There’s something phantom-like about NEW YORK’s presence, their un-Googleable name serving as both obstacle and invitation. In an era where young artists saturate every digital channel to fight algorithmic obscurity, the London-based duo of American Coumba Samba and Estonian Gretchen Lawrence have chosen deliberate elusiveness instead. It’s a radical stance that extends into their music: capturing digitally mediated existence without succumbing to its demands for constant visibility.
2024’s rapstar was a deadpan testament to the terminally online. The album occupied a strange middle ground between tedium and unease: grating yet oddly comforting, music so inert it became the perfect soundtrack to digital ennui. Their brand of anhedonic pop captures something essential about our current collective emotional state – the peculiar numbness of the present. Push allows for something approaching actual warmth while maintaining its core aesthetic of productive detachment.
The opening tracks establish this evolution: Samba’s vocals maintain their characteristic distance but reach toward genuine emotion rather than the cynical self-commentary of rapstar. Where that album offered hollow lifestyle mantras like “Zone out when you talk / Indie girl on the go”, Push explores more sincere romantic territory, though always refracted through the aesthetic of conscious remove.
Informed by synthpop and Detroit electro, here they twist both into a dissonant yet strangely intimate suite of 80s-inflected love songs. A Y2K flavour runs through the production too, evoking pre-millennium electronica without tipping into pastiche. Lawrence’s production is disciplined, often channelling the sleepy minimalism of Young Marble Giants while ensuring melodies land exactly where they need to. On ‘2 am’, this approach reaches its most sophisticated expression – the track sounds like Mr. Oizo’s ‘Flat Beat’ countered by emotional synth work, like two songs occupying the same space: the rave and inevitable comedown. It’s a perfect example of NEW YORK’s knack for finding profundity in contradiction.
The fractured ‘together’exemplifies this approach, a “love song” that splinters romantic sentiment through stuttering samples and exhausted drum programming. Lawrence’s production excels at containing the chaos of information overload within irresistible rhythms, drawing inspiration from the mundane ubiquity of background music – those anonymous tracks that soundtrack podcast ads and hold-music limbo.
Samba’s writing operates through a kind of emotional collage technique, her diaristic observations fragmented and reassembled in ways that recall postmodern literary experiments. Her vocals serve as both narrator and subject, creating an intoxicating soundtrack to digitally mediated urban existence where sincerity and performance blur.
The EP’s brevity works in its favour; six tracks feel exactly right for this kind of concentrated mood study. Push distils how emotional life functions under constant digital translation – accepting the terms of our era while maintaining just enough distance to examine them.
