FADER will soon be launching our app on Spotify, where you'll be able to hear all the music we feature in our magazine. But we wanted a way to share with you all the stuff we are super nerdy about and we'll be doing that with our Staff Selects section, using new releases to start a trip down the rabbit's hole. Before our app launches soon, we're partnering with Spotify to help introduce these Selects as embeddable playlists on TheFADER.com. The new Black Dice sounds super weird, check out some old New York jazz and Moroccan music that sounds suspiciously similar; Lotus Plaza is a new shoegaze favorite, hear some of the OGs. This is how we listen to music, voraciously and extra curiously and Spotify is giving us an exciting platform to share—just press play.
Soft Dice
With the release of Black Dice's sixth album, Mr Impossible, we looking at a band 15 years into their career. From where they started, it might as well be 100. Or maybe zero. They began as a wildly aggressive hardcore band in Rhode Island, took a happy detour with long, slow-growing songs, and now are making incomprehensibly majestic sounds. My favorite era of the band remains the early 2000s, when they were truly blissed out. Their album Beaches and Canyons has the wonderfully named "Endless Happiness," a song which is appropriate for peace pipes and skate parks alike, a meeting of the minds I am all for. This mix of music is things that have come before and after them in that same zone, music with a love of odd organic sounds or the more zen side of electronics. —Matthew Schnipper
Tanlines' Family Ties
Before teaming up as Tanlines in 2008, Eric Emm and Jesse Cohen made music in New York City (and for awhile, Pittsburgh) with family and friends for nearly a decade. Here are some tracks from Tanlines' excellent new album, as well as traces of their previous projects; Jesse Cohen's dance band Professor Murder, Eric Emm's intricate instrumental group Don Caballero and the duo's hyper-motivational work with their short-lived group, Restless People. It's music for wilding out in the city or on the beach somewhere, pushed forward by treadmill-ready conga and lots of positive thinking. The epic rise and fall of "Pistolwhip," a hit trance single by Emm's brother and onetime production partner Joshua Ryan, rounds things out. —Naomi Zeichner
Lotus Plaza and Other Bummer Shoegaze
Technically, the shoegaze part of this this title is a bit of a misnomer, as some of these songs only touch on key points of shoegaze's hypnotic reverb, but there's other sonic similarities here. As a member of Deerhunter, Lockett Pundt has been responsible for some of our favorite songs from the group ("Desire Lines" what up!), but, as Lotus Plaza, he's also an expert at creating songs that endlessly cycle inside of themselves like some sort of beautiful ouroboros. His new album, Spooky Action At A Distance, is so expertly constructed, it took us like five listens to penetrate it properly. Here's a selection of older Lotus Plaza music, as well as songs from Deerhunter and Atlas Sound, paired with some ambient jams and shoegaze classics from My Bloody Valentine and Ride. None of this is as much of a bummer as you might expect, but all of it will probably make you think some deep stuff about your life. —Sam Hockley-Smith
Dunes' West Coast Blend of Goth, New Wave and Punk
California has always had its own current of rock that has run, depending on the moment, parallel or perpendicular to the rest of the music world. Dunes, a new band from Los Angeles, incorporates many of the tiny pockets of music from the West Coast's history, from the poppy rockabilly of X, through the cold, cold 1980s Goth of Christian Death and 45 Grave, to the more recent downtown scene surrounding The Smell, the small D.I.Y. venue that birthed Dunes and many of their contemporaries like Abe Vigoda and No Age. Their new LP Noctiluca is a beautiful blend of so many sounds, no distinct era overpowering any other, with only California as the most important influence. —Alex Frank