The album is the latest in a long line of releases from Ben and Adam Parker. Starting as Tempertwig back in the halcyon days of noughties indie, the pair shifted through various projects including Nosferatu D2 and The Superman Revenge Squad Band before eventually settling on their current iteration. The pair won acclaim from various corners with each release, building a loyal fanbase in the way Audio Antihero artists seem to do best, but always sitting uncomfortably within a music industry which often asks too much of its would-be stars. But where some sell out and others self-destruct, the Parkers decided to operate on their own terms, appearing and disappearing as it suited them, always changing, always staying the same.

Following on from similar retrospective features on Benjamin Shaw, Fighting Kites, Broken Shoulder, Frog (parts 1 and 2) and Magana, we have again enlisted Jamie Halliday from Audio Antihero to share their memories on the Parker brothers’ career, from the early days right up to the present day. Read on below!

I’ve worked with Ben and Adam Parker on and off since the Audio Antihero record label’s inception in 2009 when I released Nosferatu D2’s We’re Gonna Walk Around This City With Our Headphones on to Block Out the Noise. In the many years that have followed, I got the opportunity to work with them again with different names and lineups on records by The Superman Revenge Squad Band and Tempertwig.

I suppose it was a bit of a coincidence that Audio Antihero came out of hiding in late 2023 for Frog’s Grog album shortly after the Parker brothers had formed My Best Unbeaten Brother with Ben Fry. This lucky timing means I am fortunate enough to once again be their label. We did kind of a soft launch with the ‘Slayer on a Sunny Day‘ single in December, and the debut record, Pessimistic Pizza, was released late last month. I hope you’ll check it out if you get a chance.

The Parkers have had a strange journey, a kind of feast or famine in terms of output and people’s interest in their work. This is actually the first release I’ve done with them where the band is still active since previous titles have been posthumous, one-offs, or retrospectives. It’s almost a novelty to work with them on something where a follow-up release is a possibility, where the band is excited to get together to record radio sessions and play live, and maybe most importantly, where the songs we’re promoting reflect the artists in the present day.

I think my label’s history with Ben and Adam Parker illustrates that I’m quite big on documenting and archiving. That’s why I wanted Nosferatu D2’s album to be on CD, and that’s why Tempertwig demos were remastered and released. Too much stuff just disappears and so much context gets lost, oftentimes this happens with things far more important than Indie Rock, but that’s what I periodically choose to make myself responsible for, so essentially I’m doing this again here.

I wanted to record some kind of a history and evolution of the work of Ben and Adam Parker from Tempertwig to My Best Unbeaten Brother. It’s all through my eyes, and I’m not really sure who it’s for, but it’s something I wanted to exist for someone. Bands break up, labels give up, blogs go dark, and music platforms shut down, but there’s always someone who remembers, and too often I’ve sought out a band or a song and found nothing. So, I like the idea that the following links, quotes, and memories are consolidated in one place should that person ever come looking for them.

TEMPERTWIG

Tempertwig was a 3 piece band from Croydon that I tried to make into a mixture of Pulp, Arab Strap, Dinosaur Jr and the Afghan Whigs. We started in 1999 and finished in 2004 I think. Along the way we recorded a bunch of songs at different places, got played by Steve Lamacq when he was on Radio 1, built up a small group of other bands that we liked playing with, then called it a day

—Ben Parker (For the Rabbits, 2019)

The chronology of Ben and Adam Parker’s musical exploits can feel a little jumbled on account of the irregular way that much of their music was released. So while the vast majority of their output didn’t receive a formal release until 2019 (their one previous commercial release was a seven-inch split single with Air Formation), Tempertwig came first.

The trio (completed by bassist Daniel Debono) went from scrappy post-punk to something that the late great Cereal & Sounds blog called “Angled hooks, mathematical elasticity, and unbridled ferocity,” before dubbing Ben and Adam Parker “the lost pioneers of the indie-emo scene.” You can believe I ran hard with that line in our press materials.

When discussing the meaning of the song ‘Bratpack Film Philosophy’,” Ben told The Alternative: “The lyrics are inspired by the Breakfast Club, awful small talk at parties and a Motown collection on record that I got from a charity shop at university that had “I’m still waiting” by Diana Ross on it.” Ben’s lyrics often mix these references to good and bad media with the very real frustrations and disappointments that come with trying to find a way to live, connect, and relate. It’s through this combination that he creates a rat king of dissatisfaction, where the dull and drab become something frantic and frightening.

I’ve seen Tempertwig described (probably on the Drowned in Sound forum?) as something like “Nosferatu D2 with a bassist / distortion pedal,” which is factually true, but doesn’t necessarily give them their due. When compared to other more streamlined outlets for Ben’s songs, the depth of the sound, and the variety of the arrangements can be quite exhilarating to listen to. The spark that made Nosferatu D2 a small cult success is always there too, that bizarre sibling chemistry between a Metal drummer and a Bonnie Prince Billy nerd.

Nosferatu D2 and Superman Revenge Squad’s songs often push us to question how, if none of this matters, we can feel how we do. If there’s no meaning to any of this, why do we fill our homes with books and records? Why do we write, think, and take ourselves out into crowded shopping centres in search of touch and meaning? For me, Tempertwig possessed that same swollen contradiction. “Why is the bedroom so cold, etc etc.”

When reflecting on their live shows in 2019, Adam mentioned: “Every song was like a race to the end – the adrenaline definitely took hold when we played gigs, which gave us an edge of barely controlled chaos.” Ben told God Is In the TV that their anthology release contained a: “younger version of me that I can barely recognise in places.”

NOSFERATU D2

This record perfectly depicts disillusionment with the place you live or the relationship you’re in, but are completely unable to bring yourself to get away from. Brothers Adam and Ben Parker– Adam whose drumming is up there with any drummer I’ve ever heard, and Ben whose lyrics are perfect in their hopelessness

—Gareth Campesinos! (Pitchfork)

Nosferatu D2 broke up in 2007 and the Audio Antihero record label was started around their unreleased debut album in 2009. It was a silly idea that panned out quite well on account of a small but enthusiastic fanbase, which included Gareth Campesinos! (who wrote a very kind piece about the album on the Los Campesinos! website), and a small fleet of music bloggers. The unexpected interest helped us get support from  Pitchfork, Drowned in Sound,  The Line of Best Fit,  DIY Mag, The Skinny, BBC 6 Music, Public Radio International’s ‘The World’ and a heap of others. If you’ve heard of the Parker brothers (or Audio Antihero, for that matter), it’s quite likely that Nosferatu D2 is the reason why.

They’ve been one of my favourite bands since I was a teenager, but I’ve always had a hard time articulating what it is exactly that I love so much. The lyrics, of course, and the urgency that’s perhaps exemplified by the immediacy of ‘Broken Tamagotchi’ or the frantic ‘Springsteen’. This quality of urgency doesn’t always mean fast and loud though, it can be found in other ways and at other tempos.

I was once practically yelled at by a music degree student about ‘Colonel Parker’, who found its jolting stop-start so miserably unmusical. There’s also ‘I Killed Burt Bacharach’, which I saw reviewed once as something like “Radiohead stuck in the mud.” Evidently, these songs are not to everyone’s taste, but there’s an urgency in their delay. Some might hear aimlessness, but to me, it sounds like a desperate attempt for the Parkers to ground themselves, to hold onto some control, which inevitably slips away before the cathartic finale.

It was always far easier to describe the feeling than the sound, and so Nosferatu D2 was always something that you just needed to try in order to know if its rough edges were a positive or a negative for you I always loved this review quote: “Some kind of alchemy, not to be repeated—a mix of tension, bitterness, and a way with lyrics that no one has, or will, match”—Drowned in Sound

A lot of the interest in Nosferatu D2, and their moderate (but what was for us huge) success occurred before their music was sold via Bandcamp and iTunes, or streamed on Spotify and Apple Music. So, I suspect a lot of those connections were lost over the years as MP3s were deleted and boxes of CDs were shoved under the bed (and then out the door). At press and radio, a lot of their supporters were hobbyists who eventually got too busy with real life to keep up with fielding premiere pitches for so little in return.

Consequently, it’s kind of hard to really illustrate to the uninitiated that this little Nosferatu D2 revival was a pretty special moment in time, I don’t think Audio Antihero could have gotten through the first few years without the goodwill Nosferatu D2 had given us.

I spoke on this about as well as I’m going to when I made a pretty sombre Christmas mixtape for Various Small Flames last year:

It’s funny because Nosferatu D2 really did so well. As a dead band on a first-timer one-person DIY label, the album kinda overachieved and found an audience, but that CD-buying fanbase never quite translated to Spotify, which in part is my fault for being a late adapter but is probably also common for inactive independent releases. In recent years however, Nosferatu D2 have been getting a bit of a boost on Spotify at this time of year. This particular song has amassed a modestly respectable 37,000+ streams thanks to playlists like ‘christmas cries‘, ‘Christmas Music for Pretentious People‘, ‘loser christmas playlist‘, and bless them: ‘It’s Christmas time for God’s sake‘.

I don’t think that myself or either Parker had particularly aimed for their lasting legacy to be having a very nominal Christmas hit but as their song ‘A Footnote‘ illustrates: you’re lucky to be a part of all this any way that you can be. If you put enough time into it all then you’ll learn that there’s far worse things to be known for in music than having a song people like listening to.

For what it’s worth, “It’s Christmas Time (For God’s Sake)” is now up to just shy of 45,000 streams on Spotify.

When the album came out, I remember one review made a point of mocking the unsustainability of my “business model” on account of launching with an inactive band. I think it might have been the same review that said it was “absolute shit posing as absolute genius,” which I bitchily quoted on a later press release as “…absolute genius” because I thought that was a pretty funny thing to do at the time.

The writer was probably right about it all being a daft idea in theory, but in some ways, Nosferatu D2 were maybe an ideal band for a micro-revival. They’d done enough in their short lifespan to have a couple of higher-profile fans, they’d been featured by NME, BBC, and XFM, but they were also quite restrained in their live schedule and promotional efforts. There was still much that could be done, and perhaps even a small air of mystery about them, I didn’t even really know what the band looked like until I saw them live for the first time.

A 2006 interview with Ben Parker for Robots & Electronic Brains makes it pretty apparent that they weren’t terribly keen on compromise or becoming entangled in the more cynical or desperate aspects of making music. Re-reading the interview today, this quote stood out:

Adam’s got a sixteen-track that we take to the practice room, then he mixes it at home. I don’t ever want to go into a proper studio – I don’t like the kind of people you get working there. I really quite dislike the music industry and I think we aren’t part of it. I don’t really want to go back to spending loads of money and getting someone outside involved. Their influence just works its way in. I’m happy with what we’ve got, it’s immediate, and I like the fact when we’re played on the radio and stuff it’s just us two.

So, maybe in 2009, with a couple of years of distance, it was a solid option to allow in a DIY label that was helmed by an inexperienced superfan, one far too hapless to know how to try to manipulate them into something ugly or expensive. There was someone there to do the shamelessly enthusiastic (or enthusiastically shameless) promotion through channels that may have always just been waiting for something this different, someone who at that time was still too excited to really mind the indignities of a collapsing industry.

Speaking of shameless, one time I wanted to use a burner account to bump their legendary thread on the Drowned in Sound forum, but I forgot to log out of my label account first and posted something like “wow I just bought this album, so great!” on main. Mad embarrassing. When I remember who I was in the early years of this label, it makes more sense to me that Benjamin Shaw (Nosferatu D2’s only labelmate until 2011) was always making fun of me.

THE SUPERMAN REVENGE SQUAD BAND

This chronophobic dissatisfaction with how life turned out, paired with a lack of control over any of it, leads me to rehearse and remember negligible things, especially from the realm of popular culture, just so I can cling to something that allows me a pathetic sort of mastery and belonging. So much of my anxiety comes from cultural surplus, the acute unease of being always a curator, never a creator. I’m ashamed of how tragic I felt in discovering that I still know all of the words to Savage Garden’s “I Want You,” but that any other memory of my fifteen-year-old experience is virtually non-existent.

Ben Parker, formerly of Nosferatu D2, now recording solo as Superman Revenge Squad Band, has created an album that eloquently articulates these anxieties and musings with an alarming degree of accuracy. There is Nothing More Frightening Than the Passing of Time terrifies me as much as it comforts me to know that someone else is having these thoughts.

—From a High Horse

While those who discovered Tempertwig likely did so after Nosferatu D2, it was The Superman Revenge Squad’s 2013 album, There Is Nothing More Frightening Than the Passing of Time, which was the closest we’d gotten to what you could call a “follow up” to the duo’s well-received debut (until My Best Unbeaten Brother’s Pessimistic Pizza in June of 2024, of course).

Superman Revenge Squad briefly overlapped with Nosferatu D2 when Ben began uploading his solo recordings to Myspace before they called it quits shortly after supporting Los Campesinos! and Sky Larkin in March 2007 (as captured on ‘Live at The Spitz’).

Superman Revenge Squad evolved from Ben recording solo with an electric guitar to Ben recording solo on an acoustic guitar, and later he expanded the lineup to a duo (initially with Martin Webb on cello, and later with Tim Eveleigh on the accordion). If you were lucky though, you might have actually caught Adam joining him on stage to play drums for The Angriest Dog in the World, which was something I found spellbinding when I got to see it in 2009 or so (I believe at The Brixton Windmill).

Though the brothers had resumed (briefly) sharing stages, it would take a few more years before you’d hear them collaborating on new recordings. It wouldn’t be fair to refer to it as an album by Ben and Adam Parker however since the lineup for this record was expanded to The Superman Revenge Squad Band, featuring a lineup of Jon Roffey, Martin Webb, and Gavin Kinch who added saxophone, accordion, cello, and piano on top of Ben’s guitar and Adam’s drums.

As Ben had done previously with Superman Revenge Squad, he mixed new songs (‘Lately I’ve Found Myself Regressing’) with re-recordings of old songs (‘Kendo Nagasaki’), offering a more layered and immediate experience than he’d been able to offer under this moniker previously.

We wouldn’t recapture the same blitz of press support for this release, in part because so many past supporters of Nosferatu D2 and Superman Revenge Squad had moved on from music, and perhaps because just two months prior I’d burned through more favours than I realised during my unhinged press efforts for Cloud’s Comfort Songs. However the new album did well, the CDs sold out (I’ve lost my copy, and can’t even find one to buy back), we got some wonderfully thoughtful reviews, and Steve Lamacq and Gideon Coe were pretty generous with BBC airplay too.

It was a lovely experience with a lovely album. I’d wanted to work on something from Superman Revenge Squad for a long time, so to get to do so, and to find out yet again that his words and music could really move people felt good.

Here are some kind words about it:

…Practically bursts with melodic ideas thrumming off of tense accordions and wandering saxophones. In one way it sounds like Parker has gone off the deep end finally, but in another it is pure genius. You may recall we’ve done things like proclaim Parker England’s greatest contemporary lyricist, or characterize him here as “startlingly talented,” all of which still holds true

—Clicky Clicky Music

This album speaks to me on an almost embarrassingly intimate level… It’s been a long time since I was so interested in an album’s lyrical content

—The Album Wall

There’s something so special about There Is Nothing More Frightening Than the Passing of Time. It’s a record which deserves wider recognition, but will likely hold a special place only to those few fortunate enough to have come into contact with it. I for one am truly glad that I am one of those

—Gold Flake Paint

I suspect that the big band iteration of Superman Revenge Squad had always been intended to be short-lived, or sporadic at most, but the entire thing went quiet after this album. Ben continued to perform with The Jonbarr Hinge, a group he’d joined around 2010, and they released an album in 2015, but there were no more Superman Revenge Squad releases, and live shows eventually stopped too. As he’d told Clicky Clicky Music in 2008: “I’ll continue doing this until I don’t want to do it anymore.” I guess he didn’t want to do it anymore.

MY BEST UNBEATEN BROTHER

On the whole, despite often dealing with frustration and disappointment with the world, I hope the songs on the album convey a feeling of hope and some positivity. In the past, I have tended to write very much from a personal perspective, but I wanted to write stuff that is a little more universal.

—Ben Parker (MusicNGear, 2024)

Formed in 2023, My Best Unbeaten Brother began when Ben Parker happened to bump into Ben Fry, his former Jonbarr Hinge bandmate. Parker had already been experimenting with music again during lockdown and Fry’s interest in helping him flesh these songs out as bassist became the foundation of the band. Adam then joined on drums to make them a trio, a lineup that the Parkers hadn’t been a part of since Tempertwig’s split in 2004.

Their music is both familiar and strange. On one hand, they’re both very much who they always were, Ben Parker’s lyricism is still full of wit and passion, and the generally quiet and unassuming Adam is still an absolute madman behind his kit. On the other, after what we’ve heard from them before, it can be bewildering to hear Ben Parker yell “Come on! Come on!” or allow himself a bit of guitar solo.

The hopelessness found in the early work of Ben and Adam Parker verged on nihilism, stylistically, they’d usually sought to strip elements from their sound (for example, never utilising distortion pedals in Nosferatu D2). They were never self-important but there was a seriousness to them in that they knew enough about what they wanted to know what they didn’t, and so they walked away at the band’s peak, and when the posthumous release created even greater interest, they refused to reform, focusing on the projects they found more interesting.

People would tell me to “make” a Nosferatu D2 reunion happen, and my response was a politer “How the fuck do you expect me to do that?” I’d maybe talked them into some things they were unsure about, but I was never going to convince them to do something they didn’t want to, and I wouldn’t particularly wish to either.

When Ben lowered the volume as Superman Revenge Squad, it helped to highlight some of the humour that was always present in Tempertwig and Nosferatu D2, but a bit obscured by the rapid pace and yelping. But much of the lightness of his solo material was through self-deprecation (“I’m only mocking myself” he told God Is In the TV in 2013) or a cheeky warning about our own meaninglessness and impermanence through a pop culture reference to something that doesn’t exist anymore.

If Nosferatu D2 were shrugging into the abyss, then Superman Revenge Squad was shuffling into obscurity, and not even adding sax and accordion could really change that. It feels appropriate to me that the single artwork for ‘A Funny Thing You Said’ was inspired by the iconic and harrowing climax of Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond.

With My Best Unbeaten Brother though, they seem to be really having fun, and without the feeling that they should be ashamed of that. Self-described as “overly self-conscious men reborn as less self-conscious men, now too old to worry about indie credit,” there’s a looseness and a sense of freedom in their work. As Ben Parker told Marc Schuster of Abominations: “In the past, I set myself pretty strict rules when approaching music-making: no guitar pedals for one. With this new stuff, I’m just going with whatever comes and ultimately it all sounds like us somehow! I’ve even allowed myself a guitar solo on one song, which I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near previously.”

Lyrically the songs could almost be seen as a condemnation of their past selves, ‘It’s Not Embarrassing to Care About Stuff’ pushes back on fan-favourites like ‘The Kids from Fame’ and ‘Bratpack Film Philosophy’ by turning the “1980s film that no-one liked, that you quite liked” into a source of inspiration, rather than one of defeat or tedious ‘fake nostalgia’. The line “I never liked Bruce Springsteen, but I always envied that he cared” even questions the message of Nosferatu D2’s “Springsteen” (an apathetic Croydon counter to ‘My Hometown’) by willing us to find a way to find meaning and purpose–unless “we’re too old to care?”

In a Q&A some years ago, Ben Parker was asked who would play him in a film about his life, and he responded: “I’ll let the director choose and then complain at the premiere.” Just a lighthearted bit of cheek, but you could choose to see his answer as representative of where he was back then. Waiting for things to go wrong so that he can complain about them isn’t him in 2024, but for years Parker had written songs about watching the erosion of a world he didn’t much seem to care for, if he ever thought to offer a solution it rarely went much further than a trip to Wetherspoons or a doomed plan to get on Top of the Pops. His message now is much more about doing what you can and finding meaning in what you do.

Tempertwig’s This Means Everything, This Don’t Mean a Thing featured the ‘I’m not Bono’ refrain, which he later explained to mean: “I’d like to create music that would help… songs that bring people together but it probably wasn’t in me.” In 2024 though, he sings: “There’s a song / Building up inside of you that’s gonna change the world / And all your Bono fantasies are gonna take hold.”

These songs don’t necessarily have answers to all of his past work, but sometimes they change the question. Superman Revenge Squad seemed to show him willing himself to find meaning in his “box of old records” or those reviews that called him “an adequate lyricist,” but now a father, it seems his purpose is having these things so that they can be left behind for his son to explore. The question of what “these stupid songs I sing for something to do” are all worth will ultimately be left for the younger Parker to answer.

In a Resonance FM interview with the two Bens, Parker told deXter Bentley some of his prior writing had been indecipherably personal, and he was now trying to write more broadly, about things that are more relatable, or of importance on a larger scale. So while he still takes shots at figures of pop culture, it’s not because he doesn’t like the later Smashing Pumpkins albums, it’s because he’s “sick and tired of punching down,” and this feeling is no longer compatible with being a fan of Morrissey, even if, as he recently told The Daily Music Report, Reel Around the Fountain was a pivotal inspiration for his beginnings as a songwriter.

On the matter of other artists though, sometimes he was right the first time. Radiohead’s bullshit around Israel, and opposition to the BDS movement in support of Palestine has finally made me connect with Ben’s old Public Enemy homage: “Thom Yorke was a hero to most, but he never meant that much to me.”

Despite all the differences, much is still the same. Ben and Adam Parker are still unmistakably themselves, and Ben Fry, who brings a wealth of creativity to both their music and their artwork, is an addition that reaffirms the Parker brothers’ individuality, rather than diluting it. When speaking to the Hello GoodBye Show, Fry mentioned how playing in My Best Unbeaten Brother was allowing him to channel his own anger at the state of this miserable world through Ben’s words, and their collective art. There’s that important feeling of doing something rather than nothing, which is now so crucial.

When reflecting on Nosferatu D2’s “A Footnote” in 2011, Ben had said: “The main concept of the song comes from the fact that we’d probably never be famous enough to have a rock biography written about us, but maybe one of the bands we’ve played with a few times will one day get massive and there might just be a quote in the book that has a footnote that, when you look it up, references me; and maybe that will be enough.”

I always found that ambition to be quite humble, and even inspiring. In 2024 though, as he told Amplify the Noise, that concept of legacy may not be really even worth engaging with: “More than ever, you have to be making music and writing songs just for the joy of making music and writing songs. You ask yourself. why are you bothering, and you just have to avoid the question and carry on.”

And he’s right. Indie credit doesn’t last forever. You could take it to the grave, but it wouldn’t do you any good.

Pessimistic Pizza is out now via Audio Antihero and available from the My Best Unbeaten Brother Bandcamp page.

Cover Photo by Tony Robertson

The post My Best Unbeaten Brothers: An Audio Antihero Retrospective on the Music of Ben and Adam Parker appeared first on Various Small Flames.

But in many ways, despite what its title might suggest, Pessimistic Pizza is an optimistic record. One made in a country coming apart at the seams yet unable to fully embrace its impending doom. Both Ben Parker and Ben Fry are now fathers, and something in the milestone led a change of focus. Efforts to be self-aware and cool have been parked for something more sincere, if only to try and add something positive into a world descending down the drain. New single ‘Extraordinary Times’ is a direct call to arms in this regard, choosing to take all of its uncertainty and anger and channel into a sense of forward motion. If only to prove steps can still be made in that direction.

Photo by Tony Robertson

The post My Best Unbeaten Brother – Extraordinary Times appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Australian duo Simon Lam and Hamish Mitchell, AKA Armlock, are releasing album Seashell Angel Lucky Charm later this summer on Run For Cover Records, and single ‘Ice Cold’ is the ideal point at which to dive in. The Armlock style beams electronic music through the prism of indie rock, conjuring sounds at once ethereal and eccentric, something the album opener encapsulates perfectly. A lesson in minimalism which rather than forgo detail, offers it with a sense of purpose and control. Be that in the simple beat and subtle textures, or the pared-back lyricism which lends the track its ambiguous charm.

Ice cold ankle deep
Head tilt, turn a cheek
I won’t be around for the rest of the week
Takes one to know one
We were born in the air sign
I’m gonna come back with the sword you left behind

Seashell Angel Lucky Charm is out on the 12th July via Run For Cover Records.

Cereus Bright – Ride

Following on from recent EP Boys, a release we described as “an ode to every tired soul and person without direction,” Knoxville’s Cereus Bright is back with ‘Ride’, a brand new single via Nettwerk. Boys preached the value of giving in to life’s unpredictable currents, and the new single follows in a similar vein. A brightly peppy track imbued with enough forward motion to propel even the most uncertain person to confront their fears and seize the bull by the horns. “Do you wanna ride?” as the chorus asks, and with the momentum of the drums and warm psych-inflected textures, it’s difficult to refuse the offer. Watch the video below with visuals by Peel:

‘Ride’ is out now via Nettwerk.

 César Alvarez – Normal, IL

“Would it be okay to wander off?” asks César Alvarez on ‘Normal, IL’, the opening track from new album egg. “I’ll take the shitty car, I’ll leave the credit cards / Drive to the Midwest, sleeping at rest stops / Play jazz on the sidewalks.” Delivered with a tone somewhere between wistful longing and boundless curiosity, the song introduces an artist navigating the competing wills to preserve the moment and escape for good. Where life’s tiny details represent the component parts of everything we hold dear. Things to drag around year after year, things to hold tight to your chest in the hope of better days. “A few years ago I was under-employed artist parent trying to figure out how to survive capitalism and still be a composer,” Alvarez explains. “I was genuinely trying to figure out if we could keep surviving in NY. This song is that feeling of being about to give up.”

Gold Dime – Denise

Recently, New York art rock/post punk outfit Gold Dime released album No More Blue Skies via No-Gold, an album which took avant garde sensibilities and elevated them into cinematic experiences. Led by Andrya Ambro (formerly of Talk Normal), the project has long reached for increasingly inventive and immersive sounds. The new record feels like the closest they have come to the zenith of such a style, what the liner notes describe as “a widescreen, fiercely intense, hair standing up on the back of your neck kind of art rock.” Take opener and single ‘Denise’, a song somehow at once opaque and charged with clarity, Ambro’s vocals cutting through the volatile sax and shifting percussion to blur the line between foreboding and transcendence.

Watch the video directed by Andrya Ambro and Joe Wakeman below:

No More Blue Skies is out now via No-Gold and available from the Gold Dime Bandcamp page.

Kathryn Mohr – Cut (Low Cover)

Originating from a conversation between The Flenser and Planning For Burial’s Thom Wasluck, Your Voice Is Not Enough is a compilation of covers celebrating the breadth and beauty of Low‘s musical oeuvre. A whole host of Flenser artists and friends are involved, with VSF favs Midwife and Allison Lorenzen joined by Drowse, Have A Nice Life, Cremation Lily and Holy Water among others. The latest single sees Kathryn Mohr take on ‘Cut’, maintaining the sparse simmer of the original while deepening its shadowy corners with an electrified edge. “It was the lyrics that immediately drew me into this song,” Mohr explains. “The intimacy of a hair cut. The loss of a version of someone you knew as they turn themselves inside out to survive. It’s one of the saddest things in the world to me, watching someone harden and loose themselves to their pain.”

Your Voice Is Not Enough is out on the 24th May via The Flenser.

LEOBLU – full moon & snow boots

Julia Carlsson’s LEOBLU has caught our ears on a number of occasions in recent times, be it the gloom pop of single ‘Cake‘ or more recently a collaboration with Sad Dad which probed into the strangeness of love. “The impression is not one of grand gesture and romantic inevitability,” we wrote of the later, “but rather the sense of being exposed to mysterious forces. The physics of things larger than yourself, moving life beyond your control.” With new EP Blu Lucid Nightmare coming later this year, LEOBLU has returned with single ‘full moon & snow boots’, and again the track sees Carlsson setting personal emotions against larger, almost mystical backdrops. As though the natural world was our own longing manifest. Watch the video, shot in California by Hannah Gonzalez, below:

Blu Lucid Nightmare will be released later this year.

My Best Unbeaten Brother – Time on Our Hands, Spider-Man

Back in January we told you about My Best Unbeaten Brother, the latest project from the Parker brothers of Nosferatu D2, The Superman Revenge Squad Band and Tempertwig. Back then we were writing about standalone single ‘Slayer on a Sunny Day’, but as promised the band are now readying their debut mini-album Pessimistic Pizza, which will be release via Audio Antihero. To whet appetites, they have released lead single ‘Time on Our Hands, Spider-Man’, a mid-to-late-00s style indie rock song electrified with desperate emotion. Ben Parker says the song is about, “being a father and being a son, passing on memories of years and years of processing stuff and turning it into landfill indie, how we all need a Spider-Man or a Superman and how this doesn’t change the older you get,” which goes some way to illustrating the mixture of sadness, sincerity and frustration that sit just below the up-tempo surface.

Wild Yaks – Desperado

With almost two decades and (roughly) five albums under their belts, Wild Yaks have made a name with an affirming and often riotous brand of rock music, filling the gap between hopes and realities with a carefree embrace of the present. Out next month via Ernst Jenning Record Co. latest album Monumental Deeds feels like both a continuation of this spirit and the culminative product of twenty years spent pining and singing and howling at the moon. Born on a drive back to Florida lead Rob Bryn took with his 79-year-old mother, single ‘Desperado’ is a fitting combination of desperation and defiance. When the ghosts of past selves and possible futures are strung out on the road before you, sometimes the only option is to roll the windows down, put the pedal to the metal and feel that wind in your hair.

Watch the video below filmed on VHS tape by Renée Muza and edited by Sameer Kapoor:

Monumental Deeds is out on the 21st June via Ernest Jenning Record Co. and you can pre-order it now.

Zoya Zafar – Clumsy

“Time allowed Zafar opportunity to understand the tracks beyond the usual level, and thus gradually shape them towards their ideal, essential form.” So we wrote of Zoya Zafar‘s Some Songs, an album interrupted by real life difficulties which only came to realise itself more fully in the intervening years. Tracks like ‘Sweet Talk’ “condens[e] months of suffering into a single prayer released into an empty room,” as we put it in a preview, a testament to the value of patience and care brought to life with a tender folk pop style. Latest single ‘Clumsy’ invites the listener further into this space, a song produced by friend Gia Margaret which shares Margaret’s quiet, sometimes cryptic sincerity. “You were the light in the dark,” as Zafar sings, “giving away your sad, sad heart / living inside a house of cards.”

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Back in 2023, North Carolina post-punk/dream pop outfit Cor de Lux released Media, an album which channelled the uncertainty of the present and attempted to turn its energies into something more constructive. Single ‘Rumors’ came complete with an animated video created by Matt Smithson which further delved into these themes, matching the song’s story of losing a friend with a picture that captures the folly behind so many human interactions. “The video is a super abstract story of some amoeba/single cell things emerging, becoming sentient, trading ideas, fighting about their ideas,” the band explain, “until there is nothing left: no color, just rage until it all implodes at the end.”

Media is out now and available from Bandcamp.

Cordelia Gartside – December

Based in Hastings, Cordelia Gartside is a singer-songwriter who uses a mix of indie folk and rock sensibilities as a vehicle for delivering succinct and emotionally charged vignettes. Centring on  what she describes “spinning out in December when the light goes and time’s weird and it’s hard to know how you feel about anything,” latest single ‘December’ is the ideal introduction to her narrative-driven work. A track hushed in tone but winding taut with feeling, capturing the volatility of one’s internal weather when the outside world presses in a little too heavily.

Crying at commercials, I know
I should try to be discerning with
My emotions
Don’t know how I’m feeling
December it’s me again

Ground Loops – Get It Right

“The lasting impression is that of organic development,” we wrote of Ground Loops‘ self-titled debut release via Rue Defense back in 2020, “the various components reaching out in all directions and meshing with those around it, knitting together to form a dense and textured sound.” Follow-up EP When A Stoppable Force Meets A Movable Object sees TC Brownell (Wild Pink, Dead Painters) channel his new surroundings of the Pacific Northwest to offer a freshly verdant edge to the sound, as opener and single ‘Get It Right’ attests. A song which exists within the landscape’s foggy breath without sacrificing the level of detail Brownell’s precision and patience creates.

My Best Unbeaten Brother – Slayer on a Sunny Day

With Ben Fry joining Ben and Adam Parker, who you might now from Audio Antihero favourites Nosferatu D2, The Superman Revenge Squad Band and Tempertwig, My Best Unbeaten Brother is the latest project to rise out of Croydon swinging. This year will see the band unveil their debut EP, and for now we have the non-album track ‘Slayer on a Sunny Day’ by way of introduction. First appearing on Joyzine’s 20 Years of Joy compilation, the song channels the wry contradiction of its title, pairing a racing momentum with droll delivery in an attempt to look on the bright side and make the best of the present moment, no matter how difficult outside forces conspire to make such a mindset. As Parker sings: ‘The apocalypse can wait until tomorrow.”

‘Slayer on a Sunny Day’ is out now via Audio Antihero.

Routine Caffeine – In The End Now

Louisville, Kentucky‘s Routine Caffeine are prepping a new EP for release in 2024, and latest single ‘In The End Now’ offers a glimpse at the band’s penchant for rich, bittersweet soundscapes. Rising from careful beginnings, the song explores the benefits and pitfalls of holding your tongue within a relationship, and if the quiet tiptoeing of the opening suggests a certain hesitance to raise difficult topics, the track soon gathers conviction as the momentum builds and tips into a cathartic back half. Speaking the truth might cause things to unravel, but sometimes change requires a few things to be broken in order to precipitate.

SAVAK – Leash Biter

Brooklyn post-punk outfit SAVAK come from strong musical stock. Founded by Sohrab Habibion (Obits, Edsel) and Michael Jaworski (The Cops, Virgin Islands), the band features Matt Schulz (Holy Fuck, Enon) on drums and welcomes Jeff Gensterblum (Small Brown Bike, Her Heads On Fire) and Matt Hunter (New Radiant Storm King, Silver Jews) for live performances. New full-length Flavors Of Paradise utilises every inch of this collective experience to create a brand rock as politically-charged as it is catchy. Single ‘Leash Bitter’ shows off the brooding swagger and bite of the SAVAK sound, simmering around a taut rhythm and gradually coming to a boil.

Dogs on every corner
Biting at my heels
Teeth cut through like a razor
A scar that never heals

Secret Secret – She’s Tired!

Consisting of childhood friends Sadie Alan, Marika Stuurman, Maria Donjacour and Thomas Fendert, and cutting their teeth in the San Francisco underground scene, Secret Secret is a band centred around collaboration and trust. Their self-titled debut full-length introduced their brand of “lullaby punk” in 2020, and now the outfit are preparing to release a brand new EP. Single ‘She’s Tired!’ is the first taste, a song which explores ideas of exhaustion and burnout with a playful energy, capturing Secret Secret’s trademark balance between fun and emotion. “Are you tired? / Are you waking up with no desire?” as Alan asks. The song is also supported with a surreal video which pitches the band into their own dreams.

‘She’s Tired’ is out now via the Secret Secret Bandcamp page.

Tractor Beam – Set In Stone

The project of Toronto-born, New York-based songwriter Sasha Balazic, Tractor Beam is less a solo endeavour and more an outlet for collaboration and friendship. Following last year’s debut album Turtles All The Way on Kingfisher Bluez, Tractor Beam have returned with ‘Set In Stone’, a brand new single that sees them continue their signature style, what the label calls “an eloquent mix of freak folk and 2000’s indie rock.” Balazic’s earnest vocals are joined by gentle guitars and lapsteel, building from a soft and subdued beginning to something genuinely stirring, complete with propulsive percussion and joyous call and response lines. But it’s not all good vibes, melancholy and potential tragedy linger at the edges, something brought into relief with the use of audio samples from the 25th Challenger space mission towards the end.

‘Set In Stone’ is out now via streaming services.

wheel kid – shortcut through graveyard

wheel kid is a project based in Portsmouth, New Hampshire that combines folk sensibilities with sound collage and noise styles to evoke both the New England landscape and the emotional terrain of those who inhabit it. The first in a series of small releases, burning sister taylor river might seem a modest offering with only three songs, but each provides into own miniature world into which the listener is invited. Take ‘shortcut through graveyard’, whose sparse lyricism is supported by a rich and patient sonic palette.

ester born in 17-5
21 years old when she died
buried in the yard on the highway side
see her grave from the kitchen window

captain alexander 1812
sailed to the far north in pursuit of the right whale
buried underneath the pool at the motel
where the kids do laps in the shallow end

Zoya Zafar – You Meant Nothing, Too

Back in October, we wrote about ‘Tunnel Vision’ by Orlando’s Zoya Zafar, the lead single from her forthcoming album Some Songs. With the record due for release this spring, Zafar has unveiled a second song to further whet appetites. Titled ‘You Meant Nothing, Too’, it’s a slow and solemn song built on droning piano, Zafar’s softly intimate vocals and strikingly poignant negative space. Acoustic guitar and subdued percussion eventually join too but things remain pared back to their essential elements. Zafar uses minimalism not as an austere stylistic choice but as a tool to hone her music’s emotional weight, suffusing it with warmth despite its direct and unfussy arrangement.

‘You Meant Nothing, Too’ is out now via streaming services.

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