It’s been awhile since I’ve heard something genuinely new. Not to say there isn’t great music coming out all the time, but it all fits in somewhere. Wake’s The Fifth Finger EP most certainly does not. The 5 track EP boasts an incredibly unique lineup of tracks, all with one thing in common – square-wave dominated synths and heavy distortion. There’s an interesting mix of warm, hip-hop style drum flavor, glitch hop-y basslines, and unclassified accents in there that I most certainly have never heard before. Take ‘Squarefunk’, for example – at a midpoint in the track, Wake breaks down the drums into a stretched out sort of roll, then immediately transposes the same sort of style into bass/synth variations for the remainder of the track. In this experimental style of music, one often finds themselves bombarded with weirdness for the sake of weirdness; producers put elements into their tracks simply because they are weird, not because the weirdness adds anything to the track. That is not the case with Wake, ‘Squarefunk’ is a perfect example of weirdness done right. ‘Sunday at Gunpont’ is another highlight – a hugely distorted bassline drives the track while a hip-hop-like synth glides along the top end of the mix, resulting in some pretty gangster dance music. ‘Violently’ serves as the vocal anthem of the EP, reigning in the distortion in favor of robotic messages and a more indie style electro-pop sound that refreshes the ear.

Fifth Finger is set to release on August 21st with Proximal Records. In the meantime, enjoy some earlier work from Wake’s debut EP, Oakland Blackouts. I promise, it’s just as gnarly.