New Noise: The Stevens, Foreign/National, Kane Ikin, Moonboat

Suite-like pop, smudgy indie rock, dark friction and experimental hardcore await in this week’s roundup of new music.

– The first new music from The Stevens since last year’s very good A History of Hygiene is the standalone single ‘Thirsty Eye’, timed with the Melbourne quartet’s 15-date US tour around Goner Fest. It’s another three minutes of scrappy pop that sits halfway between Guided By Voices and Wreckless Eric, squeezing twangy melodies, little suite-like shifts and a lot of other cool details into one compact tune. It could just be one of their best songs to date (if not, ahem, their best cover art), sounding stronger and stronger with every spin. You can grab the song as a dollar download here. The Stevens are also seeing their self-titled debut EP – which came out first as a self-released CD-R and tape and then as a 7” through Chapter – reissued on vinyl by the Canadian label Kingfisher Bluez.

– Despite being quite new still, Foreign/National have attracted serious attention with each successive single. Their very first one, ‘Paris’, has racked up nearly 85,000 plays on SoundCloud, while ‘All Honesty’ boasts 16,000. And now ‘Life Tourist’ marks their signing to fledgling Melbourne imprint Downtime, home to Darcy Baylis and Ara Koufax. The label will release the band’s debut EP later this month. The new single isn’t as catchy as their other tunes, with their trademark smudginess approaching more of a muddle in terms of production. But there are easy pop footholds beneath the murk, and Foreign/National’s blog dominance seems unthreatened.

– Mere weeks after we checked in with Kane Ikin, the mercurial producer has just dropped a two-song EP pairing “something old and something new.” That would be, respectively, ‘Circular Tip’ – featured in a recent video work by Ikin’s repeat collaborator Nic Hamilton – and the previously unheard ‘Bishop’. Both are unsettling yet determined, filling us with a vague uncertainty. ‘Bishop’ accumulates layers and gradually increases in tempo towards the end, cranking up the anxiety that way. ‘Circular Tip’ is more like an unmoored rock instrumental (or even raga), finding dark friction in slow-moving guitar and tambourine cues. The Circular Tip EP is up for name-your-price download now through This Thing.

– Billed as “experimental, blackened hardcore,” Moonboat’s debut album does indeed take hardcore and metal volatility in a more textured direction. Songs like ‘Hellpipes’ go from primal growls to gentle, folky stateliness without feeling at odds with themselves, while the fifth track, ‘Lightningpattern’, surprises us with the album’s first female vocals. Befitting the wide range covered, Spirit Panther has been likened to everything from Boards of Canada and Wolf Eyes to Neurosis and Converge. There’s very little information available about Moonboat, other than that the album was recorded in both Australia and Japan, with improvised jams transformed further thanks to “later glitching, looping [and] overdubbing.” Seeming more like a collective, the band features members of Slowly Building Weapons, At Dark, Snakes Get Bad Press, Dining in Tuscany, Redbatman, Red Ghost, At Dark and Age Majic. The album is out now as a name-your-price download through Sydney label Art As Catharsis.

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To nominate new music for this column, email us at news@messandnoise.com.