Band To Watch: RIP Magic

The press bio for rising London quartet RIP Magic doesn’t have any words. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t say anything. The group of four multidisciplinary artists — drummer Beth Boswell-Knight, audio-visual artist Felix Bayley-Higgins, DJ and sound designer Marco Pini, and bassist Pedro Takahashi — opted to use visual language to describe their band’s warped, technicolored world. The Dropbox file of images include kids exploring a neon bouncy castle, stills from filmmaker Sissel Morell Dargis' hot air balloon documentary Balomania, cartoon devils, rainbow bursts of light, balloons from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, Kim Kardashian with a sunglasses sunburn, Pope Leo XIV holding a vintage baseball bat on an airplane, and a facepainted image of Garfield. Their debut album 1,2,3 — which came out Friday, a little over a year after the release of their earliest singles "Loot" and "Dox" — is an amalgamation of bizarre samples, gauzy rhythmic trances, fuzzy vocals, and hypnotic noise. It evokes the kaleidoscopic grandiosity of groups like the Chemical Brothers or Animal Collective. Over the past year, they’ve attracted admirers including Tyler The Creator (who was onboard when all they...