Frances Chang, the Brooklyn-based artist, is being packaged this week as a voice that resists easy definition, even as the music world does what it always does: sorts, labels, and sells mystery back to the public. Her new single No Avatar is described as conversational and serene against little whorls of piano, skittish drum fizz and softly flaring synths, with songs that are hard to pin down and work to an internal logic.
Who Gets Framed and Who Gets Heard
Chang’s music is presented as an exercise in refusal. The single’s desire to avoid outward definition is matched by descriptions of an uncanny domesticity, with casual piano refrains, rainy percussion, the melty haze of a horizon at dusk, and grooves slinking in at the end of a song like next door’s cat making itself at home. The language is lush, but the underlying fact is simple: her work is being read as something that slips the usual categories the industry likes to impose.
The sound is said to share a lot with the modern Copenhagen scene, of which Astrid Sonne is a key fixture, but with more welcoming softness and warmth. That comparison places Chang inside a network of scenes and reference points, the usual machinery of cultural sorting, while still marking her as someone whose music does not sit still long enough to be fully captured by the apparatus.
Chang has recently signed to RVNG Intl, the same label that launched Julia Holter, and supported Cate Le Bon. She released her debut cassette, Support Your Local Nihilist, in 2022, and in 2024 her debut album proper, Psychedelic Anxiety. Her new material strips back the noise for a limpid setting that lets her idiosyncratic lyricism shine. The label, the support slots, the debut cassette, the debut album proper: all the familiar checkpoints of a career being organized into legible form.
What the Tracks Are Doing
Chang’s January single I Can Feel the Waves is described as a six-minute suite that starts out a little edgy, then yields with gorgeous warped piano and disarmingly intimate focus. It is also described as being about remaining unknowable, and cherishing the ever-renewing mysteries of relating to oneself and others. That is the emotional center of the piece: not revelation, but refusal to be fully decoded.
The article’s framing makes that refusal feel almost political, even if it never says so outright. In a culture that wants everything tagged, marketed and made available for consumption, Chang’s songs are described as working against outward definition while still offering warmth, softness and intimacy. Her music is not presented as a clean product. It is presented as something that keeps slipping the net.
The Week’s Other Offerings
The piece also lists this week’s best new tracks, each one another carefully curated object in the endless feed. Lambchop’s Weakened, backed by guitar, choir and Justin Vernon on banjo, is described as one of the most simple and beautiful ballads in Kurt Wagner’s 40-odd years of music, as he sings of the threshold between life and death. Silvana Estrada and PabloPablo’s Antes de Ti is described as having Estrada’s elegant music and PabloPablo’s lilt around her cuatro’s light strings before a liquid, orchestral pivot opens up a cosmic portal.
Josh da Costa’s Proving Me Right is described as a new wave anthem with a chorus pitching like a ship in a storm, while Martin Brugger’s Knees, Hands, Shoulders, Teeth is described as softly clanking, mournful ambient music with traces of Kentucky post-rock. Bedouine’s On My Own includes contributions from the Lemon Twigs and classic piano-driven MOR backing offset by affecting vocals. Resonant Bodies’ Failed Hornpipe for Jacken, by Rob Bentall and Zebedee Budworth of Sheffield cabaret-doom-folk ensemble Slug Milk, is described as a refined and hopeful 10-minute blossoming of nyckelharpa and hammered dulcimer that pelts to a heart-stopping finish.
Liz Lawrence’s Exploded Into Flowers is about the abundant floral tributes at her sister’s funeral after her sister died aged 35 in 2024, rooted in a robust repeating melody and described as a powerful tribute. Even here, the article keeps circling back to loss, memory and the attempt to make meaning out of what remains. Chang’s work sits among these tracks as another example of music that resists flattening, even while the industry keeps trying to frame it.