"Video Age is the project of Ross Farbe and Ray Micarelli, longtime friends from their early years coming up in New Orleans’ DIY scene. Together, they use a host of vintage synthesizers to craft music that taps into a vein of early ’80s synth-pop. Previously, they released a more guitar-driven debut in 2016 called Living Alone. Now they’re about to return with their sophomore outing, with the fitting title of Pop Therapy.

They’ve already previewed the album with lead single “Hold On (I Was Wrong).” It was a slick, funky track, and it clues you in to the nature of Pop Therapy: Video Age’s new music is all rubbery grooves with a dusty sheen, and it makes them one of those bands looking back to the early ’80s who are also sort of hard to trace to any actual antecedent there. As it turns out, their inspiration for Pop Therapy did come from some less-than-customary sources, McCartney II and Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly among them.

Today, they’re back with another new song from Pop Therapy. It’s called “Lover Surreal,” and the band described it as a “dance ballad about an imaginary love affair. Someone is reaching out into the void, patiently waiting for love to respond.” It is indeed a slightly dreamier composition than “Hold On (I Was Wrong),” a gauzy piece of yearning that does line right up with the way we perceive the era Video Age are drawing from." -Stereogum

True Blossom formed in 2017 from the thriving Atlanta underground synth-pop scene. The band released their debut album Heater, a sweet and strange collection of disco, city-pop, and classic indie, last year on Citrus City Records. They followed that with a series of tours up and down the east coast.

Their second album, In Bliss, arrives October 23rd, again on Citrus City. Its surface is all sophistication and light - red lipstick, brushed steel, and lace, but an eerie sadness hangs over the whole affair. Though bits of new wave synth and disco percussion shimmer and glow with warmth, the gloom never quite lifts.

In Bliss was recorded in Atlanta by Damon Moon at Standard Electric Recording Co. Founding members Sophie Cox, Nadav Flax, Adam Weisberg, Jamison Murphy, and Chandler Kelley tracked most of the instruments before Jamison left to attend graduate school in Maryland. Newest member Bonnie Hardie joined the band during the sessions, and her vocal harmonies can be heard throughout.

"Jackson MacIntosh might be in love—he just can’t quite tell. The Montreal musician, best known as the bassist for the indie rockers TOPS, is now launching himself as a solo singer-songwriter, and his latest track, “Can It Be Love,” is all about the uncertainty of a budding romance. MacIntosh’s downtempo pop is a far cry from MacIntosh’s work with TOPS: His soft croon is so languid he sounds half-asleep; percussion comes courtesy of a tinny drum machine, the melody a few light splashes of keyboard; and even when the spartan song adds a flourish of guitar in its last 30 seconds, it’s in the form of a very leisurely solo.

MacIntosh’s yearning and confusion will be familiar to anyone who’s spent time on the road. “Can It Be Love” was the last song he wrote for his forthcoming album, My Dark Side, and it was inspired, he recently explained, by that “classic musician’s dilemma” of having to be absent when what you want is waiting at home. The song captures that melancholic longing quite beautifully: “When you’re in Barcelona/I’ll be in Calgary” he sings, plaintively. “I won’t be alone but/If your phone’s on I’ll call you and check in and see/If it could be love.” Though it may be unfortunate for his romantic prospects, MacIntosh’s solo career is off to a very promising start." -Pitchfork

Life is messy and complicated. We do our best to force it into neat compartments, to bring rational order to chaos, but life always resists. On a basic macro level, albums are often an attempt to give voice to some unifying theme or confluence of ideas. That can take the shape of a guiding philosophy or a formative experience or an overarching aesthetic. As listeners, we instinctually seek out that underlying thread, a string we can tug on to tie it all together. As we pull, what’s bundled within is a piece of existence laid bare for probing and examination. The more of it we recognize and understand, the tighter we yank our knots.

“I used to be really fixated on things I create having a theme,” Bellury says. “Like, all the elements and ideas and aesthetics being tied nicely and tightly together. I’ve come to realize that’s just not how my brain works or how life happens. I’m a deeply messy and fragmented and multi-faceted person, and the writing process for this album is no exception to that. I’m learning to embrace and even cherish randomness and messiness, in music and in life.”

That’s not to say, of course, that the shadowy, dream pop underworld that Karaoke carefully constructed on their debut has been entirely stripped away. There are moments, such as the mercurial “Ride Off into the Doom” or the entrancing “Baby” where the band’s ability to conjure an eerie moonlit luminescence remains the defining feature. But elsewhere, the gauzy atmospheres and murky textures that comprised How to Make You Boil have been replaced by soundscapes far more glassy and refractive. When they are not stabbing in bright shards, Tymb Gratz’s guitars sparkle and shimmer. Meanwhile, Chris Yonker’s undulating bass pulses and pulls against Adrian Switon’s elastic percussion, creating a sense of kinetic motion that’s constantly rolling forward.

Much how glass can amplify, diffuse, or redirect light, so too does the band’s dazzling emissions help propel and guide Bellury’s vocals. The sharp rhythms and textural interplay serve as springboards. Where Bellury’s voice once floated in spectral repose, it now flutters and skips off the gleaming surfaces. And with that movement comes greater space and more illuminating light. The dense fog that enshrouded the group’s earlier work has been lifted to expose a more prismatic and wide-ranging universe.

When asked up this evolution in sound, Bellury is quick to credit the addition of Zach Pyles to the band, specifically his sensibilities as a recording engineer. While his contributions on synth and keys have helped flesh out new sonic territories for the group, Pyles’ talents in the studio have allowed Bellury to further hone Karaoke’s aesthetic. On tracks like “Bad Christian” and “Heaven,” the band embarks on dizzying excursions that veer into iridescent psychedelia and ambient drone. On the latter, Pyles stacks up the layers, recording, among other things, the sound of a humming refrigerator and a vacuum cleaner starting up. This more daring approach helps expand the boundaries of the band’s alluring art pop. Overall, it was a process Bellury found invaluable, ushering forth greater confidence—and hence, more vulnerability—in the group’s songwriting.

“Our EP was a little more washed-out sonically, more dream pop,” Bellury explains. “This album has a lot more space. A lot more vulnerable moments. It’s more dynamic. And the vocals are more forward and intimate. Which I think relates to my growth lyrically. The more confidence I feel with the words the more clarity I’m comfortable with in the recording.”

Anyone who’s listened to Karaoke understands Bellury’s voice is undoubtedly the group’s primary focal point. She has a rarefied ability to make even the most abrasive noise or mundane note sound ethereal and dreamlike. In the lead-up to the album release, however, the group unveiled a suite of five videos. Each one was conceived and produced by Bellury and features an individual member of the band. For Bellury, it was a means of pointing the lens away from herself as the front person, thus highlighting the group as a collection of talented individuals.

“It’s not necessarily about stepping out of a role as a front person,” she says about the concept behind the videos. “[It’s] more about wanting to highlight the contribution of each member of the band. I really do feel Karaoke is a unique and special combination of people. I haven’t always felt with past projects that a single member would be irreplaceable like I do with this one. On that note, I do get approached by people wanting to make videos or media centered on me as the focus, and there’s nothing wrong with that as a general thing in the music world. I just find the music we make together as a whole more interesting. If I didn’t lean so heavily on the rest of the group for their input and ideas about arrangement, I might feel differently.”