Automatic

Automatic make deviant pop music that cuts through the brainrot. Balancing irreverence with sharp commentary, the L.A. band approached their third album with a dark sense of humor and a renewed sense of momentum. Izzy Glaudini (synths, vocals) and Halle Saxon (bass, vocals) believe messages of change land best with a backbeat and a cheeky groove – and on their new album Is It Now?, they ask us to confront the world’s oppressive structures with fresh urgency.

For Is It Now?, Automatic collaborated with producer Loren Humphrey (Cameron Winter, Nice As Fuck, Arctic Monkeys), building on the minimalist, danceable sound of Signal and Excess. Where earlier records leaned more grid-based, this album was made live and loose – favoring long takes and a rhythm section that breathes. Perky grooves and affable pop melodies act as a Trojan horse for playful political commentary; it may take a few listens to realize that the pulsing bassline, stabbing synths, and sci-fi FX of ‘mq9’ are meant to echo the sound of drone bombs.

The band wanted the record to sit comfortably alongside artists like A Certain Ratio or Air. On ‘Don’t Wanna Dance,’ they nod to late-’70s British scenes shaped by Caribbean music, where dub collides with punk and funk slips into motorik grooves. ‘Smog Summer’ draws inspiration from Patrick Cowley (also an influence on ‘NRG’ from Excess), grounding its environmental message in a disco thrum.

Unsparing in their critique – of automated warfare (‘mq9’), mindless consumerism (‘Is It Now?’), and the political influence of oil (‘The Prize’) – Is It Now? also offers ways forward: dancing, resisting, coming together, falling in love. Like its title, the album doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but it might inspire better questions – or at least get you dancing yourself awake while searching.
Automatic are touring the US and Canada this year.

Accessory

Accessory is the solo project of Jason Balla, a songwriter and multi-disciplinary artist based in Chicago. Their work centers on the conflict between optimism and melancholy, holding the seemingly-infinite weight of both with equal perspective and grace, pointing to their correspondence through curious and complex melodic experiences that mimic the tension of the natural and digital world. Through his work as Accessory, Balla investigates the impact of their integration in how humanity relates to one another, synthesizing intimate acoustic arrangements and human vocals with electronic mutation.

His debut album Dust is where the celestial meets the molecular. Angels, shooting stars, and lightning converse with blood, serotonin and calcium. The duality of Balla’s self-produced work is meticulously crafted through sonic states of intuition and emotion alongside laborious mechanical manipulation. This altering rejects logic for absurdity while the other focuses on the innate nature of pure feeling. In an era of live-streamed pain and overwhelming apathy as the norm, Balla composed these songs to put his world in order, to get to the human heart of it all, processing the decay for himself and for anyone else feeling the ache of pessimism and hopelessness.

Balla has always been a prolific creator and held a distinctly DIY attitude. At an early age he was running sound in downtown clubs and booking shows across a network of Chicago warehouses and basements where he was first exposed to both experimental music and the possibility of alternative lifestyles. In a testament to his assiduous artistic nature, Dust was recorded on equipment mostly built by himself in his home studio.

While the typical studio environment strives toward sound-proofed isolation, Balla embraces the spontaneity of life happening around him. The chirping of birds in the morning, the crashing of glass on garbage day, even the screaming of passerbys from the alley find their way into the recordings behind a vocal take or overdub. The result is an intimate collage of the elemental and accidental with Balla treating the record as a living organism where mistakes are encouraged and experimentation can flourish. While known for his signature guitar and production work in Dehd, Balla proves his scope as an instrumentalist performing everything heard on album with the exception of the viola lent by Whitney Johnson (Matchesse, Winged Wheel).

Much of the record’s foundation was orchestrated on the piano—a gift from his mother after her passing in 2018. Six years later, after nearly non-stop touring, a break-up with a live-in partner and subsequent couch surfing, Balla found enough stability to move it out of storage. Mornings writing on the piano offered a new perspective on composition and a way to commune with his mother’s memory.

Balla devotes significant attention to how we absorb the people closest to us and the relational dents that impact our lives. This informs much of the lyrics throughout Dust: “Whispering dismissive of a feeling not my own” on ‘Angelfire’; “Catch myself trying to prove you wrong / Still catch myself trying to make you proud” on ‘Blood (Magnetic)’; “I cut my hair to prove I was over you” on ‘This Is Not Your Life (static).’ Balla points to missed opportunities, living with your decisions and our capacity for empathy, consolidating a hopelessness that we’re born with and one that develops as we watch the world burn.

There is a sense of release and transcendence through Balla’s work. It’s a lo-fi heliograph with a Cindy Lee-like tenderness, taking notes from the Copenhagen electro-acoustic scene, SML and the experimental jazz world: an act of discovery that finds its tones amidst guitar feedback and soft balladry. On ‘Calcium,’ persistent percussion accompanies Balla’s relentless vocals that recite images of power and tools of violence, contrasting panicked emotional states with dense instrumental beauty. ‘Safeword’ is a reckoning about losing oneself in pursuit, as Balla searches for meaning within and beyond, wrestling with the very notion of love through a sprawling, sumptuous, dream-like immersion of frantic guitars. ‘This Is Not Your Life (Static)’ is a cathartic vehemence, as the organic and electronic swirl with an unguarded and unfiltered vision.

Accessory acts as a sonic companion, exploring the noise and blur of existence and helping to navigate the suffocating nature of potential evil and the budding essence of tender intimacy. Dust serves as the thesis statement, as Balla contends and struggles with the immorality that often overshadows our boundless ability for connection. These two sides of the record tussle, bearing the weight of acknowledging each other. Balla seeks to rationalize the emotional experience, through metamorphic arrangements that take the familiar into a synthesis world.