Please note this is a pre-order item due for release 5th September, 2025

Shockwave Swirl Colour

Tracklist:

1. Obsolete
2. Violence Voyager
3. Earthshaped
4. Congratulations Champion
5. Human Bean Instruction Manual
6. Steps
7. Massive Everything
8. Infinite Trolley

Pickle Darling has always existed just outside of the periphery. In a heightened time of fast music, algorithmic consumption and rapid virality, Lukas Mayo (they/them) has remained focused on the album. Their discography is a reflection of their creative evolution, and they deliberately look for ways to push sonic boundaries from release to release. Since debuting with Bigness in 2019 followed by Cosmonaut in 2021, Mayo has curated a catalog that is deeply personal and strangely tactile, where tiny, unexpected detailsan off-kilter loop, a whispered aside, the warmth of an old Casiobecome as crucial as melody itself. Their 2023 LP Laundromat was a precise and polished expansion of that world, a record that felt like it had been carefully placed behind glass.

Their forthcoming fourth album, Battlebots, by contrast, is unruly and full of static: a collection of songs that feel like they could only ever exist on scratched CD-Rs passed between friends. Self-recorded in their home studio in Christchurch, New Zealand, it finds Mayo taking a scalpel to their own songwriting. Songs were stretched, chopped, reversed. Some ideas started as unlistenable garbage before morphing into something unexpectedly beautiful. If a song felt too straightforward, Mayo had to mess it up. That friction of old and new, organic and digital, melody and noise is what drives Battlebots. Drawing inspiration from a strange, scattered lineage: Four Tets Rounds, The Books, Neneh Cherrys Broken Politics, The Wrens Three Types of Reading Ambiguity, but also the emotional directness of 2000s pop like Madonnas Ray of Light and Robyns Body Talk, the result is an album that feels like a glitch in the system, pushing against past constraints while embracing the weird, beautiful mess of making something new.