Recorded in an old church near the birthplace of lead Daniel Hedin and taking years to bring to fruition, ‘Hideous Form’ is the new single from Det Hemliga Folket, a collaboration between Hedin and Budapest‘s Marton Fogl. The sound feels intrinsically tied to the origins of the track, offering an austere space full of shadow and cryptic weight, Hedin reaching beyond his surroundings and the present mood to re-engage with something more elemental. A song fitting for a project built around Hedin’s desire to connect with heritage, be that the ancestors who walked the land before him or the very earth of Sweden itself. Det Hemliga Folket is “a re-connection with the wild north inside me and the ancestral blues that whispers within the sound of the earth, the whispers in my head of the very fabric of the land,” he explains. “I hear the ocean and the silence of the forests that raised me like mothers and fathers. The darkness that’s been a part of me is an engine that never can die. It’s not just me, it is the earth where I am from, the deep beneath the soil of the north that is always calling me home.”

Dylan Henner – I Used To See Her On The Way Home from School and She Lit Up The Sky with her Beauty

A collection “which explores both the tactile experience of adolescence and the nostalgia of times now past.” That’s how we described Star Dream FM, the new album from Dylan Henner out via Phantom Limb, with previous singles ‘We Ditched School and Climbed Over the Neighbour’s Fence to Swim in their Pool All Day‘ and ‘We Walked all the Way to the Lake and The Water Was So Still We Jumped in Naked‘ “embracing not just a sentimental fondness for the specific moment but one wider in scope,” as we put it, “longing for the kind of curiosity and carefree spirit which marks youth.” With the album now out, Henner has shared another single and the title of the track says it all. ‘I Used To See Her On The Way Home from School and She Lit Up The Sky with Her Beauty’ is “about the frenzy and passion of love in adolescence,” as Henner explains. “About how your crush can change the whole universe with their presence, make everything feel bigger than you could possibly handle sometimes or so delicate you could lose it in an instance at others. The harp was supposed to represent the sort of angelic ascension of renaissance or classical beauty, which is the only lens you can ever see your crush with when you’re seventeen.”

ERIKA DOHI – Myth of Tomorrow

Later this week, Osaka-born, New York-based composer and pianist Erika Dohi will release Myth of Tomorrow, a brand new full-length via Switch Hit Records and Figureight Records. Described as “a sonic meditation on catastrophe, resilience, and rebirth,” the album builds upon the eclectic style of predecessor I, Castorpollux to push Dohi’s sound in new directions, utilising a variety of sensibilities from dance, jazz, ambient and classical modes to create soundscapes as singular as they are striking. The record draws its title from the Taro Okamoto’s mural of the same name, and the title track draws the clearest line between the two artworks. A song concerned with the endless cycles of existence, not only asking what they demand of us but also how we might find peace and healing within the recurring patterns of life. “For me, the song reflects on resilience and regeneration in the face of life’s relentless cycles,” Dohi explains. “Through its lyrics, I explore the contradictions of modern existence—the struggle to find happiness in repetition, the unspoken burdens we carry, and the illusions we chase in pursuit of fulfillment. Yet, amidst all of this, the song also asks us to pause, breathe, and reconnect with the beauty in the everyday: the sun rising without fail, the moon’s quiet waning, the resilience of a dandelion growing through cracks in asphalt. It’s a song of introspection that invites us to confront our disconnection and rediscover what moves us to live and hope for tomorrow.”

Myth of Tomorrow will be released on the 24th October via Switch Hit Records and Figureight Records and you can pre-order it now.

Haley Heynderickx & Max García Conover – Fluorescent Light

Haley Heynderickx and Max García Conover are no strangers to collaboration, the pair releasing Among Horses III back in 2018 on Son Canciones and the anniversary single ‘How Does the Horse Go Home?‘ five years later. “The genius of both Heynderickx and Conover is their ability to draw a relatable emotion from their subject matter,” we wrote, “tapping into a universal sense of nostalgia and longing and presenting it back to us, shaping and polished into its most gleaming form.” Based on the life and work of Woodie Guthrie and this time to be released via Fat Possum, What of Our Nature is a brand new full-length by the pair which builds upon the chemistry they’ve crafted over the years to offer songs as inventive and heartfelt as anything they’ve released to date. After the verbose and sometimes frantic ‘Boar’, latest single ‘Fluorescent Light’ highlights a more delicate, restrained dimension to the record, though true to Guthrie’s spirit, there’s a seam of social commentary running through it too. A tone at once playful, melancholic and cutting, able to take aim at the banalities and cruelties of contemporary life without losing its airy brightness.

Kramies – Goodbye Dreampop Troubadour

Back in August we introduced Goodbye Dreampop Troubadour, the new album from Kramies on Hidden Shoal, with single ‘Hollywood Signs’. The track showed the album’s nuanced nature, the sound following “a newly nostalgic direction, full of dreamlike longing and evening colours,” as we put it, yet one which possesses “something strange and quietly unsettling, full of the mysterious allure which Kramies has always offered.” With the record out now, the title track has been unveiled as a new single, the cornerstone of the record which embodies all of its richness and duality. Blending autobiography with fiction, ‘Goodbye Dreampop Troubadour’ rises from relative restraint into something enveloping, Kramies moving from a spacious, drifting sound into something rich and triumphant, playing like a metamorphosis witnessed in real time.

Langkamer – Crows

Following on from 2024 album Langzamer, as well as lead Josh Jarman’s solo release under the moniker Classic Trucks earlier this year, Bristol‘s Langkamer are preparing to release their fourth album in as many years. Coming early next January via Breakfast Records, No was recorded in the Spanish hills at Zarzalico and carries some of the Mediterranean clarity in its sound, creating enough space to examine the full scale of our frenetic contemporary life. Lead single ‘Crows’ gives a taste of what to expect, a track fired by nervous energy and unanswered questions, barrelling forwards despite its clear desire to stop and change. “’Crows’ is a song about the crazy shapes we contort ourselves into trying to create art in the era of late-stage capitalism,” the band explain. “Working a thousand jobs. Writing songs with the left hand while writing emails with the right hand. Your day is already doomed the moment you open your eyes. Everything’s a bad omen.”

Orchid Mantis – Strange Heaven

Change and evolution are key features in the career of any artist, especially one as prolific as Orchid Mantis. “Over the years, Atlanta, Georgia-based artist Thomas Howard has used the [project] as a space in which to explore a host of musical styles,” we wrote back in March, “each release responding to and building upon that which came before it so that the work was always in flux.” In Airports, the second Orchid Mantis full-length to be released this year, not only continues this process but meditates on the very meaning of such an endeavour. What does it mean to commit to a life making music? And how might it help chart all that is lost and preserved over the years? The result feels like the culmination of everything Orchid Mantis has done to date, returning to old styles and techniques as readily is it breaks new ground, and thus becomes something of a mission statement for the project. A declaration of intent to give the past and future equal billing, full of the spirit which has been pieced together over the years yet open to possibility. New single and closer ‘Strange Heaven’ expresses the sentiment most succinctly:

as it fades away
we could keep drifting
we could form a star
we could be lifted

The Planes – Tear the World Apart (MFLB Version)

We last wrote about New York indie rock outfit The Planes back in 2023, describing ‘First Breath After Mask’, a single from EP Dark Matter Recycling Co., as “a song at once depressed and affirming. As though from with its own inertia stirs some last attempt at catharsis.” Now the band are back with Motel For Lightning Bug, a brand new release which sees them continue their own idiosyncratic mix of rock and pop influences, harnessing some of the energy of their livewire shows without losing a sense of emotion or reflection. It is fitting that opener and single ‘Tear the World Apart (MFLB Version)’ is a reworking of a fan favourite from live shows, what the band call label as “slacker indie rock bubblegum” which deals with loss with equal parts wistfulness and wry humour, not to mention an infectious sense of momentum which only builds across the length of the track.

Sister Wanzala – Now You’re Mine

Back in 2022 we heralded the apparently triumphant return of London sibling trio Sister Wanzala, singles ‘Perfume‘ and ‘Top Drawer‘ appearing after a three-year hiatus which started soon after the release of 2019 EP The Circus and signalling an almost reluctant determination to pursue making music in an age which can often appear to be designed to convince you otherwise. Fittingly, both tracks featured dreams as a central motif, though rather than some inspirational battle cry to all those who which to pursue their passions, they either described these dreams as full of disaster (‘Top Drawer’) or declared a desire to have them removed entirely (‘Perfume’). You can already guess what happened next. The return was a false dawn, Sister Wanzala retreated into their shells again, only… what’s that? A new track, two years later? Another self-deprecating press release declaring their career a failure and promising more of the same? You’ll understand if we don’t call ‘Now You’re Mine’ anything more than another small blip in might otherwise be a pristine half-decade of silence, but as soon as the jazzy opening unfurls with all its nineties daytime TV swagger and the cold groove settles with effortless cool, you’ll be glad you got anything from the project, no matter how alluring and brief.

The post Weekly Listening: October 2025 #2 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Last week, New Haven, Connecticut band All The Pretty Horses released a new album, Witches Up No Mountain Switches Down No Valley, on Candlepin Records. Led by Austin Travers, the band craft slowcore-inflected bedroom pop that is equally comfortable in an intimate hush as it is in triumphant noise. Described as a love letter to cat Franny (AKA the Frances of the title), the record’s second track is a good introduction, moving from near-whispered vocals and shambling percussion into something joyously clamorous, all smashed cymbals and rousing guitar. It’s also charmingly sincere, taking the conventions of a standard love song and framing around not another human but a beloved pet. “When Frances meets me in my backyard,” Traver sings, “this song will fill her heart, her eyes stare into mine as I reach the chorus line.”

Cali Bellow – LFG!!!! (i just died)

Ever find yourself wondering what would happen if you took some of the early 2000s’ biggest musical styles and shoved them into a blender? Say, punk rock from the likes of Rancid and commercial pop from Spice Girls, NSYNC and Aqua? Well, ponder no further, because Cali Bellow has shared ‘LFG!!!! (i just died)’, the latest single from upcoming genre-bending album Ciao Bella. The single combines all those sensibilities and more. As we wrote in August, the album is inspired by everything from Dark Souls, The Muppets, Ursula Le Guinn and Joanna Russ, and the new single shows just how idiosyncratic and infectious a sound such a wide palette can create.

Ciao Bella is out on the 25th October and you can pre-order it now from Bandcamp.

Carpet – Soft and Hidden

Carpet is the solo recording project of Rob Slater, a Leeds-based artist perhaps best known for his work as a musician and recording engineer at Greenmount Studios. Slater has played in a myriad of bands—from Thank and Mi Mye to Post War Glamour Girls and Crake, as well as noisy punk outfit The Spills—though Carpet sees him go back to the beginning to reclaim the lo-fi sensibilities which first sparked his imagination in his youth. With EP Fruit coming soon via Launchpad+, Slater has unveiled single ‘Soft and Hidden’. A song which lives up to its title with its hushed and intimate sound, and serves as the ideal introduction to a release concerned with mining life for those small, fond moments.

Fruit is out on the 1st November via Launchpad+.

Clem Snide – Free

Oh Smokey, the tenth full-length from Eef Barzelay’s Clem Snide, finds a songwriter at something of an inflection point. With break-ups putting an end to long-term relationships both personal and professional, Barzelay left his home of Nashville after twenty years and set about searching for the next step without quite knowing what that might even look like. It’s therefore unsurprising the album is preoccupied with the unknown, a collection of “slow, sad songs about God and death” as Barzelay himself puts it which reflects on life’s ups and downs with a mix of empathy, wry realism and hope that only experience can bring. Single ‘Free’ shows the record’s compassionate tone, with Josh Kaufman of Bonny Light Horseman helping elevate the Clem Snide sound into some of its warmest, richest territory to date.

Oh Smokey is out on the 27th September and you can pre-order it now.

Dorio – Drive / Last Day of Summer

Recording under the moniker Dorio, Texas-based multi-instrumentalist, producer and songwriter Chad Doriocourt makes what we’ve described previously as “vivid, inquisitive songs that balance an easy-spirited energy with an underlying empathy for the human experience.” Released via Earth Libraries, new double single The Drive Collection sees Dorio continue to experiment with the pop genre, drawing the audience in with laidback simplicity and catchy earworms. Which isn’t to say there’s no substance under the surface. ‘Drive’ juxtaposes its sunny rhythm with doubt and nostalgic yearning, while the ‘Last Day of Summer’ offers an idiosyncratic snapshot of summer romance.

The Drive Collection is out now via Earth Libraries and available from Bandcamp.

max garcía conover – sue and buz catch up during fireworks

One of the most prolific and consistently interesting songwriters working today, max garcía conover has made a name with an emotive brand of folk which pairs lyrical dexterity with an earnest immediacy. New single ‘sue and buz catch up during fireworks’ captures the style perfectly, a song which unspools like long-held thoughts suddenly released, its verses dense with words but entirely natural in flow. “I wrote [the song] after spending the Fourth of July with family and friends, watching fireworks and repeatedly having the same conversation about the calamities of this country, its role in the world and the futurelessness we felt,” Conover explains. “Lot of that has since been put into a somewhat different light and I think the song landed somewhere else too, moving beyond despair without shying away from it.”

‘sue and buz catch up during fireworks’ is out now via streaming services.

 Slark Moan – Nervous Breakdown

“Oozes calm confidence and newfound wisdom [even] as life’s many emotions threaten to burst from the seams.” So we wrote of single ‘Dollhouse Heart’ from Slark Moan‘s upcoming EP, The Return of Guitar Music. The project is the alter ego of New York-based artist Mark Sloan—someone who has worked with the likes of Torres, Margo Price, Erin Rae, and SG Goodman—and provides space to utilise an expertise in craft to explore personal uncertainties. Latest track ‘Nervous Breakdown’ is no different, effortlessly blending genres to recreate an experience of feeling anything but effortless. “When I wrote the song, I was having a hard time trusting myself, and experiencing anxiety around choices I had made and uncertainty about where I needed to go,” Sloan explains. “I felt like I was always playing catch up to where I needed to be, like I had just arrived at a party just as everyone else was mapping the train ride home.” Watch the video directed by Evan Murray below:

The Return of Guitar Music is out on the 25th October.

Steve Slagg – The Newest Soil

“I spread my father’s ashes in the winter / With my brothers and my sister.” So opens ‘The Newest Soil’, opener and lead single from Steve Slagg’s latest album, I Don’t Want to Get Adjusted to This World. The record sees Missouri–born, Chicago-based songwriter place personal human experience within the wider patterns of the natural world, not only to reposition death as just another part of the living cycle, but also interrogate the ways in which our current actions might impinge on this order of things. As the opening suggests, ‘The Newest Soil’ begins this with the most intimate of subjects, describing how Slagg and his family spread his father’s ashes upon receiving his remains after a period in which his body had been donated to science.

My daddy had a body but he freed it
He knew he wouldn’t need it
At least for the next couple thousand years
This side of the veil of tears
Content he was investing in sequoias
Letting creation enjoy us

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Following in the lineage of songwriters such as Lana Del Ray and Ethel Cain, april june is a Madrid-based artist whose Gothic brand of synth pop muddies the line between desire, fantasy and reality. With a full-length edging closer, april june has been releasing a steady stream of singles in recent times, and the latest ‘it’s all my fault’ serves as the ideal introduction for those not already onboard. Shimmering nostalgia, heartbreak and loneliness marble into something enveloping, with a melodramatic gloom that is nevertheless shot through with shining longing.

ARXX – Baby Uh Huh

Earlier this year, Brighton duo ARXX released their album Ride Or Die via Submarine Cat Records, a record which saw Hanni Pidduck and Clara Townsend push the garage rock sound which made their name towards polished, soaring power pop. To close out the year, ARXX have returned with another evolution, this time of single ‘Baby Uh Huh’. Developed in collaboration with trans collective charity We Exist, the reimagined version collects a bunch of friends to celebrate the Queer community’s communal power, taking an already affirming track and elevating its joyous spirit even higher. “We were looking at the world around us, at all the attacks on Queer lives and in particular Trans lives and we wanted to do something to show our support with our Queer community,” the duo explain. “‘Baby Uh Huh’ is about finding the right people to surround yourself with to make you a better version of yourself, which is a very Queer experience.”

You can grab the charity single on Bandcamp. Ride Or Die is out now via Submarine Cat Records.

body / negative – sleepy (feat. Midwife)

Back in October we introduced body / negative‘s forthcoming album everett, with multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Andy Schiaffino enlisting the help of Midwife to create an incredibly personal memorial to her parents. “An attempt at communication through planes of existence and accumulated time,” as we described of the title track, “reaching across seemingly impassable gaps to ensure the line between loved ones remains open, regardless of how distant they might come to seem.” Latest track ‘sleepy’ is no less poignant, its sparse arrangement and layered samples playing like an evening in an empty room. Only within the stillness something else stirs, echoes of past days returning to dispel the apparent solitude, as though time is not a straight line but a stack of superimposed snapshots.

everett is out on the 8th December via Track Number Records and you can pre-order it from the body / negative Bandcamp page.

Haley Heynderickx & Max Garcia Conover – How Does The Horse Go Home?

Both Haley Heynderickx and Max Garcia Conover have been regular fixtures here at VSF over the years, so it was a real treat to have the pair join forces for Among Horses III, one of a series of collaborative releases from Son Canciones. “Whether writing confessions about themselves or imagined fictions about others, the genius of both Heynderickx and Conover is their ability to draw a relatable emotion from their subject matter,” we wrote, “tapping into a universal sense of nostalgia and longing and presenting it back to us, shaping and polished into its most gleaming form.” To celebrate the fifth anniversary of the EP, the pair have returned with a new extended edition, featuring new songs like the ‘How Does The Horse Go Home?’—another deft, striking contemplation on love in all of its changing, persistent forms.

Land Dweller – Losing Touch

Having previously recorded under the moniker Varsity Dad, Denver‘s Dan Harvey has now taken up the name Land Dweller and is preparing to release the project’s debut full-length Past Life. With Harvey on bass, guitar and vocals and Larry Shaw lending drums, the album establishes the Land Dweller MO—a blend of slacker and garage rock which melds bright rhythms and nostalgic textures. Take lead single ‘Losing Touch’, where the sound’s fatalistic reflection is counterbalanced by a rising rhythm, allowing for something at once despondent and cathartic.

Luah – To Relate

Luah is the recording project of Brendan Paul Sullivan, a Florida-born, Baltimore-raised and Kingston, New York-based songwriter, alongside an assortment of friends. The first taste of a forthcoming album, new single ‘To Relate’ is a slow unfurling of a song. Downbeat vocals bob along a meandering arrangement, so what might at first appear to be a morose mood is gradually revealed to be something more varied and natural. As though in committing to the flow, Sullivan not only accepts the changeable currents but finds beauty in every small eddy and pull.

Other Suns – To Adrianne

The cornerstone of debut full-length album Songs About Death, ‘To Adrianne’ introduces the hushed, introspective sound of Other Suns. Opening with the gentle lap of the tide, the song uses a spare folk sound to conjure something both warm and searching. A space outside of normal things in which to voice questions or share sentiments in the aftermath of loss. Or perhaps just to listen, to attune to the quiet sadness inherent in all things in an effort to sense the connection which exists between them. As the final line offers: “If everything dies, I’m not alone.”

Touch the Clouds – Dissolve

“A study on retrospection itself, calling attention to the artifice of memory and the rose-tinted fictions it has us believe.” That’s how we described ‘Gordie and the Cruisers‘ by Detroit‘s Touch the Clouds back in 2022. A bright indie rock anthem which held a more ambiguous message underneath. New track ‘Dissolve’ is no less dichotomous in style, its driving momentum and impassioned vocals detailing a headspace altogether less certain. As though only in leaning into forward motion can one shake free of the baggage of modern living. “I’ve been goin’ through a lot / trying to find a little peace / in all the yuck / racing around inside of me,” as the song opens. “Like dogs on the loose / running the street / howling a tune / into the moonlight.”

The Wolf In Our Own Backyard – God Help Me

The songwriting project of Kevin Gigler, The Wolf In Our Own Backyard is a Providence, Rhode Island-based outfit that works within folk’s best traditions. New album Stuck in Useless Country is full of wry humour, self-deprecation and dissatisfaction, all delivered with an upbeat and often scrappy folk rock style which twists and bends conventions as it sees fit. Single ‘God Help Me’ is perhaps one of the more traditional tracks on the album, though is shot through with the same spirit. Think John Prine’s ‘Paradise’ updated for a slightly later stage of capitalism, where the citizens of said useless country are left with no recourse but to mourn its perpetual decay.

The post Weekly Listening: November 2023 #4 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Conover’s latest release, everything in winter, is no less intimate, though this time the tone was baked into the songs from their origins. Because each track on the EP was at least partly inspired by a collection of letters Conover found in a suitcase. Letters written by his grandfather to his grandmother which had been sitting for seventy years. “He wrote them in the late 1940s while my grandmother was quarantined in a hospital for the consumptive poor,” Conover explains. “He was sixteen and for two years he poured all his love and frustration and hope for the future into those letters.” The songs of everything in winter might extend their view and subject matter beyond the words transcribed there, but the voice and beliefs of Conover’s grandfather underpins their mood and feel.

With backing vocals from Paula Prieto, the songs are as heartfelt and contemplative as anything Conover has written. Take opener ‘5 to 4’, the barely murmured vocals aching with a sense of tender longing though soon bound up in the enlivening momentum which so often threads the song writing of Max García Conover. The sense that some building heart or conviction is fired by the act of writing, of singing, of the way words fit together in their simple beauty to conjure the “breath of all these sacred things”:

so we named the house a country
and we named our bodies home
there was everything and nothing
little stories that we told
while a border blazed in heat and pain
a fog like burning fields revealed
machines of human wonder
making rackets reel to reel

The title track is warmed with an easy-going fondness, before ‘Yeye Won’t Wait’ offers a richer, brighter tone, its widescreen sound evoking the romance of its story as it exists free from the shackles of any surrounding context. A snatched moment outside of history’s weight or any of the inevitable loss down the line. ‘The Wedding Line’ loses none of the love but the melancholy seeps back in, its words addressing a hoped for future, its reality lifted with promises, before closer ‘Caw’ harks back to the love and longing of the opener. Life comes with deep joys and desperate sadness, and Max García Conover has made it his business to sit attentive to both.

everything in winter is out now and available from the Max García Conover Bandcamp page.

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Something of a plea, ‘Don’t Let Us Get Rich’ sees Max García Conover address his wife. Asking that their sincerity and humbleness might remain intact amid an age of calculating cruelty and greed. “Anyone can see the horizon is wanting / the national bird has a nest full of beaks,” as he sings. “Screaming to be set free from their longing / mistaking each other for something to eat.” This image of birds pushed outside of their natural cycles recurs across the song, and for all the song’s earnest hush, it ends up quietly frantic. Seeing through the façade of consumerist culture and finding a sick emptiness within.

don’t let us get rich and go crazy
don’t let us get rich at all

The foreboding tone of Dylan’s ‘One Too Many Mornings’ feels like a continuation of this. Its dogs losing their barks, its nights falling too soon, its vision blackening as though there’s a cloud over the very days ahead. And though Julie Arsenault and Max García Conover’s dual vocals might sound like tender affinity at first, there’s another reading which raises its head too. Twin voices singing about the same thing but separately. Isolated within their own response to the situation, unable to help or be helped.

It’s a restless hungry feeling
And it don’t mean no one no good
When ev’rything that I’m sayin’
You can say it just as good
You’re right from your side
And I’m right from mine
We’re both just one too many mornings
An’ a thousand miles behind

Don’t Let Us Get Rich is out now via Son Canciones and you can get it from Bandcamp.

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Influenced not only by the likes of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen but more contemporary songwriters too, with echoes of Josh Ritter and Joe Pug present in the sound. But Conover is more than capable of standing on his own amongst such songwriters, having developed a distinctive balance between wistful reflection, playful observation and a pervasive sense of emotion that wavers between subtle ache and urgent sting

Max García Conover returned last year with what we described as his most urgent sting yet. As the title suggests, brand new track ‘world war 3 is gonna be so dumb’ is rooted in the curious blend of foreboding and farce that is the contemporary moment. “The connection with American politics is obvious,” Conover explains. “But I wasn’t trying to comment on them really. I just wanted to think about how I was experiencing them.” It turns out the song is now part of deer, a brand new album out now on Son Canciones, and serves as a great introduction to the record for those unfamiliar with Conover’s work.

‘world war 3 is gonna be so dumb’ unfurls with a kind of pressing breathlessness. A sense of processing the endless stream of developments and possibilities, reacting minute by minute, hour by hour, and wondering how each incremental change might impinge upon regular life. An intuitive reaction to the times. “I wrote many verses and recording new ones was sort of a daily ritual for me,” Conover continued. “I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to finish it or if I cared to. Then one day I happened to record a take that felt true and then my wife went into labor with our first baby and then some truly dumb people attacked the capitol and it suddenly felt like a good time to post it.”

when none of our questions revealed our condition
were we part of the story were we even omissions
were we bound by our badness were we misunderstood
did the future come save us did we think that it would
and when the darkness appeared as relentless
riding a gray horse vicious and headless
did i say anything
when they said they could fix it
did i say anything
when they said it’s just business
when they said to get hungry
when they said to get rich
when they said to have fun
when they said to have kids
when they said to get happy
when they said to stay true
when they said to keep laughing
when they called it the blues
are there ways to be dying

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Unveiling an upcoming EP of the same name on Future Gods, Anni Rossi‘s ‘Wild West‘ established the artistic vision of the Brooklyn-based songwriter, performer and multi-instrumentalist. The EP, collaboration with cinematographer Sarah Tricker, sits “at the intersection of various modes of expression,” we wrote, “ideally placed to draw from [audio-visual] fields to create singular and inventive pieces of work.” New single ‘Chasing the Tiger’ follows with another evocative sound, the piano helping find a delicate balance between the ethereal and the human and emerging with something both sensual and reflective.

Wild West is out now via Future Gods.

Apollo Ghosts – Spilling Yr Guts

Vancouver‘s Apollo Ghosts made a splash in 2010 with their Polaris-nominated record, Mount Benson, though seemingly disbanded in 2013 as lead Adrian Teacher moved on to found COOL TV and other projects. But stories of their demise turned out to be exaggerated as Apollo Ghosts returned in 2019 with Living Memory, and the comeback appears to be a lasting one as this month saw the release of brand new album Pink Tiger on You’ve Changed Records. Single ‘Spilling Yr Guts’ is just one of twenty-two bright and inventive tracks, but its fresh, buoyant rhythm serves as the perfect point of entry for those looking to be swept away.

Spilling your guts on the sidelines
Spilling your guts on the stage
When you’ve got fuck all inside you
You’ll finally have something to say

A Starving Viking – Leaves

The moniker of Connecticut-based songwriter Matt Jarrett, A Starving Viking is a folk project which primarily relies on an intimately simple balance of guitar and vocals. His debut record Semblance was released in 2019 via Resonating Wood Recordings, though in anticipation of a new EP the label has released an amended version, now titled reSemblance. Single ‘Leaves’ is a great introduction to A Starving Viking‘s patient and kind-hearted sound, the melancholy of its murmured style counterbalanced by an ever-present compassion.

Fake Fruit – No Mutuas

Just over a year ago, Oakland, California indie rock band Fake Fruit released a self-titled album on Rocks In Your Head Records. Lead by guitarist/vocalist Hannah D’Amato, the band draw on classic post-punk to create something fresh and often acerbic, drawing on the frustration and general weirdness of 21st century living. A standout was single ‘No Mutuals’, a song that rallies against empty, point-scoring social interactions (what they call “Cool Guy Syndrome”) and now Fake Fruit have returned with a reworking of the track that adds an extra layer of attitude and translates the lyrics into Spanish. “This recording feels true to the original, but it’s sporting new haircut energy, an extra spring in its step and feels more aligned with how it sounds when played live,” D’Amato explains. “Plus it just feels good to scream in Spanish.” Check it out below:

Greet Death – Panic Song

Following on from 2019’s majestic New Hell, Flint’s Greet Death have spent the past few months unveiling a series of new singles. The subdued ‘I Hate Everything’ drew the listener into reserved yet resentful frame of mind, the familiar Greet Death weight hovering just out of view. ‘You Love is Alcohol’ introduced a woozy country vibe, ‘Punishment Existence’ simmered with latent intensity too. So the manner in which ‘Panic Song’ bathes the listener in its gauzy textures and insistent energy feels something like the deferred release promised on the previous tracks. Even if the release is excessive and all-consuming with its adrenaline-filled shakes.

Got onto something new
To repossess your blues
Another panic song
And sirens all night long

Jack Keyes – Gray Balloons

Last year we wrote about Kentucky artist Jack Keyes and his upcoming record, Dissolving in Dusk. Single ‘Nowhere’ introduced a sound “wrapped in an easy-going sincerity that holds both melancholy and fondness,” and latest track ‘Gray Balloons’ is similarly conflicted. Again based around the simplicity of acoustic guitar, the single confronts a difficult situation with tender charm. “This song was written after my girlfriend had her visa revoked,” Keyes explains. “She had to very suddenly leave our town in Kentucky to go back to her family nearly 10,000 miles away. In our last days together, I wanted to be happy and celebrate the good times, while also mourning a future loss.”

Dissolving in Dusk will be released later this year.

Kelly Hoppenjans – Stain

We’ve previously described the work of Nashville singer-songwriter Kelly Hoppenjans as “Channeling the spirit of riot grrrl while maintaining a folk sensibility,” with debut OK, I Feel Better representing “music of empowerment, facing up to expectations and staring them down.” Taken from new EP, Can’t Get the Dark Out, latest single ‘Stain’ is a direct follow-up to a single from that record, a kind of antidote to the toxic headspace ‘Band-Aid Girl’ asked Hoppenjans to re-enter every time she played it. As she puts it: “I decided to write a song, inspired by the same relationship, that I could perform after ‘Band-Aid Girl’ to lift me out of that funk.”

But I didn’t think to say that to you in the moment
I guess I only come up with the good stuff once you walk away
My mistake

I think it’s your fault

Check out the video directed by Crystal Bowersox below:

Can’t Get the Dark Out will be released on the 22nd May and you can get it from Bandcamp.

Kraków Loves Adana – Open The Door

Last year Hamburg‘s dream pop duo Kraków Loves Adana released Follow the Voice, a record which “in which the boundaries between physical reality, virtual reality and dreams began to merge and blur.” However the sometimes there is more to a song than the single take which makes it to the record, and new EP Swim in the Blue reimagines three tracks to allow them to exist in a different form. “I wanted to revisit these three pieces from a different perspective,” Deniz Çiçek explains, “never imagining that the songs would develop a whole new life of their own as a result.” A reworking of ‘Dream House’, ‘Open The Door’ is a perfect example of how these different spins manifest, with the sparkling synths toned down in favour of a fuller bodied sound.

Swim in the Blue is out now and you can get it from the Kraków Loves Adana Bandcamp page.

Laura Loriga – Passes the Flame

Born in Bologna and now based in Brooklyn, songwriter and pianist Laura Loriga has spent the last ten years honing her craft between Italy and the US, a geographic diversity which mimics the layered and shifting style of her work. Recording as both Mimes of Wine and now under her own name, Loriga has slowly veered away from an abstract classical sound toward something more immediate and intuitive, a move facilitated by a switch from acoustic piano to organ. Latest album Vever, out via ears&eyes Records, utilises this along with a variety of acoustic and electric elements, with single ‘Passes the Flame’ highlighting the shadowy, nuanced sound.

Max García Conover – Mud

Back in 2018, Max García Conover released Among Horses III, a superb collaboration with Haley Heynderickx on Barcelona label Son Canciones. Following on from a series of singles, this spring sees return Conover return with Deer, a brand new album on the same label which again leans into collaborative work. Take lead single ‘Mud’, written and recorded with Massachusetts folk trio The Ballroom Thieves. A song every bit as sincere and searching as anything in Conover catalogue, looking for substance in a strange world. “I don’t need to find the centre, I just need another song,” he sings. “So what if I write it wrong?”

Proper. – The Great American Novel

“This record is a concept album that’s meant to read like a book,” explains Proper. vocalist Erik Garlington of new record The Great American Novel. “Every song is a chapter following the protagonist through their 20s. Imagine a queer, Black Holden Caufield-type coming up in the 2010s.” Produced by Bartees Strange and released via Father/Daughter (US) and Big Scary Monsters (UK), the record is a searing critique of a society dedicated to and built upon denying Black genius. One which refuses to extend a hand to those who uphold this system of violence, deciding that for once it must be them who do the work to meet the album on its own terms.

The Great American Novel is out now via Father/Daughter (US) and Big Scary Monsters (UK).

Slow Down Molasses – Street Haunting (Vator Sessions)

Back in 2021 Saskatoon‘s Slow Down Molasses released their latest record, Minor Deaths. What we called ” a committed decision to embrace the energies of the contemporary moment in all of their frustrations, aggressions, vulnerabilities and dread.” Ahead of a UK tour this May, the band have unveiled a live version of single ‘Street Haunting‘ recorded with Vator Sessions. A take which encapsulates the bristling intensity of a SDM live show.

Minor Deaths is available from the Slow Down Molasses Bandcamp page, and you can find the full performance on the Vator Sessions Youtube page. Details of the tour are available here.

Uma Bloo – Strange Actress

The recording project of Molly Madden, Uma Bloo came into being when Madden left behind a strict conservative background and headed to Chicago. Among other artforms, songwriting soon became a way to express the dimensions of her personality that had otherwise been repressed. “Once I accepted the fact that I wanted to create my own music, these songs started pouring out of me in an effort to unpack the life I had and what I thought I wanted to build,” Madden explains. “In a lot of ways this album has been in process since I was eight years old without me fully knowing it.” Latest single ‘Strange Actress’ carries all the ferocity and feeling you might expect from such a process, holding desire, desperation and defiance in its hands and refusing to apologise for any contradiction.

You think I’m very strange
But the way I live makes sense to me
I think I’ll stay the same

The post Weekly Listening: March 2022 #4 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

This spring saw the release of ‘Handsome Suit’, the first new music from Max García Conover since. As ever, the track is rooted in the folk tradition, influenced not only by the likes of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen but more contemporary songwriters too, with echoes of Josh Ritter and Joe Pug present in the sound. But Conover is more than capable of standing on his own amongst such songwriters, having developed a distinctive balance between wistful reflection, playful observation and a pervasive sense of emotion that wavers between subtle ache and urgent sting.

‘Handsome Suit’ is a nostalgic song that evades the worst trappings of the mindset, looking back not with rose-tinted vision but something clearer. The result is less forgiving than many a backward look, but no less fond, a song that refuses to polish out the imperfections and flaws of the past, accepting that such features are very much a part of life.

half puerto rican in a handsome suit
skinny little nothing in the buffalo news
half light ticking on the falling snow
accidental baby and she moved back home
you’re crying in the kitchen and you don’t know why
drunk granddaddy in a santa tie
broke wood stove in the living room
half puerto rican in a handsome suit

boy you’re gonna wake to the pain everyone’s in
and what do you do then

The post Max García Conover – Handsome Suit appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Tracklisting:

Frog – American
The Phone Booth – Ballad of Indifference
Spielbergs – 4AM
Neurotic Fiction – Collateral
Neighborhood of Make Believe – Track Names
Pizzagirl – body part
Orchid Mantis – porch song
Gorgeous Bully – patience
Reighnbeau – Trading Heat
Troy Everett – Absent
Amparo – Hounds
REW<< – Victoire Impossible
Okay Embrace – Moving
Young Jesus – For Nana
Vender & The Cobras – Everything is Beautiful
The Lostines – Faith in Love
Haley Heynderickx & Max García Conover – Little Wind
Rivulets – Everything Goes
Balto – Bullshit Dream
Meat Wave – That’s Alright
Docks – Kiosk
Satanic Ritual Abuse – Hurting (Adjective/Verb)
SATU – Growing Up
Anna Tivel – Fenceline
Madison Turner – Richmond, Virgina
Elly Swope – 6.8
Nathan Ball – All or Nothing
Monarch Mtn – canyon blues
Stripmall Ballads – You Were Good (I Was Good For a While)
Katie Mullins – Crocuses
Lisa/Liza – Tea Kettle
free cake for every creature – shake it out
Katy Kirby – Tap Twice
Lung Cycles – hottest day of the year so far (4pm version)

You can find all of our Monthly Roundup playlists here, and peruse a wider range of mixtapes that we’ve put together over the years.

The post November 2018 Roundup appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Both artists bring their considerable talents to the project. Heynderickx continues the rich and ultimately soothing narratives that we appreciated so much on her album I Need to Start a Garden, which we described as a record “about growth and the hope of new beginnings [that] doesn’t shy away from the necessary hard work that makes such growth possible.” Conover too continues where he left off with his solo work, which we summed up previously as music which “conjures a vast American landscape, positioning the narrator as a tiny speck upon its great dusty plains, every sunset and moonbeam charging a burning nostalgia, a yearning for someplace to call home.”

Opener ‘Slow Talkin’’ is a twirling folk song, complete with Heynderickx’s now signature natural poetry. “Was it the glory days or just a heat wave,” she sings with her probing emotion. “You got a promise land made of quick sand / You got a slow dancin’ praying mantis /Stuck inside this jar / Staring at the wall.” The track’s pseudo-chorus gives us the first taste of the two voices working together—joining forces to make a compelling rhythm and energy.

‘Francis’ is spiked and spurred, gathering in intensity despite its hushed nature, like a silent midnight horse ride from deep in the American West. As its title suggests, ‘Mother’ is a song for Heynderickx’s mother, her Asian heritage referenced with beautiful, subtle grace through lines like “Land filled with pears, and apricot hues / The lands filled with mangoes and papayas blooming.” The track is plaintive and moving, the vocals breaking with something like desperation as they detail the sense of never quite belonging in homes old and new.

The Conover-penned ‘Little Wind’ might be the record’s most evocative moment, Heynderickx’s painting vivid pictures of the Catalonian countryside as she again invokes imagery of plants and nature to approach the same rhythms and cycles we experience in our lives.

I wish that I had stayed
In that river house with you
Pulled away the weeds
And let the wild roses bloom
But all the hanging plums
Someday will go sour
Little wind I’m with you in the roadside flowers

“It took hold of me,” Heynderickx sings on ‘The Park’, “I saw a grown man crying.” The song frames her as a silent observer, a vicarious tale of feeling that situates the songwriter as a conduit for outside forces. And, while ‘Crow Song’ re-positions back to the personal perspective, a similar sensation persists. Because, whether writing confessions about themselves or imagined fictions about others, the genius of both Heynderickx and Conover is their ability to draw a relatable emotion from their subject matter—tapping into a universal sense of nostalgia and longing and presenting it back to us, shaping and polished into its most gleaming form.

You can get Among Horses III now from the Son Canciones Bandcamp page.

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