Bandcamp Pick of the Week 11/15/2024

It’s our Bandcamp Pick of the week, featuring Jamie Paige’s electrifying electropop collection CONSTANT COMPANIONS!

Jamie Paige – CONSTANT COMPANIONS

Genre: Indie Pop, Electropop, Breakbeat

Favorite Tracks: “I Wish That I Could Fall,” “Machine Love,” “ROT FOR CLOUT”

In Jamie Paige’s world, love follows everywhere she goes. Since 2016, Paige has bolted into a lot of vividly bright indie pop, utilizing breakbeats, synthesized vocals, and collaborations with her tight-knit friends to paint her realm in vivid color, portraying a desire for love to shimmer through on both the brightest and dimmest days. It’s a consistent emotional throughline that gets more vivid on every album that she puts out, and on CONSTANT COMPANIONS, this desire dips into an even richer palette.

CONSTANT COMPANIONS finds Paige ramping up these recognizable elements to a different level, fully embracing them with a starlight sheen. Her vocals alone contribute a spark, showcasing these brimming emotions through the punchy breakbeats and guitar swirls on “Not Quite There” and the immense shouted vocals cast through prominent guitar riffs on “Dyad.” It’s an expression that comes from her yearning all laid out on the table, with no way of compromising that feeling.

What eventually amplifies that feeling is the numerous synthesized voices that act as companions to this yearning, contributing to Paige’s most brightly lit set of instrumentation, songwriting, and production duties ever put into her work to date. This results in a saturation of colors that lights desire afire; the feverish state of “ROT FOR CLOUT” sounds chaotically bubbly with Katane Seto SV’s chipper notes and all of its sugary melodies. The soaring craving of “I Wish That I Could Fall” keeps on flying as the piano, acoustic guitar, and woodwind gently shimmer around GUMI SV’s gleaming voice. The inviting companionship of “Liasion” is paired with a jaunty groove around the calming tone of Solaria and ANRI Arcane’s vocals. Meanwhile, the transcendent longing of “Machine Love,” where the presence of guitars mingles with pumping synth grooves, only gives more leaps to the melodies that transition magnificently to the ecstatically striking hook.

True to its name, CONSTANT COMPANIONS is an album where Jamie Paige positions familiar pieces of her past work with the most vibrant coat of paint that she has pulled together yet. These songs radiate in their bubbly and saccharine state far beyond the headphones. Listen to Jamie Paige’s pining electropop on Bandcamp.