Combining the sensibilities of lo-fi rock and slow burn country rock, Vermont‘s A Box of Stars have made a name re-examining life’s small moments in search of their weight and meaning. Single ‘Jenny When the Blues’ is the perfect introduction for the uninitiated, a tender, near-whispered folk duet which blooms into life across its runtime, drawing the listener through a seemingly ordinary moment to reveal the depth beneath the surface.

‘Jenny When the Blues’ is out now. Find A Box of Stars in all the usual places.

Cooper Wolken – Hold Me Under

Back in March we premiered ‘So Down‘, the lead single from Cooper Wolken‘s new album Chapters on Earth Libraries. “The album sees Cooper Wolken apply such observations to his personal life,” as we explained, “mining the fine details to illuminate the fundamental truths at the core of his experiences, no matter how vulnerable this might make him.” The album has now been released, and latest single ‘Hold Me Under’ continues this introspective, unguarded mood. A song which combines shimmering textures with an urgent edge, Wolken again pacing out into the woods of his childhood and finding something sacred there.

I left those woods behind my home
The place where I first heard your song
Then I saw your face, unexpected place
If we meet again, if we meet again
If we meet you can

Hold me under holy water

Chapters is out now via Earth Libraries.

Graves – Cavin’ In

Last month we introduced Gary Owens: I Have Some Thoughts, the upcoming album by Graves on Perpetual Doom and Curly Cassettes, with single Little ‘Dumb Dogs’. The song highlighted how the album represents “a throwback to Nashville’s golden age, loaded with a sense of bittersweet nostalgia and a wry humour that brings new vigour to a timeless style.” Latest track ‘Cavin’ In’ continues the vibe, what the label describes as an “upbeat downer” which evokes the bygone simplicity of the previous age while offering a self-deprecating melancholy too, utilizing this style to explore age old themes of regret and mortality.

Olivia Reid – Central Park West

Following 2021 debut Earth Water, Olivia Reid is releasing a series of new songs this year, and latest ‘Central Park West’ highlights the careful arrangements and emotional depth which marks her work. Written after the passing of her aunt and uncle, the track is an effort to preserve specific memories of times shared, its mourning leavened by an overriding gratitude. Because though illness altered and ultimately ended the walks in Central Park Reid would share with her family, she makes a point of choosing to cherish what they shared rather than lament what is lost.

Paper Lady – Swan Song

The esoteric Allston, Massachusetts project Paper Lady has won our attention on several occasions in recent months, from the dense shoegaze spiritualism of ‘Five of Swords‘ to the excoriating romance-gone-bad ‘Starcross‘, the latter “burn[ing] with what could be spurned fury or frustrated embarrassment,” as we put it, “building nonetheless into with unerring intensity of an ancient curse.” Ahead of new EP Traveling Exploding Star, latest single ‘Swan Song’ sands down the sharpest edges of the previous tracks yet loses none of the intensity, building from smouldering beginnings into an all-out blaze, the sound’s sluggish melancholy transcended in a final moment of release.

Traveling Exploding Star is out now and available via streaming services.

Puppy Angst – TKO

Lead vocalist and guitarist Alyssa Milman (Past Life, Blushed), Puppy Angst is a Philly-based outfit which draws upon everything from dream and power pop to shoegaze to capture life’s contradictions. Hence the PA sound embraces raw energy and dreamy hazy, and Milman’s writing is happy to explore vulnerability and strength within the same song. Released via Fire Talk‘s digital singles imprint Open Tab, new single ‘TKO’ is an encapsulation of the sound, its momentum possessing a cathartic empowerment even as the vocals announce their fatalistic conclusions.

Maybe I’m a masochist
I’ll put you first if you insist
Baby I’m a pacifist
Don’t wanna fight so I let you win
I let you win

‘TKO’ is out now and available from the Puppy Angst Bandcamp page.

Rival Consoles – Coda

Back in October we wrote about Now Is, an album by London-based musician and producer Ryan Lee West’s Rival Consoles on Erased Tapes. A record which “sets out to explore the full spectrum of minimalism and the moods which can result,” as we explained, “from anxious isolation to playful curiosity and everything in between.” New single ‘Coda’ is equally ambitious in its reach, looking to portray the duality of the nocturnal environment through haunting quiet and pulsing energy. What results is a soundtrack for the spectrum of night, from the still darkness of an empty room to the house clubs glittering on across the city.

Wombo – Thread

We’ve covered Wombo a number of times in recent years, culminating in last year’s full-length Fairy Rust on Fire Talk Records. A released we described as “a collection of songs which explores the contemporary preoccupation with the unreal.” This month sees Wombo return with Slab, an EP which looks to harness the outfit’s instinctive creativity, favouring immediacy over perfection with stylistic freedom and scratch take guitar. Single ‘Thread’ hints at the result—a picture of a band in constant motion, always looking to challenge themselves with new directions while nevertheless growing increasingly assured upon the ground they’ve made their own. Watch the video directed by Wombo’s own Cameron Low below:

Slab is out now via Fire Talk Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.

Yvonne Hercules – Phoenix

Based in Cambridge, Yvonne Hercules is a singer-songwriter whose work draws on the rich lineages of folk, Blues and soul, tying them together with a contemporary twist. Last week she released Olive, a brand new EP on Trapped Animal Records, a collection of songs which “celebrate the strength of Black Women and the ability to rise up and overcome adversity” and fully captures her rich and varied style. Closing track ‘Phoenix’ is perhaps the standout, a soulful, quietly epic ode to Hercules’s mother and her resilience and compassion in the face of adversity.

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Described as a song “about having the capacity to love different people (friends, partners, etc) in different ways, using a lot of silly car and public transit metaphors along the way,” ‘Something Like a Honda Odyssey’ is the latest single from Cambridge, Massachusetts artist Banti Gheneti, AKA Banti Buli. The track emerges with all the heart and playfulness this description suggests, with a languid rhythm ticking over below Gheneti’s verbose vocal style, refusing to commit fully to irony or sincerity, instead hovering in the ambiguous middle ground. As though a song about relationships couldn’t really function without equal doses of heartfelt emotion and tongue-in-cheek humour.

My love is no tesla model e
It’s something like a honda odyssey
Don’t worry though, it’ll play nice with a model e
If that’s how you want things to be
So let me know what you think
Any takers out there?

Gorgeous – Raindrop

Gorgeous are a “frenetic yet friendly” noise pop duo from New York, comprising of Dana Lipperman (guitar and vocals) and Judd Anderman (drums). Next month they will release their sophomore album, Sapsucker, via Sad Cactus Records, which promises to develop the band’s dynamic signature blend of fractured rhythms, cynical lyricism and sweet and sour melodies. The record features songs about everything from “technological dread,” to “literal and figurative monsters, liars, dreamers, and true believers,” and lead single ‘Raindrop’ drops us in the deep end. “Our bones are made of cosmic dust,” Lipperman sings over jerky clockwork percussion before the track slams into life, “exploded stars, we’ve come apart.” Strange, unpredictable and gloriously noisy. What’s not to love?

Graves – Little Dumb Dogs

California-based Greg Olin has been releasing music under the Graves alias for almost two decades. On his next release, Gary Owens: I Have Some Thoughts, which comes out late June via Perpetual Doom and Curly Cassettes, he adopts a new name as a kind of Country music alter-ego. The album’s sixteen songs are a throwback to Nashville’s golden age, loaded with a sense of bittersweet nostalgia and a wry humour that brings new vigour to a timeless style. As Perpetual Doom put it, “[they] sway with the moonstruck sweetness of classic country, blending the sounds of golden age AM radio with a laidback West Count vibe.” Lead single ‘Little Dumb Dogs’ is a good introduction, its laidback atmosphere and gently cutting lyrics (“If little dumb dogs and the finest of drugs don’t kill you / and a smile from a child and walking down the aisle don’t thrill you”) capturing the album’s essence in less than two minutes.

Gary Owens: I Have Some Thoughts will be released on 30th June. Pre-order it rom the Perpetual Doom Bandcamp page.

The High Water Marks – American Candy

Led by Hilarie Sidney, founding member of the revered Elephant Six Recording Company and flagship band The Apples In Stereo, The High Water Marks are making their third ‘comeback’ this summer, with album Your Next Wolf coming very Minty Fresh. Based between Lexington, Kentucky and Grøa, Norway, the outfit had never played in the same room before opening for Pavement in Oslo is 2022, and the new record is their first recorded together and in-person. If latest single ‘American Candy’ is anything to go by, the set-up was conducive to the band’s creative energies, kicking along with an infectious momentum, capturing all the addictive sweet and sour overtones of its namesake and drenched in fuzz for good measure.

Lauren O’Connell – Joangeline

‘Joangeline’, the latest single from LA-based multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Lauren O’Connell, is a song of strength and vulnerability. “I saw me there in the half light / As shapeless there as the dawn,” they sing near the beginning of, a tenderness juxtaposed by tangible weight of the the drums. “And every promise it brings / Dying to feel even half right.” What quickly becomes apparent is that the source of the fragility is not any sense of uncertainty or hesitation, rather the inherent sensitivity of exposing core truths. Shedding outer armour as an act of defiance, deciding to be open no matter how much pain this might invite.

And all I wanted to know
All I wanted to know
Who would want me
The way I want you

Drag me out, baby
Drag me out, baby I’m in it now

Leeann Skoda – Little Star

With EP Living Room Sessions out later this month, Leeann Skoda has unveiled the slow-burning ‘Little Star’ by way of introduction. Emerging from the “familial Americana scene” of LA’s The Grand Ole Echo, and recorded with on one afternoon in the living room of Malachi DeLorenzo (Langhorne Slim, Izaak Opatz), the release is one built around an authentic folk spirit, and the single embraces the style with its lush, intimate warmth. A track stripped of all excesses, standing instead on its own simplicity, like some lullaby which has been crafted through years of repetition into a perfect state of function.

Living Room Sessions will be released on 26th May and is available via the Leeann Skoda Bandcamp page.

Paper Lady – Starcross

Back in January we introduced Paper Lady, an “immortal crone” brought to life by Allston’s Alli Raina and company in a kind of musical ritual. Previous single ‘Five of Swords‘ saw the project push their spiritualism out into noisier, shoegaze territory, and new single ‘Starcross’ continues the path with gauzy textures and a pummelling momentum. Described as “a scathing account of an almost-romance with a farmer gone awry,” the song burns with what could be spurned fury or frustrated embarrassment, building nonetheless into with unerring intensity of an ancient curse.

You feel it
Logic overrun
Conceal it
What else is there to be done

‘Starcross’ is out now and available via streaming services.

Ruth Radelet – Leaving the Table

Though best known as the front of synth pop stars Chromatics, Ruth Radelet has recently turned toward solo music as a means of exploring dimensions perhaps neglected in her work thus far. The Other Side EP confronted classic themes of love, loss and renewal after a traumatic period, with songs like ‘Crimes’ retaining the vivid Chromatics sound while those such as ‘Strangers’ allowed Radelet to break new ground with its almost orchestral pop tones. Ruth Radelet’s latest single, a take on Leonard Cohen’s ‘Leaving the Table’, straddles the fence between pop and folk, with the timeless vocals and echoing melancholy adding a dash of Julee Cruise to Cohen’s classic.

‘Leaving the Table’ is out now and available from the Ruth Radelet Bandcamp page.

Symbol Soup – Airglow

Writing of previous single ‘Overdressed‘, we described Symbol Soup (AKA London‘s Michael Rea) as a combination of “classic British folk charm with something rather more American, including faint notes of country and a couple of spoonfuls of Alex G-style lo-fi indie rock.” Latest track ‘Airglow’, again on Sad Club Records, continues the arrangement, the intimate sensibilities of bedroom pop polished with a golden psych-folk sheen, resulting in a sound able to evoke the slow hours of a summer afternoon without sanding down the snags and edges beneath the surface. The sound plays into the themes too, with Rea offering a take on the information overload of the internet age, though subverting its usual framing to instead present it on more grounded terms. So there’s no dystopian chill here, just a willingness to float above the sea of data and embrace peaceful ignorance instead.

‘Airglow’ is out now via Sad Club Records and available via the Symbol Soup Bandcamp.

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