Founded in 2018 by musician Adam Kinner and artistic director/writer Jacob Wren, and now expanded into a wider ensemble, The Air Contains Honey is a Montreal-based project which crosses artistic boundaries to meld the musical and the literary in a genuinely innovative way. After gradually evolving over the years, the project is now preparing to release their first full-length, The Air Contains Honey Sings Quotes, via Quindi Records, and the album quite literally lives up to its name. With arrangements orchestrated to be performed by nineteen musicians, the record sees the group sing quotes from across literature and theory (lines from Agnes Martin, Diane di Prima and Chris Kraus feature, to name just a few), resulting in a novel form which sits between indie pop, jazz and something like musical theatre. Lead track ‘Sexuality’ is the perfect example of the release’s ambition and invention. A number built around words from Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations which encapsulates not only the artistic vision of the record but also the welcoming communal spirit with which it is brought to life.

Damn Shame – Making Habits

“Every year that passes / taking stock with where we’re at and / Making plans to break through and make change.” So sings Portland, Maine multi-instrumentalist Robb Paniconi, AKA Damn Shame, on the closing track of new EP For Lack of Trying, out now via Repeating Cloud. As the title might suggest, the release is crafted around this sense of striving, be it towards a better future or healthier version of oneself. But it is forever held back by some self-defeating dimension, or else the hectic distraction that is the contemporary world. ‘Making Habits’ is a summation of the project musically as well as thematically, Paniconi bolstering his songwriting with an array of experimental flourishes, from found sounds and field recording to synths and tape loops. The result is all the more sincere and sympathetic as a result, positioning him alongside the likes of Ben Cooper’s Radical Face or even the slower side of Trace Mountains.

Daniel Glenn Padgett – Geraldine x Rocky Top!

Blurring the lines between DIY experimentalism and classical composition, the work of US-born, UK-based artist Daniel Glenn Padgett draws utilises both analogue and electronic modes to collapse the distance between the past and the present, bringing forward that which seemed lost or else opening up a nostalgic path backwards. Latest single ‘Geraldine x Rocky Top!’ is the ideal introduction to this style, a glitchy dance-based number which opens with a voice note from Parisian photographer Geraldine Morat and grows to incorporate a samples from the anthology of American folk music. On the surface, the result is an infectious slice of pop which hums with a bright energy for its brisk two minute run-time, though delve slightly deeper and the true nature of DGP’s work reveals itself. A cross-pollination between the contemporary and the traditional which charges both which newfound energy, as though commingling these ostensibly mismatched styles allows a kind of mutual invigoration.

David James Allen – So Much Pain

Prince Edward County, Ontario-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist David James Allen has shared a number of singles from his new full-length Jubilation Potpurri in recent months, and now the album is finally out via Littleknown Records, he is sharing one more. Following on from the likes of ‘By Your Side‘ (“an ode to the safe harbour of a significant other, where calm might be found no matter how stormy the outside world might prove”) and ‘Dukes Up (Since You’ve Been Gone)‘ (“a vow to confront life’s struggles head on, standing on your own two feet, fists raised and ready for anything”), latest track ‘So Much Pain’ explores far more uncertain, vulnerable headspace, though you wouldn’t know it from the sound itself. “There’s so much pain / Seen so much pain / It hurts to be alone / Feeling scared on my own,” Allen sings in the opening verse, though the arrangement is full of soulful swagger and confidence, redirecting the needy longing of the lyrics into something altogether different. As though, in voicing such vulnerabilities, Allen isn’t so much underscoring his fear of solitude as championing its opposite, connecting to the universal human experience of loneliness to better communicate the power of connection.

The French – Maybe Tomorrow

The ongoing mission to make Darren Hayman‘s vast back catalogue available online shows no sign going down (read more on the project here), with Audio Antihero now unearthing some deep cuts Hayman’s bands Hefner and The French recorded during sessions with the legendary John Peel. “When Hefner became a ‘Peel band’ and recorded their first session, I felt that a true life goal had been achieved,” he explains. “Many bands, much more revered and successful than myself, would have wished they’d recorded a Peel session. I could die a little happier.” Invited to a session with no record to promote, Hefner instead recorded a collection of gospel singles, with Peel delighted by a band using his sessions to push themselves and break new ground. Hence, when it came time for The French to visit a year later, they followed suit with another experimental idea, this time recording their own versions of four television theme songs, released here as TV Themes. Alongside ‘Crockett’s Theme’ and ‘Theme from Hill Street Blues’ and ‘Big John, Little John’, Hayman and John Morrison also recorded ‘Maybe Tomorrow’, their take on the theme from The Littlest Hobo which shows both the nostalgic spirit of the project and the invention with which they brought it to life.

henry o henry – There

Back in August we previewed henry o henry‘s new full-length Apocrypha, describing how the Dublin-born, US-based songwriter uses “the experience of being an immigrant in America for over thirty years to observe the country from the novel perspective of an adopted son.” After lead single ‘The Fool‘ (“worn and wistful and weathered but with a glint in its eye, moving with a sincerity and easy grace that comes with experience”) came ‘The Parade’, “an example of the careful patience which marks so much of the album,” as we put it, “understated yet strangely hypnotic, as though its mellow rhythms slowly envelop the listener and hold them within their world.” With the record now out via Western Vinyl, henry o henry has shared final single ‘There’. An album highlight which serves as a metacommentary on the creative process which brought it to life, specifically how making art can take personal feelings and transform them into something greater and long-lasting. “It feels like a triumph over something,” as henry o henry says, “even if you’re a bit embarrassed by some of the sentiment.”

Jonathan Something – The Garden

“A prime example of how One More Lonesome Cowboy Song lives up to its name, the track manages to evoke both the intimacy of personal experience and something far larger, bringing in the melancholy of the archetypal wanderer in search of meaning.” So we wrote of ‘Gasoline‘, a single from Jonathan Something‘s new album forthcoming via High Shelter, back in August, a song typical of a record all about yearning for something more. The record’s release is now less than a month away and Jonathan Searles has shared new track ‘The Garden’ to pave the way. “‘The Garden’ is a collection of epiphanies I had regarding self growth while wrestling demons.” as Searles explains. “I kept the conclusions and deeper meaning behind each verse as cryptic as possible to avoid preaching while still resonating as widely as possible. The goal was to offer my hand to hold for those who needed it and a high five for those who just wanna vibe.”

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

Josephine Illingworth – Who Burnt The Mountain

After the release of EP Bright Things I Found In The Dark earlier this year, London-based songwriter Josephine Illingworth returns with new single ‘Who Burnt The Mountain’ in partnership with Sounds Right, a global music initiative that allows nature to generate royalties on streaming platforms. Released as part of the Sounds Right and EarthPercent Climate Week NYC releases, the track confronts the urgent ecological crisis by drawing on the sounds of nature itself, though these gradually distort and denature as the song unfolds to mirror the ongoing loss of habitat and biodiversity. “‘Who Burnt The Mountain’ is a rallying call against the desecration of our wild spaces, and an expression of grief that I, as a young woman, feel in seeing the wilderness that has been a space of sanctuary and identity for me being literally burnt out of existence, often thanks to the decisions of distant male politicians,” Illingworth explains. “The song is about wildfire and deforestation, and the flattening and privatisation of these wildernesses in the UK. I gradually distorted the bird field recordings as the song goes on, ending so that they sound almost like human screams.” Watch the video filmed by Reuben Denison below:

Who Burnt The Mountain is out now via Sounds Right, with royalties donated to frontline conservation projects around the world.

MANAS (Tashi Dorji & Thom Nguyen) – 100 sunset

The project of Asheville-based duo Tashi Dorji and Thom Nguyen, MANAS gather threads of free jazz, noise, punk and experimental music into propulsive improvised tracks that pay attention to small details while possessing a physical intensity and unpredictability. “Improvised music, this music-making in the immediacy and now, in the moment, feels way more radical than anything I’ve ever done,” says Dorji. “Making improvised music and creating radical music with the intention of opening people’s ears.” October sees the release of a new MANAS record, The most yielding thing in the world will overcome the most rigid, via American Dreams. The album came into being as the score to 100 Sunset, the debut feature film from director Kunsang Kyirong. Our first glimpse is the opening track, which is named for the film, a 13-minute exercise in restrained forward motion that builds toward a blown-out crescendo, the pair merging guitar and percussion into a single, unified instrument of urgent power.

Melissa Weikart – L’amour se construit

Back in July, we featured ‘Crash’, a single by French-American songwriter Melissa Weikart. Calling it “lush, immersive and slightly warped at the edges,” it was the perfect introduction to an artist who exists “between the poles of experimental improvisation and crowd-pleasing pop.” Weikart has just announced that the song was our first taste of a new album, titled Contact, which will be released via Midnight Special Records at the end of next month. To coincide with the album announcement, Weikart has unveiled a second single titled ‘L’amour se construit’. Translating into English as “love is built”, it’s what Weikart describes as “a plea to not only accept but welcome the inevitable messiness that accompanies our emotions around love.” Musically this translates into something as strange as it is sophisticated, drawing on foundations of both jazz and smooth seventies folk and bending them into dreamlike shapes with a psychedelic flourish. Watch the suitably surreal Ruby Cicero-directed video below:

Contact will be released via Midnight Special Records on 23^rd October. Pre-order ti now from the Melissa Weikart Bandcamp page.

summersets – Forgetting For The Better

“Drunk conversations, uncomfortable truths / Daily routines, bills that are due,” so opens ‘Forgetting For the Better’, one of the standout tracks on Pine Trees In A Perfect Row, the new record from Kalle Mattson and Andrew Sowka’s summersets project. The line is indicative of an album that is very much grounded in reality, exploring the contemporary moment without sanding away its uncomfortable edges. The pair of childhood friends reunited in their northern Ontario hometown of Sault Ste. Marie after being priced out of the big cities, and this frankness and economic realism is littered across the record. Mattson calls it “a (complicated) love letter to Northern Ontario and small town Canadian identity and experience… with the intention of speaking to a (hopefully) universal sentiment: that you never really leave your home.” As that quote might suggest, there is a glimmer of magic braided throughout too. ‘Forgetting For the Better’ is the perfect example, a gentle folk song that explores life’s ups and downs (from car crashes and playoff defeats to “the words that I said”) with a combination of wistful regret and mellow warmth.

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These themes are apparent from the very beginning. Opener ‘The Ground Here’ is rich with a sense of place both past and present, longing for the familiar rhythm of distinct seasons, and centring on the anxiety of living through human-induced destruction. Houdei wrote the track following a move from her home in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri to Topanga in southern California, an area devastated by the Palisades wildfire in early 2025. “[The California] landscape is undeniably beautiful,” she explains. “I, however, being painfully aware of how strained the land had grown to be during years that I lived there, longed for natural bodies of water and the simple rainstorm.”

Why must I be quiet
I have grown to long to doubt
The ground here’s turned to dust yeah
All the lizards running about
I walk in search of grassland but the hills have all burned down
I see it in my reflection
May the river wash me out

It is not just the name of the record that is important to this release. This Bed Was Made For Me is Biita Houdei’s first release under her own new name (her given name is Lisa, and she previously recorded under the moniker LéPonds), which was gifted by her aunt and translates from Farsi as “unique”. “I proudly take this name,” Houdei says of receiving this gift. “It makes me feel that much closer to my Persian heritage.” One of the strengths of the collection is the melding of influences, pulling in threads of this family heritage and weaving them into Houdei’s own, very much American, lived experience. What sound like timeless US folk songs take surprising turns, adorned with gentle orchestral elements and playful flourishes. ‘Frog Song’ has the whimsical simplicity of a children’s rhyme, while ‘Burnin’ is suffused with the slow build and incense-scented atmosphere of a ritual, Houdei’s voice moving from whisper to full-throated cries. Each track rewarding those who give it the space and time of repeated listens, eschewing the contemporary urge to seize attention with blunt force to instead foster a more collaborative relationship between artist and listener, one of mutual attention, curiosity and wonder.

Far from a solo endeavour, collaboration was key to the creation of the record too. Celebrated songwriter Haley Heynderickx, who leads on production for the first time in her career, is a central presence in the songs. The pair met when Houdei opened for Heynderickx in 2018, a moment that sparked a strong bond and creative synergy. Before making This Bed Was Made for Me they headed to rural Oregon for a writing retreat, and upon their return brought the same sense of cosy solitude and connection to the studio. The songs came into being over the course of ten days which Houdei says “began with fermented tea and ended with a shared meal together,” the recording process a practical embodiment of the spirit of an album all about the ways in which we shape, and are in turned shaped by, one another and the world around us.

More than a neat anecdote, this origin story feels fundamental to the very sound of the release. How else to bring an album of careful, patient songs to life other than a careful, patient process? Because more than the ten days in the studio, This Bed Was Made for Me was crafted in the slow forging of a friendship over eight years, not to mention the life lived before it. Even the preparation of tea and sharing of a meal together feels important in this light, the album earning its authenticity by stacking moment upon painstaking moment with no thought of cutting corners in the name of efficiency.

The mindset is evoked most clearly in a parallel project Houdei undertook alongside the record, sewing a patch for each tracks, and then combining them into the quilt you can see on the cover. “Making the quilt was laborious. Taking the cover photo was laborious’ says Houdei. “No shortcuts, but rather a manual and tangible approach. I am thankful for the time it took.” Because, more than a prop for the artwork, the finished object became a tangible symbol the ethos of the album, one particularly poignant in this age of automation. “I encourage people to dive deeper into everything that they choose to consume,” she continues. “It is not my intention to sound pretentious, but instead, I am trying harder to explain the gratitude I have for being able to craft every part of this album— using my hands, my brain, my voice, my visions. To me, it is an all encompassing work of art.”  For all of its nuanced meanings, there’s a hidden irony to the title of This Bed Was Made for Me. Because in truth, with help from a number of friends, Biita Houdei made this bed herself, and wants to remind you that your bed is there to be made too.

This Bed Was Made For Me is released via Basin Rock and Father/Daughter Records. Order it now from the Biita Houdei Bandcamp page.

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After recent single ‘Neighbours’, a song “which manages to mine the ostensibly mundane experience of nodding hello to a familiar face in the neighbourhood for all of its uplifting delight, and all without a trace of irony,” as we put it, “even if the repeated assertion ‘I’m not afraid of strangers’ suggests something telling about the contemporary moment,” Max Bien Kahn has now returned with ‘Skipping Stones’. Again crafted with equal parts brightness and wistful reflection, the song takes another incidental encounter and turns it into a meditation on the momentum of a life and the routines which maintain its forward motion, or else preserve the illusion long enough to allow us the will to climb out of bed in the morning.

Standing in line
The cafe is full
And they’re sitting by the window
I accidentally catch their eye and smile
They’re married to their jobs
And married to each other

I don’t ask hard questions
When I don’t want the answer
And every skipping stone hits the bottom

Baby Green will be released on the 23rd October and you can pre-order it now from the Max Bien Kahn Bandcamp page.

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I had the feeling that most writing in this environment becomes an advertisement for yourself and your virtues. There is importance and beauty in writing characters and stories that are filled with the good you wish to see in the real world, but sitting around a table of like-minded individuals doesn’t always leave a lot of room for narrative art that is ugly and weird.

The story I’m telling is ugly and weird. It’s mean-spirited, it makes fun of its characters, it’s violent, and I go for cheap laughs. The songs that emerged for this project, the first I’ve written in over a decade, probably speak to an urge to make art like that, which I’ve likely repressed in my fiction writing for polite academia and peer-to-peer workshopping.

After foreshadowing opener ‘The Television Watcher’, single ‘I’m a Soldier’ introduced the tone of the record, not least how The Male Pattern’s style of storytelling manages to carry emotional and thematic weight despite its wacky, off-the-wall charms. “The undeniable irony and playfulness do nothing to undermine the heartbreaking loneliness running through its heart,” as we put it in our preview. “An anthem of America in 2026, where vapidity, ridiculousness and mean-spirited self-interest feel like symptoms of some dark, cursed pathology lurking beneath the surface.”

Latest single ‘Charlie (The Robbery)’ zips us further through the story, finding our protagonist sinking ever further into the underbelly of society, and teetering on the precipice of something far worse. He can’t quite get back on the job market, can’t keep his urine clean enough to satisying the state, has taken to carrying a gun around with the American urge that someone might give him an excuse to use it (“It’s my God-given right”). But firearms and narcotics have never been a good mix, especially not when the characters involved are quite so desperate, and an ostensibly foolproof plan to rob a small-time dealer inevitably tilts towards disaster. “This gun might be loaded but we only need to show it,” as the next verse goes, “And then it’s all for the taking, there’s no way to blow it.” Only, of course, there is a way to blow it. The obvious fate for anyone TV-brained swinging a loaded gun.

Stick ‘em up, this is a heist, put your hands up toward the sky
Don’t reach for that piece unless your ready for heat
Charlie looked like he was going to cry
I got too excited
I tried to say a line from The Dark Knight Rises
When Charlie made his move
I blew him half way across the room
I grabbed the score and I ran for the door

Photos by Andrew Piccone, album design & art by Edelweiss Cardenas

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To celebrate the announcement of the record, Shaina Hayes has unveiled new single ‘Tempest’. Like previous tracks before it, the song finds Hayes meditating of the cycles and rhythms of her rural life, finding both solace and wisdom within nature’s propensity to change, be it dying back or growing anew. So while the track takes place within a personal storm, it is always reaching for a greater perspective. As though attempting to view one’s problems from a higher vantage might work as a kind of inoculation against fear of the unknown, instead installing a deep curiosity. “And I’m not scared of the world / And what it may hold,” as Hayes sings in a telling verse. “I just fear that I won’t / Have time to explore it.”

Watch the video by Flavie Lemée below:

Take the Case of a Rose will be released on the 13th November via Bonsound and you can pre-order it now from the Shana Hayes Bandcamp page.

Photo by Charline Clavier

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It was only on the insistence of filmmaker Rick Alverson that henry o henry realised the songs might hang together as an album, and the recording process developed organically from there with a characteristically authentic spirit. Father and son duo Eamon O’Leary and Ned Steves play across much of the album, recording together for the first time and without rehearsal, favouring instinct over deliberation and furthering the sense of songs unfurling in real time. Emilie Rex of Lean Year and poet Callie Garnett also appear, while Alverson oversaw the sessions and guided these energies towards their final shape, and Erik Hall contributed overdubs and mixed the result to further its subtly striking power. A record able to live up to its title: ambiguous in nature and all the more alluring because of it, where the hard-won wisdoms of a life well lived are matched by the flickering sense of some unforeseen possibility.

After lead single ‘The Fool’, what we called “a song worn and wistful and weathered but with a glint in its eye, moving with a sincerity and easy grace that comes with experience,” henry o henry has now shared latest track, ‘Parade’, ahead of Apocrypha’s release next month via Western Vinyl. An example of the careful patience which marks so much of the album, the song is understated yet strangely hypnotic, as though its mellow rhythms slowly envelop the listener and hold them within their world.  “It’s like lying completely still in the grass but there’s always a circus in town,” as o henry puts it, hinting at both the grounded nature of the sound and the eccentric shadows which play across it.

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With the album’s release imminent, Kate Prasher has returned with final single, ‘Retrograde’. As the title might suggest, the track again moves away from the present, though represents far more than simple reflection. Because, within its sparse, poetic lyrics and understated arrangement featuring Ben Garnett, Greg Jones, Diana Walsh and Adam Schwind, the song is both a gesture of solace within current moment and a promise for the future. A pledge to future action in the name of care and love no matter which planets might be reversing or obstacles fall in the way.

Sunday Afternoon will be released on the 28th August via First City Artists and you can pre-order it now from the Kate Prascher Bandcamp page.

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After the suitably existential, transformative lead single ‘Country Rose’, Jonathan Something has now shared latest track ‘Gasoline’ to further build anticipation for the release. A prime example of how One More Lonesome Cowboy Song lives up to its name, the track manages to evoke both the intimacy of personal experience and something far larger, bringing in the melancholy of the archtypal wanderer in search of meaning. Katie Martucci (bass) and Dylan McKinstry (drums) join to flesh out the sound, and the result is relatively understated yet charged with real feeling, driven by a persistent yearning for something more. Watch a live version recorded at Greenpoint Recording Collective with Dogstar Films below:

One More Lonesome Cowboy Song will be released on the 16th October via High Shelter. ‘Gasoline’ is available from this usual places.

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For those unfamiliar, Thomas Dollbaum combines the stylings of alt-country that are very much en vogue with a beefier brand of heartland rock, tracing a lineage back through Molina and Springsteen as far as van Zandt, though there’s another set of influences that cannot go unmentioned. A parallel bloodline of writers (think Breece D’J Pancake, Barry Hannah and Larry Brown) who capture the beauty and sorrow in an often rough and tumble Southern existence. Interestingly, arguable heir apparent Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, whose short story collection Sleepovers is one of the best contemporary example of this literary genre, writes the liner notes and has a great interview with Dollbaum in Southwest Review, which digs deeper into the album’s literary influences, from Raymond Carver to the poetry of Jay Hopler, C.D. Wright, Joy Harjo and Philip Levine.

The country-rock-album-as-short-story-collection might not be a new idea, but paired with the aforementioned immediacy with which the songs were recorded, Birds of Paradise feels less like a set of penned vignettes and more like short glimpses at lives themselves. Each song drops the listener alongside its characters within their Southern homeland, people often on the margins of society, eking out a living within the transient space between a lost past and unknown future. Lead single ‘Dozen Roses’, arriving after the subdued and tender opener ‘Visitation’, plays like the album’s mission statement in this regard. A meditation on loss and the soothing wonder of the natural world that’s full of taut energy and forward motion, even while the narrator cycles back to the same sentiment, repeating themselves with increasing urgency.

When you were still around
I’d carry you across the river
I’d ramble through the dark until the time would deliver
Before the time would deliver

Many of the songs on Birds of Paradise are repetitive in this way, swinging back around to the same verses as if Dollbaum is working through thoughts in real time, lingering over memories both positive and not so much. This internal world provides a neat counterbalance to the present tense of many of the tracks which is altogether more transient. Our narrator(s) look for sure ground in the uncertainty of the in-between, or at least acceptance that the time spent on the “backroads leading to I-95” or “rambling through the pines” is not so much a path towards something as the body of life itself. Poignant closer ‘Blue Meets Blue’ confronts the idea head on, an ostensibly a fatalistic track (“There’s nowhere to go this is just a circle,” as Dollbaum sings, “there’s nowhere to run this is just landlocked blues”) that transforms acquiescence into a kind of charged catharsis.

It’s not too much of a reach to say this cyclical nature evokes another of the album’s key themes. Imagery of nature is abundant, and its rhythms extend across the songs as a backdrop to the very human emotions that often take centre stage. A place choked with vine and timber, where the waterbirds are strange and tall and coyotes howl at night. You only have to peek at the album art (an incredible embroidered quilt by Cora Nimtz) to understand the kind of picture Dollbaum paints across the record. Nature as something vivid and precious and undeniably peculiar, like some half-understood miracle which happens to occur all around. Yet, true to its setting, Birds of Paradise has dirt beneath its fingernails. Wonder and violence sit side by side. No more directly than on ‘Rabbits’, where the childhood innocence and bursting life is depicted as its own inversion, kids running through the burnt fields of Okeechobee with iron bars, trying to beat their siblings to the song’s titular prey as their mother watches on, keeping count.

This same mix of animation, desperation, melancholy and absurdity run through many of the songs, regardless of their subject matter. Take ‘King’s Landing’, with its childhood dream of a pilot’s license and the freedom it offers giving way to the mundane (“So lets go home and watch Judge Joe Brown / And reruns of Cops episodes in our home town”), though without ever extinguishing the desire and imagination which kicked off the fantasy in the first place. Or ‘Pulverize’, where a narrator fights the urge to look back through forward motion, then ‘Coyote’, where stasis seems to hold latent potential, as though some drastic act might materialise out of boredom itself. ‘Big Boi’ sees a teenaged Dollbaum act as chauffeur for a feuding couple strung out and desperate and looking to score. “Big Boi showed me his tattoos all down his arms,” Dollbaum sings, “said he got his nickname for being so goddamn large,” before switching the tone several shades darker, painting the titular character as a victim of the opioid crisis with the deft brevity of a poet.

Scars all from the emergency room
Asked me if I could fill a script too
Says he’s in a lot of pain right now
Who am I to say no to him anyhow?

Dollbaum might have recorded the album in the blink of an eye, but these are songs born of a lifetime in the worlds they inhabit. Places ignored by many, full of the kind of sensations we all too often forget. The dejection and sadness, yes, plus the weight of aborted dreams and all associated regrets, but also a nascent wonder which sits at the edge of our vision. A peculiar light which illuminates the future, colours the pictures of our memories. This might be human or mystical or else just something out in the wild, but we would do better if only we looked for it. Even if it can never really offer a satisfactory answer to whatever afflictions we’re called to bear. “I know you never believed / And me not in a long while,” as Dollbaum sings on opener ‘Visitation’, a fitting conclusion if you view the album as a cycle in itself. “But the older I get, the more I do magical thinking / About how the birds ride out on the sky / How the echoes hang out in the wind / How them ghosts are here in the light/ But you cant talk to any of them.”

Birds of Paradise is out now via Dear Life Records and available from the Thomas Dollbaum Bandcamp page.

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

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