On 2023’s The Flying Toad Circus, Milwaukee “emo-adjacent rock melancholia” group Bug Moment spun a hushed and haunting spell. There were moments of brilliant noise and anguished cries, but the bulk of the record quietly channeled the swamp-submerged carousel on the album’s cover.
Fast-forward two years and Bug Moment is back with a new five-song EP, The Lazer Collection. Gone are the “30-second soundscapes of crickets, night wind, and music box ditties” from Flying Toad. In their place are blown-out walls of guitar, bass, and drums; gorgeously glitchy vocals from Jasmine Rosenblatt; and the occasional death-metal howls of pain and fury. Oh, and song titles that reference video games.
Opener “Destroy All Monsters” begins quietly enough, but it soon gives way to a riotous hyper-pop explosion. “Purple Guy” scores big on distorted Rosenblatt vocals and pummeling work from the rest of the band (Grayson Edward, Elias Dorsey, Aidan Hoppens). The title of “Arbiter” nods to the Halo franchise but its sound is pure driving emo, complete with late-song gang vocals. “Chaos Emerald” is both The Lazer Collection‘s most heart-on-its-sleeve track and its heaviest. Five-minute closer “Moonlight Greatsword,” meanwhile, finds Rosenblatt in full soul-baring mode. “I wasn’t meant to carry this weight like I expected you to do,” Rosenblatt sings. “A different version of me gets to have you, and that’s enough for me.”
“Our intentions were to make a quick little homemade EP with a looser theme than our full album, well, that didn’t exactly happen how we hoped,” Bug Moment says. “While writing these songs we all individually and collectively went through so much. We played so many shows, heard so much music, and met and lost so many amazing people that our original vision morphed into this lil project.”
This “lil project” ends up being Bug Moment’s best yet.
Bug Moment will celebrate the release of The Lazer Collection Saturday, March 8 at Cactus Club.
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