An album by Peach Rings.
First, some background for the sake of New Music Journalism. I fucking love this album. I discovered it because of an artist that likes to paint the album/cover art of music and books she's liked using a muted mix of acrylics with watercolors and crushed up pastels mixed in. She shared her cover of the album art for october again on the Discord server for HARDCODED, a fairly popular erotic cyberpunk visual novel. Today I learned that my found sister's bride-to-be is reasonably close with her, hanging out and sharing music and playing rhythm games on stream. Yet, she did not know that she was an artist.
After a few weeks of having the album in my head on and off, I decided to also copy the album art, (which made me decide to reach out to Madi, and my found sister-in-law.) I listened to the whole thing again while drawing those cartoon faces and pumpkins and knives.
Anyway, the album. It's an EP, having only four tracks, and the first one is under a minute. It's Halloween-themed, of course, so there's that background horror aesthetic in the lyrics. There's a bit of a subversion though, as most songs are mostly about trans stuff or relationships. The track titles reflect that, too: "hallow's eve" (kind of a teaser for deadname), "i'm going to be a girl for halloween", "deadname", "witching hour".
My favorite (right now, anyway) is "witching hour". It starts out with those horror tropes, then becomes more ambiguous:
you tied me up just like a harness
bound to your will
trained like a dog
i've never been that good at doing things for me
brain got all lost inside your fog
Then it becomes more obvious that it's about romance:
felt fucked before i met you
you led me to your light
we could kiss in sacrilege!
chase love into the night
(The other songs are also great, but I have less to say about them. It's better that they speak for themselves.)
Musically, the album is rock? It reminds me of the kind of indie rock that grew out from 90s grunge. That describes a huge amount of music, but I'm not sure if it has a more specific label. There are really cool riffs on guitar and bass, and kind of lo-fi recordings. Peach Rings self-describes as power pop, with october again also tagged as punk, indie rock, diy, and Boone.