Featuring Dora Noonan, Nat Cimino, Zara Roy and Noah Kelley, Queens-based indie rock outfit blankette combine the irreverence and mischief of twee music with something altogether more cathartic and raw. The result is an unapologetically singular sound able to communicate the full spectrum of emotions. New album doll puts this to good use, exploring knotty ideas of identity, depression and self-actualisation with a decidedly unguarded air, displaying courage in its vulnerability and embracing the communal power of a band. Single ‘after’ shows the kind of mood to expect, a song all about the misplaced suspicion that a simple change might fix your life. It starts out with something like hesitant hope and culminates in a something of an exorcism.

after i stop drinking i’ll feel better
after i stop overthinking i’ll feel better
after i start running i’ll feel better
after i make more money i’ll feel better
after i feel better i’ll feel better

Brimheim – My Collection

“Writing new music had felt like swimming in molasses for months until ‘My Collection’ arrived,” explains Danish songwriter Brimheim of her latest single, a track she considers something of a paradigm shift. “The jazzy direction was surprising to both me and Søren [Buhl Lassen]. It’s a musical tradition I haven’t explored before. Yet somehow, it immediately revealed itself as the most enchanting path we could take. It felt like receiving a gift from the universe.” Where her previous album RATKING sought clarity within the fraught, confusing experience of personal identity, ‘My Collection’ moves in a more ambiguous direction, swapping out the brightness and rhythm in favour of something more fictional and oblique. The story of a perhaps eccentric woman who collects objects discarded by others, valuing the hidden beauty within that which has been rejected, and guarding her prized possessions with an almost maternal instinct.

Watch the video directed by Stine Emil and produced by Monster Crotch below:

‘My Collection’ is out now via Tambourhinoceros and available from Bandcamp.

Caoilfhionn Rose – Horizon

“Some of the lyrics talk about becoming ‘lost inside your own imagination’ and how ‘dreams can seem so real’,” explains Manchester songwriter Caoilfhionn Rose of her fourth full-length, Draw Out Your World, coming early next year on Lost Map Records. “To me, this album is about building a life for yourself, stepping out of daydreams and carving out a path towards a happier future.” Made with husband and collaborator Rich Williams in the years of pregnancy and early parenthood, Draw Out Your World finds Rose working through a tumultuous period with both resilience and curiosity, resulting in a sound that is marked with compassion and always reaching for some brighter, calmer territory. Lead single ‘Horizon’ gives a flavour of what to expect, not least the impact of Danish duo Svaneborg Kardyb (Nikolaj Svaneborg and Jonas Kardyb) who lend their talents to the release and leaven the sound with their ethereal electronics. 

Hank Tree x Peter Broderick – You Can Thrive

Led by Fergus MacDonald (formerly of State Broadcasters), Glasgow‘s Hank Tree first caught our ears back in 2023 with album The Big North. “Hank Tree take folk sensibilities and elevate them into something truly atmospheric with a mixture of field recordings and distortion,” as we wrote, “but amid their invention and subversion of genre, Hank Tree hark back to folk’s best roots, positioning themselves in the long lineage of artists using the form to write about social history and labour movements.” Latest album Care 1 is every bit as thematically challenging and emotionally urgent, a record crafted around MacDonald’s experience working with people with profound learning difficulties and mental health problems. It delves into what it means to care and be cared for within a society which too often seems willing to disregard any semblance of responsibility. This time MacDonald is joined by Clarissa Cheong and Peter Broderick and together the trio conjure a sound that intimate, compassionate and subtly unflinching, as single ‘You Can Thrive’ suggests.

Karen y los Remedios – Mayahuel

Fronted by Mexico City-born, Guanajuato-raised artist and researcher Ana Karen G. Barajas and featuring Z.A.M.P.A. (Guillermo Berbeyer) on guitars and Mexico City producer Jiony (Jonathan Muriel), Karen y los Remedios is a shapeshifting project rooted in cumbia yet fluid and mysterious enough to bring its own mythologies to life. Latest album Bestiaria fulls like the most pure embodiment of the act to date, evoking a series of legendary women from across the world to celebrate femininity in all its desire, sorrow and power. Single ‘Mayahuel’ is a perfect example, “a hypnotic, low-tempo cumbia rebajada that dives into Mexica mythology,” as Barajas explains. “I was deeply moved by her story in the ancient codices—her escape to be with Quetzalcoatl, turning into maguey plants, and the sacred legend of the Four Hundred Rabbits.”

Watch the video directed by Barajas herself below:

Bestiaria is out now via ZZK Records and available from Bandcamp.

LAPêCHE – Parallel Park

“Drawing on shoegaze and post-punk, they make indie rock songs that are both shadowy and catchy, centering on a sense of considered patience that the band says is born from ‘a shared language of healing, honesty and presence’.” So we wrote of Brooklyn‘s LAPêCHE back in July, with single ‘Phantom of Cinder’ introducing the tone of their new album Autotelic on Tiny Engines. With singer and guitarist Krista Diem supported by with Dave Diem (bass), Drew DeMaio (guitar) and Colin Brooks (drums), the entire album channels a nineties sensibility without ever descending to cheap nostalgia, not least thanks to the committed, complex style in which they work. Take ‘Parallel Park’, a song about the end of a relationship which favours emotional honesty over poetic gesture, and thus recognising how any project, be it personal or artistic, relies on a kind of tenacious imperfection in order to move forwards.

Party Dozen – Full Powers

Australian duo Kirsty Tickle (saxophone, vocals) and Jonathan Boulet (drums, loops, production) have recorded under the Party Dozen moniker for near on a decade now, pushing an inventive style of psych rock which leans on improvision. But new Party Dozen album 21 Bum Salute, coming next month via City Slang, finds the band in their purest form, Tickle and Boulet dropping whatever pretenses which might have persisted in their work in order to fully embrace their idiosyncratic vision. Latest single ‘Full Powers’ indicates the raucous abandon of the result, not to mention the ambiguity of record which swings between swaggering confidence and something more volatile, almost dangerous. “There’s ‘Full Powers’ good and there’s ‘Full Powers’ bad,” they explain. “The good is when you’re personally becoming too powerful, an angel pisses on you, everything is going very well and suddenly you’re gliding down the street like King Swinging Dick. The bad is when one side has all the power and more is not enough. Powerlust, greedmongering, gluttonous fiends. This track switches between the two.”

Watch the video below, made with help from John-Henry Pajak and Jos Eastwood:

21 Bum Salute will be released via City Slang on the 6th November and you can pre-order it now.

Samjo – Franconia

Brooklyn born, Lille-based songwriter Sam Rueckert, AKA Samjo, works between folk, indie rock and punk to create songs at once emotive and energetic, as highlighted by 2025 album Barely Even Something. With a new extended edition of the album recently released, Samjo have returned with a video for single ‘Franconia’ to further the life of the record, and the track is the ideal introduction for those who missed the album the first time around. With a slow building and detailed style, the track is a lesson in slow burn, its determined indie rock chug slowly blooming outwards as cinematic strings widen the frame of the arrangement. The style is keyed into the thematic concerns too, the song moving from the doldrums of a particularly bad day towards some appreciation of the universality of misfortune, and in doing so emerging with compassion and solace.

Barely Even Something (Extended) is out now and available from Bandcamp.

Tough Old Bird – Tall Summer Clouds

Tough Old Bird continue their steady stream of new singles with ‘Tall Summer Clouds’. Following on from predecessor ‘Come Back, Come Back‘, a track we described as a poetic narrative that’s at once brooding and compassionate and little world weary too,” the new song again delves into a bittersweet headspace, specifically the strange blend of joy and sorrow which accompanies the passing of time. Written in the weeks before lead Nick Corrigan welcomed his first child into the world, there’s a tension between new beginnings and the inevitable loss which will follow, Tough Old Bird confronting mortality and deciding that life lies not in grand gestures but small moments. Perhaps the humbles snatches of calm are the best life can get.

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

Only the recorded memory is not the same as the actual event. The very process of recording has its own influence over what is heard when the result is played back. Which is to say, just as the human body—our apparatus for recording and sharing memories—influences the information which it receives, stores and communicates, so too does the equipment performing the sonic equivalent. “Multitrack machines function here as extensions of the body and time,” as Huerta continues. “They are not neutral tools, but surfaces of friction where the signal wears away, duplicates itself, deviates.” Quite literally no queda nada, todo resuena. Nothing remains, everything resounds.

Listen to the album’s b-side, ‘Todo Resuena’, which evokes a sense of fractured, haunted physicality, below:

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Now based in Naarm/Melbourne but originally from San Diego, Bella Cloud says she is “at heart a wanderer, using music as a reflective surface for her travels and navigating through interpersonal relationships.” Following last year’s EP The Limerent (that we described as “emotionally charged and richly immersive”), new single ‘Spin’ focuses on the melancholy sense of reflection that haunts New Year’s Day. But it is also threaded with a kind of hope, a feeling of possibility. After all, New Year’s is not just the end of something, but a new beginning too. “‘Spin’ feels like both a eulogy, “Cloud describes, “for a period of time that encapsulated a really important relationship and my early twenties and also a prayer to myself that I might become more rooted within myself in the coming year.”

Cameron Knowler – Placer Camp Blues (Nagra Demo)

Back in 2025 we wrote about CRK, an album by Arizona songwriter Cameron Knowler on Worried Songs. “A meditation of Knowler’s hometown of Yuma, Arizona both in its physical presence and historical weight,” as we put it, “all achieved via a style of instrumental folk both traditional and visionary.” Now Knowler has returned with ‘Placer Camp Blues’, a single written as part of the Just Cause Vol. 2 compilation and released via Castle Dome Records, to further this style. Recorded in his own home on a 1920s Martin guitar using a Nagra tape recorder, the song evokes Jimmie Rodgers or the earliest Dylan. Ostensibly little more than a minimalist instrumental sketch, the song nevertheless carries its own narrative weight, proceeding with the reflective, slightly mournful tone of a humble life lived by routine.

Fugue State – Floating

We’ve covered a number of singles from Fugue State‘s new album After Nothing Comes in recent weeks, with tracks like ‘Dark‘ and ‘So What Is There?‘ introducing Dan Langa’s unique ability to dissolve the border between solo and ensemble work, as well as composition and improvisation. The album is finally coming out later this week via Switch Hit Records, and a final single has been released to pave the way. ‘Floating’ finds Fugue State at its most organic, with Elias Stemeseder taking the lead for what at least begins as a restrained, almost hesitant sound. But as the track progresses, the sound blooms into something altogether richer and the vocals rise with it, before things fall back into a more ambiguous, muted style once more. “What do you think about love?” asks the repeated refrain across the track, “and the ocean between us?” A question framed in any number of different tones, each one seeming to ask something very specific and only furthering the cryptic power of the song.

After Nothing Comes will be released on 22nd May via Switch Hit Records and is available to pre-order via Bandcamp.

Helicopter Leaves – It Really Never Did

After a drip-feed of singles since the start of the year, Sabrina Nickels, the new album by Helicopter Leaves (the project of Beach Bunny’s Anthony Vaccaro) is now out in the world. In case you’re not already onboard, Helicopter Leaves has highlighted one more track as a single, the opener and in some ways focal point ‘It Never Really Did’. “When I was going through old demos to attempt to brainstorm how I would go about making a new Helicopter LP,” Vaccaro describes, “‘It Never Really Did’ would constantly jump out as the spark that lit the whole tree on fire.” It’s a fitting introduction, a joyous and cathartic indie rock song that wastes no time, bursting to life without prologue or preamble. “This being the album opener is fully an intended choice,” says Vaccaro. “Sadly in this day and age no one has time, or should I say attention, for music. Starting out without a riff, without a moment to realize what is even happening the track begins.”

mmj – nobody knows

A few weeks ago, Purity Ring’s Megan James announced that she would be picking up an acoustic guitar and performing a solo opening set for the band’s mammoth US tour. She christened this solo act mmj, and has now announced her forthcoming debut album under the moniker on Captured Tracks. The record promises to be a collection of what she describes as “folk songs refracted through a haunted lens,” more organic and analogue than anything in Purity Ring’s oeuvre. As James puts it ”everything has been touched by real hands, tape, tubes or all the above.” Details on the album will follow, but for now we have lead single ‘nobody knows’,  a rich and atmospheric song about the limitations of human experience.

Nobody knows
a fallen star
from wildfire ash
raining down on the yard

paer – Mean It

We last wrote about LA duo paer back in 2025 with single ‘Power Lines‘. “Delve into the hazy richness of the sound and you’ll find there’s an entire world beneath the surface, exploring ideas of grief and mourning with real nuance,” we wrote of the track. “The aftermath of loss, the song suggests, is a delicate balance. A push and pull between the past and the future where the seeming opposite desires to commemorate and move on must be handled with care.” Now paer are back with ‘Mean It’, a single on Anxiety Blanket Records (released in preparation for a brand new EP) which harks back to the mid-noughties era of dream pop. But within the hazy shimmer of the sound lies considerable complexity, the track refusing the escapist tendencies of the genre to present something far more conflicted. After all, there’s a fine line between self-protection and avoidance, and the lushness of the sound is challenged by a vibe almost claustrophobic, as though paer are aware that any attempt to find safe harbour from the world carries its own form of risk.

‘Mean It’ is out now via Anxiety Blanket Records and available from the usual places.

Pearla – Sky Is White

With Pearla’s latest album Song Room now out in the world, the New York artist has shared final single ‘Sky Is White’ to celebrate the release. After the declaration of love that was ‘Loved By Me‘ and the active attempts to combat unhappiness detailed on ‘Imagine Your Face‘, ‘Sky Is White’ offers another thoughtful engagement with personal suffering and efforts to move beyond it. “If the thoughts are in my mind / And my mind in my skull / And my skull in my body / And my body is small,” as Pearla sings in one verse, “Then the thoughts must be smaller / Than I even think they are / How can they hurt me?” Such ruminations are delivered with a hushed intimacy, pulling the audience right into the very mental space being described. That paradoxical place where the evident smallness of our interior thoughts bely the gravity they can exert on our lives. Song Room might not offer a complete escape from this pull, but it does muster an opposite force that might one day prevail.

Polhawan – Ride On

Back in March, we featured ‘No Sweat’, the debut single from Polhawan, the new project of Bristol‘s Tim Rowing-Parker (Woahnows, Immy). The song was “cryptic, strange, fresh and confident,” we said back then, “tak[ing] a sunny, surfy sound and applies it to something altogether more supernatural.” It was the first glimpse of EP Wild Mountain Time, which was finally released on Breakfast Records last week. What the liner notes describe as “like some mythical meeting between Fairport Convention and Parquet Court,” the record is formed of a moreish blend of folk and slacker rock that’s only going to sound better when summer hits. ‘Ride On’ is a good introduction, a lively and carefree song about relinquishing worries and expectations. “‘Ride On’ is about letting go,” says Rowing-Parker. “To me, our experiences can often feel measured and quantifiable, we’re so used to that. I’d love to be better at just letting life wash over me and living in a way that feels more natural and in the moment.”

Sari Lightman – The Way I Saw You

Best known as one half of experimental bands Tasseomancy and Lightman & Lightman with twin sister Romy, Sari Lightman is now striking off alone, announcing her debut solo record, The Way I Saw You, on Night Bloom Records. Produced by Meg Duffy of Hand Habits, the record promises to be a more straightforward take on the folk genre. Our first glimpse is the title track, a song inspired by LA writer/artist/seventies cultural icon Eve Babitz who went into self-imposed isolation after suffering third degree burns following an accident with a match. “She yearns to be remembered the way she was in her writing—sensual and carefree,” Lightman explains on how this inspired a song about aging and feminine identity. “To live in the rose, immortal, blossoming inside a body of work. I went down a theological rabbit hole with the rose. I thought about Dante’s Paradise and all those feminine saints stashed in the petals, like an exquisitely scented sexy hotel.”

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There is a repeated line, a single word refrain, in ‘The Glow’, the new song from Aïda Mekonnen Caby, which you may have some trouble comprehending. Fjaðrárgljúfur is the name of a canyon in south east Iceland which Caby and her partner visited in the early days of their relationship, and the landmark’s cinematic majesty leaks into the song’s very DNA, transforming a gentle indie folk song into something rich with widescreen emotion. It also represents something of a new dawn. For one, it is the opening track of the debut Aïda Mekonnen Caby album, Mais Uma, which comes out at the end of August via Mtn Laurel Recording Co. But also because the trip that inspired it and the feelings it evokes marked a turning point in Caby’s life too, one which saw her move first to Portugal and then to France. Mais Uma promises to explore this period of personal change and all its associated heart swells and aches, illuminated throughout with that sense of wonder at newfound love.

Dead Tooth – Song of the Weak

Led by New York-based songwriter Zach Ellis, self-described ‘rodeo-core’ outfit Dead Tooth have made a name crafting an atmospheric and often slightly chaotic brand of post-punk, combining the brooding shadow of the genre with raw energy. With their self-titled debut out now via Trash Casual, Dead Tooth have shared single and opener ‘Song of the Weak’ to introduce their work to the uninitiated. A song full of volatility and bite, Ellis’s vocals spiking with frustration as though driven half-crazed by the constant motion beneath him, or else how it never seems to lead to anywhere new. “In so many words [the song is] about struggling with cyclical destructive decision making,” Ellis explains. “Choosing hedonism over looking in the mirror. I’ve spent many years in NY on what feels like a hamster wheel of trying to fill a void or chase some kind of unattainable self/other. A song written for the darker times that in retrospect I feel have eaten too many years of my life.”

Dead Tooth is out now via Trash Casual and available from Bandcamp.

Living Hour – Wheel

Winnipeg’s Living Hour have announced Internal Drone Infinity, their fourth record, which will release later this year. What the band themselves have coined “yearn-core”, their style combines slowcore, indie rock and dream pop into something shaded by the gauzy texture of memory. The record was in part inspired by lead Sam Sarty’s time as a cinema projectionist, and it exists in a similarly otherworldly setting, its dark backdrop illuminated by a wistful glow as the band express what they call “the quiet magic hidden in everyday life.” To celebrate the announcement, Living Hour have unveiled lead single ‘Wheel’, which shows off both the dreamy yearn and crunchy rock sides of their sound very nicely.

The track comes complete with a video by Leigh Lugosi and Brett Ticzon, which you can see below:

Internal Drone Infinity will be released on 17^th October via Keeled Scales, Paper Bag Records (Canada) and Beloved Records (Australia). Pre-order a copy now from the Living Hour Bandcamp page.

Malena Zavala – MELT

Born in Argentina and now living between London and Mexico City, Malena Zavala is a self-taught musician and producer who first caught attention with her 2018 debut, Aliso. Drawing inspiration from both Latin American music and the likes of Devendra Banhart, Beach House and Feist, Zavala’s music layers poetic lyrics over hypnotic and haunting instrumentation. Latest single ‘MELT’, the first single from an EP of the same name that comes out later this year on Zavala’s own new label Paraná Records, is a good example. A soft and cosy love song that Zavala says tries “to express the feeling of being wrapped up in bed,” it’s built on gentle acoustic guitar and her hushed and intimate vocals and accentuated by ethereal harmonies and subtle synths.

‘MELT’ is out now via streaming services

Oh, Rose – For Art

Almost a year on from their last full-length Dorothy, Olympia/Portland mainstays Oh, Rose return in September with For Art, a brand new EP released via the good folks as Antiquated Future Records. The EP finds the band’s members in the midst of some big personal events, like getting married and starting families, and perhaps understandably this has them ruminating on family and relationships. As the label put it, the EP focuses on “themes of long-term commitment and partnership—both in romantic and platonic relationships, as well as to artistic practice itself.” Oh, Rose have released the title track by way of introduction, an unhurried and heartfelt song that captures these themes perfectly. “At first I feel so nervous to be this vulnerable,” Rose sings with courageous clarity, “it’s true that I was thinking about you.”

Routine Caffeine – Green Glass

“A track which marries a taut central rhythm with a dreamy haze, and hints at a sharp bite too, all highlighting just how much control Katie O’Brien Kelley (vocals, guitar), Madison Elizabeth Case (bass, synth, background vocals) and Emma Treganowan (drums) have over the mood of their work.” So we wrote of Routine Caffeine‘s ‘Philodendron‘ back in 2024, a track taken from the Louisville-based trio’s Weeds Under Concrete Stones. Their first release since that EP, new single ‘Green Glass’ is no less evocative, again crafting an immersive atmosphere to explore themes of nostalgia, belonging and the passing of time. “This song has served as a way for me to reflect on my family’s old farm in Michigan, one of my most treasured places,” they explain. But more than a lesson in simple longing for home, the track also charts the changes to the beloved place which accumulate with every return, adding an extra layer melancholy as the familiar slowly shifts into something different, and the past only grows further away.

runo plum – Lemon Garland

Minnesota singer-songwriter runo plum has slowly amassed a following over recent years, her detailed, wistful style of bedroom folk winning plenty of attention online. Having now signed with the ever-impressive Winspear, plum has released new single ‘Lemon Garland’ to celebrate. The first taste of forthcoming debut album patching, the song embodies the fondness and compassion of the runo plum style, as well as the longing for connection which underpins it. “Give me company / barefoot and muddy,” as she sings, “give me pointing / at the birds we’ve never seen before / we’ll stop to pick some veggies / for the big feast at our friendly table.” The result is inherently bittersweet, a hopeful vision of the future shadowed by the suggestion such community remains just a dream, though the lasting feeling is one of affection. As though it wishing for something so simple and fulfilling, runo plum shows our desires need not be so far away.

Watch the video directed by Karlee Boon below:

patching will be released soon via Winspear.

Scree – TV Sometimes

Brooklyn experimental maestros Scree return next month with August, a brand new full-length on Ruination Record Co. The band—that’s primary trio guitarist/composer Ryan El-Solh, bassist Carmen Quill and drummer Jason Burger, plus lots of guests—are hard to pin down, smashing together everything from Romantic classical music, dusty lonesome Americana, improvisational jazz and weighty indie rock to create some of the most interesting and deep instrumental music around. Scree released the title track as the lead single a few weeks back, and have now returned with a second cut, the enigmatically titled ‘TV Sometimes’. The song has been part of the band’s live repertoire for years, and here it gets a richer arrangement with contributions from the cast of collaborators. “It’s something like a love song,” El-Solh describes. “I probably should’ve chosen a more generally intelligible title, but at the time there was really only one person I was trying to reach with this bit of code and she got the message so the title stuck.”

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

Last year, East Vancouver post-punks Aversions put out the full-length You Wanted The Bike, an album which “combine[d] heavyweight riffs, pounded percussion and acerbic vocals to comment on our contemporary moment,” as we put it in a preview. Songs like ‘Undecider‘ channelled this raw energy into a sound of “anxiety and latent violence, drawing on a whole host of political and social themes in three and a half minutes of Strummer-esque polit-punk.” Recorded at the same time as that album but not quite sitting right among the rest of the tracks, latest single ‘Wormhole’ sees the three-piece reaching further afield for their stylistic influences, dialling back some of the ferocity to allow in alt-country sensibilities. But the lyrics are as cutting and contemporary as ever, charting the rise and fall of an internet personality who, after selling their soul for recognition, is left lonely on the other side of fame, banging the locked door leading back to normal life.

Blue Canopy x A Beacon School – Bright Spot II

When Blue Canopy‘s Alex Schiff asked Patrick Smith of A Beacon School to remix single ‘Bright Spot’ after its release back in 2022, he probably didn’t quite expect the level of collaboration and vision which followed. Fast-forward eighteen months and the result has now been released as a single via Grind Select. ‘Bright Spot II’ is not so much a remix as a reimagining, a sister track which drags a cover of darkness over the original’s sunny wistfulness, carving out a nocturnal space of electronics which further amplifies the themes of regret and longing in a song about facing difficult periods with a long-term partner. “I just wanted everything to be OK between us,” Schiff explains, “and this song sorts through my feelings throughout that time, hoping for a resolution.”

The song comes complete with a video by Ebony Davies with additional edits from Chase Wagner:

‘Bright Spot II’ is out now via Grind Select and you can get it from Bandcamp.

The Dead Tongues – Body of Light

“Baby there ain’t no rules here / we can just slide / keep bending and drawing new lines / all shapes defined.” So opens ‘Body of Light’, the title track from one half of the upcoming double record from Ryan Gustafson’s The Dead Tongues on Psychic Hotline. Described as a pair of “interweaving and disparate albums,” the release embraces the diaphanous, intangible sentiment offered in those opening words, refusing to calcify into solid form in favour of something ephemeral. As the lead single suggests, the result is something intuitive and ever-shifting, mapped along the unseen currents of both our own interiors and the natural world. “Maybe you don’t know what to call it,” as Gustafson sings, “or it ain’t got a name / i’m here for it all just the same / all colors and shades / i’m just a body of light.” Watch the video by Gustafson and Cat Siravantha below:

Body of Light will be released digitally on the 14th June, and physically as a double album with I Am A Cloud on the 9th August via Psychic Hotline. Pre-order it now.

dog eyes – fair

dog eyes is the recording project of Oakland‘s Davis Leach and Haily Firstman which started when Leach helped produce Firstman’s previous project Mr Marigold. The pair soon realised their collaborative chemistry could stretch much further. Following on from the earnest, delightfully lo-fi debut good, proper sendoff on Grand Jury Music, new single ‘fair’ continues to develop the dog eyes sound. A track about friendship and its strange ebb and flow, the childlike wonder of the vocals is shaded by a lingering wistfulness, as though every perfect moment foreshadows its inevitable end. “When you’re a kid and you make a new friend you think they’ll be your friend forever and often they are not, the band explain. “They were there for a season. A love or crush can be the same.” Watch the video directed by Ev Fitzpatrick below:

‘fair’ is out now and available from the dogs eyes Bandcamp page.

Joy Guidry – I Will Always Miss You

Writing in March, we described how Brooklyn-based bassoonist and composer Joy Guidry was releasing new album AMEN via Whited Sepulchre Records, where Guidry experiments with the multitude of Black American music styles to create something new. Previous single ‘Members Don’t Get Weary’ combined jazz and gospel music into something impassioned and triumphant, whereas new track ‘I Will Always Miss You’ takes an entirely different path. Built upon a foundation of lush ambient synths and boasting some of the most evocative bassoon you are likely to hear, the instrumental piece offers a meditative space that’s rooted within the wider experience of life—where mourning and joy marble into a single whole.

Lake Michigan – Rituals

Described as an album about “love, OCD, class, addiction and probably a couple of other things too,” La Madrugada is the latest full-length release from Mexico City-based Lake Michigan on Start-track. The record continues the project’s gloomy, intimate bedroom pop style, with arrangements stripped back to their sparest elements to sound like raw messages as voiced in the latest hours of the night. Focusing on OCD and the general unease so intrinsic to the condition, single ‘Rituals’ is great entry point, its vocals emerging through the lo-fi sound as barely a murmur, heavy with weariness yet afraid of relaxing, as though compelled by the need to balance the world.

Mr. Sam and the People People – Go People Go (Part One)

This summer sees the release of Again! Again!, the new full-length album from New Orleans-based songwriting project Mr. Sam and the People People on Tape Dad (distributed by Gar Hole Records). Opening single ‘Go Baby Go (Part One)’ introduces the compassionate tone with a mindful reflection on the beauty inherent in simple things. Mr. Sam Gelband’s vocals land somewhere between Dean Johnson and Frederick Squires in their fond baritone. “I wrote ‘Go Baby Go’ to honor […] my closest people, the lake, the porch, the mountain, the shoreline, the neighbourhood, the quiet moments with myself,” Mr. Sam describes. “I know now that these things are the keepers of my truest joy, and I thank them.” Watch the video by Mayme O’Toole and Sam Gelband below:

Again! Again! is out via Tape Dad on the 11th June and available for pre-order now.

shn shn – Glimmer

We’ve covered the work of shn shn several times in recent years, always admiring how Toronto-based producer, singer-songwriter and creator Shanika Lewis-Waddell reimagines what the project might be with each release. “[shn shn] aims to do more than merely convince the listener to examine themselves,” we wrote of Form(s) last year. “Rather, it allows them to drift off to new frontiers. That is, to dream.” With its expansive ambient tones and idiosyncratic details, new single ‘Glimmer’ furthers this aesthetic. A meditation on the power of patience and understatement which coalesces into something quietly triumphant. “Building up gradually,” Lewis-Waddell sings, “unexpectedly found myself /so close yet so far / to a glimmer of hope.”

The post Weekly Listening: April 2024 #5 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“Jack and Edie lying across my bed
Flying high like the spirits of the dead
The living and the dead”

The track’s artwork was done by London-based illustrator Henry McCausland. You can follow him on Tumblr and buy some beautiful things from the shop area of his website.Remember, you can pre-order Quiet, Constant Friends now on our Bandcamp page. All tapes come with arty goodies, all profits go to a great cause. Fill your boots!

–

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Dawn and Armando are now married and play together in a band called The Tallest Tree. You can hear their first single, ‘Tree’ right now.

youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qbjWpXgty8

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