“Are you so bored, or just boring?” asks American Cream Band‘s Nathan Nelson on ‘Don’t Burn the House Down’, the latest single from their new full-length Twin, coming next month via Quindi Records. A repeated refrain dripping in sardonic wit and clearly pointed towards the malicious forces currently extending their tentacles across the US and beyond. Based in the Twin Cities, Nelson and co. have experienced the blunt end of contemporary fascism in recent months, something which charges the new record with an almost electric urgency, as ‘Don’t Burn the House Down’ attests. A rich, colourful and caustic track which stands its ground against those who would destroy the places we call home if given half a chance.

Aubrey Jane – Karmic

Next week, New Orleans-based songwriter Aubrey Jane will release Starshiner, a new full-length album which builds upon the foundations of previous release Calamity, using vulnerability and emotional honesty to move beyond difficult experiences and towards something new. Latest single ‘Karmic’ is the ideal entry point, demonstrating Jane’s mix of folk-inflected brand of indie rock and the confessional bedroom pop sensibilities which underpin it. Flowing between relative restraint and urgent peaks of intensity, the track confronts a dysfunctional relationship head on, probing at the parts at hurt with an almost masochistic compulsion. “And I’ll play the victim / Cause I’ve always been good at it,” as Janes sings:

Wait till you have the words to tell me
What I did
Maybe all this is karmic
Maybe it’s deserved
So I’ll be the bad guy if you be the damsel
Cause I like how it hurts

Watch the video filmed, produced, directed and edited by Quinn Young below:

‘Karmic’ is out now and available from Bandcamp. Starshiner will be released on the 15th May.

Félicia Atkinson – Les Yeux II

Ghent’s VIERNULVIER runs a series called VIDEOROOM, where classic cult films are shown with new live soundtracks, with 2026’s programme featuring the likes of Mary Lattimore playing a score for Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy and Alabaster DePlume doing Peter Kass’s Time of the Heathen. Félicia Atkinson‘s new album SANS VISAGE stems from the project, taking the reimagined soundtrack for Georges Franju’s 1960 horror classic Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face) she performed live and condensing it into a continuous, non-linear composition. One which considers the “female and animal gaze” of the film, repositioning the focus towards the resistance displayed by the victims to open up a feminist counter-narrative, and ultimately working to show how old art might offer sites to imagine new ideas. Listen to first cut ‘Les Yeux II’ now:

J.W. Ricci – Through a Frame

Though Through a Frame / Pollen Drop is the debut solo guitar released from J.W. Ricci, the double single is far from the first time the North Carolina-based songwriter has attempted to put his music into the world. He spent the best part of the last decade playing in various bands to different levels of success, all while working a series of underpaid, exploitative (and sometimes downright dangerous) jobs, though ultimately emerged feeling discouraged and burnt out having been chewed up on either side by twin meat grinders of the music industry and life. But fast-forward to the present, armed with stable employment and some sense of perspective, Ricci has turned to writing instrumental guitar songs which speak to a new creative headspace. “I feel a sense of spaciousness, ease and openness in those pieces,” he explains, “in contrast to the white-knuckled, clenched, grasping that I hear in my older music.” There’s an clear sense of authenticity to Through a Frame / Pollen Drop as a result, each track recorded live with no overdubs and feeling like an artist not only reflecting on their journey to the present, but also coming to understand a healthier path they might follow from here on in.

Watch the video by Emma Geiger for ‘Through a Frame’ below:

Through a Frame / Pollen Drop is out now and available from Bandcamp.

Laura Lucas & Luke Sital-Singh – Same World

Described as the closest Winnipeg-based songwriter Laura Lucas has ever come to penning a love song, ‘Same World’ was a single on her 2025 debut There’s a Place I Go. A track which turned to the beauty of the organic world as an allegory for human connection, equating the symbiotic bonds of nature to the mutual benefits of a loving relationship. “The first verse of the song is one of my favourite things I’ve written,” she explains. “The line ‘I’ll use your light after you go’ is basically saying ‘I will photosynthesise off of you’, which I think is what falling in love is meant to feel like, like they are the sun and you are the leaf.” But Lucas was not quite finished with the song, and has now returned with an alternate version recorded with Luke Sital-Singh. The essence of the original is preserved, but the addition of an extra voice only accentuates the tenderness and romance.

And I think we live in the same world
And I’ll wait for a sign
Think my nature is something like yours
And yours something like mine, mine

Lemoncello – Tomorrow Nostalgia

In recent weeks we’ve shared a couple of singles from Perfect Place, a full-length from Dublin duo Lemoncello which sees Laura Quirke (guitar/vocals) and Claire Kinsella (cello/vocals) adopt a newfound clarity and emotional honesty within their work. First came ‘Meet Me Halfway’, a song featuring “a complicated relationship between intimacy and distance,” as we wrote, “a sense of push and pull,” then ‘Articulate Animal’, which was “something like a mantra,” as we put it, “a spell intended to cut to the quick of the self, hurdling over the rational part of the mind and sinking into the instinctive.” With the album now out with Claddagh Records, the pair have shared new single ‘Tomorrow Nostalgia’ to further convince audiences of their talents. With a combination of taut, almost brooding tones and altogether more ethereal textures, the song faces up to the dangers of our preoccupations with both the future and past, where the seductive urge to fill a life with dreams of either results in not much of a life at all. Watch the video directed by Eilís Doherty below:

Perfect Place is out now via Claddagh Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.

Max Knouse – Angel’s Share

“The title Goat Pupil could be aspirational, like a name for a student of greatness,” explains Max Knouse of his new record, coming next month via Ruination Record Co., though the LA-based artist offers a number of alternate reads too. “It could be something about seeing in widescreen—goats have amazing rectangular pupils. Or it could be a self-deterministic thing. Goats are pretty Satanic. I like the paradox of following someone who follows no one. There’s a lot of stuff in the songs about harnessing your own powers of evil or about perseverance while witnessing the evil around you.” Following hot on the heels of 2025’s Chimpmunk’d Away, Goat Pupil is itself a story of perseverance. An album created under considerable financial constraints (which, of course, equates considerable practical constraints), that, with help of producer Chris Schlarb, somehow manages to twist this fact to its benefit. How long does it take to capture lightning in a bottle? Judging by this, it takes exactly a day and half in a studio above an Arizona pizza shop. Listen to the lonesome, languorous lead single ‘Angel’s Share’ for an early preview:

Rowena Wise – Blood Ties

Naarm/Melbourne-based songwriter Rowena Wise won acclaim back in 2024 with Senseless Acts of Beauty, an album which drew as much from the classic folk of the sixties as it did contemporaries like Aldous Harding and Julia Jacklin to create a sound able to explore the difficult themes of loss, longing and alienation with an ever-burning compassion and warmth. New single ‘Blood Ties’ continues to develop this style, using a steely yet earnest tone to confront pain head on, and emerging with the possibility that suffering might be conquered if we could look at it honestly. “I wrote ‘Blood Ties’ after a close friend experienced a mental health crisis,” Wise explains. “In the aftermath, I watched his father struggle to respond, not because he didn’t love his son, but because he didn’t know how to meet him emotionally… In Australia, especially, emotional restraint has long been normalised… But that silence creates space for shame to grow, particularly within families where unspoken pain lingers beneath the surface.”

Watch the video directed by Didirri below:

‘Blood Ties’ is out now via Beloved Recordings and available from Bandcamp.

Trivial Shields – First Edition Paperbacks

Having cut his teeth with college band My Dear Disco, Christian Carpenter has gone on to play with the likes of Renata Zeiguer, Luke Winslow-King, Kent Odessa, Anna Ash and Cassandra Jenkins, though has also built up a considerable catalogue of his own work under the moniker Trivial Shields. Recorded analog to tape at the renowned Tiny Telephone studio in Oakland, latest single ‘First Edition Paperbacks’ is the ideal introduction for anyone unfamiliar with the project. The tale of two relationships which come to mirror one another (one with a bookseller, another with an experimental ‘plant musician’), both enthralling the narrator despite (or perhaps because of) proving somewhat unobtainable in the grand scheme of things.  “Living off of manic lust in excess / Eating from your supple hands,” Carpenter croons in typically passionate fashion. “When brilliant minds / antagonize / Is there fault to contest? / I don’t know but…” The result is lush, woozy and sensual, committed to romance even while understanding such things are doomed, and savouring the grandeur of feelings while they last.

Watch the video below, directed by Melanie Drew Chambers, filmed and coloured by Otium, featuring the puppets of The Bob Baker Marionette Theater:

‘First Edition Paperbacks’ is out now and available from Bandcamp.

The post Weekly Listening: May 2026 #2 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Comprising of  Olivia Eguia (vocals), Charlie Eguia (guitar), Jaden Gabriel (writing, production), Khadija Aslam (bass) and Liz Musinsky (drums), April Fools is a new Brooklyn-based outfit who introduced themselves last year with debut EP Knock Knock, though they have wasted no time in following up the release. Out via Happen Twice in the next few weeks, the second April Fools project Who’s There? finds the band freshly confident and ready to hone their sound, further developing their indie folk style to capture a wide range of emotions. Equal parts playful, heartfelt, infectious and melancholic, single ‘Say Nothing’ typfies the tone of the release, presenting a warm glimmer over nostalgic longing as it processes the experience on moving on from someone once cared about.

Banti Buli – When Birds Write Poems

Stroll Down Pearl, The Night is Young, the upcoming new full-length from Boston-based project Banti Buli, is dedicated to the musical communities of lead Banti Gheneti. So it is fitting that album closer and latest single ‘When Birds Write Poems’ serves as a love letter to all those people who go about creating and maintaining artistic spaces. “I think about all birds that grace the streets of Cambridgeport and greater Boston,” Gheneti explains, “building nests, putting on shows, making meaning out of life. Without community, there is no artist, and it means nothing.” A fittingly collaborative endeavour, the song sees Rachel Eber from Ragu joining on vocals and was recorded with help from June Isenhart from Miss Bones. The result possesses all the fondness and heart its mission statement suggests, with a number of Easter eggs scattered through the lyrics that fans of the local scene will appreciate.

Watch the video animated by Luca Depardon below:

Stroll Down Pearl, The Night is Young will be released on the 7th November and you can pre-order it now.

bugcatcher – Hurry

Back in 2023 we wrote about Bugcatcher, the recording project of Rochester‘s Jake Denning and a rotating cast of collaborators and friends, describing how album Go! offered “a combination of sincerity and whimsy delivered with an understated tone yet marked by a pervading sense of mystery, as though below the mundane surface of things exists an untold manner of possibility, a source of both wonder and unease.” Now Denning and co. are back with new single ‘Hurry’ ahead of a forthcoming full-length on Raincoated Records. The track concerns the white lies and wistful longing inherent within major change and suggests the new material has built upon the foundations of previous releases to achieve a sound more earnest and emotive than ever.

Devin Shaffer – I Guess I’m Crawling

“Interrogates just what it requires to achieve lasting peace. That is, to reject the idea of a neat arc entirely, resist the temptation to believe one achievement or epiphany will solve your life for good.” So we wrote of Devin Shaffer‘s new album Patience, forthcoming next month on American Dreams, with lead single ‘All My Dreams Are Coming True’ displaying the clarity and nuance of the release. Now Shaffer has returned with ‘I Guess I’m Crawling’, the record’s penultimate track and perhaps its most illustrative one, its gentle pace and soft tone confronting all of life’s doubts and injustices with a steady patience. “In a way “I Guess I’m Crawling” is the ethos of the record,” Shaffer explains. “It is a surrender to the pace at which things move, a surrender to all the setbacks and limitations and diversions that have led me to where I am now.”

Watch the video shot by Jordan Reyes below:

Patience will be released via American Dreams on 7th November. Pre-order it now from the Devin Shaffer Bandcamp page.

The Hello Crows – Let ‘Em Go Home

Consisting of Dylan Ward, Judie Acquin, Emilio Quinn Bonnell and Mattie Comeau—four Indigenous songwriters all hailing from different areas of Wabanaki territory in Canada—The Hello Crows is an indie rock project born of the traditional practice of storytelling and driven to explore the themes and problems facing their home within the present moment. Their self-titled debut album, out via Forward Music Group, touches on everything from personal love and loss to wider traumas like the violent legacy of the Canadian residential school system, and provides all the heart and painful catharsis you might expect. Latest single ‘Let ‘Em Go Home’ is an ideal entry point, the band’s tribute to the survivors of cultural genocide which is at once warmly compassionate and loaded with stark weight.

Lazy Trail – Post Tour

The second Happen Twice act to make this week’s list, Lazy Trail is the recording project of songwriter Emma Willer, who you might know from her time with bands like Slumbers and Boyscott. Under the Lazy Trail moniker, Willer makes music fitting for the name. Songs often short and usually sweet which play like small adventures or little daydreams, taking the listener to another place for just a moment. New album The Sound is a great place to dive in, with singles like ‘Post Tour’ possessing all of the brightness and yearning ever-present across the release. A song which owes as much to the natural world as anything else, playing like a brief hike down a particular path of Willer’s memories, stopping to catch glimpses of all the things which used to mean so much along the way.

Lydia Luce x Luke Sital-Singh – Ephemeral

Back in August we introduced Mammoth, the upcoming new album from Lydia Luce which leads “out of suffering,” as we put it, “charting the path of recovery from chronic pain and the hard-won bonds which came with it.” After single ‘Quiet’, “a song all about the slow process of learning to not only tolerate silence but embrace its power within a noisy world,” Luce has now returned with ‘Ephemeral’, inviting British singer-songwriter Luke Sital-Singh into the fold for a moving duet. With another careful, evocative arrangement featuring strings, winds, piano, viola and cello, the song deepens with a sense of grace, the chemistry between the vocals seeming to lift the instrumentation and culminating in almost classical peaks.

‘Ephemeral’ is out now and available from the usual places.

The Noisy – Nightshade

“Draws on literary and cinematic influences (especially Spaghetti Westerns and Body Horror) and ideas from the drag and queer community to create its vivid, larger-than-life sound.” That’s how we described The Secret Ingredient Is Even More Meat, a deluxe edition of The Noisy‘s debut album The Secret Ingredient is More Meat, coming soon via Audio Antihero. After singles ‘Twos‘ and ‘Grenadine‘, Sara Mae and co. are back with new unreleased song ‘Nightshade’ to further expand the record’s universe. A kind of sister track to ‘Twos’ which again explores the aftermath of difficult relationships but flips its attention from the other to the self. An examination of the attempt, and possible failure, of trying to build intimate, trusting connections with others without twisting the ideas of these bonds in your head.

Pansy – Mercy, Kill Me

You might know Vivian McCall as part of Chicago rock outfit Jungle Green, but upon starting the transitioning process several years ago, the singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist realised she needed a new project to chart the emotion and complexity of the experience properly. Pansy is that very project, an outlet which sees McCall plunder the gamut of indie rock in an attempt to capture the wild range of emotions of the transitioning process. Described by label Earth Libraries as “a noisy power pop anthem about a catastrophic breakup that demanded reinvention,” new single ‘Mercy, Kill Me’ is on the jangly and hooky end of the spectrum, documenting a difficult, life-changing breakup with a breezy energy.

runo plum – Halfway Up The Lawn

We’ve featured a couple of singles from runo plum in recent weeks, with new album patching coming soon via Winspear. After the “inherently bittersweet” ‘Lemon Garland‘, ‘Sickness‘ showed the newly powerful sound of the record. “Plum has lost none of the tenderness which so marked earlier releases,” as we put it, “but is now even better equipped to elucidate the highs and lows of life.” Latest track ‘Halfway Up The Lawn’ is no less striking, pairing a rich arrangement and heartfelt vocals and charging everything with an insistent energy to evoke the desperation of an unravelling relationship. A track existing at the intersection of yearning and frustration, a state of mind which so often comprises the end of things. “Will you turn the lamp back on / or leave it to your mom,” as plum sings, “to be the one to reach out to me / I don’t wanna make a scene.”

Watch the video directed by David Milan Kelly below:

patching will be released on the 14th November via Winspear and you can pre-order it from the runo plum Bandcamp page.

Young Elk – Silver Bullet

“You started lying when you learned to speak / Your mother gave you the throne / Gave you a silver bullet enemy / Sang you a sorrowful song.” So sings Ezekiel J. Rudick on ‘Silver Bullet’, the latest single from Young Elk. Released ahead of a new full-length coming soon via Rue Defense, the track is the epitome of the Young Elk sound. One loaded with both foreboding atmosphere and pressing weight, Rudick’s charged vocals falling somewhere between empathy and accusation. A mood fitting for a song which looks to mine the mother/son relationship for all of its complexity, emerging with a picture undeniably dark yet never without sympathy, as though one’s ability to cause pain is not derived from simple cruelty but rather a tangled web of suffering and the hope for reprieve.

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