Alexia Avina – I Am Opening
Following 2020 album Unearth on Topshelf Records, Brooklyn-based artist Alexia Avina is set to return with a brand new LP, A Little Older. Released via Lost Map Records, the album began on a borrowed guitar and a friend’s floor, slowly blossoming into a deep and searching meditation on the existential functions of love and art. “What does it mean to feel small, to feel nothing, to feel everything?” asks the album notes, “to skirt around the edge of true vulnerability unknowingly and yet somehow so consistently?” Clocking in at over eight minutes, slow-burning single ‘I Am Opening’ shows that while Avina might not have an answer, her rich and evocative compositions create spaces in which to contemplate such questions.
The Bins – Santa Cruz Mountains (Remix by Danny Spiteri)
Last summer, The Bins released the album Happiness Complete, a stellar collection of songs which showed off Clark Barclay’s joyous plunderphonic style. But as if his own endlessly inventive cut and paste experiments weren’t ambitious enough, Barclay then turned over his sonic mosaics to other artists and asked they rework them into new forms. The result is Happiness Completely Remixed, an entire album of these reimaginings. Danny Spiteri’s take on ‘Santa Cruz Mountains’ is emblematic of the power of such processes, rendering the originally buoyant track into something reflective and subdued. A meditation on place which excavates not just the sunny present but the ghosts of the past too.
Dawning – Demo Tape
After fronting post-folk Apricot Blush, South Carolina’s Jackson Wise has emerged from a musical hiatus with brand new project, Dawning. A collaboration with artist and musician Matt Massara, the outfit work between brooding punk and gauzy slowcore, the tracks united by the texture of their style. Soundscapes that drift over you, invite you to lose yourself inside. The debut release Demo Tape shows off this aesthetic, from the frustrated yells of ‘We All Went Swimming’ and the searing energy of ‘Kreuzberg’ to the searching melancholy of ‘Sediment’. Each of the six songs feels like a door through which the Dawning project might head, and Demo Tape has more than enough to suggest you would be advised to follow whichever they choose.
Demo Tape is out now.
Dead Nettle – Undertow
The recording project of Nashville/California artist Lindsey Wall, Dead Nettle is set to release album How I Thought later this year. With its slow burning intensity, single ‘Undertow’ introduces the engaging and poetic style the record promises to bring. Opening with acoustic strums and smoky vocals, it builds from wistful warmth to fierce conflagration, finding a sound which engages with emotional turmoil yet finds buoyant energy within the roil. As though the updrafts of the burn lift Wall high above the situation, floating high and free if only for a moment.
Denitia – Highways
Raised in Houston and currently living in New York’s Hudson Valley after time spent in Nashville and Brooklyn, Denitia is an artist often on the move. New song ‘Highways’ embraces this nomadic spirit while recognising the value of connection too. An ode to the road which is nevertheless unwilling to leave home behind. “‘Highways” is a song about looking forward but taking the past along with you,” Denitia explains. “I’ve had many friends and loved ones in my life and as time passes and I move from place to place, phase to phase, I hope to always take those connections with me wherever I go. I want to take home with me everywhere I go.”
Itch Princess – To Be Your Fool
The recording project of New York‘s Katelyn Farstad, Itch Princess make self-described psycho-existential-dredge ballads which wrestle with the various torments of human living. Latest record POP CALLS PASSES, out now via Crass Lips Records, was written at the end of an eighteen-year struggle with substance abuse, and directs all of its ambition and energy to communicating the move beyond suffering into a more creative space. Single ‘To Be Your Fool’ is the perfect introduction to the record’s off-kilter vibe, capturing its embrace of left-field oddness symbolic of a wider acceptance of life and its unpredictable motion.
Marissa Nadler – Cold Wind Blowin’
This spring sees the release of Todo Muere SBXV, a compilation celebrating fifteen years of Sacred Bones which asks artists from across their roster to cover one another’s songs. With songs from Anika, The Hunt, Dean Hurley, Black Marble, Hillary Woods and others, the result is a testament to the diverse and ambitious line-up the label has built over a decade and a half. A group linked not by clear style or genre but something more oblique. A shared commitment to artistic vision, whatever shape that might take. A great example is Marissa Nadler‘s take on ‘Cold Wind Blowin’ from David Lynch‘s The Big Dream, a version which understands the twin forces of familiarity and strangeness which underpin Lynch’s work and treats each with the reverence they deserve.
Todo Muere SBXV is out via Sacred Bones on the 27th May and you can pre-order it from Bandcamp.
Pacing – Sunny <3
Combining the twin forces of anxiety and sarcasm, Katie McTigue uses Pacing to explore the busy and oftentimes ridiculous period we find ourselves inhabiting. Ahead of new mixtape hatemail later this spring, McTigue has unveiled lead single ‘Sunny <3’ to get us acquainted with her distinctively sardonic style. Because do not be fooled by the title, or at least be sure to excavate its wry connotations, as this FOMO anthem does not find joy or self-actualisation at the end of a productively jammed day. Just creeping panic as the pressure to be better and better coils like a spring. “I’m gonna be good,” goes the tongue-in-cheek refrain. “I’m gonna be so good.”
hatemail is out on the 13th may and you can pre-order it from the Pacing Bandcamp page.
This Frontier Needs Heroes – Not Gonna Write a Song
Following on from 2021’s Go With the Flow, the fifth album from David Bradley Lauretti’s This Frontier Needs Heroes, this spring sees the project return with a new song series titled Every Song is a Single. The first taste of this new material comes with the ironically titled ‘Not Gonna Write a Song’, a wry take on a break-up number which sees Lauretti break his own promise in real time. A song about resisting the urge to write. But despite this playful humour, the sound itself commits to a subdued warmth. Earnest and reflective, caught between looking back and moving on. Lauretti is gonna continue to write songs, and the world is all the better for it.
Take what you have to take
And I’ll break what I have to break
I know that it’s not a mistake
So I’m not gonna write a song for you