Having now signed with Winspear, Awning have returned with ‘Little Green Book’, their first new music since since their debut, which builds upon the foundations it set out. Again spontaneity feels like a big part of the track, as Dimick pairs soft pop textures with sharp post-punk edges. The bittersweet result is marked with a twitchy energy that feels reflexive in an almost literal sense, as though we’re listening to the track unspooling before us for the very first time. The song is “cryptic in its lyrical imagery,” Dimick expands. “I like the way children write poetry. This song is about taking the perspective of my childhood self from a lyrical space and watching someone struggle with grief. But this is not necessarily for the audience to understand. They can pull what they want from it.”

Watch the video directed and edited by Damin McCabe below:

‘Little Green Book’ is out now via Winspear and available from the Awning Bandcamp page.

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But as the title suggested, BAPTIZED I was just the beginning, and now JoJo Worthington is returning with the second part, BAPTIZED II, before eventually releasing a full-length album ARMOUR OF GOD which will collect tracks from both of its predecessors alongside new material. Our first taste of this next chapter is ‘Ever Ender Star Infinity’, a brand new single which not only continues the narrative started back in 2022 but shows a clear evolution in Worthington’s cinematic style of indie rock. Turning its attention to the heavens, the track mines everything from Magic: The Gathering to astrophysics to synthesise its own spirituality, not least the latter’s idea that we consist of stardust which dates right back to the Big Bang. The sound itself rises as though in response to such grand imagery, offering a widescreen richness which only furthers the drama of the song, and allows celestial magic to once again colour reality.

mysteries and fables
I still believe
you say there’s a good star watching over me

I sit with the meaning
I let it bloom
I want to know you
do you want to know me too

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Now Slow Down Molasses have shared single ‘Life Without Buildings’, their first original material since Minor Deaths and a clear indication of what to expect from subsequent releases. With Hüsker Dü and Archers of Loaf as lodestars, the song offers a sound at once momentous and rambunctious, leaning into a chaotic energy and emerging triumphant because of it. But supporting vocals by Erica, Julie and Lenore Maier (of The Garrys) deepen the track and expand its thematic resonance, existing in something like opposition to the forward motion. Like the figurative common sense amid the hectic clatter and bang, trying to hold things together in case the whole thing comes crashing down.

The resulting conflict is fitting considering the song’s concerns, detailing the experiences of a touring band in the 2020s, where urgent progress might not so much conquer concerns as drown them out beneath the rush. “I feel sometimes that being in a band and on tour, it’s easy to get lost in the minute to minute importance of getting to the next show, playing the next song, finishing that last lyric, or finding that perfect arrangement that keeps us excited and moving forward,” explains lead Tyson McShane. “Then the next thing you know you come up for air, look around and realize you aren’t certain where you are or how you ended up there. Lyrically this song tries to capture that feeling. Particularly the last few years coming out of some of our most successful UK and European tours, trying to figure out the post-pandemic music industry and where we fit in, it took a bit to get back to releasing music, so it feels appropriate as the first of our new songs to be shared.”

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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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Eliza Edens has now announced brand new album Death Drive, and the title track suggests the record continues this newfound style, tackling difficult themes with unabashed brightness and even wry humour. As you might expect, the idea is informed by the Freudian concept of the title, Edens finding fertile ground in the fact that brushes with death (be they physical or psychic, from childhood ski accidents, digital breakups during lockdown, or their mother’s experience with dementia) bring a greater appreciation of life. So while there might be a certain recklessness to the abandon with which Edens faces this new era, it is all part of deeper pact to seize the moment while it is still present. A joyous, if slightly dangerous, celebration of being alive.

When I was a kid I crushed a rib while skiin’
Dad said I’m glad you didn’t die
Maybe I was flirtin’ with the limit but baby that’s how you win it
Wanna get tangled up
I wanna love my death drive

Watch the video below, directed by Edens themselves with Mod Schwalbe (DP), Michelle Hanks (editing and colour) and Elena Foraker (title design):

Death Drive will be released on the 30rd October via First City Artists and you can pre-order it now.

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After the title track introduced the tone of the EP, King’s Evil are now back with latest single ‘Private Failure’. Like much of the EP, the track is hewn from golden era indie rock, with K Records and Slumberland clear touchstones, as well as Berman, Guided By Voices and The Glands, though to list comparisons is to risk clouding the real triumph of the release. Because King’s Evil is an EP all about recombination, taking the sensibilities of its two principle songwriters and the acts which have come to inform them and assembling the constituent parts into something new. On ‘Private Failure’, the result is a succinct yet potent confession, a song which does not lack energy but seems to linger in the same space, like a message delivered from a chopper hovering low over your old house.

Art by Sami Martasian, layout by J Kimball

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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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With Punisher coming this September, Sweetbreads are back with brand new single ‘Open Mic’, and the song very much continues this struggle between hope and disallusionment. As the title suggests, this time the focus is on the artistic pursuit, and how a desire to create can often seem insignificant or futile amid the distracted present. “I was sitting in this dingy dive bar waiting hours for my turn to play one song amongst a sea of people who were there for the same reason,” Stolpp explains. “I felt kind of pathetic and self-involved chasing what seemed like a dying dream.” But more than a voicing of frustration, ‘Open Mic’ pushes deeper to meditate on the emotions underlying ambition and disappointment, and how we might show up for one another in order to better navigate the bumpy road.

Punisher will be released on the 25th September. ‘Open Mic’ is available from the usual places.

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The release of As Far As The Eye Can See is fast approaching, and Van Chamberlain are back with brand new track ‘Fantasy TBD’ to keep the momentum going. What might be the band’s most propulsive single to date, the song grapples with the long tail of a break-up, attempting to break free from the spell of a relationship that won’t quite let you go. “We felt like a song about breaking free needed to literally sound like breaking free, so we turned the ’67 Vibrolux up to ten and let the breakup of the amp reflect the breakup in the lyrics,” Chamberlain explains. “This might be the loudest song off the new record, and it also might be the most cathartic.”

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