New music review with singles from Slowly Drowning and sundayclub

Julia Mason aka The Decibel Decoder
4 hours ago
4 min read

Our weekly fix of the best new music as Julia Mason (aka The Decibel Decoder) brings us her new music review with singles from Slowly Drowning Inside Out and sundayclub Corydon Ave (To Meet You)

Artist: Slowly Drowning

Track: Inside Out

Inside Out is the debut release from the Belfast based duo Slowly Drowning — Credit Anna Burnett

Slowly Drowning are ready to emerge from the shadows. The debut release Inside Out from the Belfast based duo delivers up a pulsating blast of alternative metal that pulls no punches.

FFO Nine Inch Nails, Sleep Token, Deftones, Slowly Drowning is an atmospheric alternative metal project emanating from the psychological abyss. Emerging from the Obsidian Ocean, a liquid consciousness forged from humanity's collective regrets and shattered identities, this masked duo creates a devastating, cosmic horror soundscape for those lost in the dark. To the surface world, they are drowning. To the depths, they are finally breathing.

The band's sonic ritual is anchored by two primordial states of being: Null (The Erasure): The crushing weight of the deep. Null commands the heavy, aggressive alternative metal assault - the brutal pressure of the depths.

V O I D (The Emptiness): The cold, shimmering expanse. V O I D commands the dark, electronic pulse; the echoing, atmospheric chill where eldritch horrors dwell. Through fractured masks and an immersive, multi-dimensional production, Slowly Drowning invites their listeners, "The Drowned", to shed their egos and embrace the fragmentation. "The surface is a lie. The reflection is a cage. We find our truth in the shards at the bottom."

The duo band share the following on the track: “Inside Out is a descent into the fractured abyss of the self. It explores the suffocating anxiety of feeling lost, submerged beneath the weight of a thousand shifting identities. Whether drowning in the toxic gravity of a destructive relationship or violently wrestling with your own internal demons, the song captures the terror of looking in the mirror and not recognizing the face staring back. You are a mosaic of shattered versions of yourself: trapped in a cosmic loop, trying to escape a toxicity that might just be your own creation. In the end, how do you flee from yourself?”

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Artist: sundayclub

Track: Corydon Ave (To Meet You)

Canada's sundayclub have released their debut album SUNDAYCLUB via Paper Bag Records, alongside focus track Corydon Ave (To Meet You). The album captures the first chapter of their life as a band, formed in the stillness of rural Manitoba and rooted in Winnipeg, romanticised and re-examined, its hard edges softened the way memory softens things, the way analogue photography blurs what digital sharpens.

Across nine tracks, Courtney Carmichael and Nikki St. Pierre move through themes of identity, desire, self-image and belonging, all threaded together by the particular disorientation of early adulthood, the feeling of being caught between who you were and who you're becoming. Growing up, growing apart, growing into your skin.

New single Corydon Ave (To Meet You) emerges as the album's defining moment. The song began in the neighbourhood where Nikki grew up, Winnipeg's Corydon, a culturally rich pocket of the city that Courtney came to know through him. Spending time there, she found herself unexpectedly and intensely struck by a new acquaintance who happened to be from the same streets.

"Along with being struck with the beauty of it, I became impossibly and unexpectedly struck by a new acquaintance who also happened to be from the area. Realizing the intense feelings and infatuation that quickly developed, the song took a deeply personal turn. It became an opportunity to create this world in which the two of us could be together, despite it being so fragile in reality."

Courtney was navigating her sexuality at the time, and what followed was complicated: consuming, guilt-ridden, heady. The song became a way to hold all of it.

"I was starting to explore my sexuality around this time and so there were also a lot of confusing, guilt-ridden feelings that came with it as well. The relationship felt almost hedonistic at times because it felt so forbidden and self-indulgent and yet felt like something I wasn't supposed to want or enjoy. It was a constant gauging of mine and her physical and emotional boundaries and I found myself wrestling between wanting to preserve and yet cross them at the same time."

That tension found its way into every layer of the track, the hesitation in her vocal, the restraint in the production, the second verse that took six months to finally arrive. "I think you can definitely hear the hesitation and restraint in my voice and in the lyrics," Courtney says.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNkyB3ervDo

sundayclub Live Dates

July

20 - Quebec City, QC @ L'Anti Bar

22 - Montreal, QC @ Ptit Ours

23 - Ottawa, ON @ 27 Club

24 - Hamilton, ON @ Doors Pub

26 - Toronto, ON @ St-Stephens-In-The Field, Loveless Festival

September

24-26 - Toronto, ON @ Second Summer Festival

October

3 - Middlesbrough, UK @ Twisterella