Song Of The Week – 90.5 The Night: Recent Episodes
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Geese is back! You may remember their debut album Projector caused more hype/excitement than there’s been around a NYC band in years. They made their TV debut on Colbert, were profiled by the NY Times, Stereogum Band To Watch, Consequence Artist Of The Month, Paste Best Of What’s Next, Rolling Stone called them “indie rock prodigies,” and they toured with Jack White and Spoon. The new single is called “Cowboy Nudes”. The song’s an apocalyptic funhouse mirror, but more than that, it’s a massive departure for the band. They’ve totally overhauled their scrappy post-punk sound into something volcanic, bugged-out, and unpredictable (watch out for that bongo vs. sitar duel before the third verse). It’s the sound of them throwing the kitchen sink toward some of the weirder corners of the classic rock pantheon – Bitches Brew, Ween, Uncle Tupelo, Tim Buckley – and piecing it all back together inside Sgt. Pepper’s garage.
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Wednesday is a band from North Carolina made up of guitarist/vocalist Karly Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, bassist Margo Shultz, drummer Alan Miller, and lap/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis. Hartzman writes most of her songs from her bedroom floor in Asheville, NC. Nodding to Nineties skuzz, shoegaze, and country, the music is gauzy and heady, a gnarled wall of sound where Hartzmanís voice and storytelling cut through the din. The band has long revered country lyricism ñ the dial in their car is often tuned to 105.5 The Outlaw, the DJ with the wild-ass voice ñ and the distorted lap steel innovations Chelmis unleashes on ìBull Believer” and elsewhere is an ode to the genre, to the music and imagery of the American south, the sprawl of the North Carolinian forests, a black bear darting through the yard during a barbeque with friends, a muggy summer and the impossible darkness only lit by lightning bugs when itís real late at night.
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Solid Bronze began as a recording project between Trenton, NJ natives Ian Everett (bass) and George Miller (drums). They established themselves with their acclaimed 2019 debut The Fruit Basket. Callum Bains of PopMatters said “The album captures the sound of 1970s funk and soul, resting on solid songwriting and powerful arrangements.” [PopMatters, September 10, 2019] After releasing The Fruit Basket, Everett and Miller expanded the live band to accommodate the full-bodied funk of the record. Known on stage as the Solid Bronze Rhythm Band, the group now features Mark Gallagher on baritone saxophone, Tommy Heutmaker on guitar, Eric Johnson on keyboards, and Nilah Montgomery on vocals. This lineup recorded Mt. Fuji in 2020 and 2021.
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Hailing from St. Catharines, Ontario, Dallas Green started City and Colour in 2005 as a (then) quiet counter to the band he co-founded, hardcore luminaries Alexisonfire, releasing songs via the Internet. They proved so popular with fans that he released City and Colour’s first album, Sometimes, later that year which won the JUNO Award for Alternative Album of the Year. He has since released five more albums under the moniker, accompanied by a shifting lineup of musicians, and collected four JUNO awards, including two Songwriter of the Year awards, plus one Triple Platinum, two Double Platinum, six Platinum, and one Gold certification in Canada,
and one Gold certification in Australia. In 2022, Green was honored with the SOCAN National Achievement Award in recognition of his philanthropic contributions to music education in Canada. Beyond the legacy of City and Colour, Green teamed up with global icon Alecia Moore (a.k.a. P!nk) to form the folk duo You+Me. The duo’s acclaimed Platinum-certified first record, rose ave., debuted at #4 on the U.S. Top 200 Chart, #1 in Canada, #2 in Australia. Despite that productivity and work ethic, Green went through a dark and fallow period before The Love Still Held Me Near got on track.
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“The Price of Progress is The Hold Steady’s 9th studio LP. As I sit to write this, I don’t have an exact vivid memory of when we started making it. This is largely because it was part of what has become the normal flow of our band’s life: we play shows, we write songs, we record them, we release them. Making this record was a logical extension of what being The Hold Steady means to us right now, and what we’ve done for a number of years now. Here’s what I know for sure: We got together in 2021 for two different sessions a few months apart. We worked with producer Josh Kaufman and engineer Dan Goodwin at The Clubhouse studio in Rhinebeck NY. All of this was comfortable- it was the same producer, engineer and studio as we had used on our previous two records. In fact, our last LP, Open Door Policy, was just months old when we first assembled to work on these songs. As per our normal working methods, I’d been getting song ideas from Tad, Franz and Steve. I’d write lyrics to them and then we’d work on the arrangements when the band was all together in person. The songs come together quickly at first, then Josh would help us dial in on some of the finer points on the floor before recording. During each session we recorded five or six songs. We worked hard but were relaxed. We stayed on site on the studio grounds, and there were barbecues and baseball games on the lawn outside the Clubhouse tracking room. By late 2021, our 9th LP was coming into focus.” – Craig Finn
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Josh Ritter has been thinking a lot about space exploration. It has nothing to do with his spellbinding new album, Spectral Lines, except that in a way, it really does. “The Voyager spacecraft went up in ’77 and now it’s out there in a place that no one’s ever been before, and it’s sending back all these messages,” Ritter says. “I feel like songs do that in their own little way. They’re probes: they go out into the world, and sometimes you hear stories back from them, but really, they go off on their own.” Ritter, too, is sending back messages, in the form of 10 new songs that are atmospheric and impressionistic. Like the recently launched Webb Telescope, or Voyager all those years ago, he’s looking for signs of life, reaching for a sense of commonality, something that feels universal in this infinite universe. Spectral Lines, his 11th album, finds those shared experiences in songs that push beyond the bounds of Ritter’s previous work.
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photo: Rahil AshruffThe Happy Fits‘ third full-length is a massive leap forward for the New Jersey trio, who have already built a serious following with their energetic and electrifying pop-rock style. At once a showcase of rock-solid songcraft and gleeful experimentation, Under the Shade of Green is a deceptively bright opus that also zooms in on the anxieties and catastrophes of daily life while never losing its irresistibly hooky attitude. Under the Shade of Green is the latest chapter in The Happy Fits’ impressive rise, dating back to their bonding in high school in 2012. Cellist Calvin Langman and guitarist Ross Monteith started playing covers together in earnest, and when Langman revealed some original songs he’d been working on, drummer Luke Davis came aboard to join in a creative genesis that would result in the Awfully Apeelin’ EP from 2016. After Awfully Apeelin’s “While You Fade Away” scored a placement on Spotify’s Fresh Finds playlist, the trio dropped out of college to focus on the band full-time; by the time the group’s debut album Concentrate was released in 2018, they’d amassed a growing following. After that album, the band hit the road two years before recording their second album What Could Be Better, which saw release in 2020 and was written with the band’s live audience in mind.
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photo: Gustavo OlivaresThee Sacred Souls is a young soul band born out of the San Diego retro soul scene – recently released “Love Is The Way”available now digitally, and on vinyl as the b-side to the “Easier Said Than Done” physical 45 on Daptone Records. “Love is the Way” finds lead singer Josh Lane exploring love’s many stages with a sweet, soaring falsetto that has audiences swooning. “Love has no limits and it has no name, it has no gender and it has no creed,” Lane sings, with a Mayfield-esque warmth. “Love is the way. Whether its romantic love or love for your neighbor, it’s all love,” says lead singer Josh Lane. “Inspired by Toni & The Harts and the Stax sound, this uptempo B side will be sure to inspire a two step out of even the coldest of hearts.” Thee Sacred Souls released their self-titled debut album in August to raves. They have been a must-see band on tour, with sell-out shows in NYC, LA, the UK and Europe. Thee Sacred Souls were formed by Sal Samano and Alex Garcia when they were just 23 years old in Chula Vista CA, and inspired by everything from trailblazing East LA band Thee Midniters to Italian library music. They met Lane on Instagram, who was studying classical voice at the time. The band was rolling tape with Daptoneís Gabe Roth just three days after Roth saw one of their first gigs, in 2019. Their all-analog yet distinctly modern debut weaves together hints of Chicano, Philly, Chicago, Detroit and even Panama soul.
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Over the past 20 years, The New Pornographers have proven themselves one of the most excellent bands in indie rock. They’ve constantly offered new sonic surprises with every album, and Continue as a Guest is their greatest leap to date. The groupís ninth album and first for Merge establishes them alongside modern luminaries like Yo La Tengo and Superchunk when it comes to their ability to evolve while still retaining what made them so special in the first place. A dazzling and intriguing collection of songs that are truly built to last, Continue as a Guest finds bandleader A.C. Newman and his compatriots Neko Case, Kathryn Calder, John Collins, Todd Fancey, and Joe Seiders exploring fresh territory and shattering the barriers of their collective comfort zone. Newman began work on Continue as a Guest at his Woodstock, NY, home over the course of a year, after the band had just finished touring behind 2019ís In the Morse Code of Brake Lights. “I found myself for the first time thinking that it was really time for me to learn how to become a home-recording guy and I had all the time in the world to do it as well,” he recalls. “There was a lot of woodshedding. It was helpful to learn more about engineering and arranging. I still feel like a real novice at it, but Iím much better than I used to be.”
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Many musicians turn inward when the world around them seems chaotic and unreliable. Reframing one’s perception of self can often reveal new personal truths both uncomfortable and profound, and for Beth Orton, music re-emerged in the past several years as a tethering force even when her own life felt
more tumultuous than ever. Indeed, the foundations of the songs on Orton’s stunning new album, Weather Alive, are nothing more than her voice and a “cheap, crappy” upright piano installed in a shed in her garden, conjuring a deeply meditative atmosphere that remains long after the final note has evaporated. “I am known as a collaborator and I’m very good at it. I’m very open to it. Sometimes, I’ve been obscured by it,” says Orton, who rose to prominence through ‘90s-era collaborations with William Orbit, Red Snapper and The Chemical Brothers before striking out on her own with a series of acclaimed, award-winning solo releases. “I think what’s happened with this record is that through being cornered by life, I got to reveal myself to myself and to collaborate with myself, actually.” Orton has long been regarded as possessing one of the most unique and expressive voices in music–a voice that has grown evermore rich and wise over time. Her 1996 debut, Trailer Park, pioneered a synthesis of electronic and acoustic sounds, while its 1999 follow-up, Central Reservation, garnered international success.
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“Some Of Us Are Brave was a moment to pause and pay homage to Black women,” says Danielle Ponder. “My biggest cheerleaders are Black women. Bravery is what it takes to walk through this world as a Black woman, so I hope this song provides an anthem for Black women who are navigating this world with courage and strength.” In Ponder’s life, bravery manifested in the decision to leave her successful day job as a public defender to pursue singing and songwriting full time. Ponder had always been musical but chose to pursue a career in law after her brother received a 20-year sentence due to a “three strikes” law. But even as she became a tireless advocate for justice in her community—first as a public defender and later as a diversity, equity and inclusion officer in that same office—the music was never far; she remembers a time when she did a small tour in Europe and was back in court the following Monday. There eventually came a time to choose one, and so she leapt.
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Kalmia Traver and Alex Toth, the group’s front persons, co-writers and co-producers, first began a friendship as jazz students at the University of Vermont. Soon after, they formed Rubblebucket, using the project to delve into pop, funk, dance and psychedelia; performances have spanned Bonnaroo to Glastonbury to their self-curated Dream Picnic Festival, and they’ve collaborated with kindred genre-blenders including Arcade Fire and Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears. But before their musical relationship, Traver and Toth initially bonded over another shared passion: the two were part of UVM’s Sustainable Community Development program. Since their last full length, 2018’s Sun Machine, Rubblebucket’s songwriters have recorded extensively with other projects. Traver, usually a saxophonist, poured dance sensibilities into Kalbells, a rhythmic indie quartet in which she plays keyboards. Toth, who dove into punk catharsis with his band Alexander F, went interior for T?th, a solo project inspired by Arthur Russell’s serendipitous sparseness. “By doing multiple records on our own and together, you just get better and better at understanding the process,” says Toth. That process includes “song-a-day” workshops, an ecstatic endeavor the band likens to “spiritual upheaval.”
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On January 13th, UNI and The Urchins will release their debut album, Simulator, on Chimera Music. Formerly known as Uni, UNI and The Urchins are the post-apocalyptic rock & roll cult led by vocalist and NYC nightlife fixture Jack James Busa and ex-GOASTT bassist Charlotte Kemp Muhl. Combining acrobatic post-punk with glittery glam rock, V Magazine once described the band’s sound as “in their own league and therefore genre.” Simulator was written (and mixed/mastered/engineered by Kemp) mostly in isolation in the woods of Upstate NY, but takes listeners on a cosmic journey through a “lobotomized disco” world of silicone sex doll factories, crucifix manufacturers and iPhone graveyards, in a Camus-esque dive into the ways technology has permanently changed our lives and, quite literally, us.
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There are times in our life when we feel magic in the air. When new love arrives, or we find ourselves lost in a moment of creation with others who share our vision. A sense that: this is who I want to be. This is what I want to share. It’s a fleeting feeling and one that Kyle Thomas, the singer-songwriter who records and performs as King Tuff, found himself longing for in the spring of 2020. But knowing he couldn’t simply recreate this time in his life at will, Thomas—who hails from Brattleboro, Vermont—set out to write a love letter to those cherished moments of inspiration and to the small town that formed him. The one where he first nurtured his songwriting impulses, bouncing ideas off other like-minded artists. The kind of place where the changing of the seasons always delivered a sense of perspective and fresh artistic inspiration. Where he felt a deeper connection with nature and sense of community that had once been so close at hand. “I wanted to make an album to remind myself that life is magical,” he reflects. The result is Smalltown Stardust, a spiritual, tender and ultimately joyous record that might come as a shock to those with only a passing knowledge of the artist’s back catalog. On Smalltown Stardust, Thomas takes us on his journey to a place where past and present collide, where he can be a dreamer in love with all that he sees. Images of his youth abound: from Route 91 which runs through his hometown (in “Smalltown Stardust”); to Redtooth, a spectre who used to roam the streets (“Bandits Of Blue Sky”); to old friends, old haunts and old dreams (“Always Find Me”); to Vermont’s Rock River, which gave its name to a song of a torch still burning for past love: “Those days are gone and we can’t rewind/ Cuz people grow and places change/ But my love for you will never fade away.”
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“People come and people go away / Yeah, but God with me he stayed,” sings Alex Giannascoli, the Philadelphia-based musician best known as Alex G on his new album, God Save the Animals. “God” figures in the LP’s title and multiple of its thirteen tracks, not as a concrete religious entity but as a sign for a generalized sense of faith (in something, anything) that fortifies Giannascoli, or the characters he voices, amid the songs’ often fraught situations. Giannascoli has been drawn in recent years to musicians like Gillian Welch and writers like Joy Williams, artists who balance the public and hermetic and who present faith more as a shared social language than religious doctrine. Filtering his experiences through fact and fiction, Giannascoli also opened up the songs through a more practical method: collaboration. God Save the Animals features several individual contributions from his bandmates (guitarist Samuel Acchione, drummer Tom Kelly, and bassist John Heywood) or frequent collaborator Molly Germer on strings and/or vocals. As with records since his adolescence, Giannascoli wrote and demoed the songs
of God Save the Animals by himself, at home; but, for the sake of both new tones and “a routine that was outside of my apartment” during the pandemic, he began visiting multiple studios in greater Philadelphia. God Save the Animals consequently features the work of some half-dozen engineers whom Giannascoli asked to help him produce the “best” recording quality, whatever that meant. The result is an album more dynamic than ever in its sonic palette and its thoroughgoing complexity.
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Their first new song since 2021, produced and co-written with Day Wave, the lilting, dreamy “Horsegirl” finds Overcoats (the duo Hana Elion and JJ Mitchell) crafting a hypnotic, hum-in-the-sun pop song. The eagerly awaited new song is the band’s first new material since the 2021 EP Used To Be Scared Of The Dark. The band says “Horsegirl” captures the paradox of longing for connection while yearning to be free. “It’s about that feeling of wanting to wander instead of being tied down or tamed,” says Elion. “But the point is that we’re not horse girls—we’re the horse itself.” Recorded in Los Angeles with Day Wave (aka Jackson Phillips) along with additional production from Daniel Tashian (Kacey Musgraves, Lissie, Demi Lovato) in Nashville.
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On new single “From The Hill,” Nation of Language set the emotional dissolution of friendships against an enthralling arrangement filled with visceral lead vocals, eruptive synths, and a feeling of wistful, unconventional bliss. The song marks the Brooklyn band’s first release of original music since 2021’s A Way Forward LP, further expanding the sound that has made them “the most exciting synth-pop act in years” (Paste). Combining complex subject matter with all-consuming catharsis, Nation of Language’s blend of new wave, punk and krautrock has been praised as “melancholy and full of longing, yet dance-floor ready” (Washington Post), and they are about to bring “From The Hill” to some of the biggest stages they have ever played. On the heels of a year that’s already seen Nation of Language make their national television debut on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, perform at festivals like Governors Ball, headline NYC’s Webster Hall and other shows around the world.
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“I feel like there are two sides of me,” says the Nashville-based singer-songwriter and guitar virtuoso known as Sunny War. “One of them is very self-destructive, and the other is trying to work with that other half to keep things balanced.” That’s the central conflict on her fourth album, the eclectic and innovative Anarchist Gospel, which documents a time when it looked like the self-destructive side might win out. “Everybody is a beast just tryin g their hardest to be good. That’s what it is to be human. You’re not really good or bad. You’re just trying to stay in the middle of those two things all the time, and you’re probably doing a s—– job of it. That’s okay, because we’re all just monsters.” Extreme emotions can make that battle all the more perilous, yet from such trials Sunny has crafted a set of songs that draw on a range of ideas and styles, as though she’s marshaling all her forces to get her ideas across: ecstatic gospel, dusty country blues, thoughtful folk, rip-roaring rock and roll, even avant garde studio experiments (like the collage of voices that closes “Shelter and Storm”). She melds them together into a powerful statement of survival, revealing a probing songwriter who indulges no comforting platitudes and a highly innovative guitarist who deploys spidery riffs throughout every song.
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The release of ‘Double Vision’ coincides with the release of Ocean Alley‘s 4th album ‘Low Altitude Living’. This release caps off what has been a mammoth 2022 for the band. […]
In the late 1990s, James Mercer and Brian Burton were living just about as far apart as possible while both residing in the continental United States—James in Albuquerque NM, Brian […]
The Jaws of Brooklyn formed when Zia Uddin-Drums, Paul Christofferson-Bass, Bryan Cohen-Guitar met singer Lindsay Love in Seattle during the height of the COVID pandemic in August 2020. They recorded […]
After more than a decade in New York City, Anthony D’Amato headed west for his new album, At First There Was Nothing, relocating to American Fork, Utah, for recording sessions […]
Throughout their lifespan as a band, The Lone Bellow have cast an indelible spell with their finespun songs of hard truth and unexpected beauty, frequently delivered in hypnotic three-part harmony. […]
Although Panda Bear and Sonic Boom are no strangers to each other’s music, Reset marks their first collaborative release. When SB pitched an idea to take their working relationship to […]
The latest full-length from Rhett Miller, The Misfit, exists in an enchanted dimension all its own. With its elegant blurring of psychedelia, dream-pop and electronic-leaning indie-rock, the Texas-bred singer-songwriter’s ninth […]
Illiterate Light thrives on subverting expectations. Though just a duo, the HarrisonburgVA-based singer-guitarist Jeff Gorman along with Nashville TN-based drummerJake Cochran make surprisingly pummeling and thoughtful alternative rock. Since the […]
flipturn makes indie music for endless summers, sun-streaked days, and introspective nights. It’s a cinematic sound rooted not only in the Florida towns where the musicians first banded together as […]
Formed in London 2012, Bear’s Den have amassed a dedicated and international fan base with their anthemic songs. With 3 studio albums under their belt, as well as a collaborative […]
The Heavy Heavy create the kind of unfettered rock-and-roll that warps time and place, immediately pulling the audience into a euphoric fugue state with its own sun-soaked atmosphere. Led by […]
In the twenty-four years since eclectic improv-rock band Umphrey’s McGee formed, their sound has been an amalgamation of genres, moods, and tempos, effortlessly flowing from one feeling to the next […]
The new Tegan And Sara album Crybaby was produced by John Congleton (Angel Olsen, Sharon Van Etten), Sara Quin and Tegan Quin. “This was the first time where, while we […]
If you’re a guitar enthusiast or familiar with the L.A. music scene, you may already know the name Abby Hwong. Born and raised in the Chicago suburbs before moving to […]
GRAMMY-winning French band Phoenix has shared their first new track in two years. Entitled “Alpha Zulu,” the song is a radiant departure from Phoenix songs of yore, pointing towards bold […]
The 1975 return with new single “Part Of The Band” to announce album Being Funny In A Foreign Language. Being Funny In A Foreign Language, the band’s fifth studio album, […]
Smash cut to Kiwi Jr.’s third album, Chopper, overseen by trusted pilot Dan Boeckner (Wolf Parade, Handsome Furs). Turning nocturnal with necks mock turtle, our Local Kiwi Jr. takes neon […]
Sharon Van Etten has always been the kind of artist who helps people make sense of the world around them, and her sixth album, We’ve Been Going About This All […]
Goose is Rick Mitarotonda [vocals, guitar], Peter Anspach [vocals, keys, guitar], Trevor Weekz [bass], Ben Atkind [drums], and Jeff Arevalo [vocals, percussion, drums] – fluidly traverse genres with head-spinning hooks, […]
From their inception in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1986, the Afghan Whigs have never played by the rules of convention. Against the plaid-and-grunge-shaded backdrop of the early to-mid-‘90s, the Whigs stood […]
Two-time Grammy nominee Madison Cunningham’s new album Revealer is set for release September 9. “Hospital is written from this sort of half awake, slightly drunken, on the cusp of a […]
When Sarah Shook & The Disarmers released Sidelong four years ago, the irreverent quintet’s debut turned heads around the world. Then 2018’s follow-up Years hooked everyone from Rolling Stone to […]
Martin Courtney IV is the frontman of the indie rock band Real Estate, from Ridgewood NJ. When Martin Courtney was a teenager, he knew how to get lost. In the […]
A landmark moment for Miynt, whose path towards her debut album has already boasted multiple EP projects, Lonely Beach resonates like a thesis on Miynt’s sonic evolution displayed across 13 […]
Lo Moon deftly balance expansive soundscapes and eloquent songcraft. The Los Angeles based quartet of Matt Lowell, Crisanta Baker, Sam Stewart and Sterling Laws -ultimately use music to make sense […]
Craig Finn is a Minnesota-bred singer/songwriter based in New York City, best known as the singer of The Hold Steady. Finn spent the ’90’s leading Minneapolis indie band Lifter Puller, […]
When considering Los Angeles outfit The Interrupters, take a moment to kindly forget jargon like “SoCal punk rock” or “next wave ska” or whatever perimeter you want to secure around […]
The latest album from Jack Johnson, Meet The Moonlight (out June 24th) opens on a question opens on a question about the strange complexities of human nature, and never lets […]
Pastlife, the first new full-length record from Day Wave in five years, is a raw, immersive meditation on these ideas and the past lives of the project’s creator, Jackson Phillips. […]
“Everything sort of lined up, but I don’t believe in coincidences.” Chlo White could be talking about any of the several key moments in her musical history: meeting best friend […]
With one foot in the real world and the other in a charmed dimension of his own making, Amos Lee creates the rare kind of music that’s emotionally raw yet […]
PM Warson grew up in an English town in the staple suburban musical landscape of heavy rock, the ghost of New Wave, and the fading star of the indie boom […]
Praised by NPR for their “sprawling, cross-cultural indie rock,” Calexico has spent the better part of the past three decades exploring the dusty musical borderlands of the American Southwest, crafting […]
After releasing their critically acclaimed sophomore album, Two of Me, in 2020, the Brooklyn-based and LA-born grunge-pop band Momma have returned with new infectious singles “Medicine” and “Rockstar,” the band’s […]
In the years between 2018’s BAMBI and LP3, Minneapolis’ Hippo Campus — made up of vocalist/guitarists Jake Luppen and Nathan Stocker, drummer Whistler Allen, bassist Zach Sutton, and trumpeter DeCarlo […]
On their Dualtone Records debut Sticking With It, Seattle-based seven piece The Dip deliver the kind of unbridled rhythm-and-blues that hits on every emotional level. Inciting everything from raw catharsis […]
Band of Horses is an American rock band formed in 2004 in Seattle, Washington by Ben Bridwell. The band has released five studio albums, including 2010’s Grammy-nominated Infinite Arms. The […]
One of the reasons you started listening to music in the first place might have been in the hope of finding the kind of conviction and fierce rawness evident in […]
Growing up surrounded by forests and mountains near Bergen, Norway, Aurora first felt the compulsion to sit alone and create at six years old; by the time she was twelve […]
Credit Phoebe Fox In many ways, Yard Act is a project that exists through the fusion of seemingly opposing entities. Old friends in a new band, they seek out shades of socio-political grey, imbibing their stories with sharp, satirical spoken-word humour. Spearheaded by James Smith (vocals) and Ryan Needham (bass), the now four-piece, completed by Sam Shjipstone (guitar) and Jay Russell (drums), have built a sound that speaks inherently to their birthplace of Leeds, West Yorkshire, and yet ties together observations from all walks of modern British life – the small-town bloke in the local pub, the anti-capitalist stuck at a desk job, the tired activist in all of us torn between easy complicity and the desire to fight. Their sound and ethos might be progressive, but it’s not about pointing fingers so much as opening eyes.
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photo credit: Barbara FG Loss and hope, isolation and communion, the cessation and renewal of purpose. Timeless and salient, these themes echo throughout the fifth album from Midlake, their first since Antiphon in 2013. Produced to layered, loving perfection by John Congleton, For the Sake of Bethel Woods is an album of immersive warmth and mystery from a band of ardent seekers, one of our generation’s finest: a band once feared lost themselves by fans, perhaps, but here revivified with freshness and constancy of intent. From the cover to the title and beyond, a longing to reconnect with that which seems lost and seek purpose in its passing sits at the record’s core. The cover star is keyboardist/flautist Jesse Chandler’s father, who, tragically, passed away in 2018. As singer Eric Pulido explains, “He was a lovely human, and it was really heavy and sad, and he came to Jesse in a dream. I reference it in a song. He said, ‘Hey, Jesse, you need to get the band back together.’ I didn’t take that lightly. We had already had these feelings with everyone in the band of, oh, this could be a cool thing to do. But the dream was a kind of beautiful depiction of a purpose to reconvene and make music together as friends.” Featuring Chandler’s father during John Sebastian’s set, the cover image was taken from the 1970 documentary Woodstock. In 1969, Jesse’s then-16-year-old dad had joined a friend and hitchhiked from Ridgewood, New Jersey, to the legendary festival. Raised in Woodstock after his father moved there in 1981, Jesse later paid pilgrimage to Bethel Woods with his father; there, the elder Chandler recorded an audio account of his festival experience in the museum’s public database. “So for me, the picture of that kid, my dad, forever frozen in time,” says Chandler, “encapsulates what it means to be in the throes of impressionable and fleeting youth, and all that the magic of music, peace, love and communion bring to it, whether one knows it at the time or not. (I think he knew it).”
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photo credit: Max Wanger Every Lucius song begins with what Holly Laessig calls “coffee talks,” in which she and Jess Wolfe share what’s on their minds—and in the spring of 2020, they had a lot to discuss. Since 2007, Laessig and Wolfe have written this way, learning each other’s stories by heart before weaving them into the lyrics and chord progressions of their inventive indie-pop anthems. Onstage, they’re two identically-dressed and coiffed halves of the same whole, the mirror image of each other at the microphone; off-stage, they step into their respective lives—separate, but close—as chosen family. They’ve shared countless joys as they’ve seen the world while touring behind their 2013 debut album, Wildewoman, and its follow-up, 2016’s Good Grief, but they’ve weathered profound losses and lows together, too. And when one of them experiences a seismic shift that shakes their world, the other is there to listen, and reflect, in order to help write through it. “Holly and I are actual witnesses to each other’s lives,” says Wolfe. “Not only are we able to talk about these things and offer perspective, but she has this unique view into my life, and I into hers. We have been together almost constantly for the last 16 years.” Second Nature, Lucius’ third album, is the closest thing yet to the musical versions of these intimate conversations. “We’ve gotten so used to helping each other write about very personal things,” says Laessig. “It’s funny, because Second Nature makes perfect sense as a title: it’s become second nature to write for each other. A lot of what we wrote about on the record were things we hadn’t talked about before: there wasn’t a readiness to face some of those things.”
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Photo credit: Angela Ricciardi Based in Los Angeles, SASAMI is a descendent of the Zainichi people on her motherís side, a diaspora of ethnic Koreans who lived in Japan during Japanís occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. Though some Zainichi moved voluntarily and others were forcibly kidnapped, these people and their progeny continue to experience systemic discrimination and oppression in Japan to this day. While conducting a deep dive into her familyís mixed Korean and Japanese history and culture, SASAMI stumbled upon stories of Nure-onna and was immediately drawn to the water creatureís multiplicitous nature. According to legend, the deity is feminine and noble, yet powerful and vicious enough to brutally destroy victims with her blood sucking tongue. The fluidity of the Nure-onna can be felt in how “Squeeze” naturally flows through musical influencesófrom System of a Down to Sheryl Crow and Fleetwood Mac, to even Bach and Mahler. A classically-trained composer, SASAMI constructed the LP in the form of an opera or orchestral work that has different ìmovementsî that take the listener on an emotional journey. Compared to the introspective indie rock of SASAMIís 2019 self-titled debut album, “Squeeze” is a full-throttled expansion. The dark, fantastical elements of the Nure-onna legend feeds into SASAMIís use of heavy rock elements throughout Squeeze. She hopes that listeners will identify with this new sinister, intense sound and use it as a soundtrack for processing their ìanger, frustration, desperation, and more violent, aggressive emotions.î Her ultimate desire is for marginalized folks, including femmes, BIPOC, and queer people, to listen to “Squeeze” and find catharsis from the oppression and violence that they experience.
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photo credit: Piper Ferguson Brooklyn-based synth auteurs Nation of Language entered 2020 as one of the most heralded new acts of recent memory, having only released a handful of singles but already earning high-praise from the likes of NME, FADER, Stereogum, Pitchfork, etc..
In 2021, they continued to turn heads having released one of the most critically acclaimed debut albums of the year ‘Introduction, Presence’. The band’s ability to blend the upbeat with a healthy dose of sardonic melancholy made it a staple on year-end ‘Best of 2020’ lists. Inspired by the early new-wave and punk movements, the band quickly earned a reputation for delivering frenzied nights of unconventional bliss to rapt audiences, and established themselves as bright young stars emerging from a crowded NYC landscape.
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There are few things as chilling as attempting to parse the emotional tone of the punctuation in a text message from a partner–a period, a single dot that at once can mean so much. On her latest album with MAITA, Maria Maita-Keppeler digs into that crippling oxymoron of modernity, the constant bombardment of communication paired with utter disconnection. Due February 18th, “I Just Want To Be Wild For You” grasps passionately for a world that too often seems at a gauzy distance. Splitting time between her mom’s Japanese-speaking home and her father’s English-speaking home, Maita-Keppeler found an expressive avenue out of her childhood shyness through music. The Portland-based singer-songwriter tapped into that grand yet intimate reverence for MAITA’s sophomore album, from the churning twinkle of “Pastel Concrete” to the riotous give-and-take of “Honey, Have I Lost It All?”. In those moments of disconnect, of confusion, of isolation, I Just Want To Be Wild For You thunders ahead, forging unexpected connections along the way.
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“I’ll find my own way home,” Pete Yorn sings at the top of his exhilarating new album, Hawaii. Lonesome as that notion may sound, there’s actually something ecstatic, something triumphant in its delivery, a commitment to survival and self-reliance in the face of doubt and uncertainty. “I’ve always been drawn to symbolism in my songwriting,” Yorn explains from his home in Los Angeles. “With any given lyric, there’s always something more going on beneath the surface.” The same can be said of Hawaii as a whole. Written and recorded with Day Wave’s Jackson Phillips, the album serves as something of a sequel to Yorn’s critically acclaimed 2019 release, Caretakers, building off the intoxicating creative chemistry the pair discovered on their last go around and elevating things both sonically and emotionally as it grapples with growth and change, escape and anxiety, independence and isolation. The songs here are driving and propulsive, delivered with rich, three-dimensional arrangements that draw on everything from ’60s surf rock and ’70s punk to ’80s Britpop and ’90s indie rock, and Phillips’ production work is suitably raw and cinematic, muscular in all the right places without sacrificing an ounce of vulnerability. “I knew I wanted to make an energetic album,” says Yorn, “and the pace we were working at really reflected that. We’d get together once a week and bang out a new song every single time.”
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photo credit: Ebru Yildiz Aeon Station’s album Observatory is an epic statement more than a decade in the making, with miles of timeless melodies and the kind of overpowering songwriting that will reaffirm your belief in life itself. Longtime Wrens member Kevin Whelan’s first solo album draws heavily from the perseverance of the soul, resulting in rock music possessing an infectious and inspiring sonic uplift. If you’re familiar with Whelan’s past work, these ten tracks bear a certain and unmistakable familiarity—but they also mark an exciting new chapter in Whelan’s musical career, as he steps out with more vulnerability than ever before. Observatory came together carefully for Whelan—over the course of 14 years, specifically, as clusters of demos and sketches were eventually assembled and recorded largely by Whelan himself, with assistance from Wrens bandmate Jerry MacDonald and Greg Whelan as well as Tom Beaujour in his Union City recording space. The long gestation of Observatory means that a lot of lived experience went into making this album. As time passed, Whelan got married, started a family, and moved to the Asia Pacific region for a period of time; at 15 months old, his son (now eight) was also diagnosed with autism, and the title of Observatory itself is inspired by Whelan’s own relationship with his son. “The moment you’re told your child is not ‘neurotypical,’ your whole world expands in ways you never imagined,” he explains. “Even though he doesn’t speak much at all, or look at anyone directly, you can see him observing everything around him. The album title reflects upon the stories within the songs — each one observing a certain situation or feeling.”
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Band of Horses formed in 2004 in Seattle, Washington by Ben Bridwell. The band has released five studio albums, including 2010’s Grammy-nominated Infinite Arms. The band’s lineup, which included Mat Brooke for the debut album, has undergone several changes. The most-recent lineup of Bridwell, Ryan Monroe, Tyler Ramsey, Bill Reynolds, and Creighton Barrett, was together several years and recorded three albums. That lineup ceased when Ramsey and Reynolds departed in 2017. In October 2021, Band of Horses issued the new single “Crutch” and announced the upcoming release of Things Are Great, their first album with Matt Gentling and Ian MacDougall, and sixth overall. Calling it “a return to their earlier work and the kind of raw ethos that lies at the heart of Band of Horses,” Things Are Great is due for release on January 21, 2022.
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Growing up in a conservative small town in the mountains of North Carolina, Indigo De Souza started playing guitar when she was nine years old. “Music was a natural occurrence in my life. My dad is a bossa nova guitarist and singer from Brazil and so I think I just had it in my blood from birth.” It wasn’t until moving to Asheville, NC that Indigo began to move into her current sound, developing a writing practice that feeds from the currents that surround her: “Sometimes it feels like I am soaking up the energies of people around me and making art from a space that is more a collective body than just my own.”
At the forefront of all De Souza’s projects is her magnetismóher unique quality of spirit that is both buoyant and wise. While her backing band has undergone shifts between releases, her sound has stayed tethered to her vision. Any Shape You Takeis the first full-length album that Indigo produced herself. Teaming up with executive producer Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Waxahatchee, The War on Drugs) and engineers/producers Alex Farrar and Adam McDaniel, Indigo recorded the album at Betty’s, Sylvan Esso’s studio in Chapel Hill, NC and finished it with additional production and mixing at Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville. Moving past the limitations of a home studio, Indigo could finally embody the full reach of her sound: “It felt really exciting to lean into my pop tendencies more than I have in the past and to trust my intuition to take the songs where I felt they should go. I had the tools to do it and collaborators who were willing to go there with me.”
“I feel very much like a shape-shifter with my music, I’m always trying to embody a balance between the existential weight and the overflowing sense of love I feel in the world.” It is exactly this balance that Indigo strikes in her Saddle Creek debut, ‘Any Shape You Take’. A listening experience that gives back, as you shed and shape-shift along with her.
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Credit: Remi ferrante hartman Parcels have always been a band of extreme light and shade: they’re from surf hotspot Byron Bay in Australia but living in Berlin for years; their sweet-as-honey vocal harmonies rival the Beach Boys but their live shows can turn into slamming techno rave-ups.
The twentysomethings stand out amid the current musical landscape: a soulful rock band that looks like it’s stepped out of a postcard from 1970s California, all flares, moustaches and shaggy hair. They’re a classic band for atypical times. Their seductive style has translated into 100,000 album sales worldwide, over 200 million streams, cross-continental tours, shows with French royalty Phoenix and Air, a US TV debut on Conan O’Brien, a Coachella slot and a debut single that was produced by none other than Daft Punk, who saw them live in Paris and ushered them into their studio. After two EPs, 2015’s Clockscared and 2017’s Hideout (the band’s penchant for smooshing words together is a result of a broken keyboard when they submitted their first demo), Parcels’ acclaimed self-titled debut album came in 2018 and was called ‘timeless and devilishly fun’ in a five-star NME review. They followed it in 2020 with an impressive live album, Live Vol.1, recorded at Hansa Studios, the legendary studio where Iggy Pop and David Berlin hung out during their Berlin years.
The band returns in 2021 with an ambitious studio album, Day/Night, a double record that spans impossibly catchy disco-soul, prog, pastoral folk, Laurel Canyon-era classic songwriting and cinematic strings. Made over the course of 2020, when the world was at a standstill, itís the sound of a band growing up; five guys whoíve known each other since childhood and are finding their way together, in spite of all the major obstacles the last 18 months have thrown at them, when they were unable to return home to Australia and see their loved ones. Day/Night is huge in scope and sound, and its hopeful messages of perseverance through difficult times are a balm for these uncertain times.
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Music is the universal language for a group of people who all come from vastly different corners of the earth. Lo Moon is lead singer Matt Lowell is from Long Island, Crisanta Baker (guitar, bass, keys) from Denver, Sam Stewart (guitar) from London and Sterling Laws (drums) from Seattle; Los Angeles was their eventual meeting place. It was Lowell who instigated Lo Moon before it even had a name. His mantra – if you like – for all the material was their first release “Loveless,” a track he had been working on for years.
Released in 2018, their self-titled debut album – a dark, luscious collection of songs full of crescendo rock and sparkling electronics – spanned the breadth of human highs and lows. The record could sit happily among the likes of Talk Talk, Roxy Music, early Coldplay, and the cinematic scope of Sigur Ros. Lauded for its ‘shimmering, immersive and otherworldly’ (NPR) qualities, Lo Moon received critical praise from the likes of The New York Times, Billboard, Vice, NME, The Sunday Times, DIY and many more. Elsewhere their songs hit the top 3 on Billboard’s AAA chart and gained international radio support from stations including KCRW, BBC 6Music & Radio 1 and NPR. During that period the band appeared on US late night TV shows Jimmy Kimmel Live! and The Late Late Show with James Corden and played more than 150 dates, headlining in North America and Europe, and supporting the likes of The War On Drugs, Phoenix, Glass Animals, Air, London Grammar and Chvrches along the way. Elsewhere, they capped off their touring with festival performances including Governor’s Ball in NYC, Lollapalooza in Chicago and All Points East in London.
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El Alimento (translation: the nutrient) is the monumental second album from Cimafunk, the Cuban medical-student-turned-Latin-funk-star who crash-landed onto the music scene with his debut album Terapia in 2017 and an electric live show that been compared to that of James Brown. The sonically dynamic collection masterfully blends Afro-Cuban sounds and rhythms with global funk, hip hop and soulóresulting in a progressive, head-bopping celebration of black musicís power to eclipse borders and cross-pollinate across cultures. Written and recorded over the last year, the album served as an alimento for the soul, a motivation to persevere through the pandemic, as Cimafunk spent countless hours studying decades of musical influences to help understand who he is musically and culturally, and thus, where he wanted this album to take him. As innovative funk forefather George Clinton (Parliament-Funkadelic), who sings alongside Cimafunk on the opening track “Funk Aspirin,” says: ìCimafunk takes it back there while keeping it in the now. Itís what we do, always reinventing the Funk to keep it fresh.î The 13-track album was co-produced by Cimafunk and Grammy Award-winning producer Jack Splash (Kendrick Lamar, Alicia Keys, John Legend, Goodie Mob, Valerie June, Tank & the Bangas). El Alimento also includes collaborations with US hip hop stars Lupe Fiasco and CeeLo Green; Jamaican dancehall singer Stylo G and Afro-Colombian hip hop group ChocQuibTown; as well as Cuban musicians Chucho Valdes, an AfroCuban jazz icon and ’70s funk pioneer, LosPapines, a Cuban Rumba group whose career spans six decades, and AfroCuban rapper and Reggaetonero El Micha.
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