Strawberry Girls‘ French Ghetto came out in 2013, but I only became aware of the band’s existence, thanks to their recent Audiotree session. They play a sort of melodic, progressive alternative rock. The band is instrumental, but thanks to the many guests on the album, almost every song has vocals to it, and they’re of high quality. It’s an entertaining and relaxing album.
Luke Mandala‘s upcoming EP, Passing, will be out soon on Merkaba Music. I’m admittedly not very proficient on electronic music genres, but I can tell you it has some very interesting compositions, to the level of Merkaba themselves. The twenty-seven-minute EP is really chill, contemplative yet immersive.
Senegal Grindcore Mafia is neither grindcore nor Senegalese, and I doubt they are mafiosi, too. What they are, in fact, is an Argentine experimental death metal band. While not as imaginative as their former outfit, Los Random, they bring interesting ideas to their recipe. Hay daño en casa came out in 2015, but it’s still quite relevant in the death metal world.

The new single from Sweden’s atmospheric djent band Karmanjakah, Color, is out now, in anticipation of the band’s debut EP on December third. With only slight tweaks on Tesseract’s formula, the band’s sound is just as emotional, melodic, and catchy. Karmanjakah will most likely be a very interesting release, this late in the year.
Consisting of four high-level musicians, Obo is an international avant-garde folk jazz fusion project. The project’s debut, Palace of Waiting, consists of eight tracks somewhere between composition and improvisation. The fifty minutes on record are graced by various instruments, some traditional, some more exotic, each adding a new layer of mysticism atop the already dense musical framework. It’s an astonishingly beautiful set of pieces that will make you wander and travel. Recommended!
Canadian mathcore blog Mathcore Index just released its second compilation. With twenty-nine songs from as many different artists, the ninety-five-minute-long amalgam showcases bands like Car Bomb, Down I Go, Gendo Ikari, Hadean, Ion Dissonance, Morkobot, Noise Trail Immersion, and Upsilon Acrux. On top of that, it’s free, but they still accept donations. Go get it.
One of last year’s most surprising discoveries, Swiss fusion band Öz Ürügülü recently released their second album, Fashion and Welfare. Even though I knew approximately what to expect, this time around, the band still surprised me at every occasion. From country music – as in the opener ‘Tarkatan Rush’, which I will henceforth label as barn fusion -, to atmospheric djent fusion – as in ‘Garlic Venus’ -, and going through many other phases, Fashion and Welfare is definitely one of the highlights of this year.
Brûlez les meubles is a brand new experimental free jazz trio from Montréal, with one member from the Gisèle quarter, for which we already discussed our love. Their eponymous full-length features forty-seven minutes of intimate experimental music that will make the people around you flee, leaving you at peace with the music, finally. Check this out!