Here’s how I imagine Mr. Kitty: Squirreled away in a stuffy home studio, surrounded by wires and synths and weird cat masks, slamming energy drinks and Marlboro Reds, doing nothing — seriously, nothing — but writing new songs. I mean, his Bandcamp says it all; the 19-year-old Arlington producer (a.k.a. Forrest Carney) has 33 separate albums, singles and remix collections available on the site — and though some are better than others, their passion is clear and severe. You almost have to love Mr. Kitty, simply because he loves music so effing much.

Plus, you know, his poison-tipped electro-pop is pretty easy to love. Shades of French house, crystalline ambient, motorik techno and pure saccharine pop collide to create an irresistible energy, this hot-blooded excitement that’s as fresh as it is contagious. Carney seems insistent on displaying his entire journey as Mr. Kitty — like some sort of Muslimgauze-esque comment on creation and completion — and if most recent albums Realms and D E Δ T H are any indication, he’s got an incredible road ahead of him. Keep going, Kitty. I can’t wait to hear where you end up next.

Grab the releases at Bandcamp, then check Kitty’s Tumblr (for lots of photography and endearing commentary) and Soundcloud (for even more remixes and one-offs).

Uncarresed by Mr.Kitty

†‡† – Ghetto Ass Witch (Mr. Kitty Remix) by Mr.Kitty

Destroy Me by Mr.Kitty

Bestial Mouths are a real tribute to their name: Feral, intense. Luscious. They sound like blood dripping off lips or flesh torn from bone. Despite any bit of maudlin imagery, that deep and watery haze of a visual vibe, there’s nothing detached about this Los Angeles band; each song sounds like it’d claw out your heart if it could.

Now multiply that bloodlust by a trillion and you’ve got debut Hissing Veil. This thing’ll send you recoiling: Carnal beats, synths piercing all jagged and rusty through your veins, Lynette Cerezo’s howl like a sacrifice waiting to happen.

Bestial Mouths channel the long-defunct Jaks in a darker, even more confrontational way; rather than come at you with pure noise and bravado, they attack with legitimate desperation. An animalistic reaction to the constant thrum of fear. Their Tumblr says it best: Even in my dreams, the screaming never stops.

Grab the (very) limited-edition Hissing Veil LP from Dais Records and lurk around LA for one of the band’s shows. Rumor has it they’re vicious.

Glass by Bestial Mouths

Small Prey by Bestial Mouths

It’s a beautiful dichotomy, the Pacific Northwest, all lush and cold, gray and vibrant. The cool concrete of cities bellow from between mountains and forests and ocean, and in one of those cities — the mostly industrial Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, BC — lives the duo Animal Bodies.

This is what they sound like: Steel and pine. Saltwater. Street grime. Animal Bodies, like Joy Division and Manchester before them, encapsulate the feeling of a region; all the nervous energy of an industrial neighborhood nestled into so much green nature. Practically speaking, their just-released LP Kiss of the Fang is something close to Neu! and Section 25, Katrina Ford wailing in Love Life or the frantic guitars of the VSS.

But Sam and Natasha would be the first to tell you: Animal Bodies isn’t hinged on specific musical inspirations. It comes from found images and newspaper clippings, samples of a woman smoking crack outside Sam’s building and those cawing, processed seagull noises. It’s about songs that conjure the smoggy, gray dread of city living and the hazy forests looming only miles outside.

Stream Kiss of the Fang below, then grab the vinyl from fellow Pacific Northwesterners Sweating Tapes. And if you’re in LA (and, you know, see this in time), head to Part Time Punks tonight; Animal Bodies is playing with Soft Metals and Feathers, i.e. a show you seriously don’t want to miss.

Kachinas are ancestral spirits. They’re messengers and elements, souls and animals and family. Pueblo cosmology accords them incredible importance to both the spiritual and natural worlds — and that’s the space, that little slice of cosmic purgatory, where San Francisco’s Swallow Key operates.

Released on the ever-mystical 11.11.11, debut album Kachina is a firelit, tribal-infused tangle of electronic jams. Think Bear in Heaven meets a minimal-techno Fever Ray; Swallow Key’s Eujene Oakden is never outright sinister, but he conjures the gauzy atmosphere of mythology and folklore enough to feel ancient blood coursing through every beat. Vocal-centric tracks like “We Got The Honey” and “Dark Lit Paradise” pulse with air and fire and earth, while chilled instrumentals “Give Her Tattoos With Octopus Ink” and “Capsules” shoot somewhere into the heavens, well beyond consciousness, to soar with souls, spirits and stars. Swallow Key has an awkwardness to it, this organic and sometimes childlike sense of movement, but Oakden always circles back to the project’s roots: The sacred and elemental dance of the spirits.

Download Kachina from Swallow Key’s Bandcamp and check his Soundcloud for remixes and DJ sets.

Dark Lit Paradise by Swallow Key

Seekers by Swallow Key

Capsules by Swallow Key

Give Her Tattoos With Octopus Ink by Swallow Key

Another gem from the ClanDestine Records camp. Montreal duo Spastic Joy make jams that glide through gray skies, their Factory-era tone and wind-chilled melody hovering somewhere just above sea level. Think early New Order with a more…you know, spastic vibe; though they never erupt outright, the tracks on debut cassette God’s Lover quake with a certain misalignment. The sense that each glassy verse could shatter in your face with just the flick of a knob.

Lebensborn by Spastic Joy

But for all that nervous atmosphere, the majority of God’s Lover is contented above all else. Menes and Rubin Vitriol make melancholy feel like a favorite threadbare jacket: Comfortable, familiar, beyond nostalgic. Somewhere between the jagged Peter Hook homage and throaty vocal back-and-forth is a wistfulness, all sweet and young, for a more effortless sort of joy. The instant pleasure of a catchy guitar line, jumpy beat, simple lyric; sonic complexity that doesn’t actually feel complex. Credit some of that to Xavier Paradis’ mix — each part sparkles and sways in harmony with everything surrounding it — but don’t think too hard about the specifics. Even when they’re lurching around more menacing tracks like “PVC Recorder”, Spastic Joy are a quick and lovely pleasure: A duo soaring smoothly through those gray skies, squinting at the concrete mess below.

Grab the extremely limited-edition God’s Lover (while you still can) at ClanDestine’s Big Cartel, and definitely check the Ela Orleans-produced video below. It’s a pretty impeccable repurposing of footage from 60s lo-fi filmmakers George and Mike Kuchar.

Whatever by Spastic Joy

Somewhere in Porto, Portugal — at the edge of blue earth, this ancient city perched on a river — Ivo Pacheco sits in a room, making songs. He makes “Tears,” and it sounds like tears. “Change and Love” like the terrifying uncertainty of both. He’s influenced by witch house but well beyond its borders; IVVVO is like Porto itself. Old, mysterious and entirely its own being.

It’s tough to know where to begin with IVVVO; for a producer so entwined in ghostly atmospheres, his catalogue is thicker than molasses. If you’re like me, you’ll start with the achingly dark ambience of “Tears” (by accident, via Don’t Die Wondering), then backward to the hypnotic I Just Love You EP on Terrain Ahead and the most recent For U single. That one, according to Pachenco, isn’t an actual release. It’s a gift for a girl. But if all the care and emotion in the world brought him to that place, the chilled and minimal beauty of it, it’s worth everyone’s attention. Pachenco’s best songs, after all, are his most intimate: The sinister syntax of witch house morphed into a more harmonic, moon-hued melancholy, all of it whispering directly in your ear. This is music made for basements and bedrooms. For crying and hating and falling in love, somewhere in the darkness of Porto, at the mouth of a cool, docile river.

Find IVVVO’s latest tracks and remixes — including a just-released collab with Palmistry — on Soundcloud and Bandcamp, and download several of his EPs directly from his website.

Change and love by IVVVO

for u by IVVVO

Please by IVVVO

Goitia Deitz don’t write songs. As far as I can tell — as far as Facebook, Soundcloud and any number of blog posts assure me — nothing about the minimal electronic duo’s music is pre-planned. I’d like to think they sit with a pile of synthesizers and effects boxes, patches and crates of records, just watching what happens when they throw all these Italo and komische concepts against each other, but let’s be serious. I have no idea what goes on behind those studio doors. Goitia Deitz are shadowy: Two producers, living in Brooklyn, not telling you their names. They could be back there bouncing melodies off Jandek and JT LeRoy for all I know; their process is just one in a haystack of mysteries.

But the process doesn’t matter yet. We’ll get to that. What matters now is this: Goitia Motherfucking Deitz, whoever the hell they are, make some of the best new music you’ve heard all year (however the hell they make it).

R O M A N C E / C O M A by Goitia Deitz

Released by the impeccably curated UK label DiscError, the duo’s debut ROMANCE/COMA 7” is an exercise in restriction; experimentation as medium as message. No pre-planning or recording. Nothing but analogue gear. No more than one take. But it’s through that restriction that ROMANCE/COMA finds its no-holds-barred pulse. Aside from a little mixing from James Aparicio (These New Puritans, Mute Records), the record is very nearly untouched; live energy at its most visceral. The sharp beats and swaggering, propulsive Italo bass of “COMA” crashing against the primal, detuned “LINE” and the sweet comedown of “ROMANCE”. So many noises and melodies building and building, disappearing when you least expect it, erupting only when the intensity’s too much to bear. Despite its obvious Krautrock inspiration, there’s something almost Avant Hard-era Add N To (X) about Goitia Deitz; the manipulation of analogue equipment into explosive, hysterical, uncharted territory.

Grab the 7” from DiscError now — seriously, these things won’t last — and check out Goitia Deitz’s unreleased tracks and mixes on Soundcloud. Whoever they are, whatever they’re doing, they’re doing it fucking right.

Full disclosure: Warm Hands is my friend. I’ve known Conrad Vollmer for more than 10 years — the just-old-enough-to-drink days long before he played guitar in The Fugue or Tijuana; before Warm Hands was even a vague consideration — and I’ve watched him move from project to project, city to city, inventing and re-inventing. Becoming, gradually, this musician who makes these songs, these ice-cold and intimate songs, forever toeing the line between joyousness and a quiet nervous breakdown.

Songs like that are hard to make. I’m not writing about Warm Hands because he’s my friend; I’m writing about him because he fucking makes them. And for all their minimalism, their terrified and resigned silence, they wash over you like frantic, roiling water.

Warm Hands feels like this: The moment just before a person drowns, when the brain’s lack of oxygen supposedly sends a rush of euphoria through every desperate nerve. It’s the sensation of utter misery and pure happiness struggling to co-exist, and tracks like “Darker” and “Anxiety” fully exploit that disconnect. Even with all the harsh white space, there’s something strangely optimistic about these songs; as if the only way to handle impending doom is to smile right through it. Warm Hands, despite its bleak and detuned atmosphere, is nothing but that lock-jawed grin.

Download his side of the Petra Schelm/Warm Hands split on Soundcloud — the physical copies of both this and his split with Bad Life are sold out via Clan Destine — and watch for a new EP out later this year on Tundra. (The perks of being a friend: I’ve heard bits of the new tracks, and they’re seriously his best yet.)

Anxiety by Warm Hands

(Cold) Graves by Warm Hands

No matter which coast has dibs on your heart (if your heart even cares about such things), it’s tough to deny the pulse currently thrumming through Los Angeles. From the icy Violet Tremors and Frank Alpine to the sweltering Present Moment and just-transplanted Jewels of the Nile; from Stallengrad’s black metal disco to Teams’ strobed-out dance; from Chelsea Wolfe to Zombelle, Bestial Mouths to Disaro, Killing Spree to Part Time Punks to dozens, hundreds, more: The Los Angeles heartbeat is, at its best, bloody and beautiful and constant.

And then there’s Brandy St. John. She makes beauty like you wouldn’t believe, the would-be oxygen to LA’s blood, but you probably have yet to meet her; though it’s gaining loads of traction, her solo project The Long Wives still simmers just below the radar. But it’s the good kind of simmer, the deep and mysterious kind; the kind that makes you wonder how you’ve managed to miss her dark, tumultuous fallen-angel folk…and when, where, you can hear more.

Holy Water by The Long Wives

Self-described as writing “songs about death and love, and the death of love,” St. John spins haunting yarns through madness and misery, endless hope and its terrible indecency, each woven simply with a guitar, piano and her throaty, impassioned voice. The Long Wives is the stuff of lucid dreams; tangible unil you try to touch it — then it whispers away like so much cool air. But close your eyes and go back for more; hers is a dreamscape of angels and demons, love and its perfect loss, the Los Angeles of Francesca Lia Block and Nick Cave and Trinie Dalton. The veins of a city, all that beauty, bloody and infinite.

Hear more at The Long Wives’ Soundcloud, and watch her exclusive videos on YouTube. (Embeds were disabled, but trust me. Go.)

Off Toward the Great Sea by The Long Wives

They came from New Zealand to make noises like hell. Aucklanders Adrian Bird and Jordan Puryer are creeping onto your shores, lurching ‘round your cities; they’re dropping watery, terrible deaths at the foot of your door.

They used to be different. Different band, different name, different cast of characters. And they still play in that band, 1995 — technically, this is a side project — but something happened. Or maybe nothing happened, or maybe it all happened by mistake. Only Bird and Pruyer can tell you exactly how Mellow Grave startled into being, but I can tell you this: Once you’ve heard them, it’s like you’ve known them all along. They make music both familiar and dangerous: the sea at midnight, waiting to drag you under.

It’s like the Nine Inch Nails that never was. A skewed The Fragile spawned from a witch house universe with no expectation; just chaotic, nightmarish electronic tracks created by two people exploiting every possibility. Mellow Grave is at once metallic and fluid, direct and imprecise, sexy and sexless, with hip-hop and shoegaze and industrial burned perfectly into each other — and they’ve only been at it for little more than a year. Debut full-length Smoke Filled The Room, We Slept (featuring tracks from March’s Mellow Grave EP) feels so developed, it’s tough to imagine where the duo will have leapt by next September, or the September after that. And here’s hoping they see it through that far: Mellow Grave are among the most promising new bands to come from the seething electronic underworld.

Smoke Filled The Room is available digitally on Bandcamp now. Grab the LP from LA’s Living Tapes.

Wood Grain by Mellow Grave

Night Society – Hussle Club [MELLOW GRAVE REMIX] by Mellow Grave

DUST by Mellow Grave