A squelching keyboard. A bleeping melody. Finger snaps holding down a backbeat. Then a voice raps, defiant, powerful. “Mask on / me and my bitches paint the city / Queer bitch gang, put ‘em up if you with it / Flags out the window, it’s the 203 / not a cis het bitch that be fucking with me,” Indigaux intones. They keep going, gender blending, but the devotion to place unwavering: “Bitch I’m from New Haven,” they rap. “Every winter is a bump.”
So starts “Blocgrrrl,” the first song from Indigaux’s Aux Aux Aux, the New Haven-based musician’s debut album on New Haven’s own Fake Four Inc. It’s a blast of present-day queer politics set over a futuristic soundscape, and it — along with a couple other releases — show how New Haven’s artists keep pushing their sound forward.
“Indigaux (aka Indigaux The Fae) is an extradimensional hyperpunk rap artist of the digital hardcore / sugartrap diaspora,” Aux Aux Aux’s liner notes. “A dark fusion of catchy bubblegrunge beats with edgy queercore lyrics, Indigaux emits a thrilling enigma of sounds that stimulate the moshpit baddie within each of their listeners. Claiming to have arrived on earth after a long journey from innerspace, Indigaux brings an otherworldly presence to the studio and stage that rapidly transports the audience from one realm to the other.”
Those who have caught Indigaux live at various venues in New Haven know that description plays out in the ferocity of their performance. That energy translates directly to recording as well, whether it’s in the shimmering stomp of “Kikyaux,” the sinister rumble, scintillating synths, and club beats of “As the Soul,” or the galloping 8‑bit beat on ”)Numb(“ that bring to mind the most epic videogame boss fight out there. Indigaux saves the best for last: “Spyraux” and “Elm City Bitch” are their jankiest, most mesmerizing beats of the album, and don’t sound quite like anything else out there.
Meanwhile, beneath the defiance of the lyrics is a portrait of a young rapper who embraces what they are as an ever-changing entity secure in their strength. “Don’t call me queen because I’m a pharaoh,” they rap on “Kikyaux.” “I am the style that you cannot claim / I am the wolf that you cannot tame,” they intone on “As the Soul.” With an album like Aux Aux Aux, they make their boundless freedom infectious.
Indigaux finds something of a kindred spirit in Olive Tiger, who, in their music, weave together acoustic and electronic instruments into a lush, skittering soundscape that writhes with emotion. On “Bless You,” the first song from their latest release, Softest Eyes: Side C, violins, cellos, and drums meet voices, electric guitars, and keyboards in a dark, rich harmonic structure that partakes of hymns and soul songs. Olive has a gift for expressing the complex emotion of wishing someone the best while at the same time wanting never to see them again. “Bless you baby, bless you baby,” they sing. “Bless you baby, be gone.”
“Kintsugi” then rides an urgent rhythm while at the same time getting even more lush, as Olive’s voices sneaks through it all as though walking through a dark forest, until in the second half the song folds open with driving strings, guitars, and epic keys. “Tear It Down” has a straight-up rock strut, while “See A Light” is built on Laurie Anderson-like glitches updated for the future, finding the way forward to optimism. “I think I see a light / Can I trust my eyes? / I’ve been here before / It’s been getting bright / It’s coming through the blinds / Open up some more,” Olive sings. “All I want is to adore you.” It leads into “Surrender,” the album’s closer, which is also its warmest and most straightforward, a glorious sunrise of a song after a tumultuous, thrilling night.
If Indigaux and Olive Tiger are both rushing headlong into the future, on Soon, Pīlu — Suhail Yusuf Khan on sarangi and Henry Hodder on guitar — are finding their way there with less urgency but no less surety. The sarangi is a traditional South Asian instrument that, in its sound, carries the sense of centuries of history, and Khan leans into that in his lyrical playing, which moves from wistful to wrenching over the course of five expansive songs and in sometimes in the space of a few seconds.
The sense of invention comes from the dialogue of the sarangi with Hodder’s guitar, which he plays with the same sense of his own Western folk tradition. The two players don’t try to meld their styles together. They don’t have to. Instead, they find the places where they connect easily, through deep listening and deeply empathic playing. Musically, they engage in the kind of cultural dialogue so many struggle for in political and social spheres; they show that you don’t have to give up who you are, where you’re from, or what you’re becoming to join together with others and make something better.