Back in March we introduced the self-titled debut EP from beaming, the new project of Derek Ted and Braden Lawrence, sharing single ‘slow sinkin’. “With Field Medic adding guest vocals, the track possesses all of the earnestness fans of Ted and Lawrence’s solo work will know well,” we wrote, “the bright rhythm and heartfelt tone the sonic equivalent of shaking clarity into a clouded mind.” With the EP out now via Rose Garden, beaming have unveiled new single ‘4U’. “This song is about falling in love and needing to confess how you feel,” Ted explains. “We wanted it to live in a space between glitchy digital sounds and acoustic moments. The chorus is meant to feel like an avalanche of relief—like everything just opens up once you finally say what’s been on your mind.” Watch the video directed by Olivia Alonso Gough and edited along with Braden Lawrence below:

Beaming EP is out now via Rose Garden and you can buy it now.

Don’t Worry – This Time

We’ve been building up to the release of Don’t Worry‘s new album Idealism in recent months, sharing a number of singles which suggest the record will find the Essex punks exploring new sonic ground while furthering their signature blend of sincerity and playfulness. Taking inspiration of the 90s/00s alt golden age, latest single ‘This Time’ sees the outfit reach towards the likes of Smashing Pumpkins in its sense of scale and weight. The result is as cathartic as anything in the Don’t Worry catalogue to date. “‘This Time’ is a song about learning from bad experiences and making sure you don’t make the same mistakes again,” explains songwriter Ronan Van Kehoe. “It’s about growing as a person and coming out of a rough period into a better time.”

DUG – Livelong Day

Having signed to legendary Irish label Claddagh Records, folk duo DUG have shared a new single ‘Livelong Day’ in preparation for their much anticipated debut full-length. Comprised of Jonny Pickett and Lorkin O’Reilly, the project has quickly risen to prominence in the contemporary folk scene, seeing them earn two Grammy nominations and support slots for the likes of Willie Carlisle and Iron & Wine. Though the new track offers a glimpse at a so far unseen darker dimension of DUG, it is easy to see why they have earned such acclaim. A reimagining of the old folk tale ‘The Legend of Knockgrafton’, the song finds its protagonist sobering up amid a drunken dance in a faerie ring. And while the tone might be slightly heavier than previous tracks, it is one nevertheless leavened by its playful spirit.

‘Livelong Day’ is out now via Claddagh Records.

Kaycie Satterfield – ford falcon

Following on from 2024 album Rosie, a release with Earth Libraries we described as “a record which sets out to explore large themes through a personal lens,” Los Angeles-based multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter Kaycie Satterfield is back with brand new single, ‘ford falcon’. A song full of attitude and honest truths which faces down the expectations placed upon women with a mix of sardonic humour and steely defiance. “I’m not your fucking mother,” as Satterfield says in the opening lines. “I can’t come tuck you in.” She’s not your daughter either, nor your lover, just a woman in the same room. And she’s here to make sure you realise the fact, even if it is the last thing you do.

kissing other ppl – Ashes of American Flags

Last month we introduced the self-titled covers record from kissing other ppl, the new project that brings together folk duo Viv & Riley and singer songwriter Rachel Baiman. The lead single was a take on Dr Dog’s ‘Where’d all The Time Go’, adding a timeless folk style to the original, and now the trio are back with their version of Wilco classic ‘Ashes of American Flags’. It’s illustrative of the outfit’s experimental sense of collaboration, as Viv jumps behind the drum kit to play a “no holds barred snare smash,” while Riley adds distorted fiddle and Baiman gives her all with the vocals. Altogether, it’s a worthy homage to the original, which is no mean feat. “Growing up in Chicago, Wilco were royalty,” Baiman describes of the source material. “The line at the end about fallen leaves in shopping bags brings up such strong childhood imagery for me.”

kissing other ppl is available now from Bandcamp.

Old Man of the Woods – Meditation

“With a languorous, enveloping sound, again the mood is undeniably ghostly, though its eeriness carries not so much fright or unease as a sense of possibility,” we wrote of ‘Amber‘ from the new Old Man of the Woods full-length Tendrils last month. “As though in connecting the long-dawned past with a gesture towards the future, [Miranda] Elliott invites us to consider just how interconnected the stages of so-called linear time might be.” With the album now out, Elliott has shared latest single ‘Meditation’, a self-described  “breathy, minimal ritual” which performs its own form of transubstantiation, taking a desire which might otherwise appear absurd and changing it into something charged and devotional. Built on strangely hypnotic percussion that wobbles and clatters throughout, it’s almost a dance track, but Elliott’s vocals remain ethereal as ever, drifting in and out like curtains of mist.

Rebecca Schiffman – Bubble of Love

“The record sees the LA-based songwriter grapple with what it means to live a moral life within a society that can appear hellbent on compromising our personal values.” So we wrote of Before the Future, the new album from Rebecca Schiffman coming later this summer with Lost Sound Tapes. No stone is left unturned across the songs, with everything from motherhood, grief, family vacations and the ethics of the pet-owner relationship explored. Latest single ‘Bubble of Love’ employs a peppy rhythm and sweet vocals to turn its attention to the familiar arc of romantic love. The song “traces a relationship from the honeymoon phase when you could spend all your time with someone and anything is possible,” as Schiffman explains, “to a time when it feels claustrophobic and you want to pop the bubble.”

Watch the video by Renata Zeiguer below:

Before the Future will be released on the 25th July, including a cassette via Lost Sound Tapes, and you can pre-order it now.

Snake Orange Cake – Stitch

When covering the work of Berlin-based artist Julia Carlsson in the past, it has been for leoblu, a project we’ve described as making “ambiguous and atmospheric music which situates intimate emotion against the more mysterious forces at work around us.” But now Carlsson has branched out towards a new sound, and has thus adopted a brand new moniker. Snake Orange Cake sees Carlsson elevate her experimental electronic style with spoken-word poetry and extra narrative thrust. The first tase of a forthcoming EP, new single ‘Stitch’ offers a glimpse of the invention and playfulness which underpins the new project, weaving a detailed, rhythmic sound over which Carlsson’s spoken vocals play with disarming closeness.

Star Moles – Fate

“The oeuvre is a lesson in the potential of bedroom pop, refusing to settle for genre conventions to push the style in new directions.” So we wrote of the work of Emily Moales’s Star Moles back in May, describing how single ‘Key Change’ embodied Moales’s “growing boredom with idealised romance of polished pop, choosing to instead get its hands dirty and dig into the messy guts of what love really means.” Now Star Moles has announced full-length album Snack Monster, coming later this summer on Earth Libraries, and opener and latest single ‘Fate’ serves as a mission statement for the release. A song which looks to address contemporary neuroses via traditional styles, looking to break free from the strictures of established narratives and reclaim agency from the impression of predetermination.

Xol Meissner – Hunt [97]

The recording alias of Swiss-born, NYC-based composer Mauro Hertig, Xol Meissner pairs baritone vocals with a singular hammered lap-steel style to create soundscapes as evocative as they are otherworldly. New album Excess of Loss might be Hertig’s debut under this moniker but arrives fully formed, each track functioning with the eerie, unnerving logic of a dream. Take single ‘Hunt [97]’, a song sedate in rhythm, drifting within its own textured arrangement, yet shot through with imagery both violent and strange. “Open field vision / we access the graveyards / ancestors aim / at the holes in our hearts,” he sings in one such typically striking verse. Or elsewhere: “The bodies pile up / to a sculpture of justice / fathers are holding / the hands of their sons.” The result is mythic. Oddly timeless yet sonically unique. Weighted with a meaning slightly beyond our understanding. Something which lingers at the edges of our reality. Alluring, terrifying and sublime.

Watch the video by Camille Henrot (director), Ben Scofield (director of photography and colourist), Mauro Hertig, Camille Henrot (editors), Marie-Christine Statz and Gauchère (costume) below:

Excess of Loss is out now and available from Bandcamp.

The post Weekly Listening: June 2025 #3 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Folks songs which “explore ideas of home, family and memory within the context of the queer experience” was how we described the work of Bad Posture Club back in 2022 when writing about single ‘My Good My Sweet My Bright‘. Consisting of duo Maren Day and Morgan Kavanagh, the project uses a timeless, sincere folk style to bring such themes to life, and new album Affinity, coming this summer on Ghost Mountain Records, looks to develop this further. The lead single and title track offers the first glimpse into the release. A considered, spare song which nevertheless glows with a modest yet persistent warmth. “No such thing as an excess of gentleness,” goes the instructive opening line, “at least not for me.”

Bonniesongs – Olive Oil

“Olive oil is good for me / Nourishing deep within my skin / Fills me up with vitamins / Makes me feel so comforted.” So sings Irish-born, Australian-based multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Bonnie Stewart, AKA Bonniesongs, on new single ‘Olive Oil’. The latest single from Strangest Feeling, the new Bonniesongs LP forthcoming this summer on Impressed Recordings, the song introduces the record’s sense of nuance. It blends warm dream pop with something weightier and strange, all delivered with a playful spirit. “I wrote ‘Olive Oil’ while visiting Wellington, New Zealand. I had recently started a game with friends where we list our top five favourite things,” Stewart explains. “Olive oil, ocean, sunshine are some things that bring me joy. I wanted a happy, light-hearted song.” And while light-hearted the song might be, it is anything but twee, the Bonniesongs sound far more ambitious and conflicting to fall into such a trap.

Watch the video directed by Shadow Cut Films and Stewart herself below:

Strangest Feeling will be released on the 25th July via Impressed Recordings.

Chrome Harvest – Hex Whoever

Originating as project between Chris Jerwin (guitar, piano, vocals) and Ben Wellman (banjo, guitar, vocals) and later expanding into more of a collective, Chrome Harvest is a Lethbridge, Alberta-based band which sits at the experimental end of indie rock. After winning praise with 2023 debut Sun-Circuit, Chrome Harvest have recently released a self-titled follow-up, Evan Brownlee (drums, percussion), Keilan Hakstol (drums, percussion), Connor McGinnis (bass), Ray Wong (saxophone) and Cori Campbell (saxophone) joining the fold to push the project further. Standout ‘Hex Whoever’ hints at both the richness of the resulting sound and its emotional resonance, unfurling as a raggedy, quivering folk song before blooming into something lush and affirming and packed with raw energy.

Far Caspian – An Outstretched Hand / Rain From Here To Kerry

The recording project of Irish songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer Joel Johnston, Far Caspian has established itself through a number of releases since its inception in 2020. Namely debut full-length Ways To Get Out and follow-up The Last Remaining Light, which employed everything from indie folk to late 90s/early 00s alt sensibilities to offer a distinctively personal sound, full of unguarded sincerity and searching emotion. Set for release via Johnston’s own Tiny Library Records this July, new album Autofiction is both a continuation of this process and something of a soft reset. An opportunity to return the Far Caspian project back to the simple joy of making music after years of challenges both artistic and personal. Latest single ‘An Outstretched Hand / Rain From Here To Kerry’ is an indication the record lives up to its title, finding Johnston as his most diaristic as he details an experience driving all night across Ireland after a failed attempt to climb Carrauntoohil in 2014.

Watch the video directed by Johnston himself below:

Autofiction is out on the 25th July via Tiny Library Records and you can pre-order it now.

kissing other ppl – Where’d All The Time Go

Something of a folk supergroup, kissing other ppl sees indie folk duo Viv & Riley join forces with songwriter Rachel Baiman, and the project’s self-titled debut introduces what to expect. Released via Peacedale Records, the album is a collection of covers taken from across a wide spectrum of acts—Lennon Stella, Songs: Ohia, Wilco and Joan Armatrading to name a few. “It just kind of happened that we were talking about the same music. It felt like fun coincidences, these artists across a lot of different realms and times,” Riley explains. “So it just then seemed like we could make a record with these great songs, us reinterpreting them, have them all feel of a piece, even though the songs are from different eras and the original recordings are very different.” Listen to single ‘Where’d All The Time Go’ now, with kissing other ppl taking Dr Dog’s original and adding a timeless folk style.

Merzbow – Sedonis A

Renowned avant garde sound artist Masami Akita has been recording under the moniker Merzbow for going on half a century. The Tokyo-based musician has built a vast, varied oeuvre which reimagines the possibilities of noise. But while Akita’s back catalogue is already far deeper than most artists could even dream, he continues to create and release new music, and new album Sedonis shows there is no let up in his ambition. Merzbow’s debut with Chicago imprint Signal Noise, the record uses a computer, modular electronics and homemade instruments to create a sound inspired by the kaiju Barunga from sixties TV series Ultra Q. Single ‘Sedonis A’ is suggestive of the scale of the release, a cut as harsh and sublime as any giant creature hell-bent on making Tokyo its own.

Rebecca Schiffman – Little Mr. Civility

“Is pure feeling possible? Can we ever extricate ourselves from culture or do we need it to even think, let alone communicate with others?” So asks the album notes of Rebecca Schiffman‘s fourth full-length Before the Future, coming this summer via Lost Sound Tapes. The record sees the LA-based songwriter grapple with what it means to live a moral life within a society that can appear hellbent on compromising our personal values. Everything from grief, family vacations and the ethics of the pet-owner relationship are explored, but lead single ‘Little Mr. Civility’ turns its attention to the experience of raising a young child. Namely the inevitable influence a parent has in shaping their nascent understanding of the world and its expectations. “The song expresses misgivings about the large responsibility one bears bringing someone into the world,” as Schiffman explains, “and resignation at having to try to shape them so they exist in society.”

Watch the video directed by Faryl Amadeus below:

Before the Future will be released on the 25th July, including a cassette via Lost Sound Tapes, and you can pre-order it now.

Tuxis Giant – Last Laugh

We’ve followed Tuxis Giant for a number of years now, most recently in 2023 with the release of full-length The Old House. “The songs find Tuxis Giant offering a sonic representation of solitude in all of its nuance,” as we wrote. “The inherent safety in being removed from the wider world is challenged by an inevitable anxiety and loneliness, [resulting in] a strangely nostalgic alienation.” Now Matt O’Connor and co. are back with You Won’t Remember This, a brand new LP released via their own label Worry Bead Records (who recently curated True Names, a great compilation for the Trans Youth Emergency Project). Lead single ‘Last Laugh’ provides the first look inside, a short yet no less evocative song about the dangerous allure of self-medication, delivered with Tuxis Giant’s trademark mix of intimacy and heft.

Winter – Just Like A Flower

Recording under the moniker Winter, Brazil-born, New York-based Samira Winter combines gauzy shoegaze and summery pop sensibilities to weave a sound as lush as it is energetic. Following the success of 2022 debut Some Kind Of Blue, Winter returns this summer with new album Adult Romantix on Winspear, and lead single ‘Just Like A Flower’ introduces both the style and theme of the record. The song’s reflective, often melancholic tone is buoyed by an insistent momentum, with Winter contemplating a move from LA to NYC amid the wider progression of young adult life. There are loves and inevitable losses along the way, but the forward motion can never quite be halted.

Watch the video directed by Sammy Lamb and Samira Winter below:

Adult Romantix will be released on the 22nd August via Winspear and you can pre-order it now.

The post Weekly Listening: May 2025 #4 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

We’ve decided to expand things slightly this year, giving ourselves a chance to write a little something about the albums we wanted to cover but never got the opportunity. Albums which meant something to us at various points through 2021. Some cemented themselves early as our favourites of the year, others were relatively late additions that held our attention as the calendars changed, and a few break the rules in being albums released in previous years but earn their inclusion here having proved constant companions through last twelve months.

So here are some records we really enjoyed in 2021. We hope you enjoy them too.

22° Halo – Garden Bed

Lost Sound Tapes

Led by Will Kennedy (Sleeper Records) and supported by the likes of Heeyoon Won (Boosegumps) and Francis Lyon (Ylayali, Free Cake For Every Creature), 22° Halo are something of a Philadelphia DIY lo-fi pop supergroup. Their third release, Garden Bed is as sweet and soft as the peachy pink cover art, taking the gloomy fog of slowcore and holding a light beneath it, the cloud suddenly enveloping and bright. Paired with the earnest tenderness of Kennedy’s vocals, the songs come to feel like old companions. Fond and quietly contemplative, strangely familiar and hopeful in a manner not quite explicable. Songs easy to be around and easier to return to, comforting in the very fact they exist.

Advance Base – Wall of Tears & Other Songs I Didn’t Write

Orindal Records

In ‘Kitty Winn’, a song on Advance Base’s 2015 record Nephew in the Wild, Owen Ashworth described watching The Exorcist and recognising the actor from Panic at Needle Park. “It felt like seeing an old friend,” he sings, “The way I wondered where she’d been.” Ashworth has introduced us to a lot of characters of his own over the years, but Wall of Tears & Other Songs I Didn’t Write performs a different kind of introduction. Inspired by the conspicuous absence of karaoke during recent times, the release takes tracks from acts both old and new and reimagines them in the image of Ashworth’s distinctively hushed and empathetic style. With a mixture of classics (Lucinda Williams, Iris DeMent, St. John Prine) and contemporaries/Orindal Records label mates (Dan Wriggins, Gia Margaret, Wednesday). The collection will resonate differently depending on who’s listening, but chances are there’ll be at least one occasion where the introduction is more like a reintroduction. An old friend smiling through the years, suddenly before you once again. 

Cassandra Jenkins – An Overview on Phenomenal Nature

Ba Da Bing Records

“I’m a three-legged dog, working with what I’ve got,” sings Cassandra Jenkins on ‘Michaelangelo’, the opening track from An Overview on Phenomenal Nature. “And part of me,” she continues, “will always be looking for what I’ve lost.” It’s one of the few tracks that directs its focus on Jenkins herself rather than reflections from those around her. The record is inspired by the work of Indian sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee, an artist who explored the line between allegory and abstraction with an intuitive fluidity, and Jenkins follows this lead to spin her surroundings into representations of her own. Be that the characters and objects encountered in the travel diary of ‘Hard Drive’, the accumulated wisdom of ‘New Bikini’, or the startlingly pretty instrumentation that builds across the record thanks to a whole host of musicians. Songs shaped by Jenkins’s careful but fleeting hand, like sculptures allowed to dissipate as soon as they have formed. Moments captured, meaning what they will.

Cla-ras – Five clusters

Lily Tapes & Discs

The first full length by multidisciplinary artist Jeremy Ferris, Five clusters takes inspiration from nature’s long game. With subtle intricacies growing from every crevice, its ambient folk style sees the organic slowly overwhelm the electronic, evoking ecology’s reclamation of abandoned industrial land. The sense of some circular pattern, the past returning as the future, post-humanity imagined as prehistoric verdancy. The sensation is both delicate and strangely visceral. Keyed into the botanical surface and the supporting undergrowth, where fine mycelium threads facilitate pungent decomposition, enriching the soil so that the songs might bloom with their damp, bodily life.     

Damien Jurado – The Monster Who Hated Pennsylvania

Maraqopa Records

The world of The Monster Who Hated Pennsylvania is familiar in the way a dream is familiar. Or is that foreign in the way dreams are foreign? Damien Jurado presents each track as a space between the known and unknown, their characters hanging on in the hope such positions are transitory, and in doing so blurs the line between the characters and the songwriter himself. Take Majestic centrepiece ‘Johnny Caravella’, which calls to mind ‘Percy Faith’ from The Horizon Just Laughed but this time takes inspiration from fictional DJ Dr. Johnny Fever from WKRP in Cincinnati. But ‘taking inspiration’ doesn’t quite capture the song’s true extent, as Jurado channels the fictional doctor, his delivery neither quite Fever or himself but a blend of the two. “Who’ll wear the crown when the change is approaching / Of some other season renown?” this hybrid figure asks as the track winds tighter with every line. This latent intensity is brought to the surface in the finale, an urgent beseeching that we hang on a little longer. “As I exited north the radio spoke / ‘All is not lost even if you’re without a direction’,” goes the final verse. “Go west, go west, 1972 / The sun hasn’t set, the stars very few / Just stick around ’til the light pushes into the darkness.”

The Felice Brothers – From Dreams to Dust

Yep Roc Records

‘Jazz on the Autobahn’, the opening track of what is The Felice Brothers’ eighth and perhaps most compelling record, finds two people fleeing their old lives. It’s never revealed exactly what Helen and The Sheriff are leaving in the rear-view mirror of their “doomed Corvette,” but what waits for them at the end of the road is imagined in vivid detail. Helen dreams of the apocalypse arriving as an anthropomorphic tornado, as poisoned lakes and acid rain, a force as “loud as a mushroom cloud” yet “ghostly like a glockenspiel.” The Sheriff disagrees, tries to “make a distinction between death and extinction” as Helen spits melon seeds and drinks 7-Up in his car. His is an apocalypse stripped of its fictions and graces. No saving angels, no hand of God, no spared billionaires on Mars. The track is the standard bearer of From Dreams to Dust. A record of cutting fury and crushing sadness set to rich and affirming rhythms. Poems and short stories packed with clever references and wry turns of phrase. A confrontation of the grim realities of our moment that nevertheless celebrates the fact of being alive. “What is freedom?” The Sheriff wonders in his closing verse. To be empty of desire? To find everything we’ve lost or have been in search of? Does it feel like jazz on the autobahn?

Giles Corey – S/T

The Flenser

The side project of Have a Nice Life’s Dan Barrett, Giles Corey picked up the threads of Deathconsciousness and followed them deep underground. The self-titled record, originally released in 2011 but given a new lease of life by The Flenser for its tenth anniversary, feels like a haunting committed to tape. At once intense and eerily hushed, spacious yet claustrophobic, lonely but never alone. A picture of depression as an intensely personal experience which nevertheless transcends the individual. A torment too large for a single skin. When ‘Empty Churches’ opens with paranormal investigator Raymond Cass talking of voices of unknown origin appearing on radio frequencies, the mood is not so much disturbing as alluring. A dimension beyond all this. Something to lose yourself in. To submit to. To hope for beyond all we know and can know, in spite of it all.

Grouper – Shade

Kranky

Described as a record about “respite and the coast, poetically and literally,” Shade is every bit as considered and in-depth as you might expect from an album fifteen years in the making. The mutual relationship between person and place is conjured with Harris’s cloudy abstraction, the line between strange and familiar blurred beyond its binary simplicity, and so too the border between intimacy and solitude. An overarching sense of a distance drapes over the record, evoking isolation in space or time, and the hushed tone carries with it hidden depths which speak to the unknowable nature of the sea. The result is simultaneously elemental and fundamentally human, and one of Grouper’s finest records to date.

The Hold Steady – Open Door Policy

Positive Jams

The Hold Steady universe has always been something of a gauntlet for its characters. A high-speed race with a whole lot of entrants but not so many finishers. To say Open Door Policy picks up with these winners is to assume the race has finished, when in fact it has merely changed. The participants are older, their communities atomised, their world having been sliced up and commodified by tech-savvy barons both ruthless and polite. In this way, the band’s eighth album feels a closer descendant of Craig Finn’s solo records than more recent Hold Steady records. A considered, cohesive album of narrative-driven songs which offer glimpses into the lives of imperfect figures dissatisfied or downtrodden and merely surviving. Finn & Co. mean many different things to many different people, but too often their work is (mis)understood as a mere good time. As though the joy of The Hold Steady is solely the joy of the party. But like so many of their records before it, Open Door Policy is proof of something deeper and more profound. The quiet, ugly dignity of humans persevering, and the irreplaceable value of a community to see them through.

KUZU – The Glass Delusion

Astral Spirits

Glass delusion is a manifestation of a psychiatric phenomenon witnessed primarily across the wealthy classes of Early Modern Europe where the individual feared they were made of glass. King Charles VI of France allegedly forbade anyone from touching him, so acute was his fear of shattering, and took to wearing protective clothing. It was a fear intensely human yet inorganic, recasting life as a path with danger around every bend. Chicago‘s KUZU throw us into such a heightened state, their improvisational jazz guarding its hand, leaving the listener no choice but to strap in and follow the slow-burning yet ever shifting lines. But from within the anxiety of this undetermined ride, an overarching conviction emerges. The sense everything is barrelling toward some spectacular finale. The dreadful shattering event. The screw turns and turns, the sound needling with increasingly deranged energy, leaving the listener like Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul at the end of The Conversation, tearing their surroundings rather than break apart themselves.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Theory of Ice

You’ve Changed Records

Michi Saagig Nishnaabeg artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson has made her name in poetry, fiction, music and scholarship, and Theory of Ice feels like a culmination of this body of work. A lesson in world building, in communication, in history and preservation and life. A weapon against settler colonisation that carries no dull weight or serrated edge, indeed no violence at all. “The settler colonial state is not hated, it is pitied,” describes Steven Lambke in the liner notes, “for its smallness, its evil, its perpetual cruelty.” Theory of Ice turns this force against itself, utilising an absence of violence to illuminate the absence within violence. The dark, meaningless lacuna at the heart of the imperialist project, a space never filled despite the visceral physicality of its rule. Moreover, Simpson evokes the persistent presence of the peoples who have suffered at its hand, kept alive in acts of community and gesture, in the work of a searching artist’s life. “In realization / we don’t exist without each other,” go the record’s closing lines. “She says: there’s nothing about you / I’m not willing to know.”

Macie Stewart – Mouth Full of Glass

Orindal Records

To describe the career of Macie Stewart is to describe a career of collaboration. The multi-instrumentalist founded bands such as Kids These Days, Marrow and OHMME, played as part of Ken Vandermark’s Marker ensemble, improvisational act The Few and with Lia Kohl as a violin/cello duo, as well as lending her talents to records by a plethora of acts including V.V. Lightbody, Whitney, Adeline Hotel and S.Z.A. But within these collaborations, Stewart became aware her own individual sound was being left to atrophy. Indeed, she had no idea what her individual sound might be. With its unflinching eye and succulent arrangements, Mouth Full of Glass represents an attempt to find out. An artist surveying their own inner workings through considered and open-ended exploration, leaning into solitude as a medium of discovery and learning from all that has occurred before without ever becoming beholden to the past. “What pleasure I choose to keep after I buried it deep,” as Stewart sings across the sinuous sax of ‘Garter Snake’. “Try to uncover it all.”

Michael Beach – Dream Violence

Goner Records & Poison City Records

On Dream Violence, Naarm/Melbourne-based Michael Beach reaches into the grab bag of rock history and fashions what he finds into something timely and unique. Imagine Neil Young meeting The Velvet Underground on a dark and hopeless night in our late-capitalist hellscape to muse on the meaninglessness of existence. Ripping rockers rub shoulders with heartfelt piano ballads and genuine, capital-E earworms, all in an attempt to communicate what Beach describes as “human futility, passion, desire, anger, frustration, and the struggle to maintain hope in a somewhat hopeless time.”

Natalie Jane Hill – Solely

Dear Life Records

Following on from 2020’s stunning Azaela, Natalie Jane Hill’s second record sees a reversal of perspective. Because while the first album looked to the expansive roll of the land for its focus, Solely turns inward to examine an environment far more personal. Themes of loss and loneliness emerge from this introspection, by-products of any quest for self-discovery, though Hill’s intricate arrangements are too deft and nuanced to be consumed by such emotions. What instead emerges is an ecosystem as detailed and changeable as any conjured on Azaela, an interior environment as mysterious as that of the Blue Ridge Mountains. One that holds the best and worst of life and, importantly, holds enough space to sit with both simultaneously, never losing sight of the possibility of change on the horizon.

Protomartyr – Ultimate Success Today

Domino

Across five albums, Protomartyr’s Joe Casey has cemented his status as a cynic in both the ancient and modern sense. A fatalistic Irish Catholic from working class Detroit writing songs that weave dense webs of references to ancient philosophy and arcane literature. The everyday man alienated, an outsider enraged at what is unfolding around him. Written during a spell of illness, Ultimate Success Today sees Casey confront not only his own mortality but the wider prospect of hope in the contemporary neoliberal society. His father, whose untimely death has haunted each Protomartyr album to varying degrees, died during a routine medical procedure, and Casey’s pain is matched by a dread of the doctor’s office. A cynicism of medicine rooted not in partisan politics or misinformation but existential terror—the sense even the surgeons won’t be able to save him. The explicit goodbye of closing track ‘Worm in Heaven’ might play as a cathartic acknowledgement of this fear, but Casey chooses to undercut himself, mocking his own attempts to conquer dread through music. A cynicism wrapped around itself to include a doubt in the utility or power of art. “Dumb aphorist embrace obscurants,” he sings of himself on ‘The Aphorist’, “and write in ogham for your final lines.” A cynic, old and new, to the very end.

R.A.P. Ferreira – The Light Emitting Diamond Cutter Scriptures

Self-released

Whether recording as milo, scallops hotel or most recently R.A.P. Ferreira, Nashville-based Rory Ferreira has been releasing some of the most inventive and interesting rap music of the past few years. The Light Emitting Diamond Cutter Scriptures is his most cohesive record to date, the full maturity of his lyricism on show without losing any of the DIY aesthetic that has long lended his work its authenticity. Because Ferreira is a rapper in the purest sense. A radical, a philosopher, a comedian. Interested in nothing but the words. “What’s morbid is there’s poets who want to be on the Forbes List,” he sings on ‘uptown 37’, “I will be gorgeous and homeless.” And gorgeous this is, the lyrics skating over a whole gamut of moods and subjects, reaching for whatever cultural reference he can get his hands on, however high or low. Where else are you going to find Ansel Adams, Inspector Clouseau, Euripedes and Mr Bean all living on the same record?

Renée Reed – S/T

Keeled Scales

Born into a family of musicians and folklorists, Renée Reed grew up amid the best of Cajun and Creole music. Her work contains a hundred shades and small details pointing toward this history, but its lasting influence is less tangible. A sense of intuition threads through the songs. A phenomenon which lends them a certain timelessness, the sense they haven’t been so much written as teased out of some half-remembered space. The intricate arrangements are rendered simple in their instinctive rhythm, Reed’s poetic lyrics given the weight of the land. “We’d stand in the dark and cry,” she sings near the end of the record, “Oh, if only we could / For our bones, they belong to the country.” These songs feel like they belong to the country too, Reed more a guardian than a creator. For now they are travelling with her, and a worthy custodian she makes. 

Space Afrika – Honest Labour

Dais Records

The UK has always been a kind of dreamstate. A society held up on imagined pasts and false notions, a deluded fantasy stretched to breaking point yet never relinquishing its hold. This dark dread is in the dense Twin Peakian synths of Honest Labour’s opening moments, but Manchester‘s Space Afrika are here to do more than recapitulate the moribund British dream. For within the dreamstate live the dreamers, and each dreamer—however isolated and despondent—has their own dreams. Feeling more like a documentary than album, the record details the visions of this nameless population. A tessellated blend of samples, field recordings and vocal cameos which emerge haphazardly from dark layers of instrumentation. The result is an expressionistic picture of a society, one dazed and delirious, left to wander this long night with all their love and fear and loss in the hope some dawn might lend this intangible reality some weight.  

Sun June – Somewhere

Run For Cover Records / Keeled Scales

Take a look at the artwork of Sun June’s Somewhere and you might see a pillar of smoke gradually fade into a pastel sky. The image is fitting for a sound they developed on 2018’s Years, a record of gently swaying country pop songs which traced feelings of loss and grief as they dispersed into the wider context of a life. Sadness drifting away from its source, becoming more translucent with distance but always present in some diffuse concentration. Though clearly building on the previous record, Somewhere sees a certain inversion. Love stirs from within the tracks and with it a poppier, full-bodied sound. The sense the quiet melancholy is coalescing into something more tangible and immediate, gathering weight and sinking toward some intensity on the ground. Perhaps we got it backward, we’re looking at the artwork upside down.

Tasha – Tell Me What You Miss The Most

Father/Daughter Records

In a year of weighty foreboding and needling menace, Tasha’s Tell Me What You Miss The Most came to represent a safe haven. An introspective album which excavates personal ground not as some exercise in regret or sadness but to carve a space in which to rest and ponder. Be it musing on the pasts that were and the presents that never came to be, or the unknown futures still up in the air. Imagery of beds and sleep recurs across the record, and the songs come to knit their own mattress and sheets. A place where time passes in reassuring cycles and the pressing outside is held at bay, one’s troubles suddenly small and tactile enough to be examined in the palm of a hand. 

Tobacco City – Tobacco City, USA

Scissor Tail Records

Listening to Chicago’s Tobacco City is to be transported to the imagined locale of its title, a loving patchwork of country music settings; like searching for radio waves from a porchside rocking chair or feeding quarters into a jukebox in the musty refuge of a dark barroom. Lonesome ballads wind slow with regret and pedal steel, folk songs get cosmic on sunburn and psychedelics, and honky-tonk shuffles flow easy as that three-beers-in second wind after a long day on the production line. Hard-earned wisdom sits side by side with wry humour, capturing the tragedy, hope and absurdity of broken people going about their lives the best they can. Riding out heartbreak on the buzz of cheap booze and bright lights. As Lexi Goddard sings at one point, “Being alone ain’t so bad when you’re half in the bag.”

The Weather Station – Ignorance

Fat Possum Records

“I never believed in the robber,” sings The Weather Station‘s Tamara Lindeman on Ignorance’s opening track. “I never saw nobody climb over my fence.” The lines contain a multitude of meanings. Stress a different word and you get a different shade of the album’s eponymous state. The robber doesn’t exist. At least to my knowledge. At least not around these parts. But the truth lies in the volatile swirl of instrumentation, a jazzy swell of cymbals and piano and drums, sax licking staccato like the devil’s tongue or the threatening word of God. ‘Robber’ is a confession, a plea, a waking fever dream. The colonial past and capitalist present manifest in all its unease. A violence which seeps out, haunting even the record’s most tender moments. Lindeman repeatedly turns to the natural world as an escape, from the birds of ‘Parking Lot’ to the “cold metallic scent of snow” in ‘Subdivisions’, the sky, the green, the soft of ‘Heart’. But as it says in ‘Loss’, “At some point you’d have to live as if the truth was true.” Nature might still persist, but it is the robber who built the world around us. His hand is still in our pockets. Even the sunset on ‘Atlantic’ is blood red.

Wednesday – Twin Plagues

Orindal Records

Though Twin Plagues is a record of memories, there’s nothing polished about the experiences being relayed, no rose-tinted gloss applied through repeated telling. There’s no nostalgia either. No intention to preserve or wish to return. Rather, Wednesday portray the past as something still present. The rugged surface across which the present is overlain. Its contours reveal itself on even the most ordinary days, be it in the gut-drop of a missed step, a suddenly interrupted view. Memories held for no good reason, not exclusively bad but always haunting. Memories as they return to you in dreams. The kid with a fucked up buzzcut. The burned down Dairy Queen. Birds in the air, flies in the bug light, brawls at the baseball and crossbows in old family photographs. Sometimes these memories are traumatic, sometimes they are sad, sometimes they mean nothing beyond their own shape and texture but then again, that’s just how life unfolds.        

Wendy Eisenberg – Bent Ring

Dear Life Records

Even in the crowded field of the internet age, Wendy Eisenberg stands apart in their prolific invention. Since the beginning of 2020, they have released at least five solo records (as well as working as part of Editrix), each offering intricate and thematically precise sounds which serve as frameworks through which to examine a particular space or time. The latest, Bent Ring, began as a self-imposed challenge to make an album with no guitar, but really stands apart in the direction of its gaze. A record looking back across a period of great productivity and achievement nevertheless attenuated by the hostile conditions of the surrounding environment. A contemplation of what it means to be an artist in our world, and how the endurance, commitment, frustration and joy of the vocation come to shape the artist too. With the earthy, temperamental twang of its salvaged banjo, Bent Ring encapsulates both the exhaustion and energy of an artist’s life, its steadfast rhythm always threatening to slow or speed up but ultimately pressing on regardless.     

Wes Tirey – The Midwest Book of the Dead

Dear Life Records

“Silos stand like chapels / Chapels stand like graves / Graves stand like corn / Corn stands like waves.” So opens ‘Bang the Drum Slowly’, a song which encapsulates the spirit of Wes Tirey’s tenth album. One populated with blue heron and crawdads and creek beds, a land of fields and factories stalked by stray dogs and innumerable ghosts. But more than a survey of this very American landscape, Tirey offers us characters too. People presented in snatches, sometimes nothing more than the distinctive ring of their voice. What emerges is not a clear narrative, at least not in the linear sense, but rather a patchwork of vignettes which combine into a picture far larger and more extensive. The dead are plural in this book, and each has their own story to tell.

Will Stratton – The Changing Wilderness

Bella Union

A fundamentally exploratory songwriter, Will Stratton has never been one to settle in a single groove. But if one feature has stretched through his work, it’s the art of introspection. But then came the late 2010s and the intensification of our rightward spiral down. Faced with such pressing political issues, Stratton went into The Changing Wilderness with a new desire to engage with the wider world. To write a record which might catalogue the atrocities of this moment. As he sings on ‘When I’ve Been Born (I’ll Love You)’: “The present is prosaic / The future, a disgrace / We can’t just look away now / It stares us in the face.” Capturing the tone of the record, the song charts the profound sickness of our times, and can’t help but slip back toward self-examination in the face of such horror. A search which emerges with no solution beyond a determination to face the worst undaunted. “When I get my prize, I’ll love you,” goes the chorus. “As the oceans rise, I’ll love you / When the air gеts thin, I’ll love you / If the fascists win, I’ll love you.”

If you enjoyed anything on this list, you may also be interested in list of songs we missed in 2021, which will be published shortly. And of course, there were lots of amazing records that we did write about in the last year, so have a look back through our Reviews and Previews sections to find more.

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Returning to Australia, Rezende and Saxby recruited Tina Agic (guitar & vocals) and Ben Napier (drums) to create the second Olivia’s World EP, Tuff 2B Tender, what the band describe as “a vast existential outing assembled over a period of change.” Again released on Lost Sound Tapes, the record once more lands somewhere between twee-throwback and punk propulsion, juxtaposing sweet pop hooks with tangled riffs and cutting deadpan delivery. Think Tiger Trap meets Sleater Kinney meets The Courtneys, all shaken up with the sound of four friends having lots of fun together.

Opener ‘Debutante’ begins relatively composed, but soon perks up with pummelled percussion and chugging guitar. It’s a song about the constant cyclical change of any creative scene, the refreshment and rejuvenation which are vital for creativity, though exciting and exhausting in equal measure. Rezende faces the constant state of flux as artists, venues and ideas are cultivated, used up and thinned out (or as as she puts it, “pull the shit that’s dead out of the garden bed”) in the name of creation.

From there the record commits to a blend of saccharine and acidic. Sincere wonder mixes with shrewd cynicism, resulting in razor-witted pop songs that tackle everything from colonisation and ecological collapse to your favourite type of sage. ‘Hellbent’ sounds twitchy and anxious, wiry guitar winding behind Rezende’s droll vocals, while ‘Grassland’ feels slow and wide-open, evoking the panoramic vistas referred to in the lyrics. “I’m just looking for a place to call my grassland,” Rezende sings as she imagines a post-human botanical paradise while longing for escape from the city.

Perhaps the standout is ‘Social Seagull’, an indie pop anthem about the ups and downs and general weirdness of friendship. “Tiny crown fit for tiny mice,” its begins in a moment of child-like charm, before moving on to images of rusting steel and heavy drinking and disappointed Facetime calls. It’s playful and noisy and surprisingly heartfelt, distilling everything Olivia’s World do so well into four minutes.

Tuff 2B Tender is out now via Lost Sound Tapes. Get it from their website or the Olivia’s World Bandcamp page.

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First track ‘Small Amount’ is a great introduction to what Badlands do. The deceptively meandering and laid-back vibes cradle the song’s sentiment, Tenney delivering her lines with increasing intensity, vocals overlapping and mingling until they become something like a hypnotic mantra with an ultimately hopeful message (“Just a very small amount, sometimes that much can help you out, one thing at a time, got to keep asking why”). As the title suggests, ‘Slow it Down’ is another track that’s not afraid to take its time, to do things according to its rhythms. It’s a song about putting your own personal worries in perspective, about being kind to yourself and everyone else.

“So many times
I wanted to tell you things
Like how I’ve been hurting
Like how I’ve been crying
But I slowed it down
Wait ‘til I can see a little clearer
Wait ‘til I can breathe a little better
Gotta remember the bigger picture”

‘Work to Do’ is a fiercely defiant track about the political climate, calling out racism and sexism and oppression in all its forms. There’s a scathing attack on those awful “All Lives Matter” non-sequiturs, plus a demand to Canada’s Prime Minister for justice for the First Nation peoples, a timely reminder that it’s not just the USA that has a shameful history. But it’s not just an angry punk song, rather a reminder that we all have a part to play in changing things for the better. Just like those hardy desert plants, we all need to hang on sometimes, to grab what little nourishment we can, to be prickly and poisonous to protect ourselves from those who try to eat us. And, most importantly, we are all capable of producing beautiful blooms.

“You’re worn out, overwhelmed
But I know that you’re not giving up
What the fuck is wrong with people?
And why is power so corrupt?
I heard a history teacher on the radio
She said we’re making progress
But it’s going too slow
We gotta get stronger, gotta organize
Even when it’s hitting us on all sides
So I’ll be there beside you
When it’s time to fight
It’s NOW!
We’ve got work to do”

The opening of ‘Can’t’ feels like storm in the desert, the rounded peals of guitar like raindrops, the gentle snarl of feedback like squally gusts of wind. The lyrics are rich with a sense of turmoil and struggle, the difficulty of being yourself when people have expectations of you. “Every small step feels like a leap,” Tenney sings, “Every small taste feels like a feast, People got ideas about what I should be, And I just can’t.” A rendition of Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ proves the antithesis to the idea that covers are just included to fill out an album, what Lost Sound call “a radical mantra of self love and confidence.” The final song, ‘Heavy Sigh’ loops and layers vocal tracks to create something that’s strangely uplifting despite its title and repeated lyrics about stifling heat and being helplessly in love.

Slow Growth is interested in both the macro and the micro, running a thread from our personal struggles to larger social issues, conjuring images of the natural world and applying them to our lives. We’re all individuals in a complex and finely balanced ecosystem, subject to stresses and strains and disasters, but also capable of growth and recovery. These songs feel timely, reminders of the virtues of being thoughtful and patient, that, while it’s okay to take a step back to take care of yourself, there is always someone else who needs your help too.

Head to Lost Sound Tapes to get Slow Growth on cassette, or the Badlands Bandcamp page to download it.

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