Chasing Fridays: Bleary Eyed, Cortisa Star, Coma Cinema, more

This was a good week for those who enjoy reading words that I typed into the computer. Two Stereogum interviews I wrote, one with Molly Burch and one with Greet Death, were published earlier this week, and I'm proud of how both of them came out. And then there's this edition of Chasing Fridays, which is filled with thoughts on new music from shoegaze scene-leaders, rap up-and-comers, and indie-rock veterans. I also weighed in on an underrated metalcore classic from This Day Forward, their 2000 album The Transient Effects of Light on Water.

As always, that final portion of Chasing Fridays, in which I go in on an older record I've been spending time with, is for paying subscribers only, so you can toss me $5/month to read that and any other paywalled content on my site. Thanks to everyone who supports me monetarily, as I wouldn't be able to dedicate as much time as I do to this site without your generosity.

Bleary Eyed - "Heaven Year"

I've been waiting for it. It hasn't happened yet, but I've been confident that it's coming. I've been staving off the doubters and proselytizing to the cynics, and maybe, just maybe, it's finally on the horizon. I'm talking about a real-deal, generation-defining, long-lasting shoegaze classic. Maybe not the Loveless, but ideally the Souvlaki – or at the very least the Nowhere or the Whirlpool – of the 2020s. An album – not a song or an EP, but an album – that we can hoist up as the crowning document of shoegaze's ongoing renaissance. An album that doesn't just rehash the past, but reorients the future. That codifies all of the weird, brilliant, uncanny developments shoegaze has undergone over the last half-decade and serves as this era's lodestar. That single-handedly proves why all of this – the TikTok detritus, the nu-gaze drivel, the major label interloping – was worth enduring. Because now we have a fucking classic to carry us forward for another 10, 20, 30 years.

Bleary Eyed might've made it. The Philly band have been around since late last decade and have undergone several lineup changes and stylistic shifts since then. Their 2021 album, Guise, had some good tracks, but I don't think they really hit their stride until their 2023 split with Euphoria Again and Sun Organ. Their 2024 singles, "Shimmer Away" and "2 True," were even better. They take queues from their synth-inflected peers in Full Body 2 and their downer-gaze lords in They Are Gutting a Body of Water, but have a proclivity for quirky melodies and crushing chord progressions that're entirely their own. Their music is as walloping as it is progressive as it is tuneful. Most shoegaze bands exhibit, at best, one of those qualities. Bleary Eyed have all three.

"Heaven Year" is the first single from their new album, Easy. I've heard the record and I can attest that it's fucking great. "Heaven Year" is a testament as to why. The best shoegaze songs make you feel like turning the volume dial a little louder every 30 seconds, and this is one of those tracks that's fucking howling out of my speakers every time I finish listening to it. I've been yearning for a shoegaze band to incorporate auto-tune and sophisticated electronic textures in a meaningful way, and this is exactly the sort of thing I've been hoping for. It's glitchy without feeling overindulgent. Arty while still packing a punch. Sleek and modern without sounding manufactured and cloying. It's a stunning song that positions Bleary Eyed at the forefront of everything cool happening in shoegaze right now. Either tap in or bow out.

Cortisa Star - E.M.O. (Evil Motion Overload)

Add this to the loose assembly of "post-hyperpop" visionaries who I wrote about last week. Cortisa Star is a 19-year-old Delaware rapper who's threading between the internet rap underground and the queer pop/EDM space – basically the mid-2020s version of what hyperpop was in the early 2020s. A bunch of tracks on her scintillating debut tape, E.M.O. (Evil Motion Overload), were produced by hyperpop savant Umru (Charli XCX, Dorian Electra, Fraxiom), and there's nary a second to breathe once the first beat drops and Cortisa starts spouting off through ragged auto-tune. It has all the technicolor bombast and neuron-zapping energy of yesterday's hyperpop/digicore, but there's an edginess to Cortisa's lyricism – and a finesse to her rapping abilities – that situates her in a different timeline than her whimsically amateur-ish predecessors.

Still, I hear shards of several of my favorite voices from the last half-decade in her delivery.​ The raccoon hair drill of CLIP, the unceasing punk-rap fury of Rico Nasty, and the playful auto-tune swagger of Laura Les. The semi-automatic flows and ecstasy-fueled beats are thrilling until the inevitable exhaustion kicks in, but Cortisa's lyrics are what innervates the project once the music starts to wear on your ear. "Call me man, but I don't give a fuck, guess I'm that fucking guy," she swipes on "Misidentify." In the krushclubby "Dramatic," she threatens to fling the f-slur at anyone who pisses her off and then let her opp's man "blow my back on a mattress." In "Bomb" she inserts this brutal tell-off – "tell that bitch to kill herself, she's jumping off the fucking tower" – into a rhyme scheme about loud drugs and even louder bass.

So much of v.1 hyperpop was made by dweebs and softies who affixed the overblown maximalism of prior pop eras past with a meepy, Minecrafty, almost agoraphobic tenderness. Sure, there were diss tracks and plenty of sassy brags, but I can't think of any figures from that scene (other than Black Dresses, who were always on the outskirts of it) who were as brash and uncompromisingly combative as Cortisa Star is. Whose mantra, "sometimes I be cute, but I'm evil as fuck," actually sounds believable. That's what makes E.M.O. so exciting to me. It's taking elements of a genre that was largely wholesome and twee and reupholstering it with a filthy attitude, wielding her queerness as a weapon at a time when her community is uniquely under threat. Whether you want to think of it as emo drill or dark hyperpop (or just, you know, rap music), whatever Cortisa Star is doing here sounds more of-the-moment than almost anything else I've heard in 2025.

Coma Cinema - "Thomas Kinkade's Grand Delusion"

Astute Chasing Sundays readers will know that Mathew Lee Cothran is one of my favorite songwriters ever. His band Elvis Depressedly were a crucial indie-rock gateway for me, and he's released music under several other monikers – Coma Cinema, The Goin' Nowheres, his own name – that I rank among the greatest indie-rock of the 21st century. One of my first paid music journalism assignments was reviewing the "final" Coma Cinema album, 2017's Loss Memory, a massively depressing, staggeringly pretty collection of dusty folk and mournful bedroom pop that stands as one of the best releases in Cothran's prolific catalog. Cothran is always retiring projects and starting new ones, and after putting Elvis Depressedly to bed in 2023, he's decided to regenerate Coma Cinema for a new record called Grand Delusion, due out sometime later this year.

"Thomas Kinkade's Grand Delusion" is the album's first single, and it has all the hallmarks of a great Cothran song. A spindly bassline, gales of distorted guitar, drums that clap like a deconstructed trap song, and a hook that casually lingers like leaves collecting in the crevices of an alleyway. The production quality is a little brighter and clearer than where Coma Cinema last left off, and arrangement-wise, the song returns to the pop severity of Elvis Depressedly and Coma Cinema – an approach Cothran eschewed with the muddy, fuzzy Goin' Nowheres material. Lyrically, the track is a condensed biography of its titular subject, the secretly tortured kitsch painter Thomas Kinkade who became fabulously wealthy for his mass-produced schlock and ultimately died from the alcoholic lifestyle he descended into. If you know anything about Cothran as a person (and you can learn a helluva lot just by listening to his lyrics), then you could see why such a man would fascinate him. I'm looking forward to wherever Grand Delusion leads.

Hotline TNT - "Julia's War"

Oh, shit a Hotline TNT song that I actually like? This band's 2023 album, Cartwheel, is one of the more lauded shoegazey albums in recent years, but I never understood what made it catchy, dynamic, and/or riff-licious enough to earn the hype, because to my ears it was none of those things. "Julia's War" is all of them. I love the way the lead lick brays and foams with plenty of overdriven spittle, but the vocals are still mixed loud enough to ensure the hook drills into your skull. The nah-nah-naah naah naaaaah" refrain is loads of fun, and the guitar solos are giving Built to Spill in exactly the way I like them to. It's not a drastic swerve from what they were doing on Cartwheel, but in my opinion, it's loads more enjoyable. Hopefully the full record will be, too.

Subscribe to Chasing Sundays for $5/month to continue reading the final segment of each Chasing Fridays column, where I go in on an older record that I've recently been spending time with.

This Day Forward - The Transient Effects of Light on Water