Black Moth Super Rainbow – now two decades into their candied up career – emerges from the technicolor pollen puckered Pennsylvania landscape with a new and reformulated fructose-blasted seventh album. Soft New Magic Dream is announced today for a June 6th release via Rad Cult, and it comes that familiar rush of flavors that pump directly from the BMSR soda fountain; that signature blend of strange neon nostalgia, sweetly melancholic synth pop wizardry, hip hop head bobbing, and citric acid tinged freak out flourish. Today they share the new single "Open the Fucking Fantasy," alongside an announcement of a North American tour in summer 2025. Check out the new searing new single via YouTube (as well as the video for the previously released "All 2 of Us"). Pre-order the album here. It’s been seven years since the more sinister Panic Blooms, and in that time plenty has happened in the house of Rad Cult, but with Soft New Magic Dream, we are invited to bask in the analog sweet and sour embrace of that classic and here notably chilled out and snoozled up BMSR sensibility. Soft New Magic Dream has a nuanced flavor profile; these are freaky love songs, they funk up crunchy and rattle the speakers here and there, they melt down gelatinous at the right temperatures, and even go full ballad in a few extra-soft spots. The album balances sugar kinked romance with their distinctive and here notably downtempo funky production. Never fully eschewing BMSR’s signature strange liquid centers, these songs still flirt with the uncanny while honing in on the deeply melodic and approachably groovy tendencies they’ve have been exploring in their twenty years of lid flipping. Soaring synth leads ribbon through taffy colored chord changes and highly tactile and fractured drum programming and breaks. Tobacco’s classic vocoder vocals, puckish as ever, burble fawning tenderness and body horror quasi erotic double dares in the fizzy saturated mist. These gummy serenades will leave you blissed out with a cavity-crumbled ear to ear grin. As the BMSR project has evolved, from the scuzzier and folk-tinged backwoods leaf worship of the first albums into the more anthemic roller disco fog machine scenes of their mid-career, and then darker turns in the last few recent albums, Soft New Magic Dream feels like another subtle and surprisingly tender twist on that now-classic sound you’ve come to expect from BMSR. A turn towards something more serene, more direct, playfully wooing us without totally ditching that enigmatic crooked smile. Lose your toothbrush in the clouds and get ready to guzzle down this potent marshmallow cloudscape concoction optimized for falling into face first.

On October 10, 2025, The Elephant 6 Recording Company releases Alarm, the second full-length album by Giant Day. Their first, 2024’s Glass Narcissus, bore a unique weight — it wasn’t just a debut album, it was the debut album by the first official Elephant 6 band in more than 15 years. With the 2023 wide-release of the documentary The Elephant 6 Recording Co. codifying the E6 “sound” for some and introducing it to others, what Giant Day — the duo of Derek Almstead (The Olivia Tremor Control, Elf Power, The Glands, of Montreal) and Emily Growden (Marshmallow Coast, Faster Circuits) — conjured into being on Glass Narcissus was, if not against type, notably darker than the lysergic, sun-drenched pop associated with their former Athens, Georgia home. The word “former” is important to Giant Day’s origin story. In 2020, Almstead and Growden moved from Athens to rural Pennsylvania, where they became caretakers of a family farm. They converted the horse stables into a studio and continued to write and record music, but they were dislocated from their sense of the world, let alone anything resembling a “scene.” That lack of place — what Almstead and Growden refer to as the “dissonance” between the beauty of their new home and the reality of the world beyond it — crept into their songs, a desperate signal emanating from off the grid. On Alarm, that signal is stronger, more urgent. With the momentum of Glass Narcissus at their back, Giant Day returned home from tour and poured themselves into making new music. The alluring, paranoid throb underpinning their songs is keener now, more lived in, as if the veil between the fears of characters whose points of view Almstead had written from on Glass Narcissus and his own had dropped. “It’s the first time I’ve ever put out a record that’s concurrent with what’s going on in the world,” he says, “where everything, music and lyrics, has that weight bearing on it.” Growden’s voice, a glassy siren’s call shimmering on the horizon of Giant Day’s songs, also finds new resonance on Alarm. Her singing remains cool and precise, but as with Almstead, there is less distance between her and the material now, reflecting her expanding role in composing these songs. When Almstead toured with The Ladybug Transistor in late 2024, she stayed home in Patience, writing lyrics and melodies in the dead calm of winter — more than imagining isolation, she offers up her own. “I’m proud of it, but it was hell,” she says with a laugh. “Being alone for it took me to a pretty dark place, but it forced me to be confident about the decisions I was making, the direction I wanted to go.” The result is unsettling — at turns furious and blissful; danceable, but in the way where what compels you to dance isn’t joy, but the need to purge oneself of emotion at the end of the day for the sake of making it through tomorrow. It’s a looser sound, not for lack of craft, but because the frayed nerve they’ve exposed is their own. Growden breathes the opening line of “Devil Dog,” “Is it painless,” with a determined chill, but the deliberate spacing of the phrase, breaking between “it” and “painless” is a line cracking through a sheet of ice that’s about to break. Instead, her focus snaps around Almstead’s bassline, and it’s as if the two of them are white-knuckling it together through a haunted house on the B-52’s “Planet Claire.” Horror is a prevailing theme of Alarm: the shock of it in newness, the way one grows numb to it, the brief respite we find from it, and the cycle that results. What Giant Day capture at their poppiest — as on “King of Ghosts,” a propulsive psych-funk raver in which Growden shrugs “I’ve guess you’ve got your reasons” to a rising swell of apocalyptic images — is very of this moment, the strange way in which the world feels like it should stop to redress any number of issues but instead hurtles ceaselessly towards oblivion, “Steady at the wheel / no distractions.” In “Golden Times,” Almstead and Growden find shelter in each other, a glittering soundscape of stacked harmonies, synths that tower into eternity, and reverb that slows time to a crawl. Like their home in Patience, it’s a bubble, one Almstead and Growden know they can’t occupy forever, and that could burst at any time. What’s so brave about Alarm is that Giant Day break down this fortress themselves, allowing birdsong to burst through the walls of synthesizer when they’ve turned sour and dystopic, letting a beam of sunlight in when things are at their darkest. “One minute closer to midnight,” Almstead sings on “Good Neighbor,” referring to the ticking of the doomsday clock. The world is terrifying — existence of the doomsday clock is proof enough of this — but in its last moment Alarm offers up something more than paranoia as a response: “Call if you need anything.” What ends up breaking on Alarm is not ice, but spiritual winter — there is something green, something verdant, something hopeful in that final note, however unwritten the future beyond it is. One aches to hear something so tender. Almstead and Growden ache in finding it. But that ache is like a muscle knitting more tightly together, growing stronger, more resilient — something will survive into the future, no matter how hostile that future is.