Though the songs were written in 2021, it wasn’t until later Costolo felt in a position to record them, and some of this frustration and unease works its way into the very sound. The sense of the ground being unstable beneath you, of being unable to rely on anything to take your weight. But with Tom Morris (Swim Camp) joining on drums, Costolo embraced these feelings and ushered in a new stage of the Ghost Fan Club project. One which didn’t look to solve the things holding it back but instead understand them as key components to its artistic process. Songwriting not as a method of escape from dark emotions but a canvas upon which they might be laid out and examined from a new perspective.

New single ‘Now and Then’ pushes further into these emotions. Brighter in tone than the previous single, the song is nevertheless caught within a mournful air. But in keeping with the spirit of the release, the sound is more than Ghost Fan Club bemoaning present circumstances. “I’m tired of hearing it’ll get better,” as Costolo sings “And maybe one day I’ll look back at all this and laugh.” As though to commit to the optimism of change is to in some deny a part of yourself. To render the present as a kind of meaningless void. A sentiment, it bears pointing out, which differs from fatalism. Because a life predicated entirely on some future transformation is not a life at all. Why not instead embrace the present on its own terms, at least for now?

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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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With a soft and cautious style, the [release] tiptoes forward with something between bummed out slacker stillness and a kind of weighted trepidation, as sad and scared and bored as any spirit unable to pass on. But the ghost here is still very much living, the life slipping past before his eyes very much his own. The goal is not the bright afterlife but a far duller paradise—a sense of contentment, comfort in one’s own skin. The feeling that, yes, you really are living, right here and right now.

Last month saw Ghost Fan Club return with brand new single that continues these ideas. As the title suggests, ‘Crutch’ deals with the limbo of coping mechanisms, the thoughts and actions imposed to get one through the day that might also prove a hindrance in conquering the real problem. Costolo captures this with a slow and reluctant style, following the likes of Told Slant in the way the delivery feels at once rhetorical and not. “Why am I like this?” the lyrics asks, not expecting an answer but hoping for one all the same.

Everything is scary
I don’t want to move on
What does the end mean
Am I too far gone

Why am I like this
Inside these walls
I’ll stay safe
The crutch that holds me up

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Though Costolo is pushing the Two Meters sound increasingly into metal territory, he wanted to preserve a space to continue a more restrained, emo-inflected bedroom style. Hence Ghost Fan Club, a brand new project that will serve as an outlet for the softer side of things.

If you were wondering about the choice of name, then introductory single ‘Passing Through’ gives a good indication. With a soft and cautious style, the track tiptoes forward with something between bummed out slacker stillness and a kind of weighted trepidation, as sad and scared and bored as any spirit unable to pass on. But the ghost here is still very much living, the life slipping past before his eyes very much his own. The goal is not the bright afterlife but a far duller paradise—a sense of contentment, comfort in one’s own skin. The feeling that, yes, you really are living, right here and right now.

Another morning
6 am just falling asleep
Birds outside remind me
Of what I’ve always known
I’m not living I’m just passing through

Losing days faster now
Will time ever slow down

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