Philadelphia duo Cold Court releases chaotic, expansive debut EP

Cold Court’s debut EP arrives like a burst of overlapping signals, not a clean introduction. The Philadelphia brother-sister duo of Mini Serrano and Jojo Lavina-Maldonado released “\ (^_^) /,” which they call “Hands Up,” as a seven-track project that mixes hyperpop chaos with heavier, more deliberate songwriting.

Serrano and Lavina-Maldonado grew up in New Jersey and had been making music together since childhood before officially forming Cold Court in 2021, when Lavina-Maldonado was a high school senior and Serrano was a freshman. Their earliest musical education came from following their father into recording studios where he worked on hip-hop tracks, and Serrano has said discovering rock and My Chemical Romance in high school pushed the duo toward guitar and sharpened their collaboration.

That background shows up in the EP’s construction as much as in its sound. The pair recorded parts of it in their old Philadelphia apartment and in upstate New York, first trying to keep the recordings “outside of the computer” before abandoning that approach and leaning into clipping, distortion and deliberate noise when the initial versions did not land. The result is less a polished genre exercise than a statement of intent: Cold Court wants the mess to stay visible.

The project’s preview track, “Burn,” captures that approach. Serrano called it their “Frankenstein's Monster,” and the song started with a beat Lavina-Maldonado made over winter break while away at college. The siblings then passed remixes back and forth over email, building the track with Ableton, guitars and live drums until it became a dense collision of styles. FLOOD described the song as blending early HEALTH-style dance-punk riffs, hardcore hip-hop, blown-out Daft Punk textures and hyperpop chaos.

That blend places Cold Court inside a larger shift in pop’s online ecosystem. Acts associated with the hyperpop wave, including 100 gecs, helped make glitchy genre collision a recognizable language, but Cold Court’s debut sounds less like a wink at internet irony and more like an attempt to build a durable identity from the same raw materials. WHYY described the EP as an introduction to the duo’s songwriting and soundscapes, and that framing fits the project’s bigger value: it shows how younger artists are using scattered tools, remote collaboration and unruly references to make their own lane outside the old label pipeline.