FIN – Cleats

To be released on CD, cassette, and digitally on May 31st, 2024. CD packaged in a mini LP jacket. C30 – orange cassette with black imprints and artwork by FIN. This is the catalog page with album information and artwork. To purchase, head to our Bandcamp page.

FIN is the musical alias of Canadian-born, New York-based artist Fin Simonetti. Her multidisciplinary practice ropes in elements of future-facing pop music, experimental electronic production, and visual art. For more than a decade, she has exhibited her ambitious sculpture and installation works — oriented around marble, metal, and stained glass — at galleries and museums worldwide. Cleats, her second album released on Hausu Mountain, follows 2017’s Ice Pix (HAUSMO57). Building on Simonetti’s omnivorous production sensibilities while refining her presence as the idiosyncratic personality at the heart of her compositions, Cleats offers us a vision of contemporary gonzo pop shaped by her affecting vocal performances, her finely curated palette of juxtaposed electronic tones, and her deft integration of genres both inside and outside of the pop tradition.

FIN populates her self-produced music with layers of digital synth lines, bludgeoning percussion, and found sounds that cohere into a dense backdrop whose exact level of “fidelity” remains always in flux. Chiming bell tones float over synthetic orchestral strings and churning organ arpeggios, conjuring up mental images of sacred religious spaces splintered by the intrusion of digital technology. Simonetti hijacks signifiers from the art world that she occupies in one quadrant of her practice, captured in the baroque instrumentation she selects for her productions and her lyrical infusions of subject matter plucked from “Flemish Still Life” and “Pre-Raphaelite” art — mirroring her sculptural works that warp stained glass and its history as a trade practiced by Italian immigrants in Canada (including her own family) into uniquely modern forms. To put it simply, FIN sings what she knows, and builds her sonic palette around the life she has patiently sculpted for herself over years of back-breaking effort carving marble, cutting glass, and welding metal.

Far from a dry interpolation of what could be seen as rarefied topics for an ostensibly “pop” album, FIN uses her background in the contemporary art world as one filter through which to present her undeniably charismatic energy as a frontperson. Melismatic vocal lines delivered with an impish smirk curl around each other as she harmonizes with herself or drifts into luminous torch song territory. Shades of trip-hop, conveyed in stuttering breaks and grooves, lay out smoky atmospheres for her vocals to wind and twist over. Moments of glitched disfigurement overtake both her productions and her vocal lines, positioning her a few paces out of our view — a phantom materializing as human for a few moments before dipping back into the digital ether. Lush ambient expanses drift into her tracks and create momentary oases, like shafts of light cast through the towering windows of a cathedral. More than anything, Cleats shows us that Fin Simonetti knows how to write a pop song, knows how to transfix us with her toplines, and knows how to sidestep the trappings of the genre that might make us roll our eyes in overfamiliarity through the ingenuity of her production. We trust the full scope of Cleats to take us somewhere we haven’t been before, and FIN channels the sum of her life spent in devotion to art to piece together an aural assemblage that only she could create.

^^photo above by Mark Sommerfeld (https://www.instagram.com/marksommerfeld/)



^^photo above by Mark Sommerfeld (https://www.instagram.com/marksommerfeld/)