Sex Angel by Milo Korbenski

Vital UK auteur-songwriter Milo Korbenski returns with new album Sex Angel, a masterfully crafted suite of slacker-dream-pop whose irresistible and addictive earworming reveals a deceptively deep songcraft.

“It's an optimistic album, an album of positive realisations,” writes Milo Korbenski, a shadowy, Brighton-based solo musician only publicly seen in a featureless white mask, Stetson and denim jacket. “The narrator of each song is having a 'light at the end of the tunnel' moment. You have to go through something to get to where you are and you'll hopefully be better for it.”

Korbenski’s deeply expressive take on lo-fi art-pop indie invokes this optimism in an unexpectedly emotional way. Throughout the record, catchy-as-hell hooks and canny lyrical wordplay sing straight to the soul. Moments of boxy, torn-cone distortion and octave-dropped vocals coalesce with the sweetest synth and vocal interplay. The record crosses references points as broadly spread as Kurt Vile, Helado Negro, Black Sabbath, The xx, The Cocteau Twins, Siouxsie Sioux, Jagwar Ma and Calvin Johnson while retaining a crucially singular energy: Milo’s underlying unreality is more haunted than the indie-leaning acts mentioned here, and the blown-out cassette grit lends an intimacy beyond the prettified sheen of his pop influences.

“I wanted it to sound like an album you found on a floppy disk in a puddle and then you took it home, put it on your iPod, and it became the soundtrack to your summer of fun and debauchery. I don't know if people will feel that way about it, but who knows. I'm optimistic.”

Incorrigibly prolific, Korbenski wrote Sex Angel in a flurry of activity after the release of 2024’s acclaimed debut When You Gonna Tell ‘Em The Truth, Aaron? Following the wholesale scrapping of an earlier version, he has created a deft, weird, and lean record that balances shades of light and dark. It represents a flourishing songwriting confidence and, naturally, is uniquely characteristic to Milo Korbenski.

“Interestingly, it was definitely the most difficult album that I've ever made. I had a big moment of thinking I'd lost it. But this record made me realise that, if that feeling of failure creeps up again, it will probably never affect me as deeply.” Light and darkness, together as one, just as the record plays out.

New album Sex Angel follows 2024’s debut When You Gonna Tell ‘Em The Truth, Aaron? and the cassette only self-release compilation Vol. 1. Quickly developing a formidable and unpredictably modular stage presence, Milo Korbenski performs live (in mask and Stetson) with a changing line-up of musicians. A true auteur, and inexhaustibly prolific, Milo home-recorded, designed and self-released a number of albums on streaming platforms (and enjoyed staggering listening figures) without any backing, and only recently signed his first record deal.

Slip on this.

https://open.spotify.com/artist/6AcfbTxwwz9q4dxJP9sZTI?si=VRk01MzQTFOI65pqg7zcYg