New album Troubadour, coming this autumn on Audio Antihero, feels like the culmination of this aesthetic, emerging from a difficult yet necessary period for Wright. “For most of my life, I defined myself almost completely on who I was in relation to others—my friends, my family, and my relationships,” they explain. “Troubadour was written in a short period of time where these relationships changed significantly, and it felt as if I underwent complete ego death. For months, I felt insane but inevitably found solace in nature and the constant of the trees. For a period, I felt utterly connected to the universe in a way that was completely outside my sense of self. I was everything all at once, and it was one of the most profound experiences I’ve ever had. And it was hard. And I think I was lucky enough to capture it in these ten tracks.”

Lead single ‘Sag’ sees Wright going through this process in real time, reaching for what they want Tiberius to sound like and who they want to be. “I wrote ‘Sag’ when I was really playing the ‘comparison game’ in my head and asking myself what role I wanted music to play in my life,” Wright explains. “It was the first in a batch about looking at yourself in relation to the others around you and trying to decipher who you are without that context.” The result ebbs and flows across its runtime, pulled in all directions by competing emotions. Uncertainty, doubt, desperation, a recurrent yet skittish determination to embrace some inner truth. And while there might not be any clear answer by the end, the song itself represents one in its own right. An amalgamation of styles woven into something singular and delivered with cathartic weight.

Photo by Zoe Hopper

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With the release of the album fast approaching, The Taxpayers have shared brand new single ‘I Am One Thousand’. A song which takes on a different dimension of our troubled present. Teaching English learners within the public school system a few years ago, it dawned on lead Rob Taxpayer how so much of the world exists under the trauma of violence. In a single class were students from Afghanistan, Burma, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, El Salvador, Honduras and Ukraine, all of which are experiencing war to one degree or another.

“To suddenly have war thrust upon you. Unfathomable. But a reality for so many,” as Taxpayer says. “As part of a writing assignment, we were discussing the places we come from. A student from Burma was describing escaping the violence, and feeling guilt when thinking about family and friends who were not able to leave. At the end of the discussion, she said, ‘I left for my children. I live for the future’.” ‘I Am One Thousand’ is a song written for and dedicated to such people—those given no choice over the difficulties thrust upon them, yet reacting to the cruel, overwhelming present with hope and defiance.

Watch the video by Preston Spurlock below:

Circle Breaker will be released on the 21st March via Ernest Jenning Record Co. and you can pre-order it now.

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[The album is] about facing the endless horrors of the world and remembering to pay attention to the good. People on the ground, activism, and remembering that we shouldn’t be hardened by everything we witness or we can lose empathy. And it feels like without empathy we’ll never be able to achieve class consciousness, and lose our sense of community.

Pulling no punches with its observations, lead single ‘All My Friends Are Depressed’ plays like a dispatch from the trenches of the present. An attempt to shake life into an exhausted population beaten down by work and expectations so that we might act to shape a better world. The song represents “my observation of the mental health crisis we’re in, how widespread it feels and how sociopolitical factors are playing such a huge part,” Cook explains. “It’s also a reminder to myself that I need to stop distracting myself from my issues and try and change something or face things or nothing will happen and I’ll never shake off the episode.”

Wield Your Hope Like A Weapon is out on the 16th May via Specialist Subject Records and you can pre-order it now from the Soot Sprite Bandcamp page.

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Our first taste of the record came in the form of the title track, a galloping song powered insistent marching drums that refuse to let up. Set against this, Springer’s introspective vocals are given a rising intensity, a deep building force that pulls toward some future resolution. But for now the lyrics remain rooted in the uncertain present, and indeed the energy of the track seems geared towards living in spite of life’s ambiguity.

I should rely
A little less on success, a little more on divisible time
My appetite is not what it used to be
Moving on, we’re counting sheep
I opened the door, the dog up and ran away
Gone for weeks, I’ve been doing OK

Check out the video by Dan Watt below:

Latest single ‘Compensation’ sees no let up in the energy. Bursting into a tangle of guitars and propelled drums, the song has a cathartic momentum, Springer’s vocals riding the rhythms of the track to give a head-out-the-car-window sense of release. But the track also highlights another side to Retirement Party, with no small pinch of wry humour in the lyrics. “I’ll always know / To look both ways before I cross the road,” Springer sings “If I get hit, all that means is compensation / At least it’s something.”

Dan Watt gave this the video treatment too, so check it out below:

Runaway Dog is out via Counter Intuitive Records on the 15th May and you can pre-order it now.

Cover photo by Adam Parshall

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Solace is an album about pain and love, tackling the issues of mental health and racism through an emo-influenced brand of alternative folk. Some of the tracks, such as opener ‘Joseph’, play like frenetic rock songs, while others, like ‘Capacity’, are slow and dark and brooding. Walker’s lyrics are often simple and melodramatic, written without poetic flourish, like blunt and truthful diary entries.

The title track plays like laid back folk with both emo and country tinges, the vocals plain and confessional throughout the verses though building into cathartic choruses ruled by alienation, isolation and melancholy.

“Could you feel
in your empathy?
Look at their pain
and find beauty.
I can’t live like
like you want to.
I can’t live like
you want me to”

‘Heart’ emerges warmer and more hopeful, the proverbial new dawn, while ‘Cruel’ morphs across it’s length into an alt-rock anthem. Other notable songs include ‘I Hope It Ends One Day’, a powerful meditation on racism where Walker’s subtle guitar plays behind a spoken word sample from his grandmother, and the striped back ‘They Don’t Want us to Live’ with only acoustic guitar, piano and backing vocals from Olivia Price of Fossil Jane.

Single ‘It Hurts’ represents Walker at what could perhaps be his best, fierce folk which rises into rock by the very momentum of his words.

“We are the slaves of a desperate past
It’s memories like this that we’ll always look past
It’s the scars that touch our bones
That will always hit home
It’s the memories within
That’ll leave our skin

It hurts
To know the truth”

This is music from someone sick and tired, someone beat-down and furious with the things they see and experience every day, a person making a decision as to what to accept and what to fight in the ultimate hope that things can change. And forget genre, or sound, or influences, forget whether you’d prefer your songwriting less forceful and melodramatic, because this is the sort art the world needs. The sort of artist.

There’s plenty to get down about, plenty to hate or fear or ignore, and the solution isn’t going to be found in hashtags or think-pieces. The answer, I think, lies in human connection, in empathy. In realising that despite it all, there are people out there feeling the exact same way, or else worse in ways you can’t begin to image. For all of its doubt and anger, and whether he is aware of it or not, A Day Without Love is some sort of attempt at this, a kind of starting point. Taking a quote from the beginning of ‘Too Fast’ as his mission statement:

“You’re still not alone in the world. You just have to believe there’s a power greater than yourself.”

Solace is out now and you can buy it on CD from Sounds and Tones Records and digitally from the A Day Without Love Bandcamp page.

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The first single from an upcoming full-length, ‘Housemouse’ is a brand of acoustic bedroom pop with emo overtones and deliciously rough alt-folk delivery. The song plays as half apology, half plea for help, both the narrator and the target of his communication clearly suffering in one way or another, while also dealing with the concerns of solipsism that come with mental pain. Caught in the double whammy of feeling bad and feeling-bad-for-feeling-bad, the track bristles with a raw-throated intensity which gives the whole thing a sincere, cathartic air, even if no conclusion or solution can be reached.

“I left you in your state
Clouding the fact that
It wasn’t too late
Wouldn’t be the first one
Your suffering I’ve chosen to ignore

Didn’t even mean to do you harm
Didn’t even mean to leave you there
Didn’t even have to go that far
Hit me so that I could just not stare

[…]

We all have burdens
We all have burdens they feel the same
But they look different”

The full-length on which ‘Housemouse’ belongs is still in progress, but be sure to keep an eye on Wyndwood’s Soundcloud and Facebook pages for updates. In the meantime, why not head to the Wyndwood Bandcamp page and explore his previous releases?

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Things are packed with melancholy and nostalgia from the first track, ‘Dirt Under My Fingernails’, which opens with the lines,”I buried it below the tree, near the place where we had picnics as kids / with the tyre swing and the ditch /it’s now six feet deep”. The start of ‘Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost’ is a mellow drone, backed with burbling field recordings of birds and a stream, before a pleading audio sample from BoJack Horseman and light and spidery guitars precede the vocals proper.

‘Dim Sum’ sounds warm and sad, like that ache of fading light on a quiet summer evening, before closer ‘Something Profound & Meaningful’, a vague and emotional song with lyrics that seemingly describe the devotion of the narrator to someone who isn’t quite well.

“You dream of teeth,
and nothing else,
and nothing else.
And you feel oh so sick.
Your mind is in hell,
your mind is in hell.

But I will think of you,
and I will dream of you”

You can get The Future’s Here & It’s Terrible now on a name-your-price basis from the See You At Home Bandcamp page.

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‘A Petty Song’ charges headlong at the strangeness of life in the 21st century, sitting on a knife edge of viewpoints. Is the world slowly sinking into a landfill of meaningless nonsense? Is the entire population becoming what the song describes as “a generation of culturally inferior types”? Or is that just a defence mechanism? Snobbery we coat our lives in to try to feel somehow better than everyone else? Whatever the answer, the track has some pretty cool verses, almost reminiscent of Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine. Take, for example, the opening verse:

“We roam around department stores
Searching for things we can’t afford.
Getting lost in a world of cultural beigeness
And other futile things like avocado holders”

‘TV Routines’ and ‘Megabus’ are ironic and funny but bathed in a persistent melancholy that the smirks can’t quite shake. “My best friend is called Megabus,” Watson sings on the latter with disarming sincerity, “He texts me all the time / Even though they’re always just a bunch of digits and letters / intertwined.” Following jabs at the rival coach service competitors (“Fuck you National Express / For your unequivocally, awful service”) the song falls into a a sadder place, the vocals pleading for reprieve from a fast-approaching future.

‘Constantly Ignored’, which opens with a quote from Portlandia to sum up the Exam Season vibe, sounds like the lonely echoes of a disillusioned cynic, his thoughts rattling around inside the blank vacuum which belies the superficial skin of mass media. The title track closes things with more nostalgia and sadness, the only two emotions left standing as the technology-induced razing continues unabated:

“We’re swiftly approaching a great sense of numbness everyday,
Colour has leaked from the walls to reveal a desolate grey.
I cling onto hope that something at the shady bower might change,
Still I’ve got no desire to leave, and no desire to stay.

I call it home.
It’s all I’ve ever known”

With its references to Eggheads and Flog It! and headers & volleys, Mostly Homely is a delightfully British record addressing an unquestionably global malaise. It’s music for those of us who spent our youth swapping Merlin stickers and naively thinking life could only get better and more meaningful, only to find ourselves over-educated and unemployed and wondering if this is really all there is. You can buy it now from the Exam Season Bandcamp page.

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‘Goodness Pt. 1’ is the song from the album trailer, a relatively restrained and full of vivid, nostalgic writing which conjures a world full of both bright sparks and wide, flat darkness. That said, there’s a sense of wonder and hope that seems to represent the titular goodness, though how this will evolve across the album itself remains to be seen.

“When the sun rested on olive shoulders
and the wind kissed the back of your neck,
I would lay and absorb in the silence,
in your language I haven’t learned yet.
In the tune of the national anthem
sing the words while the corrugate bursts,
while our burning desires crackling.
We exist in the unified verse.”

‘Piano Player’, the lead single from the record proper, sees the tempo increase somewhat, though the sense of joy remains (abetted by the lovely video). Again the lyrics are incredibly detailed, packed full of strong images and well-written thoughts so that the song becomes a pop punk poem, though there are sing-along segments too.

“A kid half my age, baby’s breath and meadow sage clutched in her hands like trophy game, just like the wild world was tame, was granted home and tender care into an awkward piece of ware three-quarters full or quarter-drained and both adversely sure how long they will sustain.”

All in all, The Hotelier look set to put out a well-written, intricate album that also comes with an instinctive, emotional side, balancing accessibility with depth. You can pre-order Goodness and the Goodness Pt. 1 7″ now from Tiny Engines. The band are set for a pretty extensive tour this spring/summer with the likes of Rozwell Kid, Told Slant, Bellows and Loone. Check out the dates on the posters below:

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We should therefore have high hopes about their recently announced third full-length album, Goodness, to be released on Tiny Engines this coming May. So far all we have is a trailer, though it goes above and beyond the remit of such pieces. The video, directed by Xirin, is a full three minutes in length, showing a woman walk through a city before finding an oasis of freedom. Watch it below, but be warned it does contain nudity (albeit non-sexual):

We’ll share further details as and when they’re announced, but in the meantime why not head over to the Tiny Engines Bandcamp page and get acquainted with The Hotelier’s back catalogue?

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