Lionmilk is a pianist/composer/producer from Los Angeles who started releasing music in the mid-2010s. In 2018, he made his debut on Paxico Records with the release of Depths of Madness. In 2019, he moved over to Leaving Records to release Visions in Paraíso, and he’s remained with the label since then. Most recently, we got his album, Intergalactic Warp Terminal 222, just this past March. Now he’s back with a collection of unreleased material from the past three years, Sauna Saudade.

One test of how good a musician is how much you can mess with their B-Sides, their beats, their demos, or whatever exposure you have to their unpolished, unfinished, or otherwise unreleased material. Are you listening to it once or twice because this is your favorite artist and you’re a completion-ist, or are you really getting into the music and enjoying it for what it is? With Sauna Saudade, if you told me this was a regular planned out album from Lionmilk, I’d probably believe you, the music is just that good. Part of it is that Lionmilk is an incredible keyboardist, and even with a basic groove to improvise around he can really get cooking, but it’s also that Lionmilk has a lot of different musical ideas and interests, and he brings them together in interesting ways. Over the course of this collection, we’re getting everything from piano-driven compositions to downtempo instrumentals to bossa nova to jazz and funk and everything in between. And what makes it even more unfair to the rest of the musicians out there is that there’s a pretty good flow and musical conversation happening between all these different pieces, just in the way that Lionmilk is putting his own spin on each style of music to make it his own. In the end, you get a project that works way better than what it looks like on paper.

Normally, when an artist drops a collection of unreleased material, it feels like a way to tide fans over in between projects, but it’s not something that you’ll return to all that often. In the case of Sauna Saudade, Lionmilk has given us a really funky and soulful collection of music that is really enjoyable on its own.