Audiopile Review: Alongside this week’s highlighted album by Dregs, Milan W.’s hyped new album was also sold out before landing in the shop, anxious customers banging down the door with an inescapable case of FOMO. As it’s been going these days, that resulted in the first pressing ballooning in price online, but Stroom make the correct move with this quick repress. And we’re here to tell you that this does indeed warrant that rapt reception. The Milan W. story certainly doesn’t begin here—a long trail of LPs and small format releases under many guises and projects have led to this breakthrough amalgamation of the synth-pop wanderings, bedroom-wave idiosyncrasies and indie-folk dalliances studiously explored beforehand. And Leave Another Day divides itself between these worlds evenly. The pop-forward tracks, which have surely been the draw for most of the folks already enamoured with the album, are spread out among a mixture of woozy instrumentals that touch on homespun kosmiche and industrial-laced exotica, which will surely leave some of you double checking the date on the back of this jacket. 1984 this ain’t. But it’s when he steps up to the mic that’s got us so lightheaded. His stoned croon, flitting somewhere between ineffable longing and morose melodicism, is a dream-like addition to the baroque grandiosity and psych-folk mysticism deployed.  Truth be told, it reminds us a teeny bit of Jack J’s bedroom pop, albeit spun with a wave-y, dour edge that’s rooted in dark Belgian winters rather than the open skies of a PNW summer. If you haven’t already caught wind of this, you may be in for a real surprise. Its the “Re-configuring-your-top-10” kind of good.

***

“agony, anguish, bitterness, despair, grief, heartache, pain,
remorse, sorrow, suffering, torment, woe. Another heartbreak album that is totally worth all of it.”