Three Track Week: Signals #5
- Raven
- May 7
- 4 min read
From self-address and cultural friction to identity sustained across time
Not every act of self-definition sounds the same. This week's Three Track Week: Signals #5 selection brings together three independent artists: UK pop artist Starling, cult lounge-pop act Love Jones, and Berlin-based psych-disco trio Zoon Phonanta, each at a distinct point in their practice and each working through a different relationship between voice, language and identity. Rather than converging around a shared sound, these tracks point toward different ways of speaking on one's own terms: rewriting internal narrative through direct self-address, sustaining a sensibility across decades without concession, and constructing identity through linguistic and cultural friction. Signals does not document fixed positions. It captures movement - how artists construct, suspend and reconfigure who they are across different stages of their practice.
Listen to this week’s Three Track Week: Signals selection
This week’s tracks are available in our playlist INDIENOXZINE I Selections, offering a direct way to engage with the sounds discussed in this feature. Follow the playlist on Spotify to stay updated with new selections each week.
Starling - Self-Address and the Rewriting of Internal Narrative
With "Cupcake", Starling turns a personal ritual into a compositional act. Written on her birthday, a day she describes as historically triggering feelings of shame and inadequacy, the track does not process those feelings retrospectively. It rewrites them in real time.
Positioned within what Starling calls a "pop therapy" ethos, the track pairs sharp-edged production with lyricism that moves between vulnerability and deliberate self-reclamation. The sonic textures are playful, almost subversive, but the underlying gesture is precise: choosing kindness over self-criticism not as resolution, but as active intervention. The collaboration with producer Patch Boshell, who also helmed her previous single "Queen", reinforces this directness. The production does not aestheticize the struggle; it holds space for the shift. As a signal, "Cupcake" points toward a form of independent practice in which songwriting functions as self-address. Identity is not reflected upon from a distance, but spoken to directly - reshaped through the act of writing itself. Following BBC Radio support and a growing platform built around empowerment and connection, Starling's practice extends beyond music into a broader project of narrative reauthorship, one in which the song is both method and outcome.
Love Jones - Continuity Without Concession
With "The Greatest Show On Earth", Love Jones return not with a reinvention but with a restatement. After more than three decades operating at the margins of mainstream visibility - television appearances, a cult film placement, an unlikely opening slot for Tool - the band resurface with a record that makes no attempt to explain itself in contemporary terms.
Produced by John Alagía across sessions in Louisville, Los Angeles and a makeshift warehouse studio during lockdown, the album leans into what the band has always done: pairing lush, lounge-informed arrangements with lyrics that move between irony, vulnerability and quiet social observation. Sophisti-pop, bossa nova, Steely Dan-adjacent wit - none of it updated, none of it abandoned. The sensibility is the same. The execution is sharper. As a signal, "The Greatest Show On Earth" points toward a form of independent practice defined by patience. Identity here is not renegotiated under pressure but maintained across interruption, a refusal to chase relevance that itself becomes a position. In a moment defined by algorithmic speed and constant repositioning, Love Jones make a quieter case: that continuity, when it is genuinely held rather than performed, is its own form of resistance.
Zoon Phonanta - Language as Friction, Identity as Collision
With "Dim Diolch", Zoon Phonanta do something that resists easy categorization almost by design. Berlin-based but two-thirds Welsh and one-third Danish, the trio deliver what they describe as the world's first vocoder-sung Welsh-language krautrock track - a claim that is partly provocation, partly accurate, and entirely consistent with a practice built on cultural and sonic collision.
Raw drums, vintage organs and bass form the structural core, but the defining gesture is linguistic. Singing in Welsh through a vocoder, against a backdrop of motorik grooves and psych-disco dissonance, Zoon Phonanta situate identity not in origin or genre but in the friction between them. The Welsh language - minority, political, alive - does not function here as aesthetic choice alone. It introduces a dimension of cultural resistance that the music's Berlin context only sharpens. As a signal, "Dim Diolch", which translates simply as "No Thank You", points toward a form of independent practice in which identity is constructed through incompatibility. Genre boundaries, national languages and geographic contexts are not resolved into coherence but held in productive tension. The result is a track that refuses to be placed, and in doing so, places itself precisely.
These tracks do not form a unified argument. They operate across different moments of artistic development, each reflecting a distinct relationship between voice, language and identity. What connects them is not stylistic coherence but orientation: the question of who speaks, in what language and on whose terms. Independent music appears here not as a single practice but as a continuum of self-definition: immediate or patient, personal or structural, singular or irreducibly hybrid. Signals makes these dynamics visible as they emerge, not as conclusions, but as indications of how practice evolves across time, context and experience.
Further perspectives are available in our Artist Features, Cultural Essays and Three Track Week, each situating music within broader cultural and structural contexts.
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