#41: INFATUATED
on the vulnerable club girl Mantha Ye's new EP and the goofy adventuring of indie-pop duo Octopus Villain
I’ve been playing catch-up a lot recently. Maybe that’s the best kind of problem to have, where the good stuff seems never-ending, where the stuff that excites you just never seems to end, but just sifting through it can feel like quite a bit of a task. I finally got around to a Spotify-exclusive album that’s been sitting there in my library, favourited but never listened to—guess that’s the price you pay for only using one streaming service (in this case Apple Music). Take a listen to Almost There by The Bastard Kids, probably would have been in the top ten of last year if I’d remembered to get around to it on time.
Mantha Ye - INFATUATED
Pop’s current obsession with club tropes just can’t match the sticky heat exhaled off the dancefloor. When a rapper like KnowKnow takes to UK Garage, the results still sound more like flexing than bouncing; when bedroom artists incorporate a house beat, they render them in soft and fuzzy textures—insular sounds meant to fit their headphones. These songs feel carefully choreographed, with sharp turns and controlled twists that feel incompatible with the sweat and warmth of bodies bumping into each other, of one drink too many, of lusting after a stranger who’s name you’ll forget. Shelhiel’s SuperKiss: A might be one of the best projects of the year thanks to its club-influenced energy, but see if you can find me a TikTok that looks less like performance and more like release.
INFATUATED, the debut project from Shenzhen-born Mantha Ye, is pop-minded but sounds ready-made for the club. Even between the two hooks of “SURRENDER,” the singer lives in the shadows of dim-lighting and cramped space, quietly slinking between producer HARIKIRI’s UK Garage beat. She attempts to stop herself from falling back on an old habit, but can’t help melting back into the arms of a lying, cheating flame. “Baby, I surrender to you / I bring out / all my game / want you back,” she whispers in a soft mewl over the hollowed-out space. Ye’s concession becomes clearer with repetition. Each utterance is like another shot of courage, amplifying the nagging voice that begs to call her ex. Yet, as sweet and dizzying as the song might be, “SURRENDER” is filled with the friction of bodies on bodies; each resounding beat is made out to be more comprehensible than Ye’s loopy hook.
The desire to simply forget and dance is clearest on the title track. Ye describes having written the track after cutting off a number of former friends and it cuts to the complex feelings of satisfaction and emptiness that come with this detoxification: “you make me so obsessed with the drama, I almost became blind / trying to cover up makes you look so flustered,” her voice distorted and practically unintelligible. In favour of this cleanse is the song’s rapid drum ‘n’ bass backing—foregrounded as if these thoughts are made insignificant. Only the chorus comes clear, the titular word repeated over and over: “infatuated,” she sings, as if already having set her eyes on another. Towards the end of the track, the rapid breaks morph into Jersey club kicks, a trick that may seem familiar. Rather than let the Jersey club beat act as a pillowy-soft accompaniment, its hard thumps take over the track as if searching for a harder stimulant to empty her mind.
Even the quieter moments come with their own promise of lust and abandon. Over intimate R&B, she murmurs with a carnality hidden behind her heart-eyed mask. She repeats thoughts until they’re all that’s left in her head. “You don’t have to tell me what to do / and I know how you feel / cause all I want is you,” she purrs. But maybe this is too vulnerable for the club girl. On “KNOW MY NAME,” the chunky chords return, the drum ‘n’ bass tweaks are back. She’s seemingly changed her mind on her flitting feelings: “what I want will all come true / but your eyes have turned red.” INFATUATED might not last long, rather it captures the temporary and fleeting height of a satisfying night out.
Listen here: Apple Music // Spotify
Singles: “INFATUATED”
Octopus Villain - Octopus Villain’s Unintended Meeting
Octopus Villain liken their role as villains as “less MF Doom, more Team Rocket.” Comical over dastardly, misfits rather than misanthropes, a quirky team-up instead of the musings of a formidable supervillain. Comprised of members Galatea and Jin Bao, the duo’s first EP, Bedridden Octopus Villain, feels like a prototype of their Team Rocket cosplay—opener “Mysterious Angel” feels like a demo, a breathy vocodered performance set to a bare-bones accompaniment. “Requiem for a Single-eyed Frog” might not feel fully-rendered, but it gets closer to the sort of playful pop song the band aim for with a mixture of breezy tropical rhythms, bitpop synths and stuttered breakbeats, calling to mind tropical and futuristic imagery.
On their second EP, Octopus Villain’s Unintended Meeting, the band arrive at this absurdity with the punchy backing that makes it stick. “An Unofficial Guide for Space Tourists” propels forward, surfing over a glitchy bassline, while those bitpop synths that previously attempted to hold “Requiem for a Single-eyed Frog” afloat are now rendered into bright decorations. Combining bathroom fixtures with space imagery, like casting swirling water as a black vortex or mold on the ceiling as stars, when Octopus Villain drone in a monotonous hum, “I’m gonna flush myself to toilet.” The dynamic nature of the song makes it easy to imagine that it’s an entrance to their spacecraft rather than the goofy hook being a cry of defeated humiliation over an embarrassing bathroom mishap.
Despite Octopus Villain’s often subdued sound, conflict and tension feel more readily apparent here. On “7 Gang,” the placid nature of their earlier work feels like it’s been substituted for something more explosive and vibrant: vocal melodies don’t trail off but erupt in punky shouts, while the synths collide into clusters of noise. “In a Trance” uses vocal effects to create a sense of mystery, there’s a bitcrushed recording of a conversation that strains your ear, but it’s the heavily-processed hook that catches your attention. “There’s nothing left to worry about / there’s nothing left to lose,” Octopus Villain hum, like an alien warning.
The results don’t always feel like so much of an evolution as a reconfiguration of their previous work. On “Real-time Log During a System Crush,” the feelings of a crush by an idiosyncratic mind doesn’t really grow into anything compelling, held back by the mild tempo and the softness of the sound, never matching the quirkiness of its “system error alert.” “Quickening” might feel on par for the same course, but when its descends into discordant noise and off-putting squelches that turn towards a more somber version of the band’s concept, Octopus Villain are entrancing. It’s at the poles that Octopus Villain excel, the directions in which they should head: goofy pop songs with the bright punchiness to back them and swirling discordance that invites the unknown.
Listen here: Apple Music // Spotify
Singles: “In a Trance”
66 & Amiro - “Masters of Sex”
Think it’s charming for all the work that 66 and Amiro do to position themselves as cool or bad, it’s all undone by the earnestness of the song’s disco production, which down to its whooped calls seems to beg, “please, one more dance.” Hard to pretend to be slick when rapping about paper, referencing Tinder, and attempting to pick a girl up with the line “tonight, let’s make luv,” all in one breath, but when you’re working on a song that starts with those sweet disco strings, all those pick-up lines feel like clumsy little mistakes.
Datboirg - “MOONTOWN (feat. Lokk)”
“MOONTOWN” deftly captures how a night can change. The song might set itself up as a lonely cruise with nothing but blurred-out vocals and an acoustic guitar, but the bassline grows out of its introspection and into sexier ideas, especially once Datboirg makes the second person explicit. Lokk’s voice is slurred and lethargic: “waiting for you, just us two,” he sings, a moment of pleasure on the track’s Jersey club beat, but maybe the best detail is how he gets there. The track betrays his speech. “If I could choose, I’d rather be alone,” he sings before the bedsprings squeak—what comes after feels honest.
Ozone - “Speed Reload”
Ozone’s short career has often felt like a test in recreating the K-pop experience in Taiwan. Prior to their debut, the group spetn some time training in South Korea—coming up with a convoluted name—Ozone with the chemical symbol O3, which in the case represents origin, optimism, and originality (aren’t two of those words a little too similar)—and a debut track that would also act as their fandom name. Single “Purple Days” from last year went by route of lore, cramming references to their previous singles, despite the fact that the group had amassed a catalogue of four tracks by that point.
Earlier single from this year “World Top” signals that the group is still figuring it out: the arrangement is full of those metallic NCT synths (which are already dated by K-pop standards), but they’re buried so far in the background that they feel like a distracting inclusion. “Speed Reload” doesn’t suggest that the group have magically got it, with a mess of influences: the line “happiness and unhappiness are hard to separate” immediately feels like lyricist David Ke’s and too artistic for the track’s cheeriness and almost immediately brushed aside for a too-confident pick-up line; the full demin outfits of the performance video feel like a strange fit for the tropical scenery. For all of these faults though, “Speed Reload,” steamrolls anything that doesn’t resemble joy with its four-on-the-floor beat—there’s even something endearing about the group’s frozen-frame High School Musical jump—but to me, it’s the gang vocals—so ebullient, so crude—on the chorus that truly sell its vision of youth.
Extra Listening
Zhang Xingchan’s debut album, No, no! is one of my favourites from this year, her indie pop made up of jazzy instrumentation, sharp hooks, and perfectly cozy bedroom sensibilities. The math rock-influenced “Filters” is a buzzy and exuberant freakout; “From A to Z” is the effervescent feeling of taking the leap. Zhang might have a strong ear for instrumentation but it’s her performance that draws me in: on “Talking to You on the Phone Again,” she might sound reserved, but when she sings “there are still a lot of words I still haven’t told you,” she sounds ready to confess—these songs are made of the complex emotions that come with change in your early twenties.
Jiao Maiqi’s third album, At the Pool, has finally been released on Western streaming, almost half a year from its release. Great stuff—if his first album was all about love from a teenager hopeful about what it could be, his latest feels like it’s clumsily figuring it out, what it means to be in love, how it feels to be in love. He tries to put it into words on a song like “爱情是” (“Love Is”), but my favourite is “今夜会降临很多浪漫吗” (“Will Tonight Bring A Lot of Romance?”) a song that feels like nervous confessions, weekend getaways that you wish could last forever, and the realization that just that one person would be enough.
R&B label ChynaTown—formerly ChynaHouse—has been held up by two artists, Julia Wu and Kimberley Chen, the rest of its roster doesn’t tend to stay long on the label. They’ve been painful to follow, really into NFTs at the start of the decade, and now AI visuals. Anyway, Wu’s got a new single in the wake of being exposed as an accidental third-party, and Chen’s got a new album.
The contrasts of their voice are apparent on these latest tracks: Wu’s voice is light and airy, that when she touches on reality here, it sounds like she’s been crushed by it; Chen’s voice has a slight grit so that when her fantasies come fully realized, they feel like they’re filled with warmth. Her latest album, Kiki, comes with an FKA twigs cosplay that’s played twice for some reason (once in English, once in Mandarin), but the best track is the straightforward “Good on You.” “My love, my love, my love, looks good on you,” she sings—barely higher than a whisper and it still manages to make you feel like you’re at the top.
More in “2024 is continuing to be a great year for rap”: check out swimming’s 邻家小丈夫, Vansdaddy & LusciousBB’s 牛窝坑之子 (waiting for this to come to Western streaming, but you can listen on NetEase Cloud Music), and GhostCrew’s 迷失街头.
babyMINT are about to debut as a six-piece, with three members leaving the group and the name about to be changed to babyMINT∞, which is like sure, lol why not. They performed their latest track in baseball jerseys (where Where Chou also performed) and it’s worth watching if not just to see them do a slow-motion flip of one member. Thankfully, the song sounds great—had the hook stuck in my head for the last couple of days—and official single and music video release are set to follow sometime towards the end of the month.
South Korean band HYUKOH and Taiwanese band Sunset Rollercoaster have a new collaborative album out today—a month and a half ago, they were both credited on RM’s latest album. All cool, but I love the music video for “Antenna,” which has Leah Dou and Greg Hsu.
No Party for Cao Dong were the big winners at the Golden Melody Awards, taking home Album of the Year, Mandarin Album of the Year, and Band of the Year—interesting pick but kind of feels like the music (disappointing by comparison to their former album) is overshadowed by the narrative. Accusefive somehow took home Song of the Year. MC Hot Dog for Best Mandarin Male Singer, Shi Shi for Best Mandarin Female Singer. Chiu Shu-chan won Best Hakka Album, Makav won Best Indigenous Album and Best New Artist. Panai won for Best Taiwanese Album, then used Tiananmen Square as an example of how music can be inherently political in her speech and promptly got most of the award discourse shut down on Weibo—some people use their awards acceptance for good!
Find the latest Canto Wrap and Mando Gap playlists on Spotify and me on Twitter here.