♫♪  Xiu Xiu - “Jenny GoGo”

Few bands are as dependable, in their own way, as Xiu Xiu. Plotting their own course for going on 15 years now, Jamie Stewart, Angela Seo, and their group of footsoldiers have created something that has pretty much become a genre unto itself. One could call it “art-pop,” but this description sort of diminishes the size and specificity of the Xiu Xiu universe, an aesthetic that makes a tour of 40 years’ worth of underground art — from Throbbing Gristle to Elfriede Jelinek and onward — and stays inscrutably itself.

This journey now continues into FORGET, the group’s forthcoming, 13th (!) full-length, from which we are happy to help share the video for album cut “Jenny GoGo,” made in collaboration with Emp.Bikutoru. If you ever needed a primer for what this band is, it would be hard to find a better entry point: the shrieks (from Stewart and synth alike), the lyrics both wrenching and funny (“Too dead to be this dumb/ Too dead to be this young”), the primitive/low-res animation that appropriates, distressingly, the feeling of children’s art — it all makes something like peak/definitive Xiu Xiu, a world where even your most vulnerable glitched-out Troll Doll terror fantasies might suddenly spring to life (unless you suffer from epilepsy; then you probably shouldn’t watch this video).

FORGET will be available February 24 from Polyvinyl. Pre-order it here, and go see the band on tour soon.

Chocolate Grinder

CHOCOLATE GRINDER is our audio/visual section, with an emphasis on the lesser heard and lesser known. We aim to dig deep, but we’ll post any song or video we find interesting, big or small.

Most Read



Etc.