Playlist Picks July ’25 – FAULT Magazine’s round-up of this month’s best under-the-radar releases.
If you’re tired of playlists that feel algorithmically bred in captivity, think of this – our Playlist Picks July ’25 – as your sonic palate cleanser. From bLAck pARty’s cosmic groove therapy to ASHRR’s sunrise-tinted reinvention, TAVE’s soul sermon on perception, and Joey Miceli’s glittering existential opera, these four releases offer something better than genre: perspective. It’s R&B that side-eyes cliché, disco that reads poetry, and pop that plays chess with its own ego.
bLAck pARty – The Last Dance
Genre-fluid maestro Malik Flint, better known as bLAck pARty, returns with The Last Dance, a kaleidoscopic R&B fantasia stitched from funk, Afrobeats, and cosmic slow jams. It’s a lush, lived-in soundscape where existential musings nest inside jazz-laced grooves and flirtatious hooks glimmer over dancehall pulses. Every track feels like a vignette in motion, retro yet restless, intimate yet widescreen.
Fresh off the Late To The Party tour and playlist heat from Hola Mami, bLAck pARty is styling past and future into one hypnotic continuum. Think Issa Rae soundtracks meets post-Gambino soul mutations, only smoother, stranger, and built for late-night revelations.
ASHRR – Sunshine Low (ASHRR Soundsystem Versions)
ASHRR takes their dusky art-rock heart and plugs it straight into the mixer. Under their alter ego ASHRR Soundsystem, the LA trio reworks last year’s Sunshine Low into a tactile, hypnotic experience equal parts live band electricity and after-hours alchemy. Imagine post-punk gone Balearic, dub reverb tangled with cosmic house shimmer, all wrapped around Steven Davis’s ever-haunting vocals.
Released under 20/20 Vision, this track isn’t club music in the usual sense; it’s emotive, expansive, made for movement but steeped in mood. It sounds like sunrise rolling through fog on a rooftop set, the ghosts of New Order and Khruangbin nodding in approval.
TAVE – “BLOCK” (feat. Musiq Soulchild & IDK)
TAVE conjures a soulscape that swells with jazz loops and spiritual weight, flanked by Musiq Soulchild’s velvet resolve and IDK’s lyrical realism. It’s hip-hop with hindsight, R&B with teeth, stitched together by a quiet urgency that suggests survival is both sacred and stylish. That line, “the brokest people that you see be the rich,” lingers like incense.
With an EP, Fly Away, landing August 15, and collabs ranging from BiBi Bourelly to India Shawn, TAVE is clearly building something intentional.
Joey Miceli – Pretenders
Joey Miceli’s staging a mirror maze with his new album. Pretenders is ambitious, theatrical, and oddly intimate, a concept record that sifts through fame, identity, and status obsession with both venom and vulnerability. Remedy (feat. LEXXE) crackles with synths and emotional fracture; Heavy Hand snarls like a dark musical manifesto. Every line feels ripped from the margins of a diary someone tried to burn.
The LA singer-songwriter turns heartbreak and ambition into cinematic pop sermons, making Pretenders feel like a late-night phone call from someone spiraling beautifully.