Artificial Go + No Peeling

Artificial Go hail from Cincinnati, USA, and bring the beat to life with their New / No / Whatever Wave weirdness! Last year they released ‘Musical Chairs’, building on 2024’s 'Hopscotch Fever', an album of ten existential post-punk chamber pop tracks.

Recorded at Lambda Research and the haunted attic of the band’s house, the core trio of Angie Willcutt, Micah Wu, and Cole Gilfilen have traded the sparse jangle of their debut for a broader, fuller sound. ‘Musical Chairs’ deftly meshes the angular excitability of 'Hopscotch Fever' with a spectral warmth and expensiveness able to encompass acoustic guitars, Wu’s almost metaphysical funk bass lines, tape loops and blips and bleeps, a guest spot by Eric Dietrich (of The Drin and Sorry Eric) on saxophone, and Gilfilen’s hip moving boom-bap drumming add to the excitement.In Willcutt’s hands, the struggles, and at times terrors, of our current age are playfully subverted with agile world play and dynamic vocalization that moves from sweet and dreamy to cartoonishly exaggerated as she charts an emotional course through such topics as the difficulties of playing the role of “woman” in a misogynist world (“Playing Puppet”) or the injustice of anthropocentric hierarchy (“Tightrope Walker”).

Musical Chairs is serious music not meant to be taken too seriously, a playful act of resistance, a meditation on the good and bad of this world, and ultimately a remarkable statement on the continuing growth of Artificial Go.No Peeling formed in 2025 as a studio project by five friends in the fertile Nottingham DIY underground.

September 2025’s self-titled EP was the perfect introduction to the No Peeling universe.

Bandcamp Daily picked it as an Essential Release, calling it “a clanging collection of get-in-get-out egg punk that doesn’t ask for more than 10 minutes of your time and overdelivers on every front”.

It managed to cram a lifetime of idea-nuggets into seven songs that rarely exceeded the minute mark.

A blast of enthusiasm and hyperactivity, the EP was the audio equivalent of a barrage firework: exhilarating and energising.

Whilst the first EP was completed before the band had played live; the forthcoming EP2 hits a little differently.EP2 has the garage punk clatter and sparkly efficiency of their debut but is somehow faster and weirder.

The guitar and synth seem to be engaged in a constant (playful) fight, tumbling further and further away from the song structure being held together (and propelled) by one of the tightest rhythm sections around.

The scrawl and skronk might occasionally recall No Wave but those grooves are locked down.

This all provides the perfect foundation for the wry, dry observations of Sophie Diver.

From pasta post and fluff-clad delinquents to clingfilm catastrophes and poor working conditions, all modern life’s bases are covered and emerge miraculously from a magic-eye explosion of clangs, thwacks and bloops.