Heartbreaking Bravery

Editor’s Note: There’s been a month-long gap in coverage, thanks to near-incessant travel and other extenuating circumstances. The following run of posts that contain this note will be posts that should have appeared sometime within the past several weeks. Use these posts as an opportunity to catch up to the present release cycle or to simply discover some new music. Either way, enjoy.

Exploding In Sound has been carefully assembling one of the strongest track records in music over the past several years, so when they sign a new act to their roster it’s generally worth giving that act quite a bit of attention. The label recently acquired Jackal Onasis, a trio who specializes in creating discordant basement pop that, like much of the rest of the roster, boasts a knack for incorporating a whole host of influences gleaned from the slacker punk movement of the early ’90s.

Their first trip up to bat saw the band releasing the piercing “The New Ron” which exemplifies the exact kind of subversive, technically proficient basement pop-meets-basement punk that Exploding In Sound excels built its name finding. “The New Ron” finds its most defining elements in the nearly overwhelming amount of ideas that are packed into a scant two minutes and 13 seconds.

From the onset, the band’s exploring a surf-like bent before taking an extremely sharp left into a heavy grunge sensibility that quickly evolves into screeching noise-punk. It’s an impressively eclectic mix and, impressively, the band manages to pull it off with aplomb, never once letting the song escape from their grasp. Alternating between an airiness that skews closer to dream-pop and a brute, relentless, near-tribal propulsive angle, “The New Ron” stands out as one of 2016’s most fascinating compositions. In under two and a half minutes, Jackal Onasis make an airtight case for being the kind of band that arrives unexpectedly and blows everyone away.

Listen to “The New Ron” below and pre-order Big Deal Party from Exploding In Sound here.