Listen: I Punch The Clock - Dorvin Borman

Dorvin Borman is a musician and songwriter based in LA. With a focus on dream and psyche pop, he uses drum machines to specifically bring a sense of rigidity to a genre known for being anything but.

As you can here below on new song I Punch The Clock, the result is stark and yet intimate. Those drum beats feel crisp and Germanic and yet the vocals and guitars wind around them to make something more humane and natural, more Californian in sound.

I Punch The Clock is a nostalgic song about our preoccupation and obsession with nostalgia. Borman sings about our feelings regarding the past whilst simultaneously drawing on elements of it in the psychedelic feeling of his guitars and melodies. It is hard not to get pulled in by that feeling...

Check out I Punch The Clock below:

Listen: Tides - Onni Boi

Tides is the kind of song that feels like it is bursting with energy from the moment it starts... A drum snap, a bubbling electronic bassline shimmies along with a sense of excitement and desire, a falsetto vocal carries a sense of independent determination. This is the new single from Onni Boi, a musician from Helsinki who likes to blend the sounds of electronic music, indie, house and R&B.

Onni Boi is the work of Onni Poika Pirkola (Poika means boy in Finnish). Music is his vehicle to cover things he finds it hard to talk about, focusing on intimate and difficult to discuss topics.

Tides is a record that has been a while in the making, covering a topic that the artist finds difficult:

“I had a verse for 'Tides' laying around for a year or two. A little loop in the head. There was something irritating but exciting about it so ended up waiting a while before recording it. I think Tides turned out cool and cheesy and also kind of personal. There’s this feeling of trouble with letting someone close (and keeping them that way). And how those are seasonal things, cycles, tides. It’s so much easier to please people than to let them in on where you head’s at.”

Tides is out now through Lyktan Records.

Listen: Flow - Moglii

Flow is the new song from Cologne-based musician Moglii, real name Simon Ebener-Holscher, and it bursts with a wild sense of movement.

The song is a tribute to the ocean, the feeling of the flow-state and the experience of the soul of a special person. Listening to it conjures a feeling of being truly in the moment, when time seems to shift and take on a different form, somehow both longer and shorter at once.

Having previously had success in collaboration with Novaa on the 2016 EP Down Under, Moglii started to release music on his own in the form of the debut EP Naboo. Having opened for the likes of Roosevelt, Elderbrook and Empire of the Sun, Ebener-Holscher is able to combine his background in songwriting and training in jazz piano with knowledge of electronic production and what it takes to stage a live performance. The result is heard here, in the polished and yet authentic and honest feel of Flow.

There is a little bit of a bedroom, future pop feel to Moglii’s music. Flow calls to mind Metronomy and James Blake amongst others - the hooks are irresistible but at the same time the vocals feel emotionally intimate. The instrumentation deliberates plays with the sound of the sea, and a sense of serenity and strength. It’s confident and yet vulnerable, in the way genuine vulnerability can be often be incredibly strong.

Describing the inspiration of Flow, Moglii says:

“I wrote “Flow” two years ago during a profoundly formative trip to Tenerife. We camped in the middle of nature and woke up every morning at the sea – it was a surreal experience, seemingly detached from time and space, made even more magical by a special encounter: I fell in love there and put that flow I experienced with this girl into a song. It's about getting to know each other, the deepening of the relationship and the natural lightness and ease that underlined it all.”

Check out Flow below:

Listen: Kick - Shee feat. Andrew Butcher

This right here is the kind of joint I feel irresistible... slipped into my inbox at a point when my backlog of blog posts is already worryingly long, Kick is the sort of song I can’t not write about.

Kick has a weird and woozy production style that feels cavernous and a vocal that somehow feels so close it’s like it’s in my head. This is music built like architecture. It's a dayglo danceline in an empty multi-storey car park, neon lights in echoing alleyways, bright candy trickling down drainpipes.

In other words, Kick, a song about infectious attraction, manages to combine brightness and grit in way that you can almost touch. It elevates the chorus to magic trick - slight of hand as seemingly everything happens at once, multiple rhythms bounce around my head and, once it is over, it is hard to know what happened... all I do know is I found myself singing this in the bathroom as I got dressed, having only ever heard it once.

Listen: Win You Over - Whethan & Bearson feat. SOAK

Win You Over sounds like someone took your emotional sensation of a having a crush, bottled it and then poured it into rare plastic vinyl records. Bubbling enthusiasm and determination grabs you by the shoulders to create a moment of forced eye contact as Whethan, Bearson & SOAK tell you, “Hey... I’m really into you, you dummy”.

There is a feeling of joyful easiness here in Win You Over... knowing you are into someone and just seeing how that plays out. The main refrain from the song asks over and over again, “If I try could I win you over?”, some 27.5 times, and you suspect it is as much a rhetorical question as one directed at anyone in particular. It’s the nagging, insistent craving of a brain that can’t quiet itself, joyous and in awe and just wanting someone so damn bad.

Win You Over is the first collaboration between Chicago producer Whethan, Norwegian musician Bearson and Irish artist SOAK. Together they have made something that truly feels like the product of one mind - a sparkling piece of disco-pop. Check it out below.