Brzmi w Trzcinie #4: Kosmonauci, Coals, TONFA, Franek Warzywa & Młody Budda, ruskie kotki & paszka

Wrapping up our favorite albums and songs from March

Kosmonauci, Sorry, nie tu (U JAZZ ME Records)

Representing the new vanguard of Polish jazz, Kosmonauci are a quartet of streetwear-clad, hip-hop-indebted virtuosos who are very much continuing the Polish tradition of pushing the envelope of European improvised music as a genre, while at once entering in a sort of conversation with London’s youthful, boundary-disrupting musical milieu. Kosmonauci have been playing together since high school, and their level of comfort with one another belies the fact that Sorry, nie tu has been largely improvised. Performed by Miłosz Pieczonka (saxophone), Bartłomiej Lucjan (bass), Tymon Kosma (vibraphone), and Jan Pieniążek (percussion), the group’s debut album is made of pieces that pair snappy chromatic riffs with gorgeous harmonic progressions, propelled confidently by brisk beats taken straight from the worlds of funk, rap, and club music. Dynamic and high-energy, theirs is a jazz that looks forward unwaveringly, with both purpose and resolve. —Patryk Mrozek

Coals, Sanatorium (PIAS Recordings Poland)

It would be extremely unfair to call the Coals catalog monotonous, but there was a very particular deadpan, decadent mood to their atmospheric experimental pop: a distinctively foggy ambience. Their largely fantastic third album Sanatorium just goes ways beyond that. As the first single “Dzwony,” now a bright closer of Sanatorium suggested, they blew the door wide open to more light, accessibility, and even directly expressed emotions here and there.

The album opens with the fantastic, instantly repeatable second single “Nowy świat,” driving the point home in an entirely different style. It could be their most propulsive song so far, hitting the ground running in seconds with a siren-like riff and an almost absurdly loud kick-drum. There's still room for moody gothic pop like “Ferie x lat temu” or “Czar,” but it's just one of the shades among some more surprising ones, such as the reggaeton (“Kurort”) and jungle (“Batalija”) influences that crop up elsewhere. And that’s all on their shortest and zippiest album. 14 tracks skip ahead in less than 36 minutes, each one different and each one over before overstaying its welcome, just like on a Beatles or Pixies record.

There are some incredible highs on the duos previous albums and EP-s, but it's hard no to think that Sanatorium is the record they've been working towards all that time: both their richest and tightest, flexing songwriting and production skills at every turn, and both shamelessly poppy and shamelessly weird.—Łukasz Konatowicz

TONFA, TRZECIA SZYNA (Big Tonga Energy)

To say that a homegrown hip-hop scene has existed in Poland since the mid-’90s would be a comical understatement; the genre’s epic growth and gradual transformation from a dominant counter-cultural force to the number-one pop genre in the country has largely paralleled and reflected the “becoming” of capitalist Poland. The proper debut album by the hyped duo TONFA, consisting of MC’s kierat and kaserolaaa (who also handles production duties), looks back towards the early aughts, when Polish hip-hop artists occupied a very special niche within the music scene: largely independent and uncompromising in their message and pursuit of innovation, yet immensely popular by the sheer volume of their die-hard fanbase. This looking back is in spirit only, however, because sonically the album couldn’t sound more like the future. While giving hints of the broad “experimental hip-hop” category that rappers like MIKE and Billy Woods currently operate in, TONFA make rap that’s unburdened by genre expectations, sounding remarkably imaginative, fresh and seeking. The duo’s lyrics are abstract and playful, while kaserolaaa’s beats amalgamate everything from punk to dancehall to deconstructed club music. Trzecia Szyna is as colorfully wacky as the album’s cover.—Patryk Mrozek

Franek Warzywa & Młody Budda, “Komputer” (self-released)

Anybody who's seen Franek Warzywa & Młody Budda live must know about the duo's spastic, post-hardcore side that didn't really come to the fore a lot on last year's Wykopki EP. Well, it's front and center in “Komputer,” the title track of their forthcoming EP: a love letter to a computer that they rip through sounding like The Dismemberment Plan at their most cybernetic and unhinged, or 90's Dayton, Ohio legends Brainiac at their regular. The mix of quirkiness (MIDI-synth James Ferraro-esque intro, “cyber” voices) and driving energy, culminating in electrically minimal guitar histrionics from Młody Budda, makes this track super infectious.—Łukasz Konatowicz

ruskie kotki, paszka: “fiku$ne ubr4nia” (self-released)

“fiku$ne ubr4nia” brings together ruskie kotki (Oliwia Nadzieja Muraszka), a singer, songwriter, and self-described “internet teen idol,” and up-and-coming producer paszka (born Szymon Sapalski), whose last year’s collaborative EP bajki with ania grr was among our favorite albums of 2023. A quick glance at the pair’s social media accounts reveals a visual aesthetic of Gen-Z maximalism and post-irony, which matches the song’s sprightly, shiny mood but runs counter to its deliberate and rather restrained production. Centered around two repetitive, bouncy melodic figures (of the bass and vocals), with occasional synth bursts and syncopated percussion filling in the crevices, the track lounges ahead at a steady pace, not unlike a peppy banger from the mid-aughts blog house era. Lyrically, “fiku$ne ubr4nia” (“flashy clothes”) celebrates the liberating power of self-expression: “I put on flashy clothes/I don’t care what you think/I can do it if I want to.” Earnestness is rather a rare term to throw around at a hyperpop-adjacent track, but these lines track. Maybe that’s what post-irony is all about.—Patryk Mrozek