It’s already become a cliche to label any artist’s work born around the ‘Great Lockdown’ of 2020 as being accordingly inspired or shaped by the contemplative pause that beset most of the World, yet pensive material indeed came from the sudden halt of reflective uncertainty. Take SuperCheri’s Featurette as a case in point. Suspending guitar duties with main band Brabrabra, Berlin’s Kitchen Leg Records co-founder Federica dusted off her Tascam 4-track to create introspective, lo-fi bedroom rock with all instrumentation (including “legendary stubbornness”) handled alone.

Featurette‘s dedication to Prince and David Graeber hints at the album’s blend of anarchism and philosophy with infectious, D.I.Y. tape pop. Like Kitchen Leg Records’ distinctive collage artwork, SuperCheri uses her drum machine like a canvass to assemble disparate cuts of funk, post-punk and surf twang against a backdrop of hissing minimalism. ‘Spinterogeno’ (Italian for ‘distributor’) recalls the delicate restraint of Young Marble Giants with its foggy organ and brittle bass, the hushed disquiet hovering over ‘We Despise You’ til a potent attack of rock seethe interrupts the austere fragility.

Gang of Four dub funk struts on ‘Step Back’ which manages to expertly excavate pop diamonds in its sonic sinew, and reverb-drenched grunge adds other hues to the album on the slacker ‘I’m Not’. Label co-founder and in-house artist Andrew Kemp lends his vocals on the haunting ‘Time’, resurrecting the primitive drum machines of Suicide scoring the song’s examination of time’s non-linear, amorphous nature with ghostly pertinence. The drum machine itself has different flavours which act as a springboard for the character of each track; Bossanova, jazzy, even martial, always maintaining the intimate urgency of bedroom recordings but never to the point of derivativity.

Continuing Kitchen Leg Records’ reputation for its impressive catalogue of leftfield punk, SuperCheri’s Featurette sits alongside the best of their output with a debut that is replete with intimate sketches and post-punk vignettes which serve as an authentic document to the extraordinary suspension of everyday life that the pandemic brought, but vibrant and colourful enough to not be defined by it.