WET LEG — POKEMON

There is some joy in Wet Leg titling this song 'pokemon' (or should I say Nurse Joy, right?). Mostly because, when 'Chaise Longue' popped into this material plane back in 2022, I never clocked them for a band that'd name a song after this mega-franchise. But that's just a small joy.

Lyrically, the 'pokemon' weaves a low-key less on-the-run Thelma and Louise love story. "Oh, to be yours, to be driving away..." sings frontwoman Rhian Teasdale, painting a poetic picture with cute couplets like

But nothing hits like you and me
"I love you, " I say casually

and

You taste so sweet, like grenadine
You are my favourite human being

There are a couple of references to partying, what with the grenadine (above) and getting "another round". Starting the song with "Get lost, get loose..." feels like an echo of famed rock hedonist Jim Morrison, who utters the words "Get loose!" in the intro for 'Changeling', the first track on L.A. Woman (1971), his final album with The Doors.

A more obscure reference can be found: "Giddy up, you want to go faster? / Call me the demon headmaster" — quite a throwback to a British TV series from the '90s called The Demon Headmaster (it was about a headmaster who was a demon). It is followed by the line that names the song (and another '90s reference): "You just gotta choose me, baby, yeah, I'll be your Pokémon."

Showing how far the Teasdale (and the band) has come, the chorus features a line about driving from Isle of Wight to Tokyo, which is really quite a long way culturally, population-wise, and geographically. Ultimately, it's a driving song, a mood evoked not only through the road-tripping lyrics but in the galloping rhythm of the track, the gleaming guitars like a half-setting sun glinting on the metallics of a car.

The video for the 'pokemon' basically illustrates the thoughts and feelings evoked within the song, except in place of another human being it's about a woman who's in a relationship with a giant egg. Which, incidentally, makes it feel a lot more Tamagotchi-coded than Pokémon related.

✧

---

• 🔔 The video for 'pokemon' by Wet Leg was directed by Elliott Arndt (from the band Faux Real, who often support Wet Leg on tour). The woman in the relationship with the giant egg is played by Alice Longyu Gao, who is a DJ, producer and all-round artist in her own right.
• 🔔 'pokemon' is, of course, taken from Wet Leg's much-anticipated second album moisturizer, which was released in July 2025 via Domino. You may stream the album, purchase it in vinyl form or digitally by heading over to Bandcamp.

---

📠
☟ Wet Leg Internet Presence ☟
bandcamp ⚘ official site ⚘ youtube ⚘ instagram ⚘ wikipedia ⚘ spotify

---

⌾

💿 AIDA SKEE — MACH LEISURE

⌾ LISTEN TO AIDA SKEE - PKMN SNAP ⌾

---

Skittering and beset with structured staccato slices of unidentifiable sampling, 'Pkmn Snap' by Aida Skee feels like a cool breeze. What relevance it bears to 1999 N64 title Pokémon Snap isn't immediately obvious, and perhaps there isn't one, but in its simplicity — its lines of airy sampling, sparing and delicate bassline, background ambience — there is something at least in spirit to the game's soundtrack, notably its 'The Young Photographer' theme.

Cheerful without being sunny, sparse without feeling overly lonely, 'Pkmn Snap' similarly conjures an imaginary landscape. Not unsurprising, as the musicmaker themselves revealed to yes/no that Mach Leisure, the beat tape which the track is taken, is inspired at least partly "hiking while listening to Knxwledge, Marvin Gaye, and deep cut '70s R&B." Physical landscapes, and how music enhances or reflects them, play their part.

This musical foundation is noticeable on the rest of the beat tape, which sometimes gloops with vaporwave ooze ('can't see shit'), glitters like the vapor-friendly tracts of nostalgia in title track 'MACH LEISURE', or radiates warmth as in the comforting groove of album closer 'Where to start it'.

Attention to detail comes to the foreground in tracks like 'right' — its beat clicks into something high octane, before samples drop in slowly skewed and bubbling. It's places like this where Aida Skee's process reveals itself, Mach Leisure being a collection of experiments in high BPM tracks that still retain a "relaxing element of R&B sample-based music."

This sense of relaxation is an element throughout that was (probably) sought after and welcomed by the musicmaker themselves. "I made this whole tape while living alone in Montreal, smoking too much legal weed," they say. "The theme is meant to be like attempting to attain relaxation as fast as possible and how that's sort of an oxymoron."

Tricks in tempo aren't the only cocktail that binds Mach Leisure: "The tracks integrate pitched up and pitched down components of the same sampled tracks, use heavily warped or distorted sample components in tandem with non-distorted loops," the producer explains.

That sense of speed, as well as glistening pairings of pitched and non-pitched samples, occurs in 'like relaxing in a car that's going fast' — a title that sums up the whole idea behind the album — and following track, 'Keep me talking', whose sampled flashes and snaps crackle with chaos. In them, the situation of creating the album — not just hiking in the mountains and listening to music, but also weed and panic and paranoia — come into play. It's both a result of, and a cure for, those negative emotions that inspire minds to race and disappear into realms we wished they wouldn't.

---

• 🔔 Stream and download Mach Leisure over on Aida Skee's Bandcamp.

---

📠
☟ Aida Skee Internet Presence ☟
bandcamp ⚘ instagram

---

🐣 DAISILY — JEFF'S BEAT / SQUIRTLES DON'T DROWN

The emotive nature of this charged with nostalgia with the crackle of many moons past with the delights of some place some time that you reach for fingers outstretched and straining the odyssey of memory a fog in the mind slowly curling and crowding and fingertips glazed with yearning aim yesteryearly seeking for that one thing which is a something composite of many things this nebula of fond experience. It is beatmaker daisily's utilisation of this piano sample that so washes the track in gallons of organic ancestral yearning, a dusty tract of high-pitched keys that call out coldly chiming into a night that does not seem to be listening, or that listens a silently weeps knowing it can do nothing to ease the distress.

Wow. And that piano comes lifted, the musicmaker tells us via email, from an episode of the Pokémon anime called Pikachu's Goodbye: "it is pretty emotional if i say so myself." Light organs accompany the twinkling keys in the nicely named 'jeff's beat / squirtles don't drown' (it's true—they don't), now warped as if distorted through bleary tear-filled eyes, now fluttering like panicked heartbeats, providing soulful ambience on the backdrop of a crackling nocturnal canopy of sound, insectoid and chirruping, itself reminiscent of summer days, specifically summer nights, humid endless. The beat is persistent, the rapid double-tap thud of the kick, the full-bodied clack of the snare.

---

• 🔔 This nostalgic track is taken from LESS FEEL I, the beat tape by daisily, which you can download from Bandcamp. It's dedicated, says he, "to the progenitors of my friends, they inspired this by n' large".

---

---

📠
☟ daisily Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ bandcamp ⚘ twitter ⚘ instagram ⚘ spotify

---

---

🐣 LUNICE — DISTRUST FEAT. DENZEL CURRY, J.K. THE REAPER & NELL

Visual distortion and contortion, twisting, trapped in a virtual world: this is the video for 'Distrust' by Canadian DJ and producer, Lunice, the videogame feel of it evident not only in the glorious glitching visuals but also in the music, in the atmosphere-conjuring sounds that Lunice lovingly sets into motion throughout. We have these stoic synth bass hits, rounded and gloopy, the foundation for this macabre march of music, the slow rolling snares, the soft wonky sounds that have this veilsome spooky quality to them fluttering phantomatic alongside it all. On top of this, we have three vocals that perforate the polished parade of this track: Nell and Denzel Curry, as well as J.K. The Reaper, who starts proceedings with nihilistic flair—"I'm an outer body experience, my ligaments attached to this soulless corpse i been living in"—before he asks existentially, "am I the only human in truest form?"

In his breathless verse, Denzel Curry casts some vivid vital imagery: "here's a kiss from the dragon hot as the back of my spliff" precedes the relatable line "fisticuffs, knock your ass out, that's Jigglypuff," which references either the ability of the Pokémon to sing opponents to sleep or, as a character in Super Smash Bros, a seemingly innocuous move ("Rest") that if executed correctly is a very powerful attack; either way, this line has made an impact. For the outro of the song, Lunice suddenly turns it overcast and gloomy, low-pitch piano and atonal chiming strings marking the beginning of the finale, a tract of noise-inspired harsh abrasive beats and ever more gruesome glitching and Curry's final distorted mantra: "Tell the cops i don't give a fuck / run and hide, boy you better duck."

---

• 🔔 The wonderful digital gore of this video has been created by director Sam Rolfes, which was recorded "live within a game engine." The resulting warped human forms that are thrown and skewed around the screen reflects the revolt of the soul intimated by the lyrics (notice the decayed confederate flag in the still we took from the video up top), the unconventionality and affront of these same images a suitable accoutrement for the noisy sonic experimentation in this track.
• 🔔 Listen to and/or purchase 'Distrust' via this link here.
• 🔔 'Distrust' is taken from Lunice's debut album, CCCLX, which will be released on 8th September via Scottish label LuckyMe. Pre-order it here.

---

---

📠
☟ Lunice Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ official site ⚘ twitter ⚘ youtube ⚘ songkick

☟ Denzel Curry Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ official site ⚘ twitter ⚘ youtube ⚘ instagram

☟ J.K. The Reaper Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ bandcamp ⚘ twitter ⚘ youtube ⚘ instagram ⚘ songkick

☟ Nell Internet Presence ☟
soundcloud ⚘ twitter

---

---

SNORLAX TO PROTECT & TO SERVE

Woweee, first post of November. Well, aside from my October MIX (yeah, it's still a thing)... But this - THIS - is my first real post. Even though it's the 3rd already. That's ok though. Don't worry about me - I've been half-busy or maybe 1/3-busy. In any case, I now have a notepad on which to write everything down on so I don't forget to feature it.

However, a notepad cannot galvanise a routine so much as to make it immune to just-released, really nice music. Distractions come in all shapes and sizes, and stumbling across stuff that I hadn't planned to write about, nor knew even existed, is one of the best distractions there is. Schedules are dropped and I focus my attention on this new thing.

This time, it's got quite an interesting backstory. Not that I know all the ins-and-outs but in essence: a compilation CD of "Various Artists" (I love that phrase) associated with various entities (weekly beatmakers & beatdroppers, TeamSupreme, label/radio show/collective Soulection, by-artists-for-artists label HW&W, collective M|O|D) created for the purpose of raising funds to help a fellow artist-in-trouble, one half of duo Penthouse Penthouse, who has apparently had some trouble with the police. Justice nique sa mere la dernier flic que j'ai vu avait plus de vice que le dealeur de ma rue is what I say to that.

In any case, one of the songs from that compilation, touchingly named Got Your Back Foundation Vol. 1, is by the equally well-named LA-based Snorlax (real name Cody Farwell) and is called 'To Protect & To Serve' and here it is.

With a slow intro, percussive synth noises and fidgeting clicks pervade the silence gradually - it's almost peaceful in a way, but there's certainly a sense of bigger and louder things to come. And they sure do arrive, those loud things. They arrive in the form of a thick wall of bass that encases your entire mind - it's an ear massage, a brain-clean, instant paralysis. Paralysis in the sense that, moreso things around you seem to stop completely whilst all you kinda wanna do is get up and WIGGLE.

The beat is a skiffly half-time ghetto house juke kinda operation; supported by frantic waves of syncopated synth chords, there's a whole feeling of urgency to the rhythms of this track, the kinda thing that makes your feet itch for a nice bit of dancing. Anyway, I've said that already basically. At the same time, there's a strange sense of chill - perhaps owing to the hanging-in-the-air nature of the beat's clap/snare, but maybe owing to the thick, fluid sounds of the synth, the sorta thing you just wanna drink or swim in. In any case, it's real nice.

You should for real check out Got Your Back Foundation Vol. 1 (released by TeamSupreme).

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Like Snorlax on Facebook
Listen to Snorlax on Soundcloud
Hear more Snorlax on Bandcamp
Follow Snorlax on Twitter