Chasing Fridays: Ethel Cain, Asian Glow, Bowery Electric, more

Hello hello, and welcome back to Chasing Fridays, my weekly roundup of music criticism and (sometimes) gig reviews. This past weekend I was moshing it up at the FYA hardcore fest in Orlando until about one hour into the first day when I busted my foot spin-kicking a dude twice my size. From that point forward, I was limping along with the help of ibuprofen, but I still had a blast watching so many amazing hardcore sets and getting a few mosh moves in when I could muster the courage (I.E. stupidity) Keep an eye out for the next episode of Violent Treatment (out next week) if you're interested in hearing more of my thoughts on that.

The rest of this newsletter has absolutely nothing to do with hardcore. I reviewed the new hour-and-a-half-long "EP" (it's an album, sorry) by Ethel Cain, and then dissected fresh releases by two shoegaze-adjacent South Korean artists, omilgop and Asian Glow. Lastly, I continued my new-to-2025 segment of going in on an older release I've recently been listening to. This week, it's Bowery Electric's highly underrated 2000 swan song, Lushlife, which isn't as influential as their electroni-gaze masterpieces, Bowery Electric and Beat, but might actually be their best work. It's at least as good as their previous two LPs, and you can read what I had to say about it below.

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Ethel Cain - Perverts

Perverts is a dare. Some will call it a troll, but I think that's reductive. It isn't a bit. It isn't some kind of cheeky performance art. That said, she knows exactly what she's doing here. She knows that it will test the patience of the majority of her fanbase. She knows it will crinkle the noses of her fans who found "Strangers" in a Sad Girl Spotify playlist alongside Phoebe Bridgers and Lana Del Rey. The people who've made Ethel Cain into an alt popstar and expected her Preacher's Daughter follow-up to sound like "American Teenager." Perverts is for those people. Of course, it's also for the micro-cluster of her listenership who appreciates minimalism, drone, Grouper, and 13-minute stretches of sampled feedback that sound like an Ari Aster film score filtered through a Flenser artist's pedalboard.

But I think Perverts is mostly for the average Ethel Cain fan. It feels designed to test the durability of her standom. How far will you go for me? Are you only in this to have your rigid musical sensibilities validated? Are you willing to be challenged? Do you see me as an artist? Do you care what I have to say? Do you still care when the music, wordless and brutally quiet, speaks for itself? Am I just a vessel for tortured ballads and traumatic backstories? Am I an aesthetic? Am I a clipping on your vacant moodboard? Am I your Instagram story?

Those are the questions that Perverts' 12-minute opener feels like it's asking. It's 60 seconds of a 19th century hymn recorded on phonograph quality, and then 11 minutes of drab feedback loops peppered with spoken-word mutterings about a masturbator forsaken by heaven. "Housofpsychoticwomn" is compositionally similar: a looped signal processed through so much delay that it sounds like lapping waves on a windy shore, and a disembodied voice repeating "I love you" ad infinitum. "Pulldrone," the album's longest track at 15 minutes, is like if John Cale's viola in "Venus in Furs" was isolated from the rest of the song and stretched so wide that its midpoint eventually withers to the width of a thread. How far will you ride with me?

"Punish," the record's only song that resembles Preacher's Daughter, is a staggering flicker of ambient doom-balladry. "I am punished by love," Cain recites during the hook, the words falling up out of her mouth like spirits vacating her insides. Cain has said the song is about a pedophile who was shot by the child's father and now lives in exile, repeatedly maiming himself to replicate the bullet wound as a form of eternal punishment. Sure. It's also difficult to avoid associating the song's masochistic theme with Cain's own career, given what she's revealed about her discomfort with fame and the way her art can feel incongruent in a world that increasingly devalues sincerity. Does she herself feel punished by the fans who feed her? "If you love me then keep it to yourself," she murmurs a couple songs later in "Vacillator," crooning like Faye Webster if she was singing her last breaths away in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

The hymnal warbles and sustained chords of "Thatorchia" offer a peaceful respite in this otherwise brooding affair, while the rumbling distortion ring-outs in "Onanist" reinforce that an Ethel Cain doom-metal album would fucking rule. To me, the dense instrumentals and minimalist ambient spells that make up the majority of Perverts are as evocative as her most lyrical feats. After an hour-plus of limited singing, I almost wish the record's achingly slow closer, "Amber Waves," scrapped the vocals altogether and let the muffled guitar strums do the talking. I'm sure most Ethel Cain fans will disagree. Most of them probably won't even make it to "Amber Waves." I don't necessarily blame them. Perverts is a tough listen. It requires focus, intention, and solitude to properly digest. In this attention economy, that's asking a lot. Perverts will be written off as her "weird record." It'll be her Metal Machine Music. That's the point. It's a dare. It's a challenge. How far will you ride with me? Me personally? All 89 minutes.

omilgop - Funeral

Last year, South Korean musician omilgop released an album called a trail of fading that nicely fused slowcore trods with shoegaze flurries. I named the record's chest-thumping standout, "until I spill everything out," one of the best shoegaze songs of 2024. At the top of 2025, omilgop returned with another album of material called funeral that's more uniformly slowcore than shoegaze. A song like "stillplant" is a dead ringer for Duster at their fizziest, while "tear down the ashes" has a rudimentary banjo twang that sounds really pleasant alongside the spartan drumbeat and Ira Kaplan-esque mews. As with a trail of fading, I'm most partial to the songs on funeral where omilgop goes long.

Like ambient or techno, slowcore is a genre where repetition helps accentuate the music's gentle gestures, and I enjoy hearing omilgop tread well beyond the six, seven, and eight-minute mark on the album's second side. It leaves ample time for subtle complexities to emerge from simple phrases. The noire-noise crescendo in "new season." The ambling piano riff in the middle of "fleetingmoment." The way the sorta sloppy chords in "hibiscus" fold over each other like water splish-splashing in a bucket. There's a twee earnestness in omilgop's music that really charms me. A lot of slowcore these days sounds finnicky and meticulous. I like how omilgop's vocals in "hibiscus" almost have a one-take quality, where he sounds bashful to have been caught singing above a murmur. omilgop's music works so well because the meekness doesn't feel like a put-on.

Asian Glow - 11100011

The more I research the history of shoegaze for my forthcoming book, the more parallels I see between the early 90s and the present day. At times, I feel schizophrenic for recognizing how often history rhymes. Asian Glow was a crucial contributor to the 2020s shoegaze renaissance, releasing bedroom-built 'gaze records alongside – and sometimes with – fellow South Korean artists Parannoul and BrokenTeeth. Together, that cluster of artists helped spawn renewed interest in shoegaze while simultaneously innovating the form, inspiring other artists across the world (Jane Remover, Quannnic, Twikipedia, to name a few) to make their own breeds of DAW-designed digi-gaze. And just like that, they've collectively decided to move on.

Last year, Parannoul told me that he had "lost interest in modern shoegaze,” spurring him to collaborate with hexD group Fax Gang on the distinctly un-shoegazey art-pop blizzard, Scattersun. Earlier in 2024, Asian Glow had announced their retirement with one final 'gaze album under the moniker, Unwired Detour. These artists had only been making shoegaze for a few years, but, like Ride, Chapterhouse, Boo Radleys, and Drop Nineteens in the early 90s, they now feel compelled to evolve beyond shoegaze just when it seemed like they had a good rhythm going. Less than a year after their career's supposed conclusion, Asian Glow came out of hiding last week with the a new album called 11100011, a colorful bouquet of sampledelic dream-pop and sprightly indie, sprinkled with twigs of emo and a leaf or two of circuit-fried shoegaze. It's an album that sounds really striking even if the songs aren't all there.

The chillwave-ian "Camel8strike," my favorite cut, has diced-up vocal yelps, a funky beat, and a synth frequency that glimmers in the mix the whole time like a sound grenade. It sits somewhere between city pop and George Clanton, and I wish the rest of 11100011 was as effortlessly sleek. "Untitled *3" begins with a menacing synth intro that always makes me think Asian Glow is about to start rapping. Then, the earwormy motif gets buried under a clunky drum beat and the song is inflated with so much hissy feedback and treated singing that its sonic conceit gets lost in the sauce. Opener "m0numental" finds an effective middleground between noise and pop, even if the clattering drums remind me of Lars Ulrich's trashcan snare sound on St. Anger. The same goes for "Feel All the Time," the album's lushest track that, in its grandest moments, achieves the weightless majesty of Asian Glow's finest material.

Overall, 11100011 's central conceit is both its greatest strength and its most nagging flaw. There's so much going on at all times that your ear always has a curious loop or a bleary vocal line to latch onto. Following any one thread for more than 10 seconds, however, is nearly impossible. The record is too busy and erratic to ever find its internal clock, which makes the listening experience more taxing than the album's individual parts warrant. I felt the same way about Scattersun, for that matter. I don't yearn for Asian Glow to return to making shoegaze if that's not what they want to be making. There're enough intriguing moments on 11100011 to suggest that a more focused take on this sound could be stunning. This record doesn't quite get there.

Bowery Electric - Lushlife

This is the real music for airports. Earlier this week, I listened to Bowery Electric's third and final album, Lushlife, while my plane from Orlando was descending into Pittsburgh. The meditative drum breaks, dazed vocals, and dubby basslines were like ginger ale for my woozy tummy (flight sickness, I can't escape). Once I landed and began exiting the jet bridge, I was antsy from my flight and wanted out of the airport as soon as possible. I lacked the ability to even crack a friendly smirk at my fellow passerby's on the escalator. I needed music that would throw a functional cloak on everything around me – songs like "Saved," "Passages," and the aptly titled "After Landing."

It didn't take long, however, for my zone-out music to become an alluring form of liminal space propaganda. As I strolled down one of those horizontal escalators that makes you walk at double speed, the creaky samples and dusky drum beats animated details in the world around me that I was previously trying to avoid. Neon signs at the Hudson News stand. A well-dressed older man hustling with a gait that matched the tempo in my ear buds. The way the ceiling lights dimmed during some stretches of "CTRL + Paste" architecture – blank walls and colorless carpets stretching on and on – and then brightened again as I whizzed by antsy passengers tapping toes at their assigned terminal. Suddenly, I was enjoying my shoe-shoving transit from my gate to the airport's exit. Lushlife forced me to see color and whimsy when I wanted grayscale isolation. Don't mistake its title for mere hyperbole. ​