I’ve heard plenty of great songs that capture the dissociative lonesomeness and strange thrills of navigating interpersonal relationships now that so much human communication is sucked up by the vortex of social media. The best recent example is “Shade,” a psych-tinged single that indie duo Discussing the Sun released to preview their new debut album, Feel It All (Lonely Ghost). Front person Mars sings with a corrosive longing that underlines the bittersweet sense of dislocation in the song’s dreamlike melody and prickly yet relaxed percussion—all of which is fairly representative of the whole album. Discussing the Sun’s pop collage reflects its members’ individual output. Under the name Holy Kerouac, Mars (who’s currently in Chicago) makes bedroom indie rock spackled with emo and laptop pop; the duo’s other member, Cleveland-based Leave Nelson B, produces instrumental hip-hop and dabbles in remixing (last year, he dropped a prismatic EP of reworked material from arty Chicago act Oux). Mars and Nelson make sense of each other’s tastes on Feel It All, which flits between serene electronic dreamscapes and bustling, kaleidoscopic pop experiments that fill the air like New Year’s confetti. The duo’s genre experimentation gives their music commonalities with hyperpop, but even as Spotify and the major labels work to shape that genre into something identifiably marketable, Discussing the Sun’s forlorn, effervescent aesthetic stays undomesticated.
Discussing the Sun’s Feel it All is available through Bandcamp.
