A Song For Friday: Gushes
Delicious Collision is a striking debut from Jennae Santos. Also: Clutter, Rakel, Clarice Jensen, Lei Liang, Nicole L'Huillier, Charlotte Dos Santos, Melvin Gibbs, Dylan Henner, and Ted Hearne.
When I saw Gushes, the “music and ceremony project” of Jennae Santos, perform at Tak Ensemble’s recent Swoonfest, there were so many memorable images, such as biting the blooms off of roses and then spraying the petals out in a gorgeous, crimson storm, that I wasn’t 100 percent sure how the music would sound on its own. I needn’t have worried, as the startling originality of Santos’ theatrics runs deep in her recordings, too, as proven by Delicious Collision, which came out today. The blend of prog, metal, chamber, folk, and pop here is unique, and it makes perfect sense that two of the guests are Ethan Woods and Alice TM, who both have experience with unique blends.
The song they appear on is a perfect place to focus your attention. Mmmh is a suite-like track that showcases Santos’ assured compositional style, starting with the guitar, cello, and flute that open the song. After some flowing riffs, she ramps up the tension with a stop-start rhythm and swirling cello and violin. The vocals come in, developing the melodies further, eventually becoming the main event when Santos, Woods, and Alice TM harmonize. A proggy riff starts cycling, guitars, bass, synth, and violin all building on and playing off each other. The sound grows and grows, nearing a thrash-like intensity, before everything drops out, except vocals, guitar, and flute. The harmonies are more than enough to carry the song home, and before you know it, eight and a half minutes have passed just like that. Dive in.
Santos’ production partner, Chris Connors deserves some credit for how cool this album sounds, with even the nastiest, heaviest guitar riffs given a polished weight and placed perfectly in the mix. There are other collaborators here, including Matt Evans, who plays percussion on one track and also did the photography for the album. But the singular vision is all from the mind and heart of Santos, including the enigmatic lyrics, which definitely hit emotional buttons in poetic fashion, while also dropping a statement of purpose from time to time. You can get a window into her methods in the last stanza of Mmmh:
I am no safe place, I’m no container
Just combing through your quartz and cool debris
Build a shell that echoes from the chambers of our mouths intersecting as the insects shout and stars dive down into entropic seas
Fuel behind your wheel, I wanna run you
Excite but never satiate your drive
Peering through your depths I see all that I ever was and ever wanted all at once
We don’t fall in love, we rise
This fascinating debut album, which traverses light and dark, fun and fear, is a definite sign that Gushes is on the rise. Don’t be surprised if you fall in love with Delicious Collisions - or if you get a faceful of rose petals if you go to the show.
Listen to most of the songs for Friday here or below.
Also Out This Week
Clutter - Superstar It looks like Clutter’s spot on my Best Of 2025 list is about to become a playlist. That’s because I’m going to add this killer new track to the Loves You EP I had on my Best Of 2025 (So Far) list. As on EP’s six tracks, the guitars slice and dice, the bass pumps, joining forces with the thrashing drums, and the vocals are laced with more attitude than should be necessary. Trust me, this Swedish band’s sweet’n’sour take on post-punk contains nothing extraneous.
Bloodsports - Anything Can Be A Hammer I don’t recall how I came across this Brooklyn quartet, but I’m excited to have their debut album in my ears. Moody and urgent, there’s also plenty of space in their sound, with touches of synth, dulcimer, and mellotron adding texture to the two-guitars-bass-drums format. The vocals are distorted and buried, almost just another sonic element, which, along with their cold sound and use of repetition, could place them at an intersection of math rock and shoegaze. But, as with most sub-genres, maybe it’s best to just listen to the band and decide for yourself what they relate to in your sonic library.
Rakel - Place To Be The production on this debut album by an Icelandic singer-songwriter is so rich, layered, lush, and original, that it would be distracting if the songs weren’t so good. Nominally a folk-rock album, with plenty of finger-picked guitar and intimate vocals, it adds so many striking touches, from electronics (including artistically applied autotune) to horn and string arrangements, that you may be on the edge of your seat, waiting for Rakel and Sara Flindt, her co-producer, to fall off the cliff of trying too hard. They never do, leaving us with this glorious and deeply moving high-wire act.
Clarice Jensen - In holiday clothing out of the great darkness The title of this latest album from the thoughtful and passionate cellist, composer, and improviser takes its title from Rilke’s Letters To A Young Poet and has Bach’s unaccompanied Cello Suites in its musical DNA. But there’s nothing derivative in the immersive embrace of the music, which uses Jensen’s phenomenal technique as its main special effect, alongside well-integrated add-ons like octave displacement, delay, tremolo, and looping. Even knowing about those tools, the richness of the sound here is astonishing. You will not want the album to end.
Lei Liang - String Quartets On this new collection, Liang picks up where his last album, Dui, which I described as defining “a sublime approach to chamber music as informed by his Chinese heritage,” left off. Instead of duets, he takes on the string quartet, starting with a time-traveling arrangement of Monteverdi’s Lamento della ninfa, performed by the Brentano String Quartet, who also close the album with the sweet melancholy of Madrigal Mongolia. In between, we get the JACK, Formoso, and Mivos Quartets, each one as dazzling and committed as the others, putting Liang’s warmth, intelligence, and deeply informed blend of Mongolian and classical traditions on high-definition display. Wherever Liang turns his attention next, I’m sure it will be equally beautiful and rewarding.
Nicole L’Huillier - Respuestas This fascinating album by L’Huillier, a multi-disciplinary artist born in Chile and based in Berlin, is essentially a series of field recordings from an art exhibition. Using contact microphones and other methods of sound gathering, she then shaped the sounds into a series of colorful, deeply resonant sonic postcards. You won’t find these pieces by exiting through the gift shop.
Charlotte Dos Santos - Neve Azul With roots in Norway and Brazil, it makes it easy to talk about the duality of Dos Santos’ approach, with cool precision on one side and loose-limbed warmth on the other. But maybe that’s too easy, and it would be better to say that she’s an artist who knows exactly what she wants and puts it all together in beguiling packages, as on this delightful and all too brief EP, which follows up 2022’s “remarkable” LP, Morfo. Opening with the relaxed, lighter-than-air jazz of I’ve Been Thinking, Dos Santos pursues a slow-burning trajectory, gradually turning up the heat until the dense and intense funk of the title track. But even then, she never loses her cool. However, something tells me she’d love to see you sweat it out on the dance floor while she wends her diaphanous ways within the grooves.
Melvin Gibbs - Amasia: The Anamibia Sessions 2 Gibbs, one of the greatest bassists of all time (just go back to all those albums he worked on with post-fusion artists like Ronald Shannon Jackson and Sonny Sharrock if you’re unfamiliar), has been sitting on some of the material on this incendiary album since 2006. No biggie, it just took him a while to figure out to shape the sounds laid down by his band of luminaries, notably including Pete Cosey, who held his own with Miles Davis during the master’s densest period in the mid-seventies. But you’d never know the album wasn’t recorded yesterday in a single take, such is the furious energy of the music, which sounds incredibly alive even when it slows down a little. While the method is similar to how Miles and Teo Macero made records starting with Bitches Brew, there’s nothing orthodox about what Gibbs is doing, including the addition of beatboxer Napoleon Maddox on several tracks. If you’ve wondered what Gibbs has been up to in the 21st Century, start here.
Dylan Henner - Star Dream FM When I last touched down in Henner’s world, it was in 2021 for the Amtracks EP, which took a lovely “memory trip” through Pennsylvania by rail. Now he’s tuning into an invented radio station to explore memory and emotion via a different pathway. In between all-embracing blankets of electronic sound, occasionally augmented by marimba and his processed voice, we get fragmented transmissions, little bursts of distorted songs. The titles are evocative journal entries, like She Broke Up With Me Before our Last Class so I Walked to the Beach On My Own, which could serve as short story prompts or points of reference for your own memories of age 17.
Ted Hearne - Farming I’m not going to pretend I have any grasp on this new hour-long work by Hearne, which he composed for The Crossing Choir in 2023. I will say that if you’re at all familiar with Hearne’s past work, such as Place, the collaboration with Saul Williams that hit my Top 25 in 2020, you’ll know to expect processed vocals, a socio-political angle (in this case, the fraught world of agriculture in the 21st century), intriguing melodies, wildly original scoring for electronics and other instruments, and a strong sense of structure. But that doesn’t mean you’ll know what to expect from Farming as a whole. The only unsurprising aspect is The Crossing’s typically excellent performance, with Donald Nally wielding the baton, which once again proves they are the best, most adventurous choir in the country. I’m psyched that Farming has finally come to market!
Note: the graphic above is based on a photo I took of Jennae Santos at Swoonfest, September 12th, 2025, at the DiMenna Center.