Fluxblog 509: the NYC indie/DIY scene, right now

Plus new songs by Cute Door, Birthday Girl, Cumgirl8, and LustSickPuppy

This week’s playlist is NYC NOW 2025, an attempt to sketch out the current indie/DIY scene in New York City. I plan on keeping the Spotify and Apple versions of this updated through the year, sorta like how I was keeping the Narrators playlist of new UK/Irish post-punk bands going for a while a couple years ago.

I think this playlist makes a good case for the NYC scene being in pretty good shape lately. There’s a lot of excellent artists in this playlist, and many more who show a lot of promise. I found several new artists that I like a lot in making this, and I’m certain that if you flick through this thing, you’ll find some stuff to enjoy too. But you can also appreciate this as a more anthropological thing.

[Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube]

All four of the featured songs this week are also in the NYC NOW 2025 playlist!

There’s Something Evil

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Cute Door “Play Hooky”

“Play Hooky” is very post-Lana Del Rey in the way it uses irony as a mechanism of grounding its lyrical details but also distancing it from reality. But the music itself is more like a deliberately spooky John Carpenter-ish version of trap, and Cute Door’s vocals are much closer to the girlish deadpan rap of Kitty Pryde in tone and cadence. (Remember “Okay Cupid”? Amazing song, really holds up, plays as an evocative character study now.)

I think you could ask a lot of people what they think this song is about and get very different answers, all of them saying something about who the listener is. But I think broadly this is a song presenting horny lady rap – “he says my mouth feels wet like my pussy,” etc – in the context of horror. But I think there’s a lot of room for interpretation in terms of the specific subgenre of horror, and in her role in the implied narrative. I think she’s meant to be understood as a sort of supernatural or demonic figure who uses sex to lure in victims, like a siren or a succubus or whatever Scarlett Johansson was in Under the Skin.

But there’s still some vulnerability and vague paranoia in her voice that suggests a more ordinary scenario, or her not quite being an aggressor. It makes me think of an old U2 lyric – “A vampire or a victim? It depends on who’s around.” It’s never clear what side of that she’s on in the song, and the ambiguity makes the song more unsettling and interesting.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

cute.door

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You’re All Perverted

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Birthday Girl “Did You Know I Write You Poems?”

Eva Smittle’s vocal performance keeps you edge – she’s flirtatious, she’s threatening, she’s afraid, she’s romantic, she’s nihilistic – and moves between those moods somewhat unpredictably. She comes across like someone who can’t decide how she feels about other people’s lust for her, and the moments where she seems totally repulsed ring as true as when she’s reciprocating the lust, and maybe that repulsion feeds into her desire. The music basically sounds like slow, seasick grunge – heavy and sickly but somehow still fairly sensual and sexy.

Buy it from Amazon.

Cumgirl8 “Ahhhh!hhhh! (I Don’t Wanna Go)”

A kinda interesting thing for me has been a lot of the styles that were hot when I started this site in the early 00s are back in style, and while that certainly makes me feel my age, I mostly feel excited to have new versions of things I liked 20 years ago. In the case of this Cumgirl8 song, they’re playing in an 00s electro/post-punk mode I’ve always loved. I hear traces of Lolita Storm, Chicks On Speed, Erase Errata, Ladytron, and Metric in this music, but it’s very much its own thing with lyrics grounded in the present, at least in terms of vernacular. But aside from some familiar creative decisions, I think what I’m responding to most in this particular song is the mix of anxiety and venom, and a seeming ambivalence about both feelings.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

LustSickPuppy “Empathy Reserved”

“Empathy Reserved” is very abrasive with its harsh electronic tones, aggro rapping and frantic chopped vocals. But it’s also remarkably tuneful when it shifts gears about 40 seconds in, even if that part is also at a freakishly high tempo. As with 100 Gecs, a bratty and deliberately difficult aesthetic is more interesting and hits harder when there’s some song craft at the core of the composition.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

20thcenturyrocks

A post shared by @20thcenturyrocks

LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS

• Father John Misty is the guest on this week’s main episode of Jokermen. He’s a reliably excellent podcast guest, and it’s a pleasure hearing him talk about extremely specific production details of Beatles songs.

• I liked St Vincent’s recent appearance on the Broken Record podcast. I find that a lot of Annie Clark’s decisions can seem annoying or weird from a distance – like, why would reissue your most recent album in Spanish? – but if you hear her talk about them in detail, it’s always really well thought out and genuine.

• Glenn McDonald, the OG music blogger who was one of the chief architects of Spotify’s Wrapped and automated playlists until he was unceremoniously laid off last year, has shared a way you can analyze your own Spotify data outside of the system. It’s useful, but this post is mostly a pleasure to read because Glenn is so thoughtful in how he writes about music.