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.

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A song that she says “comes from acknowledging the type of magic that exists all around us and yearning to get a taste of it,” ‘rosemary’ is the new single from addy (the project led by Philadelphia’s Addy Watkins). Her first new music since last year’s temperance, the song takes indie pop and stripped-back folk and refracts them into a new shape entirely, something warm and fond and all-enveloping.  “I was in love with a witch once,” Watkins describes of the song’s inspiration, “who taught me rosemary hung over my bed would help with my crippling nightmares. which it did and still does whenever I remember to hang it.”

Alice Hebborn – Saisons – Movement 2

December sees the release of Saisons, the debut album from Belgian composer Alice Hebborn on Western Vinyl. Created following a move to the countryside, the record draws inspiration from theories of ecofeminism and environmental harmony and presents a world cast volatile and disordered in the wake of human impacts. Across seven movements, built of piano and electronics, Hebborn imagines a different future. One in which humans cease to throw the natural balance and instead become a key link in a harmonious web of reciprocal relationships. Lead single ‘Movement 2’ is “the starting point of Saisons,” Hebborn describes. “It was written in the spring and draws its inspiration from the captivating images of this season: the awakening of nature and our senses, the great activity of all living things.”

Banti Buli – Hennessy Song

“Refusing to commit fully to irony or sincerity […] as though a song about relationships couldn’t really function without equal doses of heartfelt emotion and tongue-in-cheek humour.” So we wrote of Banti Buli‘s ‘Something Like a Honda Odyssey’ last year, a song which mixed languid rhythms with a distinctively verbose lyricism. Ahead of an album due next spring, Banti Gheneti is now back with ‘Hennessy Song’, a track which see the US-based Dutch-Oromo artist take samples from his surroundings to build an earnest soundscape exploring the transience of even the most steadfast habits. “The closest thing to a home (the Ethiopian corner store) becomes a hole in the ground and your lover leaves you,” as Gheneti says. “Even routines and promises are ephemeral.”

figure eight – 1999 (cherry)

A mainstay of the Bay Area scene, figure eight originated as the experimental noise project of duo Nash Rood and Abby Goeser, starting out with nothing but a distorted synthesizer and acoustic drum kit. However, on welcoming a number of additional members in recent years (including Nicholas Coleman on bass and Nicky Esparza on drums), the band has now evolved into something altogether more full-bodied. Take new single ‘1999 (cherry)’, a song with finds the outfit at their most boisterous and reserved within the same three minutes. The searing opening is indebted to hardcore, though the crushing momentum soon breaks into something almost delicate. These twin threads of lightness and weight weave across the track into what appears to be the spirit of this new version of figure eight—a band aware of the transcendent power available at both ends of the spectrum.

His His – My Friend Wants to be a Freemason

We last featured Aidan Belo’s His His project almost exactly a year ago when we covered the single ‘Ford Econoline’, a song about life in a tour van that we said felt “like the sensation of returning home in your mind as you cruise down an unfamiliar stretch of highway in some faraway city.” The Toronto-based artist returns with a new EP, Good Gold, coming out next month, and has just released the final single ahead of the release. Informatively titled ‘My Friend Wants to be a Freemason’, it’s a track about a childhood friend who became obsessed with joining a masonic lodge. “The idea of joining this secret society consumed my friend, and for a couple of months it was all that he’d talk about,” as Belo describes. Musically the song follows a familiar His His formula, a gentle and folk-inflected indie pop song that wears an air of weary wistfulness like the grain in an old film photograph.

Good Gold is due to be released on 15th November via Victory Pool Records. You can pre-save it now on streaming services.

Kassie Krut – Reckless

Kassie Krut are wasting no time introducing themselves. “K / A / S / S / I / E / K / R / U / T / T / T / T,” goes the opening line of new single ‘Reckless’, a de facto theme song for the new project of Kasra Kurt, Eve Alpert (formerly of Palm) and Matt Anderegg (Mothers, Body Meat). The band have just signed to Fire Talk Records, and new single offers a glimpse at the core of the project. Something undoubtedly contemporary yet possessing a rawer dimension too, as though through the idiosyncratic art pop style comes an altogether more atavistic, primal energy. Directed by Guy Kozak, the video for the song was filmed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and offers a visual representation of the sound’s frantic playfulness.

‘Reckless’ is out now and available via the Kassie Krut Bandcamp page.

Mark Trecka – Witch’s Hat (ft. Midwife & An Heap)

The work of Mark Trecka never sits still, the Chicago-born artist and activist utilising sound to explore a diverse set of styles and themes in a practice as inventive as it is ambitious. More recent work has turned towards post-punk as an avenue of exploration, and latest single ‘Witch’s Hat’ continues to plough that same furrow. Recorded between Paris and Colorado, the track is described as Trecka’s “Halloween song,” existing with the common ground between that which is haunting and beautiful. Midwife joins on backing vocals and An Heap on synths to further elevate the dynamic, the song moving from apparent minimalism into a gauzy atmosphere as though pushing through the layers of time itself.

Michael Younker – Bad News

Michael Younker is a Detroit-born, Brooklyn-based production designer who also makes rock & roll music that he says “melds lighthearted cynicism with unashamed big rock motifs.” He has just released his debut EP, Sweet Things, a four-song record that’s brash and chaotic and amped up with bratty energy. “Sonically & lyrically, Sweet Things feels like the kid who ate too much sugar, bounced off walls, and passed out on the floor,” Younker describes. “Music of obsession, excess, indulgence, and…consequences?” ‘Bad News’ is perhaps the best place to start, capturing the EP’s manic motion and carefree bravado. “I can’t make you love me,” Younker sings, before snottily trying his best anyway in the following line – “C’mon, give it a go!”

Old Man of the Woods – Ghost

“A visceral exploration of a villain’s arc, tracing her devolution from possession to obsession to dissolution.” So reads the album notes for Triptych I: Devolve, the latest release from Seattle-based project Old Man of the Woods. The first in a series of EPs, the three-song collection offers a self-described “goth ethereal mycelial” sound to chart a fall from grace in all of its tragedy, majesty and strange avenues of agency. Such as with single ‘Ghost’, where the central character moves from resentment to something closer to power with the realisation that the ability to haunt can represent its own form of control.

Orchid Mantis – Dead Malls (feat. Cathedral Bells)

Following a collaboration with Sign Crushes Motorist earlier this year, not to mention several more singles in the meantime, Orchid Mantis (the recording project of Atlanta‘s Thomas Howard) has returned with a new single ‘Dead Malls’. This time featuring Orlando, Florida shoegazey bedroom pop act Cathedral Bells, the track uses imagery of an abandoned shopping mall to explore emotions altogether more personal. Where past hopes, once bright and shiny and full of promise, have withered on the vine, now little more than empty husks. But the atmosphere is not downbeat, rather wistful and hazy, looking back on old memories as though flickering warm and grainy from an old film projector.

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Described as a song “about having the capacity to love different people (friends, partners, etc) in different ways, using a lot of silly car and public transit metaphors along the way,” ‘Something Like a Honda Odyssey’ is the latest single from Cambridge, Massachusetts artist Banti Gheneti, AKA Banti Buli. The track emerges with all the heart and playfulness this description suggests, with a languid rhythm ticking over below Gheneti’s verbose vocal style, refusing to commit fully to irony or sincerity, instead hovering in the ambiguous middle ground. As though a song about relationships couldn’t really function without equal doses of heartfelt emotion and tongue-in-cheek humour.

My love is no tesla model e
It’s something like a honda odyssey
Don’t worry though, it’ll play nice with a model e
If that’s how you want things to be
So let me know what you think
Any takers out there?

Gorgeous – Raindrop

Gorgeous are a “frenetic yet friendly” noise pop duo from New York, comprising of Dana Lipperman (guitar and vocals) and Judd Anderman (drums). Next month they will release their sophomore album, Sapsucker, via Sad Cactus Records, which promises to develop the band’s dynamic signature blend of fractured rhythms, cynical lyricism and sweet and sour melodies. The record features songs about everything from “technological dread,” to “literal and figurative monsters, liars, dreamers, and true believers,” and lead single ‘Raindrop’ drops us in the deep end. “Our bones are made of cosmic dust,” Lipperman sings over jerky clockwork percussion before the track slams into life, “exploded stars, we’ve come apart.” Strange, unpredictable and gloriously noisy. What’s not to love?

Graves – Little Dumb Dogs

California-based Greg Olin has been releasing music under the Graves alias for almost two decades. On his next release, Gary Owens: I Have Some Thoughts, which comes out late June via Perpetual Doom and Curly Cassettes, he adopts a new name as a kind of Country music alter-ego. The album’s sixteen songs are a throwback to Nashville’s golden age, loaded with a sense of bittersweet nostalgia and a wry humour that brings new vigour to a timeless style. As Perpetual Doom put it, “[they] sway with the moonstruck sweetness of classic country, blending the sounds of golden age AM radio with a laidback West Count vibe.” Lead single ‘Little Dumb Dogs’ is a good introduction, its laidback atmosphere and gently cutting lyrics (“If little dumb dogs and the finest of drugs don’t kill you / and a smile from a child and walking down the aisle don’t thrill you”) capturing the album’s essence in less than two minutes.

Gary Owens: I Have Some Thoughts will be released on 30th June. Pre-order it rom the Perpetual Doom Bandcamp page.

The High Water Marks – American Candy

Led by Hilarie Sidney, founding member of the revered Elephant Six Recording Company and flagship band The Apples In Stereo, The High Water Marks are making their third ‘comeback’ this summer, with album Your Next Wolf coming very Minty Fresh. Based between Lexington, Kentucky and Grøa, Norway, the outfit had never played in the same room before opening for Pavement in Oslo is 2022, and the new record is their first recorded together and in-person. If latest single ‘American Candy’ is anything to go by, the set-up was conducive to the band’s creative energies, kicking along with an infectious momentum, capturing all the addictive sweet and sour overtones of its namesake and drenched in fuzz for good measure.

Lauren O’Connell – Joangeline

‘Joangeline’, the latest single from LA-based multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Lauren O’Connell, is a song of strength and vulnerability. “I saw me there in the half light / As shapeless there as the dawn,” they sing near the beginning of, a tenderness juxtaposed by tangible weight of the the drums. “And every promise it brings / Dying to feel even half right.” What quickly becomes apparent is that the source of the fragility is not any sense of uncertainty or hesitation, rather the inherent sensitivity of exposing core truths. Shedding outer armour as an act of defiance, deciding to be open no matter how much pain this might invite.

And all I wanted to know
All I wanted to know
Who would want me
The way I want you

Drag me out, baby
Drag me out, baby I’m in it now

Leeann Skoda – Little Star

With EP Living Room Sessions out later this month, Leeann Skoda has unveiled the slow-burning ‘Little Star’ by way of introduction. Emerging from the “familial Americana scene” of LA’s The Grand Ole Echo, and recorded with on one afternoon in the living room of Malachi DeLorenzo (Langhorne Slim, Izaak Opatz), the release is one built around an authentic folk spirit, and the single embraces the style with its lush, intimate warmth. A track stripped of all excesses, standing instead on its own simplicity, like some lullaby which has been crafted through years of repetition into a perfect state of function.

Living Room Sessions will be released on 26th May and is available via the Leeann Skoda Bandcamp page.

Paper Lady – Starcross

Back in January we introduced Paper Lady, an “immortal crone” brought to life by Allston’s Alli Raina and company in a kind of musical ritual. Previous single ‘Five of Swords‘ saw the project push their spiritualism out into noisier, shoegaze territory, and new single ‘Starcross’ continues the path with gauzy textures and a pummelling momentum. Described as “a scathing account of an almost-romance with a farmer gone awry,” the song burns with what could be spurned fury or frustrated embarrassment, building nonetheless into with unerring intensity of an ancient curse.

You feel it
Logic overrun
Conceal it
What else is there to be done

‘Starcross’ is out now and available via streaming services.

Ruth Radelet – Leaving the Table

Though best known as the front of synth pop stars Chromatics, Ruth Radelet has recently turned toward solo music as a means of exploring dimensions perhaps neglected in her work thus far. The Other Side EP confronted classic themes of love, loss and renewal after a traumatic period, with songs like ‘Crimes’ retaining the vivid Chromatics sound while those such as ‘Strangers’ allowed Radelet to break new ground with its almost orchestral pop tones. Ruth Radelet’s latest single, a take on Leonard Cohen’s ‘Leaving the Table’, straddles the fence between pop and folk, with the timeless vocals and echoing melancholy adding a dash of Julee Cruise to Cohen’s classic.

‘Leaving the Table’ is out now and available from the Ruth Radelet Bandcamp page.

Symbol Soup – Airglow

Writing of previous single ‘Overdressed‘, we described Symbol Soup (AKA London‘s Michael Rea) as a combination of “classic British folk charm with something rather more American, including faint notes of country and a couple of spoonfuls of Alex G-style lo-fi indie rock.” Latest track ‘Airglow’, again on Sad Club Records, continues the arrangement, the intimate sensibilities of bedroom pop polished with a golden psych-folk sheen, resulting in a sound able to evoke the slow hours of a summer afternoon without sanding down the snags and edges beneath the surface. The sound plays into the themes too, with Rea offering a take on the information overload of the internet age, though subverting its usual framing to instead present it on more grounded terms. So there’s no dystopian chill here, just a willingness to float above the sea of data and embrace peaceful ignorance instead.

‘Airglow’ is out now via Sad Club Records and available via the Symbol Soup Bandcamp.

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