"All fluid synths and blustering backbeats, 'Ocean' immediately plunges into the propulsive unknown of pop where the inky underworld of Banks meets the fervent electronics of Broods. The track was co-written by Devon and Christoph Andersson who also produced the track. 'Ocean is the first song I finished for this project, I wrote and recorded it after my lung collapsed three times,' Devon told us over email. While the singer's self-described favorite pastimes are 'smoking and watching porn,' she can no longer do the former due to her lungs collapsing so many times. Instead, she drowns out her suffocating past by breathing new life into 'Ocean' as she cooly drifts into its own lane of smoked out noir&b."

"You've said before that your goal with Drug Church is to alienate people, and this song "Work-Shy" definitely makes me anxious as fuck. What kind of audience were you going after with these new songs?"
"You know, when I say I like to alienate people, it’s a straight up personality defect, in a very defined way. The dudes in Drug Church like the experience of people saying that they like us. They don’t have the same commitment to being a lowlife piece of shit that I do. But for myself, I’m constantly doing this thing in every band I’m in, which is doing things I think are good, and waiting for someone to say something shitty about it, so I can expose those people as losers and shitheads… I think on some level you have to be combative about it, like, “I’m doing this because I really like it and think it’s cool, but I will also to do it to piss you off if you’re an asshole.” But Drug Church is kind of crazy because whenever we expect people to jump on, more people will jump on. But to those people, I warn you—we will eventually put out our metal crossover record."

"The project of songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jake Hays, Maudlin Strangers released his debut EP Overdose this year. Recorded at home in his bedroom in Agoura Hills, California, Hays’ sound morphed through his demos, bringing him to this latest phase of his sound, which he describes as 'dark disco.'"

"If it doesn't seem that way at first, it's because rather than making their sound even bigger and risk falling into cheap bombast, Foxing have actually scaled back. There's nothing as immediate as "Rory," but over time the whole record will hit you much harder. It hit me on something like my seventh listen, on headphones in the subway. It was at some point during the one-two punch of "Indica" into "Winding Cloth" -- I completely forgot about my surroundings and just lost it in my head to these songs. It's the kind of thing only a truly powerful song can make you do, and eventually I realized that every song on this album is that kind of song. That's a very personal and uncritical way of looking at it, but these are songs that are meant to be appreciated on a deeply personal level.
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It's an album that embraces weeping piano ballads and orchestral indie rock as much as climactic post rock or glitchy downtempo. Sometimes a few of those things appear on one song, like "Night Channels" which manages to tackle The Antlers' intimacy and Explosions in the Sky's soaring breadth in just over four minutes. It's a rich-sounding record too, where even the distorted guitars sound clean. But it's not clean in a sunny, spring-y way. It constantly feels weighed down by sorrow, the kind of thing you reach for in late fall or the dead of winter. In the lyrics there's allusion to religion and war, vivid imagery ("soaking blood through a dogwood lung"), and often an overwhelming feeling of guilt. Singer Conor Murphy has a great voice with a noticeably wide range, but the power of this album is often in what he doesn't say, too. One of the songs that I said helped push this over the edge for me, "Winding Cloth," is an instrumental."

..."the album's artwork which looks to maybe have taken some graphic cues from Turnstile's '90s-esque Nonstop Feeling."