After his last tour with The Rascals, early 2009, Kane left the band to focus on a solo career. He signed with Columbia Records and began recording his solo album working with Gruff Rhys and Dan The Automator, who had previously worked with Gorillaz and Kasabian.
His first solo album Colour Of The Trap is due to 9th May 2011 and next single Rearrange is available on iTunes followed by a vinyl release on 2nd May.
"As proponents of strident, goth-tinged electronica, this Toronto trio are in good company" (Source: Guardian)
Austra is the Toronto trio of vocalist/pianist/etc Katie Stelmanis (ex-Galaxy), drummer Maya Postepski (ex-Galaxy, currently TRUST), and bassist Dorian Wolf (ex-Spiral Beach), but the bulk of the band’s promo photos feature the singer by her lonesome.
Stelmanis joined the Canadian Children’s Opera at 10, sang for the Canadian Opera Company, and pursued a career in opera (while learning viola and piano) until she attended a punk show and joined a band. Instead of going on to focus on music in college, she listened to NIN and the Knife and started doing production work (for soundtracks and local plays), deciding she wanted to “make classical music with really fucked up, distorted crazy shit on there.”
Austra's debut represents the musical progression of almost 10 years of performing as an artist, resulting in minor-key operatics, industrial dance, and sleazy '80s new-wave à la Soft Cell.
Debut LP Feel It Break will be released on May 16th.
London based, electronic trio, Strangers only formed last year, but interest has been picking up fast, thanks to the immediacy and addictiveness of their dark pop sound and a familiarity with the makings of a great chorus.
The band have just premiered the music video for their new single, In Chaos taken from their debut EP, EP1, released on March 21st.
Strangers are currently working on their debut album with producer Glen Nicholls (aka Future Funk Squad).
Metronomy is an electronic music group formed by Joseph Mount in Totnes, Devon, England in 1999. The current band consists of Joseph Mount, Anna Prior, Oscar Cash and Gbenga Adelekan.
Thus far they've released two albums, Pip Paine (Pay The £5000 You Owe) and Nights Out . Mount also releases remixes under the name Metronomy, and has remixed many artists including Gorillaz, Franz Ferdinand, Klaxons, Goldfrapp and Lykke Li.
Although formed in England, Metronomy's melancholic electronica clearly shows a fascination with continental Europe, and their songs confront romance and misery on life's existential dancefloor. Their older material sounds a bit quaint but songs from the forthcoming album The English Riviera (due out April 2011) seem to be more accessible. She Wants sounds like a 2011 take on the Cure's early material, while new single The Look is electro-pop built around an instantly catchy Human League-style synth riff.
Adam Kesher is an electronic rock band founded in 2002 from Bordeaux, France. Spawned from the creative friendship shared by two brothers, Gaëtan and Julien, the band yields various influences from the eighties sounds of Joy Division, The Cure and Gang of Four, to more modern rock bands such as At the drive-in and Robocop Kraus. The name is taken from a character in the film Mullholland Drive.
Adam Kesher is getting ready to release their new album Challenging Nature on April 11th. The album was produced by Dave One (Chromeo) with additional mixing by Zdar (Cassius), A-Trak and Pierrick Devin (Alex Gopher, Cassius, Cut Copy).
The Albertans formed in Vancouver. They met as a collective, and piled into a propane-fueled, converted short bus to tour down to San Diego and back. They toured this way for the next 2 years. Unglamorously, crossing the continent to record in New York, playing shows with bands they didn't know, for people that didn't know them. They traveled 50,000 miles, hopped borders, broke down, slept on the road. They collected fans through their wanderings, played festivals, left the homes they never had, and toured until their tired bus died on the wake of a road outside Duluth, Minnesota.
That was summer '08 to summer '10. It's a new year now, and this month The Albertans have released their second album New Age including first single The Wake.
Egyptrixx, the project of Toronto-based producer and classically trained pianist David Psutkais, is an experimental club music project which borrows—to various degrees—elements from techno, house, rap, drone and pop music.
Though almost all of his records have come out on UK-based labels, Psutkais is a native of Toronto, a city he says lacks a centralized electronic scene. But as he explained in an interview with the Toronto Sun, this is a good thing for the artists who live there because it makes their output less homogeneous: "Everyone is off in their own home studios making whatever pops into their brains."
Lead single Chrysalis Records is taken from debut album, the Bible Eyes, released this month.
What Cut Copy does for new wave, Mitzi does for disco. The four-piece, identifiable by varying haircuts from 20 years ago, plays a brand of disco too true to the sound to be called disco-wave, or disco-core.
The band consists of Dominiqe Bird, Jad Lee, Charlie Murdoch and Cale Suesskow and they all hail from Australia's most laidback and sunny city Brisbane. After playing in various bands such as BMX , Comic Sans, Charlie Why! and The Gallery Kiss they decided to unite and create their own sound of NYC disco and Australian pop.
India is taken from their 3-track debut debut EP All I Heard .
Munk is the band of Italo-German DJ and musician Mathias Modica. Besides touring the world as a DJ, he's also one of two bosses of Munich's avant-garde disco and pop label Gomma. The in-demand label releases Danish indie-disco band Who Made Who and Headman and Box Codax - the solo project of Franz Ferdinand's Nick McCarthy. Modica also designs T-shirts, does video art and organises exhibitions around the world (The Mondo Gomma Shows).
Munk has recently released his new single Keep My Secret (feat. Miss Pollyester), taken of his 3rd album, The Bird and The Beat, released in February.
Princeton consists of twin brothers Jesse and Matt Kivel, Ben Usen and David Kitz. The name of the band originated from band members growing up on Princeton Street in Santa Monica, California.
Princeton formed in 2005 when Jesse and Matt and their childhood friend Ben teamed up while all three were studying abroad in London. Given that they'd left most of their instruments back home in California, they only had access to the basics: an acoustic guitar, a keyboard, a tambourine, and an egg shaker. In spite of these lean conditions, the trio managed to record enough material for a mini-album, A Case of the Emperor's Clothes, which they self-released the following year.
Usen and the Kivel brothers graduated from college in 2007 and returned to the Los Angeles area, where they wrote and recorded the breezy, indie pop songs that would become their second release, Bloomsbury in 2008.
The band took a break in 2010, while Jesse and Matt explored other opportunities. Jesse found success with the Indie blog hit Kisses and Matt teamed up with Warpaint’s Julia Bembenek and drummer Stella Mozgawa for Mystery Claws. The two brothers also spent some time together playing in Sleeping Bags.
2011 finds the Kivels finally returning to Princeton. The quartet will be releasing their sophomore LP later this year and are starting off the process by releasing new single To The Alps on March 29th.
The New Division began as a college dorm room project for songwriter John Kunkel back in 2005. He began experimenting with synthesizers after being heavily influenced by the sounds of Joy Division, New Order and Depeche Mode. Within a few months Kunkel developed a series of songs that attracted other fellow college students at the California Baptist University.
Originally, the name New Division was meant as a working title for songs that would never be released, but by the end of 2007, the one man project had transformed into a four piece.
Currently, The New Division is John Kunkel (vocals), Brock Woolsey (guitars), Janzie (synths) and Mark Michaslki (synths). With over 300 songs in their “demo roster,” the band is continually writing new material on a regular basis.
Starfield is the new single taken from their debut EP, The Rookie, available at Bandcamp.
Depending on whom you ask, Matthew Dear is a DJ, a dance-music producer, an experimental pop artist and a bandleader. Dear maintains four aliases (Audion, False, Jabberjaw, and Matthew Dear), each with its own style and distinct visual identity. In the span of a few years, he has established himself as one of America's foremost electronic music producers.
Texas-born Dear moved to Michigan as a teenager, where he was inspired by the sound of Detroit Techno. He met Sam Valenti IV at a party while attending the University of Michigan, after which the two created the record label, Ghostly International, based on a shared love of electronic music.
Dear’s first album Leave Luck to Heaven appeared in 2003 and was praised widely as a seminal fusion of pop and minimal techno. In 2007, he released his full length, Asa Breed which was a considerable departure from his previous album, incorporating the polyrhythms of Afrobeat, the irreverent pop sensibilities of Brian Eno, and the austere beauty of Krautrock.
His most recent excursions have found him at the doorsteps of the minimal-but-funky regime of techno music. Latest album, Black City, was released on August 17, 2010 and is being promoted to conceptualize a futuristic metropolis that never sleeps.
