Nascar Aloe’s HEY ASSHOLE! EP is brash and in-your-face, just as the name suggests—and it’s also exactly what music needs right now. The Los Angeles-based musician has spent the last several years building a devoted fanbase for his audacious and genre-bending musical approach, embracing a gleefully caustic and immediately appealing perspective to the many lanes of overlap when it comes to rap and punk. With HEY ASSHOLE!, Nascar Aloe brings his most impactful and immediate music to date, combining his abrasive hip-hop style with new, rock-situated elements that continue to push his music forward. Defining himself as “a little fucking twerp that came out of my dad’s nutsack,” the North Carolina-born artist formally known as Colby Suoy was invested in music from an early age, as being exposed to his father’s jazz and R&B-leaning taste led to regular viewings of 106 and Park and exploring the expansive sounds of rock, pop, and country. “In North Carolina, the radio bounces all over the place,” he explains, and after acquiring some basic recording equipment he was following suit with his own self-produced music. “I self-taught myself how to record and produce,” Nascar recalls. “I was trying to figure out ways to make serious music.”
Death Lens want to be in your ear at all times. They hide their ferocity underneath a thick veneer of style until the energy and chaos of one of their live shows leaves every audience member disarmed and forever changed. Off the strength of 2022’s No Luck, tours with Militarie Gun and Together Pangea, and the support of their hometown, Death Lens is releasing their new album, Cold World, May 3rd on Epitaph Records. For Death Lens, it’s all been building to this. Cold World is a departure from the early styles Death Lens mimicked as a young band, transmuting them into matured and brawny post-hardcore tinged rock songs. On record, Death Lens have an established habit of writing hard-nosed rock that combines West Coast reverbed-out surf punk with tight and bouncy Britrock, deceptively characterizing the band as exclusively chill and vibe-focused when live, a Death Lens show has all the energy of hardcore. Slick guitar sonics and sugary backing vocal harmonies that feel like the best parts of indie punk and shoegaze are the foundation of their style, but in a 200 capacity room, Death Lens brings the same winning concoction as Turnstile and Militarie Gun. In other words, these are the kinds of songs that become the soundtrack to enduring memories of nights of drunken, sweat-drenched singalongs.