’Holy Roller’ was a lesson for me, a song that happened with no planning, no ‘trying to write’, but a pure, detached channeling. That metaphor made perfect sense to me after the fact, there is a voice in my heart that I have a complex relationship with that tells me to move around, be somewhat nomadic, not really settle down in one specific place. During that writing session, that bittersweet feeling of moving from my home state kept returning.

Hiding Places have now unveiled their brand new album The Secret To Good Living, to be released later this spring, and have shared a couple of new tracks to preview the record. First came ‘Waiting’, a song written by vocalist/guitarist Nicholas Byrne which sits in the middle of a Venn diagram between grunge and alt country, laden with the weight of mortality and its portentous shadow as it extends across industrial America. “Heard it from around the corner / The whistling wind,” Bryne sings with trademark despondence. “The burlap bag in the barbed wire / Was ripped to shreds / Broken glass beside the highway / Crushed cement / Blinding headlights cut / the cold air /A painless end.” Again the sound not only mirrors the track’s themes but the very conditions of its creation. “I recalled the slow death of my uncle, and the painful anticipation that filled the interstitial space between here and gone,” he explains. “I wrote the verses six months later in the freezing cold on my way home from my studio in the industrial part of our neighborhood. I sang this song to my aunt years later as she was dying. We both cried.”

‘Waiting’ comes complete with a video directed and animated by Byrne himself, with additional live show footage by Sam and Ky:

Described by Keelin as “a meditation on how we can be so hard on ourselves in the face of keeping up long-distance relationships and friendships,” subsequent single ‘One Hand’ is no less evocative or foreboding. The main body of the track is expansive and stark, almost hypnotic in its slow unfurling, yet always stalked by the possibility of sudden change. As though within the sound’s gradual procession, something is coalescing. A storm perhaps, some dark mass gathering itself to the point in which a threshold is reached and thunder might be unleashed. Only this violent potential is never fully realised, the weight always at a distance, the front breaking one valley over. The result is therefore lonely in its own way, yearning for that which is unfolding beyond its horizon.

I took too long to call for some reason
I took too long to write for some reason
I want too much, too many friends to count on one hand, or two, or ten
I took too much too quick because I want to win just like they did
They want too much
You took too long

Watch the video directed by Henry Cutting below:

The Secret To Good Living will be released on the 3rd April via Keeled Scales and you can pre-order it now from the Hiding Places Bandcamp page.

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Ahead of the the album’s released in less than a month’s time, Bennett has returned with a brand new single. Described as “but one key to opening the album’s multilayered worlds,” title track and opener ‘Ston Elaióna’ again intertwines bass flute, oscillators and DX7ii to recreate the sensation of quiet periods spent “in the olive grove,” or else at some other moment of peace within an otherwise bustling city. But just as the track serves as the door into the landscape and headspace of the album, it represents a door between worlds too. A porous, characteristically Greek threshold between the old and the new which allows the accumulated layers of time to be considered simultaneously.

Photo by Christophe Piette, artwork by Zin Taylor with design by Bartolomé Sanson

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“There’s something of Kraftwerk in the sound, a smidge of Suicide and no small amount of Lou Reed, though the blend of digital and organic tones is clearly the product of a singular imagination.” That’s how we described the work of Turin-born, Toronto-based ‘poetic jazz rock’ songwriter Fortunato Durutti Marinetti back in 2023, writing about the album Eight Waves In Search Of An Ocean. Now FDM is returning with new album Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter, what label Quindi Records describe as “his most sweeping, absurd, and emotionally acute statement to date,” and lead single ‘Full of Fire’ hints at the maximalist style at its heart. A song which takes inspiration from iconoclasts like Annette Peacock, Rickie Lee Jones, Donald Byrd, Brigitte Fontaine and Fabrizio De André to paint love as something equal parts fond and fatal.

Green Gardens – Stroom

Leeds ‘feudal indie rock’ outfit Green Gardens have been sharing new material in recent weeks, with singles ‘Year of Love’ (which saw the band, as we wrote, “swapping out some of the grand scale in favour of increased intimacy”) and ‘Ghost of a Tree’ (a song “embodying the spirit of a band who make no distinction between the intimate and the sublime,” as we put it, “positioning an individual’s loves and losses within an almost geolgical span of time”) introducing a slightly new direction for the outfit. The releases have been building up to the announcement of Thistlesifting, a brand new full-length coming later this simmer via Tiny Library Records, and now Green Gardens have unveiled latest single ‘Stroom’ to further whet appetites.

Watch the video made by Joel Johnston and Chris Aitchison below:

Thistlesifting will be released via Tiny Library Records on the 25th August and you can pre-order it now.

Greg Freeman – Curtain

Later this summer, Burlington, Vermont songwriter Greg Freeman is returning with Burnover, a brand new full-length via Transgressive Records and Canvasback Music. It’s a record which pairs laidback country twang with indie rock momentum, furthering the singular style Freeman introduced back in 2022 with previous LP I Look Out. New single ‘Curtain’ captures the mix of playful lyricism and charged energy which makes up the release, Sam Atallah’s piano driving proceedings but Freeman’s vocals stealing the stage. Assured and surprising verbose, like a stream of consciousness unfurling with equal parts conversational immediacy and poetic grace.

My thoughts die out slowly on the blood swept plains where I see you every night
And to the lonely hours, it’s like burning the furniture to keep the house bright at night

The night is getting late and the horns have all been blown
And the drummer’s looking cock-eyed on his rusty metal throne
And I’m somewhere in the distance and you’re somewhere at home

Watch the video directed by Carl Elsaesser below:

Burnover will be released on the 22nd August via Transgressive Records and Canvasback Music and you can pre-order it now.

John Also Bennett – Easter Daydream

His first album for Shelter Press since 2019 solo debut Erg Herbe, John Also Bennett returns this July with new full-length Ston Elaióna. The record—titled ‘in the olive grove’ in Greek—sees the US-born, Athens, Greece-based composer, flautist and multi-instrumentalist blur the lines between the ancient and the contemporary, the physical and metaphysical, with electroacoustic compositions every bit as precise and spacious as fans of JAB will have come to expect. Lead single ‘Easter Daydream’ welcomes the audience into the world of the record, a soundscape built from subtle bass flute and synth which allows the real world to bleed in. Namely the bells from a procession captured during Orthodox Holy Week down the road from Bennett’s apartment in Athens, sounds which have a strangely dualistic effect on the mood, both haunting the track and charging it with immediacy.

Michael Beach – Poison Dart

We’ve long followed the work of Naarm/Melbourne-based songwriter Michael Beach, with 2021 record Dream Violence winning a place among our favourite albums of the year. “Beach reaches into the grab bag of rock history and fashions what he finds into something timely and unique,” we wrote. “Imagine Neil Young meeting The Velvet Underground on a dark and hopeless night in our late-capitalist hellscape to muse on the meaninglessness of existence.” Such a description might have captured the record’s searing heart, though does a disservice to the overall tone of Beach’s work. Because while there is an undeniable darkness, it is often sublime in nature, and certainly anything but nihilistic in its intentions. A fact made clear by new record Big Black Plume, coming soon via Poison City and Goner Records, which works with perhaps the only form of optimism left.  “I was wrestling with the beauty and intensity of the natural world and coming to grips with the human destruction of it,” as Beach explains. “I have an overwhelming sense that humans will come and go, and the world we depend on will outlast us.” Listen to new single ‘Poison Dart’ now:

Watch the video below, directed by Alexandra Millen with cinematography from Claire Giuffre:

Big Black Plume will be released on the 25th July via Poison City and Goner Records and you can pre-order it now.

Omo Cloud – Ultimate Love

Later this month sees the release of Mausoleum, the debut album from Cole De La Isla’s Omo Cloud on Dusty Mars Records. The album sees the San Diego songwriter reckon with their past with the intention, as per the title, of burying it and moving on. The result, as shown by lead single ‘Ultimate Love’, is every inch as bittersweet as that might sound. Enduring the painful process of returning to old traumas in order to redefine the present and future. “I feel like I spent a lot of my teenhood being very angsty and existential and cynical in a lot of ways, but I don’t want that to be the takeaway of the record at all,” De La Isla explains. “I feel the takeaway is actually a very optimistic one. We’re all capable of growth and change, and it is a lot of work, but it is worth it. I want people to trust their gut. I want to help people connect with hard emotions—and I want people to be inspired.”

Mausoleum is out on the 27th June via Dusty Mars Records and available to pre-order now.

Pacing – Nothing! (I wanna do)

Led by Katie McTigue, Pacing has been catching our eye for a number of years with a sound at once fun, idiosyncratic and deceptively heartfelt. “[Pacing] follows in the playful, tongue-in-cheek tradition of the likes of Kimya Dawson,” as we put it back in 2023, “yet always nudges the ideas further to be more than mere twee humour or sardonic fun.” After a number of successful collaborations and a high profile tour with Cheekface, this summer sees McTigue return with PL*NET F*TNESS, a new album on Asian Man Records, and latest single ‘Nothing! (I wanna do)’ suggests Pacing is firing on all cylinders. Inspired by a brain-numbing commute along Highway 85, the song is described as “a classic upbeat depression banger” (“we are all entitled to one per album, and I’m using mine now,” as McTigue says), and embodies the mission which has long lurked beneath the surface of the project. Because, when you peel back the wry humour and off-the-wall personality, it becomes clear Pacing is asking how we are supposed to live beneath the weight of all that is asked of us. How might we find meaning in a banal world?

Watch a live video for the single below, with gig footage by Hali Tauxe and b-roll by errbody:

PL*NET F*TNESS is out on the 25th July via Asian Man Records.

R&D – Everything Becomes a Sign

We’ve long followed the work of Dan Knishkowy (Adeline Hotel) and Rebecca El-Saleh (Kitba) in their own respective projects, with the latest Adeline Hotel full-length Whodunnit making our list of favourites from 2024 and the Kitba’s exceptional self-titled record winning our praise in 2023 (“Proof that art can offer a picture of identity more nuanced than simple labels,” we wrote of the latter. “A deeper understanding reached via an embrace of confusion. Identity as an ongoing thing”). So it is most welcome news the pair have teamed up under the moniker R&D to create improvised, instrumental songs which further delve into the themes they have explored individually. Because while upcoming album I’ll Send You a Sign marks something of a departure from what we might expect from Knishkowy and El-Saleh in terms of style, its thematic concerns feel more like a continuation or deepening. Take the spare, probing single ‘Everything Becomes a Sign’, which mines patience and sensitivity for all of their exploratory potential.

Rival Consoles – Jupiter

We’ve featured a number of tracks from Rival Consoles‘ forthcoming album Landscape from Memory in recent weeks, with tracks like ‘Catherine‘ and ‘Known Shape‘ finding Ryan Lee West working at the intersection of the human and the digital, crafting soundscapes full of euphoria, melancholy and restless motion. With the release approaching via Erased Tapes, West has shared latest single ‘Jupiter’. A song which embodies the album’s spirit in its combination of repetition and variation, its intricate detail and overarching brightness. “At the heart of this piece is a call and response,” as he explains. “The main idea is changing but the response is always the same, this is connected to life and nature. I wanted the music to feel like materials, bending, distorting, shimmering, colourful shards of glass and metal. To me it feels like the sun touching objects with its warmth and power.”

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The recording project of Texas musician Daniel Bryson (who also plays drums in Skirts), A.L. West is an outlet for lo-fi bedroom pop meets indie rock. He recently released a new double single, Nothing At All / Rabbitbrush 2, which is the perfect introduction for newcomers. ‘Nothing At All’ is a lovely patient indie pop song, but it’s ‘Rabbitbrush 2’ that sees things kicked into another gear. As its name suggests, the track is something of a sequel to one from 2023 A.L. West album The Store, but whereas the original was a gentle folk-inflected bedroom pop song, ‘Rabbitbrush 2’ is thick with a heavy fuzz, building from lulls of plodding percussion and Bryson’s draw out vocals into peaks of triumphant noise.

Watch the video by Alex Montenegro below:

Nothing At All / Rabbitbrush 2 is out now via the A.L. West Bandcamp page.

Casper Skulls – Roddy Piper

Turning the page onto a new chapter for the Sudbury/Toronto indie rock outfit, new album Kit-Cat promises to see Casper Skulls push themselves to new heights. Single ‘Spindletop‘ introduced this refreshed sound, drawing on There Will Be Blood to create a moody, ominous atmosphere, and now ‘Roddy Piper’ introduces a more energetic and soaring dimension. Drawing on the titular figure, the track uses a wrestling analogy to explore confrontation within a relationship, the combination of upbeat rhythm and fuzzy weight evoking the dramatic ups and downs of a choreographed bout. Watch the Mortal Kombat-inspired video, directed by Curtis Carriere and Jordan Vandenberg (of Goodscreen Media) along with the band themselves, below:

Kit-Cat will be released on the 11th April via Next Door Records and you can pre-order it now.

Celeste Madden – Lapdog

Having signed with Sad Club Records, recent months have seen Celeste Madden unveil a handful of singles, with tracks like ‘Joan of Arc‘ and ‘Fever Dream‘ embodying the London-based songwriter’s singular style. Songs both unashamedly melodramatic and undeniably strange, drawing the listener directly into Madden’s psyche so that we too might experience the diverse range of moods and feelings therein. Having announced that EP Is It Really Goodnight? will be released next month, Madden has now returned with new single ‘Lapdog’. Another dreamlike folk song where placid surfaces hide a roiling depth beneath, reflecting on difficult experiences in order to exorcise the hold of the past.

‘Lapdog’ is out now and available via the Celeste Madden Bandcamp page. Is It Really Goodnight? will be released on the 27th March via Sad Club Records.

Craig Finn – People of Substance

Anyone who caught Craig Finn on his This Is What It Looks Like tour last autumn will be champing at the bit for a new album, Finn using the solo sets to introduce a number of new narrative-driven songs full of the detail, emotion and empathy which has so long marked his work. The record, it turns out, is called Always Been, and will be released this spring. A fitting addition to Finn’s oeuvre in the year The Hold Steady‘s Separation Sunday celebrates its twentieth anniversary, the album traces the arc of a protagonist through a rise and fall and eventual redemption, the character committing the life of a priest despite his lack of faith. A whole cast of characters pass into the frame within the telling of this story, but for now we have single ‘People of Substance’ as a glimpse at the world within.

Watch the visualizer by David Kelling below:

Always Been is out on the 4th April and you can pre-order it now.

Dead Bandit – Pink

“Something of a landscape,” was how we described Dead Bandit‘s self-titled album, coming soon on Quindi Records, in a preview back in January. “One rural in tone which seems at once physical and emotional. Often stark and severe in its loneliness, a kind of haunted prairie or steppe, yet often possessing some kind of yearning fondness for the wide open space.” New single ‘Pink’ furthers the style. A cryptic, slow-building number which possesses a kind of shadowed mystery, the layered guitar and creeping beats never puncturing the understated air, as though the truth of the track is always drifting just out of view.

Jacob Faurholt – I Will Hold You

We’ve featured the prolific Danish songwriter Jacob Faurholt multiple times in recent years, an outsider artist in the vein of Daniel Johnston and co. who looks to explore existential themes via lo-fi, idiosyncratic combination of folk, rock and pop. Recorded in the room beneath his children’s bedroom while they were asleep, the most recent release of Faurholt’s we covered embraced a hushed style, but new single ‘I Will Hold You’ pivots away from this entirely. It was written in the aftermath of a Dinosaur Jr. gig, post-show tinnitus still ringing, which anchors its poignant emotion and melodies with a dense undercurrent of noise.

‘I Will Hold You’ is out now and available from the usual places.

Léna Bartels – January is the Loneliest Month

It’s Gonna be a Wonderful New Year, a split between NYC’s Léna Bartels and Nico Hedley, is the first release on new label Rock For Sale Records who release music on cassette tapes and not streaming services. Bartels and Hedley have collaborated across a range of projects (both realised and not quite), and this EP is from the intimate end of the spectrum. The pair describe it as a collection of “songs from winter. Songs for the new year. Songs to get by by,” and if lead single, Bartels’s ‘January is the Loneliest Month’ is anything to go by, it makes good on the promise of its admirably optimistic title. Though not with saccharine cheerfulness but a quiet persistence and steady belief in new beginnings.

Lucy Liyou – Arrested

‘Arrested’ is the lead single from Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name, the new record from Lucy Liyou. Released next month via Orange Milk Records, the album promises to be the Los Angeles musician’s most pop-oriented to date, but anyone expecting a collection of up-tempo dancefloor fillers might be disappointed. As ‘Arrested’ attests, Liyou’s distinctive style is far more complex than that, possessing both a fragile minimalism and lush melodrama, the understated ethereality of the sound and poignant longing of the vocals combining into a reflective and melancholic mood. The sensation of watching a fond memory fade at the edges as the desire to return to its smallest details only grows.

Watch the video shot and directed by Park Seung Won below:

Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name is out on the 21st March via Orange Milk Records and you can pre-order it now.

Mumu The Free Diver – Blossoms

The project of Raleigh, NC-based singer-songwriter Aki Laakso, Mumu The Free Diver offers an evocative brand of indie folk which embraces the authenticity of the DIY aesthetic. Recorded at home with what Laakso describes as “a cheap mic, an old guitar and a bargain-bin audio interface,” new song ‘Blossoms’ swaps out technical polish for a sense of immediacy, sounding like a direct communication from within a moment of grief-stricken vulnerability. But don’t let the description fool you, for though the arrangement is based around acoustic guitar and humble, near-spoken vocals, the track possesses a real sense of richness too. As though through its unguarded nature flows a certain intensity, be it born of compassion, panic, plain hard longing, or indeed a combination of all three.

Penny Loafer – Fridge

Consisting of Emma Barnes (vocals, guitar, keys) and Seth Parker (drums, percussion), Penny Loafer make self-described “post-college rock” which draws from nineties heavyweights like Fugazi and Sonic Youth to offer songs about everyday life which nevertheless possess real weight and bite. With debut EP Daily Deal set for release via Indecent Artistry next month, the Athens, GA-duo have shared single ‘Fridge’. It’s an example of all the ingredients which make the Penny Loafer sound so enticing, with deadpan observation and wry humour meeting tangible heft, all strung together by a chugging momentum which pulls the audience along for the ride. A little bit salty, a little bit sweet and with a noticeable acidic edge.

Tractor Beam – SHOW YOU

“Draws from across the ages in their work, owing as much to 00s indie as 60s folk, and all wrapped up the the contemporary DIY aesthetic, leading to a sound both emotionally immediate and tangibly nostalgic.” So we wrote of Toronto-born, Vancouver-based artist Tractor Beam back in 2023. Now Sasha Balazic and co. are set to return with Monoliths & The Early Reflection, and latest single ‘SHOW YOU’ sees the outfit combine their usual freak folk sensibilities and a more chaotic noise pop style within a single track. The result feels like witnessing a band solidify their ambitions in real time, expanding the possibilities of the Tractor Beam project and pushing closer to their final form. Watch the video directed by Aiden Millroy below:

Monoliths & The Early Reflection is out on the 19th February via Good Stones // Calm Water.

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With fuzzy warmth meeting an almost cinematic conclusion, ‘Dirty TV’ again sees Neil Golden (formally of the Glands) join Honeypuppy, adding organ and synthesizer to elevate their sound. “Welcome to the Zenith Family TV guide,” go the lyrics, furthering anchoring the song in a retro-futurist vibe. “If you’re reading this, Congratulations on your buy. This system is Hi Fi: An Electronic eye.” The mood and theme is furthered by a video too, so read the label’s synopsis and watch below:

Shot over the course of the night at Athens motel Perimeter Inn (possibly described at one point as charming), the DIRTY TV music video sees a wide-eyed Callahan thousand-yard staring at what else but a television. Chaos ensues as the stone-faced Callahan is entranced by the psychotropic programing (featuring a mirage of alternate reality Honeypuppy performances). Will Callahan ever escape the enchanting grip of the DIRTY TV? Can the band clean up the motel room by check out? How often has a 40 year old in-room lovers’ jacuzzi been cleaned?

Dirty TV is out now via Indecent Artistry.

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Though it certainly was an arrival, Way Haul Away was anything but an endpoint. More like the first step into a wide territory Parish can now explore at his leisure. Guided by constant study and teaching, he has continued this journey into traditional folk music, with latest album Liverpool turning its attention to sea shanties. Out next month on Dear Life Records, the release reimagines these work songs and lovelorn ballads as guitar arrangements, harnessing the power of the songs’ vocal elements and the rhythms coded within their melodies. “These old melodies are timeless due to their physiological power to vibrate the human nervous system in just the right way,” Parish explains. “They are the code to resonance within the body, and thus a fantastic and magical part of our evolution.”

Liverpool was originally envisioned as a solo acoustic guitar record, with Parish devoting much time to the complex arrangements, though eventually he found himself leaning into his days with Ahleuchatistas and redesigning the songs around the electric guitar. The result is a deeper engagement with the physiological power described above, the electrical flow of the new arrangements tapping into the melodies’ autonomic immediacy.

Latest single ‘Haul Away Joe’ shows this in action – the traditional shanty simultaneously celebrated and subverted. It’s a track taut and humming with energy, Parish’s careful restraint slowly relinquishing its grip as the momentum builds, paying off in a sound both haunting and dynamic.

The mood is captured in a video directed by Courtney Chappell and Parish himself. “My plan was to film this video in South Florida, where I grew up, over the xmas holidays, but Omicron made us change our plans and we stayed in Athens. My wife Courtney is a phenomenal dancer and I just love the way her spirit animates her body through dance. She is featured among the industrial imagery we filmed near my daughter’s dance school in Athens.”

Liverpool is out on the 4th March via Dear Life Records and you can pre-order it from the Shane Parish Bandcamp page.

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Despite the tumult and uncertainty of the last eighteen months, Lost Tribe Sound persevered with Built Upon A Fearful Void, a subscription series that released 16 new albums between June 2020 and present. Releases from the likes of Claire Deak & Tony Dupé, Several Wives and William Ryan Fritch‘s Vieo Abiungo project formed a rich and varied response to a very difficult year.

Ever prolific, this month sees the start of a brand new Lost Tribe Sound subscription series—Salt and Gravity. The current schedule will see it unveil eight new full-length albums between now and February next year, with what the label promise to be “some of the most texturally pungent music we’ve ever released… the good stuff that makes your whole body hum versus just rattling around inside your head.”

The first release in the series is The Rise and Fall of the Melting World by Arrowounds, the experimental project of Athens, Ohio‘s Ryan S Chamberlain. The album forms something of a continuation of the previous two Arrowounds releases, forming an unofficial trilogy which explores Chamberlain’s role as a carer for a loved one being treated for cancer. While the previous two were claustrophobic and suffocating, The Rise and Fall of the Melting World feels deceptively spacious, as if Chamberlain is able to fill his lungs with air for the first time in too long.

Which is not to say this is a record of blue skies and sunshine. Badness lurks in the shadows, the dark waters of The Loneliness of the Deep Sea Diver puddle and pool and threaten to rise. More general concerns encroach across the six tracks too, reminders that personal crises do not insulate us against global ones. As the press release puts it “[the] overall climate of anxiety [in] the world… threatened to darken and pollute the soundscapes during their creation.” Opening track ‘Antarctica’s Spherical Anomalies Leave Residual Trails’ is the perfect example, pairing ambient recordings of birdsong with a leaden oppressive atmosphere and great rumbling cracks like the sound of icebergs calving into the ocean.

Chamberlain says The Rise and Fall of the Melting World is intended to explore the “aftermath and resurfacing” following the previous two records, and this sense manifests sonically. Songs like ‘Insect Dream Surfacing’ are thick with a shadowy surreal logic, but have pinpricks of lightness too, while ‘Maps to Where Poison Grows,’ feels quite literally like sailing through a tempest. But even as the wind roars, wooden beams creak and threaten to break, the vessel remains above water, refusing to succumb to its murky green depths.

But the sense of re-emergence is perhaps strongest on ‘Caverns of the Behemoth.’ The track is submerged in a briny gloom, but nevertheless emerges into a hidden grotto where there is air to breathe and the mineral drip of stalactites offer a monumental beauty. It captures something intangible that is present across the record, something about perseverance, about survival. It’s comforting only in that it exists, in the inherent rejection of the alternative that sits pale and limp on the kelp-strewn seabed. The most significant element is the systolic percussion, the constant steady pulse that rings in the ears as a reminder in the darkness that even this wreck is survivable.

The Rise and Fall of the Melting World releases on 27th August and you can order it now from the Arrowounds Bandcamp page. You can subscribe to the Salt and Gravity series via the Lost Tribe Sound Bandcamp page.

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Which is not to say the New Madrid are done exploring other genres. Elements of psychedelia and post-punk dot the record, and single ‘Queen For A Day’ shows off a folk-inspired dimension too. With an intricate finger-picked sound, the song explores an even more intricate world, the song’s anxious rhythm evoking the digital age and its constant flow of information. “For me, it makes me think about the power behind looking for all the answers of the universe by just sliding around your phone screen,” says lead Phil McGill.

But further than this, the song delves deeper into the implications of such a society, where the people can be manipulated while the powerful evade the consequences of their actions. “I was curious about the poetic legal term ‘Queen for a Day’,” McGill continues, “that in short means your words cannot be used against you in a court of law primarily in the case of Government investigations.”

In such a world, access becomes a moot point. No amount of research matters when information is not equal, and the truth impinges on certain demographics but not on others. As McGill concludes, “The rules of the already tilted game board were being pushed to their ends. There was an absurdity to the evil that was lurking in plain sight. Felt like I was seeing the hands of the puppeteer in the frame.”

New Madrid is out on the 30th April via Lemonade Records.

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Big Dread Moon, the latest album from Georgia-based songwriter and poet Claire Cronin and her first on Orindal Records, has nothing to do with aliens. Yet, as the title suggests, the record exists under the same shadow, a world darkened by something large and looming. The creatures that populate it might not be from outer space but they are certainly from another world—wolfmen and wailing birds, wraiths that drift through the night—and the setting too owes something to Dean’s idea of cyberspace. Cronin offers a contemporary moment superimposed with archaic folk sensibilities and Gothic symbolism, presenting a world in which horror and joy and spiritual meaning are just as likely to emerge from a screen as any other source.

Which is not to say Big Dread Moon hides behind irony and artifice. Rather, cyberspace is presented as one space of many, another plane of our hypermediated world through which gods and ghosts can move unhindered. Claire Cronin is also a scholar, and her interest in “death and spectrality in visual media” is telling in this regard, her writing positioning the horror genre not as some camp or schlocky thrill but rather an allegorical engagement with the human experience. “Was a blue room she sank into,” Cronin sings on ‘Six Guns’, echoing a piece she published with Bennington Review. “Was a spell black as thinking / And between the two came a passing mood / that could break the back of breathing.” Images blend with reality on Big Dread Moon, replace reality, represent reality in ways that ‘real’ life cannot manage. As ‘Six Guns’ continues:

“What the eyes see on TV screens decays
I have lost all my images this way
I have known what would come before it came
Lost names: I am opened in this”

Big Dread Moon should be viewed not as the musical tentacle of Cronin’s many-limbed talents but rather the product of the whole beast, the musician and scholar and poet working as one. Crafted around electric guitar, Ezra Buchla’s viola and sparse synths from Shahzad Ismaily, the songs are elegant in their simplicity and elemental in intensity. Opener ‘Tourniquet’ sets the tone with its fragile beauty and worming dread, sounding at once haunting and haunted as the instrumentation swirls miasma-like around the plain-spoken vocals. “By the time I left, I was vacant,” Cronin sings, “a haunted house with no basement. / If you hate the night, then replace it / with visions of light underground / Dissolvable, impossible, transparent.”

Something between a poem and dark hymn, ‘What the Night is Thinking’ feels intensely personal yet somehow larger too, witness to forces that touch us in profound ways yet transcend any individual. Just as Jodi Dean describes of alien abductions, the wonder of experiencing such otherworldly phenomena is balanced by a dark uncertainty, as though violent judgement lurks within the high ambiguity of the strange and the sublime. “Who knows what the night is thinking?” Cronin asks, every inch of the mystery present in her tone.

Such a force is personified (or lycanthropified) in ‘Wolfman’. “I was in the black woods, not the bitter land,” Cronin begins, “with my gut-string murmur and my oil lamp / He appeared—come shining— / like a blue shock of rain.”  Advancing with an off-kilter creep, the track is stalked by this awful, awesome thing, its possibilities hovering over every moment. “I was bored with silence and emergency,” sings Cronin, putting this sensation into words. “And the wolf was reckless and he followed me.”

The song is a stark example of the horror-inspired world Cronin has built, where oil lamps and TV screens co-exist without any sense of anachronism. An old and mysterious age bleeds into our own, as though overlaid and gradually merging. More strikingly, it is a world we recognise, if not on a conscious level then somehow deeper, like something we’ve been waiting for, the dread of a forgotten past returning. If, as Jodi Dean argues, alien abductions are a manifestation of disfigured dreams not realised, then perhaps ghost stories are uncanny versions of the past, both phenomena merely apparitions of alternate times as they leak into the present.

There is loss of autonomy in being rendered such a witness, perturbed by the untimely appearance of the past and future. ‘Saint’s Lake’ suggests a turn to prayer and gesture, as though metaphysical forces might be appeased a certain string of words or actions. Though Cronin’s God, as described in closing track ‘The Lamb’, is “calm and decisionless.” He is not absent. He is not powerless. But He is satisfied with the arcane way of things, and will not see His creation tamed by simple ceremony. The truth will not give itself up so easily, and thus the search for it must itself become esoteric.

Researching the alien abduction phenomenon, eminent psychiatrist John E. Mack posits that abductees display a kind of ontological shock—”the realisation that one’s conception of reality does not hold.” Dean equates this to the alienation of an existence within the consensus reality of late capitalism, the abductions born not of personal trauma but of that emerging in the world, cultural-level tensions made manifest. Which is to say, far from being delusional departures from actuality, such phenomena might represent an overabundance of it, truths condensed into strange shapes. The paranormal poses “profound questions about how we experience the world around us,” Mack writes, “and how as a society we decide what is real.” On Big Dread Moon, Claire Cronin looks to immerse herself in such questions, leaning outside of the totality of Western thought, as though only in abandoning reality can we truly map its contours.

Big Dread Moon is out now via Orindal Records and you can buy it from Bandcamp.

Photos by Claire Cronin and Stephanie Sutton

The post Claire Cronin – Big Dread Moon appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Back with a brand new record, Local Support, Key has taken something of a new direction. Joined by Seth Key (electric guitars), Harrison Cloud (drums and percussion), Mark Plemmons (piano and organ) Robbie Horlick (saxophone) and Brad Gerke, Jessica Gerke and Ian Morrison (back-up vocals), the record represents Key’s most vivid and energetic release yet and places him firmly within the folk rock camp. This is made clear from opening track, ‘Change My Mind’, a fully-fledged country rock song complete with that playful barroom swagger.

I’ve been trying lately now to try and change my mind
I’ve been treading through the daylight without seeing the sunshine
I’ve been staring out the window
hoping for something that ain’t never gonna come
The walking man walks, the talking man talks, the running man’s gotta run

There’s a distinctively blue collar tone to the record, taking on the age-old themes of living and ageing in a land full of promise that never quite seems to yield. “Run of the mill old milltown blues,” Key sings on ‘Hills Like White Elephants’, going a long way to explain the record as a whole. Identity too, or perhaps the lack of it, forms an important thread. “You can lay my bones in Macedonia ground, or bury me by Indian Creek” goes the brooding shuffle of ‘No Difference Macedonia’. “It don’t make no difference to me.” Times are changing and history counts for little, let alone the romanticised version of it (moonshine has been replaced by Ambien and Xanax, by trucker’s speed).

The title track celebrates the modesty of the regional over the short-lived wider trends, while ‘West Bethlehem’ is the twenty-first century economic struggle through the classic country lens, pleas to employers and Jesus himself ignored without so much as an acknowledgement of receipt. The traditions of folk are once again present in ‘Living in a Song’, the bad luck and the blues and the attempts to escape, before ‘Mississippi Hallelujah’ closes the album with a fittingly epic finale. Clocking in at over seven minutes, the track is a lesson in the patient build, pitched in the no man’s land between golden dreams and empty promises.

Local Support is out now and you can get it from the Tyler Key Bandcamp page.

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