Staff Picks and Good Shit for the Week of May 15

How are you all on this Friday? Super stoked for that Mad Max movie this weekend? They didn’t pay us to say that or anything, it just looks awesome. You know that one part in the trailer when the truck like, gets JACKED UP and flips onto its side and like, all the sand goes flying straight up. So sweet. Anyway, what were we talking about? Oh right, here’s everything the Noisey editors were listening to this week.

Peach Kelli Pop is my favorite band out of LA right now. Maybe it's because my heart literally splits for four-chord love songs, but this band has me seeing straight up rainbows. The latest album is a little cleaner than their earlier cassettes, but that high fidelity xylophone kills me every time. I've been to a dozen PKP shows, and if you're into Sailor Moon or The Misfits, you do not want to miss their live set. Trust me. Their voices are as high-pitched and swinging as their pony tails.

Bryn Lovitt, Contributing Editor
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What’s that saying about God and doors and windows? I’m not religious so I don’t know it. I think it’s something to the effect of “every time God looks out a window, he listens to the Doors,” I dunno. But when Meghan O’Neil left Punch, a big door slammed in my face. Thankfully the window known as Super Unison has opened to reveal skies full of heavy distortion. Super Unison sees O’Neil, still as in-your-face as ever, now leaning more heavily towards Dischordy post-hardcore than spastic powerviolence. More of this, please.

Dan Ozzi, Editor
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This is better than any of the music I told myself I liked this week.

Kayla Monetta, Social Editor
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All I've listened to this week is Hank Williams, death metal, and this yelling seal, and with Maryland Deathfest coming up quick, it seemed most fitting to err on the site of blastbeats here. Necros Christos is one of my very favorite bands; I've seen them play in four different countries, written thousands of words about their brilliance, and spent a worrisome amount of money on their records, but I still can't get enough. They've lain pretty dormant for the past year, but given that Mors Dalos Ra and the boys still owe us that elusive "final album" they've been promising for what seems like aeons, here's hoping that the upcoming festival season lights a fire under their infernal asses.

Kim Kelly, Contributing Editor
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There is a good chance that most of you will run for the fucking hills when you hear this 2006 Prurient track, which opens with THE MOST brutal high end shrill you may ever hear. Dominick Fernow played all of this LP at last night’s Red Bull Music Academy party, pushing the limits of the Output system and making the most memorable “club” night in a long, long time. Forget metal, forget punk, forget it all, this is ground zero for the most angry music you’ve heard in a long time.

Fred Pessaro, Editor-in-Chief
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Wouldn't it be hella LOL if The Strokes guitarist covered Underworld? I can't even imagine what that would sound like. Sadly he hasn't done that, but actually, happily, he's written a whole new song. In fact he's written a bunch of them which he's releasing this July, via Vagrant Records, and he's calling the album Momentary Masters. It's basically his first solo album since 2008, his first since he got clean, and not only does he sound better for it, but his biceps are also bigger. He told me the other day that he was sick of seeing scrawny boys in rock bands looking like they were about to fall apart on stage. Hear! Hear! Anyway, we're going to be talking to Alby Hammy Jammy about everything that went into this record—Carl Sagan, self-doubt, loss, and reconciliation… and probably motorcycles too, very soon. In the meantime, here's "Born Slippy," which dropped this week and made me feel like skipping. It kicks off with a voicemail that was accidentally left on Hammond Jr.'s wife's cellphone. It was a wrong number situation, but the full message was some lady angrily raging at this other lady because she was banging her man. She was also calling to tell "the other woman" that said man was carrying a venereal disease. Sounds like everyone's a loser in this situation! Delightful.

Kim Taylor Bennett, Style Editor
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Meek Mill might be the best artist since Lil Wayne in regards to flipping a familiar beat into a new territory using only his vocals. But unlike Wayne, Meek doesn't do it through bending his voice around the beat in a new way—Meek blows a hole straight through the instrumental, reaching though its torso and ripping out the heart before swallowing it whole. "Energy" has Meek Mill absolutely blowing through Drake's beat like a Tasmanian Devil with a gun, kicking up dust while aiming red lasers in all directions. With the confidence of a man who is dating Nicki Minaj, Meek Mill taunts and threatens his enemies to do something—anything—to incite him to react. It's the perfect weekend playlist in so many ways, whether you're going to the park to do pushups, or spending the day reading a book while doing push ups.

Slava Pastuk, Canadian Editor
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Since we ran a lengthy profile on Vince Staples last week, I've been on a kick from the West Coast MC. Here we have "Nate," a track from last year that's full of lines that will make your heart break—"As a kid all I wanted was to kill a man, be like my daddy's friends, hopping out that minivan"—laced over a simple beat that's made for sinking into a bed, reflecting on all the decisions of life and letting them wash over you. This song isn't sad; it just casually exists. That's what makes it so tragic.

Eric Sundermann, Managing Editor
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Tuesday night, I took a tram from downtown Oslo to the city's Vigeland Sculpture Park, a giant, carefully laid out garden full of statues of people entwined in various poses of physical activity (some of which involves dudes tossing babies—who knows). It was the final evening of a two week trip through Europe that had also taken me to Portugal, France, Tunisia, and Ireland, and I was pushing hard to settle on some kind of epiphany about what it had all meant and what I was going to take away from this time abroad. But I didn't really have any kind of conclusions to draw about myself or my place in the world. I knew I was a lot better at being American than I was at being Norwegian or French. I knew I had had a good time, though, and that I had managed to navigate these countries pretty smoothly even if I wasn't always totally on top of what was going on. The world is incredibly vast and full of all kinds of different people and all of them are just doing their best to get by and maybe occasionally understand their own place in the world or take their own trips to somewhere else in the world. But it's also pretty simple and small and recognizably human anywhere you go. It had rained most of the day, so the only other people in the park for the most part were people working out in those brightly colored neon outfits that real fitness heads work out in these days. It was cloudy, but the sun was starting to break through the clouds while simultaneously setting. I walked through the park surrounded by those funny statues and the people in their neon blasting this song, which I still don't totally understand, and the guitars were so cool that suddenly I was just completely jubilant about being there and I literally started skipping with excitement to the riffs. And I didn't really need an epiphany or anything—I was just happy to be there and happy to be at the end of my trip and thrilled at my own success at navigating all these different places. I walked to the center of the park, where there's a giant obelisk statue at the top of a giant flight of stairs. A couple ran up the stairs, which suddenly kind of reminded me of Rocky running up the stairs in Philadelphia. Hop Along, of course, is a band from Philadelphia. So there I was, momentarily, in a place of city sisterhood, listening to "Sister Cities" and thinking about how small the world is and watching, below me in the park, a bunch of spandexed Norwegians involved in some sort of calisthenics, and, from my vantage point as a newly minted global citizen, I knew, with absolute certainty, for that moment at least, that it was the best song in the world.

Kyle Kramer, Editor
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