Last week, New Haven, Connecticut band All The Pretty Horses released a new album, Witches Up No Mountain Switches Down No Valley, on Candlepin Records. Led by Austin Travers, the band craft slowcore-inflected bedroom pop that is equally comfortable in an intimate hush as it is in triumphant noise. Described as a love letter to cat Franny (AKA the Frances of the title), the record’s second track is a good introduction, moving from near-whispered vocals and shambling percussion into something joyously clamorous, all smashed cymbals and rousing guitar. It’s also charmingly sincere, taking the conventions of a standard love song and framing around not another human but a beloved pet. “When Frances meets me in my backyard,” Traver sings, “this song will fill her heart, her eyes stare into mine as I reach the chorus line.”

Cali Bellow – LFG!!!! (i just died)

Ever find yourself wondering what would happen if you took some of the early 2000s’ biggest musical styles and shoved them into a blender? Say, punk rock from the likes of Rancid and commercial pop from Spice Girls, NSYNC and Aqua? Well, ponder no further, because Cali Bellow has shared ‘LFG!!!! (i just died)’, the latest single from upcoming genre-bending album Ciao Bella. The single combines all those sensibilities and more. As we wrote in August, the album is inspired by everything from Dark Souls, The Muppets, Ursula Le Guinn and Joanna Russ, and the new single shows just how idiosyncratic and infectious a sound such a wide palette can create.

Ciao Bella is out on the 25th October and you can pre-order it now from Bandcamp.

Carpet – Soft and Hidden

Carpet is the solo recording project of Rob Slater, a Leeds-based artist perhaps best known for his work as a musician and recording engineer at Greenmount Studios. Slater has played in a myriad of bands—from Thank and Mi Mye to Post War Glamour Girls and Crake, as well as noisy punk outfit The Spills—though Carpet sees him go back to the beginning to reclaim the lo-fi sensibilities which first sparked his imagination in his youth. With EP Fruit coming soon via Launchpad+, Slater has unveiled single ‘Soft and Hidden’. A song which lives up to its title with its hushed and intimate sound, and serves as the ideal introduction to a release concerned with mining life for those small, fond moments.

Fruit is out on the 1st November via Launchpad+.

Clem Snide – Free

Oh Smokey, the tenth full-length from Eef Barzelay’s Clem Snide, finds a songwriter at something of an inflection point. With break-ups putting an end to long-term relationships both personal and professional, Barzelay left his home of Nashville after twenty years and set about searching for the next step without quite knowing what that might even look like. It’s therefore unsurprising the album is preoccupied with the unknown, a collection of “slow, sad songs about God and death” as Barzelay himself puts it which reflects on life’s ups and downs with a mix of empathy, wry realism and hope that only experience can bring. Single ‘Free’ shows the record’s compassionate tone, with Josh Kaufman of Bonny Light Horseman helping elevate the Clem Snide sound into some of its warmest, richest territory to date.

Oh Smokey is out on the 27th September and you can pre-order it now.

Dorio – Drive / Last Day of Summer

Recording under the moniker Dorio, Texas-based multi-instrumentalist, producer and songwriter Chad Doriocourt makes what we’ve described previously as “vivid, inquisitive songs that balance an easy-spirited energy with an underlying empathy for the human experience.” Released via Earth Libraries, new double single The Drive Collection sees Dorio continue to experiment with the pop genre, drawing the audience in with laidback simplicity and catchy earworms. Which isn’t to say there’s no substance under the surface. ‘Drive’ juxtaposes its sunny rhythm with doubt and nostalgic yearning, while the ‘Last Day of Summer’ offers an idiosyncratic snapshot of summer romance.

The Drive Collection is out now via Earth Libraries and available from Bandcamp.

max garcía conover – sue and buz catch up during fireworks

One of the most prolific and consistently interesting songwriters working today, max garcía conover has made a name with an emotive brand of folk which pairs lyrical dexterity with an earnest immediacy. New single ‘sue and buz catch up during fireworks’ captures the style perfectly, a song which unspools like long-held thoughts suddenly released, its verses dense with words but entirely natural in flow. “I wrote [the song] after spending the Fourth of July with family and friends, watching fireworks and repeatedly having the same conversation about the calamities of this country, its role in the world and the futurelessness we felt,” Conover explains. “Lot of that has since been put into a somewhat different light and I think the song landed somewhere else too, moving beyond despair without shying away from it.”

‘sue and buz catch up during fireworks’ is out now via streaming services.

 Slark Moan – Nervous Breakdown

“Oozes calm confidence and newfound wisdom [even] as life’s many emotions threaten to burst from the seams.” So we wrote of single ‘Dollhouse Heart’ from Slark Moan‘s upcoming EP, The Return of Guitar Music. The project is the alter ego of New York-based artist Mark Sloan—someone who has worked with the likes of Torres, Margo Price, Erin Rae, and SG Goodman—and provides space to utilise an expertise in craft to explore personal uncertainties. Latest track ‘Nervous Breakdown’ is no different, effortlessly blending genres to recreate an experience of feeling anything but effortless. “When I wrote the song, I was having a hard time trusting myself, and experiencing anxiety around choices I had made and uncertainty about where I needed to go,” Sloan explains. “I felt like I was always playing catch up to where I needed to be, like I had just arrived at a party just as everyone else was mapping the train ride home.” Watch the video directed by Evan Murray below:

The Return of Guitar Music is out on the 25th October.

Steve Slagg – The Newest Soil

“I spread my father’s ashes in the winter / With my brothers and my sister.” So opens ‘The Newest Soil’, opener and lead single from Steve Slagg’s latest album, I Don’t Want to Get Adjusted to This World. The record sees Missouri–born, Chicago-based songwriter place personal human experience within the wider patterns of the natural world, not only to reposition death as just another part of the living cycle, but also interrogate the ways in which our current actions might impinge on this order of things. As the opening suggests, ‘The Newest Soil’ begins this with the most intimate of subjects, describing how Slagg and his family spread his father’s ashes upon receiving his remains after a period in which his body had been donated to science.

My daddy had a body but he freed it
He knew he wouldn’t need it
At least for the next couple thousand years
This side of the veil of tears
Content he was investing in sequoias
Letting creation enjoy us

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With her album Utopian Fantasy coming this spring via Nettwerk, LA/London-based songwriter Allie Crow Buckley has unveiled the final single, ‘Cowboy in London’. A perfect introduction to Buckley’s psych-inflected folk rock style, the song exists as something both ethereal and emotive, transporting the listener with its rich and languid sound. “The song is a reflection on my years as a teen and being on my own in London for the first time,” she explains. “It was wonderful and terrifying, and I was totally enthralled.” But running through this carefree spirit is a certain wry humour too, as though calling to attention the naivety which sits at the heart of such a mood.

I could be a cowboy in London
Think I could play the part
‘Cause I’m kinda cheap
And I’m pretty tall

The song comes complete with a video directed by Buckley herself which you can watch below:

Utopian Fantasy will be released on the 19th May via Nettwerk and you can pre-order it now.

Angel Abaya – The Bubble

Next month, LA-based songwriter Angel Abaya will release debut album The Bubble on Earth Libraries. It’s a record which uses the image of its title to explore the various siloes we put ourselves in—be it relationships, friendship groups, identities or physical locations—and how such things can be both comforting and suffocating. As you might expect from a record dealing with conflicted states, the sound varies from bright to dark across its ten songs, and the title track encapsulates the mood. An upbeat pop song carried by Abaya’s soulful and playful vocals, the tone walking the line between confident and confessional.

There are many queens walking circles round this gigantic planet
Not a lot get the credit in the bubble run by princes reciting
Hamlet
Woe is me to be or not to be is that the question
These ladies know what they want and they’ve got too much
time to teach you a lesson

Arthur Moon – 7 O’clock Clap

The moniker of Brooklyn‘s Lora-Faye Åshuvud, Arthur Moon is a project based around intuition and experimentation, as typfied by forthcoming album Chaos! Chaos! Chaos! Side B. Through a combo of pop and electronic styles, they weave sounds full of left-field surprises while always maintaining an overarching sense of control, playing at the boundary between intention and improvisation. “The idea I had was to make an album that was ‘coherently incoherent’,” as Åshuvud explains, capturing the logical diversity of an old-school mixtape. Single ‘7 O’clock Clap’ shows some of this spirit within its two-and-a-half minutes, its shifting moods and tempo evoking the ever-changing phenomenon of identity, and using those cast of ideas to shape what we might ultimately become.

Brother Language – Epley Maneuver

With an album pencilled for release sometime later this year, New York‘s Brother Language has unveiled the single ‘Epley Maneuver’ to give an indication as to what to expect from the record. A slow burning slice of indie rock inspired by a close family member’s diagnosis of vertigo, the song manages to evoke some of the condition’s dizzying force. Its hushed beginning eventually rising into a hefty crescendo, strummed acoustic guitar and a sense of negative space giving way to thumping drums and a scrawl of distorted guitar. Watch the video shot by Abigail Diess below:

‘Epley Maneuver’ is out now and available from the Brother Language Bandcamp page.

Corey Leiter – Lay It Down

After the shadowy tones of 2022 LP Fire Season, LA’s Corey Leiter has returned with brand new single ‘Lay It Down’ on Anxiety Blanket Records which turns to a more compassionate vibe. While living in Echo Park by the 101 Freeway, Leiter came to witness his neighbours living under the overpass, and the track looks to humanise those failed by the system and state while raising money for the Los Angeles Food Bank. Leiter says the song “seeks to feel like a warm hug from a friend,” offering a hand to those in need amid a country all too ready to pretend they do not exist.

Dorio – Lost These Days

Described as hanging “in the liminal space between upbeat orchestral pop and anonymous late-night lounge,” the music of Austin‘s Dorio (AKA Chad Doriocourt) offers a dreamy nocturnal sound indebted to Tokyo’s Shibuya-Kei movement. With new album Strawberry Dreams coming later this month on Earth Libraries, Doriocourt has unveiled new single, ‘Lost These Days’. Introducing the vocals of collaborator Rachel Rascoe, the song offers a typically vivid sound, with the easygoing retrofuturist vibe only accentuated by the clarity of Rascoe’s voice. “When the big night is here is late,” she sings with a tone somewhere between twee and sardonic, “Rest your heart rate, yeah the rush is great! / Legend in your own mind, if you write the lines.”

Hayden – Are We Good

“Are you worried about the past / coming back to you too fast,” asks Hayden Desser, AKA Hayden, on the title track of tenth album Are We Good. “Are you worried about the sea / and what’s going on underneath?” The final image is a pertinent one for an artist who has made a name blending melancholic emotion with a certain slacker rock charm. A sound which might appear untroubled on the surface yet is constantly roiling and drifting below. The new record, his first since 2015’s Hey Love, feels like the perfection of this style, landing in the centre of a Venn diagram consisting of Berman, Malkmus and Berninger. Watch the video for the single directed and edited by Desser himself below:

Are We Good is out now via Arts & Crafts and available from the Hayden Bandcamp page.

Lee Switzer-Woolf – Yucatán

Back in 2022 we wrote about ‘The Negative Twin’ from Lee Switzer-Woolf‘s Scientific Automatic Palmistry, a “sparse and haunting” track which carried “a stark urgency beneath its inky surface.” Switzer-Woolf has a new album Annihilation Signals coming next month and latest single ‘Yucatán’ gives an insight into what to expect. A song which again offers a shadowy atmosphere with a downward suck at its centre, drawing the listener down into a subterranean world this time overtly referenced in the lyrics.

Show me those underwater caves
I’m planning on swimming down
Until the light decays
To the crater that the asteroid made
I need to understand the violence
Of the clean break

Annihilation Signals is out on the 5th May and you can pre-order it now.

Life Coach – Monday Morning Revelations

Blending the sample and drum machine style of Casiotone For the Painfully Alone and Meursault with the cutting observational lyricism of Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton, Life Coach is the project of Glasgow-based poet and musician Jamie Cameron. New release ‘Monday Morning Revelations’ was penned during the imposed slowdown of the early pandemic, when Cameron took stock of contemporary lifestyles from that moment of surreal remove and found little to appreciate. What emerged is a song which rails against a society built towards efficiency and productivity at the expense of almost everything, as well as our habit of falling for the system’s false promises and playing its game despite ourselves. “Our holy present shrouded in denial is of little worth,” as Cameron says, “if all we seek is ourselves.”

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Blood Warrior – Wooden Shade
Rosie Tucker – How Sad, How Lovely (Connie Converse cover)
Fran – Company
JAYA – Learn To Swim
Taylor Hamilton – What Is Real?
Carver Baronda – If Nothing Else Comes Along
Rose Dorn – Deathwish
Milly – Crazy Horse
Guidon Bear – Washing Machine
Joey Nebulous – Pride Month
Dorio – Shortcuts
Special Friend – Before
Sarah Pagé – Lithium Taper
Old Amica – Condensation
Blushing – Dream Merchants
Patient Hands – Stasis
Bryce Kepner – Chances
Jake Bellissimo – why fit? (Jordaan Mason cover)

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It wasn’t until SXSW 2019 that Dorio was properly realised, the songs debuted live at the festival and introduced to the public for the first time. By then, the tracks had taken on a pop-orientated sound, partly inspired by the 70s deep cuts he’d grown familiar with through the speakers of a supermarket when working in the store. Factor in the observational perspective gained from studies in anthropology and the shape of Doriocourt’s singular pop style begins to make sense—vivid, inquisitive songs that balance an easy-spirited energy with an underlying empathy for the human experience.

The first Dorio single ‘Shortcuts’, released in advance of the SXSW debut, displays this in spades, the languorous tone casting a hazy sunshine over the emotion of the lyrics.

Today, we’re delighted to be able to share a brand new single. Building on the half-paced lilt of the previous single, ‘Funny People’ is altogether more robust, its playful enthusiasm and peppy beat offering an infectious flow. “I wanted ‘Funny People’ to have the bright, high-energy feel of a classic sitcom theme song,” Doriocourt says, and it’s fair to say the intention is fully realised. Rich, vibrant and marked by a freewheeling ease, the track could be the intro the the best show that never existed.

Thematically, the song maintains a balance between sincerity and tongue-in-cheek whimsy. However, the former is not undermined by the latter but rather strengthened, as though for all of the hi-jinks and ironic winks that might ensure, there will always be a sentimental fondness for home, family and loved ones to which to return.

“‘Funny People’ was the first song I wrote on my Suzuki electric piano, while I was watching a show about comedians,” Doriocourt explains. “The song is about being around a bunch of people you know and some you don’t. With so many conversations and interactions to see, sometimes you would still rather just go home to be comfortable in your own surroundings.”

Photos by Rachel Rascoe

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