undeniably influenced by a Brazilian sense of pulse — something you can feel is beneath the grayscale. He isn't imitating; he is evolving. He is not chasing trends; he creates sounds from the edge of genre.

What distinguishes “Wind Before the Storm” is not just its sound but its restraint. Samuel knows there are moments for holding back. The song does not rush. It breathes. It allows you to sit still in the melancholy, in the space in between beats. And that patience fosters intimacy — the kind that feels like someone is whispering their story from a broken speaker at midnight.

And perhaps that is Samuel's greatest gift. He does not perform; he gives you confidence. His music feels lived-in — like denim, or a notebook smeared with beef rings and the graphite of a too-hard pencil. It is messy, in the best of ways, reminding us of the sacredness of imperfection, when it's honest.

All of this is evident when you think about his arc from early recordings at Lumen Studios, to his recent international experiments, like "Versions of the Sun" — complete with songs in German and French — and you can see the pattern; Samuel is a restless creator. He does not settle, and that creativity moves across borders, without losing its soul. There is grit, sure, there is grace too. And it is that rare balance, which keeps you listening long after the last note fades away.

"Wind Before the Storm" has the effect of being less of a single and more of a glimpse into an artist in the middle of a transition — a man in the twilight of something bigger, guitar in hand, wind at his back. And, when the last chord diffuses into the silent ether, you don’t feel finished. You feel the promise.

You can stream "Wind Before the Storm" on all the majorstreaming services, but just a fair warning: it's not a background song. This is the type of song that creeps into your bloodstream, pulls up a chair in the static, and sticks around long after the storm has passed.

Sleeping Fits’ “I Feel Fine”: A Half-Smoked Surrender in Desert Static

There is a strange kind of peace found in chaos — the kind that flows through busted amplifiers and cracked pickups, the static hum between empty beer cans and half-written lyrics. For Sleeping Fits, which is the indie/alt-rock vessel of Matt Chabe, chaos is something to be chased not hidden away. It’s the goal. On his new single, "I Feel Fine," time slips away like a fever dream of modern contentment; equal parts numb and electric, equal parts confession and confrontation. It sounds like that someone was watching the world burn from a cracked patio chair, half smiling through the smoke.

Chabe, once living in Bangor, Maine, now lives on the fringes of Guadalajara, Mexico — a shift he now bleeds into the edges of his sound. There's desert dust in his chords, a kind of dry shimmer that calls to mind long highways and low suns. "I Feel Fine" lives in that tension, desert-rock grit crashing against post-grunge melancholy, glam edges melded with lo-fi static. Every hissing amp and loose snare hit adds texture to the song; concrete, ash, beer foam, static — the real stuff of living.

The project is referred to as Sleeping Fits, though the irony is not lost on him. These songs were created in sleepless hours; coming from a busy brain that waits in the room between connection and collapse. “I Feel Fine” doesn't claim to have answers; it actually falls into the exhaustion, the dullness of trying to remain as human as possible while the world runs at an increased pace. “I didn’t want it to be slick,” says Chabe. “I wanted it to be alive.” And it is. You can hear the room breathe. The guitars sound like they've played a hundred nights too many; the vocals seem both resigned and defiant.

There's an arc here, the quiet hero's journey of someone learning to process what's genuinely living and feeling, in the chaos. I Feel Fine feels like Act II, the fall before the break. Chabe is writing from the heart of the storm instead of after it. The song hums with that uneasy ease, the understanding that you can feel fine, and feel everything. This is modern malaise reframed as instinct to survive. There are no pretenses, no processed perfection, only the fragile hum of a person trying to calibrate to their frequency.

Sonically, it evokes the DNA of Queens of the Stone Age and Truckfighters, but what makes it stick is not genre; it’s presence. The production is brutally honest—no reverb to hide behind, no auto-tune polish. It resembles a recording in motion—like a live wire session that could short out any second. That rawness is what hooks you. You’re not listening to something engineered for radio polish—you’re listening to something that could collapse, and that’s why you’re drawn in that much closer.

Lyrically, “I Feel Fine” teases irony. Under the shrug of its title is exhaustion, a dry smirk at modernity’s absurd peace. Chabe sharing images of numb digital rituals and the rituals of disillusionment—swiping, scrolling, watching shadows dance on concrete. But there is, below the lines, tenderness, even hope. The chorus does not explode; it exhales. It’s less of a proclamation, more of a moment of surrender.

In the context of his first album, Sleeping Fits, "I Feel Fine" is the grounding moment—the emotional stillpoint in the musical journey through noise, connection, and the strange beauty of being alive in amidst it all. Chabe's music is not simply reacting to the chaos, he is embroiled in it, having a beer with it, and finding a rhythm in its static. And perhaps, therein lies the quiet revolution buried in much of the fuzzed out melodies: not against the chaos, but into something that hums, something that feels fine for the moment.

The Kiss That Took A Trip’s Horror Vacui: A 20-Minute Defiance of Empty Noise

Horror Vacui has a sort of rebelliousness about it—not in a loud, self-righteous way, but that quiet defiance that just happens because someone refuses to play by anyone else's rules. The Kiss That Took A Trip has been an ongoing project by Madrid-based artist M.D. Trello that has always walked that thin line between the emotional and the experimental. But this 20-minute-long new epic of conceptually and philosophically interesting music feels like an inscription in concrete, full of heavy static and ash. It resists an era of forwards fast culture—the 30-second hooks, the endless scroll—and invites you to simply sit down, crack open a beer (or not), and listen like people used to: with time, curiosity, and maybe a little reverence.

Horror Vacui unfolds rather than opening. For several minutes, the track breathes, almost uncertainly, before it develops into surging tidal waves of post-rock magnificence — echoes of Mogwai and Bark Psychosis stitched into the lo-fi tapestry Trello has been weaving for the last eighteen years. The music does not demand your attention; it claims it. Each section wades into another area of a mix of gentleness and anxiety, like walking through the same street different at different hours of the night. There is music, yes, but there is also drone, dissonance, and that kind of silence that feels alive.

M.D. Trello's narrative is fundamentally one of quiet resistance. When he debuted The Kiss That Took A trip in 2006, he was not thinking of the charts or fests. He was simply blissfully following an impulse—an impulse to create something that did not need to follow the rules of permission... to build something. Calling to mind the spirit of the DIY North American scenes influenced by Steve Albini, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Trello started developing a sound that fell into a fluid, stratified space between genres—creating provocations against the notions of “band” and “musician.” He humorously cites Brian Eno as saying he’s, “not a musician at all,” but his discography is something else—an experience of use of sound as a richer, more fluent language than words.

The transition of The Kiss has taken on a near-cinematic quality; each album allows for a new chapter progression in a long-form narrative about creation, collapse, and renewed life. How the Mighty Have Fallen (2012) was a debut of sorts, representing an origin story, in a sense; Electroforest (2014) broadened the world-building with generous melodic confidence; and then Punk Cathedral (2017) shredded down the structure and built it back up from barely recognizably. And then there was silence: personal conflict, a pandemic, a long stretch of silence that, at times, felt longer than years. Out of that void came Victims of the Avantgarde, a collective rebirth that signaled Trello had not finished evolving—and Horror Vacui feels like the full exhale from that last bout of breathlessness.

There is irony in the title of this piece. "Fear of emptiness"—and yet, emptiness is a place this music thrives. You can hear tension, juxtaposition between precision and chaos, melody and noise. You can almost feel Trello's fingerprints pressing through the static, finding meaning out of feedback loops and ghost melodies and sonic texture. The weight of each sound could almost imply a memory of the silence. This is an audacious slow piece in a culture even more obsessed with impatience, collapse; compressed sounds amid a rational need to be spacious.

In conclusion, Horror Vacui isn't merely a song; it's a declaration on the subject of endurance. An act of having the audacity to make long-form beauty in a throwaway culture. The Kiss That Took A Trip doesn't chase trends - it burrows deep beneath trends, in search of what is real, what can last. And therein lies the persistence - the reverb or static, the echoes that refuse to fade, of an artist who has turned solitude into a kind of symphony, and silence to a kind of grace.

Todd & Karen’s “WORK”: A Smirking Indie Pop Soundtrack for the 9-to-5 Grind

It's oddly soothing to observe Todd & Karen while they engage in their trade. Not the standard fluorescent-lit, corporate kind — but the kind that they sing about in their latest single, "WORK." The kind of work that is disheveled, lyrical, and collaborative. After a year's worth of absence, the Norwegian-Irish/Swiss pair Øyvind Berge and Ina Verdi-Ruckstuhl are back with "WORK," a track that is equal parts wry commentary and textured indie pop daydream. The kind of track that tickles your ears and leaves you nodding, smirking, and contemplating why your 9-5 doesn't have a work soundtrack of its own.

All of which is to say, "WORK" is multi-layered like the aroma in a great café in Oslo or Zurich. There is a little static in the background, the muffled sound of concrete streets outside, and the faint noise of beer cans opening somewhere down the block. Øyvind's voice floats in and out of the lush melodic arrangements, and Ina interjects with spoken-word interludes in Swiss-German that cut through the melody like a wink. It's playful, self-aware, and definitely Todd & Karen. There's humor/excitement intertwined with the rhythm, melancholy folded into a swell of synth, and some underlying pulse reminding you that even listening to it the rat race is ridiculous, but somehow sustainable.

The collaborations on this track represent a list of adventurous, creative talent. US electronica artist Trick Knobs adds a brilliant and sparkling texture like vinyl static, William Lovitt's organ layers imbue warmth into the song structure, and Albert Nesbø Baker delivers a raw energy somewhere between jazz and metal that pushes the song into disorienting territory. Yet, even with all of the contributions, this track does not sound busy; Todd & Karen have discovered the secret to that special balance — melodic pop sensibility anchored with experimental edges that they have developed since "Mr. Beardsley" first ushered us into their orbit.

The lyrical anchor of "WORK" is deceptively simple: an ironic rumination on working for a living, the monotony of daily life, and oddities of limitlessly modern-life absurdity. However, Todd & Karen start and finish the laughable musicality of the lyrics — the type of song that makes you tap your foot, tilt your head, and laugh at your own captivity. There is repetition, yes — mechanical rhythms and state-cubical ashtrays for tedious ingestion — and release: in the synth glimmer, in the curling violin lines around the vocals, in Ina's phrasing suggesting a wink to we see you, we get it.

Then there is the b-side, "LUNCH," which is less meditation and more filmic afternoon wind. Following an AIR-tinged instrumental, playful surf rock twang pokes through in tinkerbell moments, all with the same cheeky philosophy of “WORK.” It is an interlude. A suggestion that among the grind, there’s room to breathe; to stretch; to daydream.

Todd & Karen have always moved in this liminal space - between humor and sadness; a pop-friendly approach to often adventurous experimentalism; Scandinavian minimalism and an international eclecticism. The songs feel moderately neurotic, still melodic enough that you'll remember them, but also just adventurous enough that you won't know what the next turn will be. "WORK" captures these dualities - the pulse of indie pop, shuffling electronica, and jazz-metal chaos, all presented with a lyrical voice that is both intimate, knowing and oh, so unbearably human.

At the end of the track, you are experiencing a suspended moment, a little amused, a little pensive, a little less weighted. Todd & Karen’s genius is not limited to the notes or the production — it is in the emotional micro-beats, the feeling of concrete, beer, ash, and static that makes their world lived in. “WORK” is not merely a song about the modern grind. It is a poignant reminder that just like it is in music, it is in life, the pauses action and collaborators we invite along way — that is where the magic is.

Glass Cabin’s Real Bad Day: Whiskey-Burnt Americana from Ash and Asphalt

The first aspect to declare about Glass Cabin’s Real Bad Day isn’t the grit, per se—it’s the way in which the grit hangs in the air like static in a room of half-consumed beer cans and concrete dust. Jess Brown’s vocals—rough-hewn, all the weary mornings of Appalachia and night-bleached desert bones threaded in—cut through intricate lines of guitars, mandolin blares, and slight percussion from David Flint, each note occurring already lived-in. It is the kind of song that strikes speakers and does not depart unceremoniously, dragging in a day’s worth of ash and sunscalded asphalt into your living room.

To Brown, music represents not merely a career, but a heritage and connection to a time that left him fragmented. Growing up in the Catskills, losing his father at nine years old, and being a teenager who wandered the southwest—sleeping in parking lots, under highway bridges, and even in the corners of a place known as a bordello—all affected him. That restlessness permeated through Real Bad Day. Writing a song invites a wandering spirit in every chord; the song itself has "hitchhiked" across deserts and back again, filled with stories of moonshine, love, and survival in its pockets.

Flint's contributions pushed Brown's work in the right direction by employing a precise yet easy, reassuring warmth. You can hear the ghosts of band battles, school dances, and Nashville studios throughout his guitars and keys years of precision and craftsmanship masked just behind a thin veil of spontaneity. They evoke some sort of Americana noir thick with mood and memory, it's a tight whiskey of sound; smoky with longing and ruggedness.

Real Bad Day does not hurry. It unrolls like a cigarette burn through paper—picking over words, holding spaces between, letting each emotional micro-beat land with gravity. Brown's lyrics—brutally honest, yet soft—fold in on themselves, turning and repeating in ways that reflect how grief and regret and hope get stuck replaying in our minds. This is not a lament, but an excavation—a dig into the marrow of what it is to survive, to wander, to return.

What makes this track intimate to hear (even conspiratorial) is how concrete it feels. You can sense the texture—the rasp of Brown's voice against string buzz, Flint's fingers scraping the frets, or the delicate metallic clink of percussion. It is a recording that does not elide the edges to polish it up. You could almost reach out and touch the surfaces—the aged wood floor of a studio in Nashville, the rough grain of the walls of a Catskills cabin, the potential for cold concrete under a bridge in New Mexico.

Glass Cabin’s craft is based on creative pairings: large and small, spooky and silly, necessary and informal. On “Real Bad Day,” those pairings are constantly up for impeachment. The listener feels caught in some landscape and between the pull of memory, and the ache of longing; the thrill of having survived to the depth of grizzled observations etch into tired years of existence. It’s a rare strain of Americana that holds onto its history, but doesn’t get bogged down by nostalgia. A stream of pain, but never sentimental.

By the end of “Real Bad Day” there’s a feeling that’s hard to put a name to: A half smile. Echoes of feet on ash-covered asphalt. Beer and dirt still swarming in the mouth. Glass Cabin has always been a duo of experience, and on “Real Bad Day,” the experience flows, loose, apparent, unwashed, and magnetic. It’s gritty reminder of why alt-country still matters and matters not just for the melodies, but for the people who wrote it, the roads they walked on, and the stories they lived to tell.