Back in 1987, San Francisco alt rock outfit Donner Party released a self-titled debut full-length, a record which drew on the strange, macabre imagery behind the project’s name (the Donner Party was a group of American pioneers who alleged became murderous cannibals when stranded in the Sierra Nevada) to explore themes of anxiety and death with a tone both playful and esoteric. Hence tracks titled ‘Godlike Porpoise Head Of Blue-Eyed Mary’, ‘John Wilkes Booth’, ‘The Owl Of Minerva’ and more. Fast forward nearly forty years and Donner Party are re-releasing the album via Trussed Recordings, with the tracks remastered by Melbourne-based musician and engineer Mikey Young. Single ‘Halo’ serves as an introduction to a whole new generation, its racing rhythm and country twang embodying the band’s mischievous spirit and infectious energy. “There’s a halo on my head,” as the chorus goes, “though it sometimes fades, I would sooner lose my life than trade my halo away.”

Eli Carvajal – Scar

“Manag[es] to evoke the ways in which love elevates the ordinary into something wonderful, and creates the possibilities of new myths and dreams before us.” That’s what we had to say about ‘Stretch Marks‘ by London-based songwriter Eli Carvajal back in March, a song “simple in execution and all the more convincing for it,” as we continued, which “marks Carvajal as a songwriter to watch as we move further into 2025.” Well, now we’re further into 2025, the wait to hear more is almost over, as Carvajal is preparing to release new full-length Eyen Forever in October via Safe Suburban Home Records. Latest single ‘Scar’ is every bit as observant and tender, welcoming the audience into the mundane details of everyday existence in order to gesture towards themes more poignant and sweeping. “I wrote this song on my 29th birthday, while I was living in Tokyo, when I cut my finger while cutting garlic,” Carvajal explains. “A symbolic spilling of blood over the last year of my twenties. I imagine the drops of blood as rubies springing up; this theme of transformation continues as I reflect on everyday life in Japan and my feelings around approaching thirty.”

Joyer – Cure

Nick and Shane Sullivan, the sibling duo behind Joyer, have gone their separate ways since the release of previous record, Night Songs, each moving to a new city and having to grapple with the distance and loneliness when going through the already challenging post-tour blues. But if new full-length On the Other End of the Line… is anything to go by, the experience has only strengthened their resolve to utilise Joyer as a force for connection and meaning. Forthcoming via Julia’s War Recordings, the full-length sands down the shoegaze scale of the previous record while maintaining its pop melodies, as well as pushing the Joyer arrangements into newly ambitious territory. Lead single ‘Cure’ gives a hint at what to expect, detailing how we search for small moments of connection within the isolation of the contemporary world.

MacGregor Burns – What I’ve Been Looking For

“Through a number of singles in recent months, LA songwriter MacGregor Burns has established a style at once emotionally resonant and idiosyncratic,” we wrote back in June, with songs like ‘Silent Answers‘, ‘Can’t Go Back‘ and ‘I’m Not Supposed to Be Here Anymore‘ falling somewhere on the spectrum between slacker rock and folk. Latest offering ‘What I’ve Been Looking For’ both continues this style and nudges it in new directions. Relatively sparse and slow-moving, there’s a slightly forlorn tone to the track, though as a subtle R&B groove establishes itself and Burns’s vocals rise in conviction, the result is romantic rather than lonely. The spacious arrangement revealed to be not the product of stark solitude but rather a burgeoning clarity, the delivery aching with the knowledge of having stumbled upon that which he so keenly desires yet had previously proved elusive.

‘What I’ve Been Looking For’ is out now and available from the usual places.

Minus The Bear – Drilling

Back in July we wrote of how Suicide Squeeze Records are putting out a deluxe edition of Minus The Bear‘s seminal album Menos el Oso to celebrate its twentieth anniversary this month, with the original album expanded with a number of demo versions of some of the most beloved tracks. After ‘The Pig War’ a few weeks ago, the band are now back with a brand new video for ‘Drilling’, directed/edited by Cheyne Smith and produced by Minus the Bear and Do Better For Artists. Check it out below, and be sure to catch Minus The Bear on their North American tour this autumn if they pass a town near you. All the dates are available here.

Suicide Squeeze Records will release Menos el Oso (20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) on 22nd August. Get a copy now from the Minus the Bear Bandcamp page.

My Generation – Want It

My Generation are a new band from LA, who recently unveiled themselves to the world with debut single ‘Want It’. What label Post Present Medium describe as “a sparse yet lambent meandering jam,” the track is a great intro to the trio, that is N.A.S. (P22, Purity) Sara Mayako (Mayako XO, Behavior Mayako XO) and Sophie Weil (Syko Friend, Pink Trash Can). It’s oddly timeless, the raw guitar, subtle percussion and detached drawl of vocals sounding could be modern or fifty years old, like some unearthed long-lost 7” gem that has lost none of its electric verve.

The New Eves – The New Eve

On the first day of August, Brighton-based quartet The New Eves released their debut album The New Eve Is Rising, via Transgressive. The record captures the band’s theatrical and ritualistic live performances and their distinctive “Hagstone rock” style that combine mystical freak folk, reckless punk and poetic radical feminism. It’s the product not of a superstitious or occult past, but rather something altogether new, a self-created mythology. As the label put it: “It’s a boundless, uninhibited kind of magic that feels completely new; that’s writing its own rulebook for how to exist – as a band, as women, as humans in the world – from the ground up.” The opener and title track is (unsurprisingly) the best place to start, something like a mission statement of the project as a whole.

Noele Flowers – Ricky, you are a vision

Back in 2023 we wrote about Massachusetts-raised, Hudson Valley-based songwriter Noele Flowers and her EP Wait For Me, explaining how the title track existed in a strange liminal space, where shoots of possibility were shaded by the still looming past. A love song, but one flavoured by a blend of hope and anxiety. Flowers is now preparing to release debut full-length Historically Close Friends to build upon this style, and has unveiled lead single ‘Ricky, you are a vision’ as a preview. Recorded with the help of her former choir, Khorikos, the track is what she describes as “an imagined love song,” where she puts herself in the shoes of a historical figure in order to write. Namely twelfth-century abbess, writer, and composer Hildegard von Bingen (who you might remember as the focus of Larum‘s recent release), addressing likely lover Richardis von Stade. A track not without a certain sense of hesitancy in it gentle warmth, yet imbued with an encompassing fondness with furthers the patience which Flowers set out with the previous release.

If history remembers us as lovers, they won’t be quite wrong
Cause I wrote you into every remedy and every song
You are a vision

Historically Close Friends is coming soon.

OK Cool – Last

“Combines emo confession with an infectious forward motion to create something genuinely cathartic despite its dark tone.” That’s how we described ‘Waawooweewaa’ from OK Cool‘s new full-length, Chit Chat, back in May. A track which served as the ideal introduction to Bridget Stiebris and Haley Blomquist Waller’s fresh style, reaching across the spectrum of indie rock, math and shoegaze and combining the influence into something new. With the album out now via Take A Hike Records, the Chicago outfit has shared closer ‘Last’ as a new single. Another emotionally charged number which pairs vulnerability with layers of energy and reverb, feeling far larger than its relatively short runtime thanks to its equal embrace of heart and heft. “Sweetness will you be my last / all my lives have come to pass,” goes one typically conflicted verse, “I can’t see it, i don’t know is my driving way too slow.” Yet for all of the uncertainty, the overarching result is again catharsis, as though OK COOL have found a way to not so much solve life’s problems but power on through regardless.

one day you’ll believe me
one day i’ll believe me too

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Described as “an interdisciplinary artist and practitioner of earth-reverent skills and philosophies,” Fletcher Tucker is an artist looking to further his connection to the natural world, and new album Kin takes this as far as ever. Tucker’s distinctive animistic verse is supported by an array of breathing instruments (Swedish bagpipes, pump organ, elder and bamboo flutes, Mellotron saxophone and flute tapes), as well as guests including Chuck Johnson (Western Vinyl), Mariam Wallentin (Fire! Orchestra), Spencer Owen and Sean Smith (LFZ). Together they conjure soundscapes able to summon the spirit of the natural world and rekindle its latent magic. Following the lineage of Hildegard von Bingen and inspired by the experience of a white-out blizzard in the Northern Sierra mountains, latest single ‘To Light a Fire’ is the perfect example. The one and only Phil Elverum adds percussion to a song which embodies the stratified layers of time and place which constitute the record.

Watch the video shot by Fletcher Tucker on Esselen land in Big Sur, California below:

Kin will be released on the 15th August via Gnome Life Records and you can pre-order it now.

Fortitude Valley – Oceans Apart

“A track which finds [Laura] Kovac addressing her younger self, delving into the person she was before and during her move from Brisbane to the UK, and how the competing desires for home and escape never really go away.” So we wrote of ‘Sunshine State‘, the lead single from Fortitude Valley‘s forthcoming album Part Of The Problem, Baby later this summer on Specialist Subject Records. Following subsequent single ‘Video (Right There With You)‘, Fortitude Valley are back with ‘Oceans Apart’. Taking its title from Brisbane rock royalty The Go-Betweens, the song again confronts the move from Australia and the conflicted emotions which accompanied it. “Crossing my heart / Oceans apart,” as Kovac sings in the refrain. “Trying to make it on my own,”

Laughter Lines – The Right Way To Pray

Laughter Lines, the recording moniker of South California musician David Giali, has just released a new split with neighbour and collaborator Jimmy Brown, AKA JIMMERS. Appropriately titled Shared Spaces, the EP not only introduces the two projects but the underlying friendship which bolsters their sounds, and single ‘The Right Way To Pray’ shows the kind of earnest, impassioned music which results. A song which confronts the interplay between doubt and conviction which surrounds a person’s faith, and how this is liable to create unbridgeable gaps between people. “I worked for a church for about decade and now I don’t,” Giali explains. “This song is about a handful of conversations I had with the many church goers who had never questioned their faith and their reactions to my questioning of theology and faith-based logic.”

Mappe Of – A Scourge Laid Upon The Earth

The recording project of singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, composer and producer Tom Meikle, Mappe Of first appeared back in 2017 with debut album A Northern Star, A Perfect Stone on Paper Bag Records. The record introduced a decidedly ethereal sound which pushed folk with the spirit of the avant garde. Concept album The Isle of Ailynn followed in 2019, further cementing Meikle’s ability to break boundaries, and while a pandemic-enforced hiatus delayed the continuation of the project, forthcoming album Afterglades shows the break has had no detrimental effect on the ambition or execution of the Mappe Of style. With the album again set for release via Paper Bag in September, Meikle has unveiled new single ‘A Scourge Laid Upon The Earth’. “It felt like there needed to be a sense of weight to this chapter of the story, there needed to be some chaos as a payoff for all of this reflection,” he explains. “This is in many ways the extinction level event. It needed to be heavy and raucous, retribution for all of our mistakes. It’s a bit of my dormant heavy metal energy emerging from me.”

Minus The Bear – The Pig War (Demo)

Twenty years ago Seattle math rock royalty Minus The Bear released seminal album Menos el Oso, a record which not only saw them fully inhabit the spirit of the project for perhaps the first time but also claim a place among the notable acts of the late 90s/early 00s scene. Aside from a big US tour to celebrate the anniversary, Suicide Squeeze Records are releasing a special deluxe edition this August, featuring not only the original album but also five previously unreleased demo versions to give fans an indication of where their favourite tracks started out. “We came into our sound on this record, the band explain. “Excited people get to hear these demos for the first time! Revisiting demos and hearing the evolution of some of these tracks puts me right back in our early 2000s practice space. And now we’re literally back in that same practice space for rehearsals. It’s wild!” Listen to the demo for ‘The Pig War’ now:

Perish – Cool Guys

Originating as the solo project Florida-born songwriter Katie Callihan, Perish blossomed into a full band in Brooklyn when Callihan met Sam Lopane, Austin (Chappie) Chappell and John Dockery and welcomed them into the fold. The chemistry was apparent from the off, and the quartet headed up to Lincoln, Rhode Island, to record with Bradford Krieger at Big Nice Studio after only two practice sessions. The result, a self-titled debut EP, will be released this autumn on Rue Defense, and lead single ‘Cool Guys’ gives an initial taste. A vivid slice of folk-inflected rock which sounds at once wistful and affirming, a combination which looks to be a signature of the Perish sound. Because while Callihan’s delivery is thoughtful, her lyrics probing beneath the surface of things, the sound retains an upbeat, exultant air. As though there’s some energy to be found in the act of being open and honest to the point of vulnerability.

Tan Cologne – In Resin (Trentemøller Rework)

We’ve featured a number of singles from Tan Cologne‘s new LP Unknown Beyond in recent weeks, with songs like ‘Cool Star‘ and ‘In Resin‘ embodying the atmosphere of the record. The former possessed “a vibe again ambivalent in its meaning,” as we wrote, “sounding at once like an otherworldly escape from our terrestrial suffering and some mournful elegy delivered in its aftermath,” while the latter used “gauzy layers to present the various lives we live simultaneously, a series of selves superimposed.” To further the dreamy depths of this sound, Danish producer and multi-instrumentalist Trentemøller has reworked the track, taking the vocals further out into mysterious ethereality. “When I heard [Tan Cologne] had a new album coming, I immediately asked if I could work with one of their beautiful songs,” Trentemøller explains. “I chose the magical “In Resin”. For my rework, I only used their vocals, which I also had a lot of fun experimenting with.”

Unknown Beyond is out now via Labrador Records and you can get it now from the Tan Cologne Bandcamp page.

The Tines – Ozone

We first wrote about New Haven, Connecticut project The Tines a few years ago upon the release of their self-titled debut, describing single ‘Collarbone‘ as “a track which combines shimmering dream pop with a more pressing indie rock rhythm, the reverbed vocals drifting above it all to give the whole thing a sunny if enigmatic vibe, drawing the listener into its psych-inflected world.” Now the outfit are preparing to release a brand new album Barrows via Funnybone Records, and have unveiled single ‘Ozone’ as a preview. A rich slice of indie rock which combines heartfelt emotion with a certain understatement, building upon the previous record with a more assured, controlled sensibility, and sounding all the more evocative as a result.

‘Ozone’ is out now via Funnybone Records.

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