This spring sees Dana Gavanski return with LATE SLAP, a brand new record on Full Time Hobby born of a newfound experimentality. Using Logic for the first time allowed Gavanski to work in ways previously out of reach, opening up new avenues of playfulness and invention to bring to life the full spectrum of contradictory moods which make up any person, and thus explore the sheer strangeness of being alive more fully. “This album is my take on the tension between cynicism/despair and openness/trust,” Gavanski explains. “It’s about tenderness in a world that’s constantly trying to desensitize us.”

Latest single ‘Ears Were Growing’ typifies the record’s ambiguity. A track at once buoyant, whimsical and deceptively dark which straddles a variety of competing wishes. Dreams of escaping one’s surroundings are presented in all their contradictory nature, the allure of change both thrilling and tormenting as the realisation of being stuck in reality dawns. But running counter to this frustration is a certain relief too, the sense familiarity carries its own comforts, no matter how dull or despairing that familiarity might be.

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Back in February, we wrote about Dana Gavanski‘s forthcoming album When It Comes on Full Time Hobby, describing the record as “more unguarded and ambitious than its predecessors.” With its delicately eerie tones, latest single ‘I Kiss The Night’ is another example of Gavanski’s commitment to sitting with vulnerability on the new record, practising an instinctive and honest examination which roots itself in the voice. It possesses a sense of hushed, late-night seclusion, that unique lonely feeling experienced only when it feels like the rest of the world has gone to bed. But far from an ominous experience, the song is “an ode to the night,” as Gavanski explains, “learning to lean into its magic, and the magic and spookiness of solitude in a winter storm.”

Fresh – Babyface

Writing of the single ‘Morgan & Joanne‘ back in December, we described a new positive side to London punx Fresh. The track, which displayed a willingness to subvert “traditional narratives to develop a truer picture of the queer experience,” held a distinctively upbeat, celebratory tone. The vibe might not always be so sunny and playful on new record Raise Hell, to be released this summer on Specialist Subject Records, but something of the brightness is retained on latest single ‘Babyface’. A song described by lead Kathryn Woods as “a cry for help masquerading as a pop song.”

FonFon Ru – Fatty Tissue Thorn

Ahead of their fourth record Collapse Of The Silver Bridge, out next week on Repeating Cloud, Maine trio FonFon Ru have shared latest single, ‘Fatty Tissue Thorn’. Barrelling headlong into the spiralling chaos of a hypochondriac mind, the track spikes its indie rock energy with an anxious post-punk needle, the building momentum falling somewhere between catharsis and catastrophe as it gathers its volatile motion. Check out the video directed by drummer Wes Sterrs below:

Collapse Of The Silver Bridge is out on the 15th April via Repeating Cloud and you can pre-order it now from the FonFon Ru Bandcamp page.

JoJo Worthington – The Divide

Based in Montreal, songwriter, composer and producer JoJo Worthington works at the intersection of pop, folk and ambient styles. Utilising an array of technological techniques to conjure songs both mysterious and intimate. Soundscapes as a kind of emotional geography. Latest single ‘The Divide’ turns its attention to the partisan nature of contemporary society, and how between the fervour and bombast of its extremes stretches a deep and lonely canyon. “You know in movies when there’s an earthquake and the earth splits open and it separates the protagonist and the love interest and then sometimes you see people fall in the gap?” Worthington asks. “[The song is] kinda about the people in the gap and trying to find a home there.”

When there’s so many delusions
When there are so many truths
Maybe I’m confused
Sometimes I don’t know what to think or do

Nancy Mounir – Khafif Khafif

Described as “a remarkable communion with ghosts,” the debut record of Egyptian composer Nancy Mounir juxtaposes its microtonal and non-metered arrangements with recordings of artists from back in history. Titled Nozhet El Nofous (‘Promenade of the Souls’), the release is in dialogue with a different era of Arabic music, one before the dominant maqam (modal systems) were established and creativity reigned. First single ‘Khafif Khafif’ highlights the blend of haunting emotion and steely defiance which underpins Mounir’s work.

Nozhet El Nofous is out on the 3rd June via Simsara Records and you can order it now from the Nancy Mounir Bandcamp page.

Panda Riot – E.S.P.

This summer sees the return of Chicago‘s Panda Riot with a brand new album, Extra Cosmic, and lead single ‘E.S.P.’ throws listeners head first into their detailed yet immediate sound. After a period of experimenting with increasingly complex guitar pedal work, the song finds the band at their most intricate, but everything is tied together by an intuitive forward motion, a sense of release which lines up with the cathartic epiphany of the themes. “‘E.S.P.’ is a song about trying to connect with someone and never quite getting there,” the band explain. “Every time you think you’ve got it, you realize you’re still passing one another by and not quite syncing up.”

Extra Cosmic is out on the 10th June and you can pre-order it from the Panda Riot Bandcamp page.

Party of the Sun – Hymns Forgot

Despite having released new EP Capsule I barely a month ago, New Hampshire‘s psychedelic folk outfit Party of the Sun are not ones to rest on their laurels. Out via Trailing Twelve Records, latest single ‘Hymns Forgot’ is the most recent in a series of monthly releases, a self-described ‘nylon boogie’ which stitches together layers of bright guitars, shuffling percussion and lush harmonies to evoke an easy springtime warmth. Lyrically, the track explores an urban life removed from the peace of the natural world, and charts this disconnect through historic cultural violence. “Was it mine to take or yours to find?” they ask, “Maybe the one who chose to give it.”

Sailing down
Never would I have come
To the land devotion lost
Giving power to a sun

‘Hymns Forgot’ is out now via Trailing Twelve and available via streaming services.

Pet Deaths – swingtime

Following their acclaimed 2019 album to the top of the hill and roll…, London duo Pet Deaths return this spring with a brand new record, unhappy ending. The release takes inspiration from the likes of Alice Coltrane and Miles Davis to conjure an exploratory and colourful sound, a kind of spiritual freedom which carries the highly personal lyricism of lead Liam Karima beyond its immediate resonance. The result, as single ‘swingtime’ shows, is often intimate and surreal, something captured in the video by photographer Kulbir Thandi and Karima himself.

unhappy ending is out on the 27th May and available to per-order from the Pet Deaths Bandcamp page.

Rose Brokenshire – Better Now

Splitting the year into summers as a firefighter and winters making music, BC‘s Rose Brokenshire has learned to embrace larger rhythms within her work. The path has seen her develop her folk style into a more ambient-based sound, something patient and compassionate gained only through experience. Looking to accept the past in all its nuanced truth, latest single ‘Better Now’ utilises this wisdom to offer a salve against suffering. As though embracing the emotional volatility of life can provide its own balm. “I wanted to make something that honoured the journey of growth,” Brokenshire explains. “Something that expressed love for both the ups and downs, the light days and dark days, and the tools I found most healing during a more desolate chapter of my life.”

‘Better Now’ is available from the Rose Brokenshire Bandcamp page.

WILDES – Woman In Love

The first new release since 2020 EP Let You Go, London-based singer-songwriter WILDES has returned with single, ‘Woman in Love’. Taking inspiration from the defiant work of artists like PJ Harvey and Patti Smith, the track confronts suppressed emotions with an unerring eye. The vocals emerge through smoky layers of the sound with a searing honesty, what begins stripped-back and taut eventually blossoming into something lush and soulful. “‘Woman In Love’ is a song of anger,” she explains. “It’s all about the façade presented by someone who isn’t all that happy, and the rage that lies under the glassy exterior.” WILDES is here to crack the glass, to feel the empowerment of release.

Bitter memories, digging up the treasure I sunk
Love your enemy, maybe you can keep them infront
How would you know what I’ve seen, what I’ve done?
How would you know I’m a woman in love?

‘Woman in Love’ is out now and available on streaming services.

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This spring sees the release of a brand new Dana Gavanski record, When It Comes, again released by Full Time Hobby. But, it represents more than the next step in the evolution of her sound thanks to a process of healing ‘lost’ vocal cords. “In many ways this record feels like it is my first,” Gavanski explains. “When I could use my voice, I had to focus so there is an urgency and greater emotional trajectory than before… it’s very connected to vocal presence, which extended into an existential questioning of my connection to music. It felt like a battle at times, which I frequently lost.”

What emerges is a record more unguarded and ambitious than its predecessors, following a strengthened trust in intuition gained through this newfound focus on the voice. Take single ‘Indigo Highway’, a Moog-centric track that captures the sincerity and playful absurdity of a dream. Not only does it push far beyond the pop structures of Yesterday is Lost, but the subject matter is equally challenging. A tribute to a childhood relationship now lost forever. Plunging back through time—through the events that followed, the changes inside and out—to return to the innocence of those days.

“From the beginning of my interest in songwriting, I’d tried many times to write about this relationship and never could,” Gavanski explains. “It felt too fragile, too fraught with experience and distant in many ways.” However faraway the time feels, no matter what came next, ‘Indigo Highway’ endeavours to return to what made the relationship special. “This song is like a prayer,” Gavnaski continues, “or a way back, temporarily, to innocence and silliness and sunshine on a field.”

when you come over
and visit me
we’ll sit by the willow tree

i’ll find your face
it’s changing in different ways
and i’m looking around to see

Check out the video directed and edited by Daisy Dickinson below:

When It Comes is out on the 29th April via Full Time Hobby and you can pre-order it now from the Dana Gavanski Bandcamp page.

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Gavanski went into the record with a desire “to make something bigger, more thought through,” and the sentiment is clear in the sound. Co-produced by Toronto-based musician Sam Gleason, Mike Lindsay (Tunng, LUMP) and Gavanski herself, the album was hammered into shape by different tastes and influences, taking something new from each collaborator. However, this was balanced against the desire to retain the organic simplicity that made Spring Demos so captivating, the trio aiming to “fin[d] essential things, not overblowing, keeping things bare and letting the elements speak for themselves.”

The result is a more mature record, one which shows the development of Gavanski’s artistic vision and practice. Which is not to say it is free of uncertainty, far from it, but now such doubt is not ignored or airbrushed but embraced as a fundamental part of art and life itself. For being an artist does not mean complete dominance over one’s creations. “Transforming a burning desire into something clear and tangible is a vulnerable and delicate act,” Gavanski explains. “You have to be able to let things happen, to accept losing control.”

Such ideas work their way into the themes of the record too. Living up to its name, Yesterday is Gone is ostensibly an album about the past—how we find ourselves governed by it, longing for it or fearing it. But just as Gavanski has learn to step back from that which she cannot control in her creative process, the songs offer a new mode of thinking about the past. One in which you let go, surrender to knowledge that there is no going back, and refocus your energy in a new direction. Yesterday is gone after all.

This is introduced in the delicate vulnerability of opener ‘One by One’, a story of a relationship that has faded to nothing, and continues through the psych-inflected folk of ‘Catch’ and the 60s pop-inspired title track. ‘Good Instead of Bad’ wrestles with potential actions in the aftermath, asking if it’s possible to move on with kindness instead of anger or sadness, and the playful energy of ‘Small Favours’ attempts to escape the weight of emotions by placing them is some sort of context. The yearning for what has been might remain, but it need not drag up or down completely. For with Yesterday is Gone, what Dana Gavanski offers is a transformation of longing—changing it from a paralysed act of retrospection to just another facet of ourselves, and a key component of our journey forward into the future.

Photo by Tess Roby

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By some miracle or black magic, the albums are coming out on Song, By Toad Records, the Edinburgh label that ceased around eighteen months ago after releasing some of our favourite Scottish bands over the last decade. Indeed, it was a support slot with one of those bands, Meursault, that saw Allan meet Song, By Toad’s Matthew Young, the latter offering an afternoon at a recording studio. Somehow, this escalated into an ambitious twenty-plus song project involving a musicians from Scotland and beyond, resulting in Separate Lives and a second LP as well as a series of accompanying singles.

“We got the core of all those songs in just the one afternoon on my acoustic,” Allan explains, “but it was cold that spring and I kept gravitating over to this squeaky old black piano next to the stove, which relaxed me and all these new melodies began to come out […] They kept turning into new songs that we kept on recording whenever and however we could. And it’s grown into this fantastic big project, involving some really wonderful musicians.”

So far two singles from Separate Lives have been released. A duet with fellow Fox Food alumni Dana Gavanski, ‘Rainfall, Canada’ is a slice of swelling melancholia that balances stark beauty with a kind of world weary self-deprecation. The tone is therefore plaintive yet not quite tortured, some small wick of amusement burning, no matter how black the humour. Think somewhere between Malcolm Middleton and Jason Molina‘s acoustic stuff—beat down yet still breathing, unsure whether to cry or to grin should help arrive, or the worst happen.

This time featuring Faith Eliott, ‘Undone’ is cut from the same cloth, though something in the sound is brighter and a little more hopeful. Like the wistfulness of early mornings, when one’s problems have not deserted them but at least sit still enough to seem manageable. Where sadness can come to have its own curious comfort if only for a little while.

Separate Lives is out via Song, By Toad Records on the 14th February and you can pre-order it now.

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Today marks the fifth anniversary of Fox Food Records, and to celebrate James Smith has gathered a large number of the label’s artists for a special compilation, Something’s There But You’re Not Sure What. Essentially a who’s who of the Fox Food roster, the release represents a celebration of what truly independent labels can offer—a diverse group of people from all over the world linked not by a specific sound and style but rather the spirit within.

Opening with an acoustic version of Oh Rose‘s ‘Prom’, Something’s There But You’re Not Sure What features a whole host of our favourites. Nice Legs stop by with another slice of delightfully warm fuzz pop, Spartan Jet-Plex provides an alternate take on single ‘Meant’ and Monarch Mtn returns with his characteristically intimate and melancholic whisper-folk.

Dana Gavanski joins Kaiya Cade on the haunting ‘Garden’, Fazed on a Pony serves up a dose of wonky nostalgia and Goodbye Max welcomes us back into his wistful warmth with the modest wonder of ‘Search Party.’ Then there’s the icy pop of Bloodhype, the whimsical momentum of Plant Food, not to mention the playful hush of Lewtrakimou and cool swagger of Saint Charles. Mixing things up, Henoheno and Fair Mothers offer different takes on patient, sprawling music—the ethereal gloom of the former matched in mood and scope by the foreboding creep of the latter.

Elsewhere, Unisex offer a carefree sway with ‘Let the Tide Take You’, Fairy Godmother a garage rock washed with dreamy haze and the likes of Ratbath, Hairpins, Suzy Jivotovski (of GRNDMS) and Deer Scout all provide stellar examples of intimate bedroom folk. Then, in a fitting finale, Smith’s own Good Good Blood teams up with Astral Social Club for mammoth closer ‘Heathen Astronaut’.

With ambient textures and electronic beeps and glimpses of sincere emotion peeking through the fog, the track acts as a kind of summary of the compilation and therefore the Fox Food Record’s mission as a whole. Heartfelt, experimental, bound not by expectation or convention but rather some gut-level intuition. Together, the elements coalesce into an intangible yet sustained sense of spirit, something far more powerful and lasting than anything done alone. This might not be something than can be adequately put into words, but that it exists is a testament to Smith’s judgement and effort. Because something is there, even if you’re not sure what.

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We’re delighted to share the second single, ‘How Long Has It Been?’, an equally striking meld of intimacy and elegance. From Gavanski’s count in, the track feels spontaneous, as though recorded on impulse as thoughts and feeling emerge, though sacrificing nothing in terms of craft and atmosphere. Thematically, the song casts love as a natural process, meteorological or geological, both subject to and capable of great change. Here relationships are for the most part unpredictable, their subjects reduced to superstition and flat hard waiting, blind hope mixed with vertiginous fear, everything beautiful and delicate and tending toward slow disintegration.

“It felt like the wind blew us apart
just so we could begin to see in the dark
to believe in the feeling
that starts in the bones”

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