April Fools – Say Nothing
Comprising of Olivia Eguia (vocals), Charlie Eguia (guitar), Jaden Gabriel (writing, production), Khadija Aslam (bass) and Liz Musinsky (drums), April Fools is a new Brooklyn-based outfit who introduced themselves last year with debut EP Knock Knock, though they have wasted no time in following up the release. Out via Happen Twice in the next few weeks, the second April Fools project Who’s There? finds the band freshly confident and ready to hone their sound, further developing their indie folk style to capture a wide range of emotions. Equal parts playful, heartfelt, infectious and melancholic, single ‘Say Nothing’ typfies the tone of the release, presenting a warm glimmer over nostalgic longing as it processes the experience on moving on from someone once cared about.
Banti Buli – When Birds Write Poems
Stroll Down Pearl, The Night is Young, the upcoming new full-length from Boston-based project Banti Buli, is dedicated to the musical communities of lead Banti Gheneti. So it is fitting that album closer and latest single ‘When Birds Write Poems’ serves as a love letter to all those people who go about creating and maintaining artistic spaces. “I think about all birds that grace the streets of Cambridgeport and greater Boston,” Gheneti explains, “building nests, putting on shows, making meaning out of life. Without community, there is no artist, and it means nothing.” A fittingly collaborative endeavour, the song sees Rachel Eber from Ragu joining on vocals and was recorded with help from June Isenhart from Miss Bones. The result possesses all the fondness and heart its mission statement suggests, with a number of Easter eggs scattered through the lyrics that fans of the local scene will appreciate.
Watch the video animated by Luca Depardon below:
Stroll Down Pearl, The Night is Young will be released on the 7th November and you can pre-order it now.
bugcatcher – Hurry
Back in 2023 we wrote about Bugcatcher, the recording project of Rochester‘s Jake Denning and a rotating cast of collaborators and friends, describing how album Go! offered “a combination of sincerity and whimsy delivered with an understated tone yet marked by a pervading sense of mystery, as though below the mundane surface of things exists an untold manner of possibility, a source of both wonder and unease.” Now Denning and co. are back with new single ‘Hurry’ ahead of a forthcoming full-length on Raincoated Records. The track concerns the white lies and wistful longing inherent within major change and suggests the new material has built upon the foundations of previous releases to achieve a sound more earnest and emotive than ever.
Devin Shaffer – I Guess I’m Crawling
“Interrogates just what it requires to achieve lasting peace. That is, to reject the idea of a neat arc entirely, resist the temptation to believe one achievement or epiphany will solve your life for good.” So we wrote of Devin Shaffer‘s new album Patience, forthcoming next month on American Dreams, with lead single ‘All My Dreams Are Coming True’ displaying the clarity and nuance of the release. Now Shaffer has returned with ‘I Guess I’m Crawling’, the record’s penultimate track and perhaps its most illustrative one, its gentle pace and soft tone confronting all of life’s doubts and injustices with a steady patience. “In a way “I Guess I’m Crawling” is the ethos of the record,” Shaffer explains. “It is a surrender to the pace at which things move, a surrender to all the setbacks and limitations and diversions that have led me to where I am now.”
Watch the video shot by Jordan Reyes below:
Patience will be released via American Dreams on 7th November. Pre-order it now from the Devin Shaffer Bandcamp page.
The Hello Crows – Let ‘Em Go Home
Consisting of Dylan Ward, Judie Acquin, Emilio Quinn Bonnell and Mattie Comeau—four Indigenous songwriters all hailing from different areas of Wabanaki territory in Canada—The Hello Crows is an indie rock project born of the traditional practice of storytelling and driven to explore the themes and problems facing their home within the present moment. Their self-titled debut album, out via Forward Music Group, touches on everything from personal love and loss to wider traumas like the violent legacy of the Canadian residential school system, and provides all the heart and painful catharsis you might expect. Latest single ‘Let ‘Em Go Home’ is an ideal entry point, the band’s tribute to the survivors of cultural genocide which is at once warmly compassionate and loaded with stark weight.
Lazy Trail – Post Tour
The second Happen Twice act to make this week’s list, Lazy Trail is the recording project of songwriter Emma Willer, who you might know from her time with bands like Slumbers and Boyscott. Under the Lazy Trail moniker, Willer makes music fitting for the name. Songs often short and usually sweet which play like small adventures or little daydreams, taking the listener to another place for just a moment. New album The Sound is a great place to dive in, with singles like ‘Post Tour’ possessing all of the brightness and yearning ever-present across the release. A song which owes as much to the natural world as anything else, playing like a brief hike down a particular path of Willer’s memories, stopping to catch glimpses of all the things which used to mean so much along the way.
Lydia Luce x Luke Sital-Singh – Ephemeral
Back in August we introduced Mammoth, the upcoming new album from Lydia Luce which leads “out of suffering,” as we put it, “charting the path of recovery from chronic pain and the hard-won bonds which came with it.” After single ‘Quiet’, “a song all about the slow process of learning to not only tolerate silence but embrace its power within a noisy world,” Luce has now returned with ‘Ephemeral’, inviting British singer-songwriter Luke Sital-Singh into the fold for a moving duet. With another careful, evocative arrangement featuring strings, winds, piano, viola and cello, the song deepens with a sense of grace, the chemistry between the vocals seeming to lift the instrumentation and culminating in almost classical peaks.
‘Ephemeral’ is out now and available from the usual places.
The Noisy – Nightshade
“Draws on literary and cinematic influences (especially Spaghetti Westerns and Body Horror) and ideas from the drag and queer community to create its vivid, larger-than-life sound.” That’s how we described The Secret Ingredient Is Even More Meat, a deluxe edition of The Noisy‘s debut album The Secret Ingredient is More Meat, coming soon via Audio Antihero. After singles ‘Twos‘ and ‘Grenadine‘, Sara Mae and co. are back with new unreleased song ‘Nightshade’ to further expand the record’s universe. A kind of sister track to ‘Twos’ which again explores the aftermath of difficult relationships but flips its attention from the other to the self. An examination of the attempt, and possible failure, of trying to build intimate, trusting connections with others without twisting the ideas of these bonds in your head.
Pansy – Mercy, Kill Me
You might know Vivian McCall as part of Chicago rock outfit Jungle Green, but upon starting the transitioning process several years ago, the singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist realised she needed a new project to chart the emotion and complexity of the experience properly. Pansy is that very project, an outlet which sees McCall plunder the gamut of indie rock in an attempt to capture the wild range of emotions of the transitioning process. Described by label Earth Libraries as “a noisy power pop anthem about a catastrophic breakup that demanded reinvention,” new single ‘Mercy, Kill Me’ is on the jangly and hooky end of the spectrum, documenting a difficult, life-changing breakup with a breezy energy.
runo plum – Halfway Up The Lawn
We’ve featured a couple of singles from runo plum in recent weeks, with new album patching coming soon via Winspear. After the “inherently bittersweet” ‘Lemon Garland‘, ‘Sickness‘ showed the newly powerful sound of the record. “Plum has lost none of the tenderness which so marked earlier releases,” as we put it, “but is now even better equipped to elucidate the highs and lows of life.” Latest track ‘Halfway Up The Lawn’ is no less striking, pairing a rich arrangement and heartfelt vocals and charging everything with an insistent energy to evoke the desperation of an unravelling relationship. A track existing at the intersection of yearning and frustration, a state of mind which so often comprises the end of things. “Will you turn the lamp back on / or leave it to your mom,” as plum sings, “to be the one to reach out to me / I don’t wanna make a scene.”
Watch the video directed by David Milan Kelly below:
patching will be released on the 14th November via Winspear and you can pre-order it from the runo plum Bandcamp page.
Young Elk – Silver Bullet
“You started lying when you learned to speak / Your mother gave you the throne / Gave you a silver bullet enemy / Sang you a sorrowful song.” So sings Ezekiel J. Rudick on ‘Silver Bullet’, the latest single from Young Elk. Released ahead of a new full-length coming soon via Rue Defense, the track is the epitome of the Young Elk sound. One loaded with both foreboding atmosphere and pressing weight, Rudick’s charged vocals falling somewhere between empathy and accusation. A mood fitting for a song which looks to mine the mother/son relationship for all of its complexity, emerging with a picture undeniably dark yet never without sympathy, as though one’s ability to cause pain is not derived from simple cruelty but rather a tangled web of suffering and the hope for reprieve.
Calm Down will be released on the 11th November via Rue Defense and you can pre-order it now.