{"id":380147,"date":"2026-04-15T05:22:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T05:22:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/380147\/"},"modified":"2026-04-15T05:22:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T05:22:09","slug":"josephines-next-million-miles-buckle-up-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/380147\/","title":{"rendered":"Josephine\u2019s Next Million Miles: Buckle Up Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

The genre descriptor \u201cdawk,\u201d or \u201cDAW-based rock,\u201d is compelling because it combines two conflicting terms. It was coined by friends&<\/a>, a Canadian blogger-musician who really likes coining things, and whose label, dawk26, doubles as a conceptual testing ground. \u201cLaptop twee<\/a>,\u201d its most lucrative cultural export, is loopy and wonderfully giddy, running 2000s indie-pop through Ableton plugins and plotting a rave in Purble Place<\/a>. But like \u201cdawk,\u201d it is also conceptually split, with a rich central tension between what is being performed, and by whom: childlike innocence by adults who long for it back. At best, that friction breeds not only generational ambiguity, but a sort of bidirectional bliss. In this zany Neverland, the club floor is not littered with beer cans, nor bodily fluids: It is strewn with discarded DSi styluses, sticky with apple juice.<\/p>\n

As a self-proclaimed purveyor of \u201cnew internet sound,\u201d dawk26 relishes in digital-era tensions, treating records as field reports\u2014from fried new genres, and more broadly, our fried new reality. (Catalog highlights, thus far: a gooning concept album<\/a>, a dispatch from the world of \u201cbrainrot psychedelia,\u201d<\/a> and friends&\u2019s own musical statement of the 21st century<\/a>.) Its latest release is Buckle Up, the debut LP from indie-pop band Josephine\u2019s Next Million Miles, whose name evokes open-world video games, and whose go-lucky songs sometimes evoke them, too. In a Bandcamp disclaimer, the group noted the project was \u201cmade primarily on a computer,\u201d before listing several preferred tools: among them, Ableton Analog, which humanizes digital sounds, and Virtual Singer, which digitizes human sounds. Across this soppy set of songs, the sum of these frictions is cyborgish and spectral, music from a Macbook whose dying wish was to see the world.<\/p>\n

No score yet, be the first to add.<\/p>\n

Now is a good time to introduce the real, breathing humans behind Josephine\u2019s Next Million Miles, who are credited by their first names: Cathryn, Dylan, Lovette, and Mason. Buckle Up embraces wistful insularity, wielding glitchy little-pop as a leitmotif for lost humanity. These textures crystallize the longing of laptop twee; they also evoke the human cost of late-stage capitalism, whereby easy living\u2014or, in this case, easy listening\u2014demands depersonalization. Vocals often sit low in mixes, barely distinguishable from digital debris; beneath the blissful timbre, there is a stench of decay, like the ditty that plays when you die in an 8-bit video game. \u201cSummer Song<\/a>\u201d is the best song here, and the best symbol, too: an indietronica carol that implores us to \u201clook out, the sun is shining,\u201d before conceding that it \u201churts to look at.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Buckle Up does still dream of sunlight, and its doomed simulation makes for a tragic, twisted sort of beauty. By one reading, \u201cmade primarily on a computer\u201d suggests this album\u2014like its moment\u2014seeks catharsis in a digital world, because the real one is decaying. Its most evocative tracks, like \u201cNext Million Miles\u201d and \u201cHe wore a beautiful hat,\u201d channel this desperation into dynamic patchworks, all shifty drum patterns and chorales of cooked strings. Nonetheless, the computerized whimsy is wearying, to the point that \u201cJosephine\u2019s Next Million Miles\u201d evokes Wall-E: a well-intended machine roaming a wasteland. The rustling glitch-beats of \u201cRug\u201d nicely undergird its cutesy singsong, but when the chorus invites us to \u201ccircle the water for hours,\u201d the \u201ccircle\u201d (repetitive, mechanical) feels more apparent than the \u201cwater\u201d (wriggling, alive). By emphasizing the \u201claptop\u201d in \u201claptop twee,\u201d Buckle Up allows the latent longing of the genre to absorb its trademark bliss.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The genre descriptor \u201cdawk,\u201d or \u201cDAW-based rock,\u201d is compelling because it combines two conflicting terms. It was coined…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":380148,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[4958,156,157,111,139,69,1251],"class_list":{"0":"post-380147","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-albums","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-new-zealand","12":"tag-newzealand","13":"tag-nz","14":"tag-web"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=380147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380147\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/380148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=380147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=380147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=380147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}