Much more than in other recent years, the OKC music scene has been crashing the gates of 2025 with a load of great January singles and new releases.
Normally, you might expect a flood of activity like this to ride in on the spring or to kick off a wild summer, but our city’s most exciting artists aren’t wasting any time this year, with some dropping new tracks, videos, and albums in just the year’s first few days.
And we’re not just talking about dour wintery laments, either. We’ve got monstrous metal, soulful R&B, and even transcendent, driving electro to carry us through the month.
So with temperatures plummeting outside, let’s stay in and warm up beside some of the hottest new releases in local music, shall we?
Rainbows are Free – ‘Sleep’
It’s easy to call Rainbows are Free the reigning kings of psychedelic alt-metal in Oklahoma, but it’s honestly difficult to think of any other band that’s even attempting that style in the same way.
Still, the kings have returned to defend their throne with the behemoth new “Sleep,” demolishing the lines between Sabbath-style doom and desert-blasted stoner metal.
Announcing itself with a hypnotically rhythmic guitar foundation drenched in vibrating reverbs, the track opens up to a stomping, loping beat and builds and builds like the cascading nightmares and insomniac paranoias that the lyrics explore.
Even when the bottom falls out and leaves only a single, rasping, choked-off guitar melody, it’s all in service of the ratcheting tension, and when it finally explodes in a searing solo climax, it’s worth the wait.
And if the song itself isn’t enough to affect your dreams, director Rohitash Rao’s grotesque video for the track – featuring a host of stop-motion nightmare creatures growing from a sleeping man’s eyes – is sure to leave you lying awake.
“’Sleep” by Rainbows are Free is streaming everywhere now.
Softaware – ‘Beautiful Blade’
Part trance, part electro-pop, and part indie-rock, “Beautiful Blade” – the new single from OKC-based synth-master Softaware – is all rising and all epic.
Once a band outfit, Softaware is now primarily just Colin Nance, who loads layer upon textural layer of persistent beats, punctuated bass, and atmosphere-soaked synth pads into a seven-minute electro opus of building momentum.
Employing Jeffrey Stevenson – the sax maestro of jazz-poppers Bee & the Hive – to kick off the track with some decidedly Bon Iver-ish sax layering, “Beautiful Blade” just keeps opening up minute after minute, continuously revealing new textures and syncopations, only detouring briefly to cradle Nance’s ravenous, wild-eyed vocal.
It’s a triumphant piece of summery, sci-fi soundscaping, and when the sax rears up once again to carry the affair toward its finale, you’ll be hard-pressed not to ascend along with it.
“Beautiful Blade” by Softaware is streaming everywhere now.
Metra – ‘Capgras’
Somewhere between delicate, modern R&B and dark 90s alt-rock floats this aching exploration of changing loves and reality-shifting heartbreaks from OKC’s soulful Metra.
She glides over the crystalline guitars and subtly builds textures of producer Bended, who lays the foundation for her to contemplate the ways in which lovers stop seeing one another when emotional walls and rifts develop between them.
Capgras Syndrome is actually a very real psychological affliction in which a person comes to believe that everyone around them has been replaced by imposters or fake approximations of the people they’ve known and trusted.
It’s a terrifying concept and an apt metaphor for the feeling of growing apart from someone so fully that you see them as a stranger, no matter how familiar their face looks to you.
At just two minutes, it’s an effective fly-by of emotion, but it also leaves you immediately wanting more, both for the weight and beauty of Metra’s heartfelt vocal and for the pitch-perfect production, which may well be some of the best to pop from the scene in awhile.
“Capgras” by Metra is streaming everywhere now.
Sun Deep – ‘Ghayal’
Rapper, singer, producer, and experimenter Sun Deep understands the effectiveness of soulful minimalism arguably better than anyone else in OKC, and his newest single “Ghayal” only serves as a welcome reminder.
Opening with little more than bubbling, distorted bass and a handclap under his sparkling, effervescent vocal (as always, in his native Hindi language,) the beat quickly drops to establish a subterranean groove and a hyper-minimal synth-chord bed beneath him.
It plays like the soundtrack to a postmodern noir, with fog, rain, and upturned collars, but it is lit by neon streetlights and LCD screens.
In the context here, “’ghayal” translates to “wounded,” and that’s the feeling that Sun Deep is imparting: a pained, resigned longing, but also an acceptance of defeat and a resolve to keep moving, to keep growing, and to resist the allure of hardening your heart against the world.
It’s a lesson that maybe we should be trying to learn right now.
“Ghayal” by Sun Deep drops on streaming services everywhere January 24th.
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 has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.