One-person production project Landethics dropped the relatively short but jam-packed 12-track album phantom tidepools on their Bandcamp at the beginning of May. The producer explores a palette of sounds and production styles that falls between windswept Japanese role-playing-game soundtracks that you might hear on turn-of-the-century Playstation games and a hip-hop-adjacent series of grooves built over clipped kick drums and heavy 808 bass thuds.

Davenport-based psych-rock power trio Giallows have been pumping out a steady stream of studio-recorded material, live shows, and odds and ends on their Bandcamp over the last couple years. Their newest recordings from April 2020 include the full-length release Enochian Power Ballads that features three improvised jams in the psych/stoner rock vein, and the standalone single “The Sun Falls Down (Plague Music)” that falls closer to a surreal collage of horror-movie music and somber poetry.

Davenport's progressive metal band Kronos Resistor released a lengthy LP called The Book of Pariah earlier this year. The five-piece band has a discerning ear for epic metal arrangements that veer between guttural metalcore beatdowns and more stately, almost neo-classical interludes built over washes of synth and bright guitar harmonies. When your band has “Between the Buried and Me” listed as a genre tag on Bandcamp alongside more conventional but no less indicative choices such as “mathcore” and “melodic metal,” you might go into their music knowing what to expect: a fusion of disparate genres and moods, all of which orbit around a bruising core of barked vocals and palm-muted guitar shred.

The duo was scheduled to play a set at the Renwick Mansion in the near future to air out Lungs tracks into the public sphere, but of course, that date has since vanished. One hopes that they’ll get back to the stage before too long to let their amps sizzle and their drums crash in the live setting.