Listening with an open mind. Writing about what I hear.
Do you have something interesting you'd like to share? Write Mick at thasoundblog@gmail.com.
Twitter @thasoundblog
For a LONG minute there in the late '00s and early '10s, it seemed like every band wanted to be Dinosaur Jr. Now no one does. Ironically, at the start of the '90s nostalgia boom that crested in the early part of this decade, anyone worth their salt stopped wanting to sound like a band Michael Azerrad might have profiled in Our Band Could Be Your Life and moved on to greener pastures (or got an actual job, something). Maybe folks got the picture that he wasn't going to be writing an update/sequel and figured they might as well do something with the degree they spent the equivalent of a mortgage on a medium-sized family home. I learned about Amherst's California X at the tail end of the '80s-aping garage glut, because, well, that's when people were talking about them. Most critics at the time liked to treat California X as more derivative than they actually were, when in fact they were just very apt at capturing a classic sort of rock'n big hair vibe and didn't seem to put much currenty into cultivating clout in the shadows of their idols. They were a band that played, earnest to a fault, retro-sounding fuzz-imbued punk as if it had never occurred to anyone to crank your amps to 11 while spirit spear-fishing through Neil Young's back catalog before- And it worked!. As you might have guessed, the band had been dogged early on by comparisons to Dinosaur Jr., which the band often pushed back against as a superficial assessment of their sound. On their second album, Nights in the Dark (2015), California X made a conscious effort to shatter the impression that they were simply braiding chords from their indie rock forefathers' hair by adopting elements of progressive rock, Americana, and ballsy '70s arena anthems. That being said, that scuzzy SST-era, post-hardcore stomp that defined the best of J Mascis's early career can still be heard lumbering around in the background. Not surprisingly, seeing as the album was produced by Justin Pizzoferrato (who, yes, has produced records for Dino Jr., and Lou Barlow, as well as Speedy Ortiz, who were unfairly maligned at one point as the GIRL DINOSAUR JR.... critics were REALLY thoughtful and creative back in the day, I tell ya). If you're up to checking out this dusty old pick-me-up from my giddy garage rock phase, then I hope you get a kick out of the summer speedway anthem “Nights in the Dark,” with its Phil Lynott-worshipping leads, as well as the vigorous, charged and fluttery guitar sweeps of “Red Planet,” the bluesy, chops-busting guitars and naïve, indie rock charm of “Blackrazor (Pt. 2),” and the felty, distortion-wrapped, razor-toothed dirge “Summer Wall (Pt. 2).” Nights in the Dark might be California X's last album, but it was a real light at the end of the tunnel for me in the era in which it was released.
I do appreciate it when a shoegaze band gets it right. And when I say that they get it right, I mean that they actually inaugurate a sense of place and dimensional presence in their music. It's so easy, x ∞, to just lean into an effects pedal and let the distension of distortion that expands out from a struck chord do the set dressing for your music for you, but Denver's Ratstallion are not leaving such essential details to mechanical happenstance. Their debut EP Sisyphus Happy sounds like it's risen from the depths of Erebus, seeping up like steam through the cracks in the Earth, and greeting you like a mirage in the forest- a trick of the eye piercing the senses in the dusky shade of an evening's gloom. The six-song release teeters in a balancing act between bright apparitions and scorched floodplains that snare you in a gale of riveting corporal catharsis. Angelic vocals skim with fluid grace over the icy contours of palpably dense distortion, which maps the refined tissue of the chord progressions like a suit of armor around the corpus of a knight- these lithe vocals playfully preserving themselves against the imposing mass of an unfeeling exterior until the tension builds into a rapturous outburst of purgative convulsions, one where all sensitive follicles have hardened to quills and the nausea brought on by the dance of its existence has achingly roiled to its angsty pinnacle, like froth dripping over the brim of a boiling pot. Some specters you see, others you hear, still others creep through your bones, gripping your frame and persuasively conducting you to a realm of dark illumination, where you can discover happiness in release from the ambient torment of the quotidian.
Harm's Way is literally why I'm into hardcore... at all, as in completely, as in no Harm's Way and I'm stuck in a painful, decades-long limbo, grinning and bearing it and putting on a brave face to acquaintances while I pretend to enjoy and appreciate Wilco. It's a long story as to how this happened, and I'm not going to get into it here, but it's essential context for why this review of Like Rats's Death Monolith has come into existence. In the very early part of this decade, I was skimming music discourse, trying to pick up on new hardcore bands that might tickle my fancy, and Like Rats came up in a back-and-forth about Harm's Way and Xibalba (...on Facebook, I think? This was prior to it serving primarily as the internet's trailer park and/or content landfill). I checked out Like Rats's then-latest album Death Monolith (2020), but since I was expecting them to be a hardcore band, I didn't spend much time with the album... until recently. I've been somewhat nostalgic lately for the high-brow, misery-mired sludge era of Chicago's cross-pollination with Indianapolis and the metal scene it produced, roughly running the gamut of the mid to late '10s and begetting such legendary monstrosities as Indian and Lord Mantis- you know, smart guy, bad attitude type stuff- the kinds of music that Jordan Reyes likely started American Decline Records in order to sign, only to have every viable candidate snatched up by Southern Lord or Profound Lore. A Chicago band, Like Rats, emerged out of this milieu, and while they did not reach the lofty conceptual heights of groups like Coffinworm, they demonstrated a strain of intelligence that is all too rare amongst metal acts, even in boom times- they can really write a song. Sonically obtaining succor somewhere between Atlas Moth and Bones, the group wrings all the tarry goop out of tried-and-true death-sludge dynamics, leaving its tendons and muscles spry and springy, lethal and ready to hone in for the kill, whether it be by a frontal bombardment or an evasive ricochet. As if they were a Souls-like adversary, they give glints and tells of their movements, subtly, but mockingly concealed, warning you of their intended course of action, with a feint or flourish, before driving their point to a fatal conclusion with bloody intent. If you're quick-witted and agile enough in your faculties, you can catch wind of the strike and dodge well enough to afford yourself a fleeting moment of appreciation before a succeeding thrust angles for your breastplate, or maybe you'll only be granted the opportunity to appreciate their artful, deathly flow posthumously- Death Monolith is intelligently crafted to delivery you into a prone position, whether this is merely a temporary resting place before a permanent dirt-nap, or a repose before reprisal in proportion to the aggression you've been dealt is a matter of ingrained determination- something Like Rats has in spades, and as I suspect, something they mean to test the mettle of in their audience.
Crypt Sermon is epic doom metal as it was always meant to be. The Stygian Rose is their third album and follow-up to the somewhat lackluster The Ruins of Fading Light, which dropped back in 2019. Their 2015 release, Out of the Garden, descended like a lightning strike on the US metal scene, compelling many to credit Crypt Sermon with single-handedly resurrecting interest in epic doom metal as a viable sub-genre once again. Crypt Sermon's sound is heavily influenced by Candlemass for sure, but also American compatriots, Solitude Aeturnus, so you can expect lots of eastern guitar scales, dancing rhythms, and mountain-shaking, battle-cry vocals. The Stygian Rose puts to bed many of the black metal influences that the band had previously leaned into on The Ruins of Fading Light, which is really for the best. Their love for this style was sufficiently demonstrated on the 2017 flexi single tribute to Mayhem titled De Mysteriis Doom Sathanas, and it is a warranted act of redress that this most recent album sees them consciously clawing their way back to the killing fields where they earned their darkly noble knighthood with a sagacious play towards the brawnier details of swords & sorcery. Like most of their best songs, "Glimmers In The Underworld" tells the tale of bravery and corruption in relief before hubris, exhibiting the fatalistic charm of the group's bleakly heroic baptism of blood and vice with razor-sharp, cut-to-the-bone grooves and cyclonic vocal harmonies that resemble a tempest of grand mal-inducing psychic fulguration, "Down in the Hollow" takes you on a twisting slump into a warped and forbidden romance with an illicit chthonic seraphim of benighted allure, while "Scrying Orb" adds campy elements of occulted arena rock, and the closing title track (it's very common for the band to put the song that bears the album's name as the closer) is amongst the slower and more psychedelic dirges on offer while functioning admirably as both a ballad and a banger. Clasp The Stygian Rose tightly and feel the cathartic cut of its thorns as it rewards your devotion with punitive instruction and cruel cupidity in proportion to the inglorious valor with which it is coveted.
Somehow Chase USA's Honey Baby: I Love When You Call Me hit last year and bounced clean over my head in an arching leap like a superball tossed off a high school gym room- it made its impact on Earth and then completely cleared my field of vision while I'm left blindly staring at the sun, frying my retinas and wondering what the hell all the commotion is about. Luckily, their most recent EP Child Rebel Soldier came at me like a warning shot, hissing and shaving my eyebrows, imposing its presence with searing intensity. Perhaps the reason why CRS has arrived in my purview with such stinging clarity is due to its focused nature. CRS, as opposed to Honey Baby, is a more explicitly coded hip hop album, while Honey Baby, beneath all its layers of burnish and ambition, was a pop-punk project at heart. On CRS, Chase USA continues to display a sharp eye for production and an incredible instinct for dynamics and catch-and-release rhythms, carried over form his previous efforts, while thematically and stylistically, it's less a mash-up of the past twenty years of punk and emo canon with an experiential twist, and more Chase's version of good kid, m.A.A.d city, a hyper-real panoramic sound exhibition that examines the author's adolescence being reared in the junkyard of decay rotting below the pretenses of the American dream, and drawing out how such circumstances have necessitated the extremity of growing up fast, hungry, and ready to stand on business, as if every day was a fresh battlefield in a war of attrition that plays out over a lifetime. If you can't dodge the hard knocks, it's obligatory that you knock back twice as hard, ideally with the punching cycle of a Thompson submachine gun.
It's not Halloween anymore, but I figured I'd still share a creepy episode from the annals of my life. A little while ago, I received a padded envelope in the mail postmarked as having been sent by an OmniDyneGlobal... no return address. Weird, right? But I guess if Amazon can find me at this address, really, anyone can. So I open the package, and out spills a CDR with "Scarlet Street - No Alternative: Promotional Use Only! WILL EXPLODE IF COPIED!" printed on it in a strange metallic ink that seems to change color every time I look at it, and a shock-collar, presumably meant for a large animal. I say presumably because when I looked inside the envelope to see if anything else was inside, I also found a grainy, xeroxed photo of the streamer Hasan Piker. At least, I think that's who it is. His features look so distorted, and the ink on the paper smears easily. And there are his eyes. There is something very uncanny about the expression in "Hasan's" eyes... like he can actually see me through the paper- or at least something behind me... On the back of the photo was a pasted-together message made of various cutouts from tabloid headlines reading: DO IT RIGHT OR WE'LL EXILE YOU TO THE DOG HOUSE. PERMANENTLY. Below this message was a URL, printed in the same color-shifting metallic ink as that on the CDR. Despite the ominous nature of the contents of this package, combined with the fact that I don't get a lot of mail anymore, I was understandably curious. I also had the weekend free (for once oh my god a weekend where I don't have to work basically unheard of), so I did what any sane person would do: I typed in the URL into a browser, and without a VPN or a rational care in the world, hit enter on my laptop keyboard. The URL took me to a private portal where I used a previously overlooked username and password that had been written on the CDR with a laser or something (I could only see it if I held it at the right angle). This took me to a chat server where I connected with someone who identified themselves as "Ben from Scarlet Street." As we chatted via short messages throughout the afternoon, I listened to the CDR I had been sent on a USB optic drive, as "Ben" revealed to me many disturbing and malignant facets of reality that lay hidden beneath the assumptions and illusions that undergird the economy, the political system of our country, and our way of life. The following is a semi-coherent transcript of what I was able to piece together from what was revealed to me during this conversation. I share it with you now in the hope that you can make more sense of it than I can and avoid the seemingly inexorable fate that most of the population will only become wise to when it is far too late to avert total calamity. May god have mercy on our souls.
The following interview was ACTUALLY conducted over email in September of 2025. It has only been lightly edited and reformatted from its original contents.
Is there an overall theme to your LP No Alternative?
When we wrote this album, an election was starting, colleges across the country were protesting, rhetoric about dictatorship was ramping up, and we were seeing AI proliferate across social media and into every aspect of life. All of this had us asking ourselves how we got to this point and why things had to be this way, could there possibly be any hope of things getting better? To sort of make sense of all of it there were a few books we read, one of them being particularly relevant was Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher. It really reinforced our sort of pessimistic idea of; there is no alternative to modern life, that choice has been taken away from us all. This is all happening by design. None of this was by accident.
The cover for No Alternative is gorgeous! Where was that photo taken? What is in these murals?
Detroit, Michigan. The Main Branch of the Detroit Public Library, 2nd floor. The mural is called Man’s Mobility and it was created in the early ‘60s, it depicts 3 eras in Detroit; 1855, 1905, and 1965, showing Detroit and America’s progress in technology. I think it really depicts a prevailing thought that was once true; Technology and Science will solve all of mankind’s problems. There’s an optimism here that never came true, it’s depicting a future that never happened.
I know you're big Blink-182 fans, and I can still hear some of their influences here, but it also feels like you're leaning more into the grungier aspects of your sound with this record. Why did that feel like the right move for this material?
We’re influenced by so many bands and sounds. I do think it’s purely coincidence that some of these songs land on a grunge style, but I think that’s because there’s a lot of angst and anger behind the lyrics and it simply comes out in the music. There’s a lot for us to be angry about right now.
Image courtesy of We're Trying Records
Do you think there are any inherent overlaps between emo and grunge music? Where are the gelling points for these two styles in your mind?
They’re both styles of music that are very emotion-forward, I think Sunny Day Real Estate is the best example of that crossover. There’s a lot of frustration in both genres, just different time periods. In the 90s there was a lot of frustration around boredom, meaninglessness and leading a bland life. I think in the 2020s the frustration is watching a society with no one at the wheel, doomed to watch a dystopian nightmare day after day while the populous numbs itself. I also think bands like Nirvana sort of poked fun at the same aspects of modern society we poke fun at; the white picket fences and suburban lifestyles that seem cognitively dissonant to reality, where a world running out of resources wants to sell you bigger homes and bigger trucks.
What is the deal with the Bear v Shark callout on the opening track? Are you trying to start some beef with them, or do you genuinely think bears and sharks can cohabitate?
It’s actually a reference to a Space Ghost Coast to Coast episode, and thought it was a fun nod to a lot of the song titles we had on the last album. But also Bears and Sharks being scummy finance people.
It's excellent to hear how you are expanding your sound with tracks like "Victory Speech" and "Palo Alto." It sounds like you've been listening to a lot of Failure or even Deftones while writing this record, with how bleak and claustrophobically spacey they are. Can you give some insights into how/why you attempted to cultivate a consistent sense of crushing atmosphere on this album?
We’ve always listened to bands and albums that have a very desolate, crushing feeling to it, but until this album we’ve never really had the confidence to take that on. We really approached this album with the thought of “What if this was the last thing we ever got to record?” and decided to shoot for the moon. We just really wanted to make a complete artistic statement.
How do you feel as though your sound has evolved between your debut and No Alternative, and what direction do you hope to take it in the future?
We wanted to make a darker record that spoke to people who felt like everything around us is going wrong and wanted something that sonically was a bit of a deeper listen. I only see us going further on the next one. This is a dense record, we packed a lot into this 32 minutes, I think we try to make the next more cinematic, more ambitious, more experimental. We’re probably going to take this sounds and go further with it, this one feels more like a “Scarlet Street” record than anything else we’ve ever done and we want to chase that feeling.
What do you hope is the big takeaway from this album for listeners (besides, "Wow, that ruled!")?
I want people to see this as a reflection of the social and political climate we’re in now. I want to make the people who feel like everything is falling apart feel seen. There’s a lot of people out there who don’t feel like there’s music that speaks to the moment that’s happening right now, and we wanted this music to do just that. We simply made an album we want to listen to, if people are on our wavelength, all the better.
For your further vindication and pleasure, please enjoy this track-by-track breakdown of the band's new album No Alternative.
"BEARS & SHARKS: NATURE’S BEST FRIENDS" We wanted to show immediately to everyone that we weren’t fucking around with this album. From the get go this was going to be the album opener because it set the tone with all the angst and frustration we are feeling with the systems of the world. We feel trapped, and sometimes it feels like the only way out is to simply die by the 2 things the powers that be love the most; Guns or Drugs.
"VICTORY SPEECH" This is the other side of the situation; it’s the ticker tape parade of those in power gloating about how well the deck is stacked. Once again, we just came right out with showing off the heavier sound we’d been working on. The chorus comes from this part in the book The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher, where the overwhelming majority of start ups in Silicon Valley are pumped full of money by venture capitalists in the hopes that one of them will be the next Facebook or Oracle or Palantir. If they don’t pan out it doesn’t matter, what’s a couple billion dollars? This is one of our favorite songs to play live simply because of how much ground it covers between the spacey verses, screaming choruses and the final breakdown.
"WARNING SOUNDS" Every day the world feels like it’s going to collapse, and every day you’re still suppose to clock in and go to work. I’ve always had a tough time staying focused when particularly gloomy world events are happening, and yet it seems like co-workers have no problem just shrugging off impending fascism. For me, I’ll simply never be able to turn those sirens in the back of my head off, I guess I’m glad others can. That’s what this song is about. We really took a liking to Prawn and Signals Midwest on this. Just wanted to show off gloominess without heft for once.
"DRINKS ON THE HOUSE / PALO ALTO" We really just wanted to write something brainlessly heavy and when we threw on the fuzz pedal and played this, it just sounded right. It’s a song about being completely brain dead while scrolling all day long. I’m very cautious about social media use, I think it’s a really good tool to numb the populous into just being content instead of getting up off their ass and doing something, hopefully that doesn’t sound too self-righteous, but I think we all need to take a minute and ask ourselves if this shit is actually improving our lives in a meaningful way or if it’s just something we’re all collectively addicted to. Anyway, the post-chorus “You’re sick inside your brain/And we can take away the pain” is my little version of a quote from Capitalist Realism; “You’re sick because of you’re brain chemistry. We can fix you with our SSRI’s” - Essentially casting off the fact that everyone is constantly mentally ill as being a fault of the individual instead of the root cause being; this world is literally mentally torture. Fun fact; I wrote this song while trying to learn "Snag" by Cheem.*
*Editor's note: That is a fun fact!
"HAIL" I went down a lot of rabbit holes and read a lot of non-fiction while writing this album, and one of the most influential was probably The Storm Is Here: An American Crucible by Luke Mogelson, it recounts the lead up to January 6th and protests during the pandemic. I feel like we’ve all collectively moved on from January 6th without learning a single lesson. But anyway, I think there was something so dark and twisted about the people who just mindlessly decided to join this death cult on the far-right, like they felt compelled to take matters into their own hands at the cost of everything. That scares me. That keeps me up at night, and I really think it should keep everyone else up, too. That’s what this song is about; those who are willing to kill their fellow humans over things made up by bots in memes and videos on the internet. All Hail The Line, All Hail The Hook. This song was originally split off from the 1st incantation of “CORPORATE MEMPHIS” actually, but our producer thought it was a little weird, so the verse from that became the bulk of this song, and the chorus from "CORPORATE MEMPHIS" became the verses.
"MIDCENTURY MODERN WHOLESALE FURNITURE" This whole track spawned from a real-life occurrence of hellish, Black Mirror-esque serendipity that I’m sure people think I made up, but I use to have this Samsung phone that had Bixby
(Samsung’s equivalent to Siri) and one day I set an alarm in the middle of the day for something, and when the alarm went off, instead of a chime or bell, it played the Bixby assistant reciting the headlines of the day. This was mid-2020 and of course every headline was the worst news you had ever heard. It stuck with me for years, and I wanted to make something that reminded me of that. We set out to make a sort of funeral march of headlines, and we wanted it to build up and sound like what it feels to just take in every bit of horror that the human condition has to endure. This song had somewhere north of 50 tracks, easily the most dense recording we’ve ever made. We tried to make it as symbolic as possible, as well. Almost every headline is real, except for 3 or 4 because we wanted to symbolize the fact that with as much misinformation as there is you can literally never tell what’s real and what’s fake. Even the ending “No rain in the forecast” symbolizes that there’s no relief coming. We titled the song after one of our favorite Instagram profiles, (now goes by doomscroll_forever) - it felt apt.
"THE STORM IS HERE" I was inspired by the poem “First They Came...” - I really despise the state of activism in America right now, where it seems like posting on social media is the beginning and end of the lengths in which people are willing to go to stop literal fascism and genocide from occurring, it’s all so performative. This song is a critique on people who do that. While people post that they stand against something and do nothing else, others are being rounded up in the country and other countries and killed. The music on this track is one of the oldest on the whole album, it actually predates our first album, and we almost used it on the first one, but it felt too heavy and slow to make sense. I really think it found its place perfectly there.
"CORPORATE MEMPHIS" This came out of complete frustration with the music industry. It really feels like there are a million hurdles in the way of doing anything successfully in music, and there are a million-and- one people who are willing to take your money from you. It feels overwhelming and like a completely uphill struggle. There are so many times between the last album and this album we’ve felt like hanging it up and calling it a quits simply because there’s always someone who wants to leech off you, and yet there’s always someone who’s success is completely undeserved. This was the first song we finished in the studio, and I think it’s really when it became clear we weren’t the same band we were from the Self-titled album; we really went with the big guitars and screamed vocals, and it was so much goddamn fun to do it, and it probably shows.
"EASY DECISIONS" I think just about anyone reading this has laid awake at night, worried about paying rent or bills. That’s exactly what I wrote this about; deciding if I should spend the last few dollars I have on groceries or my electric bill, do I pawn an amp or plead with a friend to borrow a few bucks for gas? Those are tough decisions. The guitar part is actually the first thing I ever recorded, it’s nearly 10 years old, but I never found a use for it until this album and I’m so happy it found a home here, we ran it through a Roland Jazz Chorus and it felt ethereal when we heard it back, and Gary just kept adding layer after layer on the 2nd half of this song until it became this blissful wall of sound.
"IT DOESN’T GET ANY BETTER THAN THIS" In a way this song sums up the previous 10; It has a bit of the sound all the previous ones had, the lyrics are about how we’re just set up for extinction by technology and unfettered capitalism, and it ends in a grand finale. We got to use all sorts of beautiful delays and reverbs on this, and it just rocks hard. We liked it so much we named the album after the lyrics: “No Alternative in sight, so they’ll exercise their right. There’s no way they got this wrong” - The whole album is about systems, systems that aren’t failures, but actually working exactly as designed. We’re overstimulated on purpose, we’re depressed on purpose, we’re numb on purpose.
"THERE WAS A HOLE HERE // IT’S GONE NOW" This song was almost entirely written by Luke on guitar and bass. It’s so mesmerizing and haunting and we just had to have it on the album, but when it came time to write lyrics for it was so hard to get them right, we kept trying vocal deliveries that were super spacious and minimal, but it didn’t sound right, so Gary suggested we go with something unhinged and crazy, and that’s just what we ended up with. The lyrics are actually some of the most personal on the album, it’s my 2nd hand experience with a mental health emergency I once had with a friend and having to deal with them eventually using police force to take care of the situation. Unfortunately in this country we don’t have a way of helping those in need without sending police in which often makes the situation much worse and I think about having to do that every day. The end of this song is one of my favorite moments on the album. Luke, Gary and I all took turns recording our own version of the solo in the outro, Gary mixed it to taste so what you’re actually hearing is all 3 of us playing the solo at different moments.
So, another week is starting, and it's getting colder outside. The last thing you probably want to do is crawl out of bed and interact with other humans, or do anything that appears remotely or even hypothetically productive. At this point, thanatosis (the art of playing dead) likely seems a cunning and ultimately tempting option for avoiding the burden of one's commitments- and as a traditional reflex amongst North America's only native marsupial, the opossum, it's arguably the most patriotic measure of avoidance as well. Far be it for me to counsel you on how to justify or edify your rotmaxing, but if you do need to burrow into obscurity for an indeterminate period of time, during which rumors of your expiration may be exaggerated (if only slightly), might I suggest that you take with you into this social-void some tunes from the master of morbid bluffs, Milkypossum- the curiously lively, shadow queen of the internet, whose presence is felt nowhere, and yet everywhere, hiding her power levels in plain sight, while rehearsing a terminal case of taciturn aloofness. This is all to say that she's a lot of fun, but you're going to be hard-pressed to spot her (sans pseudo-rigor mortis) in the wild- much like her namesake. If you're not already hip to Milky's brand of OST acid house, hip-hop, hyper-referential digital hardcore, hyperseeding webcore, and hyper...well, hyperpop, let my interview with her be your introduction to a new world of eccentric opossibilities and digital euphorias as you withdraw into reclusive social hibernation for the year- preferably with access to high-speed internet and a pouch stash of lactose-loaded snacks.
Listen to interview with Milkypossum:
Check out Milkypossum's latest EP 7STAGES:
... and a cool collection of instrumentals from some of her favorite original tracks:
