Editor’s Note: Anyone who says there isn’t good music coming out these days — and quite literally, every day — simply isn’t paying attention. Vanyaland’s compilation feature The V List highlights the best in new music, both homegrown and national, over the past month, pulling together the sounds that have soundtracked the website in recent weeks. It’s all the stuff we’re bumping here at Vanyaland HQ, one new bop at a time.
Boy Deluxe, ‘Whiplash’
On the Friday ahead of a long Labor Day weekend in a defeated and deflated America, it was no surprise to see Boy Deluxe putting in work. The Los Angeles dark-pop project dropped a sinister beat on the holiday eve with “WHIPLASH”, awarding us no time to chill as we sashay back to the mutant disco calling us by flashing strobes across our collective conscience. We’ve spent a great deal of 2025 getting freaky with True Murra and Hope S’ hyper-glossy beats n’ treats, an intoxicating head trip of EBM, darkwave, and electroclash brought into the light via underground club banger and SOTY contender “FEEDBACK” — which landed on our half-Year in ReView roundup — and things aren’t likely to fade out anytime soon with this kinetic new throbber. “Listen to it everywhere,” the duo states on Insta. “Make your friends listen to it. Make your boss listen to it. Turn your work into a runway. Your car into a vampire dance club.” Do what Boy Deluxe tell you to do.
Madeleine Rose Witney, ‘shine’
Given the cesspool of misery and danger we’ve all found ourselves mired in these days, it’s a bit of a wonder why there aren’t more torch songs to soundtrack our collective fears and loneliness. Not feeling back the love we try to put out to the world is a common refrain in 2025, all while living life on the defensive, and a sentimental song of unrequited love, in all its forms, could be applied to whatever we need it to. Madeleine Rose Witney is here to fill the void, and the London singer applies an age-old style to a modern problem with the emblematic “Shine,” an exquisite new single drawn from the deep lounge of your soul. The celestial composition has an undertow allure as it draws us into Witney’s world, offering a cinematic lullaby that doubles as a haunting ode to female resilience. The “Shine” of moonlight is a protective measure against the shadowy forces that seek to harm, and a reminder that what we invest into the world around us is usually not reciprocated. “‘Shine’ by design is an anthem for particularly women but anyone who may be vulnerable in that situation, day or night, to have a kind of angelic figure guiding them home but tragically the fact is it’s not safe to walk alone with headphones in because you have to have your wits about you,” Witney says. “It’s set to a ‘jolly’ tune with intentional juxtaposition.”
Wisp, ‘Yellow’
It’s been a wild year for both Wisp and Coldplay, for entirely different reasons. But we finally have the crossover event we’ve been waiting for, and it’s one that won’t get us busted on the Jumbotron of Gillette Stadium. Wisp, the dreamy nu-gaze project of San Francisco’s Natalie R. Lu, which we have featured a few times for its rather breathtaking spin on modern shoegaze, has taken Coldplay’s “Yellow” out for a spin, balancing the heavy and the light under waves of caressing distortion and gentle might. A preview clip has generated nearly 7 million views on TikTok, and now we’re treated to the full version. Says Lu: “‘Yellow’ to me is a childhood memory that I wanted to rendition into my present life. A song that I never understood the depth of, to now relating to the lyrics and singing them with the emotion of my romantic journeys this past year.” Get into it below, and make time to revisit Wisp’s sterling August album If Not Winter, which should only sound better as the temperature begins to drop across a welcoming autumn.
In Lieu, ‘Hooligan’
There are few things better than a band in Minnesota loud enough to be heard on both coasts. But that’s the energy drawing us back to the center via In Lieu, the Minneapolis noise-rock dynamo that unleashes “Hooligan,” the title track to the band’s new album out October 24 on Learning Curve. “Hooligan” is a crunched-out, guttural growl of a gut-punch, a feral seance swirl of belligerence and control that positions the likes of Melvins and Jesus Lizard as the Beatles and Stones of our day. “We tend to lean into our most primal feelings and our music tends to remind me of an animal backed into a corner and the only option left is to bite,” says vocalist and guitarist Nikii Post. “I started the band nine years ago and wrote all the material but was never happy with a release until this new one… Hooligan is the first album I’ve been proud of and it took nine years of trying. I played acoustic at first but I always knew that quiet music wasn’t going to cut it for me.” Go let it the fuck out below.
Automatic, ‘Black Box’
Few bands view the world through a lens as sharpened as Automatic. Last we caught up with the Los Angeles alternative band, a steady buzz of beats n’ treats soundtracked a journey through a corporate dystopia that’s only grown more dire in the three years since. Now, the trio of Izzy Glaudini (synths, vocals), Halle Saxon (bass, vocals), and Lola Dompé (drums, vocals) return with a low-hum buzz through “Black Box”, a hypnotic new single that sets up third album Is It Now?. “Black Box” comes correct with a galactic trip-hop beat and tense atmospherics, a tumbler of an alt-pop tune that emits a signal of cautionary grayscale under a colorful groove. It’s a portal into a reflective world view, and places a price on how we’ve positioned art as a capitalist commodity. “The title ‘Black Box’ refers to the black box in a crashed plane,” says Glaudini. “The repetitive synth is supposed to suggest a plane gliding as it crashes — an alarm distress call. I was listening to the Leonard Cohen album The Future a lot around the time the lyrics were written. It’s a pretty straightforward critique of people that have sold-out on a large scale, specifically within creative industries. Thierry Mugler said, ‘art used to tell money what to do, now money tells art what to do’ and the world is a less interesting place because of it.” Dance to it with a full mind, vibe to it with an empty feeling.