Max's Music Mondays with Hasani and Ayka
October more like boptober? oh no... i am so sorry :(
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! That would be meaningful to me!! Very, if I’m honest!!!
Alright. It’s October. You know what that means. Spooky Season is here. I don’t know why I love it so much, but I do. I genuinely hate scary movies, and am not someone who is ever in the mood to be scared (certainly not by choice). But there’s something so charming about the word “Spooky” that sucks me in every single year. It’s adorable and almost feels deceitful. Using such a playful word (basically equivalent to goofy in my vocabulary) in context of scary things?
And it’s incredibly versatile too. Could be spooky how good something is (this new illuminati hotties record??), could be spooky how quickly time is moving by (cliche, sure, but it’s october!! wtf!), could be spooky how hard it is to come up with more spooky things. I don’t know, it’s just silly and delightful to me. If we’re honest this intro is absolutely just all one big excuse to photoshop my head on a skeleton, what do you want from me?!?!
It was my birthday last week and I appreciated all the love. Appreciated it so much that I didn’t have any brain power left for a breathtaking intro, sorry. But the songs this week?? Breathtaking for sure! I adore them both and hope you do too.
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.
devil in da dance - Hasani
Everyone ready to have some fun? I was in pure awe when I clicked play. No waiting around, it’s just full steam ahead. An ominous riff bouncing on, welcoming us into ~spooky season~ too. Those synth stabs floating eerily on the edges. The drums are also very good, humble and hidden as they might be. The whole thing has this heavy, murky substance to it, in a way that songs rarely do! I adore the balance, both playful and menacing. Hasani plays to that feeling all too well. The songwriting feels personal, but with so much reverb it is spacious. Intimate, but not private. It’s in that space that Hasani really stands out. An incredible voice on its own. And in these moments all feel like they’re expanding over the edge of the beat, just by a hair, Hasani not pressed with a sense of urgency. But it’s over by the perfect amount, still feeling just right. These long sauntering lines like “and tell me have you ever sat in a room this hot before / that you might as well just dance” feel like they’re playing tug-of-war with beat, begging for it to relax and slow down a bit. So by the end of the lyric, when they find each other at the perfect moment, right in time, over and over again, it almost feels like a magic trick? How does he keep pulling this off? The whole devil section is slick - sexy and frightening. “We’ll be with you in a minute” maybe the most menacing line of all, and yet I’m excited, patiently waiting for my number to be called. At 48 seconds the production falls out for the first time, that rising synth the first sense of ease. But then we dive right back in, this first line lingering on as Hasani’s vocals get pitched up and thrown around. In this great Dazed interview, this song is positioned as, “a driving ode to London’s nightlife where Hasani has felt rebirthed, with the exhilarating risks and thrills of partying with your chosen community”. As the vocals shift, it mirrors that underground blur, time moving at different speeds as the night goes on. When the vocals find stable footing again, with the “animal things” lyric, you can hear a smile break through for the first time. It echoes out, swirling all around. Meanwhile the production starts to turn back time, the drums in reverse (and still so nice), the vocals now running backwards too, it’s mystifying and hard to follow. Instead just makes for a beautiful wave to get lost in. All these pieces melding together into one stunning mess. The song breaks from the cycle, leaving us with that warm synth, cleaner now than ever before, reminding us where we are. His incredible voice is on full display across the new EP, BOOMBYEBYE, (Blue Compassion? Leon Bridges WISHES he could) but it’s such a specific treat to see it thriving in this darker context too.
Follow Hasani on IG / Spotify
Tokyo Garden - Ayka
Only Ayka’s second single, but this was a no-brainer. Those gentle vocals under the hazy organ, those last moments before the sun rises. It’s quiet, it’s a little chilly, but we have faith that there’s so much more warmth around the corner. And Ayka delivers. That first moment feels so soft and intimate, drawing me in further and further, so when the band joins - that kick drum and bass mostly - throws me back, a surprising force. That bass is something else, popping through with an unmistakable tone. It’s a symphony of such specific sounds, with the percussion booming underneath. It’s giving me tastes of Buscabulla, which I’m obviously partial to… The vocals are steady and stunning, even with the wave of sound Ayka stays soft and inviting. It’s such a shift, musically beyond 15 seconds, it’d be easy to pull away. But just on cue, Ayka reaches out to us, “I can feel you harden / But please let me help you come through”. Well I certainly trust Ayka so, let’s lean into it and keep going. The next section is very heartwarming!!! Reaching out to someone with so much love that the world around you starts to fade away. A synth-y rain stick-y texture pours over moments here, creating such a full sound, it’s hard to get too fixated on any one part. Just as you relent and float with it all, the break beat hits. The band dispersing, leaving the song so much lighter than before. Ayka returns, floating a bit too. It’s cloudy as the ambience bubbles up underneath. But rather than a storm, the clouds part and give us that moment of sunshine at 1:22. Ayka crushing the chorus again. The band comes back in full, the chorus rolling on by one last time. Ayka’s last release was Tuna Tune a big psychedelic number with more gnarly melodies, the two together present a clear picture - adventurous and lush production, gorgeous vocals, and otherwise very few rules to confine their sound. The rest of the EP drops in about a month, and I am looking forward to it.
Follow Ayka on IG / Spotify
That’s it and that’s all, please let me know if you’re planning some kind of MMM-themed costume for halloween. I mean, I’m sure most of you are, seems like the obvious choice this year, but hey! I’d be happy to hear more about it :)
Happy Monday, have a great week,
Max