One of the bright young stars of Austin hip-hop has just recently followed up a heavy quality first track (which we liked a lot) with a second, dropping “Only Rapper Alive” a couple weeks ago. Like a pink-hazed dream of a song, “Only Rapper Alive” features some glistening warm production from Eric Dingus, one of the co-owners of Dream Sequence Records and a Texan musician whose tracks regularly pull down 40k+ listens on SoundCloud. Now, metrics don’t make a track good automatically, but that’s tremendously more than most popular groups in Austin ever get. Hell, quick math says the average number of listens on Dingus’ last 10 posts on SoundCloud is exactly 57,212.3, a number that is higher itself than most decently well-known Austin acts get across their entire online catalog.

For a rapper with two tracks out, Plato III is also pulling down both big numbers and big attention himself. This big response from the net is interesting considering Plato’s firm and well-thought-out stance as something different than and a bit critical of most rappers (what a lot of his two existing tracks are about), but really it’s not surprising at all considering his obvious talent for wordplay and musicianship.

A jazzier-affair than career-opener “Natalie Portman,” “Only Rapper Alive” is somewhat of a stream of consciousness style rap, with Plato talking through his own and some other possible perspectives on life and everything from money to fame to strugglin’ to survive to death itself and the afterlife. There’s a lot of info to process in this one, but the gist is that Plato is a deep thinker who sees through the facade of the entertainment industry and the self-absorbed modern life, but who is also not just hating on those things and instead offering a balanced and mature perspective that’s all wrapped up in really pretty, catchy music. And we’re damn into that.

Get on our cultural plane and watch for new Plato III with us at his Facebook here, and put some Austin talent in your ears below.

Later this week we’ve got a piece droppin’ on our latest Artist Poll tiers Slooom (that’s the "people who tied" kind of tiers btw, not the stacked thingies), talkin’ about their drip-beat beautiful new video "Honey," but as a bit of a prelude to that, here’s a new track by CAPYAC, the other big project from (the producing half of Slooom) Delwin Steven Campbell along with Eric Peana. This track is called "How I Feel" and it takes that classic and classically reworked "Feeling Good" hook and turns it into silky fun sexfunk glory. That’s future sexfunk glory, if you want to get specific about it, and "How I Feel" is an immediate hip-mover with its quick-picked melody and bright organ backbone folding right into a big, hip-hopped, chopped-up song that you do wanna get down to. We’ve already known that CAPYAC has that true smooth funkdisco thing, like they vampired it right outta the 1977 Bee Gees, and CAPYAC obviously also has their modern elements of beat construction and electronic instrument-use right on point too. However, with "How I Feel" it’s just been real good and confirmed- we now also know that, undoubtedly, CAPYAC is making the sexiest, smoothest music in Austin at this moment. Thank you CAPYAC for being so clear in your claiming of the throne. It’s nice to have questions settled so easily.

“We can’t wait to meet you,” says the ¿Que Pasa? description of one of Austin’s most anti-pretentious, most-likable rock music bands. That’s not rock referring to the guitar-inflected whatever that mostly associates itself with that agin’ word these days; no ¿Que Pasa? is of the punk (with some post-punk notes and venturing into psych at times) flavored school of this rock thing, and they just put out a pretty damn good modern punk album this last December that is now gettin’ the music video treatment on a couple tracks.

That sentiment of welcome found upon yon FB page is an extension of the band’s general attitude, which presents a kind-of “friendly punks” attitude that, if you’ve ever known any punks that weren’t just into the life for the infamy, is actually dead representative of a certain side of the genre. “Infeliz” is the latest track off album BIG MISTAKE to get visuals, and it shows off a band that you just really wanna go get some P. Terry’s with after and hang out drinkin’ in a park or some shit. I mean, the other track with a vid, “My Family,” literally lists singer Liz Burrito’s friends, including all members of the bands and a few others, and involves cake, board games, beer, bathtub candles and the lyrics “My friends, they are my family.”

Yet, the punk is strong with this one, and the songs are fun and often heavy and harsh, and entirely sincere. Passion + friendliness used to be the unofficial/official Austin creative way, and in the modern muddle that is an Austin where Cheer Ups has to fight to preserve a beautiful natural limestone wall being torn down for no other reason than money, we’re fully into bands that keep alive the spirit that made Austin a destination in the first place and preserve something very Austin. ¿Que Pasa? is what Austin’s about in its soul, and you should all go and be their friends now. Seems like they’d be pretty into it, if yer a non-dick and all. Music video below, full album to be found at their Bandcamp here.

Just a quick blast to drop the new Keeper track that came out this week, which is some deliciously smooth-bass-heavy R&B that sees the group (who came in 3rd in our 2014 Artist of the Year Poll and whose jams have been gettin’ major notice around the nation since, even showing up as an opener track on a Broad City episode) continuing its mastery of the three-voiced future music front. They’re also keeping steady on the collaboration front, adding San Antonio producer MoonDoctoR to their list of producers who have dropped a hell of an electronic beat to accompany the sultry sirens in doin’ what they do, a list that is quickly becoming a who’s who of Texas producers who themselves are set to break out on the big scene. Do just what the song say and get sweatin’ out your clothes, as the girls put it, with "Next to Me" below y’all.

As a fuckoff big Urban Outfitters goes up on the drag, and as a seemingly endless series of articles about the death of the Austin creative class at the hands of the Big Dollar swarms at us like a nonstop sandstorm of hurtytruth, it’s nice that we at The Deli keep gettin’ an equal if not even psychically stronger swarm of good Austin music flowing at us from the other sociological direction. It helps to keep our souls from burning out, and it’s especially cockles-warmin’ (oh them neglected cockles) to know that there are still some Austin creatives out there succeeding at that most oldschool Austin of tasks, in that they’re able to both continue to make awesome shit and actually make a functioning business of it.

Among those makers who keep the good light burnin’ and the money comin’ in to the ATX the right way (and for the right people) is one Paul Grant- Record Label Manager at the stellar Raw Paw records, and the creative force behind Eyelid Kid, an electronic pop music act that just released an excellent new track of bouncy, tempo-changing beats called “Shadow Talk.”

“Shadow Talk” is a bit of a conundrum in this celebration-obsessed city, in that its very “now,” airy, thoughtful electronic production is complemented by lyrics that are all about frustration with dating someone who is all party all the time, a sentiment that you don’t hear expressed out loud that much here in Party City, Texas. If you’ve ever had the misfortune of being in the situation it discusses, “Shadow Talk” gets the feeling of being dead into someone while also being quite aware that they’re far more into themselves and The Party than is healthy just dead to rights. Lines like “But it’s just like you to blow me off” are almost painfully accurate that lopsided, always-doomed (but pretty thrilling while it lasts) dating set-up, but even if you’ve never been in that weird (and perhaps more Austin than we’d all like to admit) sexual limbo, the track itself is also just one gorgeously constructed piece of future pop music that should find itself buried deep in that part of the brain where ear worms live for any listeners who are into artful pop music.

Eyelid Kid himself calls it “frosting pop,” a moniker that encapsulates the “very bright and pretty and feels good right now” vibe of the track, though perhaps it undersells the somewhat outside-the-typical-pop-box thoughts in the lyrics. That fully pop-ness that also undermines pop expectations (lines could be maybe be drawn between Eyelid Kid’s approach and that of pop confusers PC Music) extends even to the album art, a manga-influenced piece by Blake Bohls that is very much in the realm of pop art but also very unlike most pop music record covers.

“Shadow Talk” is just one more piece of proof that Austin has a burgeoning pool of pop talent that is indie only in their disassociation with big labels and which fears no beat, and it is a wonderfully welcome piece of future-leaning pop music that is good for the Austinite’s soul, as it is for the soul of Austin itself. Eyelid Kid has only been performing since September, but it’s said that his shows are something magical to behold and more have been coming up of late (including a show at Empire Garage June 26th with The Deli Austin favorites Slooom and Shmu along with Hikes), so keep an eye on this entrepreneurial creator and embodier of the spirit of this city as it is when its being its true self at his Facebook page, and listen to the poplovely “Shadow Talk” below.

We’ve been waitin’ to post this one y’all. Malik is a rising, top-quality Austin hip-hop artist that we brought you a bit about not too long back, and he’s also a nominee for our Artist of the Month, primarily because he’s on a goddamn high octane productive roll right now.

As part of said roll, Malik has been firing a veritable arsenal of creative endeavors out at the world, so far including the following:

A solid as hell single — “On My Own,” which we profiled in March
A mixtape — The Prerequisite, dropped last month and which has amassed over 6000 listens across its 8 solid tracks in that time on Soundcloud (that’s a big deal, most of the bands we post here barely get that in a year)
A fucking video game — The Chase, a pixelated chaser based on a dream by Malik and out for iOS and Android for absolute free
A soon-to-be dropped music video- “Breakaway,” from the new album and released July 5
An upcoming album — The Principium, primed and ready to be launched at the world on July 12

It’s rare for a local artist to drop even a couple things at once, much less content at this breakneck rate. I mean, who drops a damn video game as a musician? It’s a pretty simple runner game, but The Chase has a great style of pixelly desert goodness, and it also serves as a way to get an early listen to some of Malik’s music from the upcoming album. Produced with game creator and composer Emily Meo, The Chase is without a doubt one of the most creative and engaging ways to reach an audience that we’ve ever seen from any musician, much less a local one.

When it comes to the music, Malik is riding quite high at the top of the list of up-and-coming local hip-hop artists. His commanding baritone flow and deftness on the wordplay front ride over dynamic production (his own) that creates songs that mesh pop elements and true rap like it’s not a hard thing to do at all (it is). Malik uses his voice as more than just a word-purveyor, turning his bars into a percussive instrument like the best rappers do, but he never neglects the content. Malik also never slacks on making the beats something fun to listen to, as opposed to focusing too much on the words, and the result is track after track of unique sounds and perspectives on life that you just wanna keep listening to.

It’s frustratingly common for a young hip-hop artist’s early work to go too heavy on one single front while neglecting others; maybe the beats or the song structure are killer, but the rapping is weak. Maybe they’re too pop, or, on the other side, too heady or aggressive over a whole album. There can be too much focus on the rapper’s ego and not enough real, quality perspective, or there could be too much of the same sound from one track to the next. In these cases, there’s usually one good track and the rest is a bunch of fluff to fill out an album.

But not with Malik. Malik’s music makes no rookie mistakes. It’s damn enjoyable music from one track through to the rest of the entire mixtape, it’s good from beat to voice to structure, and it presents a picture of a young man who has worked to become an expert at every layer of hip-hop music, and whose shit you like and you want to hear more from. That is as rare as it gets for a young artist, and it’s why we’ve nominated Malik for Artist of the Month (that, and his insane productivity of late).

You can get a listen goin’ on The Prerequisite mixtape below, find his game in the Apple and Android stores, and you can get more Malik in yer ears on July 12 when The Principium drops. You can also vote to the right, if you think Malik deserves some e-recognition for his fine, hard work. Get listenin’ Austin music heads.

Our current poll for Artist of the Month is in full swing, and that means it’s time to get familiar with the nominees y’all! This go around, we’re talkin’ Taylor and the Wild Now, who sent a summer firework of a song up into the Austin air early this month, and who have been playing a ton of shows and appearances since to show this gorgeous new thing off.

A deep, sensual baseline and some island-soaked guitar are the unusual and welcome framework for the new pop-dubby track “Salt” by Taylor and the Wild Now, a crew known for their approachable indie sound with a roots bent that sometimes wanders into territory that may or may not be a step or two past the country music border (depending on where you personally mark it). This most recent track from the group after last year’s promising self-titled EP, which hinted of good oddness to come from Taylor et al., “Salt” is a move away from the more heavily country/folk-influenced sound and toward something all their own, and it’s a move which sees them only growing as a truly unique (a quality that is pretty rare) and enjoyable feature in the Austin indie scene. Taylor might well (though almost certainly isn’t) be singing the chorus of “Salt” to those afraid to leave the beach of genre and swim out into that deep place where the currents of different sounds mix together into something new when she croons, “I don’t even care what you say/It’s gonna happen anyway.”

And goddamn are we glad it’s happening, if by it we’re referring to what’s going on in "Salt" musically. All elements are on their game in this track, including a bassline that gives the song both its structural background and its considerable, moonlit soul, plus remarkably inventive guitar work that is unbound by genre. That last is a strength that the group has built on since their EP, and the dynamic, unique flavor of the guitar here may just put The Wild Now in contention for most interesting guitar sound in town. Add to those remarkable bits of instrumentation some siren vocals from Taylor herself that are somethin’ to swoon for, and you’ve got one hell of a shimmering summer track.

The smooth, beach-at-night trance that “Salt” coaxes the listener into should, if there is any justice for artists in this universe, be what puts Taylor and the Wild Now on blogs and playlists worldwide, and on the map in a big way in the indie music scene in Austin and beyond. We wouldn’t be surprised if it lands them in some pretty high caliber gigs quite soon, especially if there is more of this experimentation-done-right to come from Taylor and the Wild Now (that is to say, tracks that only allow thoroughly vetted and chosen elements to make it in). Get up into this newness at yon Soundcloud player below, and follow these rising stars on Facebook to be the first to hear when Taylor and co bring us more beautiful music. Oh, and if you feel the itch to help this group on its way to deserved major recognition in this city, get to votin’ at the right side of the page.

Mother Falcon is Austin’s premier big numbers band, which you likely already knew, but they’ve just released a new track whose strength comes from its efficiency and its singular elements, rather than from the amount of noise that a big group can make. A lot of the energy in the just-released single “Kid,” in fact, comes from the lone female voice doing the largest portion of the singing, which is all lightness-leaking breathy tones that kick the track off with just a few strummed chords and an egg shaker beat in accompaniment.

This being Mother Falcon, however, layers and instruments are quickly added, tossing in at some point everything from horns to chanting to some really nice background drones that waver from right in pitch to just off to completely dissonant and give the song a lovely off-kilter texture. There are moments where MF does do the Arcade Fire/Broken Social Scene pioneered “all of our giant band playing at once” thing, but the restraint they show as a group throughout the song and even in these moments, and the benefits that each piece in the group adds to the overall song in these cacophonous parts has Mother Falcon resembling those other influential big bands at their thoughtful song-engineering best.

Speaking of seminal 2000s bands, MF also seems to be channeling something that was going on at that time in North American music (and is much murkier these days), which was a sense of just wanting to get together with other weird kids and have a lighthearted, happy time. “Kid” has that same kind-of “temporary refuge from the suburbs,” sunny-day in the park flying kites and drinking stolen vodka in plastic cups with your also-loner friends kind-of feel to it. In this age of endless online outrage clashes and what seems like just a whole damn lot of divisions between people, this is a feeling that’s nice to see it not only expressed in MF’s newest work, but downright nailed.

The track sits here below for you to get your feel-goods from, and you can keep up with the MF at their Facebook here. This is music that’ll help you remember that sometimes it actually does stop raining, which even some of us Texas storm-lovers might need right now, and it precedes the full album release on 8/14.

Those’d be some seriously 80s, seriously British reverbed chords we’re talkin’ about, and they come slinking out of popgazers Single Lash, them of the perhaps most perfect pop goth band name what has ever been, on their new eponymous album. Released this April, "Single Lash" follows up on 2014’s intriguing "Soft as Glass" with 12 cacophonous tracks with one or two word titles, those sparse words more often than not being from the gloomy romantic side of the dictionary (“Bitemarks,” “Keep It,” “Drown” and “False” start the album off, just to name a few). In fact, a flavor of gothic influenced “lovely, but with death on the mind,” thorned-rose notes percolate through and from the music itself through all of the album, the sound of which comes from the art poprock side of the dark music genrescape.

“Single Lash,” and Single Lash the band itself, are well-done breaks from the idea that dreary must always be dark (or is it vice versa), with the satisfying and even at times near ecstatic prettiness of the album pairing perfectly with the goth- and general 80s-British-Music-informed melancholia of the songs here. Which, truth be told, is just the way any good pain + pleasure thing should go (I guess in a way what I’m saying is that “Single Lash” is the consensual rough sex where everyone involved leaves bruised but happy of music).

As an example of this sweet and sour sound I’m talking about, take track “False,” one of the more outwardly happy, more upbeat sounding tracks on the album. Soaking in the waves of bright, quick shoegaze that wash out of the drack (and not drowning in them, as can happen with many -gaze tracks), one can just make out the words of the song, “There’s nothing here to want/Just bitter nostalgia-/There’s nothing here that’s true.” Second track “Keep It” nails the sentiment in one line, “I am spellbound as the stars go out.“

Speaking of nostalgia, that feeling is an excellent touchstone for this music, the word coming from the combination of the Greek words for “return home” and “pain (apologies to Don Draper fans). When that word was coined, real life medical people actually thought you could die from nostalgia, and listening to Single Lash, you get the sense that the band might not find that concept too outlandish. They pine, they remember, they query the universe about why things are the way they are in most tracks. However, from the bright sounds they blend into their laments and existential requests, I also get the sense that Single Lash is less interested in the idea of despair alone, but maybe more of just a heaviness of all emotion. I get the feeling that if their members died because of grief or existential uncertainty, it would be more of a chosen and beautiful event than a perishing one.

All of that, of course, is just speculation (maybe super happy people are great at sad music? you never know), but what is nothing but sure is that “Single Lash” is a deadly gorgeous album that does not tire from track to track despite its drone-heaviness and which is both fully versed in its influences and yet has also drifted away from them to a nearby space all its own. Listen below, especially if it’s still fucking raining when you find this piece. You could do much worse for rainy day music.

Oh yes, new Institute day is a good day. I’ve been wanting to post the heavy jangle, effects-lite punk shit that is Institute since I became editor of the Austin Deli, but their (no-holds-barred good) last EP Salt came out in October of 2014, which was just barely, annoyingly out of the range to be considered "news."

Today though, with a fist-shake of gritty happiness, I’m here to say that the wait is over. There is new Institute, and it’s them at their fuckitall best. The new track from Sacred Bones Records is thoroughly appropriately titled "Cheerlessness," and as opposed to Salt, which often had Institute sounding like a band made up of people each about to fall apart at the seams in a really good and satisfying way, this new track is tighter and more determined.

The singing, or whatever you’d call that nicely out-of-it noise they’re making, still seems like it’s coming from a depressed drunk who stumbled upon a microphone just after getting hit in the head by a large human, but now he’s in his third song and just doesn’t even care enough to put energy into his shit until he just loses it at the end. There’s true emotion of the kind the title espouses here, something you really get with the exasperated breath into the mic at the end, and that they layer that whole modern malaised man sound over a non-stop breackneck, clenched-asshole beat and wails from a guitar that sounds like it’s dying is just damn good fuck the world punk. Listen below y’all, and get you a beer and a good brick wall alley slouch goin’ to make it feel right. The rest of the album, called Catharsis is out June 9th, and you can get tour dates here.

It was a tight race, but thanks to a major last minute push, the close of the polls on our most recent Artist of the Month contest saw beatmaker Artificial Earth Machine take home the victory comfortably. While all of our artists were worthy of the nod, it’s a well-deserved win by AEM, who rode into first place in large part due to the damned good new album he’s just released, called Biosphere Simulator.

As you might guess from the name of both artist and album, AEM’s music has a strong current of scifi running through it, full of weird sounds that sound like they were recorded straight from alien sources. In fact, it wouldn’t be much of a surprise if AEM claimed to be piping the inspiration for this starmusic straight from another corner of the universe through some sort of musical telepathic pipeline, taking in the weird signals and processing them through a beatmaker’s mind. That last part is what elevates this music to truly impressive heights of goodness; AEM corrals all of the weird, space chaos through an obviously keen head for song structure. The repetitiveness and rigidity of hip-hop and other beats provide the perfect counterbalance for all of the odd sounds from the outer reaches, and the result is instant grin-inducing. It’s the perfect music to put on while watching a space documentary or a film like “Aliens” or “Sunshine” on mute, and it’d be even better for soundtracking a stoned solo trip to the planetarium (an activity we highly recommend).

In addition to this solid, thoroughly enjoyable album of space songs, many of you who voted AEM into the winner’s spot made note of the musician’s live show as a major reason you gave him your vote, or as poster “aa” put it, “amazing live and is like a magical synth spa for your brain.” That show (you can watch a bit of it from a few years ago below) features AEM bathed in a sea of projected colorscapes, with just the man, his beatmachines and a mic producing these many-layered, highly thought-out tracks. That he does use a mic is one thing that separates AEM from much of the beat scene, especially here in Austin, where the tendency is mostly to use pre-recorded vocals by someone other than the artist in live shows, or to use none at all. AEM’s aesthetic is made even more unique by not shying away from injecting his own equally alien live vocals into his spacey beats, and it makes for quite an arresting live experience.

In all, Biosphere Simulator is a thoroughly excellent nearly mid-year album and one of the best so far in 2015 from the musicmakers of the city. You can listen to the whole thing here, and we’d like to beam out a heartfelt congrats to Artificial Earth Machine from our communications array at Space Station Deli. Stellar stuff, in every meaning of the word.

A while back yonder, we brought you some sweet preliminary sounds from Austin post-rock duo COSMS then-upcoming EP. That EP has done gone and come out, and we’ve got the whole thing for you here today! Arteria expands on the sound from pre-release, Asian-influenced instrumental track "Pagoda" with five total tracks of contemporary two-musician post-rock experimentation.

It’s a little weird to us who remember when Godspeed! You Black Emperor, Explosions in the Sky and the other post-rock of the 2000s was a wholly new sound, as now the genre is in a very different place. Most "indie" fans have moved to a pretty heavily psych-rock, indie-folk, synthy pop zone, and the massive underculture (does that even exist anymore?) attention has shifted away from genres like post-rock (you could include a lot of other genres like doom metal in there too). Personally, I think that’s a great thing for bands like COSMS, because it allows them space to do whatever they want, to work on subtle changes and enhancements to their genre and to really get the sound they want down on record. The result is lovely gems like Arteria, with its Shanghai-meets-American post-rock sound, and its ultra pared-down two musician format that allows for each piece of their songs to be prominent, allowing the listener to really see how each part contributes to the whole.

That’s an approach that is quite nice in post-rock, especially when you think back to those 20+ piece tracks that Godspeed used to drop. As awesome as those were, they were going for something very different, something rougher and louder and more urgent, almost desperately so. That was great for the time, but that COSMS has found a space to do something very different, and very lovely, in post-rock that’s shows that the genre has much still to offer.

In all these are some fresh-layered tracks with delightful complexity in the song structure from but two musicians, and you won’t find tighter instrumental music coming out of Austin. Listen to all of Arteria below y’all.