By It’s our Bandcamp Picks of the Week, including Hekt’s cinematic and idealistic club album FOREVER and the chaotic and cathartic noise rock of My Wife’s An Angel’s KEEP HONKING I’M ABOUT TO FUCKING KILL MYSELF!
Hekt – FOREVER
Genre: House, Club
Favorite Tracks: “Forever,” “Dream,” “Someday,” “Up In The Air, So”)
On FOREVER, Fine Glindvad frames the youthful and titillating anticipation of a night out through the propulsive and wizened lens of nostalgia—each beat, drop, and vocal hook musically looking back with a dreamlike happiness. The Copenhagen-based producer’s debut album under the name Hekt slowly creates a dazzling, raw, beautiful club night in real time. Alongside a handful of collaborators, including Valeria Litvakov and Norwegian EDM duo Smerz, there is an emotionally considered core at the heart of the album; even from just a headphone listen, far from his decks in Denmark, you can feel a fondness for the communal experience of dancing with strangers in the night.
The highlights revolve around the soaring, cutting pop tunes that frontload and backload the project (“Someday,” “Up In The Air, So,” “But I Can’t Really Show You,” and “Just Like You”), but songs like “Baby” and “Beautiful” cut to the hypnotic core of the stylish, cinematic club experience, artfully examining the anatomy of modern dance music. Sometimes that’s delivering minimal, racing deep house (“You Won’t Believe”) and other times it’s subverting bubblegum bass production into guttural ticking time bombs (“Anytime Anywhere”). On standout “Dream,” an echoing, metallic rhythm builds, meticulously revealing the apex of an evening out as it unfolds live. FOREVER finds an imagined sense memory to the club experience, focusing on last night being a movie rather than the bogged-down realities; therein lies the nostalgia, instead creating an “ode to those eternal dance floor moments where time stops and you start hoping for something big.” Hekt crafts something you can both dance and daydream to to great effect. You can give it a listen over on Bandcamp.
My Wife’s An Angel – KEEP HONKING I’M ABOUT TO FUCKING KILL MYSELF
Genre: Noise Rock, Pigfuck, No Wave
Favorite Tracks: “Lil Bug,” “PAUSE!”
My Wife’s An Angel are not doing great — listen to 30 seconds of any one of their songs and you’ll hear what I mean. I suppose, to that end, none of us really are doing that great. That’s just the shared experience of living in 2026. But the Philadelphia experimental noise project exhibits that sonic chaos of unbalance and anger and depression and mania with genuine musical symptoms that feel cathartic; as the commotion in our heads gets louder day-by-day, week-by-week, it sounds something like My Wife’s An Angel.
The band’s latest, KEEP HONKING I’M ABOUT TO FUCKING KILL MYSELF, is a cry for help (perhaps literally). Where most artists put the liner notes for the album, on Bandcamp My Wife’s An Angel published something closer to a manifesto from guitarist Boone, a slowly escalating rant that begins as a screed about getting cut off in traffic and ends with all-caps threat of violence: “They don’t expect anyone to actually be real about anything. I’ve been looking for an EXCUSE to make things real, keep testing me. HEY, KEEP HONKING ASSHOLE!! KEEP IT UP!!! YOU DON’T THINK I’LL DO IT, DO YOU??? DO YOU, HONKIN’ ASS BITCH???!!”
There are layers to our individual and societal psychoses, and at its core KEEP HONKING I’M ABOUT TO FUCKING KILL MYSELF is exploring how one small thing can push us to places of anxiety, paranoia, rage, and violence. Their pigfuck sound is more abstract and no wave’ish than obvious peers like Truck Violence or Chat Pile — think more Lightning Bolt or Liturgy. The album effectively isolates the fried vocals in the mix in a way that is stark and jarring, allowing the cacophony of guitars and drums to almost act as claustrophobic crowd noise.
That stressful, asymmetrical playing is all in service of the lyrics. Vocalist G has the type of vocal delivery that acts as a perfect stand-in for the average Joe Lunchpail; there are moments where the vocals are conversational, but when it escalates into singing or yelling it’s always done with a Jokerish uncontrollable imperfection — the emotion to the timbre almost overwhelming and surprising to the band themselves as the songs continue. On “Bowser’s,” he shifts from defeatedly lamenting our societal failures with, “We can do whatever we want / Whatever we desire / There’s cancer in the rain / And the earth’s on fire” to howling and slurring, “Do you know how hard it is to think while you’re in pain? / No / Shut up!” On “PAUSE!” a house party goes from talking down a friend over a cigarette to screaming, “There’s nothing gay about being sad / You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about / You don’t know / FIGHT ME / I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU DUDE.” It’s a little bit GG Allin. It’s a little bit M. Gira. It’s a little bit Connor O’Malley. It’s a little bit FALLING DOWN. It’s rabid and fearful and primal. It’s all done with the back against the wall. It won’t be for everyone, but if wired, snarling anger sits comfortably inside you these days, keep honking. You can hear the album over on Bandcamp.
Comments