Heatwave. Brain cooked. Writing… hard. 

Whatever, maybe it’s a good excuse to talk about my favourite – and I think most underrated – Trapped Under Ice album, Heatwave. 

But first..

GOING TO GIVE YOU MYAYAYYYY… EXTRA LARGE PIECE OF LOOSE TOPICS

• New music new music, baby!

  • There’s a new Fiddlehead EP, Baby I’ll Change, which to my ears feels like a more restrained version of the band, but also more confident. It’s an absolutely lovely release and will definitely be on repeat for me.

  • Cheating a bit now, because this release is definitely not new, but I recently caught Touché Amoré on their ten year anniversary tour for Stage Four. This record is quite special to me, as it is for a lot of people, so it’s been in heavy rotation. Also check out the photos I took at the show, as well as of Greet Death, which opened for TA. 

• If you’re a musical artist, it’s worth checking if your work has been used to train AI models. The Atlantic has a handy page up where you can search for these databases. And if you think these only used pop tunes, do a search for the likes of Converge or Youth of Today…

• Lab grown art? Kind of! How about playing Doom on a screen made out of E. coli cells? Yeah, with 9 hours to render a single frame, maybe the framerate leaves a little to be desired, but dangit, it sure is cool.

  

• Are you sick like me? Do you like to listen to the soothing clickity-clacks of physical keyboards? Go have a look (and listen) at the Listening Museum! Choose from 36 keyboards and enjoy as those sweet clicks shoot into your earholes.

• If you’re a dedicated Wordler, like me, this breakdown of standard mode vs hard mode scoring is quite fascinating. Turns out, you might score better if you play on hard mode (in which you’re forced to use the clues you gained in previous word guesses). The more you know!

• Swinging back to non-AI, actual human art, check out this amazing embroidery of little Japanese and Korean city scenes by artist Adrienna Matzeg. Check out this Colossal article about her work or her Instagram profile.

• Tying your shoelaces is probably not something you think about a lot, but turns out there’s a lot of ways you can do that! Ian’s Shoelace Site is kind of an amazing resource if you want to go deep on it. Or read this Aftermath interview with Ian, aka Dr. Shoelace.

HEATWAVE. Both in real life here in Western Europe and the album.

Now, my brain is fried due to the increasing temperature so fret not, this will not become a long think piece about this album, I just want to pay tribute because I feel it gets overlooked a bit. 

But first, let’s enjoy this incredibly horny album art together:

What a concept! Certainly more out-of-the-box than the nautical and old school tattoo themes of the two preceding albums. 

But then, that’s kind of the whole crux of Heatwave. Where Secrets of the World and Big Kiss Goodbye are excellent hardcore records in their own right, it’s this album that the band kind of goes into some weird (good) directions. The sing-songy intro to XL, the tambourine at the end of Throw It Away – it’s all just a little more daring and (dare I say it?) fun (I dared). 

There surely are reasons the band went in this direction, but I don’t know these fellas like that so I’m not too interested in speculating.

But the fact that the bands in the Baltimore scene are so intertwined with one another and around the time this came out Angel Du$t was coming up and Turnstile started getting big, all with their own unique takes on punk and hardcore…

That scene just started experimenting like crazy around this time and I’m all about it.