Somewhere while I was reading about Thermal for the post the other day, Clothesline from Hell came up. The drummer for Thermal is also the guy behind this. There isn’t much about him online — I guess I first heard of him thanks to this Exclaim! piece from a couple of weeks ago, which is a bit light on the details. Check out his latest single, You Don’t Know. It’s pretty different:

The artist here is a guy named Adam LaFramboise, and the music has been described as ‘breakbeat slacker pop’. That’s about as succinct as you can get.

Seems he’s been putting out music under the name Clothesline from Hell for a while, but his recent releases seem to be really leaning into this style — an updated take on the sound that made Beck famous. Here’s the other recent single called Open Up!:

It’s excellent hot weather music. It’s been in regular rotation while I wait for my air conditioning to get fixed (don’t get me started). He has one prior EP on streaming services – a 2020 release called The Something Nothing Tape, which shares a lot of DNA with the tracks above, but the tracks don’t quite commit as hard as these do to the breakbeat style, the samples and weirdness – they’re more gentle, bedroom pop-style songs, driven by a more traditional acoustic guitar style. Love and Basketball is a good example, the bones of his sound are in place, but it’s more reserved.

There’s an older release on his Bandcamp page called Here Comes The Pain from 2018, which is pretty experimental. It’s fascinating to hear his style develop over time.

The EP, Soon We’ll All Be Smoking, releases July 26. I’m looking forward to hearing what the rest of it sounds like.

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