The Bad Penny (beta)

As we began to compile another rundown of quality albums you can scoop up for free on Bandcamp, we came across two new, interconnected releases that deserve the entire spotlight this time around. Read what we discovered below, and prepare to be moved.

(If you have the means to support these artists, Louis Jucker and Elie Zoé, please consider paying at least some money to support their remarkable work.)

Louis Jucker’s A Pharmacy of Songs (Humus Records)

Every musician attests to “listening to their audience,” but with A Pharmacy of Songs, the Swiss artist walked the walk. Jucker set up art galleries, presented early versions of material he had started to sketch out and asked those in attendance to share their personal struggles that he then impregnated into his new songs. In other words, Jucker broke every rule in the book instructing how artists should keep a distance from their fans. The exercise resulted in what Jucker’s calling his 50 “remedy songs” that comprise this special artistic endeavor, released less than two weeks ago. Jucker is the epitome of a modern-day Good Samaritan.

Elie Zoé’s Shifting Forms (Humus Records)

Another Swiss artist on the Humus Records roster, Elie Zoé issued a statement surrounding the release of Shifting Forms that provides more insight into the record than we could:

The album “is born out of the need to redefine my relationship with my voice — and with the world,” Zoé said. [At the] end of 2023, I decide[d] to wrap up the Hello Future Me tour after having to transpose all the songs several keys down, while coming to terms with the fact that I could no longer sing any of the songs i had ever written. I enter[ed] 2024 as if stepping into the kind of ‘mythic time’ that animist cosmogonies speak of: my usual vocal habits no longer work, and I don’t know how to present myself in public anymore.”

Zoé continued: “I choose to see this state of non-definition as an exciting way to understand and rethink who I am and what I do. for that, I need to build a safe place with my near-brother Louis Jucker. We build a studio out of salvaged materials, and in parallel, I relearn how to sing with the melodies I write. I feed on stories from anthropologists and biologists, and the lyrics that emerge speak of change, of blurred boundaries, of connections between beings. by ourselves, we record and mix these songs made of pop melodies and rock instrumentation, with a new voice that I love recording.

Zoé concluded: “In the fall, I publicly change my name, removing a ‘mi’ from my former stage name. My name is elie zoé. this is my fourth album, although it might sound like a first. Inside it lives a multitude of beings inviting us into a contact zone without limits, where the names we gave them are open to question. » – elie zoé”

Go here, here and here for the previous rundowns of The Bad Penny‘s recommended free downloads on Bandcamp.

This entry was posted on 12/10/2025 at 9:21 am and is filed under Lists, MP3s with tags Elie Zoé, Humus Records, Louis Jucker. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.