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Aug 03, 2023 By Caleb Campbell

Exciting!!Excellent!! is the moniker of Portland-based musician Jasmine McElroy, combining Gameboy-era chiptune aesthetics, glittering emo riffs, and weighty lyrical confessions on grief, isolation, and Jasmine’s life as a trans woman. Her colorful concoctions are also stridently DIY, produced and recorded from Jasmine’s Portland bedroom. She debuted in 2021 with her EP, i feel like i deserve to feel like this forever and i will, and followed last year with another new EP, tysm!!!!!

Later this month, she’s back with her forthcoming debut album, you will watch me die, arriving August 25th via Lonely Ghost Records. Last month, she shared the album’s lead single, “become dream (rank 1)” and today she’s back with another new track, “ice key 2,“ premiering with Under the Radar.

The track opens with a soundbite pulled from Star Trek: Deep Space 9一“He was more than a hero. He was a union man.” From there, Jasmine rides atop of a pounding chiptune riff and MIDI percussion, delivering an expressive vocal performance tinged with both fury and melancholy. There’s an inherent nostalgia to her careful recreation of old-school chiptune aesthetics, one that Jasmine blends seamlessly with her wistful vocals and downcast lyricism. The track finds Jasmine looking inward, reflecting on the disconnect between her personhood and her body: “I think I do this to myself in purpose / Putting myself in danger / I don’t know how to be social right now / I don’t even feel like a person.”

Jasmine says of the track, “Despite the name, this song actually has very little to do with ‘ice key’ from tysm!!!!!!. Whereas the first song is quite hopeful and light in tone, ‘ice key 2’ is much more about despair and dysphoria. I used this song to sketch out a lot of the larger themes on the album, and I consider it to be the song that connects this album to my previous EPs tonally and thematically which is why I decided it deserved the name. There are a few lyrical references to other tysm!!!!!! songs as well.”

Check out the song below. Her debut LP, you will watch me die, is out on August 25th via Lonely Ghost Records.