gushes is hyper-rhythmic guitar loop-driven performance art-prog by Jennae Santos. Santos is a music, performance, and installation artist with a penchant for feral florals and whimsical psychedelia. They live in Brooklyn, grew up in the Bay Area, and trace their bloodlines across the Philippines archipelago. These varied coastlines— urban/queer, powerful/dramatic, vibrant/tropical compose the eco-erotic portal from which their art spills forth. A tapestry of interlocking, polyrhythmic, ambient, and textural guitar loops form the foundation for gushes’ lyrical songwriting and shapeshifting instrumentation. An ever- evolving roster of coconspirators further energizes compositions rich with colorful guitar tones. The music is arranged for chamber prog ensemble, rock band, movement cycle, sound installation, dance music, and drone. 70s prog, dance punk, soul, kulintang in conversation with Afro-Latin rhythms, and cinematic sound design inform their musical world-building. gushes’ ritualistic performances employ light, wind, mirrors, and flowers with intimate bombast and ceremony, casting tactile mythos for unbound expressions of liberation.

Roadkill are a Lisbon-based band made up of young people Lucas Souza and Nia Fernandes who compose, write, record and produce all their music. They started working in 2023, brought together by their similar passion to create, and by their musical and aesthetic inspirations in artists such as boygenius, Bright Eyes, American Football, Teen Suicide and Ethel Cain, among others.

In April 2024 they released their debut album ‘What to Do When The Earth Swallows You Whole’, a record that not only creates its own universe, but pulls everyone in like a black hole or a storm. These songs were born contained in a small room, but their strength was too much to bear, so they escaped. Now they belong to everyone.

Maripool is the moniker of Lisbon-born, London based songwriter Natacha Simões, a selfdescribed “one girl band” who works largely solo, writing and playing on her guitar-driven, bedroom-pop arrangements. Upon moving to London at 18, Simões got a job at Whole Foods and bought a guitar with her first paycheck. Having never played music before she then spent most evenings teaching herself how to play the music of her heroes from the midwest emo scene. Honing her craft in isolation, Simões would eventually fall upon what would become the world of Maripool – a captivating mix of melancholy that swirls between the delightful wonders of articulated shoegaze, and a witching hour state of deep-blue dreaming. Maripool’s debut single ‘Blindness’, released in 2021, received critical acclaim from the likes of DIY, So Young, and Pitchfork.

Her debut EP, ‘It All Comes At Once’ was released in 2022, via Practise Music. Filled with emotive charm and drawing from the canon of 2010s jangly guitar-centric pop, 1990s shoegaze and midwest emo, the EP is an energetic, romantic and accomplished interpretation of the extremities of human emotion and Maripool’s own inner demons. Just signed to US label, Smoking Room, 2024 sees Maripool release her long awaited sophomore EP ‘a day that feels like nothing at all’. A more mature and more complex dive into the Maripool world/sound.