Highly recommended.

Originally two anonymous brothers, the past few years have seen Mamaleek adding members and venturing into live performance. Diner Coffee, following in the footsteps of 2020’s Come and See, features new, unfamiliar, unknown voices—including expanded experiments with horns, woodwinds, and strings and a Bay Area-local blues harmonica player who improvised recorded selections during practices. The resulting tracks touch on signifiers from black metal, blues, ambient, and more.

Diner Coffee simultaneously represents the band’s artistic progression and the state of the world. Taking a surprisingly optimistic perspective, Mamaleek once again puts forward a project of left-field, wholly unique compositions, eluding easy categorization and furthering their abstraction of genre.

“The group cloaks its music in the kind of warm, hypnotic distortion that defines shoegaze, and underneath that haze is a style that’s conceptually abrasive yet altogether beautiful.” —Forbes

For fans of Have A Nice Life, Xasthur, Planning For Burial, and The Flenser.