With the EP now out via Super Tuff Records, we got M. Vaughan to reflect on the release, going through each track to delve a little deeper into their origins and the intentions behind them.

I wrote these songs between 2021-2024. It took me some time. At first, I was worried I’d lost my mojo because a lot of the things I made after that were schizophrenic and some of them just plain not good.

It’s hard to balance living in a new country, job, social life, and making music. Sometimes I just paced around my apartment practicing how to say “Congratulations on your Wedding” in German and never touched a synthesizer.

But honestly, if you don’t live life a bit, you won’t have things to write music about and these past few years have been incredibly rich. No regrets.

Tire Swing

I wrote this song in Berlin during my first Spring. I didn’t have a good time in Germany and was really homesick when I wrote this. I had been wondering if I made the wrong choice by moving abroad, if I’d deserted a lot of great friends for this shitty unknown world I was trudging through at the time.

Sonically, I love the interplay of the cheesy piano and blown out drum break, it kind of reminded me of Fishmans, an iconic Japanese post-rock band.

All Good

This was my attempt to write a non-bummer song. I’ve been living in Lisbon Portugal for two years and I used to think that I can’t write music because I’m happy now. Compared with living in a mouse-infested flat in Brooklyn, living in a sunny, warm place can strangely be a destroyer of motivation.

There’s a sample underpinning the whole song which I recorded while visiting my friend in Morocco. It’s this peaceful moment in the morning in his garden outside Casablance. There was a massive commotion of birds buzzing around his yard and you can faintly hear the call to prayer in the distance. It’s my own reminder to allow yourself to breathe and enjoy life’s small moments.

Nazaré

Nazaré is a town about an hour north of Lisbon that’s known for having the biggest waves in the world. It’s a surreal, spooky, David Lynch-ian place. When you walk the streets there’s these old ladies who walk around in black hoods, waiting for their husbands they’ve lost at sea.

When I wrote this, I was listening to a lot of Blood Orange, Erika de Casier, and Massive Attack at the time. I had a lot of fun recording the call and response vocals at the end and I love the mega chorus that it crescendos into. This is my personal favorite track on the record.

Cold Read

This one is about working up the courage to do hard things, to overcome isolation, to put yourself out there enough to be seen by others.

When I wrote this, my mom (who lives alone in rural Vermont) was going to audition for a play in her town. I’d get on video calls with her at night to help her prepare. We’d read her lines and mark up her script together on FaceTime, and I’d try to pep her up. This song is about rooting for her—wanting her to shine, to self actualize, and for her to see how awesome she is.

While I’m writing this, Carnival celebrations were going on outside my window in Lisbon, days of parades with thousands of people in costumes and drumlines and glitter everywhere. And I’m this sober curmudgeon, locked up in my apartment trying to finish this last song.

There’s a theme about the battle between isolation and creative expression. Wanting to be seen/heard but working in this self-imposed exile at the same time. And once you’re done, when you spill your heart, will anyone give a shit? I was working through these doubts and just trying to find fulfilment in the process.

Keep in Touch is out now via Super Tuff Records and you can get it from the M. Vaughan Bandcamp page.

Photos by Chiara Soldati

The post M. Vaughan – Keep in Touch appeared first on Various Small Flames.

When we spoke with Ben Seretan about his album Youth Pastoral back in 2020, he brought up the impact friend and collaborator Devra Freelander had on the record. “Dev understood how special it was to get together,” Seretan explained. “She was always, always happy to see other people, and really went out of her way to make you feel like you were having the best day of your life.” Made in Italy with Nico Hedley (bass) and Dan Knishkowy (drums) mere weeks after Freelander untimely death in 2019, Seretan’s latest album Allora in many ways represents an attempt to harness such sentiments, however conscious this might have been. There’s so much more to say about the record, which will be released via Tiny Engines later this summer, but for now we’ll leave you with opener and lead single ‘New Air’—a song as thunderous, chaotic and big-hearted as anything Seretan has released to date.

Islands – Drown A Fish

Eighteen years since debut Return to the Sea, Islands return early this summer with What Occurs, the tenth album in their storied and always idiosyncratic history. Replacing the band’s signature style of meticulously layered indie pop with something more raw and natural, the record promises to emphasise the spontaneous energy of a band still finding fresh and quirky angles from which to explore pop music. This new approach is apparent on lead single ‘Drown A Fish’. Recorded live in a single take in a studio on Vancouver Island, it’s a power pop jam with an unconventional narrator. “I was looking to throw my hat in the ring of Pop Songs About Lovelorn Losers Who Couldn’t Buy a Clue to Save Their Life,” lead Nick Thorburn says of the track. “I set out to write a song that laid bare a series of ‘ironic situations narrated by a delusional idiot’, because I think that’s more interesting than listening to an uplifting anthem about a flawless, self-empowered smartypants.”

What Occurs comes out on 21st June and is available to pre-order from the Islands Bandcamp page.

Jahnah Camille – flesh

Based in Birmingham, Alabama, songwriter and musician Jahnah Camille is set to release her debut EP i tried to freeze light, but only remember a girl next month via Winspear. The songs offer a picture of late adolescence in all of its bittersweet nuance, its introspective contemplation matched only by its bold confessional attitude. Single ‘flesh’ offers a glimpse of the style, channelling a 90s alt rock aesthetic to evoke a mood at once tender and simmering with bite. “Limit my flesh / And tell me my place,” Camille sings, tone set somewhere between desire and wistful regret. “We shared so many kisses / But we weren’t awake.”

Check out the video directed by Sapir Blain with text by Disney Bagwell below:

i tried to freeze light, but only remember a girl is out in the 21st June via Winspear and you can pre-order it now.

Kramies – Social Light

“A combination of folk, rock and dream pop which conjures its own fantastical worlds. Places both haunting and romantic, separate from reality but on some level echoing its deeper truths.” That’s how we described the self-titled album by Kramies back in 2022. With a new EP coming this autumn on VanGerrett Records, the Dutch-American songwriter has returned with new single ‘Social Light’. With contributions from members of Band of Horses, The Black Keys and Grandaddy, not to mention backing vocals from Allison Lorenzen, the song represents another dreamy, melancholic fairy tale which blurs the line between eeriness and empathy to form something ultimately affirming.

Las Nubes – Would Be

Las Nubes, that’s Miami duo Ale Campos and Emile Milgrim, have made their name with a raucous blend of punk rock and dream pop, earning them shows with the likes of  Shannon and the Clams and The Coathangers, not to mention backing Iggy Pop as the first all-female version of The Stooges in 2020. Following on from 2019 debut SMVT, Las Nubes return this summer with a brand new album to build upon these successes. Titled Tormentas Malsanas (which translates to ‘unhealthy storms’), the album channels the unpredictability and fury of its meteorological title to produce an electrically charged sound, as introduced by single ‘Would Be’. Because while the track opens with a reflective haze as Campos and Milgrim consider life’s inhospitable nature and the too quick passing of time, they soon burn away any negativity with sheer force.

M. Vaughan – Tire Swing

New York-born, Lisbon-based artist M. Vaughan cut his teeth in the indie rock scene before devoting his creative energies to electronic music, putting out releases on labels like Freerange and Monologues as well as his own Super Tuff imprint. New EP Keep In Touch feels like that of musician looking to embrace all the disparate influences which came to shape his sound, be it the genres he has moved between or the places in which he has worked on them. “This record is about these past few years of transition,” Vaughan explains, “trying to reckon with my own musical roots while making sense of life abroad, and eventually landing in a new place and making it home.” Single ‘Tire Swing’ presents the result of such a motivation, breaking the mould to offer something looking towards rock while keeping one foot firmly inside the club.

Russian Baths – Bind

In June, New York indie rock band Russian Baths will release their sophomore album Mirror, via Good Eye Records. The album’s second single, ‘Bind’ is a dark and ominous track that fuses goth rock, post-punk and a shimmer of shoegaze into something at once propulsive and eerie. Lyrically stark with a sense of gloomy poetry, it’s a song the band say explores past injustices “all connected by misguided vengeance desperate to escape the past but doomed to repeat it.” The result lands somewhere between a sweaty basement club and the desolate landscape from a folk horror tale. Nervous clockwork percussion chugs beneath stabs of sharp and surreal guitar that gives the whole thing a sense of sickly madness and doom. As the press release puts it, “it’s all a sinking ship that keeps pressing onward.”

 Sleeepy Anderson – Gamblin’ Shoes

Louisville-based musician, songwriter and visual artist Scott T. “Sleeepy” Anderson, AKA Sleeepy Anderson, is releasing his debut album Truck Songs later this year. New single ‘Gamblin’ Shoes’ offers a view into a record which promises to hark back to the heavyweights of classic country. It was formed while Andersen was travelling the breadth of the US in an old red pick-up truck, tapping into the freedom and lonesome heartache of the transient life to offer a contemporary vision of which Hank Williams and Townes van Zandt would be proud. Anderson’s vocals sit above plucked guitar, unadorned and raw, at the crossroads between forlorn and easygoing. Watch the video shot by Cullen Monasterio and Nick Netherton below:

Truck Songs will be released later this year. You can download ‘Gamblin’ Shoes’ from the Sleeepy Anderson Bandcamp page.

Yoshika Colwell – Adelaide

Following the release of her debut single ‘It’s Getting Late’ last month, Kent-based singer-songwriter Yoshika Colwell has announced her debut EP, There’s a Time. It comprises of five tracks of timeless and emotionally wrought folk music, recorded live with a band that bring a rich and easy grace to Colwell’s explorations of time, relationships and the notion of selfhood. To further whet appetites for the EP, Yoshika Colwell has unveiled a second single, ‘Adelaide’, an intense song which reaches for all of these themes in its three and a half minute runtime. “Adelaide is a song about tension and release,” Colwell describes. “About repetition of unhealthy patterns, hurting yourself and others because of a fear of being radically honest.” But it’s not all turbulence and gloom, there’s a freedom too, that sense of relief experienced when letting go to those unhealthy patterns. As Colwell puts it: “It also is a song about catharsis and the phenomenal lightness that comes when you listen to your intuition.”

There’s a Time is out on the 26th May and you can pre-order it now.

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