Wells enlisted a host of talent to help bring the songs to life Jack Brown (Healing Potpourri) adds bass and piano, Zach Elsasser (Affectionately, Jay Som) drums, Lizzy Dutton violin and vocals and Ainsley Wagoner (Silverware) vocals, plus Stephen Steinbrink and Jason Kick (Mild High Club, Healing Potpourri) produced the release. What results is a sound rich and idiosyncratic enough to match Wells’s vision, each track carving out its own small, ethereal world. Take the latest single and title track, ‘The Lesson’. A song of subtle detail and alluring patience which closes out the release with a space of relative calm. Indeed, if predecessor ‘Ophelia’ paints a darker picture, then ‘The Lesson’ serves as the quiet on the other side of the storm. Not a definite safe haven, but a place from which you might catch your breath before pushing towards something better and new.

Steinbrink also features in the track, and his fingerprints are clear in its execution. Writing of his 2023 album Disappearing Coin, we described how the album represented “a wilful attempt to make music with the same creativity and sense of awe-filled wonder that he felt when exploring these other avenues,” leaning heavily on the magic trick imagery of its title to become “a figure who, guided by invention and playfulness, looks to use mastery of a physical craft in order to open the door to small, intangible miracles.” The Lesson is very much informed by the same ideas, with Asha Wells highlighting how thinking outside the box can lead to the more intuitive, authentic expressions of emotion, and collaboration need not preclude a singular style.

The Lesson will be released on the 3oth May via Anxiety Blanket Records and you can pre-order it now.

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Splitting the difference between pop and folk with avant garde invention, latest single ‘The Carousel’ is typical of this new turn in the Asha Wells sound. “I put all of my coins in the carousel / I’m not sure if you’re coming back or if you’re here still,” they sing, charting the cyclical patterns of a relationship left to linger too long, the landscape growing tired in its repetition. “Are you cold are you alone in your bedless room / are coming back cause I’m here still.” To use the metaphor from the title, a fairground ride is fun for a while, but the novelty of the music and the lights can only carry a person so long before they begin to crave something new.

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Royal Oakie also co-released Half Stack‘s Sitting Pretty alongside Forged Artifacts, an album which saw the Bay Area outfit evolve their sound in exciting new directions. “The record loosens its grip on the country aesthetic and in doing so allows all sorts of stylistic directions to show themselves,” as we put it last summer. “Psych rock, power pop, even a dose of honky tonk, each song opens up a new avenue to explore. But this unpredictability feels less like a band experimenting with possibilities as one finally able to embrace their fuller selves. The dusty cowboy aesthetic remains, but there’s more to Half Stack than that. Now they’re allowing their true spirit to shine through.”

To celebrate the year, Royal Oakie Records has released Greatest Hits of 2023, a compilation which collects the “fan favorites and deep cuts” from across their roster. All of the prior mentioned acts feature, as do Jeff Moller, Michael James Tapscott, Well Well Well, Whiskerman, Go By Ocean and Bard’s Flying Vessel. Listeners unfamiliar with the label can use this as the perfect primer, but equally, just as with Orindal Records’ recent compilation Powerful Forces Beyond Our Understanding, those already acquainted can come to appreciate the label more fully, with the chance to hear their artists back to back allowing fans to find the links and resonances between otherwise disparate projects.

Greatest Hits of 2023 is out now and available from the Royal Oakie Records Bandcamp page.

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“Moves through sounds and emotions like scenes in a dream, seemingly disparate thoughts and feeling united by an uncanny common thread.” So we wrote of Water Words, an album by Bay Area artist Asha Wells which combined a number of genres to “sit in the strange space at the heart of any new relationship,” as we continued, “the period where nothing is decided in any one direction, the potential of both promise and regret latent within every detail.” Next year, Wells is releasing a brand new EP Tears of a Clown on Anxiety Blanket Records and first single ‘Impermanent I’ shows a clear evolution of this style. A piece of idiosyncratic pop which melds the experience of classical training with a willingness to push beyond conventions to mine the fertile ground outside.

Cloudbelly – November

Last year we featured ‘Leavened‘ by Montague, Massachusetts‘s Cloudbelly, introducing Corey Laitman’s expansive yet personal style which “[found] assurance in their contemplation of identity and relationships.” New single ‘November’ is no less heartfelt and confident, taking the melancholy of the titular month and infusing it with a marching rhythm to evoke the precious fragility of love. “Say my love’s marked ‘return to sender’ / Teach me mercy, cold November,” as Laitman sings. “Hungry lungs, my love’s the space between the notes / I meant them, every word I ever spoke.” Here, the onset of winter is both a threat and a reminder, as well as something which might yet be outrun.

Daphne’s Demise – Bedroom Window

The solo project of Sarnia, Ontario’s Zoë L, Daphne’s Demise has made a name with a home-recorded blend of indie pop, folk and ambient sensibilities. However, the new ‘Bedroom Window’ represents something of a change, with the track seeing Daphne’s Demise take to the studio with a full band. What emerges is a country-inflected labour of love which taps into the dreamy richness of the seventies. But within the enveloping wistfulness and languid drift lies something more direct. “No more can I be / The one that you keep inside your head,” as the opening lines play, “Looming over me is a thing I just won’t see / Can’t watch it spin.”

Through the bedroom window
See it light up green
And fly away

Dead Bandit – Staircase

The recording project of Ellis Swan and James Schimpl, the music of Dead Bandit might be instrumental, but it is decidedly lyrical in spirit. Swan is known for haunting murder ballads within his solo work, while multi-instrumentalist Schimpl weaves expansive soundscapes. So it followed that the debut Dead Bandit album From the Basement combined these sensibilities into a raw, shadowy sound which merged Southern Gothic needle and hauntological strangeness. Again on Quindi Records, new album Memory Thirteen is no less evocative, with single ‘Staircase’ presenting a cryptic mood. Is the past returning to haunt the present? Or is that the future we glimpse breaking through the clouds?

Humbird – Child of Violence

“Another blue sky morning,” sings Humbird’s Siri Undlin on new single ‘Child of Violence’, “In the land of the free to believe / Lies on the Internet and the glamor of money / Missing the real thing.” The Minnesota artist has been releasing a number of singles via Nettwerk in recent months, channelling the politically charged folk rock of yesteryear, and the new track is perhaps the most direct and cutting yet. A song which refuses to treat acts of violence within the US as tragedies or aberrations, but rather a cornerstone of the entire national project. And perhaps most importantly, it identifies how honesty around this fact is central to any hope of change.

I could be a break in the chain
I could be a piece of the change
When I talk about it
I’ll call it by its name

Little Kid – Something to Say

Back in 2020, Toronto‘s Little Kid released Transfiguration Highway, an album “at least in part inspired by an enduring interest in Christian mysticism,” as we described, “and themes of epiphany and revelation allow [lead Kenny] Boothby to explore his own growth.” Next year will see Little Kid return with A Million Easy Payments, a new full-length on Orindal Records, which finds Boothby and co. again probing at the line between the corporeal and the spiritual. Lead single ‘Something to Say’ offers a picture of reality so keenly observed that a sense of latent mystery begins to suggest itself, and with it the possibility of transcendence.

Nora Roy – No Steppy Snik

“Sometimes I want to pull my teeth out / unzip my skin / start over.” So sings Nora Roy on ‘No Steppy Snik’, a new single which pairs surreal detachment and forthright confession to welcome the listener deep into its heart. Joined by Julian Fader (guitar) Brett Nash (bass) and Daniel Siles (drums), Roy follows this dreamlike thread through murmured quiet and towering peaks, though for all of the song’s unreal qualities, the parting sense is that of having been told something true which might not have been communicable any other way. “You love / Like a snake I saw,” as Roy continues, “in a magazine / some time.”

‘No Steppy Snik’ is out now and you can find Nora Roy on streaming services.

Parademaker – Utah

The recording project of Houston‘s Shaun Clarkson, Parademaker creates folk in the mould of John Prine, where heartfelt emotion and wry humour intertwine to form a picture of a specific period and place. New album Good Shit is full of such songs, but single ‘Utah’ encapsulates the spirit perfectly. A story of the second coming where Jesus is kicking about America, looking for somewhere to settle down. “This time he came to live and not to die,” as the lyrics offer. But that’s not to say Christ has no standards when it comes to potential homes. “You won’t find me in Utah / the Latter-day Saints and the petite bourgeoisie ain’t seen a cage they didn’t want to climb inside.”

You won’t find me in U-hecking-tah
the worst damn state that you ever saw
along with Texas, Florida, most of Indiana
and the whole goddam Bible Belt

Prism Bitch – City Nights

Albuquerque’s Prism Bitch originated when Lauren Poole and Chris Walsh met at a small theatre group and imagined creating a band as a piece of performance art. But upon adding Lilah Rose and Teresa Cruces to the line-up, they found themselves shedding the performance aspect and becoming the real deal. Establishing their rambunctious and often flamboyant brand of garage rock, debut full-length Perla showed the switch was more than justified, and it is fitting that new single ‘City Nights’ sees the outfit return to their theatrical roots. A sleek, sensual eighties bop which comes complete with a delightfully tongue-in-cheek video filmed at the Albuquerque public access studio, directed by Lauren Poole with cinematography by Colemar Nichols:

‘City Nights’ is out now and available from Bandcamp.

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As if to mirror the turbulent conditions that birthed it, the record refuses to sit in one place. From the noirish folk pop of opener ‘At Night’ to the vibraphone-based closer ‘Motorbike’, Wells moves through sounds and emotions like scenes in a dream, seemingly disparate thoughts and feeling united by an uncanny common thread. An early standout is lead single ‘Mood Indigo’, which combines folky acoustic guitar with plinky vibraphone and airy vocals that soar through some pretty heavy subject matter. Crying in the closet, don’t know why I feel the way I do,” Wells sings,” hiding like the locket, hollow and blue / Performative sadness, I scream into my coats, unbearable lightness, I never really feel alone.” Like much of the album it’s dark and mysterious but with a strange lightness too, refusing to succumb simple emotions or song structures.

Initially released as a double single back in March, the album’s centrepiece is the two track run from ‘Blue Angels’ to ‘Drugstore Perfume’. Emblematic of the album as a whole, the songs sit in the strange space at the heart of any new relationship. The period where nothing is decided in any one direction, the potential of both promise and regret latent within every detail. As we described in a preview, ‘Blue Angels’ “marbles intimacy and hesitance into its tender tones, like an open palm wanting to grasp what is before it, though wary of the thorns hidden out of view,” while ‘Drugstore Perfume’ is a heady dreamlike glide into the uncertainty of the unknown.

Water Word‘s personal nature is perhaps best captured on the soft and swaying ‘Up In a Cloud’. An exploration of Wells’s experience of supporting their partner through spells of disassociation, it directly references the song ‘Chimacum Rain’ by 70s folk singer Linda Perhacs which they would sing to their loved one when things were at their worst.

You’re spacing out, up in a cloud, I find you
Thinking out loud, what’s that about
I can’t get through to you

Water Words is out now via Royal Oakie Records and available from the Asha Wells Bandcamp page.

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Bay Area songwriter Asha Wells is releasing a double single ahead of forthcoming album Water Words on Royal Oakie Records. Written during a testing period of a relationship, Water Words traces the arc of a partnership from dreamy beginnings to the new paths of the aftermath, and this pair of singles sits in the strange space at the heart of this progression. The period where nothing is decided in any one direction, the potential of both promise and regret latent within every detail. Take ‘Blue Angels’ and the way it marbles intimacy and hesitance into its tender tones, like an open palm wanting to grasp what is before it, though wary of the thorns hidden out of view.

Elisapie – Uummati Attanarsimat

Recording under her first name, Juno Award-winning Inuk musician, filmmaker and activist Elisapie Isaac makes music that reflects Canada’s complex history, singing in English, French and the Inuit language of Inuktitut as she combines contemporary pop with her ancestral culture. Her latest single ‘Uummati Attanarsimat’ is a cover of Blondie’s new wave classic ‘Heart of Glass’ translated into Inuktitut. A song that transports Elisapie to her childhood, bringing back memories of dancing to the radio with her cousins. “I remember one night when they played ‘Heart of Glass,'” she recalls. “I must have been five or six years old. They all started dancing like crazy. I observed their joy with admiration. I felt like I was free.” The cover also comes with a video, directed by Philippe Léonard, which comprises of Super 8 archival footage from Quebec’s northern reaches. Watch it below:

‘Uummati Attanarsimat’ is out now via Bonsound and available to download from the Elisapie Bandcamp page.

Her New Knife – douglasland.v1

Philadelphia outfit Her New Knife have recently released lead dreams/flayed so light, a new EP via Julia’s War Records. Through a combination of noise and shoegaze elements, the band weave a deliciously dark sound somewhere between 90s alt rock and contemporary acts like Greet Death, the controlled simmer of its brooding dark always threatening to spill over into chaos. Inspired by the band’s dog, who is said to have the regular old name of Halo 3, ‘douglasland.v1’ is the ideal intro to the aesthetic for anyone uninitiated, its palpable weight settling over the listener and gathering like a thunderhead before the searing climax.

Josie Toney – Extra

With album Extra coming soon on Like You Mean It Records, Olympia‘s Josie Toney has shared the title track to whet appetites for her distinctive blend of traditional and contemporary country styles. It’s a tale of longing dressed in a wistful brightness, inspired not so much by the heartbreak so familiar to the genre but rather the missed opportunity that comes with lonely living. “Is there anybody out there / who wants what I’ve got to give?” she sings in the opening lines. “I have so much extra / more than any one girl needs to live.” But more than that, Toney recognises that others are out there feeling the exact same way, and the song becomes a kind of ode to the possibility of a mutual love, if not yet the love itself.

Extra is out now via Like You Mean It Records.

Jude Brothers – practicing silence / looking for water!

There’s a curious mix of sorrow and whimsy on ‘practising silence / looking for water!’, the lead single from Jude Brothers’ render tender / blunder sunder coming soon on Gar Hole Records. The sense that the distance between the confusion of loss and clarity of peace isn’t all that large, with a considerable overlap between the experiences. Consisting of just Celtic lever harp and vocals, the song explores this territory with a delicate, compassionate tone, cataloguing those things lost amid living while coming to a sense of acceptance too. The track also has a video directed by Adeliza Backus-Pace which featured puppets made by Flying Wall Studios and controlled by Damon and Sabrina Griffith:

render tender / blunder sunder is out via Gar Hole Records and you can pre-order it now.

Langkamer – Hatchet

With new album The Noon and Midnight Manual coming this May on Breakfast Records,  Bristol‘s Langkamer are unveiling a steady stream of new tracks. First single ‘Sing at Dawn’ found “the sweet centre of a Venn diagram of twangy Americana and insouciant indie rock,” as we described it, though in doing so worked through heavier themes and depressive moods. New single ‘Hatchet’ again uses left-field pop energy as a Trojan horse to push into darker territory, taking inspiration from an old poet vocalist/drummer Josh Jarman knew. “He read me a poem about going to the supermarket with his wife, and how much of a struggle it was,” Jarman explains. “His words really stuck with me. How difficult such everyday things had become for them. Even just getting out of a car. It was heartbreaking, the matter-of-fact way he spoke about it.”

The Noon And Midnight Manual is out on the 8th May via Breakfast Records and you can pre-order it now from the Langkamer Bandcamp page.

Matthew Danger Lippman – And

Matthew Danger Lippman practises what has been called “stream-of-consciousness songwriting,” blending psych, pop and indie rock into an inventive and endlessly shifting style able to evoke the flights of fancy of our inner worlds. New album Once You Get Low You’ve Gotta Start Flying Baby promises to build upon this style is all of its bizarre glory, with lead single ‘And’ typifying Lippman’s ability to be earnest and absurd in the same breadth. The sort of thing which only makes sense when caught up within it, dream logic fired by its own momentum and charged by the endearing brightness of its rhythm.

And I had that dream last night
Where I pissed on the third rail
And the charge climbed up the piss trail
And it shot into my dickhole
And electrified me

And I walked around glowing
And I fried everything that I touched
And then I ran into my third grade teacher and she said
“You better watch where you piss”
And watch me now!

Palm Shadow – You Wouldn’t Have It Any Other Way

Based in southern California, Palm Shadow is a songwriter and musician who combines elements of dream pop, shoegaze and folk to create lush, diaphanous songs that shimmer and swirl in an enveloping haze. Debut single ‘You Wouldn’t Have It Any Other Way’ is the perfect introduction, taking the stark emotion of the likes of Phoebe Bridgers or Lucy Dacus and wrapping it up in ethereal ambience. Subtle arpeggiated synths add a cinematic poignancy as the song looks head-on at the tender regrets and heart-quickening inevitability of a complicated relationship, touching on what the liner notes describe as “bad timing, tabled ambitions, missed connections and procrastination guilt.”

Wayfinding – Hiro Up From The Woodshop

Wayfinding is an Edmonton-based project consisting of nêhiyawak members Marek Tyler and Matthew Cardinal alongside musician/artist Cassia Hardy (Wares) and Ryan Beattie (Himalayan Bear, Chet). The band introduced their shoegaze-inflected pomo pop back in November with ‘Bad Bloods’, which turned out to be the opening track of a self-titled EP set for release next month. It is a collection of songs which explores the full spectrum of memories both personal and cultural to Canada’s colonial history and the people shaped within it. Latest single ‘Hiro Up From the Woodshop’ moves through loneliness and humble compassion to capture the essence of a friendship, as well as the existential weight bubbling beneath even the quietest of moments.

And if you should inscribe
Iambic pentameter on my gravesite
make it a couple of lines
about the first part of my life
No empty accolades
Or poetry infantilized
Just the good times

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