Aluminum

San Francisco indie pop’s been such a constant around the site it could hold its own drop down menu, but one of the city’s most exciting new offerings strays from the jangles and slips through the altar of singe with a curated cast of Curation alums and acolytes. Aluminum slice through the shoegaze garden with well-prepared shears — nipping the topline luminaries like MBV and Ride, but slicing deeper into Chapterhouse, The Swirlies and Drop Nineteens. Unlike many nu-gaze contemporaries, the band doesn’t see fit to stop at the foam and fuzz. Rather than just create a smudged wonderland that’s beholden to their influences, the band embraces the baggy beat of Madchester, letting it litter a few of their singles. They flirt with Brit-pop’s love of rhythm, the influx of rave, and the verdant sweat of Mazzy Star.

Instead of peeling back pastiche, the band creates an album as aura that brings the’90s rushing back like the sense memory of walking through clouds of Dream and CK One on the way to the more fruitful ends of the mall. Aluminum are able to boil down the decade and re-fashion colors and contours that quiver, gnash, and float in the same ways that their predecessors had, but with a sincerity that’s not just dressing up in the play clothes of the past. The band slinks down the avenues of the mind, finds the key under the mat, and lets the speakers push the panes for an afternoon while parents work and the hours seem endless. The record recovers the feeling of finding music that slipped past the myopia of Midwest radio. So good you should have to special order it at the imports desk of Camelot (showing my Midwest roots there) but instead its an instant hit in 2024.

Support the artist. Buy it HERE.