Sonarpilot Releases New Single

August has always been a historically good month for new music, but this year it feels particularly special for some reason. It could be that we’re near a new era in alternative songcraft, or perhaps that there has been such a rampant influx of exciting new styles and sounds coming out of the North American underground this season culminating in a string of fresh releases from artists like Sonarpilot this month.   Sonarpilot’s highly-anticipated new single, “Quantum Factory,” is likely going to take the last month of summer by storm thanks to its outlandishly flamboyant grooves, powerful lyrical confessions, and crisp mastering that we’ve all come to expect out of The Mirage Project.

There’s a lot of splendid music getting ready to replace the current tunes dominating the charts as we look toward 2024, but out of everything that I’ve listened to this past month, there aren’t many songs that can top the blistering beats of this engrossing new track from Sonarpilot.   Don’t let the cosmetics of “Quantum Factory” fool you – this single is structured on top of a traditional EDM framework, but it’s designed to be a lot more flexible than any of the music that it’s modeled after ever could be. The synths are manipulating a stock melody into something evocative and even a little jarring now and again, and even though they never steal the show away from the vocal, this would be a completely different track without their primeval pulverizations.

The term alternative electronica hasn’t seemed all that applicable to any of the mainstream music that’s been made in the last ten years, but Sonarpilot has recorded something that might qualify in “Quantum Factory.” There’s nothing standard about its conceptual foundation, and when we compare it side by side with some of the other synth-wave songs that have garnered similar buzz in 2023, there’s no hiding the obvious indie aesthetics that this track wears with pride. I can’t wait to hear the rest of the EP that this will eventually end up on, but in the meantime, these harmonies make up a sufficient soundtrack for any sunny August afternoon.  

Sonarpilot has the chops to do just about anything he sets his mind to, and if he chooses to pursue this career in experimental music any further than he already has, then he’s going to need a lot more material of this pedigree in his discography. There haven’t been many EDM creators with as strong a push as his is in the last couple of years, and frankly, I think that the genre could use someone with his liberal level of emotionality at the moment. “Quantum Factory” has a modern look and feel to the very bones it was made with, and if there’s anything that it teaches us about Sonarpilot’s artistic profile, it’s that this is a musician who isn’t hung up on trying to please the masses with a stereotypical sonic assault. He’s as determined to make physical, contemporary pop music as he is to reintroduce American EDM fans to the soul that made the genre so great in the first place.  

Mindy McCall