A Song For Friday: strongboi

If I made a top 50 instead of a top 25, Alice Phoebe Lou’s “effortless” 2025 album, Oblivion (Nettwerk), would have easily made the cut. While she recorded that album on her own—and can do it all with sigh-inducing perfection—when she’s feeling collaborative, she turns to strongboi, her “lo-fi” band project with Ziv Yamin (who also plays on her solo albums), which has been issuing a series of playful, rhythm-forward songs on singles, an EP, and an album since 2020.

Today sees the release of their latest track, think twice (self-released), a languid candidate for the Song of the Summer. As Lou’s winsome soprano reels out a golden chain of melody, a clever construction of keyboards and guitars burbles happily away in the background. After a brief breakdown, the song returns for 90 seconds of Lou’s oohs and aahs accompanied by tart and tasty solos on electric guitar (Eden Leshem) and pedal steel (Magnus Bang Olsen). Dekel Adin’s bass and percussion do a wonderful job of keeping everything moving without drawing attention to themselves. The whole song puts you in the lovely, warm glow of a summer night.

Looking back at my archives, I see that I’ve done of poor job of sharing strongboi’s wonders, though I have been listening. That ends here, and I’m also going to try to see them in concert. Their extensive fall tour touches down at Brooklyn’s Warsaw on November 3rd. Are they coming to your town?

Listen to most of the songs for Friday here or below.

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Mark Takeshi McGregor - Jocelyn Morlock: Artemis Sleeps (Redshift). The hunt, wilderness, and the moon—three intertwined entities—were the purview of the Greek goddess Artemis. She also protected children and wild creatures, while remaining childless herself. In contemporary society, Artemis could be seen as a reflection of different and potentially competing life paths available to women. Perhaps some of that inner struggle is what animates the serene surfaces of Morlock’s music, here presented in seven pieces from across her abbreviated career. Abbreviated, because this leading light of the Vancouver classical scene was only 53 when she died in 2023.

Even though Morlock won the Juno Award—one of the highest musical honors in Canada—for her 2016 piece, My Name is Amanda Todd, I was entirely unfamiliar with her. In the capable hands of flutist McGregor (also new to me), she emerges as a master composer, able to generate fascination in solo works and those for large ensembles. Unfurl, one of the latter pieces, is a major piece for winds, with McGregor joined by Joo Bin Yi, oboe; Aidan Mulldoon Wong, clarinet; Holly Bryan, horn; and Sophie Dansereau, bassoon; for 22 alternately blissful and intriguing minutes. Another highlight is Vespertine, a sublime two-movement piece for flute and harp, played by Joy Yeh. Despite a nearly 30-year career, there is not an overabundance of recordings of Morlock’s work, making this new release a mighty, and mightily necessary, brick in the edifice of her legacy. The fact that it is such a pleasure to listen to only makes it more poignant.

Rebekah Heller - Righteous Rage (Cantaloupe). In 2024, this bassoonist extraordinaire released One, an “all too brief” EP of her own compositions, which gave her free rein to explore the many sonorities of the instrument on its own and layered in precisely assembled multitrack recordings. On this expansive release, she turns that firepower onto five works by others. The album opens with a 10-bassoon arrangement of Julius Eastman’s cello piece The Holy Presence of Jean d’Arc, which sounds uncannily like an extended intro to Holly Miranda’s roadhouse stomper Golden Spiral, and ends with the title track by Brittany J. Green, which has some of Duke Ellington’s intricacy. In between, we have her take on another cello piece, Steve Reich’s Cello Counterpoint, here called Grand Street Counterpoint (first released by Heller in 2024), Jessie Cox’s remarkably sculptural Sonic Cartographies, and Fay Victor's Nurture (for Ingram), which pays tribute to jazz musician Ingram Washington in fitting style. It’s worth noting that Heller commissioned the works by Green, Cox, and Victor, continuing her project to expand the bassoon repertoire while expanding our minds.

Charlotte Jacobs - Word Passed The Time (Geographic North) The composer, multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, and producer follows up the “Folky, myth-making electro-art-rock” of 2024’s a t l a s with one of the ultimate headphones albums of recent memory. Put it on in the background, and it may occupy a space beyond ambient. But through headphones, a rich world is revealed via Jacob’s intimate voice, subsonic beats, and plushly textured surroundings. While she calls it “text-forward,” after a few listens the words still blend into the music like road signs blurring by in a late-night drive. Language is in use, but you don’t need it to get where you’re going.

James Murray - Islands Alight (Quiet Details) If you like your ambient soundscapes as lush as a featherbed and vast as an Alaskan glacier, Murray is your man. The CD contains a continuous single track of the eight-song album, but I don’t think you’ll be turning it off in the middle, whatever platform you use to play it.

Sofie Birch - Bivabippabualukka (Stroom) When I reviewed Birch’s Holotropa in 2022, I remarked how “musically astute” she was as a “composer and sonic sculptor.” Those qualities keep her ambient excursions from entirely drifting off into the ether. She’s also embraced forward motion in her collaborations with Antonina Nowacka. Yet beyond the overall excellence of Birch’s work, nothing quite prepared me for the juicy and rhythmic pleasure fest of her latest album. Working with her brother, Alfred Bundgaard, Birch has leaned into the healing power of joy, touching on jazz and bossa nova with no fealty to their traditions.

In addition to the usual blend of electronic and acoustic instruments (in this case Choir, clarinet, percussion, guitars, autoharp, zither, mouth percussion, synths, violin, hand chimes, whizzle, and Rhodes), Birch also contributes vocals, singing with casual grace on songs like Miarai, a delicate dance of acoustic strumming, shimmering Rhodes, gleaming flute (played by Ned Ferm), and rich bass. Bundgaard, who also co-wrote most of the album, plays guitars, bass, percussion, synths, Choir, and Rhodes, creating a seamless musical blend. Spirit Cartography, the last track, combines pensive guitar and lush field recordings, circling back to Birch’s earlier work. But clearly, she can do whatever she wants, as proven over and over again on this deeply satisfying album. If Birch’s name is new to you, start here, and I dare you to resist further journeys into her fecund musical world.

Mallory Hawk - Chinook (Self-Released) This varied, ambitious debut seems to let you in on the process as Hawk, a Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, untangles her identity as a person—and a musician. If you want to cut to the chase of what she’s accomplished, check out the smash cut of Low Rise, which opens with spare guitar and diaristic lyrics (“misery, is gone without me//jesus looked at me/in my low rise jeans
age 13/if i kissed any girls/i’d burn in my bedroom/burn in my bedroom”) before building to an epic and noisy crescendo, into Superhighway, a bittersweet, dance-pop confection with coruscating lyrics (“sticky streams of pain/and my bird-like rage”). Impressive stuff that will hit you where you live, wherever you live.

Lockimara - Only Sun, Only Moon (Play Dead) Upending his life in Toronto to move to New York and pursue a master’s degree in music production probably led Peter Gay to question his life choices, at least a little bit. But based on the sheer variety and mastery of texture and song structure on display on his second album as Lockimara, it was exactly the right decision. Aside from his sunny melodic style, one thing that distinguishes his approach to the eclectic, chopped and screwed indie pop he’s giving us here is the sense of air between the many manipulated layers of guitars, keyboards, drum machines, and vocals. His use of dynamics is also assured, often building songs from spare elements that pick up elements like a rolling snowball and rise to celebratory and even thrilling crescendos. Gay’s immersion in rock history is also evident, never more so than in Kissing You, the final track, which opens with the sweetest T.Rex guitar crunch I’ve heard in years. Somewhere, Marc Bolan is giving Lockimara a well-deserved tip of his top hat.

Dorio - Agent Friday & the Perfect Angel (Earth Libraries) Presumably, when you’re listening to something familiar, you’ve put it on because you’re in the mood for it. But in my avocation as a music writer, I’m constantly playing things with no idea what to expect beyond the loosest of genre descriptors. Yet my mood still matters, which is why the first time I played this fourth album from the Austin duo of Chad Doriocourt and Rachel Rascoe, I turned it off during the third song, exclaiming, “This is sooo lightweight.” I don’t remember what my mood was that day, but it must have been unshakably grim, because the next time I played the album, my outburst was one of delight: “This is so lightweight!” With danceable programmed rhythms, stacks of acoustic and electric guitars, goofball synths, and instantly hummable tunes, the indie-pop classicism is real with this one.

They both sing, with Doriocourt’s hushed voice letting you in on a secret and Rascoe’s soprano soaring above it all. Adding the delight, there’s a loose spy-thriller concept unifying the album, with tales of speeding racers, agents chasing each other, and the big reveal of Codename Too Much. If I had paid attention to the RIYL in the press materials (lots of talk about Madonna’s Ray Of Light and Gorillaz’s Plastic Beach, yawn), I might have skipped Dorio entirely. My points of reference are more along the lines of The Vaselines, Saint Etienne, Dubstar, and TV Girl. So, if you like any of the six artists mentioned above, buckle up for a fun ride with Dorio!

Touch Girl Apple Blossom - Graceful (K/Perennial) The hype for this debut LP was strong enough in one of my little corners of the world that I was led to skepticism. While I liked it OK at first listen, it wasn’t until I was able to mainline the Austin group’s joyful jangle live on Oakwood Beach during a whirlwind Chicago visit that I truly got it. On songs like the storming Heart-Go, the quartet employs the tried-and-true two-guitar approach (Olivia Garner strums, John Morales solos) with the fervor of self-invention as the rhythm section (Dustin Pilkington, bass, and Charles Powell, drums) plays with the sprung intensity of a bow releasing an arrow. On the songs Garner sings, she seems unruffled by it all, serenely lofting bright melodies into the air, while Pilkington injects a little more intensity into his vocals. The Byrds and Big Star are both in TGAB’s DNA, but there’s nothing retro about the thrills delivered here. If you’re left wanting more (I was), go back to their first release from 2023, which could use a slightly better mix but is otherwise everything you want from the band, especially Dream From An Eyelash, which was a real barnburner when they played it on the beach.