Jules Batterman recalls driving along a dark desert highway with her now-husband on a cross-country move to California. “It felt like it was going on forever,” she says on a recent video call.
Years later, Batterman, who fronts the L.A. band Julez and the Rollerz, referenced that drive in “Time,” the opening track on debut album Dirty Little Rock N Roller. It’s a song about the passage of time and disconnecting from the world, including our phones. “We don’t need these distractions,” says Batterman. “Experience life for what it is because there is so much going on.”
Replaced By Robots sounds like it could be anything from the title of a 1950s B-movie to a 2026 news headline. It’s actually the name of a band, albeit it one that embodies the terror and absurdity of both mid-20th century horror and modern life. That’s all embodied in Replaced by Robots’ video for their song of the same name, a stop motion romp through a Hollywood bot invasion where no one and nothing, not the musicians or the Angelyne-pink sports car, are safe.
“We were talking about how fun it would be if we had a Monkees-style TV show around the hijinks of the band,” says singer and keyboardist Heather Morgan. “Then, we thought, we should make a theme song.”
“Compliment” by Rare DM has been sitting around on my laptop, waiting to be played, since the album, Attention, came out a couple weeks ago. Last night, it finally turned up in between Depeche Mode and Boy Harsher earlier in the night at Underground.
You might have seen Rare DM, the analog synth project of New York-based Erin Hoagg, before, as she played Substance LA a few years ago. Attention is her second full-length. It’s a poppier sort of darkwave, sounding somewhere in between Boy Harsher and “Bad Guy” Billie Eilish, but with a stronger techno influence. My actual favorite track on the album is “Significant Other,” a killer minimal synth/techno instrumental that reminds me of a cross between Soft Cell’s “A Man Could Get Lost” and early Matthew Dear. It’s a solid album, so check it out on Bandcamp when you have the chance.
Full set list from last night at Underground is below. New-ish songs (less than two years old) are linked back to previous mentions on this site. As always, thank you for dancing.
There’s a well-known photo of Yoko Ono from 1967 where the artist is holding a glass hammer. If you live in Los Angeles, you’ve probably seen the image recently in connection with the Music of the Mindexhibition that’s currently at The Broad. English duo Memorials caught sight of that photo when the Yoko Ono retrospective showed at London’s Tate Modern and it ended up inspiring their song, “Cut Glass Hammer,” from the recently-released album All Clouds Bring Not Rain.
“We went to that exhibition and on the posters they have the picture of her with the glass hammer,” Verity Susman recalls on a recent video call. “They don’t have it in the actual exhibition, but that concept really stuck out in our minds.” In fact, Susman says, there was a lot about the Yoko Ono exhibition that seeped into the subconscious as she and Matthew Simms worked on the album- like the artist’s instructions and her references to nature- and may have manifested as subtle influences that they didn’t realize until looking back at photos from the Tate Modern after finishing the album.
As always, Club Underground is happening at Grand Star Jazz Club on Friday night. I’ll be back on the decks on June 12 playing alongside Larry G. There’s no theme, so expect a mix of indie, Britpop, post-punk, darkwave, new wave and more from 9:30 p.m. until 2 a.m. Advance tickets are available online, but you can also get them at the door. Underground is 21+ and the Grand Star is located in Chinatown’s Central Plaza, next to the Bruce Lee Statue.
This is going to be a pretty busy weekend in Los Angeles, given that Pride is this weekend and the World Cup starts on Thursday. Keep reading for my recommendations for clubs, concerts and movie screenings happening in Los Angeles between Thursday, June 11 and Wednesday, June 17, 2026.
Remnants of the Madonna loop on my For You page, Sunday evening.
Last Thursday, Madonna played a free show in Times Square. From the onslaught of clips that dominated my Instagram feed that night, I could tell you that it looked like a Pride kickoff, sponsored by Grindr, and a preview of Confessions II, set for release in July, with a couple Confessions on a Dance Floor songs (“Hung Up” and “I Love New York,” obviously) thrown in to hype the crowd. The clipshow came courtesy of influencers, legacy media and fan accounts whose posts quickly overthrew the Euphoria loop that had eclipsed election news earlier in the week.
The Madonna loop was a particularly relentless one, filled with virtually identical videos that bombarded my feed for no less than 24 hours. Even after it subsided, the remnants of Madonna Mania lingered on my For You page as I finished writing this post on Sunday evening. It was overkill, and that’s coming from someone who grew up listening to Madonna, cites Confessions as her best album and intends to get Confessions II on release day.
You might not expect to read this, but I’m way into Nature Is Healing, the new album from horsegiirL. If we’re IRL friends, though, you might think, yeah, Liz would totally be into something that sounds like the rave at an anime convention. And that’s true. But, there’s also a lot more to horsegiirL than DDR beats and pitched up vocals.
Just to back up a second for anyone who is like, wtf are you talking about? HorsegiirL is a DJ/producer/singer known for wearing a horse mask, or horse prosthetic face makeup, who had a viral hit some time back called “My Barn My Rules.” She’s known for playing hard, fast dance music- roughly equivalent to what ‘90s ravers would know as hardcore or happy hardcore- and has been buzzy for a good while. She played Coachella in 2025, made guest appearances during Wet Leg and PinkPanthress’ sets at this year’s Coachella and will be opening for Robyn at the Forum in September.
Nature Is Healing is horsegiirL’s debut album. It dropped yesterday and it’s a genuinely strange and subversive album. Musically, it’s not really something you can categorize. You’ll have something like the single “That’s My Beach!” that brings together a summer party sound with a play on words to talk about respect for the beach or “Only the Best,” which satirizes materialism. Then there’s “An Apple a Day,” with its relentless kick drum and campy, Europop-style lyrics and vocals, and “Fun Guy Fungi,” an avant-garde, new age interlude. Last night, I tried out “Hands Hands Hands,” a synthpop tune with bit of a Kylie Minogue vibe and a touch of house percolating underneath. Hopefully, sometime soon, I’ll have the chance to play “Music Goes On” because I love how it morphs from euphoric rave track to Pure Moods jam. The sounds are all over the place on Nature Is Healing, but it makes sense as an album because the songs all seem to tied to this very My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic-meets-Nausicaä Valley of the Wind message about taking care of the planet and each other. Right now, it’s not too often that we see people making art that’s both light-hearted and serious, so, if you’re looking for something that hits those notes, I recommend checking out Nature Is Healing.
Last night’s set list from Club Underground is below. As always, the new-ish stuff links back to previous mentions on this blog. In addition to horsegiirL, the other brand new song from last night is “Every Single Weekend” from The Avalanches and Jamie XX.
“War Economy,” from Mekons’ 2025 album Horror, is a quintessential post-punk jam with a funky pogo beat, urgent guitars and snarling vocals that rip through lyrics as relevant to the Thatcher/Reagan era as they are to today. When Tony Maimone (Pere Ubu) reconfigured the song for the newly released companion album Horroble (Mekons vs. Tony Maimone In Dub Conference) he teased out an even more ominous quality, with vocals echoing as if the past and present were joined in chorus to sing the same song. In a way, that’s what “War Economy” is about.
“This excursion into Iran doesn’t make any sense, logically. They can’t even explain it,” Jon Langford says on a video call. It’s the first week of April and the Chicago-based Mekons co-founder is on vacation in Georgia. “Apparently, now we’re fighting to open the Straight of Hormuz, which was open before we started fighting the war.”
Devlin McCluskey had been on a Sopranos kick that sent him down a music rabbit hole. Remember the episode where Christopher relapses, with carnival lights twinkling and Fred Neil’s song “The Dolphins” playing in the background? “That set off me obsessively listening to that song and then trying to find more songs that sounded like that,” McCluskey says on a recent video call from Cathedral City, where the formerly L.A.-based musician now lives.
That Sopranos needle drop prompted McCluskey, previously of The Dead Ships and now of Devlin and the Harm, to dig into more sounds of the 1960s and 1970s that were unfamiliar to him. There was “Something on Your Mind” from the bluesy singer Karen Dalton and Scott Walker’s “The Old Man Is Back Again” and playlists loaded with Donovan tunes. “I’m the kind of person who will listen to one song over and over and over or start my morning listening to one song every morning for months and months,” says McCluskey. That was the case here.
For years, Krissy Barker has been dreaming about houses. Some of the dreams are frightening. Others are not. All feature very specific dwellings that only exist in her dreams. “I’ll visit the same ones over and over and over again, sometimes multiple times in the same night,” the L.A.-based singer and drummer says on a video call. After so many somnial visits, Barker started turning those mysterious spaces into songs and, after forming Holy Sun Opera House with composer dl Salo, they became the basis for the project’s self-titled debut album, out now via Hologram Opera.
Holy Sun Opera House is gothic music in a way you wouldn’t expect for 2026. Barker and Salo- both classically trained musicians who met playing pinball and share a wide variety of non-classical influences- have made the kind of music you want to hear while you’re reading Rebecca or marathoning episodes of Dark Shadows. The album The Holy Sun Opera House is gothic in the sense that it gives you the impression of wandering through an old mansion on a stormy night, guided only by candlelight and unsure of what lies behind the doors you find.
