PREMIERE: Norty - Alien Eyes

Phillipe Roberts

“Alien Eyes,” the lead single from Norty’s full-length debut The Years Are Fleeting, begins as a distant echo, a stuttering shimmer of a guitar figure piling on the distorted reverb as it crawls down a long hallway. Listen with your eyes closed and you’d expect to get a face full of indie rock. Instead the Young Heavy Souls producer slams you straight into a glitch-pop drop of sliced-up horns and thick bass. From there, it’s round after round of tasty fusions and juxtapositions on an incisive track masquerading as big-tent dance pop.

Though the message creeps out over the course of multiple listens, “Alien Eyes” is Norty’s attempt to spell out a flavorful missive on the snake-like hypocrisy of mankind’s fixation on profit over people; in his words, calling out the fact that “some humans are just bad at being human.” At its core, however, the track can’t escape the upbeat flair of Norty’s production. Rather than break it down over spare, moody instrumentation, he packs in crunchy bumps to bop those blues away, making it less a call to arms than a nagging voice of political consciousness under the strobing concert lights on the dancefloor.

Still, no matter how high Norty turns up the bass or how hard he drops the beat (and he truly does), the message isn’t far behind. “Alien Eyes” keeps it human by moving your body with playful energy, something worth keeping around as the heat, and the lizard-person madness, ratchets up this summer.

ARTIST PROFILE: Sonnymoon

Laura Kerry

“We are not Earthlings / We hail from Sonnymoon.”

Harnessing the otherworldly register where her voice often settles, Anna Wise dispassionately chants this line at the beginning of “Soular” as bandmate Dane Orr spins a low, pulsing beat and electronic bass. From the duo’s first album, the self-produced, self-released Golden Age (2009), it offers a good early lesson about the band: In the course of a seven-year career, they have proven themselves not entirely of this world.

Kids (and grown kids) may know that giggle-inducing game in which players add “…in bed” to the end of fortune cookie fortunes; for Sonnymoon, a useful trick to describe their music is to add “…in space” to the end of an assortment of genres. Particularly on Golden Age, which more freely explores a range of sounds (and contains some of the band’s most dazzling tracks to date), this yields fruitful results. “Run Away” is electro-pop in space; “Soft Shoulders” is Amy-Winehouse soul in space; and “Golden Age” reaches the neighborhood of the universe that Portishead has already colonized. In the course of two other full-lengths, 2012’s Sonnymoon and 2015’s The Courage of Present Times, the classification “trip-hop,” which self-contains the appendage “in space,” comes further into focus. But even with its mashed-up and foregrounded percussion, heavy electronic bass, and experimental vocals, the duo often slips away even from that inclusive label.

It’s no surprise that such evasive-yet-controlled experimentation has a scholarly foundation. Wise and Orr met at Boston’s esteemed Berklee College of Music, where she studied voice and he focused on saxophone. Golden Age came out while the two still attended school, and they started on their second album after Wise dropped out of her program in 2010. Even without a degree to show for it, Wise’s voice exhibits the dexterity and power that comes from training mixed with raw talent. While the music on Sonnymoon’s three albums varies hugely in tone and style, her voice remains the focal point of all of it—sometimes lilting softly, as in the self-titled album’s closer, “Just Before Dawn,” sometimes bellowing euphorically, as in the chorus of The Courage of Present Times’ “SNS,” and sometimes humming with an alien weirdness, as in “Nursery Boys” from Golden Age.

As Wise tells it, it’s that last quality of her voice that attracted her best-known collaborator, Kendrick Lamar. Lamar saw the video for “Nursery Boys” on YouTube (while Sonnymoon didn’t have a huge local following in Boston in 2011, they had amassed fans on the Internet), contacted Wise, and she arranged to stop by Compton during the band’s cross-country road trip. From the ensuing partnership came features on Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City, and two songs from To Pimp A Butterfly, including the Grammy-winning “These Walls.”

Wise rejects the suggestion that Lamar’s hip-hop might have influenced Sonnymoon’s music, though. In an interview with Billboard last year, she said, “I don't really consider the genre—to me art is art, and I want to work with the greats.” Still, it’s difficult not to read something into the progression of the band alongside Wise’s work with such a legend—if not in the embracing of the trip-hop seeds they had at their start than in the move toward clearer messages in their songwriting. In the second album, Sonnymoon leaves behind a bit of the tongue-in-cheek of “Soular” and “Nursery Boys” and the nebulous poetry of “Gills or Wings” and “Soft Shoulders” for more direct—albeit sometimes mystical—language. “Maybe your head works different than these other fools... / What happens when you toe the line of crazy,” she sings in “Greatness,” reflecting on the mental cost of art. And in “Just Before Dawn,” she croons, clearly and achingly, “Any night you should have someone to hold / Tell you that did okay when your mind’s against you.”

Sonnymoon’s third album takes a step back in the direction of abstraction, but Wise, whose solo career is now inextricably linked to the band, has taken off running down the path of straightforwardness and earthly concerns. Her recent EP, The Feminine: Act I, launches itself into a feminist dialogue with songs such as, “How Would You Call a Dog?,” “Decrease My Waist, Increase My Wage,” and “BitchSlut,” which starts, “So they callin’ you a bitch, callin’ you a slut / ‘Cause you dress up, ‘cause you dress down.” Championing a more unambiguous mixture of pop, R&B, and hip-hop, the EP features cover art that re-creates of Klimt’s painting Danaë, with Wise’s pale knees raised to her forehead, her red hair flowing over her shoulders in a way that renders her both erotic and innocently vulnerable.

Meanwhile, with Orr, Wise continues to favor a style more out-of-this-world. If songs such as “Sex for Clicks” and “Transparent Times” off of The Courage of Present Times engage with the timely topics that their titles suggest, they disguise it with the vitality of their weirdness. Even on the former song, one of very few spare piano ballads in their repertoire, Sonnymoon seems isolated from vulnerability by the distant, supernatural quality that persists throughout their music. But while some of the tunes feel alien and distant—mediated by electronics, experimental editing, and eccentricity—their makers do not shy away from a direct relationship with the audience. In the same Billboard interview, Wise says that live performance is where her band’s music “makes the most sense.” Or, as she explains in “Soular”: “Soon you will find Sonnymoon to you is like a drug / You’ll be like ha ha ha ha give me love.”

REVIEW: Leyya - Spanish Disco

Laura Kerry

I experienced a series of small blunders while listening to the new Leyya album. I first put on Spanish Disco at night, after a long day and fell into a half-sleep with fantastical half-dreams that kept sliding away from me, informed by the changing music. Then, finally awake and sitting in a room full of people, I couldn’t shake the paranoia that my headphones had slid out of the computer; the music seemed to play throughout the whole room. Finally, when a man started speaking in one of the songs, I thought it was an interesting sample. It took me longer than I care to admit to trace the voice to a pop-up ad playing in another tab.

All of these little events, I think, speak to the fact that Spanish Disco has a tendency to absorb everything it touches. The first full-length work of an Austrian duo, the mostly electronic album functions on the dreamy atmospherics that come from droplets of mallet sounds, washes of ambient synths, and crackling, minimalistic percussion. If they belonged in any category, it might be trip-hop, but Leyya is too elusive and ethereal to hold to any one genre for too long.

Like those slippery half-dreams I experienced with Leyya in my ears, Spanish Disco continually morphs. Its title sets up the expectation of dance tunes with a world-music touch, but the beginning of its first song, “Dyno / Intro,” delivers all-instrumental, light electronica before adding a deep, driving bass that transforms it into a fiery roar. Quiet, whispered tracks like “Brando” explode into noise before fading into ominous, echoing counterparts like “Jordan,” followed by the monk-like humming of “Coma Kit.” Most of Spanish Disco is down-tempo and quiet, but songs like “Superego,” with its propulsive clapping percussion and beat drop, lend some urgency.

All that is to say nothing of the human voice, which, contrary to the expectations set in the first song, propels the album even more than the clever beats and otherworldly synths. Rather than bring it back to earth, though, the vocals add to the dreaminess. When it comes in for the first time on the second song, “I Want You,” it recalls the sparseness and languid sensuality of another male-female duo, The xx (a sentiment echoed in seductive lyrics such as, “Your eyes, they undress me,” on “IDM”). Throughout Spanish Disco, this female voice adopts different shades of ethereality, sounding sometimes like Phantogram (“Drowning in Youth”), Grimes (the falsetto on “IDM”), and Portishead (“Acid / Outro”). Only once does the voice rise and fill out, taking shape in the cries at the end of “I’m Not There.”

It’s easy to consume the audience with noise—it’s much harder to do so with quiet. On Spanish Disco, Leyya manipulate synths, percussion, and vocals in the perfect minimal balance to swallow the listener in their ethereal landscape. Intelligent, polished, and pretty, the album comes with one warning: it just might creep into your dreams.