We Speak Music
Ledher Blue will sweep you away with scuzzy effervescent slab of indie-rock ‘Fun’

Ledher Blue’s new album ‘Fait Divers’ came from an existential crisis. Admittedly, it was shameful to accept that the most generic of internal conflicts were at hand: the “what’s the purpose of life?”s and the “why am I here?”s out of every self-help book seemed adequate, but needed to be articulated in a particular way. What was the purpose of my life until now; “Why am I here?” Zé from Ledher Blue thought as he got into Dublin.
Ledher Blue are the product of two distinctively different individuals that the waves of life comically decided to beach in a northern town of Portugal – Guimarães. The city is known for its historical meaning in the birth of Portugal, for its nasty hooligans, for its emigrant parvenus, its domestic parvenus, its humble proletariat, its shame, envy, resignation and most importantly a mystical ability of seeing the depressed times – which have long been in the region – united in empathetic jealousy, certain that betters days are coming. The club keeps losing but we’ll be champions, the people are poor but we’ll get better, everything may be bad but he will rise in a foggy sunrise.
Zé and Pedro, the pair behind Ledher Blue, encapsulated the diversity of the town in an existential way. One was always happy, one was always longing, one found a girl, the other found the one, one flourished, the other stagnated when one fell in love with the bars and was now bored the other said, “don’t gamble your life for a couple of poems”, but impressively they would always converge from different perspectives to the same idea. Certainly, one loved Illiad for Aquiles and the other for Hector, one for Vronski another for Levin, one for Grey the other for Vane, one for Liam another for Noel… what matters is that instinctively – or “zoroastrianly” – the pure meaning for their message was not what each wanted to say but the product of the pressure. This conflict was in their youth the birth of friendship and in their slope the birth of the band.
That is why one can say that one song looks happy with mournful feel, or rebellious with fearful grooves; it can be satirical in lyricism and classical in structure, it tries to be a singular unitarian message independent of the peripheral chatter. It’s alternative sometimes, post punk in the others, even poppy on some choruses, but most importantly it always feels original and unique.
Zé’s move to Dublin meant a big separation for the friends and bandmates, but most importantly brought a new perspective for their old problem. The problematic youth from Guimarães, their problematic youth, was not unique to the land. It could be observed on the Irish town. The lifeless eyes, the change dribbling in an oversized pocket, the fortuity misfortune, the keys in the bathroom, a generation sprayed with anxiety and embalmed in panic. It was paralysing. The song forcefully quieted on the lips of a dead philosopher was slivering to the bones of our time. It was as if everybody – even unconsciously – believed that regret was the only certainty of existence; that unescapable longing for the unlived life. And as the uniqueness of our situation dissolved, as our small town became countries, we found new binoculars, not only to inspect reality but most importantly our own. Transcendentally, we found our true selves, which we may have seen before, but were now so overwhelmed to the point of acceptance. As theory imprisoned and pressured reality, the only answer was King Sebastian. The individual who could look down at Narcissus smugly and was able to curse an whole nation was mystified as the long awaited saviour. Sebastian may have lead Portugal to the abyss when he disappeared in the desert but with it created a myth; the myth that he would return in a foggy morning and save us all. Hope. This hope was what united our town. What united the past generations from this existential dread and what would cure our generation. Sebastianism was the cure, it was clear.
“Not only the message was so clear it seemed to dazzle but also the universe, the habitat of each song was drawn.”, says Ledher Blue. “We felt rain during ‘Dublinesque’, the popped dark smoke from old cars for ‘Sorrows of the Amended Hearts’, the lady on the bus in ‘Craic’, the winey red out of a absolutist cape emerged on ‘Èlan’ with libertarian scarlet blues and shadowy greens, we heard the people talking in the pubs of ‘Fun’, we could distinguish the whiteness of their teeth; it stopped being a group of songs and became something else. Complete. Portugality embroiled in Irish thread. A message for all but about none, a concept for the unknown based on the past, a tale without morals.”
New single ‘Fun’ is a scuzzy effervescent slab of guitar music, that according to the band “comes from a place of hot headedness, so to speak” and is “intended for narcissistic types”. The band’s sound on the track conjures the best of 90s and early 00s indie bands, with Arctic Monkeys-esque nonchalant vocals, underpinned by a driving rhythm section that is impossible not to get swept away in, as the track’s fast paced, gritty guitars implode into a screaming mess.
Ledher Blue’s new album ‘Fait Divers’ is out now.
New Single ‘Fun’ is released 9th May.

We Speak Music
Mutual Shock’s Nervous Systems Showcases The Architecture of Alienation

Seattle’s ever-shifting musical landscape has long given rise to voices that thrive in the gray areas—between genres, between moods, between identities. Dan Powers, the artist behind Mutual Shock, adds a new entry into that canon with Nervous Systems, a debut album that operates as both sonic exorcism and sociocultural diagnosis. At its core, the record is a meditation on life under late capitalism—a terrain where dread, detachment, and digital blur are not just thematic textures, but everyday conditions.
Emerging from the shadowy emotional terrain explored on his 2024 EP Stimulus Progression, Powers takes his vision further here—not louder, but deeper. Nervous Systems doesn’t seek to overwhelm. Instead, it seeps in. It’s less an album you “hear” and more one you slowly inhabit, like a strange new architecture that reveals its structure room by room. The choice of analog synths and skeletal drum programming isn’t retro affectation; it’s a design choice rooted in feeling, in tension, in deliberate control.
Mutual Shock sits in conversation with a lineage of outsider electronic music—Drab Majesty’s theatrical alienation, Molchat Doma’s post-Soviet nostalgia, the mechanized introspection of Nine Inch Nails—but avoids being pinned down by any one aesthetic. Powers is less interested in genre homage than he is in emotional architecture. Each sound feels like a corridor leading somewhere disorienting yet familiar, like a half-remembered dream of an office building at night.
Thematically, the album is deeply of this moment. It’s about burnout, yes, but not in the way we meme it. It’s about the deeper erosion beneath the hustle: the spiritual confusion, the existential rootlessness, the constant digital hum that keeps us from ever fully arriving in our own lives. Powers channels these anxieties not with histrionics, but with careful understatement—letting the atmosphere do the heavy lifting. It’s as much sociology as it is art.
What makes Nervous Systems so vital is that it doesn’t offer escape. Instead, it offers recognition. In a time when much of culture aims to distract, Mutual Shock chooses to reflect. Powers holds a mirror to the disquiet and lets it speak—not with panic, but with precision. The result is an album that lingers long after the final note, not as a soundtrack to alienation, but as a language for it.
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