Chasing Fridays: Cameron Winter, High., Novulent, more

Hello hello, welcome back to Chasing Fridays, my weekly column of music criticism and (sometimes) gig reviews. I'll start with the second Chasing Sundays update of 2025.

Earlier this month, I introduced a new segment in this column where I retrospectively write about one older release each week. So far, I've written about some obscure shoegaze and some underrated trip-hop, and in this very newsletter I wrote about Swirlies' overlooked 1998 remix-ish album, Strictly East Coast Sneaky Flute Music. I've heard from several subscribers that they've been enjoying this new addition to Chasing Fridays, so I'm going to continue that segment of the newsletter, but put it behind the paywall. Since I don't presently have the bandwidth to publish weekly interviews and essays on Chasing Sundays, I want to provide something for my paying subscribers, and hopefully my thoughtful dives into older discoveries will be appreciated by those who kindly toss me $5/month.

The rest of each Chasing Fridays installment – the writeups about new music and live shows I've seen – will remain free for anyone to read. But if you want a little something extra from me, and value when I go in on music that's rarely been written about anywhere else on the internet, then you can sub to Chasing Sundays at the $5/month tier. I greatly appreciate everyone who's currently subscribed, free or paid, and I hope you enjoy what I wrote about this week: Cameron Winter's critic's pick, Heavy Metal, High.'s great new shoegaze EP, Come Back Down, Novulent's bad new shoegaze EP, Before Evolution, and the aforementioned Swirlies record.

Cameron Winter - Heavy Metal

I saw someone tweet the other day (paraphrasing here) that the Cameron Winter album is so darn likeable that it's bringing listeners from all walks of life together under one pair of headphones. I thought that was an interesting statement because I had previously listened to the first song on Heavy Metal, "The Rolling Stones," and turned it off almost immediately in an act of visceral revulsion. Cameron Winter is a member of the New York band Geese, and Heavy Metal is his solo debut, released late last year. It was dubbed "Best New Music" by Pitchfork at the top of 2025, and many critics and pals in my sphere have been praising it heartily. I haven't actually read anything more than a tweet-length review of it because I was hoping to go in blind and form my own opinion, but after feeling like my ears were singed by the conductors of an electric cattle prodder during my first attempt, I put off listening any further until I saw the aforementioned tweet. If this record is really so great that it'll appeal to virtually any kind of contemporary music head, then I felt I owed it a proper go.

My impression of "The Rolling Stones" after my second listen is that it's a grotesquely horrible song. Winter sings with a demented warble that plunges to a monotone groan – the voice of a hungover man calling the bar from bed to see if they found his credit card – and then flutters to a shrill falsetto that sounds like listening to Whitney in a k-hole. The exact musical reference points are beyond me. The kind of 70s coke-folk, I presume, that 35-year-olds who wear cotton collared shirts on the weekend and do karaoke in Kingston, NY would be able to ramble about for hours. None of my business. Suffice to say, I was displeased with "The Rolling Stones" and braced myself for agony as Heavy Metal trekked onward.

To say the rest of the album was a "pleasant surprise" doesn't capture the full breadth of my satisfaction. I felt as if I had been granted the mercy of a benevolent goddess when I not only tolerated, not merely approved, but thoroughly, ecstatically enjoyed the remainder of Heavy Metal. Winter's voice never regains its balance or recuperates from whatever blasphemous disease is ailing the singer on the first track. He's still singing with the unearned confidence of a shower crooner the entire time, cheerfully ambivalent to the perimeters of pitch and key. Often times, particularly on "$0 bill," he reminds me of Why?'s Yoni Wolf – if Wolf was tasked with belting in a soundproof room without the ability to hear himself and know if he's even in tune. Yet, to my utter shock, Winter's approach just happens to work exceptionally well on virtually every song beyond "The Rolling Stones."

"Love Takes Miles" is also kind of like listening to Whitney in a k-hole – the kind of k-hole that conks you unconscious so you no longer hear Whitney at all, and instead get to frolic to the fantastical dream-folk your brain pumps out before the DMT starts kicking in to ease your untimely demise. Something about this album sounds aptly cursed for the moment in which it's emerged. Songs like "Drinking Age" and "Cancer of the Skull" are as whimsically beautiful as they are slyly foreboding. The hideous cover art has all the trappings of the post-ironic indie sleaze moment that's been dragging on for the whole decade. It's hard to pinpoint why, but something about the process of revolting against, and then adjusting to, but sometimes still wincing at, yet ultimately adoring, albeit skeptically, Winter's voice mirrors the experience of watching Beau Is Afraid. At once hilarious and horrifying, classically brilliant and modernly obnoxious, confoundingly limber and cringe-inducingly sloppy. It's not for everyone. Most people in my life would despise this. Not me. Not me, goddammit.

High. - Come Back Down

High. are a good shoegaze band. They're from New Jersey, they've toured with DIIV, and Come Back Down is their first release for Kanine Records. The first four songs on this lot are new, and you get a good sense of what you're in for with opener "In a Hole." Moody, melancholic alt-gaze that's never quite Nothing levels of heavy, but certainly crisper and more dynamically soaring than the average Philly-gaze band. The vocal delivery on "In a Hole" reminds me of Turnover's Peripheral Vision. Maybe that's not the "coolest" reference point for a shoegaze band in 2025, but what I mean by that is that High. know how to assemble a compelling vocal hook. That goes a long way in this shoegaze climate. They also know how to riff, as the floods of distortion in "Catcher" and needley lead lick in "Flowers" demonstrate.

The second half of Come Back Down was initially released as the four-song Bomber EP via Julia's War and Suburban Creep in early 2023. Those songs have been out there for a while, but most listeners will be hearing them for the first time in this context. The guitars on this side are a little more Slowdive-ian, filling with helium huffs of reverb and then leaking out when the prickly distortion punctures through the balloons of texture. These are strong songs. Sturdy melodies and well-arranged riffs with a linear logic. If all the shoegazey effects were turned off, they'd still be compelling alt-rock tunes. I think High. are going to pop off this year. I would be surprised if they're not one of the more talked-about U.S. shoegaze bands by the fall. They've got the look, the sound, the vibes. Don't pass this EP up.

Novulent - Before Evolution

Novulent might sneakily be the most popular shoegaze artist on the internet. Their 2023 single, "scars," presently has 113m Spotify streams, a healthy 13m more than Wisp's TikTok-era shoegaze landmark "Your Face." If you're keeping tabs on modern shoegaze then you definitely know Wisp, but you might not know too much about Novulent, the 20-year-old Dallas musician who's now signed to Capitol, making them the third, by my count, zoomer-gaze musician to sign with a major label (following Wisp at Interscope and Julie at Atlantic). I don't know what, if anything, that means in 2025, because "scars" picked up its own following on TikTok, and Novulent's remarkable rise has otherwise been pretty organic, as far as I can tell. I suppose it means that Novulent is making money, and Capitol thinks their new EP, Before Evolution, can make them some, too.

Novulent's schtick can basically be boiled down to, "What if gothboiclique had a shoegaze rapper?" They look like a Hot Topic promo from 2008 (snake bites, stud belts, and rawry poses) and they rap with a lethargic croon that's one part Wicca Phase and two parts Chino Moreno. Most, if not all, of their songs to this point were made in collaboration with producers who made shoegaze instrumentals with MIDI instruments, giving all of Novulent's "beats" a stilted, inorganic groove. I'm not opposed to MIDI shoegaze beats if they're made well, and I actually think "scars" makes a pretty compelling case that "shoegaze emo-rap" is a sound worth pursuing. The three songs on Before Evolution do not make that case.

Opener "death wish" is one of the most poorly mixed songs I've ever heard from a major label artist. The drums are presumably real, but are so loud and isolated in the mix that it sounds like Novulent is rapping over a YouTube drum tutorial. The guitars are barely audible, and Novulent's angsty moans are panned up into the corners of the mix in such a way that the drums – particularly the distracting, off-kilter snare thwacks – take center stage. It's like if someone explained what Deftones sounded like to a producer who's never heard Deftones or shoegaze, and then just shruggingly accepted the first draft they turned in. An absolutely awful, directionless song with none of the personality or pathos that made "scars" even remotely compelling.

"sex toy" is a bit better. A fast, driving grunge-gazer that actually hits hard and (somewhat) effectively juxtaposes Novulent's reverb-soaked groans with some musical body. "just like in the movies" is the ballad. The one that sounds like Whirr or Wisp, except, you know, worse. On both of these tracks, Novulent's voice can sound good for a few seconds at a time, but they always end up tracing along well-worn shoegaze trailways, never adding any flecks of innovation. The hooks are entirely flat. There's no character or twinges of human suffering in the way Novulent delivers the verses. In shoegaze, enough style can easily make up for a lack of substance, but Before Evolution offers neither. The instrumentation is plasticky and transparently cheap, and Novulent doesn't even sound like they're trying on the mic.

"Shoegaze emo-rap" deserves to sound as thrillingly weird and uncannily pleasurable as both shoegaze and emo-rap were in their initial incarnations. The worst thing about Before Evolution is that, despite all its glaring flaws – instrumental choices that are so bad that they're almost interesting – it's all just such a fucking bore to listen.

Subscribe to Chasing Sundays at the $5/month tier 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.

Swirlies - Strictly East Coast Sneaky Flute Music