New music review with singles from GIFT and Robocobra Quartet
Our weekly fix of the best new music as Julia Mason (aka The Decibel Decoder) brings us her new music review with singles from GIFT Hand To The Flame and Robocobra Quartet Haha
Artist: GIFT
Track: Hand To The Flame
GIFT, the project led by TJ Freda and comprising Jessica Gurewitz (synths/vocals/guitar), Kallan Campbell (bass), Justin Hrabovsky (synths/guitar), and Gabe Camarano (drums), announce their new album, Frenzy For The Thrill out 15 January 2027, via Captured Tracks.
In conjunction with the announcement, the band release the lead single/video, Hand To The Flame, following a premiere by Craig Charles on BBC Radio 6 Music. GIFT also return to the UK this month, for a nine-date run of live shows, including a London date at The Lexington on 24 September.
New single Hand To The Flame provided a skeleton key to the album. The track is an aesthetic meeting point of big beats, heavier guitars, and trippy synths, while also taking inspiration from the famed hubris parable of Icarus. Fire became a crucial organising image for Freda as he considered the border between ambition and ego, the pitfalls of obsession, and the idea of cleansing one’s past by letting it all go up in smoke.
TJ comments: “Hand To The Flame is holding onto passion, and what makes us human while the world falls apart. Desperately chasing passion in a passionless world. Like charging full speed towards something you know will eventually hurt you. Repeatedly putting your hand in the flame with the same outcome, knowing it will always be the same outcome but hoping it will be different. There's romance in the chase, regardless of whether or not its going to hurt when you get to the end.”
GIFT began in earnest during the pandemic, with Freda holed up in Brooklyn building the lush layers of what would become the band’s 2022 debut Momentary Presence. The album, along with its 2024 successor Illuminator blended various strains of psychedelic music - krautrock, new wave, electronic, shoegaze - while cataloguing Freda’s battles with panic attacks, most often seeking to counter anxiety with transcendence. Yet in the time before Frenzy For The Thrill, Freda found that particular metaphorical drug was no longer working. He gravitated towards grittier, angstier inspirations like ‘90s alt-rock, grunge, and brasher iterations of electronic music. Combined with the band having become a unit honed by rigorous touring, Freda wanted to create something more visceral and collaborative. The sound of Frenzy For The Thrill became one of five musicians diving into the madness together.
The tours behind Illuminator had left Freda ragged. When a friend offered to let him stay at their house in Los Angeles for two months, it seemed a perfect way to decompress, to take time and write songs for other people and put GIFT to the side for a bit. Instead, Freda arrived in Los Angeles as they tamed the final fires of early 2025, to a house full of ash and otherwise not much more than the instruments he brought with him. Moved by the renewal he saw in Angelenos coming together in the wake of the fires, Freda suddenly felt a creative outpouring.
New GIFT songs arrived, more angst-ridden than in the past, yet not without their own sense of release. They were vehicles in which Freda asked large, existential questions: Now entering his thirties, he had watched friends settle down, and yet found he was not done searching. “Making Frenzy For The Thrill was partially about exploring the balance of living as an artist without disappearing into it.” From despondence, Freda emerged with a revitalised sense of creative purpose and direction.
Wilfully seeking contrast and contradiction across Frenzy For The Thrill, Freda made GIFT’s most band-oriented album yet, but also sought out electronic producer Teddy Mars, the mastermind behind Samples From Mars. With he and Freda sharing production duties, GIFT adopted the ethos and structure of dance music, but with the rest of the band contributing more than ever before. Harnessing the immediate energy GIFT had cultivated on stage while also incorporating more of their individual instincts in arrangement and songwriting, Frenzy For The Thrill still bears the far-seeing melodies and synth textures of the band's past now anchored by their most muscular performances yet.
GIFT Live Dates
September
20 – Glasgow, UK – Freakender
22 – Edinburgh, UK – Sneaky Pete’s
23 – Manchester, UK – YES
24 – London, UK – The Lexington
25 – Bedford, UK – Esquires
26 – Southampton, UK – Heartbreakers
October
29 – Lansing, MI, USA – Grewal Hall *
31 – Chicago, IL, USA – Empty Bottle *
November
2 – Cleveland, OH, USA – Beachland Ballroom *
2 – Columbus, OH, USA – Skully's *
4 – Asbury Park, NJ, USA – House of Independents *
5 – Richmond, VA, USA – Broadberry *
6 – Asheville, NC, USA – Revival *
7 – Chattanooga, TN, USA – Barrelhouse *
10 – Houston, TX, USA – Secret Group *
11 – Dallas, TX, USA – Puzzles *
12 – Oklahoma City, OK, USA – Beer City Music Hall *
15 – Milwaukee, WI, USA – Argo *
27 – Toronto, ON, Canada – Lee's Palace ^
28 – Montreal, QC, Canada – Theatre Fairmount ^
30 – Boston, MA, USA – Sinclair ^
December
2 – Brooklyn, NY, USA – Warsaw ^
3 – Philadelphia, PA, USA – Underground Arts ^
4 – Washington, DC, USA – Atlantis ^
5 – Carrboro, NC, USA – Cat's Cradle ^
7 – Atlanta, GA, USA – Terminal West ^
8 – Nashville, TN, USA – Cannery @ The Mil ^
9 – Indianapolis, IN, USA – Hi-FI ^
10 – Madison, WI, USA – High Noon Saloon ^
11 – Minneapolis, MN, USA – Turf Club ^
12 – Chicago, IL, USA – Thalia Hall ^
* supporting Post Animal
^ supporting Temples
* * *
Artist: Robocobra Quartet
Track: Haha
Irish experimental collective Robocobra Quartet return with the announcement of Hundred Pieces, a new album made-up of 100 songs. To mark the announcement, the band have shared a new single plucked from the century titled Haha.
Opening to rolling basslines, Haha is a densely layered three-minute encapsulation of everything that has brought Robocobra Quartet to this point, with increasingly intense jazz-tinted sax lines weaving around 90s Dischord-era distortion and Ryan’s signature combination of spoken, sung, and shouted vocals of would-be adages and sardonic yet insightfully vulnerable lyrics. There are also elements pointing to further sonic development to be uncovered in the album with moments of digital augmentation, warping, skewing and supplementing the instrumentation.
With a revolving cast of collaborators who tag in and out as required, Robocobra Quartet have been growing a cult following since the release of their debut album Music For All Occasions in 2016. Formed by drummer and vocalist Chris W Ryan - who is fast-becoming a producer-in-demand, having recently worked on records by the likes of Chalk, Just Mustard, and TTSSFU – the band includes members with no musical training alongside members with music conservatoire pedigree.
On stage, the band are protons and electrons circling Ryan; meticulous arrangements and on-the-spot improvisations hang on every word. These words and rhythms are what propel the music of Robocobra Quartet forward and concoct a sound that is groove-driven but cerebral too. Their touring has brought them from Montreux Jazz Festival to living rooms, pub basements, a number of boats and as far as the Arctic Circle.
They say good ideas often start with a joke: the idea of a 100-track album was initially an off-hand remark but very soon the band started writing specifically for "the hundred" as they affectionately called it. Inspired by the durational art of Marina Abramović, and specifically her memoir Walk Through Walls, Robocobra Quartet set about to create a one hundred track album as a composition in itself.
During the writing process, saxophonist Thibault Barillon began growing petri dishes of fungus at home with a view to create the artwork for the album; this soon became an improvised process in tandem with the music-making, furthering the band's obsession with the idea of chance. Much like the organisms growing in the petri dishes, some of the songs grew into very complex studio productions laboured over for months, such as new single Haha and Nothing, whereas other songs, such as Gilded and Ashes Again, were simply moments captured during the writing process - their lives began and ended within just a few minutes.
Speaking on the artwork, Barillon says: “The petri dishes were an exploration of beauty in the natural world, scientific drawings, experiments etc. that touch us emotionally without an artist's intent being behind it. One day I just bought some agar plates and started experimenting, finding joy in inventing my own "techniques" of what type of mould would grow from different organic matter which I had put on the plate a few days earlier. This started before we knew Hundred Pieces would become a thing, without grand plans or intent. As time went by and we worked on the album, the band became more aware of the parallels with the process of the hundred: chance-based moments and letting songs find themselves, melodies and riffs as spores spreading and growing, the cross pollination, the joy of the process and the beauty of art taking a life of its own that the artist hadn't intended."
Robocobra Quartet live
Dublin - 24/10 - NCH (Haunted Dancehall)
London - 19/11 - ICA (London Jazz Festival)
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