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From<\/strong> Brooklyn, New York \u201cNo, I won\u2019t take a photo \/ Just walking around with no avatar,\u201d Frances Chang sings on No Avatar, conversational and serene against little whorls of piano, skittish drum fizz and softly flaring synths. Like Astrid Sonne\u2019s fragmented songwriting, the Brooklyn-based musician\u2019s songs are hard to pin down, mirroring the single\u2019s desire to avoid outward definition. Her songs work to an internal logic, evoking a sort of uncanny domesticity: casual piano refrains, rainy percussion; the melty haze of a horizon at dusk; grooves slinking in at the end of a song like next door\u2019s cat making itself at home. It\u2019s a sound that shares a lot with the modern Copenhagen scene<\/a> of which Sonne is a key fixture, but with more welcoming softness and warmth: Chang\u2019s January single I Can Feel the Waves is a six-minute suite that starts out a little edgy, then yields with gorgeous warped piano and disarmingly intimate focus.<\/p>\n Chang has recently signed to RVNG Intl, the same label that launched Julia Holter, another worthy comparison for her elegant oddness \u2013 and supported Cate Le Bon, another master of distanced beauty. She released her debut cassette, the abrasively fuzzy Support Your Local Nihilist in 2022, and in 2024 her debut album proper, the proggy, unsettling Psychedelic Anxiety. Her new material strips back all that noise for a limpid setting that lets her idiosyncratic lyricism shine. I Can Feel the Waves is also about remaining unknowable, and cherishing the ever-renewing mysteries of relating to oneself and others. Ironically, that lens is part of what makes getting to know her so alluring. Laura Snapes<\/em><\/p>\n
Recommended if you like <\/strong>Cate Le Bon, Astrid Sonne, Julia Holter
Up next<\/strong> New single No Avatar out now<\/p>\nThis week\u2019s best new tracks<\/h2>\n