Put It on Your Playlist: Classic Hip-Hop, Industrial Metal and More New Music Released in Denver

This week's releases include industrial metal madness, classic hip-hop, genre-punching use of Auto-Tune, virtuosic violin coupled with bass music, metal-adjacent instrumentals and dub magic. Find your new favorite song below!



River Runs Black
A Dying Breed
Record Thieves drummer Jim Wilcox explores his industrial-metal side in solo project River Runs Black's latest set of ten snarling tracks. Songs such as “The Bottom Line” and “Slug” reflect influences like Nine Inch Nails, White Zombie and Ministry simmering together, while “A Quiet Place” offers a pensive, low-key shift in the heavy album. The synthesizer lines echo and buzz, and the guitars recede before slamming into the mix with merciless verve. The vocals vacillate between anguished and screaming on the songs, which are also sprinkled with faded audio clips from old movies. The album combines genres so smoothly that it should appeal to metal, industrial and electronic music fans alike. Sourpusses should also give it a spin, as it offers moody musical accompaniment for a meh kind of day.

Stay Tuned
“Feeling Right”
Mane Rok, Ichiban and DJ AWHAT!! are the emcees who make up Denver's Stay Tuned. The group’s latest single, “Feeling Right,” offers four minutes of classic cipher-heavy raps. Chicago-based producer Maker — who made the theme music for Abbot Elementary — lays down the track, a deeply layered cut of insistent key stabs and little clips of symphonic strings, movie samples and dance hall reggae vocals over deftly executed scratching and cutting. It’s good hip-hop, done in the classic fashion. To steal a phrase from long-defunct Ego Trip magazine: “This shit is so dope you can step all over it and still get $120 a gram.” Catch it on bandcamp.com.



No Signal
“Embers”
According to the Boulder- and Denver-spawned three-piece, the title of No Signal's new single, "Embers," is meant to evoke a wildfire and its fading embers as a metaphor for moving on from the past. Vocalist Riley Schmelzer uses Auto-Tune but keeps it subtle enough to never be annoying; it’s more James Blake than Cher. "PSD" takes the use of harmonized, manipulated vocals even further, and is worth a listen while you're hanging out on the group's Spotify page. No Signal also offers technically impressive instrumentation that seems intent on punching genre conventions in the face. Most of the bandmates are too young to drink — legally, at least — so we look forward to seeing what they dream up in the coming years.

Josh Teed
Recurring Dreams
Josh Teed’s Recurring Dreams prompts the question: Who is nerdier — violinists or synthesizer fanatics? Teed answers this question with violinists who record dubstep, with virtuosic violin as the anchor. Teed works with a variety of collaborators on these eight filter-twisting tracks — DAGGZ, Shanghai Doom, IZZI, Jason Leech, Eyezik and Super Future — but the kitchen-sink approach never dilutes the cohesiveness of the concept, and suggests that he knew what he wanted when he set out to write the record. The songs fit in the dance-music realm and wouldn’t be out of place in a club. But Teed incorporates enough lo-fi flourishes and tastes of 1990s East Coast hip-hop to appeal to shut-ins who just want some music to listen to while they watch their cat hunt butterflies in the backyard. We’ll call it intelligent dance music (IDM) in that regard.



Liontortoise
Photosynthesis II
Denver quartet Liontortoise is a bit of an anomaly. It’s a band that hangs out with a lot of metal bands, but the music it plays isn’t exactly metal. The group categorizes its music as progressive metal, while others may call it post-metal. It’s more like a jazz act playing the gates of hell. Whatever label you wish to ascribe to Liontortoise, its members all know how to play their instruments well, and the songs on Photosynthesis II, which are new takes on pre-existing tracks by the band, offer a master class in virtuosic playing throughout. That said, they're never bloated or self-indulgent, but rather engaging and absorbing. You won't be reaching for the "skip" button at any point because you can’t take another guitar solo.



J Dubby
"Heart & Soul Dub (J Dubby Mix)"
Boulder “mountain reggae” outfit Policulture released “Heart and Soul” on its 2018 album Mountains to Cross, which reached number four on the Billboard reggae charts. Joel “J Dubby” Scanlon has taken the original track and bathed it in a heavy wash of echo and delay, placing new emphasis on some of the original’s lyrics and transforming the entire affair into a new song in the process. J Dubby works with vintage dub music processes and has collaborated with Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad, The Movement, Skip Marley, Policulture and Thunder Body.

Unless otherwise noted, music is available on all major streaming platforms. Send releases for consideration to [email protected].