ahem – Waterlogged
Like many artists in recent years, ahem found the process of making new album Avoider a unique and challenging experience. “We were writing songs in ways we never had before,” they explain, with trio Alyse Emanuel, Courtney Berndt and Erik Anderson often working in separate basements. But rather than treat the circumstances as a limitation to be worked around, the outfit choose to embrace the frustrations to charge the songs themselves, something most apparent in single ‘Waterlogged’. As the title suggests, the song provides a sense of confinement or submergence against which it struggles. “A kind of unresolved hope that maybe we can someday break a little loose and get free in whatever ways we need too,” as the band put it. “We wanted the song to feel like you were getting free especially as it went on—like it feels like a celebration of that aspiration and hope even if you’re still just actually stuck.”
Derek Ted – BLACK WIDOW LIGHTNING
Following on from 2022’s times have changed, a record which developed the warm, earnest side of Derek Ted‘s work, the LA-based songwriter returns this year with new album, day went away. First single ‘BLACK WIDOW LIGHTNING’ offers our first glimpse of what to expect. Finding a balance between loose-limbed energy and sincere tenderness, the song is a three-and-a-half minute dose of fondness, capturing a late summer light where the shadows are stretching and temperatures holding, and where the suggestion of any end only serves to strengthen the appreciation of the moment.
Black widow lightning
The end of summer’s coming
I love you more than ever
I love you like no other
Evelyn – I’m A Dog
Described by the artist as both “a heart-swelling love song about attachment theory,” and “a Cancer Moon abandonment-wound ballad sponsored by Big Feelings,” ‘I’m a Dog’ sees Evelyn grapple with the various contradictions bound up within any relationship in search of some sweet catharsis. Especially how the security and comfort of an intimate connection seems to conjure the possibility of the very opposite, as though to experience a good thing is to summon its shadow too. “Late at night, you’re sleeping by my side / And I’m playing out ways that you could die,” as one verse plays, “I keep track of your breathing / I’ll feel better in the morning.”
Watch the video directed by Izzy Dow and shot and edited by Tim Gersten below:
‘I’m a Dog’ is out now and available via Bandcamp. Evelyn’s album Someday We Will Eat A Feast of Light which will be released later this summer.
Fake Fruit – Mucho Mistrust
“This song was a snapshot of how I got through a difficult year.” So says Ham D’Amato of Fake Fruit on the lead single and title track from the Oakland indie rock outfit’s forthcoming record on Carpark Records. Written in response the the end of a relationship and the start of a new one, an alopecia diagnosis and looming big birthday, it’s a typically vibrant and unpredictable song from a band that burn bright with volatile energy. Wry humour and cathartic noise combine to great effect to live up to the Blondie-homage title, which the band say is intended to “encapsulate both the anxieties of daily life, a bloodless music industry, and global capitalism as well as the clear-eyed scepticism needed to rebel against it.”
Holding Hour – Come Undone
Des Moines, Iowa duo Holding Hour first caught our attention back in 2022 (when they went by elison), with single ‘Hopes & Horoscopes‘ confronting vices and regrets with a sound energetic and confident enough to emerge with an affirming air. Latest single ‘Come Undone’ is no less nuanced in its tone, Marissa Kephart’s reflective, hushed vocals painting an introspective mood as the instrumentation rises into something far larger. Holding Hour again mine the rich creative seam at the intersection of dream pop and shoegaze to offer something ethereal yet sensual. “Say something sweet to me,” as one of the verses goes, “I wanna hear my name inside your mouth / Before you chew and spit it out.”
Julia-Sophie – numb
The debut solo album from Anglo-French avant-garde electronic pop artist Julia-Sophie coming soon via Ba Da Bing Records, forgive too slow is a record which charts a journey through life. There are moments of self-destruction, of romance and longing, not to mention the inevitable loss which chases everything. But such developments are not presented in palatable, linear sequence. Instead, Julia-Sophie uses her danceable electro pop sound to present something messier but more authentic. As though the album is not a straight line towards a final goal but an orbit around an elusive answer. Single ‘numb’ highlights the sensuality and cinematic depth of the sound, where the crystalline shimmer of the track makes everything feel so fragile and precious and sharp.
forgive too slow will be released via Ba Da Bing Records on 26th July. Pre-order now from the Julia-Sophie Bandcamp page.
Leif Vollebekk – Moondog
This September see the return of Canadian songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Leif Vollebekk with brand new full-length Revelation on Secret City Records. Pairing his distinctively earnest vocals with almost cinematic arrangements, the album sees Vollebekk follow Jung’s Dreams, Memories, Reflections through to themes such as alchemy and the mystery of the divine, as well as the pervasive uncertainty of our existentially threatened present. What results is something which sits at the intersection between the earthly and ethereal, a style typified by lead single ‘Moondog’. Love held up in all of its magic and strangeness, where chance and predetermination move our lives with their inscrutable gravities.
Watch the video directed by Kaveh Nabatian below:
Revelation is out on the 27th September via Secret City Records.
Nick Zanca – Little Professor
Having spent a decade making electronic music under the moniker Mister Lies and working as a producer with the likes of Wendy Eisenberg, Nick Zanca has now stepped out under his own name for Hindsight—an album which forgoes electronic styles in favour of a theatrical, jazz-inflected brand of rock music. Coming soon via American Dreams Records, the album sees Zanca follow a very personal line to explore some of our society’s most pressing themes, not least the crushing omnipresence of capitalism and the ways this works to undermine anyone who might wish to devote their life to something more fulfilling. Lead single ‘Little Professor’ engages with experiences in the wake of a childhood diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome, not only castigating the harmful language and actions faced by such young people, but offering a new vision where neurodivergence is seen as something valued and respected. Watch the video directed by Hunter Adams and Carl Elsaesser below:
Hindsight will be released on 2nd August and is available via Bandcamp.
West of Roan – The Bell
West of Roan is the recording project of artists/musicians/puppeteers Annie Schermer and Channing Showalter who together draw on a rich folk tradition and centuries of myths and legends to create what they call “a deeply resonant balm for a fractured culture.” This summer, West of Roan will release their second album, Queen of Eyes, via SPINSTER and have unveiled the lead single and opening track by way of introduction. The pair say the song was inspired by “conversations about gods of loss and ancestral wounds [and] texts about the Sumerian underworld demon-goddess Ereshkigal,” all during a near-apocalyptic period of forest fires near their home and the global pandemic. But it’s more than a lament for a world gone bad. Built on the plaintive drone of harmonium and fiddle, it’s sober and aching but somehow hopeful too, finding potential for growth and healing in family, friends and the world around us.
sister find me
sister keep me fed