Zuzanna Pazola

With HOUNDSTOOTH, SIIICKBRAIN builds a record that feels like stepping into a dark, sweat-soaked room and letting the walls close around you. It is abrasive, hazy, clubby, vulnerable, and strange in all the right ways, pulling from industrial grit, electronic production, hip-hop beats, alternative pop structures, and something far more instinctive. It never feels interested in sitting neatly within one sound, and that restlessness becomes part of its identity. The album opens with a short,...

There’s a fine line between contrast and contradiction, and on brutalist, SACE6 lean fully into the latter. Their whole approach hinges on a simple question: how heavy can something get while still feeling undeniably pop? It’s not about blending genres neatly together, but forcing them to coexist, and more often than not that tension is exactly what makes this debut hit as hard as it does. After making serious waves with 2025’s Limerance, the duo wasted no time in levelling up. Not even a...

There’s a version of Theft World that probably could’ve existed where LIP CRITIC doubled down on what previous album, Hex Dealer started - more chaos, more sharp left turns, more of that “anything goes” energy that made them such an immediate talking point. Instead, this feels like a deliberate shift. Not a retreat from that previous intensity, but a refinement of it into something more focused, more suffocating, and in a strange way, more purposeful. A lot of that comes down to how the band...