San Diego-based songwriter Bella Cloud sits somewhere between contemporaries like Phoebe Bridgers and Merce Lemon, grafting pop and shoegaze sensibilities onto an indie folk style to create something both emotionally charged and richly immersive. With new EP The Limerence on the horizon, Cloud has shared new single ‘The Littlest Death’, and the track is the ideal entry point for newcomers. Spencer Dugan (guitar), Jeremy Field (viola) and Rebecca Sykes (drums) lend their talents too, helping to create a sound vivid enough to match the sense of reflection and longing which runs through the vocals.

The Limerent is coming soon and you can find Bella Cloud in the usual places.

Green Gardens – Year of Love

“Combining swaying, laidback harmonies with fuzzy guitars and an almost Medieval preoccupation with heavy themes and gothic imagery.” That’s how we depicted the work of Leeds outfit Green Gardens when writing of their album This Is Not Your Fault back in 2023. The self-described feudal post-rock outfit are back with new single ‘Years of Love’ with Tiny Library Records, a song which both continues this style and makes certain alterations, swapping out some of the grand scale in favour of increased intimacy. “’Year of Love’ is a step away from the live room,” the band explain. “The guitars and drums suddenly felt too far away, so we brought them and the small room where we recorded them right in to our ears. It’s about the dogs, and it’s about the flies, and it’s about the trees. I’m happy this song is out while the winter closes, and those things grow again.”

Helena Deland – Silver and Red / Bigger Pieces

“When I finished recording what I thought would be my first album, I was faced with a miscellaneous bunch of songs,” describes Montreal singer songwriter Helena Deland. “Instead of wiggling them into the expected format, I released them as a series of short EPs called Altogether Unaccompanied.” Several years since the previous instalments, Deland has released the fifth volume of Altogether Unaccompanied, two songs that very much deserve to see the light of day. ‘Silver and Red’ is wan and wintry, a lo-fi acoustic track that put’s Deland’s vocals at the forefront, while ‘Bigger Pieces’ fleshes things out with contributions from Alexandre Larin (guitar), Francis Ledoux (percussion) and Cédric Martel (bass). Check out Nik Arthur’s video for ‘Silver and Red’ and listen to ‘Bigger Pieces’ below:

Altogether Unaccompanied, Vol. V is out now via the Helena Deland Bandcamp page.

Joni – Things I Left Behind

Having spent the best part of a decade writing songs for other people in New York and Los Angeles, a move to London, a difficult break up and feelings of pandemic-based isolation pushed Joni back to making music of her own. In April she releases Things I Left Behind, her debut LP, via Keeled Scales and Hand in Hive, a collection of ten songs that look backwards in order to move forwards. The latest single and title track is a good example, exploring life’s ever shifting nature via those pieces of oneself cast overboard in the name of pressing on ahead.

Lavender Blue – Scarlet Blood

Next month sees the release of The In Between, the new album from Asheville, NC artist Lavender Blue on Ghost Mountain Records. Previous single ‘Wishbone’ offered what we described as “a sound that owes as much to emo as it does folk or dream pop, combining sharp and smooth textures to evoke the duality at the track’s heart,” and though latest offering ‘Scarlet Blood’ opens with a far more restrained, acoustic style, it sacrifices none of the emotional intensity. For while the initial mood is one of numbness and stasis, but the sensation is not lasting. Instead Kayla Zuskin and co. push through to something more keenly felt, and the track settles into a kind of ebb and flow between subdued quiet and rising intensity, accepting such patterns as the natural state of things. As the repeated refrain goes: “What goes around comes back again.”

MAN LEE – Wind

Back in October we wrote about MAN LEE, the recording project of Brooklyn-based duo Sam Reichman and Tim Lee, as single ‘Best Ones’ tapping into the pair’s close-knit connection to evoke “the sense of solidarity between close friends after a challenging break-up with something between open compassion, droll humour and languid cool.” With full-length album Hefty Wimpy coming next month, new single ‘Wind’ offers another look at the distinctive personality of the MAN LEE sound. A nostalgically fuzzy track which reflects on the formative events of life, resisting the urge to revaluate memories with the new perspective of later years to instead inhabit the magic and mystery of the original moment.

Meagre Martin – Comfort Food

We’ve mentioned Up To Snuff, the new EP from Berlin-based project Meagre Martin, several times in recent months. Single ‘Frankie‘ “pair[ed] gauzy shoegaze textures with a persistent rhythm…embrac[ing] a bright spirit of playfulness and curiosity” and ‘In The Room‘ used a “slow, sludgy style to take on the cloying weight of toxic masculinity, opening up a space in which such forces can be acknowledged and confronted once and for all.” With the EP out now via Mansions and Millions, the outfit is back with final single ‘Comfort Food’. It’s the release’s closing track, which puts a peppy, affirming rhythm behind what might otherwise be a wistful sound, powering through the daunting or melancholic aspects of change with a sense of sheer motion, emerging on the other side with something like positivity.

Moontype – Long Country

Led by singer and bassist Margaret McCarthy, Chicago indie rock outfit Moontype won acclaim with their debut full-length Bodies of Water back in 2021, a record which felt like the final painting after the series of sketch-like releases (like ‘The Great Ohio / Not That Easy‘) which preceded it. But if Bodies of Water was the culmination of something, it was not the Moontype project in its entirety but merely one iteration of it. Now it appears a new cycle is beginning, the outfit signing to Orindal Records and unveiling new single ‘Long Country’. The first taste of the fruits of a new gestation period in which McCarthy has both altered the line-up and grown as a songwriter and musician, and a kind of stepping stone between the old version and the new. “I would never leave you without saying goodbye,” as McCarthy sings in the opening line, but every farewell leads to new beginnings.

Watch the video directed and edited by Ian Kelly below:

‘Long Country’ is out now via Orindal Records and available via Bandcamp.

Pink Must – Karaoke of the Bends

“Establishes an interplay between polish and dissonance, as well as an often wryly sardonic vocal style and conscious resistance to easy labelling at every turn.” That’s how we introduced the self-titled album from Brooklyn-based duo Pink Must back in January, with single ‘Morphe Sun’ embodying the ambitious and idiosyncratic vision Mari Rubio (More Eaze) and Lynn Avery bring to the life via the project. With the album coming later this month on Copenhagen label 15 Love, Pink Must have released new single ‘Karaoke of the Bends’. The song highlights both the strange and heartfelt dimensions of the the record, and is unique for being the only track on the record where Avery takes over vocal duties. “It’s that kind of corny ‘I know I’ll see you soon, but I want to see you tonight’ feeling,” they explain, “and doing karaoke of songs from The Bends by Radiohead.”

TOM LARK – Rock & Roll Baby

The recording project of New Zealand songwriter Shannon Fowler, Tom Lark is preparing to release new full-length Moonlight Hotel this spring. An album which spans almost a hundred years to link two experiences of displacement in the wake of natural disasters—that of Shannon’s family after the 1929 earthquake in the pioneer town of Murchison on the South Island, and his own in 2011 following the earthquakes which struck Ōtautahi. Latest single ‘Rock & Roll Baby’ embraces a psych-inflected folk rock sound to lean into the volatility inherent with such themes, facing down the peaks and troughs of life with an easygoing acceptance.

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Well it’s not yet September and the duo are back, this time with an album that was written and recorded in a far more intimate setting. Drone and Hum represents a landmark for Old Amica as it is in fact the very first record they have made while spatially and temporally together. After completing Fabula in the springtime, the pair decided to meet and play some music together. So they gathered all of the instruments they could find, set up a microphone in the middle of the room and began creating. A few days later, this lovely EP was finished.

The band then sent the new songs to Swedish filmmaker Jonas Börjesson, who wasted no time in creating the beautiful video for ‘Joni’ which you can see in the player below:

Old Amica – Joni from Jonas Börjesson on Vimeo.

We were lucky enough to get a sneak peek at the rest of the EP, and I’m pleased to say that the other songs are just as good. I was unsure when the band said that the record would be largely instrumental, but this is a worthy companion to their previous releases. In fact, it is the second amazingly beautiful instrumental album I have featured this week (see also Lejsovka & Freund’s Mold On Canvas)

Drone and Hum is due for release on a pay-what-you-want basis on the 5th of September. Check back at their Bandcamp page on release day.

P.S. If you’re not familiar with Old Amica’s previous releases, then do yourself a favour and remedy that fact. Start with The Burning Dot Part I, then The Burning Dot Part II and finally Fabula.

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