OKLAHOMA CITY – The spring season normally means getting outside, getting some sun, and cranking the kind of high-energy feel-good tunes that help to bring you back to life after the long and lingering winter.
But look around. Does anything feel normal to you right now?
I didn’t think so.
In that case, maybe your springtime soundtrack this season should err on the side of the strange, the new, the gritty, or the totally out-of-left-field, casting off whatever “normal” normally means in music and embracing some sounds that reflect the pervasive weirdness of the times.
Well, if that’s the kind of less-traveled road you feel like heading down, some local musicmakers have just what you need, with a trio of recent releases spanning everything from ominous, deconstructed electro to raucous junkyard folk and something as vulnerably raw as it is coded and computerized.
NoMoore – ‘Mother Mountain’
Maybe one of the hardest acts in OKC to define or accurately describe, NoMoore (the musical moniker of experimentalist Nicolette Moore) is part hyper-minimalist, deconstructed electro, part avant-garde art-pop, and even part protest-powered anti-folk.
And if that all sounds like a bunch of different ways to say “chaos,” well, good. That’s the point.
On “Mother Mountain,” NoMoore’s newest full-length dropping March 27th, the chaos is barely contained inside 12 tracks of collapsing atmospheres, driving machine beats, and fiery confessions wrapped up in swelling, distorted techno textures and endlessly colliding vocal echoes.
There’s something in these songs that feels primal and spontaneous, even through the synths and electro beats, with Moore’s vocal style far closer to a chant or an incantation than to anything like a traditionally hooky pop melody.
On standout “The Fool,” in fact, the accompaniment is stripped back almost entirely, leaving only a bleeding-heart recitation of social and political defiance, offered more like a mantra or a natural ritual than even like a protest song.
Even when a track offers up a grooving, almost danceable backbeat, like on the irreverently named “Lights, Cameras (Big Booty),” it still wears that same chaos on its sleeve, with the lyrics following suit, tackling bodies, appearances, expectations, regrets, and hopes, all offered up alongside the album in a DIY collage book of the songs’ lyrics.
“The whole record is kind of a prologue to a very transformative period of change and destruction and creation that I was about to go into,” Moore told me ahead of the album release, “and I am glad to have something that documents the environment I found myself in.”
It’s a document that feels simultaneously impenetrably personal and broadly relatable to the tumult of the outside world in all its unpredictability and overlapping weirdness.
A sneakily powerful record from a singular talent.
“Mother Mountain” by NoMoore drops Friday, March 27th. For more, follow @nomoore01 on Instagram.
Brad Fielder – ‘All Before Me’
With just three tracks, the inexhaustible Mr. Fielder reminds us once again about the power of rusted, grimey, earth-toned blues, his guitar just as jangly and his voice just as gravel-dragged as ever.
Like a loudspeaker cranked in the middle of a junkyard, Fielder’s songs feel surrounded by broken down equipment and dirt-covered reminders of a world where music was once a communal thing made by stomping, clapping, hooting, and even some occasional hollering.
He even says as much, in fact, on the crazy-eyed “Pure Death White”: “All this junk that used to be something / in spaces that used to be somewhere.”
But whereas last year’s full-length, full-anger “The Timely Introspections of Lieutenant Venisonliver” was built on open aggression and anti-authoritarianism, the songs on “All Before Me” feel more internal, more philosophical, even.
The title track in particular is a declaration and celebration of performance’s rich history, not only for Fielder to honor the general “throwback” style of his playing and approach, but maybe even to help answer a question in his own mind about the importance and worth of music and entertainment during times such as these.
The end result is a little three-track EP that sounds – this time around – less like a man that’s surrounded himself with broken antiques and curiosities and more like a man that’s decided to sit and sing some songs at the end of the world..
“All Before Me” by Brad Fielder is available now exclusively on Bandcamp.
$T0REKEEPER – Stare.
Easily one of the most compelling and unique new artists that we’ve seen on the scene in quite some time, $T0REKEEPER is a new persona for emo-folk upstart Princess Kady, who’s spent the past couple years dropping dark, acoustic bedroom ballads and developing a voice of her own.
But $T0REKEEPER effectively flips the table on all that, centering instead on glitchy, experimental electronica that’s all designed and written in computer code.
It’s often jumpy, arpeggiated, twinkling, and even hypnotic, sometimes falling apart of its own accord and sometimes crashing headlong into a wall of distortion or reverb.
But the most remarkable thing about the sound of “Stare.” might actually be that it doesn’t feel sterile or cold or impersonal at all.
The tracks are built in code and performed by computer, but the recordings are full of life and artifacts and buried voices and noises, like the entire album was recorded on a Voice Memos app with a phone held up to a computer speaker and the daily bustle of a household happening all around it.
It creates an almost environmental effect to the computerized tracks that’s further endeared by the closeness and intimacy of Kady’s voice, entering the tracks with a surprising vocal control and melodic sense that grounds these digital experiments in something tangibly emotional.
She sings about regrets, about confusion, about the colossal questions of receding youth, many of which are even reflected in the song titles themselves.
The centerpiece of the release is also the best glimpse into the power and effectiveness that these songs can have even out of the bedroom and onto a stage, with “What Was I In It For” recorded live during an open mic performance at Factory Obscura. The deeper, pounding bass and grittier digital distortion clearer on the pro recording add something weightier and darker beneath a snaking, expressive vocal that conjures more than a little Radiohead.
I have no idea where $T0REKEEPER might go from here, but I’ll be along for the ride.
“Stare.” by $T0REKEEPER is available now for free on Bandcamp.
You can find out about local music and performance happenings in the OKC metro weekly in this music column by Brett Fieldcamp. | Brought to you by True Sky Credit Union.
Brett Fieldcamp is the owner and Editor in Chief of Oklahoma City Free Press. He has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly two decades and served as Arts & Entertainment Editor before purchasing the company from founder Brett Dickerson in 2026.
He is also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
