DEER PARK/ Deer park is the music of Andy Santella, whose variegated soundworld spans close-mic’d bedroom guitar pop, low-lidded rap, and hard-slapping production for the likes of fakemink, jackzebra, and Jawnino. His Deleted-enabled debut album Terra Infirma splits his sound neatly into two halves: the first sees echoic guitar language meet traditional song forms, while the second works in repetitions and elisions, electronic and acoustic. Since then, his sound has expanded across territories, drifting at ease between a range of formal registers — fogged-out turnups alongside Mechatok, drone shows in Parisian churches, sylvan Soundcloud ballads, and collabs with an eclectic constellation of musicians: Chanel Beads, Ivy Knight, Thomas Thatcher, and many more. Deer park weaves an all-his own sensibility from the chance encounters and horseshoe theories of contemporary microscenes. TOUCHING ICE/ Touching Ice is a Los Angeles–based band making emotionally charged electronic music where industrial textures, towering pop hooks, and cinematic production collide. Their songs move between moments of fragile intimacy and overwhelming catharsis, pairing haunting melodies with explosive walls of sound. Centered around the creative partnership of vocalist Abigail Reese and producer Dominic Colangelo, Touching Ice approaches every release like the soundtrack to an imagined world. Reese’s striking lyricism explores longing, identity, and obsession with disarming honesty, while Colangelo’s meticulous production draws from electronic music, indie rock, film, and experimental pop to build songs that are both immediate and unpredictable. Since forming in 2023 in Los Angeles, the band has earned a reputation for immersive live performances that blur the line between concert and cinematic experience. Onstage, Touching Ice expands into a three-piece, bringing live guitar to its cinematic electronic arrangements without sacrificing the precision of its studio recordings. The band has shared stages with artists including Model/Actriz, Feeble Little Horse, Provoker, and Cowgirl Clue, steadily carving out a space where vulnerability and intensity exist side by side. Rather than chasing genre, Touching Ice follows atmosphere to create music that is at once beautiful and abrasive, intimate and enormous, familiar and unsettling. THE HEALINGPOWER OF HORSES/ Cambridge-hailing duo The Healing Power of Horses’ debut EP on section1, the Los Angeles-based sister label to Partisan Records, drifts like a transmission caught mid-air with songs that lurch, glide, and shimmer as if caught between memory and dream. Brittle rhythms crack against blown-out textures, giving way to moments of weightless melody that hover just above themselves. The tracks move through flashes of paranoia,mercy, and hope, flickering between the intimate and the uncanny, with each turn revealing something shiny, disorienting, and faintly heavenly. Drawing from a vivid internal collage that spans Dancer in the Dark, Adaptation, and the spectral gloss of early internet imagery, alongside the interior worlds of writers like George Eliot and Sayaka Murata, the record gleams between the intimate and the surreal. There is no singular narrative so much as a shared atmosphere, a sense that the music is reaching toward something just out of reach. Guided by first takes and a refusal to overwork anything, The Healing Power of Horses arrive with a debut that feels immediate and unfiltered, chasing that elusive sense of heaven, however briefly it appears.