The recording project of Teague Cullen and various friends, Foot Ox has made a name with an experimental style of folk, exploring age-old themes of love, loss and longing with rich arrangements and surreal storytelling. Written during extensive travels of the West, new album A Lighthouse with Silver Dog Eyes (forthcoming via Ernest Jenning Record Co.) utilises a genre-spanning style to reckon with the past and present of the area, and ultimately how the mythology of the American West shifts and persists. Following previous single ‘Horseshoe‘, new track ‘Bed of Violets’ shows the nuanced, layered nature of the record, able to recognise the beauty of the landscape while confronting the malevolent forces which haunt it. “‘Bed of Violets’ is a pretty dark song for me, even if it doesn’t seem that way on the surface,” Cullen explains. “It’s about the struggle of facing a dark force in life and overcoming it. Even though the lyrics themselves might not be overtly hopeful, I feel like the orchestration and the strings bring a sense of something vast and beautiful.”

A Lighthouse with Silver Dog Eyes out on the 11th August via Ernest Jenning Record Co. and you can pre-order it now.

General Absurdity & the Open Source – Limestone Ghost

A self-described “CommUNITY Psych-Folk Music Rebel, Performance ARTeest, Pre/Post Historic Bluez, Multi-dimensional BEeing,” General Absurdity & the Open Source is the new project/alter ego of  Lexington, Kentucky songwriter Derek Feldman. Long time readers might recognise Feldman as Doc Feldman, who we last wrote about back in 2021 with the release of A Healthy Dose of Anxiety, an album recorded with full band Doc Feldman & the Alt + Cntry + Delete. “Progressing with what might at first seem like pessimism, decrying magic spells and empty prayers, [single ‘‘Receiving (for Rollo May)’] repurposes such disillusionment into human solidarity,” we described. “Clasping hands not in plea to God but to pull another out of the shit. If we have control over anything, it is what happens here around us.” The mystical bent of General Absurdity & the Open Source might indicate a brand new stage for Feldman, yet this core message remains. Folk music which belongs alongside contemporaries like Will Johnson and strives for human connection within this lonely world.

People Mover – Cane Trash

Brisbane trio People Mover—that’s Lu Sergiacomi (vocals, guitar), Dan Sergiacomi (drums) and Billy McCulloch (bass)—are preparing to release their new album Cane Trash via Little Lunch Records next month, and have unveiled the title track as an introduction. It’s an inherently nostalgic track that draws on memories of the ash which filled the air of hometown Bundaberg during the burn-off of sugarcane before harvest, the bright, upbeat surface belying the melancholic weight at it heart. Which isn’t to say the juxtaposition of joy and sadness is in any way peculiar, for what else is fondness but the persistent presence of those very emotions? “‘Cane Trash’ gives into memories of where you came from and how you used to feel,” as Lu Sergiacomi explains. “It analyses where we go when we need to reset. Is it home, or can it be somewhere that reminds you of it? That memory is an analogy for the album—things are fragile, special and fleeting.”

Shrunken Elvis – K-House

Spencer Cullum, Sean Thompson, and Michael Ruth (AKA Rich Ruth) are all renowned musicians in their own right, be that with their own work—Cullum releasing solo material via Full Time Hobby, Thompson forming bands like Gnarwhal and Promised Land Sound, and Rich Ruth putting out acclaimed albums with Third Man Records—or supporting a wide range of well-known artists in recording and touring. So bringing the three together was always going to be a recipe for success. Under the moniker Shrunken Elvis, they have united to explore their shared passion for experimental music, merging their talents in order to transcend genre and create something new. The project “represents a rare opportunity to create purely for the sake of collaboration and curiosity,” as the album notes put it, the trio drawing on everything from Michael Rother, Alice Coltrane, and Pat Metheny to Can, Ashra and KLF to inform their sound, not to mention inspiration beyond music, be that visual art or the films of Akira Kurosawa and Ingmar Bergman. A self-titled album is on the way via Western Vinyl, and you can listen to single ‘K-House’ now. A track which takes something of the nocturnal urgency of eighties cop show theme tunes then expands its horizons with lush psych and cosmic tones.

Stella Donnelly – Baths

Three years after the release of her last full length, Flood, Naarm/Melbourne songwriter Stella Donnelly has returned with a new double A-side single, Baths / Standing Ovation. Both songs are stripped back relative to her previous work (at least until the back half of ‘Standing Ovation’), with a patience and stillness that gives them a sense of meditative clarity. ‘Baths’ in particular stands out, almost acapella as Donnelly’s vocals stand front and centre over barely-there keyboard notes. The music has the effect of incidental ambient noise and this is no accident, as the track was conceived as the sounds of the world seeped in. “I came up with this melody while I was swimming laps at the Brunswick Baths,” Donnelly explains. “The pool filter was making a humming sound on one note which allowed me to sing a melody over the top. “It then continued when I got home and had a shower with the bathroom fan on… I finally sat with a keyboard and held a note and it all just came together.”

Tim Carr – Alone Playing Piano

Though Tim Carr has made a name as part of other projects, be that Perfume Genius, Hand Habits or collaborating on records like Rebecca Schiffman‘s recent LP, Before the Future, he also has a rich solo career too. His debut release might have followed a folk tradition, but Carr’s sound is one in constant evolution, and new full-length Pleaure Drives leans into digital pop and electronic music. Recorded in the Crescenta Valley, the album draws on the LA golden hour in its romance and mystery, Carr intentionally working from a position of celebration rather than melancholy. “Pleasure drove this album to completion,” as he explains, “as it was made from a playful place as opposed to a melancholic state or being smothered by perfectionism.” Latest single ‘Alone Playing Piano’ encapsulates this spirit both in terms of lyrics (“Alone playing piano / getting into it / hitting wrong notes / trying to find the right ones / let it happen when the time comes”) and sound, the track not living up to the apparent austerity of its title but instead offering a shadowy Lynchian waltz.

villagerrr – Ride Or Die w/ Lydia

“Zeroing in on life’s small, ostensibly ordinary moments to find the meaning within.” So we wrote of villagerrr‘s Tear Your Heart Out in a list of our favourite albums of 2024, a record which saw songwriter Mark Scott embrace his Midwestern roots with a country-inflected brand of indie rock. “The result is a decidedly empathetic collection of songs able to zoom close to the smallest details of small town life,” we continued, “be it light through a sunroof, the smell of cut grass or pencil drawings made in an effort to preserve memories.” Having now signed with Winspear, villagerrr is releasing a new deluxe version of the album featuring a handful of previously unreleased bonus tracks, including new single ‘Ride Or Die w/ Lydia’. Featuring feeble little horse‘s Lydia Slocum, the track is characteristically fond and compassionate, sitting in that liminal space between summer and autumn, where the shadows grow long and the colours tend towards a sepia glow.

Watch the video edited by Trevor Hock below:

Tear Your Heart Out [Deluxe Edition] will be released via Winspear on the 10th October and you can pre-order it now.

Weakened Friends – NPC (feat. Buckethead)

Ever feel like life isn’t quite as real as many like to believe? That unfolding events are predestined, not so much by cosmic fate but something more computational? These are the ideas worrying Weakened Friends on new single ‘NPC’, a decidedly existential track featuring guitarist Buckethead inspired by the reality-bending simulation theory. But far from some exercise in idle sci-fi daydreaming, the song is urgent, defiant and cathartic. Fatalistic, but delivered with the kind of full-throated passion that can only exist in those still with the spirit to fight. This tone runs through Feels Like Hell, the Portland, Maine outfit’s new album coming soon on Don Giovanni Records, where every soul-destroying facet of our present moment is used as fuel on the fire. The hegemony of global capitalism, complete with its mass surveillance, environmental destruction and rampant inequality, is enough to drive anyone to despair, but Weakened Friends are determined to deny it that one last victory. Better to scream, yell, bring the whole thing crumbling down with us.

Maybe I’m just fucked in the head
Here daydreaming of annihilation
Maybe we should just hit reset
It’d be the best thing

Watch the video by SunBronx & Olise Forel below:

Feels Like Hell will be released on the 9th October via Don Giovanni and you can pre-order it now.

Wombo – S.T. Tilted

We’ve covered a number of singles from Wombo‘s new full-length Danger in Fives in recent months, noting how the release sees the Louisville outfit push the envelope rather than resting on their laurels. “I don’t want to be in a band that’s confined to one form of writing,” as vocalist and bassist Sydney Chadwick says. “Where’s the fun and the creativity and the exploration in that? You have to push yourself and try something new.” With the album out now via Fire Talk Records, Wombo have shared new single, ‘S.T. Tilted’ as if to prove this sentiment. “It’s the first song we wrote after the Slab EP that made it on Danger in Fives,” as guitarist Cameron Lowe explains. “We weren’t sure it was going to work, but all the contrasting parts ended up being cool. It’s rare for a Wombo song to be written on guitar first like this one, with some of the bass and drum parts jammed out in the basement afterwards. The wacky guitar part came last.”

Watch Lowe’s video below:

Danger in Fives is out now via Fire Talk and available from the Wombo Bandcamp page.

The post Weekly Listening: August 2025 #2 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“The band’s first new release since 2022, new album The Big E promises to be every bit as ambitious and intense as previous releases, finding the trio further apart geographically, but tight knit in their vision and execution.” That’s how we described the new full-length from Editrix back in June, with the lead single and title track introducing a sound “charged with energy yet slightly unnerved in tone, playing like the chaotic, frantic internal landscape of someone gripped by neurotic concerns.” With release fast approaching via  Joyful Noise Recordings, Wendy Eisenberg and co. are back with new single ‘Flesh Debt’. A track sensual in more ways than one, blending a physical, muscular sound with coy, murmured vocals. “The internal band nickname for this song is ‘Horny Jail’,” the band described when asked about the track, “that should tell you all you need to know.”

Foot Ox – Horseshoe

Teague Cullen’s Foot Ox project arose from the Phoenix-Tempe scene that has given the world the likes of AJJ and Stephen Steinbrink, and since 2007 has been an outlet for narrative-driven experimental folk. The project has always been a collaborative one, but new record A Lighthouse with Silver Dog Eyes, which comes out next month on Ernest Jenning Record Co. takes things a step further. A rotating cast of musicians provide their talents, including a full string section, allowing things to move from hushed intimacy to full-band bombast, often within the same song. Latest single ‘Horseshoe’ is a good introduction, a track Cullen says is “about those big, uncontrollable forces in life […] losing people because of circumstances, and trying to follow your heart even when things get chaotic.”

herbal tea – Seventeen

The recording project of Bristol songwriter Helena Walker, herbal tea has won attention with a beguiling blend of dream pop, ambient and indie folk sensibilities, Walker’s home recordings spreading via word of mouth and eventually earning her invitations to play with the likes of Gia Margaret and Ex:Re. Of course, such high profile fans only cause a reputation to snowball, and it’s little surprise the debut herbal tea full-length Hear as the Mirror Echoes not only attracted the attention of Gold Day in the UK but also VSF favs Orindal Records in the US. With the album set for release at the end of August, herbal tea has unveiled single ‘Seventeen’ by way of introduction. One of the earliest songs of the project which has morphed continually over the years, settling here as a characteristically cinematic, textured slice of ambient folk which evokes both the slow aftermath of trauma and the slower process of transcending its overbearing weight.

Watch the video below, directed and shot by Chris Pugh and edited by Walker along with Henry C Sharpe:

Hear as the Mirror Echoes will be released via Orindal Records and Gold Day on 29th August. Pre-order it now from the herbal tea Bandcamp page.

Mae Powell – Contact High

With prior singles ‘Rope You In‘ and ‘Tangerine‘,  Bay Area songwriter Mae Powell has introduced the sincerity and heart of forthcoming album Making Room For The Light. The former saw Powell put comfort front and centre and the latter championing heart-on-sleeve earnestness, the songs set up a record unashamed to show compassion, not least to the self. Latest track ‘Contact High’ is no different, taking inspiration from an unlikely source to offer another affirming sound. “The idea for ‘Contact High’ came when my stoner elderly neighbor Phil suggested I write a song called contact high, but about good vibes instead of about weed,” Powell explains. “We laughed at this concept together but it stuck in my mind, and when one of my best friends was going through a tough time I used the idea to write her a song that might help her see what it feels like to be around her radiant energy.”

Making Room For The Light comes out on 15th August via Karma Chief and Colemine Records. Order it now from the Mae Powell Bandcamp page.

Mr Butterfield – The Train Left the Station//Big Oak Tree

Throughout this Spring, Portland, Oregon outfit Mr Butterfield have released a couple of great singles, first ‘Lamp is On’ and later ‘Bonnie Jean’. Our first introduction to a band—that’s Lee Butterfield (vocals and guitar), Penny Olives (drums), Kyle Raquipiso (bass) and Tim Kam (guitar)—who make an easygoing, countryfied rock ‘n roll. Their new release, double single The Train Left the Station/Big Oak Tree, doubles down on the country side of things, kicking off with the titular poem by “The Lonesome Cowboy Iz” set to galloping drums and subtly squealing guitar. “The train left the station like a bullet from a gun,” goes the opening line, “we were left there waiting, like a puddle in the sun.” ‘Big Oak Tree’ on the other hand is a joyously ramshackle lo-fi country rock song about taking a nap in the shade of an oak, complete with a catchy chorus (“there’s a big oak tree somewhere above me!”) and extended guitar outro. Check it out, it’s a lot of fun.

Okkyung Lee – good morning, harrison, it’s time to go

South Korean cellist and composer Okkyung Lee has been working at the sharp edge of experimental music for over two decades. Her new album for French label and publisher Shelter Press is no different. Informatively titled Just Like Any Other Day (어느날): Background Music For Your Mundane Activities, it’s what the label describe as “a deeply intimate body of recordings at the juncture of ambient music, minimalism, and the baroque, that stands as radical intervention with what experimental music can be, and the place that organisations of sound occupy in our lives. It reinterprets experimental music as a practice or pursuit, something made for the process of creation itself rather than the end product. It also sees Lee move away from the cello for the first time, something immediately obvious on single ‘good morning, harrison, it’s time to go’, which sees soft plinky keys fall like summer raindrops over a second bubbling keyboard line.

Pegg – Baseball Season

The music of Pegg, that’s the Brooklyn-based project helmed by Xander Duell, has always pushed the envelope in terms of style, championing a fundamentally collaborative ethos to reimagine the boundaries of indie rock. Take 2024’s self-titled debut, cinematic, finely honed and constantly surprising record which moved with both swagger and mystery. But if you thought Duell and co. has settled into a groove with the album, think again, because latest release Presque Tout: Variations no. 435-514 “Baseball Season,” Pegg & Van Dyke Parks pushes out further into the avant garde. As the title suggests, the release sees Pegg joined by esteemed arranger, composer, performer and producer Van Dyne Parks, and mammoth single ‘Baseball Season’ hints at the ambition which underpins the exercise. A song of great detail and ambiguous meaning, channelling both the wistful familiarity (and thus melancholy) of its titular period, but also the near sublime sense of stakes. “Baseball is life,” as Duell puts it. “Decisions made in baseball can affect the rest of the season, a microcosm to the decisions you make in life. ‘Baseball Season’ is about choosing your proverbial horse wisely, delicately.” 

Presque Tout: Variations no. 435-514 “Baseball Season,” Pegg & Van Dyke Parks is out now via IS NOT MUSIC. in physical form, including a CD edition and jigsaw puzzle (yes, really), and will be released digitally on the 19th September. Find everything on the Pegg Bandcamp page.

Rival Consoles – Soft Gradient Beckons

Last week Rival Consoles released new full-length album Landscape from Memory via Erased Tapes, a record we’ve described as “focusing in on small details while retaining the grand sweeps of melancholy and euphoria” to ultimately “[retain] a sense of humanity within its digital sound.” To celebrate the record, Ryan Lee West enlisted the help of artist and filmmaker Anthony Dickenson to create a video for the single ‘Soft Gradient Beckons’. Dickenson spent twelve months creating the hand-painted frame animation at its centre, matching the care and craft of the track with its own painstaking process of creation. “Each image became a fragment of memory, layered and stitched together to explore rhythm, decay, and time,” Dickenson describes. “The result is a piece that moves with the emotional undercurrent of the track—quietly pulsing, always evolving.”

Landscape from Memory is out now via Erased Tapes. Purchase a copy from the Rival Consoles Bandcamp page.

U – Is It A Kind Of Dream?

Described by label Lex Records as “working an archivist, collagist and chronicler through careful sonic curation,” the mysterious and suitably un-Googleable project U has made a name by refusing to be pigeonholed, its forays out into the general zones of techno, experimental electronic, ambient and modern classical never lingering long enough to be claimed by any one space. Latest release, double a-side single Black Vaughan / Is It A Kind Of Dream?, shows just how wide the U sonic palette can be. The former, which feels indebted to the soundtracks of Kurosawa films, offers a meditation on violence and dread in all of its poignant unease, while the haunting latter feels altogether more Lynchian in its oneiric strangeness.

Black Vaughan / Is It A Kind Of Dream? is out now via Lex Records.

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With 2023 album Cleaning Up With Big Mess, Copenhagen‘s Big Mess introduced a genre-spanning style which tapped into the unbridled joy of good old-fashioned punk rock, and new release Terry EP indicates they have no intention of slowing down. The record is out now via Specialist Subject Records, and opener and title track shows off the vibe of the collection. Repurposing Kirsty MacColl’s hit into a power pop gem, ‘Terry’ distils the wry humour and bite of the original into their purest states. The result races into life from the off and never lets up, harnessing MacColl’s cheeky defiance as its own form of momentum, and proving as cathartic as it is fun.

Ciao Malz – Clementine (Elliott Smith cover)

Back in December, Ciao Malz released their debut EP Safe Then Sorry, a four-song grab bag that veered between alt-country twang and woozy pop confidence. Now Malia DelaCruz is showing another dimension to the project with a cover of Elliott Smith’s ‘Clementine’, recapturing the hushed intimacy of the original in all of its sincerity and narrative depth. “‘Clementine’ is probably my favorite Elliott Smith song,” as DelaCruz explains. “The way he picks up on a bartender singing and turns it into something so eerie and beautiful is wild. The harmonies are something I’ve always wanted to nail, and I love experimenting with them when I’m recording. And yeah, sometimes it’s just fun to channel Elliott Smith for a while.”

You can find Ciao Malz on Bandcamp.

Committeemen – Therapy

Consisting of DJ Gilmore-Innis (vocals/guitar), Ken Dannelley (drums), Matt Kast (bass), and Graham Bell (guitar), Houston punk rockers Committeemen owe as much to post punk royalty like Gang of Four as they do contemporaries Osees and Parquet Courts. But, they’re no cheap copy, managing to recombine this range of influences into something wholly their own. With a new EP on the way via Rue Defense, single ‘Therapy’ highlights the searing intensity of their sound. Taking aim at the burgeoning ecosystem of quacks and narcissists which seems determined to tell us how to live, this is blistering punk complete with yell-along chorus, treating this vapid, insidious cohort of podcasters, Youtubers and televangelists with the contempt they deserve.

Daily Toll – Killincs

Described as “eleven songs traversing three years of forged friendships, collaborative experimentation and a shared love of growing through words and song,” new album A Profound Non-Event sees Sydney post-punks Daily Toll take the next step in their evolution, building upon what came before with a growing sense of confidence and conviction. With the release coming this June on Tough Love, the trio have shared lead single ‘Killincs’, and the track embodies the sound of a band striving towards their most truthful form while appreciating such a quest might prove unending. “The light reflects an upside-down image of a life I might never visit,” as lead Kata Szász-Komlós sings. “Too far to touch, not far enough to forget.” And as the song progresses, its verbosity belying the relatively understated, assured tone, it becomes clear the unresolved is something to be accepted, even embraced. As a later line states: “I have the key still, but I’ve buried the path.”

Watch the video directed and edited by Szász-Komlós below:

A Profound Non-Event is out on the 20th June via Tough Love and you can pre-order it now.

eggcorn – Observer Effect

Taking its name from the phenomenon where an observed system is disturbed by the very act of being observed, eggcorn‘s new album Observer Effect sees songwriter Lara Hoffman explore the ways in which reflecting on one’s life and surroundings can shape our experiences. Moving away from the synth pop sensibilities of debut Your Own True Love, the album adopts a pop-inflected brand of chamber folk which combines sincere compassion with unerring honesty, a sound able to probe deep into the heart of the matter and unafraid of getting dirty in the process. The lead single and title track is the ideal entry point, Hoffman using the impatient frustration of a slow-healing injury to delve into unpalatable truths about herself and the desires therein, baring vulnerabilities and reckoning with their implications without sacrificing a certain playfulness.

MF Tomlinson – Die To Wake Up From A Dream

Over a series of releases in recent times, Brisbane/Meanjin born, London based artist MF Tomlinson has challenged genre conventions, progressing beyond classic folk styles with the addition of psych, rock and other sensibilities. This summer will see him return with Die To Wake Up From A Dream, a brand new album via PRAH Recordings which continues this exploration of the possibilities of folk. Described by Tomlinson himself as a treatise on “resilience, hope and the frankly wildly psychedelic experience of being alive,” the lead single and title track shows one such possibility, drawing on everything from John Martyn to Talk Talk and My Bloody Valentine to create a sound which might originate in folk but ends up beyond any easy genre categorisation.

Watch the accompanying video—described as a “visual essay”—by Andrea Zvadova below:

Die To Wake Up From A Dream is out on the 11th July via PRAH Recordings.

sachi’s mirror – a new shape

The recording project of Oakland-based experimental violinist and composer Shaina Pan, sachi’s mirror offers rich, genre-bending soundscapes which use pedal effects to push the violin to new ground. Classically trained, Pan dipped a toe in experimental music as a vocalist and bassist for Bay Area art-punks Juicebumps during the pandemic, and is now reaching further across ambient, avant-garde and art pop sensibilities to weave her own compositions. Taken from debut release coral miracle church, single ‘a new shape’ embodies the style, a song full of space and intricate detail which grows with subtle grace. Spoken word samples further the mood, and the result feels like a doorway into some adjacent, ethereal world.

Serfing – no new friends

Consisting of Austin Weber and David Caploe (Singer of Hate Drugs, BEST DAD), LA‘s Serfing are preparing to release their debut EP to properly introduce themselves to the world. Lead single ‘no new friends’ is the first taste of what to expect. Painted in long, relaxed strokes, the track offers a dreamy meditation on making connections with other people, its languorous tempo able to draw out both the warmth and anguish inherent within such a process. “It’s hard to keep yourself from falling / falling in love,” as the opening lines go. “Spend enough time with somebody / falling in love.” But true to the ambiguous mood of a sound that could be taken as dawning fondness or anxious hesitancy, the lyrics soon offer conflicting thoughts.

Why even plant a tree to cut it down?
you know those roots are staying in the ground
better off just being no-one
than falling in love

The Taxpayers – Outline of Your Blood

We’ve covered a number of singles from Circle Breaker, the new full-length from  Portland, Oregon emo outfit The Taxpayers, in recent weeks, be it ‘At War With The Dogcatchers‘ with its search for love amid tragedy and cruelty or ‘I Am One Thousand‘, an ode to those afflicted by war and its adjacent sufferings. With the album now out via Ernest Jenning Record Co., The Taxpayers are releasing a new single, ‘Outline of Your Blood’, as a celebration. The closing track to the album which encapsulates everything which came before, stricken by discouragement and burgeoning doom yet unable to shake a sense of hope despite it all. As the title suggests, this is an album of cycles, the grandest of which being the circle of life itself, and no matter how dark the present, The Taxpayers want to remind you that new life is always being born too.

Circle Breaker is out now via Ernest Jenning Record Co. and you can get it from Bandcamp.

Wishy – Over and Over

“Everything fans of the band have come to love.” That’s how we described ‘Fly’ back in February, the lead single from Wishy‘s forthcoming EP Planet Popstar. “A song,” as we put it, “that looks to move beyond heartbreak with a mix of affirming energy and wistful longing.” With the EP coming next month on Winspear, the Indianapolis outfit are back with fresh track ‘Over and Over’. With vocal duties shifting back to Kevin Krauter, and Nina Pitchkites offering backing harmonies, the song sees fingerpicked guitar melded with breakbeat rhythms, offering a sound packed full of detail while maintaining a languid calm, and further marking Wishy as one of the most inventive acts working today.

The song comes complete with a video directed by Demi Fenicle, edited by Aaron Agler and with visual Effects by Stephen Orban, which you can watch below:

Planet Popstar is out on the 25th April via Winspear and you can pre-order it now.

The post Weekly Listening: March 2025 #4 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

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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How better to represent such feelings than by leaning into the strange, glorious life of playing music? A life forever caught between success and failure, not to mention the will to settle down and compulsion to keep the wheels turning. Recent single ‘Desperado’ introduced the tight weave of desperation and defiance which marks the record. A decision to confront painful memories and regrets with carefree abandon. “When the ghosts of past selves and possible futures are strung out on the road before you,” as we put it, “sometimes the only option is to roll the windows down, put the pedal to the metal and feel that wind in your hair.”

Now Wild Yaks are back with new single, ‘Fortune Teller’. Another upbeat track of catharsis and self-deprecation which probes furthered into lost love, even if the relationship is still ongoing, looking for answers in esoteric places. “‘Fortune Teller’ is about realizing I wasn’t a science-based reasonable person but a broken simp reading several horoscopes a day and obsessed with CoStar because I was willing to use ‘magic’ or any means to try and predict my romantic fate,” Bryn explains. But when the pressures build and the alignment of the stars becomes overwhelming, there’s always the trusted Wild Yaks strategy. “I’ll do what I always do,” as Bryn yelps at one point. “I’ll just run away.”

The post Wild Yaks – Fortune Teller appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Back last summer we featured ‘Froze Up’ by Brooklyn songwriter Alexei Shishkin, from his record Goodbye Summer on Rue Defense. The track “serve[d] as an entry point for those unfamiliar with his jazz-inflected pop rock style,” as we put it back then. Shiskin followed that with another album, dagger, released back in February and, nothing if not prolific, is now readying another new record, Open Door Policy, which will come out in June via Candlepin Records. Latest single ‘Bermuda’ offers a glimpse of what to expect, combing lap steel and nylon guitar into something full of bright rhythm, while Shiskin’s slightly wry vocals add an almost Berman-esque tone.

I know when we’re older
We’ll be so hungover
That our eloquence is gone
We’ll see
Find me when you wake up
Cut the wedding cake up
And stay up until the break of dawn

Animal, Surrender – After

The project of Peter Kerlin (Sunwatchers and Chris Forsyth & Solar Motel Band) and drummer Rob Smith (Grey/Smith, Rhyton, Pigeons, D. Charles Spear), Animal, Surrender! occupies the intersection of post-rock, folk and jazz. Lead by bass and decorated with an array of details, the band’s sound looks to conjure small worlds of their own, with arrangements often warm and weird and caught between fondness and unease. New single ‘After’, a reimagining of the Mike Wexler song of the same name, is the ideal introduction to the self-titled Animal, Surrender! debut coming soon on Ernest Jenning Record Co. A track which lives up to the band’s name, sitting with the tension between the human and animal tendencies within us, and how our determination to eradicate the unpredictability of the natural world has come to hasten its destruction.

Ghost Fan Club – Shoulders

We have featured Tyler Costolo’s Ghost Fan Club project a couple of times in recent years, most recently with the single ‘Crutch’, a song which continued to display a softer, more nuanced style to Costolo’s output as Two Meters. In July he will release a self-titled EP via Knifepunch Records which promises to add a new edge (plus drums from Swim Camp‘s Tom Morris) to explore themes of depression, grief, instability, and lost time. Lead single ‘Shoulders’ dives headlong into these difficult topics, capturing in raw detail the ordeal of trying to accept and live with feelings of depression while laying awake at night. “When I was young I worried the pain would never go away,” Costolo sings in the opening line. “I should have known this is just the way I am.”

IAN SWEET – Anthems For A Seventeen Year​‐​Old Girl

Has there been a more evocative song in the twenty-first century than ‘Anthems For A Seventeen Year​‐​Old Girl’? Feeling oddly timeless even when it released back in 2002, the track seems to lose none of its melancholy magic as the years go by. If you need further proof, step forward this new cover by Jilian Medford’s IAN SWEET, which maintains the original’s telephone line crackle and potent melodrama and adds just a little more bombast. “This song hits different for me now than it did when I was actually seventeen,” Medford describes. “It so poignantly nails the difficulty of trying to exist within the moment of being a teenager while you’re simultaneously looking towards the inevitable transitions looming on the horizon.”

kennedy mann – It wasn’t just you, i felt it too

Best known as the lead of Philadelphia dream pop band Highnoon, songwriter kennedy mann has recently begun to create music under their own name too. Clocking in at less than 90 seconds, latest single ‘It wasn’t just you, i felt it too’ is the definition of short and sweet. What they describe as an “itty bitty lil ditty, full of love,” it’s an acoustic indie pop song that’s full of the fizzy energy of a new friendship, swimming along with a sense of impatient possibility. Soft and vulnerable but full of quiet joy, it has the feeling that the saturation of the world has been turned up, everything looking a little more vivid and colourful now this person is in their life. “And something tells me we’ll be friends for life,” as Mann sings at the close, “I’ve got a feeling that I’m right.”

Nick Delffs – Power and Position

“This world is a prison / But there must be a way out / If you find a way you better take it now.” So sings Nick Delffs on ‘Power and Position’, the lead single from his upcoming album Transitional Phase, out this summer on Mama Bird Recording Co. “A song about the contemplation of power struggles while in pursuit of collaboration and harmony,” as Delffs puts it. “It’s my way of grappling with the cosmic dissonance and the comedy of failure and stubbornness.” The idea is conveyed via a danceable new wave groove, the song’s thematic shackles shaken off with loose-limbed confidence, providing both a cautionary tale and soothing consolation to anyone who finds themselves pulled out of shape by the crude forces of our world.

Once you get a little
It’s never enough
Once you get a taste
it’s in your blood
So rule your little kingdom
And just try to hold on
Take what you can before you lose it all

Watch the video directed, edited and filmed by Adam Wright at DayMoon Films below:

Transitional Phase is out on the 26th July via Mama Bird Recording Co. and you can pre-order it now.

Richard Tripps – Blue Eyed Open Sky

This July songwriter and multi instrumentalist Richard Tripps is releasing new album Between the Morning via Perpetual Doom. Recorded on a 4-track tape recorder in his tent cabin by the river in Big Sur, the album takes inspiration from the lo-fi aesthetic of acts like The Range of Light, The Velvet Underground, White Fence and early Oh Sees to offer a sound full of texture. ‘Blue Eyed Open Sky’ shows how evocative the style can be, its balance of upbeat rhythm and hazy tape tones capturing a mood somewhere between carefree calm and wistful reflection. An easy meandering sound which not only evokes the river next to which it was created, but in its direct, imperfect immediacy, feels porous to the entire surrounding environment.

vireo – Cloudgazers

“When’s the last time a bigwig laid on their back and watched the clouds?” So asks Chris Beaulieu of vireo on their new single ‘Cloudgazers’. Following last year’s charmingly homespun single ‘Big Elsewhere’, the Pittsburgh indie pop outfit return with something equally endearing. It’s a soft and gauzy song that evokes the act of the title with warm textures, gentle electronics and little squiggly guitar lines. At once dreamy and organic, it makes a pretty convincing case that the world would be a better place if we all took the time to look up and wonder every once in a while. So why not put on your headphones, find a nice grassy hill and let your anxieties melt away as you watch the sky above?

Why Bonnie – Dotted Line

The latest act to join Fire Talk‘s stellar roster, Why Bonnie have released new single ‘Dotted Line’ as a taste of what to expect from the band’s next phase. Lead Blair Howerton describes how the song was written under “the weight of capitalism,” and the track’s prevailing tones conjure that strange mix of desperation and mourning which comes with living within a society of unquenchable desires. “I was thinking of all the things we’re told are markers of success, and how at this rate, I’ll probably never have any of them,” Howerton explains. But rather than succumbing to the despair of this knowledge, Why Bonnie instead offer a building defiance, as though deciding to fashion past regrets and naivety into some talisman against the devils looking to make their deals.

I should’ve known better
Turns out it was a lie
I should’ve known better
Than to sign on the dotted line
I should’ve known better

‘Dotted Line’ is out now via Fire Talk Records and available from Bandcamp.

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Self-described “depression pop band” bathtub cig are an outfit who live up to their name. A project which looks to evoke those private moments of contemplation and small comforts, be they born of wallowing or self-care. Latest single ‘Red Pine’ sees lead Hilary James joined by Skyler Nowinski (bass), Dave Power (drums) and Hannah Hebl (keys) to bring to life one such situation with a mix of indie rock rhythm and bedroom pop tenderness, and culminates in an affirming chorus to match the bright joy of a queer relationship.

The Fourth Wall – Darkness Of Heart

Back in November we previewed Return Forever, the forthcoming album by The Fourth Wall, with single ‘Never a Part’ introducing a record which sees songwriter Stephen Agustin delve deep into the immigrant experience to reveal the difficulties and complications therein. “An attempt to weigh the cost of such an action against what is gained to come to a better understanding of the traumas buried within the process,” as we put it. “What must be given away to make a new start possible?” As the title suggests, latest single ‘Darkness of Heart’ flips the pattern of Conrad’s novella to present a non-Western protagonist’s journey deep into the so-called ‘civilised’ world, only to see the truth behind the illusion of the American Dream. The horror, the horror, indeed. Watch the video by director/cinematographer Maura Campbell-Shun below:

Return Forever will be released later this year via DevilDuck Records.

 Linn Koch-Emmery – Ebay Armour

Built on propulsive percussion and vulnerable but confident vocals, ‘Ebay Armour’ is the new single from Swedish artist Linn Koch-Emmery. The first glimpse of a forthcoming LP due this spring, the song is a widescreen slice of indie rock that seems destined for big things with its blend of contemplative songwriting and visceral instrumentation. “This song is about a person close to me, that I never really figured out.” says Koch-Emmery. “Trauma and grief has its own illogical ways. Sometimes we cope with it through substances, others by buying a life sized armour off the internet.”

‘Ebay Armour’ is out now and available via streaming services and the Linn Koch-Emmery Bandcamp page.

Little Champion – Like the Earth is Flat

The most recent project of Asheville, North Carolina songwriter Dustin Goldklang, Little Champion draws on a wide range of influences to shape its distinctive earnest style—from the PNW indie scene to New York anti-folk. What results are songs able to exist with both hearts on sleeves and tongues in cheeks, as latest single ‘Like the Earth is Flat’ attests. Taken from the upcoming Little Champion LP Curiosity, the song braids life’s banalities and joys into a seamless thread, searching for peace in a world burning up, caving in, and always trying to sell you something.

I could use a heart attack like the earth is flat
So calm me down
Say it’s okay
Let me go

The Problem With Kids Today – All I Wanna Be

Based in New Haven, Connecticut, The Problem With Kids Today are a trio of “rock and roll delinquents” who make songs that hark back to vintage punk and power pop, with elements of several varieties of pop thrown in for good measure. At the end of the week The Problem With Kids Today will release a new album, Born To Rock, which as its title suggests is chock full of vigorous devil-may-care punk songs. The final single before the record’s release, ‘All I Wanna Be’ sees the band weave some eighties jangle pop influences into their scrappy punk style, taking the foot off the accelerator compared to some of the record’s other tracks, but losing none of the buoyant infectiousness.

Born to Rock will be released this coming Friday and you can order it now from the The Problem With Kids Today Bandcamp page.

SAVAK – Will Get Fooled Again

Next month, Brooklyn post punks SAVAK will release Flavors of Paradise via Ernest Jenning Record Co. and Peculiar Works. Following previous single ‘Leash Biter’, which we said “shows off the brooding swagger and bite of the SAVAK sound, simmering around a taut rhythm and gradually coming to a boil,” the band have unveiled a new single, ‘Will Get Fooled Again’. “There’s always a dude who thinks he’s smarter and better than everyone else,” says joint-lead Michael Jaworski. “Thankfully most people [can] recognize the insecurity behind the charade. This song addresses that insecurity.” It somehow sounds simultaneously catchy and burnt out, adding a sober tinge of anxious melancholy to SAVAK’s usual dynamic post punk. Watch Paul Heck-directed video below:

Flavors of Paradise is due for release on 1st March via Ernest Jenning Record Co. and Peculiar Works. Pre-order it now from the SAVAK Bandcamp page.

Speedy Ortiz – Ranch vs. Ranch

Last year, we featured several songs from Rabbit Rabbit, the latest album from Speedy Ortiz on Wax Nine Records, with tracks like ‘Scabs‘ and ‘Ghostwriter‘ showing a band at the height of their game. Caustic and empathetic, crushing and affirming, the album had it all, but one perhaps understated feature of the Speedy Ortiz sound is how much fun it possesses. New single ‘Ranch vs. Ranch’ is a celebration of this side of the band, with a video capturing their time in the studio as what feels like a celebration of what the project represents. “Two years ago easily feels like ten to me now, and watching the footage feels like finding a time capsule full of lost gems,” Molholt explains. “It’s a warm reminder of how much fun we had making Rabbit Rabbit, and of how integral the two eponymous ranches—Rancho de la Luna and Sonic Ranch—were to this record.”

Rabbit Rabbit is out now via Wax Nine Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.

Split System – The Drain

Naarm punks Split System return at the end of the week with Vol. 2, their second full-length record of back-to-basics raucous fun. Released across the globe by Legless Records (Australia), Goner Records (USA) and Drunken Sailor (UK/EU), Vol. 2. promises to find a typically Aussie blend of blistering punk and good-time classic rock, what the liner notes describe as “all hooks and glory, all the time.” Third single ‘The Drain’ is a great entrance point for the uninitiated, spiky and infectious with a chorus that seems destined to inspire a thousand beer-soaked yell-alongs. Watch Ben Ulitzka Portnoy’s video below:

Vol. 2 is out this coming Friday and is available to pre-order from the Split System Bandcamp page.

Work Wife – Strangers

Based in Brooklyn, Work Wife is the indie rock project of Meredith Lampe, Cody Edgerly and Kenny Monroe. In April, Work Wife will release Waste Management, a new EP via Philly label Born Losers Records. The follow-up to 2022 debut Quitting Season, the band say the record is about “living in New York, watching the world change rapidly and feeling like you should too, wandering in and out of friendships and relationships and locations and moments.” Lead single ‘Strangers’ is the perfect introduction, a warm and introspective song of trying to find yourself in the vast bustle of the city amidst its noise and countless strangers. It builds across its almost three-minute runtime, ending in a thumping singalong finale. Watch the soothingly minimal video below:

Waste Management will be released on 12th April via Born Losers Records. Pre-order it now from the Work Wife Bandcamp page.

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Hailing from Regina, Saskatchewan, Darryl Kissick has made a name with the band Foxwarren along with Dallas Bryson, Andy Shauf and brother Avery Kissick. But he records solo under his own name too. Forthcoming album Goodbye Patterns invites Avery (drums/percussion) along with Andrea Hedlund (vocals/violin) to help create its sound, exploring themes as diverse as aliens, werewolves and various other extra-dimensional things. With that in mind, lead single ‘In the Middle’ might sound surprisingly subdued, though in reality, intricacy lies beneath the surface as Kissick works through the drifting strangeness of a depersonalised state.

In the middle of it
feel a little unlike yourself
saw a vision
from another dimension
now you don’t recognise yourself

Fast Romantics – Smoke + Lightning

Toronto’s Fast Romantics have a new record, their fourth, slated for released at the end of next month. Titled Happiness + Euphoria, the album sees core duo Matthew Angus and Kirty finally create something that has been on their minds for the best part of a decade. Latest single ‘Smoke + Lightning’ sees Kirty take on vocal duties to achieve an ethereal sound which questions the distinction between reality and dreams. One in which pressing emotion and unanswered questions are pursued with a kind of intuition, the dream logic of the subconscious brought to the surface and allowed to flow. Watch the video by by Raven Shields below:

Happiness + Euphoria will be released on 29th September via Postwar Records and you can order it form the Fast Romantics website.

Jordan Murawa – Let Her Dance

A cover of sixties rock & roll band The Bobby Fuller Four, ‘Let Her Dance’ is the latest single from Phoenix, Arizona singer songwriter Jordan Murawa. The original (which you may recognise from a certain Wes Anderson Roald Dahl adaptation) has a manic clockwork energy, but Murawa’s take is very different, instead sculpting the song right the way down to its gently aching heart. George White’s percussion adds a sense of widescreen weight, and the whole thing comes together with a feeling of lived-in emotion.

‘Let Her Dance’ is out now via streaming services.

Loose Wing – Capital Alphabet

Loose Wing are an indie rock band from Seattle, led by Claire Tucker (who also plays in psychgaze outfit Black Nite Crash). Along with her husband Jack Peters (bass), Aimee Zoe (drums) and Bill Patton (pedal steel, guitar), Tucker writes songs that combine catchy college rock with arty, left-field pop. Later this year, Loose Wing will release Miracle Baby, a brand new full-length on Drums & Wires Recordings and lead single ‘Capital Alphabet’ is our first taste of what to expect. It’s a gritty and defiant indie pop song that rallies against the soul-sucking drudgery enforced on many by the capitalist overlords, what Tucker describes as the “prevailing model of life where you get up, put all your energy into a job, then go home drained and exhausted.”

Things are looking up for the company
They’re gonna buy the moon
Things are looking up for the company
We’ve got a flash sale on single-use plastics

maeve & quinn – I Know I Will

Alaskan twin sisters Maris and Bryce O’Tierney, AKA maeve & quinn, are set to release their new LP Another Door in the very near future, and latest single ‘I Know I Will’ should convince anyone unaware of the duo to take note. Drawing on the landscape of their home of Anchorage, as well as their Irish heritage, the song offers a spacious, compassionate soundscape into which the listener is invited. Where the searching emotion of the narrator is balanced against something larger and unmoving, as though beyond personal trials exists solid ground upon which we can find our footing and realise who we are meant to be.

i’m not sorry that i’m on my own — /
the sky is clear…/
but my memory has a memory
that brings me back to you; /
and my memory has a memory /
and i don’t know what’s true //
on the outside /
i know i will //

Sea Lemon – Breakdown

We’ve featured several songs from Sea Lemon‘s EP Stop at Nothing in recent months, first the oneiric ‘Cellar‘ and then the ominous ‘Vaporized‘. With the release now out via Luminelle Recordings, Sea Lemon has released final single ‘Breakdown’, which sees Natalie Lew team up with Oakland’s Day Wave to create a nostalgic duet submerged beneath throwback nineties reverb. “The song is a campy story,” as Lew explains, “all about the aftermath after being wronged by someone where you’re trying to figure out if you should forgive and forget or seek revenge.” Watch the video below:

Stop At Nothing is out now on LUMINELLE and you can get it from the Sea Lemon Bandcamp page.

So It Was – Dance Now!

Back in June we wrote about ‘Speak Now!‘ by Daniel Lobb’s So It Was, a “combination of earnest heart and laidback charm” which “draws on a rich selection of instrumentation—from trumpet, trombone and clarinet to keyboards and electronics—yet always maintains a sense of casual ease.” With album Round the Mountain now out, Lobb has released brand new single, ‘Dance Now!’ A song which swaps out the languid calm for something altogether more taut and building, confronting the uneasy truth of change with as much positivity as it can muster. If things are uncertain, then why not roll with the punches and lean into life’s unpredictable rhythms? Watch the video directed/produced by Matt Boyle and Chris Monroe below:

Round the Mountain is out now and available from the So It Was Bandcamp page.

trash girl – Static

The project of New York‘s Shaughnessy Jones, trash girl has been making gentle and intricate folk-inflected bedroom pop songs since 2017. Following bedbug-produced debut the whole place is titled a little, and last year’s Rock N Roll, trash girl has returned with new single ‘Static’. It’s a characteristically hushed folk song painted in pastoral greens and earth tones, conjuring the cool breeze and slanting sunbeams of a late summer afternoon. Short and sweet and very beautiful.

you get me higher than heaven
you get me madder than hell
can you see me through the static
can you hear those wedding bells

Wastelander – Be Where (feat. Erin Rae)

Wastelander is the recording project of singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Cooper Formant. Soon he will release his debut album What is Left Of Me, which although ostensibly a solo record, draws upon the wealth of talent in Nashville’s Americana scene. This includes Jo Schornikow, Paul Defiglia (Langhorne Slim, The Avett Brothers), Spencer Cullum and singer-songwriter Erin Rae, who has a starring role in latest single ‘Be Where’. A throwback to the classic folk rock stylings of the Laurel Canyon scene, the song sounds sepia-toned and wistful without abandoning its sunny buoyancy. Rae’s vocals match Formant’s in effortless harmony.

Worriers – Cloudy And 55

“A song which leans headlong into the spirit of freedom and self-discovery, shaking off the nagging doubts and second guesses with its building momentum.” That’s how we described the title track of Trust Your Gut by Worriers. With the release of the LP fast approaching on Ernest Jenning Record Co., Lauren Denitzio has unveiled new single, ‘Cloudy and 55’, which offers an altogether more reflective sound. “This song is for your soundtrack to missing Autumn in New York,” as they put it, “where every corner has a memory you can’t shake.” Though true to the new Worriers spirit, the track rises through its wistful mists towards the widescreen clarity of its climax, even if that epiphany is merely coming to terms with the omnipresent emotion of missing the things which constitute your history.

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Only the record was evidently not the culmination of the project, for some short months later Denitzio is back with Trust Your Gut, a brand new full-length on Ernest Jenning Record Co. which rides the wave of this newfound freedom to further the Worriers style. Not that the record is entirely solo, with a studio band featuring Atom Willard (Against Me!, Social Distortion), Franz Nicolay (The Hold Steady), Frank Piegaro and Allegra Anka (Cayetana) bringing to life a triumphant sound typified by the title track and lead single. A song which leans headlong into the spirit of freedom and self-discovery, shaking off the nagging doubts and second guesses with its building momentum.

Think what I see in the mirror
isn’t what you’re seein’ at all.
If the feeling’s just in my head
cause I’m spinning, too.
This can’t be worth it.
I’m at my best without you

The song comes complete with a video directed by Chelsea Christer which taps into the tracks sense of joy. “This is some of the most fun I’ve ever had writing and recording a song, so I wanted the video to come from an equally fun and joyous place,” Denitzio explains. “The song is meant to celebrate learning to trust your intuition and advocate for yourself and your own time, even in the face of being told that everything is fine.” As they continue:

I thought it would be a good match for the video to be an interpretation of Empire Records where we’re saving a queer bar instead of a record store – just a fun way to claim space and community and see yourself in something when outside forces are working against you. Queer interpretations are some of my favorite things to talk about, and I’ll never turn down a chance to incorporate queer joy into our work!

Trust Your Gut will be released on the 23rd September via Ernest Jenning Record Co. and you can pre-order it from the Worriers Bandcamp page.

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Here’s a list of thirty records we didn’t get a chance to tell you about properly in 2022. Releases we think you would do well to come to know.

The A’s – Fruit

Psychic Hotline

A collection of traditional folk songs, lullabies and one original, the debut album from The A’s—AKA Alexandra Sauser-Monnig (Daughter of Swords) and Amelia Meath (Sylvan Esso)—is a mélange of the whimsical and quietly devastating. The product of over a decade of close friendship (the pair make up two-thirds of Mountain Man), and rooted in a long history of American folk eccentricity, the record features beguiling vocal harmonies, pitch-perfect yodelling and a sonic potpourri of everyday orchestral elements (the liner notes list instruments like hair, shoes, ice chunk, gravel, frog sample and shoelace). Examined individually the ten songs share little in common, but as a whole they somehow work perfectly, capturing both a sense of fun and genuine beauty. As Sauser-Monnig puts it when describing compiling the tracklist, “If it doesn’t make you cackle or cry, it doesn’t belong.”

A.O. Gerber – Meet Me at the Gloaming

Hand in Hive / Father/Daughter Records

True to its title, A.O. Gerber’s Meet Me at the Gloaming invites the listener into a world between day and night. A space in which the binaries of light and dark are muddied, complicated, ultimately dissolved into insignificance. To inhabit such a place, Gerber shows us, is to confess new feelings and relinquish old shames. To move beyond ideas of good and bad in order to exist on your own terms, and heal from the years in which this was not the case. Because if anything emerges from the nuanced folk rock of the record, it is the sense that strict boundaries are counterproductive and often imaginary, fencing off the rich confluences in which life is truly lived.

Ashenspire – Hostile Architecture

code666 / Aural Music

‘Great’ Britain might have had a strange smell about it for years now, but 2022 was the year it quit pretending and died in full view. Nothing quite managed to capture the spirit of the time like Glasgow-based outfit Ashenspire, with their LP Hostile Architecture manifesting this broken feeling as avant-garde metal. It’s a record of fury and futility that rails against not only the misery of the moment but the abject cruelty of those who have allowed it to come to pass. “Always three months to the gutter / Never three months to the top,” goes a line in the typically forthright opening track ‘The Law of Asbestos’, “another set of fucking homeless spikes outside another empty shop.” Through a series of shapeshifting, endlessly inventive tracks, the album posits hostile architecture as the contemporary British landscape. A society designed to inflict discomfort on its citizens out of nothing but fear and malice. “This is not a house of amateurs,” as the opener concludes bitterly. “This is done with full intent.”

Bartees Strange – Farm to Table

4AD

If Bartees Strange’s debut record Live Forever confronted and ultimately rejected the pigeonholing and self-censorship too often required for a Black person to exist within a traditionally white space, then follow-up Farm to Table is a dispatch from the other side. A genre-hopping and often jubilant refusal to be put into a single box, or indeed to be anyone other than Bartees Strange. “That’s why I really can’t fuck with y’all / In fact I’m feeling more grown,” as he sings on ‘Escape This Circus’. “I really can’t fuck with y’all / And I don’t wanna act no more.” But though this embrace of the self comes with a sense of empowerment, there’s another side which proves equally important. Because just as Bartees Strange wasn’t all the things the industry (and society in general) demanded he be when chasing success, he’s not suddenly some saint or superhero having found it. He’s himself, a single person, communicating something important and hoping to reach whoever might need to hear.

billy woods – Aethiopes

Backwoodz Studioz

“I think Mengistu Haile Mariam is my neighbor,” declares billy woods in the opening line of Aethiopes. “Whoever it is moved in and put an automated gate up.” For most artists, this might be using their best material too early on, leading with the ace up their sleeve. But woods is only getting started. Allusions to the drug epidemic through the Challenger disaster, colonialists on cannibal tours, quotes from Wole Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest… and that’s only by track four. “Conceptually, it was one of the [most] complex ideas I’ve ever tried to tackle on an album,” woods told FADER. “It’s a lot of ideas, big and small, of a significant depth. I guess, to me, there’s a lot going on about Blackness as an idea, Africa as an idea, Africa as a reality.”

Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – Once Again In The World

Antiquated Future Records

Antiquated Future Records has been steadily and quietly releasing collections of rarities from a range of artists as part of their Selected Songs series, delighting old fans and winning new ones, but perhaps most importantly preserving work which might otherwise have been lost. After the likes of Christopher Sutton, Twig Palace and Two White Cranes, this spring saw the turn of Will Oldham with two albums: Time From Work To Go which featured songs recorded as Palace Music, and Once Again In The World with tracks from Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. “Will Oldham’s wide-ranging influence can be felt in nearly everything in the Selected Songs series so far,” Antiquated Future’s Andrew Barton explains in the liner notes, and thus the releases feel like a milestone in the project. A key text added to the library, important not only in and of itself but also in reading what came after. “As an elementary school teacher,” Barton continues, “I look back on making it a bit like one of my students looking at a final project for a unit they got really into and cared deeply about. A view from my seat in a room full of fellow enthusiasts. The glow of the interesting subject pulses like a star in the sky, always there.”

Brian Harnetty – Words and Silences

Winesap Records

A portrait of the Cisteritan monk and writer Thomas Merton, Words and Silences sees Brian Harnetty add original musical compositions to recordings made by Merton himself during his hermitage in Kentucky in 1967. We hear him identify birdsong, listen to gunfire from Fort Knox, celebrate New Year’s Eve alone and comment on an array of topics from Sufi mysticism to Michel Foucault. But more than offering an extraordinary window into Merton’s solitude, the album elucidates the beauty and melancholy inherent within his reflections, honing the endearing doubt which permeates each monologue and furthering the strange contradictions at work. A communication to no-one, immediate in tone but of course now distant too, and very much aware of the artifice of the recording process. Brian Harnetty embraces such conflicts much as Merton did, and thus not only continues the conversation but opens it wider. Words and Silences is a meditation on curiosity, and one which understands uncertainty and inconsistency to be the very foundations of any will to learn.

The Cool Greenhouse – Sod’s Toastie

Melodic Records

British post-punks The Cool Greenhouse follow their self-titled 2020 debut with a sophomore effort that doubles down on the deadpan wit, surreal humour and thinly-disguised existential pain. Where else are you going to find references to “Jordan fucking Peterson”, talking ladybirds and the unending search for the end of the sellotape, all within the same song? But despite the weirdness, The Cool Greenhouse have polished some edges too, dialling up the accessibility with what the liner notes call “flirtations with–heaven forbid!–melody, chord progressions and arrange-ments.” ‘Get Unjaded’ is the closest thing to a pop song the band have written to date, and they even have a go at actual singing on the slo-mo jangler ‘I Lost My Head’, but regardless of any stylistic evolution, it’s that sardonic lyricism which will keep you coming back.

Craig Finn – A Legacy of Rentals

Positive Jams / Thirty Tigers

Last year, we described The Hold Steady‘s eighth album ODP as a glimpse “into the lives of imperfect figures dissatisfied or downtrodden and merely surviving.” Not so much a pivot from the self-destructive adventure of older THS releases as a natural evolution. With his fourth solo record A Legacy of Rentals, Craig Finn pushes things a step further. A move from the survivors to people who didn’t, as well as those left in their wake with nothing but imperfect memories. With vocal support from Cassandra Jenkins, Finn mines the full depth of this ground to reveal how we shape entire lives around such recollections. Stories we hold onto regardless of their veracity. The justification for toiling in a hostile world. Again we are introduced to characters on the margins—a man forced into drug dealing by financial necessity, a woman escaping life with vodka and a superhero matinee—and the detail and control of the writing is as impressive anything Finn has crafted to date, further cementing his place at the table of America’s best working writers, in music or elsewhere. Memories might not be perfect, A Legacy of Rentals tells us, but they are a way to survive after all.

Daniel McClennan – Unfurling Redemption

Cruel Nature Records

What fuels humanity’s incessant drive to conquer its surroundings? Why must we always seek to transcend? These are some of the questions explored on Unfurling Redemption, a solo album by Daniel McClennan (Warren Schoenbright, Why Patterns) which draws on a range of classical and avant-garde influences to conjure the full, dreadful weight of the subject at hand. Built from synthesised instruments and stock sound samples, the songs exist within a netherworld at once melancholic and ominous, as though having long come to understand transcendence as either an illusion or pyrrhic victory, and left to grasp blindly for redemption elsewhere in the dark.

Dear Nora – human futures

Orindal Records

In a piece for Talkhouse, Dear Nora’s Katy Davidson states confidently that human futures is the best thing they’ve ever made. “I’m just gonna come right out and say it,” they say, “this is the best one… all the previous Dear Nora recordings were practice for this moment, for this album. This is the culmination of them all.” It’s a bold statement for a project that’s been running since the late nineties, but it’s hard to disagree. human futures retains everything that has made Dear Nora a cult hit—the playful lo-fi pop vibe, the offbeat observational lyrics that have come to mark later releases—but feels somehow more complete, more cohesive. Few artists capture twenty-first century life as well as Davidson, images of natural beauty sitting next to wry humour and deadpan observations of our ruined world.

Fiver – Soundtrack to A More Radiant Sphere: The Joe Wallace Mixtape

You’ve Changed Records

Back in 2019, filmmaker Sara Wylie asked Fiver (AKA Simone Schmidt) if they might contribute music for her new project, A More Radiant Sphere. The hybrid documentary centres on Wylie’s great uncle Joe Wallace, a Canadian poet and political prisoner shunned in his home nation but celebrated in Eastern Europe and China, exploring how the role of Communists has been mostly excised from Canadian history. Fiver’s soundtrack furthers this examination, turning a selection of Wallace’s poems into song alongside instrumental pieces. “I have always felt a song is worth singing for what wisdom one can discover through its repetition,” Schmidt explains of the album’s style, “be that in beauty, prayer or, in time, prophecy.” Hopeful, heartfelt and unafraid of nuance, The Joe Wallace Mixtape captures a specific period of Canadian leftist nationalism in all of its passionate imperfection. A movement which threatened to forget its own colonial past in its hurry to attack American imperialism, yet nevertheless dared to imagine the possibility of a society beyond capitalism.

Friendship – Love the Stranger

Merge Records

Having established themselves as one of our favourite contemporary acts with Shock out of Season and Dreamin’, both on Orindal Records, Friendship‘s first LP for Merge is a continuation of their distinctive brand of introspective, country-tinged, slices of life. The songs again centre on lead Dan Wriggins’s plaintive vocals and everyday poetry, ably supported by the careful attention and creative flair of Michael Cormier-O’Leary, Jon Samuels, and Peter Gill. Be it distracting yourself with nature documentaries or a peek at the moon, Wriggins examines small, seemingly mundane details for their loaded meaning. Searching if not for answers then at least reasons to get up every day and keep looking. A way, in other words, to live and love when “gripped by a fear of no discernible beginning.”

Good Looks – Bummer Year

Keeled Scales

“I don’t think they’re evil, even when they’re awful / Not totally class conscious, but ultimately good.” So sings Tyler Jordan on the title track of Good Look’s Bummer Year, referring to his old high school friends in small town Texas. The line is indicative of the tension on a record where fondness and sentimentality are constantly challenged by life’s imperfect reality. A collection of songs willing to hold more than one idea in its head at a time, be it in celebrating close-knit communities while recognising their susceptibility to insular or reactionary turns, or charting the strange relationship between working pride and industrial exploitation. “Blue-collar” indie rock can sometimes comes off as inauthentic or condescending, but it is this nuance which allows Good Looks to come across as authentic, and moreover begin to imagine such communities as sites of revolutionary potential for positive change. “If we’re gonna make a comeback, we’re gonna need those people,” as Jordan concludes on the title track, “like my friends on the bottom who don’t know who to fight.”

Joy Guidry – Radical Acceptance

Whited Sepulchre

“One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others.” So wrote bell hooks in All About Love, gracefully unmasking the cruelty which internalised trauma can bring. That Joy Guidry released Radical Acceptance in the year the world lost hooks feels like the most fitting testament to her legacy. A clear indication that her work is not only being acted upon but developed further, pushed in new directions. A personal practice brought to life in music, the album sees Guidry combine ambient, jazz and classical styles with direct and often humorous spoken word delivery to short-circuit the self-judgement of which hooks wrote. To connect with the reality of one’s identity in a way beyond labels, and learn to love it precisely for what it is.

June McDoom – S/T

Temporary Residence Ltd.

Influenced by a love for sixties and seventies folk, intricate jazz, early soul, and the reggae of her childhood home, the self-titled debut release from Florida-born, New York-based June McDoom takes relatively simple folk blueprints and weaves whole worlds of sound around them. Working with partner and collaborator Evan Wright, McDoom’s style feels like a constantly shifting collage of her influences, warm and rich and strangely dream-like. Highlighting her talents as a producer as much as a songwriter, the record is an exercise in texture and atmosphere, shifting from the earthily pastoral to something more spectral, hallucinatory echoes and psychedelic ambient flourishes moving the songs to some other strange plane.

Kali Malone – Living Torch

Portraits GRM

Driven by both the conceptual and intuitional, Stockholm-based composer Kali Malone has made a name pushing the boundaries of the pipe organ. 2019’s The Sacrificial Code subverted the traditions of the instrument to prove its power was not contingent on a grand, cathedralesque setting. Staying true to her exploratory style, Living Torch sees Malone continue to excavate music for new styles and perspectives, but this time swaps the organ for an altogether more diverse ensemble of instruments, from the trombone and bass clarinet to the boîte à bourdon and Éliane Radigue’s ARP 2500 synthesizer. The result again manages to suggest both academic rigour and unburdened instinct, but ultimately transcends any focus on its intentions as the listener becomes immersed in the soundscape. Some hymn or lament, latent with the suggestion of the sublime, be it total dread or transcendence, silence or all-encompassing sound.

LINQUA FRANQA – Bellringer

Ernest Jenning Record Co.

Meaning both “a jab to the face that knocks someone out completely” and someone who raises an alarm, Bellringer is the perfect title for the sophomore album by Linqua Franqa, the project of Athens, Georgia-based rapper Mariah Parker. Balancing music with work as a linguist, activist, parent and politician, Parker makes razor sharp, socially conscious hip hop that aims to both empower and critique. In provocative, sometimes dark, but always poetic verses, Parker takes on the prison industrial complex, police brutality, exploitative capitalism and mental health issues. There’s also a stellar guest list, which includes Georgia hip hop talent (like Dope Knife and Wesdaruler) as well as indie rock heavyweights like Jeff Rosenstock, of Montreal and Kishi Bashi, and even legendary civil rights activist Angela Davis. Ultimately, Bellringer is a record that sees music as a tool toward liberation. As Parker puts it “[using] the aesthetic pleasure of hip-hop to educate people about why things are so bad and what can we do about it.”

Logan Farmer – A Mold For the Bell

Western Vinyl

“It’s gonna be hard to talk about this when it’s done / Those days of plenty come and gone.” So opens A Mold For the Bell, the latest album from Logan Farmer. The Colorado songwriter has long been marked by a willingness to stare straight into the maw of whatever calamity is approaching, as typified by his almost singularly successful depiction of climate dread on 2020’s Still No Mother. The new record might shift its focus away from explicitly environmental concerns, but roots itself in the same shades and colours. As though the promise of impending loss hangs in the air like a fog. “It’s a full time job, just staying calm / Don’t read the papers,” he sings on ‘Horsehair’, but portents of doom reveal themselves all around. Through lines of silver in hair, or the very silence itself. Yet across all of this persists a very human spirit, small hopes flickering in spite of everything. Because what sets the work of Logan Farmer apart from the plethora of other such dark and pessimistic art is the intimacy with which he approaches such themes. There’s no sublime release to this apocalypse, just people living on through it.

Lou Turner – Microcosmos

Spinster

Nashville’s Lou Turner returned with a cosmic country record that keeps both feet firmly on the ground. Rooted in a welcoming sense of domesticity, Microcosmos finds a sense of wonder in the infinite detail of our immediate surroundings, gently probing at some pretty big questions without the need for some epic quest. Musically it could be from some long-hidden seventies folksinger (think Joni Mitchell, Michael Hurley), but refuses to fall into many long established tropes. There are hints too of David Berman in the songwriting, which melds philosophical musings with observational images—a bird’s nest at a gas station, rising bread dough—and ultimately decrees that an artist is not doomed to tortured wandering.

Medicine Singers – S/T

Stone Tapes / Joyful Noise Recordings

In a year of many great albums, it’s hard to imagine one as bold and committed as the self-titled debut by Medicine Singers. Something of a groundbreaking supergroup, the band are the product of collaboration between Algonquin powwow drum outfit Eastern Medicine Singers and Israeli guitarist Yonatan Gat, and also features contributions from ambient music visionary Laraaji, Thor Harris and Christopher Pravdica of Swans, Ikue Mori of no wave icons DNA and trumpeter jaimie branch. Together the group collide traditional powwow and experimental music, resulting in a distinctive and often joyously cathartic experience. Take the colossal ‘Hawk Song’, or the first sudden burst of pure rock n’ roll guitar that comes blazing in near the beginning of ‘Sunrise (Rumble)’. “These two cultures can work together, and blend together,” Medicine Singers leader Daryl Black Eagle Jamieson explains, “to show people how we can work together and make something beautiful.” What emerges is a piece of contemporary art which serves as a map to its own history, following its roots back into a myriad of traditional styles.

MJ Lenderman – Boat Songs

Dear Life Records

“Listening to Boat Songs by MJ Lenderman is like joining your best friends out on the porch,” describes author Ashleigh Bryant Phillips in the album’s liner notes. “The neighbors might be yelling and the bugs might be biting. But y’all are shooting the shit and letting loose, telling the same old stories again and again.” There’s wrestling, basketball, sightings of Dan Marino in a South Carolina cereal aisle. Drained out swimming pools and birds pecking seeds off the ground. But most of all there’s the masterful knack for combining details small and absurd into something which feels like life as it’s lived on the ground. Lenderman, much like Phillips herself, represents the contemporary face of a certain type of storyteller. One living on the margins or else in the great rural stretches too often ignored, presenting life back to us with all its shine and sharp edges intact.

Posmic – Sun Hymns

Let’s Pretend Records

Clocking in at under twenty minutes, Posmic’s Sun Hymns feels like watching an old Super 8 home movie found at the thrift store, unknown people and scenes flashing by, wrapped in nostalgic film grain and warm colours. Comprising of members of several Baltimore and DC bands (Post Pink, Wildhoney, Ultra Beauty), the outfit make music that collides grungy nineties guitar rock and sixties psych weirdness, resulting in something that feels both fresh and strangely familiar. There are noisy alt-rock jams, incense-scented folk numbers and sunny, easy-going pop, the whole thing adding up to a brief but oh so welcome escape to some other time or place. Sun Hymns might be the sleeper hit of the year, so load it up and bask in its glow.

Réverbérations d’une crise – Une enqu​​​ê​​​te sonore sur le logement à Montr​​​é​​​al

Cuchabata Records

Described as existing “at the border of music and sound art,” and “produced during a collective process of sound inquiry,” Réverbérations d’une crise: une enquête sonore sur le logement à Montréal is a work seeking to evoke a fuller picture of Montreal‘s housing crisis, and make audible what is otherwise silent or silenced. Hubert Gendron-Blais (ce qui nous traverse, Devenir-ensemble) leads a collective featuring Aidan Girt (Gospeed You! Black Emperor), Claude Périard (Claude L’Anthrope), Christine White, Stefan Christoff (Anarchist Mountains) and others, with each track setting out to capture the multifaceted impact of the crisis through political, socio-economic, psychological and existential planes. Take one of Gendron-Blais’s own offerings ‘À la multiplicité fragile d’une ruelle de Parc-Ex’, a collection of sounds from the multicultural, working-class neighbourhood Parc-Extension which evokes both the diversity of the space and the growing precarity as gentrification closes in.

Sarah Davachi – Two Sisters

Late Music

Following the thread back from contemporary drone music through a variety of chamber and choral styles, Sarah Davachi’s Two Sisters is as influenced by medieval sacred music as it is modern minimalism. As though the two forms are not separate entities but the same thing manifest differently across the years—a perpetual attempt to communicate something near inexplicable, some great mystery known only in flashes. Because while spiritual endeavors in music have driven many toward ostentation, Davachi is far more astute. After all, if the mystery shows itself only in glimmers, then what use is show and noise? Two Sisters follows the lead of its forebears and instead turns toward quiet; a hushed, elusive collection of pieces loaded with all the hope, fear and strangeness inherent in that which we cannot fully comprehend.

Silica Gel – Wooden Shoe

Noumenal Loom

Listening to Wooden Shoe, the latest release from Providence, Rhode Island outfit, it’s difficult to ascertain what exactly is going on. Has the past slipped through a crack in the world, returned as some strange, haunting force? Or have we moved in the other direction entirely? Been transported to some unnamed future where old things have reoccurred as the great wheel turns? Having made their name with debut May Day, reinterpreting songs from the fourteenth century satirical text Roman de Fauve, Silica Gel continue the art song tradition by merging Early folk styles with contemporary (or even futuristic) noise, capturing both the ever-spinning cycles of suffering, exploitation and superstition, as well as the interminable dream that something better might lie just beyond the horizon.

Soul Glo – Diaspora Problems

Epitaph

The recipe goes something like this: Take two handfuls of post-hardcore for every one of hip hop, take equal parts punk rock and poetry. Don’t skimp on the humour, don’t forget to stir in the grief. Then preheat the oven to fucking furious and roast the whole thing until the smoke alarm goes off. With the myriad of ingredients and processes, Soul Glo’s Diaspora Problems risks biting off more than it can chew, but with every track it keeps biting, keeps chewing, lets you know there’s no way it’s going to blink before you. From the college scam and reselling economy to the false allyship of the white left, no topic is too much for this record. It bites off your head and chews.

Tenci – A Swollen River, A Well Overflowing

Keeled Scales

Tenci‘s 2020 debut My Heart Is An Open Field was a record of catharsis, with lead Jess Shoman moving beyond pain and trauma via a process of purging. The result was a certain emptiness, a blank space residing where negativity had once lived. Follow-up A Swollen River, A Well Overflowing is an attempt to repopulate this space. A conscious effort to collect the small joys and wonders of the world, and to reposition one’s relationship with things previously difficult to live with so that they might exist comfortably too. With a sound somewhere between bedroom pop introspection and folk hymn timelessness, each song serves as a spell, as Shoman puts it, to “fill my heart back up.”

Titus Andronicus – The Will to Live

Merge Records

“It is the same misery that is all around us,” said Werner Herzog in his 1982 film Burden of Dreams. “The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing, they just screech in pain.” Titus Andronicus reach an equally difficult picture of the world on their seventh album, The Will to Live, yet the New Jersey punk royals thoroughly reject nihilism in the process. Written in the wake of tragedies both personal and global, the album sees lead Patrick Stickles dare to embrace life despite the inevitable pain, coming to understand suffering not as the default form of existence but merely the shadow of life itself. Screeching in pain they might be, but Titus Andronicus are singing too, and it is as loud and heartfelt as anything else they have sung for years.

Young Jesus – Shepherd Head

Saddle Creek

Even for a band that has shapeshifted throughout its history, Shepherd Head feels like a departure for Young Jesus. After completing the mathy, jazzy epic Welcome to Conceptual Beach in 2020, the band were burnt out, and lead John Rossiter decided to take a different tack. Working primarily alone, armed with a Macbook, a microphone and a newfound patience, he began to piece together songs from found sounds, audio recordings and white noise. The result is, at least stylistically, a glimpse at Young Jesus in a different form—a stripped-back singer-songwriter approach wrapped in meditative electronic pop, more interested in the emotional, or even spiritual, than the cerebral. It’s a record which faces up to fear and grief but somehow feels suffused with hope, a personal, quasi-solo record that feels anything but lonely (with cameos from friends dotted throughout, including collaborations with Tomberlin and Arswain). As we wrote in a preview of lead single ‘Ocean’ back in the summer, Shepherd Head is “a tapestry both vulnerable and tender, where great loss and transcendence are not so different after all.”

Thanks to everyone who stopped by during 2022, your continued interest and support means the world to us.

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