With singles ‘Everything’ and ‘Closer’, London duo atmos bloom have indicated the dreamy depths of their new album Everythingness, as well as the push and pull between influence and experimentation which marks their shoegaze-inflected sound. “[‘Closer’] finds Gratton and Paterson looking for contentment in the present and the constant change it represents,” we wrote of the latter single, “something achieved with a woozy, almost ethereal sound that sits on a knife edge between lucidity and dreams, sanding the edges off of reality in order to consider it more fully.” With the release of Everythingness fast approaching via Spirit Goth Records, atmos bloom have shared latest track ‘It’s Enough’, and again the song finds itself caught between competing forces. Namely the difficulty of living up to the expectations of different people, each with their own distinctive image of you in their head.

Chris Acker – Overdrafted

“A country-folk lamentation about the cruel thing banks do when you have less than zero dollars.” That’s how the press release describes ‘Overdrafted’, the new single from New Orleans-based songwriter Chris Acker. His first new music since 2024 album Famous Lunch, the song explores what he calls the “half-rotten romance of the unremarkable and unrefined.” As we wrote back in 2024: “Behind Acker’s trademark absurdity is the essential troubadour tale, where the confused dreamer collides with the banalities of life and comes to feel cursed for his failings.” But what’s remarkable is, despite the self-deprecation and wry humour, there’s some strange beauty here too, a heartwarming sense of camaraderie with everyone who finds themselves “in the red but still trying to tread.” You certainly won’t hear a more affecting account of having to make do with single ply toilet paper this year.

Jacob Brodovsky – Beneath It All

The songs of Jacob Brodovsky have never been afraid to delve into the personal, with new album Tell The Kids We Tried meditating, as we put it, “on themes of community, connection and family within the tumult that is the present moment,” but latest single ‘Beneath It All’ pushes further than most. Brodovsky had been the proud director of a Jewish summer camp, a place where he had spent over two decades of his life, only to recently face backlash from some members of the wider community for liking a social media post about a benefit show Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. An ugly situation developed, with the pressure tipping over into full-blown harassment, leaving him little choice but to resign and leave the place which had come to feel like a second home. “I wrote ‘Beneath It All’ about trying to hold onto the community that raised me while it shrinks into itself,” Brodovsky explains. “A community of good people, many of whom blinded by trauma, grief, and a refusal to acknowledge harm.” The album track featured the fantastic Charlotte Cornfield, while a new alternate live version sees Keiran Placatka, Dominique Adams and Leith Ross join instead:

Tell The Kids We Tried is out now via Make My Day Records and available from Bandcamp.

Jonathan Something – Country Rose

Recording under the moniker Jonathan Something, singer-songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Searles won acclaim through the late 2010s and early 2020s, writing prolifically across rock, folk and pop styles, though emerged from the period disillusioned with the industry and music more generally. “I was finding it hard to identify with being an artist anymore,” he explains. “It didn’t bring me the same joy or comfort it used to, and I found that the only way for me to really enjoy music again was to stop making it.” Cue several years away from songwriting, a spell only broken when ill health pushed him back towards music, even if at first merely sitting at a piano now caused him anxiety. “Eventually, I realized that I needed to turn it into something useful,” Searles continues. “I needed to use it as a catalyst to start thinking more seriously about spirituality and growth and the changes I needed to make in my life. And that journey became [new album] One More Lonesome Cowboy Song.” The record will be released this autumn via High Shelter, but for now you can listen to single ‘Country Rose’ for a taste of existential, transformative tone which marks the songs. Watch a live performance of the track recorded by Dogstar Films below:

One More Lonesome Cowboy Song will be released on the 16th October via High Shelter.

LAPÊCHE – Phantom Of Cinder

Brooklyn’s LAPÊCHE began life back in 2016 as the solo project of Krista Holly Diem, but has since grown into a full-blown band. Drawing on shoegaze and post-punk, they make indie rock songs that are both shadowy and catchy, centering on a sense of considered patience that the band says is born from “a shared language of healing, honesty and presence.” Back in February, they released a new record Autotelic via Tiny Engines, a collection of emotionally intricate but very much listenable rock songs. One standout was album closer ‘Phantom of Cinder’, a typically restrained track about how we hold on to shards of the past like splinters in our skin. “This song came from feeling haunted by old versions of myself,” Diem describes. “It is about the things we carry, the memories that refuse to disappear, and the moments that shape us long after they have passed. Sometimes healing is not about letting go. Sometimes it is about learning to live with what remains.” Watch the Jacob Halpren-directed video for ‘Phantom of Cinder’ below:

Autotelic is out now via Tiny Engines and available from the LAPÊCHE Bandcamp page.

Mama’s Broke – Build It Up

The recording project of Canadian pair Amy Lou Keeler and Lisa Maria, Mama’s Broke has made a name over the last decade or so with a rootless, ever-searching style of folk music which played like the songs of old. Stories to be shared around campfires and small town bars before packing up and hitting the road once more. Latest album Reunion, coming later this summer via Free Dirt Records and Forward Music Group, continues this style, possessing a timeless quality that suggests these aren’t so much new songs as memories passed down through the ages. As single ‘Build It Up’ attests, the result is at once intimate and urgent, delivered with the earnest conviction of those unwilling to let go of this world we’re slowly destroying. “If you don’t build it up,” as the telling refrain states, “somebody else will tear it down.”

Nick Bellerose – maybe i think

Montreal’s Nick Bellerose spent nearly two decades living a double life. His career as an international diplomat saw him travel the globe, “handling global crises in the foreign service.” But, privately, his true calling was music, something he used as an anchor to himself when thousands of miles from home. A couple of years ago, things changed. A series of tragedies, spearheaded by the death of his mother, led him to pick up a guitar and start to sing, making the decision to swap “the world stage of diplomacy for the visceral truth of the microphone.” Bellerose cites the likes of Elliot Smith, Sparklehorse and Nebraska-era Springsteen as influences, something plainly clear in latest single ‘maybe i think’. Characteristically bittersweet, the track explores heartbreak with a world-weary acceptance, ultimately landing somewhere life-affirming.

Perennial – Modernism

Formed in Connecticut over a decade ago, Perennial are a self-styled “modernist punk” band who have blown away sweaty basement shows across the globe with their punk rock patchwork style that knits together just about every left-field and out-there style you can think of. The press release describes their forthcoming new record (aptly titled Modernism) as “Op art to dance to”, but the better metaphor is the tagline of a “1,200 second action painting”, as Perennial streak and splatter disparate elements of their seemingly endless record collection into hectic patterns that feel at once reverential and totally new. The real triumph is how Perennial keep these eccentric experiments so catchy and immediate (two words you may now immediately associate with sub-2-minute melange of free jazz, ambient electronica, big beat, dub and Musique concrète), as the opener and title track attests. Check it out below:

Sharp Pins – Saturday Sun

The project of Chicago’s Kai Slater (who you may also know from Lifeguard and Dwaal Troupe), Sharp Pins is an outlet for lo-fi garage pop that could have come swaggering straight out of the swinging sixties. Not content with putting out two records last year (which clocked in with a combined total of 35 tracks), Slater is already back at it, announcing plans to re-release the album MOD MAYDAY 23, first released on tape a couple of years ago when he was still a teenager, via K Records and perennial. “[MOD MAYDAY 23 is] The soundtrack to my 18th summer riding a Chinese Taotao 50cc scooter around Taqueria Moran and four tracking my Sta-Prest-Dreams,” Slater describes. “I thought it would be cool to record a bunch of songs that never really got recorded in a semi-more-thought-out-way.” And if that wasn’t enough, there’s also a brand new Sharp Pins single too. Titled ‘Saturday Sun’, it’s another slice of throwback pop music that’s sure to soundtrack the rest of the summer.

‘Saturday Sun’ is out now via the Sharp Pins Bandcamp page. MOD MAYDAY 23 will be released on 4^th September via K Records and perennial.

Siavash Amini & Eugene Thacker – Sigils of Decay (for João da Cruz e Sousa)

Next month, American Dreams will release the third edition of Songs for Sad Poets, a collaborative project between Tehran-based composer Siavash Amini and Brooklyn writer/philosopher Eugene Thacker, inspired by the tradition of poètes maudits or ‘cursed poets’. As Thacker describes, “[the term] referred to obscure or unknown poets who had endured some form of suffering and who felt compelled to write about it.” In the duo’s hands, this inspiration becomes something haunting, soundscapes that mould ideas from poetry, philosophy and music into new forms.  The first two volumes were entirely instrumental, but this new one is a little different. Amini fed Thacker’s poems into voice synthesis software and then processed and layered the output until any notion of “voice” is dissolved in noise. Lead single introduces how this sounds, a tribute to late nineteenth-century Brazilian symbolist poet João da Cruz e Sousa.

Wishy – All The Rage

“An unapologetically romantic track which creates the slightly intoxicated state of the title in all of its headspinning glory, refusing to dial down the lyrics in order to fully embrace the headspace. As though to be in love is to experience everything saturated and bright.” So we wrote of ‘Lovesick’, the lead single from Wishy‘s new full-length Nature’s Pill back in June, the Indianapolis outfit’s first full-length since the celebrated Triple 7 back in 2024. With the album slated for release via Winspear this autumn, Wishy have put out ‘All the Rage’ to keep the anticipation high. Thematically, the track is diametrically opposed to its predecessor, existing in the aftermath of a break-up and seeking solace amid the gloom. However, take a casual listen and you’d never know it. Because, for all of the bummed out frustration and wistful longing of the lyrics, the sound itself is buoyant and bright, a twee spirit which leans into the rhythm of the sound as though to cleanse itself via momentum alone.

Nature’s Pill will be released on the 2nd October via Winspear and you can pre-order it from the Wishy Bandcamp page.

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Now David James Allen has returned with brand new single ‘Dukes Up (Since You’ve Been Gone)’. Taking some inspiration from Frederick Knight’s ‘I’ve Been Lonely (For So Long)’, the track adopts a sunny tone for what is essentially a statement of defiance. A vow to confront life’s struggles head on, standing on your own two feet, fists raised and ready for anything. The sound is suitably rich and assured, with layers of guitars, bass, drums and electric piano, alongside organ from Andrew Ivens, building into something of a buoyant momentum. “On the surface, ‘Dukes Up (Since You’ve Been Gone)’ sounds like a breakup song, but I think of it more as a departure song,” Allen explains. “It’s not about any one person. It’s about those moments in life when someone you’ve relied on is suddenly gone, and you’re forced to learn how to navigate the world on your own.”

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Back in 2023 we wrote about Somethinghood by A Box of Stars, an album which saw “the Burlington outfit weave what is best described as a sense of complete attention,” as we put it, “a focus which elevates what might seem ordinary situations into something almost sublime.” Now Macaulay Lerman and co. are back with Walnut Street, a brand new record which doubles down on the style to capture both the beauty of life’s smallest details and the implicit sadness which stems from the knowledge that everything will one day fade away. Single ‘Remain’ is the ideal place to jump in, a typically lo-fi and authentic track which carries a flame of love despite the looming threat of loss around.

Alden Hellmuth – Microfictions

“Tether is a fitting name for the release,” we wrote of Alden Hellmuth‘s new album on LEITER back in May, “speaking to both the connection between Hellmuth and her supporting cast—bassists Logan Kane and Miller Wrenn and drummer Justin Brown (Thundercat, Aja Monet)—and how group, and indeed the audience, act something like a leash within the spontaneity of improvisation. The musicians might play themselves out into unexpected territory, but there’s always a line to bring them back into the heart of the group.” After single ‘Face the Wall’ kicked things off, Hellmuth has now shared latest track ‘Microfictions’. The opening number on the album, ‘Microfictions’ wastes no time in pitching the audience into the depths of her adventurous approach, drawing on Anthony Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music to create a style of improvisation centring on melody. Scurrying percussion adds a sense of urgency, while Hellmuth’s trademark sax skates over the surface with virtuosic personality.

Tether will be released on the 26th June via LEITER and you can pre-order it now.

Cheekface – I Don’t Work Here

LA trio Cheekface have made a name in recent years with mischievous brand of indie rock. Their music combines post punk angles and playful pop bounce with a droll talk-singing style of vocal delivery to create something sometimes caustic, often irreverent and always dialled into the ridiculous age we call the present. For anyone left uninitiated, latest single ‘I Don’t Work Here’ bundles up the Cheekface aesthetic into a tidy three minutes, railing against everything from the surveillance state to the steady creep of the corporate into civic life with equal parts swagger and seethe. A world where everyone is watched yet perpetually lonely, and unrealistic demands come from bosses and customers alike.

Dog Shaped – Please Hold

In part rising from the ashes of former band Sue Your Landlord, Dog Shaped is songwriter Emily Cabarle alongside Nicholas Djukic Cocks (lead guitar), Michael McCanna (lap steel), Matt Shuham (drums), Angelo Ross (keys, backing vocals) and Freddy Haug (bass). With an EP slated for release next month, Cabarle and co. have shared single ‘Please Hold’ to introduce their sound. A song described by the band as “a power ballad about wanting to be close and connect with friends/lovers but being scared of what happens when you’re vulnerable,” it confronts the needling doubt of fearing you are too much for those around you while pining for acceptance and connection. Watch the video produced and directed by Mars Alba below:

‘Please Hold’ is out now via streaming services.

Jacob Brodovsky – Kids

Back in April we introduced Tell The Kids We Tried, the forthcoming full-length from Winnipeg songwriter Jacob Brodovsky, describing how the album “meditate[s] on themes of community, connection and family within the tumult that is the present moment,” with a set of characters “attempting to build a life within a world where the future seems unwilling or unable to materialise.” Latest single ‘Kids’ addresses this style more directly than anything on the record, written while Brodovsky was wrestling with what it meant to have a young child and another on the way while the future of civilisation seems so bleak. “For me, having children has been a massive source of both optimism and dread,” he explains. “Being around children and watching them discover themselves is such an incredible gift to behold, while also terrifying to realize all the ways they could hurt themselves and the limits of my own abilities to protect them.”

Tell The Kids We Tried will be released on the 10th July via Make My Day Records and you can pre-order it from Bandcamp.

Kate Prascher – Jubilee

Later this summer, Memphis-born, Hudson Valley-based songwriter Kate Prascher will release new full-length Sunday Afternoon. The follow-up to 2024’s Shake the Dust, the record sees Prascher build upon her distinctively honest, unguarded style of folk. Lead single ‘Jubilee’ embodies both the atmosphere and emotional clarity of the release, the sound with one foot in the past but always looking forward, allowing memories and hopes for the future to sit side by side. “I wrote it while walking on an old train trestle in Rosendale, New York, a town ringing with the eerie history of a stone quarry, carrying memories of my hometown across it,” Prascher explains. “By the time I climbed down from the track, the song was mostly written. It’s a lyrical exploration of the word ‘jubilee’ as both a signal of celebration and of forgiveness.”

Sunday Afternoon will be released on the 28th August via First City Artists.

MEGGO – just my luck

Following on from 2025 EP eavesdropper ;; death stories, Montreal-based songwriter MEGGO is returning this summer with the next chapter of a trilogy of releases, with lead single ‘jaws of life‘ giving a taste of what to expect earlier in the year. Now she is back with new track ‘just my luck’, a song which allows repressed anger to bubble the surface, not only as a form of simple catharsis but also to clear the ground in order for the process of healing to begin. “There’s a part of me that needs to yell and scream. I don’t call on her that often, but she’s in there!” MEGGO explains. “‘just my luck’ is what comes from that inevitable explosion. It’s about letting go of grudges and making room inside yourself for forgiveness. It acknowledges where there is pain, looks right at it, and lays it bare so that it no longer needs to be carried. What’s left is compassion and peace in its wake.”

Two Runner – Strawberry Rhinestone

Described by label Gar Hole Records as “a warm reassurance for anyone who’s gotten dressed up just to come home alone,” ‘Strawberry Rhinestone’ is the lead single from Two Runner’s upcoming new album Porchlight. The Northern Californian duo, songwriter Paige Anderson and fiddler Emilie Rose, have lived a life steeped in folk music, growing up in the mountains and playing from a young age, and the experience shines through in the Two Runner sound. The single is a slice of lively barroom bluegrass, equal parts wistful and reassuring as it delivers a message both wise and world weary. “”Love is in your favor if you can outlast the bad ones.”

Some lovers are like the mountains
Some lovers are like the ocean
Some of them stick like velcro
And some leave in mysterious ways

‘Strawberry Rhinestone’ is out now via streaming services.

W. Y. Huang – Born To Lose

We last wrote about Singapore-born, New York-based singer-songwriter W. Y. Huang back in 2024 with the release of the EP Knots. The release possessed “a fluidity and ease suggestive of an artist who has spent time exploring their tastes and honing their craft,” we wrote. “One ready to share something intimate.” Fast forward a couple of years and W. Y Huang is preparing to release his debut full-length On Stranger Hills, and lead single ‘Born To Lose’ suggests the album will be even more honest and personal. With a lo-fi sound which owes a debut to both Daniel Johnston and Adrienne Lenker and drawing on his own immigrant experience, Huang “explores the loneliness and anxiety of what it means to be invisible in a foreign land,” as the album notes explain, “tracing the edges of belonging, where memory and place begin to blur.”

‘Born to Lose’ is out now and available from the usual places.

The post Weekly Listening: June 2026 #2 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

However, Hockitay’s latest single ‘two crows’ is something different. Not so much a pivot from its predecessors as an attempt to reclaim the old organic world from the automated present. As the title suggests, the track draws upon the traditional augury of a pair of crows, supposedly an omen of good luck and partnership, to counter an otherwise hostile environment, looking to push beyond the modern confines of finances or even the looming weight of personal mortality to find comfort in the grander, more enduring cycles of nature.

Watch the video directed by David S. Blouin and Buvard below:

‘two crows’ is out now via Future Gods and available from the Hockitay Bandcamp page.

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‘May To One’, the charged, simmering new single from Nashville based songwriter and musician Anna Grace Odom, might be an inherently personal track, but that doesn’t mean it’s themes are not more widely applicable. “This song is a confession and an offering,” Odom explains. “I wrote it on my little brother’s birthday, in the spot in my childhood bedroom where I wrote every song as a teenager. I’d just finished my first year of college and was feeling like I was letting everyone down at once (family, friends, God, myself).” As she started playing the track live, a curious thing happened. Members of the audience starting approaching with their own reads of the lyrics, and how it evoked their own personal guilt and shame. It’s a reminder of the universality of such concerns, as well as the power of music to transform confessions into acts of communal release.

‘May To One’ is out now and available from the usual places.

David James Allen – The Moonlight Waltz

Back in February we wrote about ‘By Your Side’, a single by David James Allen from forthcoming album Jubilation Potpurri. “An ode to the safe harbour of a significant other,” as we described the track, “where calm might be found no matter how stormy the outside world might prove.” Now the Prince Edward County, Ontario-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist has returned with brand new single ‘The Moonlight Waltz’ to further whet appetites, and this time the focus is on an attempted escape of an altogether different kind. Full of equal parts heartbreak and romance, the track is a country song in the classic sense, celebrating the potential within a good old fashioned barroom while nodding to the all too familiar loneliness which haunts the edges of such a place.

‘The Moonlight Waltz’ is out now and available from Bandcamp.

Fishwife – All Good Wives

The fact that Fishwife’s Lenny Moynihan and Jos Cubie first met in an oyster shack during a storm might seem like the sort of throwaway factoid that often populates a band’s bio, but in this case the origin story seems to be central to the project’s DNA. Because this is a duo that makes music bathed in shadow and charged with energy, full of an almost Gothic atmosphere that’s at once enigmatic and enveloping. Take debut single ‘All Good Wives’, which transposes Ellen Hutter’s relationship with Nosferatu onto Moynihan’s own experiences living in Los Angeles, merging the corporeal and ghostly into something as alluring as it is ambiguous. With vocals recorded in an abandoned ghost train ride and organ in a Grade II listed church, you’ll do well to find a more evocative track. Watch the video directed by Ellen Moynihan below:

‘All Good Wives’ is out now and available from the usual places.

The Huntress and Holder of Hands – Beasts We Are

“A sound that holds space for anger, confusion, sadness and compassion, as well as an inherent sense of hope that’s built into the very fact of its existence.” So we wrote of MorganEve Swain’s  The Huntress and Holder of Hands project earlier in the month, with new album Babylon representing “the perfect example of this nuanced style, confronting the corrupt and violent present without forgetting ideas of redemption and sanctuary too.” Latest single ‘Beasts We Are’ displays Swain’s uncanny ability to convey such conflicting emotions within the same sound, the tender tones carrying both fondness and fury simultaneously. “‘Beasts We Are’ is about ghosts and the stories we tell ourselves,” she explains. “It’s about the planet, and the world, and our responsibility to the place we call home. It’s about ugly pasts and shared histories, and shared grief. It’s about where we find ourselves now as a species and an appeal to each other to care enough to do something about it.”

Babylon will be released on the 5th June and you can pre-order it now.

Lydia Luce – Baby Blues

“A track which originated in the depths of a period of suffering yet nevertheless asserted the potential of recovery, as though in some way instigating not only the rest of the record but also the path back to health Luce’s life would take.” So we wrote of ‘Belly’ from Lydia Luce‘s most recent full-length Mammoth back in 2025, summing up a record which charted a course through pain towards healing. Fast-forward a year and Luce is back with ‘Baby Blues’, a very different song, yet one still chronicling a difficult path through a life-changing period. “It’s about my experience postpartum,” Luce explains. “I also fully produced and recorded this at home which is something I’ve been wanting to do for so long. I wrote this during his naps and I posted a clip on Instagram and so many moms and parents found it and encouraged me to release it. I am so proud to share this one as it feels so raw to me in this stage of my life.”

‘Baby Blues’ is out now and available from the usual places.

Swapmeet – 2 C U

We’ve covered a couple of singles from Swapmeet‘s debut album Mount Zero in recent months, with ‘I Know‘ (“A sound able to encompass both sardonic slacker bite and cathartic alt rock release, rising from sly, taut beginnings into something with serious size and heft”) and ‘Sand‘ (“A more reflective and earnest track which mourns that which is lost within contemporary youth, where a thousand distractions rob some of the magic away from the experience”) highlighting different dimension of the Aussie band’s sound. With the record coming later this summer via Winspear, Swapmeet are now back with latest single ‘2 C U’, and this time they are at their most jubilant. The track opens almost hesitantly yet soon explodes into a bright and hazy rhythm in no time at all, playing like excitement bottled up and committed to sound.

Watch the video by Rhys Scarabosio below:

Mount Zero will be released via Winspear on the 17th July. Preorder it now from the Swapmeet Bandcamp.

Shaina Hayes – Timid

“Québec-based artist Shaina Hayes runs a vegetable farm in her hometown, a fact which is more than an interesting tidbit to add to a bio,” we wrote back in March when covering single ‘Flourish‘. “Because spend any time with Hayes’s music and you’ll come to appreciate a kinship between both of these pursuits: an attention to detail, a deep-rooted connection to the land and its life, not to mention an overarching patience that allows her to reflect upon the present with admirable clarity.” Hayes’s latest single ‘Timid’, out now via Bonsound, follows in this style, leaning into introversion and the ways in which we might nurture our own interior worlds. “I wanted to explore the idea that even at our most articulate, the way we express ourselves is just a tiny glimpse into what’s actually going on inside us,” she explains. “That we contain whole, unseen universes. Ultimately, Timid is a song about everything we feel but rarely manage to express.”

Trails and Ways – Next of Kin

“A reminder that life is richer in company, and that social isolation can be overcome, written and performed by a trio who worked through that very process themselves to bring the track to life.” So we wrote of ‘Patiently’, the triumphant return of Trails and Ways after going on a decade away. Eager to capitalise on the fresh momentum, the Oakland group have returned with brand new single ‘Next of Kin’. Somehow simultaneously expansive and intimate, the track is Trails and Ways doing what they are best at, evoking a tangible sense of emotion without losing any of the brightness and movement. Lyrically, it meditates on the strange moment of the present, where small personal hopes are impinged upon by an increasingly precarious global situation wracked by war, climate breakdown and extractive industry.

Vesuvian – Hecate in the Highlands

Back in February we introduced Vesuvian, the Philadelphia-based band consisting of Garret Bollin (guitar, vocals), Joey DeGrado (vocals, guitar), Bill Magerr (bass) and Gavin Caffrey Perez-Canto (drums and percussion), with single ‘Fortunate Death’. The first taste of their new self-titled album, the track was “certainly not your usual scrappy punk number,” we described, “drawing upon the work of Julio Cortázar and accounts of Mesoamerican history to create something cathartic and boisterous.” With the full-length coming soon via Worry Bead Records, Vesuvian have returned with new track ‘Hecate in the Highlands’. Opening with an impromptu choral opening that was initially meant as a joke, there’s a distinctively playful vibe to the song, embracing retro rock sensibilities alongside droll near-spoken vocals in a way which might at first seem almost ironic. But it soon becomes clear Vesuvian are committed to the sound with full sincerity, and as such the track becomes the perfect calling card for the entire release. “At times we thought we’d have to shelve the whole thing,” DeGrado says, “but it turned out as the song I’m most proud of.”

I hadn’t seen a soul in a hundred years
So I let him sit beside me and I let him bend my ear
But when his night came mine stayed bright
The way it always does every single lonely night

The post Weekly Listening: May 2026 #4 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

With the release of Orion/Mother fast approaching, Alex Zhang Hungtai has returned with another single. ‘American Burial’ takes inspiration from Tobe Hooper’s 1982 classic Poltergeist, both in terms of the film’s narrative and the wider circumstances of its filming. “[The movie is] about a white family moving into a newly purchased home but the house was haunted because it was built on ‘Indian burial ground’,” Zhang explains. “Trivia: the skeleton corpses that float up from the muddy waters were real corpses cuz it was cheaper to buy unclaimed bodies than to build from scratch multiple skeletons. Hollywood logic! The actors did not know it was real. But perhaps all of us come to this land to bury something, consciously or not. Buildings burn, people die, and new buildings are built over it as if nothing ever happened.”

The image is a fitting one for a release concerned with the ways the past exists within the present, fragments perpetually returning no matter how deep they have been interred beneath the earth. But while other artists might get caught up with this excavation, or else put their energies into covering over the skeletons before they make themselves at home in our lives, Alex Zhang Hungtai aims to do something different. Welcome the past into the present, but not without purpose. Because that which has gone can be broken down and repurposed. From the scraps of the past, a new life might rise.

Photo by Nastya Bezrukova

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After first single ‘One Too Many Nights’ explored the loss of identity that so often accompanies the end of a relationship, Zoon has returned with ‘I Was Younger’ to dig further into such ideas. “And I know that you’re going / Leave it all in the mourning,” the opening verse states. “And I said that you’re falling / Falling backwards in the mourning.” But for all of the undeniable turmoil and drama of these lines, they are delivered amid, or rather through, a light, shimmering soundscape, Chris Chu of indie-band The Morning Benders lending their talents to help craft warm washes of textured, lo-fi pop. As Zoon puts it: “I wanted heartbreak to feel soft around the edges.”

And I know that you’re perfect
Coming down from
When you found me
Wait around until we say something real
Something real

Happy Thought School comes out on 19th June via Paper Bag Records and you can pre-order it now from the Zoon Bandcamp page.

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This summer, Jacbob Brodovsky is returning with Tell The Kids We Tried, a full-length which continues this style to meditate on themes of community, connection and family within the tumult that is the present moment. Like it’s predecessor, the album is far from a solo endeavour, supported by some of Canada’s finest musicians. Gavin Gardiner (The Wooden Sky, MOONRIIVR), Charlotte Cornfield, Jason Tait (The Weakerthans), Champagne James Robertson, John Baron, Dominique Adams, Keiran Placatka and Julie Penner (The FemBots, Broken Social Scene) all lending their talents to push the sound towards a rich folk rock sound.

Two singles have been unveiled in preparation for the release. Penned within the dark depths of the pandemic, opener ‘Past Mistakes’ dwells on the ostensible hopelessness of our times, its characters attempting to build a life within a world where the future seems unwilling or unable to materialise. The mood is understandably morose, the arrangement subtle and subdued as Brodovsky’s earnest vocals detail an array of precise, melancholic images. But it never quite slips into outright despair. As though to share and sing of such feelings is in some way to refuse them.

It’s been so hard to feel hopeful
It’s been so hard to look ahead
It’s been so hard to say I’m sorry about before
It’s been so hard getting out of bed.

Watch the video Brodovsky made along with Christine Fellows below:

Follow up ‘Colorado Low’ is altogether more buoyant, peppy in rhythm and charged with a certain electricity, though loses none of the emotional depth. A song which pines for the past while trying to imagine that reluctant future, wishing to reconnect to fonder periods while knowing there’s no chance of really going home. “I wrote it in early 2016 when I had just moved back to Winnipeg from Toronto,” Brodovsky explains. “I remember feeling underwhelmed by the Winnipeg winter and missing the snow drifts that I remembered from childhood. On the radio they kept referencing this impending ‘Colorado Low’ that would bring in the winter and I wrote this song about hypothetical characters waiting for winter, while also pondering my own decisions about coming back home and trying to settle back into life in Winnipeg after half a decade away.”

Tell The Kids We Tried will be released on the 10th July via Make My Day Records and you can pre-order it from Bandcamp.

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Single ‘Man’s World’ occupied the angry end of this spectrum, railing against the patriarchal structures of society and the cruelties and violence it too often imparts on women. Which is not to say there’s no playfulness in the song, Cat Clyde’s distinctive blend of emotive folk rock and boisterous rockabilly creating a sound that’s able to convey more than one mood simultaneously. This nuance and depth is what marks Mud Blood Bone, matching the ambition of its thematic concerns, always shifting, changing and making space for more than one emotion.

Take the difference between the wistful, crepuscular folk number ‘Dark Blue’ and racing catharsis of ‘Wanna Ride’, not to mention the cool bluesy swagger of ‘Hold My Hand’. Then there’s ‘My Love’, a cover of Marty Robbins’s 1960 classic which sweeps and flows like some grand landscape of its own. “I heard the original Marty Robbins version of this song in 2023. Hearing it felt like a great clue in my search for meaning in love,” Clyde explains of the latter. “It reminded me of the love that surrounds me in the natural world, and how it all lives within me as well. That love is accessible to me in every tree I touch, in every bird song I hear, in all the places I go, in the earth below me, the sky above me—it’s all a mirror to the love that lives within me, the love from my ancestors, from my past lives, my gods and my guides and beyond.”

But while this stylistic variety might appear scattershot on first glance, spend any amount of time within the record and an internal logic begins to emerge. A cyclical pattern which rejects linearity to mirror nature itself, Cat Clyde finding both energy and solace within the peaks and troughs of organic life. Which is how the hectic, mischievous personality of penultimate track ‘Press Down’ can lead into the slow croon of ‘Another Time’. There are times for frantic, joyful motion, others for reflection, periods of dieback and growth. A sentiment brought to life in a single elegant verse of the album’s closing track. “Hold me close now baby / Press your cheek to mine / Pull me deep into the dream / So I can live inside,” Clyde sings, “Like a flower in springtime / That must bloom and die.”

Mud Blood Bone is out now via Concord Records and you can get it from the Cat Clyde Bandcamp page.

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With the album now out in the world, we’re pleased to report Songs from the Yellow Couch maintains this level of emotional resonance and sonic experimentation across its length, and thus proves a fitting debut. Take the fluctuation of latest single ‘Roller Coaster’. Clocking in at nearly five minutes, the track represents one of the most expansive and considered Dwi Riana has written to date, its foundations of intimate acoustic guitar built upon with subtle flourishes and heartfelt vocals. This style (not to mention the title) is fitting considering the subject matter, for ‘Roller Coaster’ is a picture of a relationship in all of its ups and downs. Specifically how each party must negotiate the ever-changing needs and desires of the other in order to maintain the bond. Frequent collaborator Julie Meunier lends supporting vocals to further the chemistry and poignancy of the sound, and the result is tender, unguarded and forthright. “I used to feel so resentful singing this song,” Dwi Riana explains, “but in the end, I found it to be a way of understanding, and eventually accepting the nature of some relationships.”

This sentiment holds across the record, Dwi Riana’s ability to combine honesty and self-reflection with genuine tenderness conjuring a sound that speaks harsh truths without sacrificing a sense of compassion. Something apparent from the searching tone of opener ‘Elsewhere’, a drifting, considered number which Connor Bennett’s sax nudges towards almost jazzy territory, or the candid ‘Write Home’, which again builds from an acoustic base to ask difficult questions and confront home truths. There’s a patient longing to ‘Your Girl’, as though spiralling inwards towards the real heart of a desire, while ‘In Between’ possesses a stirring rhythm and poetic clarity which communicates the feeling of exposure while moving through a transitional phase. ‘She/Her’ also displays the vulnerability that runs through these songs, and it comes to seem like this willingness to lower defences is central to the album. As though the only way to really confront something as important as identity or relationships is to bare your heart and endure any pain which might result. But, true to the spirit of Songs from the Yellow Couch, this pain is not the lasting impression. Rather it is the wellspring of gladness which emerges upon finally locating that which has been missing for so long.

Cause nothing
Could ever come close
To the feeling that you get
When you find what you have lost

Songs from the Yellow Couch is out now and available from the Dwi Riana Bandcamp page.

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