Max's Music Mondays with chuala and Trillcloud
Two very gorgeous songs, two very different energies.
Welcome to Max’s Music Mondays - a ~music discovery newsletter~ where I get too excited about songs I love. I hope you love them too. If you do, follow along on spotify and please press that subscribe button. We’re almost at 300 likes on the playlist, my heart is about to burst (in a safe and good way)!!!!
They say a picture is worth a thousand words but I’m still gonna write more about this breathtaking artwork (~5mins to whip up). I’ve been feeling a some hamster wheel vibes lately! And not the Kia hamsters either, like normal classroom hamsters. It’s mostly been a good wheel lately, busy working and ~living life~. But sometimes I get a little sad when MMM doesn’t get the time it deserves. I’m always proud of the final product but there’s so much that I wish I could do with it, so many approaches I wish I could take. And there’s nothing stopping me but doing it. So this week I decided to hold myself to it and take a slightly different approach to these two. Just a lil more personal alongside the usual ‘this sounds like a frog cooking dinner but in a fun, unironic way’ type bullshit. I hope you enjoy :)
Tomorrow I head off to Bonnaroo - which will keep me busy for a week. So we’ll take a pause for a week or so, but I’ll be back soon enough. Excited to share this week’s and excited about what else we’re cooking up (me and the frog from a couple sentences ago).
This Week’s Songs
Please please follow along here ^^ for this week’s and every week’s songs. Each song is perfect and that is an objective fact and in no way my biased opinion i promise.
wake up! - chuala
Wake up, go work till my brain stops. Rain drops when I go to bed. Well… shoot.
The number of times I’ve heard this struggle from friends or family is hard to count - especially over the last year and a half. This endless loop, a job that’s weighing on you, sapping all of your energy, so when you clock out or sign off, there’s nothing left. Nothing left to go savor what brings you joy, nothing left to find a way out. A limbo. And not the fun party kind of limbo!! A scary place to find yourself, a hard cycle to break from. chuala went ahead and made it a banger?
As the air bubbles rise in the water jug, the synths wake us up. Waking up already in the office. Bleak. When she starts singing you feel the emptiness. Hard to write emptiness about something that’s good, she is crushing it though, a perfect performance over incredible production throughout. Portraying the drain in a way that suits its canvass perfectly. These first 50 seconds let that lyric ground us, droning almost, as the track builds. It feels so immense, even as it develops, all of these synths and sounds overwhelming and heavy even as they bounce. That first drop offers some space to breathe, space to dance. It’s lighter and even though the refrain pushes on, it still feels doable now. 90 seconds in and the lyrics stray for the first time. It’s rough folks!! A call for help, someone listening to their body and sensing this impending burn out. It’s all too familiar, that ‘imma burn out’ bouncing through every moment, every thought. A bit of silence that lets that guttural scream absolutely HIT. To use the dang alarm clock going off to cut us straight back feels rude, but also beautiful. Such a creative move, and as I listen over and over to write this, pretty moved by how well this song encapsulates the message. It’s fucking impressive!!! The power of music to capture the human experience, I’ll always be in awe. Anyways, the alarm carries us on alongside the yelp in the background. That repetition is so palpable. The snooze button must be broken, the alarm ringing off the hook, as we drop into the song’s climax. Massive and thrilling, it all starts to blur with those long dirty synths holding on the side, vocals falling into samples. We finally break free of it all, a clean moment to dance and live, only to end again where the dreams always do, with the alarm rearing its loud head once again.
Follow chuala on IG / Spotify
Run Run Run - Trillcloud
In my experience, when you write about two new artists every week you do often get the question, “Where do you look for new music?”. And let me tell you, I really don’t know. There’s a million places and there’s nowhere. It just happens mostly. And one of those nowhere’s is my TikTok FYP. Trillcloud makes the third artist in the last six months that’s ended up here thanks to the dang algorithm, which handed me this gem a couple days ago. And obviously there’s plenty to say about the music itself, and I promise I will just gimme a couple sentences here to think out loud (in words i guess?). There’s just something so moving about discovering something in this way. Just being somewhere you trust and letting it come to you (side note: i do not trust tiktok but… it is good at what it does). As I started putting this together I started thinking about how beautiful this trust could be, and wondered where else I could experience it. Trusting a waiter at your favorite restaurant? Letting your friend pick the movie? Yesterday I went to my favorite bookstore, Stories, and bought two books I knew nothing about - Mona by Pola Oloixarac and Figures by Maria Popova. It’s exciting to dive in blind, the Stories’ shelves acting as my tactile for you page. If you’ve read either, please let me know!!!
But anyways, back to Trillcloud. I don’t think it takes much describing to see what caught my attention. A wonderful cover, his tone matching the mood so well. That first line dying off with such sadness. The small flutter on ‘tears’. I could go on, but we’re here for the song not the clip!!! From there I Ran Ran Ran (SORRY I REALLY AM UPSET THAT I TYPED THIS) over to his spotify and soaked in the newest release, AUBREY. This track leaped out at me immediately. The tumbling guitar, the whole thing marching forward. Trillcloud’s voice so effortless but the star of the moment nevertheless. As we move to the verse, the sparse (and at times, almost beyond-subtle) percussion is another delightful puzzle piece. Paired with the heavy kick/stomp holding it down, not letting the song run away. It gives some heft and size to an otherwise contained moment. I love the stacked vocals, of course. Trillcloud delivering high and low, offering a story as they wade through the confusion it left. The tension between the voices really get at that confusion too. When that ‘tell me where your secrets…” hits, whew. There’s something so human about it, so tender, begging for and dedicating themselves to this vulnerability. I also really love the little piano spicing up the moment. Appearing early and gaining steam as we return to the run run run section, the whole thing feels very outdoors to me and the piano adds to that landscape. As the song fades piece by piece, the running reaching our horizon, I’m just content, a beautiful song that brings its own voice, its own shape, its own style to a genre I thought I knew.
Follow Trillcloud on IG / Spotify
Thanks again for hanging, I hope you enjoyed these words and these songs and I can’t wait to do it again soon :) I’ll see you in a bit for a Roo Recap. Until then bang the dang playlist and share it with every single one of your friends, and you have MY WORD that I will be checking to make sure you sent it to every one of them. And if you didn’t?? Well I’ll probably shy away from confronting you and certainly won’t hold any kind of grudge, but, still do it please?
hugs n kisses,
Max