Meditating about the universe is heavy stuff but, like much in life, you have the option of being consumed, or delighted by your surroundings. Brooklyn-based electronic artist, The Landing, does the latter. Producing synth-pop tracks that have their feet planted firmly on the ground, but their eyes to the sky, The Landing’s songs capture the bliss of infinity, but are packaged in a way that harkens back to pop hits of the early 60's. The result is tunes that are spacey in scope, but still feel like home. The Landing will be performing tonight (11.28) at Baby's All Right on a uber-cool all NYC electronic bill including also Salt Cathedral and Ela Minus. He also answered a few questions about his creative process in the interview below.

Q&A with The Landing about the creative process on Delicious Audio.

The last time we checked in with The Landing, the solo act was making major noise, reaching the peak of the Hype Machine charts two times back-to-back. We have to say, with his latest single "Stars in Motion" a three-peat is definitely in the space-pop artist's "stars," so to speak. On the track, he reaches critical pop mass, inflecting RnB flavored, up-beat percussion into his usual, out-of-this world synth patterns to create a track that gets heads bopping.  The vocals are also notably earthier and more seductive than on previous efforts, contrasting well with the space-y nature of the production. With this track, The Landing has proved he can do pop with mainstream appeal, but sans cheese, along with his more artful work of the past. Don't miss him live on his American tour from 8/8 to 8/27. —Henry Solotaroff-Webber

The Hype Machine is particularly good at highlighting electronic tracks by emerging artists, and there are a lot of acts out there that managed to get close to the top of their charts at some point. But climbing those charts twice is no easy feat, and automatically excludes those who pull it off from the dreaded "one hit wonder" category. Just about a year ago, the cosmic synth pop of NYC's The Landing went viral through hypem.com with debut single 'Anxiety'. Today, the brand new single 'Then Comes the Wonder' (streaming) actually reached #1 on that same site. Congrats are due to the (one man)  band, who recently made the list of our Best Emerging NYC Artists of 2014. You can catch The Landing live at The Knit on April 17th.

We added this song to The Deli's playlist of Best electronic songs by emerging NYC artists - check it out!

Last week we started publishing the results of our picks from our Best of NYC Year End Poll's Open Submissions for the genres Alt Rock/Power Pop, Songwriters/Rootsy Pop and Electronic. A bunch of categories are left, but it's now time to go Indie-Poppy! Pop has been invading the NYC scene in the last decade with bands that retain NYC's signature edgy sound, but blend it with more melodic and uptempo elements. Competition was fierce in this category, with an incredible amount of really good bands - darn, WHY can't we let them all through? Who created this poll's rules anyway? Anyway, this is what our jurors went for:

Total submissions in this category: 42

Artists qualified to the next stage (i.e. the Readers' Poll, starting around 01.20):

1. The Landing - 8 (out of 10)

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2. HEY ANNA - 7.83

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3. The Cabana Kids - 7.5

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3. BRAEVES - 7.5

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Honorable Mentions (scores above 7):

Éyal hai, Pink Murder, The Letter Yellow, Born Cages, Jonah Delso, Canon Logic, Rathborne.

Jurors: Jason Behrends (The Deli Chicago), Terra J. Jura (The Deli Nashville), PDG (The Deli NYC)

Stay tuned for more results from the open submissions, and then for the readers' poll, and then the final chart!

The Deli's Staff

Sci-Fi themes, even though central to a very influential band like The Pixies, are not exactly the most common ones among emerging indie bands. Space-pop group The Landing (brainchild of Brooklyn musician Jon Bell) sounds nothing like Black Francis' band, but shares with him a fascination for anything intergalactic and extraterrestrial. Or at least that's what you gather from new video "We Are," whose title is the answer to the question "Are we alone in the universe?" - although the answer gets mischieviously confounded at the end of the song with the tiniest "not." The song is a well orchestrated, hypnotic electro-soul ballad, in which liquid synth pads play the part of space, arpeggiators and sparse guitar notes play the stars, and Bell's falsetto plays the absence of gravity. "We Are" is the title track of the band's latest EP.