- Juliana Huxtable's new rock band with Jealous Orgasm and Via App is as excellent as you'd expect it to be.
- DJs and producers who rose from the East Coast club scene in the early '10s, now all grown up, are pivoting to rock music. LSDXOXO's forthcoming debut album is influenced by pop-punk icon Fefe Dobson. DJ Haram spat over mangled distortion on her 2023 EP Handplay. And for Tygapaw's second album released that same year, Love Has Never Been A Popular Movement, they sang and played guitar. In May of last year, I sensed a deep, nostalgic craving for angst in a crowd gathered in Williamsburg to watch Juliana Huxtable, Via App and Jealous Orgasm perform as the band Tongue In Mind for the first time. As a throng of chic club heads—who included Telfar and Kelela—bounced and yelped below the stage, a friend beside me turned to me and said, happily, "I feel like I'm 18 again."
The members of Tongue In The Mind, individually, make seriously camp art. Huxtable is a techno DJ-writer-artist whose Fotografiska show in Berlin, USSYPHILIA, paired stream-of-conscious poetry with furry-adjacent self-portraits that replaced her lower body with a voluptuous snake tail. Jealous Orgasm, or Joe Rinaldo Heffernan, promotes his music—which ranges from classical piano, rock and experimental techno—with photos of himself landing a handstand, holding a goat, sweating while leaning backward in a chair, mouth formed into a tight O. Via App, AKA Dylan Shir, evokes trickster energy as well but more subtly, through club beats that spiral out into glassy fractals. As a team, their dynamic works well. Huxtable feeds her coquettishness into raw lyrics, Heffernan contributes freewheeling post-punk guitar and Shir, head down, steers the boat with thunderous bass and beats that shuffle themselves into oblivion.
So when Huxtable shows up sounding vaguely British despite being from College Station-Bryan, Texas, yelling "Unchained with my ussy out!" over blazing breakbeats on "Free Sex," you already know what you're in for. Tongue In The Mind's lyrics paint scenes of Walmart stripper poles held up by Gorilla Glue, cartoon chicks rubbing comic book clits and prodigal suns. Huxtable's poetry background is the wind gusting through these lurid, seedy portals. On the eight-minute "Key And String," originally published as a shorter praise poem in 2023, Huxtable comfortably swings between breezy spoken word and song. At the track's hook, she sing-talks before melting into a melodic exhale: "I didn't really mean to feel like that it sees my lack and it peels right"—she pauses—"baaaack."
The ecstasy of Tongue In The Mind transcends its lyrics. The many instrumental turns of "Pretty Canary" include serrated drones and electric guitar that both anchors the song and veers off on its own, screeching and cavorting. On "Free Sex," the racing guitar riffs and breakbeats slow its breakneck pace like a train pulling up to the station, leaving a chunky, hollowed beat for Huxtable to patter over: "Au-to-sex-u-al / rode in on the lex-i-cal / greasy-sad-black-engines over my sad trail." On the closing "Plasmatic Yearning (For The Horizon's Kiss Good Night" Huxtable wordlessly hiccups and careens over a subdued landscape. Thrums of guitar sound small in the distance and sub bass rumbles the entire nebulous structure. By the song's end Huxtable chokes repeatedly, surrounded by a closing wall of distortion. There are no words to cling to, but it's bursting with expression.
Tracklist01. Pretty Canary
02. Free Sex
03. Key and String
04. Plasmatic Yearning (For The Horizon's Kiss Goodnight)