Despite Bitchin Bajas’ name, with its drug-ruggy whiff of slacker insouciance—to say nothing of the unabashedly tongue-in-cheek tone of titles like Bajas Fresh—there’s nothing self-conscious about the Chicago trio’s music. To the contrary: Their cosmically unfurling synth epics seem unbesmirched by consciousness at all. The Bajas—Cooper Crain, Rob Frye, and Dan Quinlivan—come across like a walking flow state, music bubbling forth like water from a geyser.
Bitchin Bajas’ practice has traditionally blurred the line between improvisation and composition; they wrote most of their last album, 2025’s Inland See, while on tour, hammering out arrangements on stage and recording the material at Electric Audio once they were back home. Isle Peaks springs from the same sessions, tracked at Electric Audio and then fleshed out at Crain’s own studio, Sweat Loge (sic; these guys love a good pun). But where Inland See captured them in unusually song-oriented mode—shorter runtimes, more hummable refrains—with Isle Peaks they give themselves up to the drift once again.
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The EP consists of just three tracks (one, “Watch Your Step,” is exclusive to the vinyl and cassette editions), but there’s nothing slight about it. Sixteen-minute opener “Ajami” is epic in its proportions, with an almost suite-like structure. It begins with a minute or so of steady kalimba pulses before they pull the rug out, seamlessly inserting a triplet bassline and snapping the groove to a lilting 6/8 grid. Frye’s saxophone takes the lead, infusing a curlicued melody with a whiff of Ethio-jazz; the syncopated bassline suggests a distillation of Afrobeat’s hypnotic forward motion.
The groove is nimble and quick-stepping yet also relaxed, and as they lean into the sprawl, the Bajas maintain their lightness of touch. Melodic phrases swell and recede; the kalimba dissolves into a jittery fizz. Around the 10-minute mark, the triplets melt away, and the rhythm shifts once more, back to a 4/4 stomp with a heavily motorik pulse. But even here, charging toward a finale of arpeggiated fireworks, the trio’s music is distinguished by its clean lines and elegant sequencing. Where their peers might explode into amp-charring chaos, Bajas continue to conduct themselves with a watchmaker’s discipline.
They let their hair down on the title track, the most freeform of the EP’s songs. It begins with crickets, sloshing waves, and a needling drone that gradually rises in volume. Strummed strings—a zither?—flash out from within the dusky murk. But where every sound in “Ajami” feels carefully thought out, “Isle Peaks” sounds entirely spontaneous, even authorless, as though the band had set its instruments up on a particularly gusty mountainside, like Aeolian harps, and let the wind do the work. In the song’s final minute, their drone dives slowly in pitch, as though being pulled by gravity, lending to the impression that elemental forces are at the helm.
Bonus track “Watch Your Step” comes closest to the formal concision and melodic focus of Inland See. In fact, if it were the only song you’d ever heard by the band, you might never guess that Bitchin Bajas made their name as a cosmic drone outfit. The track is built around a rising bassline that bubbles so effortlessly, it might take a moment to realize that the song is in 7/8 time. The bassline is a little bit Detroit techno, a little bit Italo, a little bit hi-nrg, and when the chord occasionally pivots to a new scale, it sounds almost like an ambient take on Stereolab—which is perhaps not altogether coincidental, given that Crain recorded, engineered, and mixed the Groop’s 2025 album Instant Holograms on Metal Film. Those aren’t reference points I would have associated with Bitchin Bajas. But then, this is a group that has collaborated with Bonnie “Prince” Billy and covered Sun Ra at length. With Isle Peaks, as with Inland See, they drive home the point that cosmic music, as typically conceived, isn’t a destination; it’s just the starting point.
