Audiopile Review: After a very quiet 2024 that consisted of just one physical release, West Mineral return with the sophomore album from Shinetiac, the trio made up of Pontiac Streator, Shiner and Ben Bondy. You’d be forgiven for missing their first venture, a 2023 streaming/digital-only release of skewered hyper-pop and mischievous swipes at trip-hop, but this physical release announces the project as more than just a one-off. Much like that debut, Shinetiac cull from the bottomless content mills snippets of pop music and the dankest of memes, reconfiguring the digital ephemera into shimmering globs of internet-addled electronica for the 22nd century. While much of the extended world circling the West Mineral/3XL vortex have moved on from the densely textured ambient music initially spearheaded by the likes of Huerco S, Mister Water Wet and Exael, Shinetiac apply that thickly glitched and garbled digi-texture to trip-hop, dream-pop and even downtempo, making new use of old tools. It comes somewhere near the deconstructed shoegaze of Naemi’s album from last year, an album that features both Bondy and Pontiac, and one that signalled that the times are a changing. Blue Vinyl, edition of 300, sold out at the source.

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The target is set, the mainframe is hacked — Billie, cloaked in her hoodie, stares through the crystalline fog at the system she’s dedicated her essence to corrupting. The hex-key? The cryptic sounds of Shinetiac etched in pavement and tatted on the wall. We have now infiltrated Roku City.

Shinetiac returns to West Mineral with the follow up to their debut album, “Not all Who Wander are Lost”and brings us “Infiltrating Roku City.” Initially composed and rehearsed as a live set for a 29 Speedway x Conditioner’s show in Brooklyn, and performed again at Philly’s Spindrift, the Shinetiac boys spent the winter of 2024 taking these odds and ends of recordings and jams and sculpting them into something beautiful, critical, and earnest all at once.

Comprised of Philly’s Pontiac Streator (Slunty), Brooklyn’s Shiner, and Berlin based Ben Bondy, the trio deliver us a delicious perspective on their worldview through their deep friendship.

Shiner, Bondy, and Slunty spent the winter cultivating the sounds in traditional Roku virtual fashion… watching YouTube videos, catching up on Drag Race & WWE, doom-scrolling TikTok, aimlessly wandering through streaming service content, and cooking dinner to Karol G and Tiesto, “Infiltrating Roku City” became the soundtrack to endless conversations about streaming and content consumption. A feeling baked deeply into the essence of the this record— a fully formed sonic outlook comprised of inside-jokes, shared nostalgia, and commentary on the algorithms we all live with.

This sample soup of music is equal parts gaudy as it is demure, and it means every word it’s says, even when the language is AI revoicing a Passion Pit synth sample into Billie Eilish’s voice into gibberish, or the screams of Underoath layered over the coo of Jiafei. The very tools used to craft parts of this record down to the track titles, are the very tools being critiqued, but where does the line blur? At the intersection of debauchery and serenity.