By It’s our Bandcamp Picks of the Week, featuring Instupendo and Ripsquad’s glitchy R&B team up RIPSTUPENDO and Cloakroom’s kaleidoscopic alt rock opus LAST LEG OF THE HUMAN TABLE!
Instupendo, Ripsquad – RIPSTUPENDO
Genre: Alternative R&B, Indietronica, Glitch
Favorite Tracks: “b.Bass,” “Island,” “Kissout”
There’s always been a bittersweet connotation to the term “chill-out music.” Its new-age sensibilities have welcomed plenty of deriding comments about how meritless, shallow and inessential it can be. Even so, the smooth allure has made it a sound many pop auteurs call upon to render their compositions hypnotic and soothing in the way only the best ambient music can, a shorthand for atmosphere.
RIPSTUPENDO, a collaboration between trap collective Ripsquad and downtempo virtuoso Instupendo, revels in this state of frictionless beauty. Its cover couldn’t be any more representative of the music within: drooping trees backlit by a misty sunset, obscured by a barrage of bright white and pink Xs. It perfectly depicts RIPSTUPENDO’s blend of glitch music and R&B, gentle digital intrusions into something warm and serene and alive.
All collaborators cycle as producers, but Instupendo takes center stage as vocalist. When bit-crushed, his breathy vocals become one with the static suffusing the mellow synths that form the backdrop of most of the album. Standout track “b.Bass” features subdued saw waves and sun-kissed guitar harmonics that weave in and out, as Instupendo lilts the album’s sweetest hook, crushing in its simplicity: “If it feels right / Promise me that it’s alright.”
The album’s palette is uniform, with acoustic guitar and jittery glitches keeping the tempo in otherwise formless soundscapes. The songs spread out at a leisurely pace, with the most urgent moments disappearing seconds after they surface: “Kissout” holds the most exhilarating moment in the project, with a first half swathed in swirling, glittery vocals stretched thin as gossamer. When it feels like it might just keep soaring the track dissolves, leaving field recordings and sparse synths behind.
Both Instupendo and Ripsquad, in their own respective ways, have visited these sounds before, albeit in more busy and active forms. Most of the top lines here could be lifted and dropped into digicore beats and they’d be a perfect fit. Some listeners might wish for something more direct or immediate, but RIPSTUPENDO proves that even in a more ethereal state the emotional weight their music is known for is completely intact: as vast and abstract as these songs are, the feelings at their core are undiluted. Listen on Bandcamp. [Jay Bracho]
Cloakroom – LAST LEG OF THE HUMAN TABLE
Genre: Alternative Rock, Space Rock, College Rock
Favorite Tracks: “Ester Wind,” “Unbelonging,” “Bad Larry”
There was a point in the 2010s, probably kicked off by the release of Title Fight’s swan song HYPERVIEW, when every hardcore and emo band pivoted to (lukewarm) shoegaze. This was also around the time that dyed-in-the-wool heavy shoegazers like Nothing and Whirr were also hitting their stride. Cloakroom was a pretty major player in that era too, making sludgy, doomy shoegaze with the force of a runaway freight train. In 2025, though, Cloakroom might well do the inverse of what Title Fight did to the genre, leading an exodus away for greener pastures.
With 2022’s DISSOLUTION WAVE, the Indiana-based four-piece pushed beyond shoegaze’s stodgy boundaries, mostly notably by incorporating old-time country warmth and jangle into their sound; LAST LEG OF THE HUMAN TABLE, the band’s new full-length, takes things a step further. Its view is kaleidoscopic, nearly totalizing—in less than 40 minutes, it plays like a cycle of all the various forms American alternative rock has taken since the ‘80s.
It begins in a familiar place to longtime Cloakroom fans; the duo of “The Pilot” and “Ester Wind” foreground muddy, crunchy guitars that threaten to drown out Doyle Martin’s voice, the sort of heavenward-looking space rock Cloakroom made their name on. On “Ester Wind,” Martin’s melodies are strong enough to cut through the haze, a hint of things to come. The brief, jangly “On Joy and Unbelieving” plays like a palate cleanser after the opening pair, and the band makes their pivot. “Unbelonging,” released at the tail end of October of last year, is the biggest departure from Cloakroom’s ordinary formula, a breezy slice of jangle pop that variously recalls REM, the Paisley Underground scene, and the most optimistic moments on KISS ME, KISS ME, KISS ME. It’s the brightest, most immediately welcoming song in Cloakroom’s entire catalog, and it inaugurates a run of tracks that blows up any idea of what this band could be.
The rumbling riff that opens “The Lights Are On” is classic Cloakroom, but the band pulls back in the first verse, letting some air in as Martin’s voice is reduced to a whisper. The song, which pushes six minutes, never returns to the heights suggested by that intro, instead settling into a mid-tempo groove that allows the band to experiment with textures and warbling soundscapes. It’s an eerie, expansive song, the best demonstration of the range Cloakroom displays throughout LAST LEG. The pairing of “Bad Larry” and “Story of the Egg” is the album’s most outre moment. The former takes the classic country influences of DISSOLUTION WAVE and pushes them even further, a dustswept ballad that’d feel out of place on any prior Cloakroom record. Kicking off with a peppy drumroll, “Story of the Egg” is the band’s take on ‘80s post-punk; if “Unbelonging” was mid-era Cure, “Story of the Egg” calls to mind that band’s earlier collegiate period. As thick and loud as the thrum of the buzzing guitars may be, they exist at the total opposite end of the spectrum from the stoner-gaze of FURTHER OUT. As uncharacteristic as they may be, though, “Bad Larry” and “Story of the Egg” are two of the most rewarding cuts on the album.
After the second interlude, “Clover Looper” functions similarly to “Ester Wind,” a foggy slice of space rock built on a massive, immediately memorable hook. Both songs are great demonstrations of what the Indiana trio does differently here: even when they’re operating in their familiar mode, things are punchier, catchier, a little bit clearer. Like “The Lights Are On,” closer “Turbine Song” is an epic, over five minutes, and it incorporates the dark, heavy shoegaze sound they’re known for—but to far different ends than their ordinary fare. Martin’s vocals throughout “Turbine Song” are submerged under walls of feedback, then cut up and looped, and the song itself constantly sounds like it’s restarting; if “Clover Looper” is a companion to “Ester Wind,” then “Turbine Song” feels like “The Pilot” caught in zero gravity, floating aimlessly through space. Maybe, when it finally comes down, it’ll have changed as much as Cloakroom has. Grab LAST LEG on Bandcamp and see how far they’ve come. [Zac Djamoos]
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