Such a style is typical of Gravity Blanket, the record seeing Stephen Becker dig through the assorted fragments of ordinary life in search of some lesson or sense of higher meaning, even if it requires him to unearth some uncomfortable things in the process. The songs lead from childhood through adolescence and young adult life, featuring everything from Slinkys and Haribo frogs to break-ups and hallucinations, though Becker’s inventive lyricism and arrangements maintain both playfulness and vulnerability across them all.

Sitting at the louder, slightly more disordered end of the spectrum, latest single ‘Careless’ again focuses on a failing relationship, though is more ambiguous than its predecessor. Because while ‘Bad Idea’ existed within the moment an end became clear cut, ‘Careless’ instead focuses on the uncertainty which worms its way the cracks of struggling partnership. “I was stuck on the word ‘careless’, and how adding a space flips its meaning entirely,” Becker expands. “In relationships, it’s hard to know whether someone’s just being careless (silly, impersonal) or if they actually care less (harsh). I tried to capture that ambiguity with a wily post-chorus guitar riff in the vein of Jonny Greenwood and Ed Rodriguez.”

It’s obvious, that you care less
It’s obvious, that you’re careless
It’s obvious but not obvious to me

Watch the video directed by Haoyan of America below:

Gravity Blanket will be released on the 24th April and you can pre-order it now.

The post Stephen Becker – Careless appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Fast forward a little under two years and Just Cause are at it again. Just Cause Vol. 2 takes the blueprint of the original and expands upon it. There are over double the number of contributing artists, with an impressive total of sixty three songs from all corners of our current musical moment. Many of the artists have featured on these very pages (some multiple times), including the likes of Ben Seretan, Caitlin Pasko, Erika Dohi, hemlock, Mal Devisa, Michael Cormier-O’Leary, Nico Hedley, Pleasure Systems and Sam Wenc. There’s such a mix of genres, feelings and styles that there truly is something for everyone, and the minimum donation of $10 is brilliant value in anyone’s book.

But of course the compilation is about more than music. It is again raising money for another vital cause. All proceeds of Just Cause Vol. 2 go to the Immigrant Defense Project, who work tirelessly to fight the mass imprisonment and deportation of immigrants in the US. As their mission statement puts it: “IDP has remained steadfast in fighting for fairness and justice for all immigrants caught at the intersection of the racially biased U.S. criminal and immigration systems. IDP fights to end the current era of unprecedented mass criminalization, detention and deportation through a multipronged strategy including advocacy, litigation, legal advice and training, community defense, grassroots alliances, and strategic communications.”

Just Cause Vol. 2 is out now and available via Bandcamp.

Cover art by Aldrin Regina Valdez

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The recording project of Chicago-based songwriter Ben Groth, The Child of Eve is preparing to release the full-length Sozo this summer. The record was brought to life together with Grammy Award winning engineer Ben Rawlins and Northern Ireland Music Prize winning engineer Caolán Austin, not to mention drummer Matt Carroll (Finom), bassist Eli Broxham (The Arcadian Wild), vocalist Sara Di Bella (Anuna) and violinist Gareth Quinn Redmond (Glen Hansard, Ye Vagabonds), and the result is every bit as assured as you might expect from such a talented outfit. Take latest single ‘I’m Here’, a song which explores feelings of fear and the ways in which can come to influence our very identity. “This song addresses a kind of fear I wrestle with,”  Groth explains. “One that convinces me to question my worth, to wear a mask and hide myself away. That I’m embarrassing to others.” But rather than allow himself be consumed by the fear, he instead confronts the feeling. Decides to walk through it no matter how uncomfortable it might be.

Dog Shaped – Reason

Rising from the ashes of Sue Your Landlord and featuring Emily Cabarle, Dog Shaped is a new band announcing itself on the New York scene, and debut single ‘Reason’ serves as their calling card. Described by the band as “a love letter and a longing to reconnect with lost childlike wonder,” the track looks to wriggle free from the difficulties and isolation that so often comes with adulthood and instead return to something more tender and curious. What if loneliness need not be the default setting of our existence? What if there’s a path back to kindness and connection once more?

Ead Wood – Emmeline

“A bittersweet slice of wistful reflection, with Soles evoking that strange mix of comfort and loss inherent within any spot of natural beauty.” So we wrote of Ead Wood‘s single ‘Peace in the Pines‘ back in 2024, describing how the Bristol-based project utilised an Americana-adjacent sound to achieve a mood simultaneously upbeat, melancholic and often a little absurd. With new EP Wild Water coming soon via Breakfast Records, Soles and co. are back ‘Emmeline’, a single which continues the introspective nature of the project while widening its focus, serving as a bridge between previous record Cash Mountain and whatever new territory Ead Wood charts next. “I wrote ‘Emmeline’ during a time when I was touring a lot and constantly heading off somewhere else,” Wood explains. “It made me think about what that experience must feel like for the person staying behind. The song is written from my partner’s perspective—that feeling of watching someone rush out the door again while life at home carries on. It’s about love, patience, and the quiet strength of the person who’s always there when you return.”

Eliza Edens – Leash

More than three years since releasing last record We’ll Become the Flowers, Brooklyn‘s Eliza Edens has returned with brand new song ‘Leash’. The standalone single suggests an evolution in style, moving away from the introspective glow of the previous record and stepping into a newfound sassy confidence. “I’m a goddamn killer, ended many things,” they sing in the opening line which rather nicely sets the tone, “fucked up your mind and stole your parents’ wedding ring.” Insistent bass and peppy percussion buoy things along with irrepressible energy, licks of guitar bursting in at intervals as if a metaphor for the abandonment of self-control at the track’s heart. ‘Leash’ “is a tongue-in-cheek, breezy rock song that celebrates the shadow self,” Edens describes, “our darker impulses, the devil on the shoulder, and the cynic inside us all.”

Eric Angelo Bessel – Upstate

After lead track ‘Double Helix’ introduced Mirror At Night B-Sides, a song “dreamlike and drifting,” we wrote, “emerging full of ambiguous meaning as though dug from deep in the distant past or else visiting from some time or space we are yet to encounter,” Eric Angelo Bessel has now shared its partner single ‘Upstate’ to cap off the release. Fans of the project will relish the opportunity to step out of the frame of ordinary existence and delve into this otherworldly soundscape once again. “’Upstate’ feels like a quiet transmission from somewhere beyond time,” Bessel explains of the track, “where memories blur, dreams surface, and sound moves like breath through spaces you can’t quite place but somehow recognize.”

Helenor  Windshield

The recording project of Brooklyn-based songwriter and visual artist David DiAngelis, Helenor serves as a vehicle to explore the twin threads of stasis and change that run through any life, and provides space to reflect on age old existential questions with a fresh, contemporary edge. Released via Mtn Laurel Recording Co., new single ‘Windshield’ is the ideal introduction for the uninitiated, exploring the ways in which we may or may not alter as we grow and come of age, and the curious comfort which might be found in the answer. “I’ve been spending a lot more of my time with children lately, which feels like a portal but also a mirror,” DiAngelis describes. “The mirror part has me feeling like—damn, I’m really not even that much different than who I was at that age. I guess the only way for me to reconcile this is to just remember that every other self-important someone walking by me in New York City is actually just one gigantic child in disguise.”

Mark Trecka – Wake Dance Romance ft. Lead Into Gold

Chicago-born writer, sound artist, performer, and activist Mark Trecka has a new record, ROMANCE WAKE NAMING, coming out next month via LA label The Garrote. Long-time readers will be familiar with his work which roams the outer edges of post-punk, neo-classical and avant garde, combining themes both personal and political in a sound which have said previously “utilis[es] sound to explore a diverse set of styles and themes in a practice as inventive as it is ambitious.” Collaboration is key to Trecka’s practice and the new record is no different. This time industrial music legend Paul Barker (Ministry) both produces and features under his alias Lead Into Gold, helping to create a trip-hop-influenced sound that’s as big and immediate as it is nuanced and experimental. Lead single ‘Wake Dance Romance’ throws the listener headlong into this style. Check it out below.

Pearla – Loved By Me

Pearla has shared a couple of singles from her upcoming new album Song Room in recent weeks, with ‘Be Around‘ and ‘Imagine Your Face‘ introducing a record which inverts the outward view of predecessor Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming to instead offer a more introspective style. “A survey not of the exterior but interior,” we wrote, “though one which nevertheless finds a vast world full of strange beauty.” With the release fast approaching, Pearla is now back with new track ‘Loved By Me’ which further grounds the emotional core of the record. “This is a song of unconditional love for someone who is used to measuring their worth by external factors,” she says. “I wrote a lot of the songs on this record guided by the question, ‘What is it that my body needs to sing?’ In this case, it was an expression of love, directed toward the more tender parts within myself and the people in my life.” Watch the video by Enne Goldstein below:

Song Room will be released on the 24th April and you can pre-order it now from the Pearla Bandcamp page.

Polhawan – No Sweat

You might know Tim Rowing-Parker as the songwriter behind acts like Woahnows and Immy, the Bristol-based artist using the later to put out a series of scrappy, surf-inflected releases in recent years. His new project Polhawan is both an evolution and revolution of this style, looking to preserve the immediacy and DIY spirit of Immy while pursuing a newfound polish and depth. The result is clearly Rowing-Parker, but also Rowing-Parker as never seen before. Cryptic, strange, fresh and confident. Take single ‘No Sweat’ from debut EP Wild Mountain Time, coming this May via Breakfast Records, which takes a sunny, surfy sound and applies it to something altogether more supernatural. “After a few years living in the country, I moved back to the city, and honestly it kinda freaked me out,” he explains. “To take the edge off the train station each morning I’d block out the noise with headphones, and for some reason this led to listening to loads of supernatural podcasts. It’s quite funny that people recounting the scariest shit that has ever happened to them seemed more comforting to me than existing alongside fellow commuters in the light of day.”

Rare DM – Compliment

The moniker Rare DM might be cryptic (does it refer to direct message? Dungeon master? Dance music?), but the music of Brooklyn-based singer, producer and multi-instrumentalist Erin Hoagg is anything but guarded. Leaning mainly on synths, Rare DM creates an immediate, emotionally charged sound which seduces the listener into its embrace before bearing its messy heart, no matter how revealing or intense the process might be. Later this spring, sees the release of new full-length Attention, and single ‘Compliment’  is typical of its sensual, confronting style. “It is inspired by when you are in a relationship, and someone who you had eyes for (before meeting your s/o) suddenly pays attention to you,” as Hoagg expands. “I was sent a suggestive message from someone, and wasn’t single anymore. As the lyrics share: ‘don’t you worry about it for a second, I can take a compliment’ because hey, I don’t want them to feel embarrassed or bad, they didn’t know that I met someone! This all being said… I can’t control if they are thinking of me. ‘You can’t have it… but you can imagine it’.”

Watch the suitably surreal, suggestive video by Lisa Saeboe below:

Attention will be released on the 29th May and you can pre-order it now from Bandcamp.

Shaina Hayes – Flourish

When not writing songs or touring, Québec-based artist Shaina Hayes runs a vegetable farm in her hometown, a fact which is more than an interesting tidbit to add to a bio. Because spend any time with Hayes’s music and you’ll come to appreciate a kinship between both of these pursuits: an attention to detail, a deep-rooted connection to the land and its life, not to mention an overarching patience that allows her to reflect upon the present with admirable clarity. In preparation for her third full-length, coming soon via Bonsound, Hayes has returned with ‘Flourish’, a suitably earthy, emotive slice of folk which highlights this style perfectly. A well-timed evocation of spring and all of it inherent hopefulness, blooming with an easy warmth as it gestures towards a brighter future of healing and growth. Watch the visualizer by Flavie Lemée below:

‘Flourish’ is out now via Bonsound and available from the usual places.

Will White – When To Stop

Songwriter and composer Will White has long been known for his work with other artists. The Maccabees, 86TVs and Great White Shark are among the acts he’s collaborated with, and he runs a residency at Ron’s cafe in Peckham which has welcomed everyone from Jasper Llewlyn (of Caroline), Katy J Pearson and Will Rees (Mystery Jets) to Florence Welch, Dry Cleaning and Sam Akpro. Even his own project BLANc practised a certain level of distancing from his personal self. But this May sees White step out into the light on his own for the first time with the release of his debut solo album It’s Easy To Let The Thoughts Gain Ground on state51. A record which takes all of the knowledge and experience gained through years spend in the heart of the UK’s artistic community and applies it to his own intimate, reflective brand of indie rock. Latest single ‘When To Stop’ captures the spirit of the release, offering a decidedly compassionate tone that is nevertheless shot through which a rising tension too. Like a picture of someone caught between the shadows of the past and an obscure future, wishing to hope for something better while the world rocks and burns.

Watch the video made by White  alongside Rosie Terry-Toogood below:

It’s Easy To Let The Thoughts Gain Ground will be released on the 1st May via state51 and you can pre-order it now.

The post Weekly Listening: March 2026 #5 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

‘Dear Companion’ offered proof, what we called an “earthy warm” track which sees “the arrangement wrapping around Panken’s reflective, wistful vocals and elevating the cryptic lyricism into something stirring.” Or the early single ‘Delightful Dust’, which takes a similar style but adds an extra old-time charm. Indeed, Panken’s lyricism takes inspiration from the wistful playfulness of his forebears, with an almost John Prine sensibility to this tale featuring rocket ships and ant colonies, which shows he is able to include brightness and humour without undercutting the emotion at its heart.

With the release of Near Divine little under a month away, Nic Panken has returned with brand new single, ‘2 Hearts’, and the song is no less sincere or endearing. An compassionate number which takes the image of its title further than you might expect, pushing the love song beyond romance and into something existential. The arrangement rises to match the ambition of these thematic concerns, offering the most expansive sound on the album to date while preserving the intimacy so key to its identity. “When this melody first took shape I thought I would write a romantic love song, but the scope broadened,” Panken explained. “I was thinking about how we come into this world already knowing two heartbeats, and our lives often seem guided by the quest for that fleeting feeling, whether it be with a lover, a friend, a work of art… It can be euphoric, disorienting, frightening and empowering, and I wanted the song to convey the wide spectrum of this perpetual cycle.”

Two hearts, two hearts
Beating as the river starts
Time will tear this veil apart
And lead me back to you

The post Nic Panken – 2 Hearts appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Minneapolis has a rich heritage in energetic indie rock, so its great to see bands like The Dead Century carrying the flame onwards. First drafted during the pandemic but now equally relevant in light of the city’s occupation, latest single ‘Been Better’ wears its influences proudly, taking the raucousness of The Replacements and some of The Hold Steady‘s buoyant positivity and applying them to the less than positive present. The result, essentially a dispatch from a profoundly difficult time, is propulsive, impassioned and ultimately affirming in spite of everything. One, much like the people on the ground of its home city, willing to confront the gravity of the moment and fight for something better regardless of how far away that might seem.

‘Been Better’ is out now and available from the usual places.

figure eight – hummingbird

Back in 2024 we featured Bay Area outfit figure eight, describing how the project has evolved from the experimental noise project of duo Nash Rood and Abby Goeser into something far more developed, with single ‘1999 (cherry)’ from their self-titled EP highlighting the nuance and balance of the sound. “Twin threads of lightness and weight weave across the track into what appears to be the spirit of this new version of figure eight,” we wrote, “a band aware of the transcendent power available at both ends of the spectrum.” Now they are back with until the sun swallows the earth / hummingbird, a double single on Cherub Dream Records, and you only have to contrast the titles tracks to see the balance between heft and elegance remains. After the slow-burn expanse of ‘until the sun swallows the earth’, ‘hummingbird’ offers something more gauzy and restrained, the sound muted though no less full of atmosphere, and ultimately fulfilling its promise to spill over into something thunderous.

Griffin Brown – DRAW

“I need a hint, like a task, to check off and put behind me,” sings New York‘s Griffin Brown on ‘DRAW’, the first glimpse of his forthcoming album Begriffin. “But I don’t quite know what my success would guarantee.” This marbling of assurance and doubt not only runs through the lyrical aspect of the track, but the woozy sound itself. Brown evokes the feeling of starting something without knowing how it will end with a propulsive chorus that never seems to quite reach its natural conclusion. A joint release between Spread Way Out and Better Company Records, Begriffin itself progresses in such a manner.It is undeniably confident and marked by forward motion, yet unsure of its final destination. As though Brown knows what he needs to do and how to do it, just not what the end result might be.

Watch the video by Brown below:

Begriffen will be released on the 8th May via Spread Way Out and Better Company Records. Get it from Bandcamp.

Little Lungs – Dragonfruit

“Songs personal, compassionate and often affirming, driven by equal parts warmth and energy.” That’s how we described the work of Baltimore folk rock outfit Little Lungs back in February, single ‘The Heat’ introducing the band’s forthcoming album of the same name. “A typically emotive track build around [lead Leena] Rhodes’s vocals,” we wrote, “and the braid of tenderness and strength they are able to evoke.” With The Heat coming later this week, Little Lungs have shared new track ‘Dragonfruit’. An example of the more electronic dimension which exists on the record, the song opens like the soundtrack to long lost videogame but soon blossoms into something charged and sweeping, and again Rhodes’s delivery is placed centre stage. “Standing outside, the middle of fall / Dragonfruit vodka clenched in your palm,” she sings in a verse indicative of the striking image-led style of the track. “You met my eyes / I knew that you changed / I hated you then but I couldn’t escape.”

Watch the visualiser by Zack Willis with clips from Leena Rhodes below [WARNING: contains flashing, high-contrast imagery that may triggering to individuals with photosensitivity or epilepsy]:

The Heat will be released on 12th March. Get a copy from the Little Lungs Bandcamp page.

Lucy Liyou – Babygirl

“Possess[es] both a fragile minimalism and lush melodrama […] The sensation of watching a fond memory fade at the edges as the desire to return to its smallest details only grows.” So we wrote of Lucy Liyou‘s debut Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name back in 2025, an album that was both an exercise in musical invention and most personal of documents, a description that more than holds true for Liyou forthcoming new album, MR COBRA. A release described by label Orange Milk Records as “a semi-autobiographical solo theater-music piece […] that combines free-jazz, Korean folk opera, musique-concrète, 2000s era pop, text-to-speech recordings, film, comedy, and drag-inspired performance,” the record sees fury, frustration, love and yearning all swirl together with the extravagance and grace of the best stage show, allowing Liyou to explore ideas of transition and identity in ways otherwise out of reach. “I was really inspired by sounds and images that felt satisfyingly ‘false’ or “unclarifyingly” true, whatever that means,” she expands. “I was drawn to Cecil Taylor’s Unit Structures, my favorite drag queens in Los Angeles, who magically bombed every Monday, Ryan Trecartin’s A Family Finds Entertainment, Sunik Kim’s Potential, and so much more. I wanted frenzy that felt disembodying, so disembodying that this time of my life could conjure a laugh.” Check out single ‘Babygirl’ below:

Primula – Cobblestone

Do not be fooled by the title, Primula‘s latest EP Nothing New signals a fresh chapter for the Malmö/Stockholm-based outfit. Having made a name across the Swedish scene with a jazz-inflected sound, the new release sees the band bend more towards folk sensibilities, though without sacrificing the sense of collaboration and invention which made their earlier work so special. Single ‘Cobblestone’ serves as the ideal introduction. It’s a track daring enough to eschew the conventional structures of indie music in order to create a dynamic sound that evokes the nuances of being alive. “‘Cobblestone’ is about the difficult yet comforting realization that you’re just a small piece in a much bigger world,” the band explain. “There’s a freedom in not having to be so significant on your own. Even if you feel insignificant by yourself, you’re still an essential part of making something whole.”

Nothing New will be released later this year.

Stephen Becker – Bad Idea

Back in 2024, Stephen Becker released Middle Child Syndrome, an album we described as “an effort, at least in part, to rise above the mundane present, as though to be trapped within conventions is to be restricted by the same inability to communicate effectively that haunts our everyday lives.” Now Becker is set to return with new full-length Gravity Blanket, and the record is no less thoughtful or ambitious. It sees him sift through the ostensibly banal details of memories in order to excavate a deeper human meaning with an otherwise unsatisfying present. As with Middle Child Syndrome, the result is forthright and unguarded, willing to open itself up to vulnerability in order to make progress, as highlighted by opener and lead single ‘Bad Idea’. “‘Bad Idea’ is about a breakup I went through after seeing the ballet,” as Becker explains. “The haunting feeling of the dancers’ movements lingering in my mind, the sad-sweet taste of spiked lemonade on the train ride home. I was thinking about, and trying to manifest, change with a newfound determination to break free from unhealthy routines and patterns in life and in love.”

Watch the video directed by Haoyan of America below:

Gravity Blanket will be released on the 24th April and you can pre-order it now.

True Green – Bindi Sue

True Green, the project of Minneapolis songwriter Dan Hornsby, is named after “medieval nun Hildegard of Bingen’s idea of viriditas, and also a lawn care company.” This combination goes some way towards capturing the project’s style, which uses a laidback, often irreverent tone to tell stories with real feeling. Later this month, True Green will release sophomore album Hail Disaster, a record which, as its title suggests, explores “tragedies real and imagined”. New single ‘Bindi Sue’ is one last glimpse before the big day. A tribute to everyone’s favourite Aussie naturalist Steve Irwin, the song is wryly funny and genuinely poignant. It evokes both the loss felt by an entire generation following Irwin’s untimely death, and the joy of his good-natured relationship with the natural world. “He didn’t hunt them,” as the song begins, “they were his friends”.

Where’s Beth – Ache Is A Cricket In The Night

‘Ache Is A Cricket In The Night’ is the title track from the new record by Where’s Beth, the recording project of Seattle-based Sarabeth Weszely. The follow up to 2024 debut Bone Broth, the album “draw[s] on apparently mundane moments from every day life,” as we put it previously, “to chart the universal experiences of love, grief and longing,” building upon the style of its predecessor in the process. The album is now out, and the title track is an ideal entry point for those unfamiliar with the Where’s Beth project, looking for a place to dive in. “I can feel your heart beat like a candleflame / Fingers stretching out, flicker in the rain,” Weszely sings in the opening lines, immediately evoking the intimacy and compassion of the record. “Wind blows, I want to tell you it’s okay / To let in.” The rest of the track unfolds within the warmth of this beginning, a safe harbour from the outside world and its accumulation of difficulties, but importantly not a total escape. For, as the title suggests, Where’s Beth is not interested in blocking out sadness or suffering but rather creating enough distance that we might examine them in the context of everything else.

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

“A song which shows how the age-old themes of work, loss and responsibility are as much a facet of contemporary folk as any other era.” That’s how we described ‘Platform No. 12 (Old Friends)‘ last summer, the first taste of David James Allen‘s forthcoming album Potpurri Jubilation. The Prince Edward County, Ontario-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist “writes classic country songs,” as we continued, “full of aching longing, wistful reflection and undying hope, as well as a small cosmic twist,” and latest single ‘By Your Side’ further cements these sensibilities ahead of the album’s release later this year via Littleknown Records. “There’s something in the way that she loves me / that keeps me warm through the coolin’ of the night,” Allen sings in the opening lines, immediately pulling the listener into the warmth and fondness of the track. An ode to the safe harbour of a significant other, where calm might be found no matter how stormy the outside world might prove. Tune in and allow the pressures of work, money and self-doubt to dissolve, if only for a while.

Fugue State – We Are Lasting

The new collaborative project fronted by Northampton, MA-based composer, producer and engineer Dan Langa, Fugue State refuses the typical distinction between solo project and traditional ensemble. An outfit which treats collaboration as its own form of compositional methodology, Langa practising what the press release describes as “an obsessive cultivation of studio recordings with a rotating cast of musicians, transformed into spectral, unrecognizable forms.” Released to celebrate signing with Switch Hit Records, and featuring vocalist Maia Friedman (Dirty Projectors, Coco) and VSF fav Erika Dohi on piano, single ‘We Are Lasting’ provides our first glimpse into this new world. The style draws on Langa’s wealth of experience across music, film and multimedia, as well as the sensibilities of its collaborators, though also follows the direction the present moment suggested. “That improvisation became the foundation, and we slowly built everything on top of it,” as Langa describes. “This was the first track that really found its identity, and I often found comfort in it during the creative process—whether for inspiration or just a moment to breathe.”

Gia Margaret – Everyone Around Me Dancing

“A picture of solitude not as some lonely retreat but rather the path towards recognising the wider connection of things. That sweet dark warmth of the whole world.” That’s how we described Gia Margaret‘s 2023 album Romantic Piano, a collection of careful, considered compositions which held a kind of melancholic curiosity for its surroundings. Now Margaret is gearing up to release her much anticipated follow-up, an album titled Singing coming via Jagjaguwar this spring, and opening track and lead single ‘Everyone Around Me Dancing’ suggests a continuation of such themes. The record might be the first to properly feature vocals since 2018’s There’s Always Glimmer (the consequence of illness, as we covered when reviewing Mia Gargaret), but it is far from a simple reversion to a previous mode of working. Rather, Margaret considers every lesson learnt through the difficult process, the resonance of every person she has ever been. The vocals might have returned, but Singing understands something greater. The voice is only part of who we are. There are deeper ways of communicating.

Watch the video directed by Catherine LoMedico below:

Singing will be released on the 24th April via Jagjaguwar and you can pre-order it now.

Little Lungs – The Heat

Little Lungs is a Baltimore folk rock project led by songwriter Leena Rhodes. With Brendan Russell (bass), Eli Simms (drums), Ricky Schwarzenberg (guitar) and an assembly of other friends and collaborators in support, Rhodes creates soundscapes inherently intimate yet often sweeping too. Songs personal, compassionate and often affirming, driven by equal parts warmth and energy. Next month, Little Lungs will put out the full-length album The Heat, and Rhodes and co. have shared the title track to establish the mood and themes of the record. A typically emotive track build around Rhodes’s vocals and the braid of tenderness and strength they are able to evoke. “Face down against the bed frame / You woke to the fire alarm,” she sings, in an opening snapshot that captures the vulnerability on display throughout.

Mary Ocher – The Narrative (First Movement)

“Has roots in the early twentieth century, both in terms of the minimalist sensibilities and the overarching themes, but it is impossible to think of the intra-war period of the 1900s without hearing ominous echoes of the present day.” So we wrote of Mary Ocher‘s forthcoming album Weimar back in January. The challenging, politically-charged album was introduced by lead single ‘The Dance’ (what we called “a mournful dirge for that which is slipping through our fingers”). And now Ocher has shared taut, plaintive new single ‘The Narrative (First Movement)’. Though it is perhaps the video which will earn the most attention. The expressionist piece is by Boris Eldagsen, one of the first ‘reputable’ artists to explore the possibilities of AI who nevertheless carries a strictly critical approach to the nascent medium (back in 2023 Eldagsen refused the Sony World Photography Award after winning for an AI-generated image). Whether this self-awareness might justify the use of such artistically disheartening technology is still very much in question, and personally we’d query whether the video achieves anything which might be unobtainable via more organic means, but if nothing else it fits into Ocher’s overall project in its willingness to push into uncomfortable places and ask the audience to examine exactly how they feel.

Weimar will be released on 13th March and is available to preorder via Bandcamp.

Miserable chillers – Bikeman

“I’ll be the bike, man / the basket and the bell / the breath before I fell / Open skin up to the air / my mouth to taste the day.” So sings Miguel Gallego in the opening lines of ‘Bikeman’, the delightfully smooth and strange introduction to Miserable chillers‘ latest album, Innocent victims, coming soon via Baby Blue. The New York-based composer and artist has covered plenty of ground with the Miserable chillers project over the years, moving from devotional to danceable and back again, or else occupying both moods simultaneously. But the uniting spirit across all releases has been one of curiosity, a mood delivered in sleek, eighties-adjacent pop that allows Gallego to push into surreal territory without losing an anchor to real life. With its anthropomorphic bicycle, ‘Bikeman’ might be the perfect encapuslation of the Miserable chillers aesthetic, and one which whets appetites for the full release.

Natalie Jane Hill – Colors

Natalie Jane Hill‘s forthcoming record Hopeful Woman is one of our most eagerly anticipated releases of the first half of this year. A collections of ten modest but supremely assured songs that explore love in its many facets. Hot on the heels of ‘Never Left Me’ and ‘I Thought Love Meant’, Hill has unveiled a third track, ‘Colors’ another richly imagined but still down to earth rumination on romance. “Simply put, ‘Colors’ is a love song- specifically about the beginning period of falling in love with someone,” Hill describes. “But it’s also about having a better understanding on personal boundaries and not losing yourself entirely in the potential of something new. It’s being able to enjoy the colorfulness of it, while leaving space for the mystery, too.” The song has a fittingly Spring-like feel, tender like new green shoots and ripe with a glorious sense of possibility.

Old Man of the Woods – Edges of Pleasure

Taken from the album Tendrils, Old Man of the Woods‘ most recent single ‘Meditation’ was “a self-described  ‘breathy, minimal ritual'” as we wrote in 2025, “[a song] which performs its own form of transubstantiation, taking a desire which might otherwise appear absurd and changing it into something charged and devotional.” Miranda Elliott appears to have taken such a style to heart, because new album Cape Perpetua sees the Seattle-based artist embrace aesthetics both religious and ecological to push their ambient avant-pop into an increasingly sacred terrain. Elliott intends to release a track every week, building up to the full release in March, and opener and single ‘Edges of Pleasure’ highlights the meditative style. A song of swirling layers which draws on the choral accumulation of Gregorian chants to conjure something that’s at once otherworldly and fundamentally present.

Turner Cody – Recognize a Friend

In a present milieu where country songs are as likely to be about Disneyland and Pepsi as heartbreak and whiskey, St. Louis-based songwriter Turner Cody shows that the traditional and alt forms of the style can coexist. Out via Capitane Records, latest full-length Out for Blood has all the thematic concerns of the giants of the field, mining the American psyche to explore ideas of freedom and fate, individualism, sin and salvation in a way which would make Van Zandt proud. Yet, as songs like single ‘Recognize a Friend’ show, there’s a playfulness within his style too. An idiosyncrasy which, by way of Prine, allows Cody to sit as comfortably next to his alt-country contemporaries as the old masters. The narrative of the track is a familiar one. Ordinary man Billy finds himself gradually growing despondent as he drifts from youthful optimism into the doldrums of normal living. The personification of an entire demographic which finds itself slipping out of its countercultural pep.

Watch the video below, directed and shot by Cam Kennedy, with editing by Ben Chace, co-direction by Ben Chace and color grading by Thomas de Hemptinne:

Out For Blood is out now via Capitane Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.

The Yum Yum Tree – Shine

It has been nineteen years since Georgia-based indie rock outfit The Yum Yum Tree released their last album Paint By Numbers, a hiatus long enough to make even the most optimistic fans fear for the future of the project. After all, the band have other things to think about, not least lead Andy Gish who has spend over two decades as an ER nurse, as well as working in harm reduction. But good things come to those who wait, and this April will see The Yum Yum Tree return with brand new full-length Turn Down the Noise, an album which builds upon the foundations of its predecessor while proudly displaying the extra wisdom, self-awareness and emotional bravery which comes with near enough twenty years of living. Single ‘Shine’ embodies the spirit of the release, packing that nineties-flavoured indie rock punch while showing a newly unguarded, introspective personality. “Shine is about wanting something that doesn’t belong to you,” as Gish explains, “being able to sit with that and still wanting the best for them.” Watch the video directed by Katherine Lucas below:

Turn Down The Noise will be released on the 10th April and you can pre-order it from Bandcamp.

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Horn’s music career took off in Virginia, where she moved to complete an MFA in Creative Writing, but this record is concerned with the next period of her life. She moved to New York City post graduation and suffered a bewildering sense of dislocation away from family, friends and any concept of home. “Moving to New York after graduation had felt almost too right, like an arranged marriage,” Horn explains. “I was pretty unhappy for a while. My life was still in Virginia, where my friends were, in Texas, where my mother was learning to live again after years of being passed from one hospital to the next… I drifted through the city in pajamas, at midday.”

Much of the album focuses on this difficult early period in the city, a series of beginnings and endings that unfurl with a surreal dream logic, suffused with that strange loneliness of being surrounded by millions of unfamiliar faces. This atmosphere is introduced on opening track ‘Go on, move your body’, a song Horn wrote in the midst of those early NYC days that finds her hesitant and adrift. “Nothing prepares you for this,” she mumbles over minimal guitar and ponderous percussion, establishing a sparseness and patience that marks the record. The uncanny accompanying video, directed and edited by Travis Kent, reinforces all this, casting Horn (both literally and figuratively) as a strange figure in a strange city.

It should be noted that this is not an entirely solo endeavour. Horn is joined by Jade Guterman on bass and Adam Jones on drums (plus Adelyn Strei and Miles Hewitt, adding the odd flourish of clarinet/flute and piano respectively) who play with a lightness of touch that feels sympathetic to Horn’s writing. As if cautious not to break the spell by treading too heavily. ‘All in bet’, for example, could have been presented as a conventional acoustic track, just strummed guitar and Horn’s yearning vocals. But instead skittering percussion kick it along, woodwinds sigh and hum, little barrages of piano leaving glittering traces as they swoop on through.

That said, Horn is happy to at times slip from the limelight, leaving bass or drums front and centre and whispering around them as if from shadows. The record is also not entirely one-pace. Songs like ‘Designer’ might not explode in terms of tempo or volume, but nevertheless see the turbulence of that time bubble up from beneath the surface. It’s at these moments the influence of Phil Elverum is most apparent, that curious ability to write a stormy indie rock song with drums and guitar that still feels hushed and heavy with sorrow.

But the true triumph of Jana Horn are the moments of near silence. The sense that, three records in, she has learned to deliver songs with the most stringent economy, finding beauty in the moments most basic and spare. As when the guitar patters like raindrops against the soft negative space of ‘Without’, or the shyly staccato ‘Come on’, on which Horn delivers short, clipped lines in exchange for a shudder of percussion. Between both, something else seeps in. The quiet that sits at the heart of the record.

Jana Horn is out now via No Quarter and available via Bandcamp.

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With the album now out, Laika Songs has returned with new single ‘Shaking’. Predecessor ‘Visitor’ was a track we described as “embracing confusion and clarity as two parts of the same whole, though always reaching for those small glimmers where the path forward is revealed,” and ‘Shaking’ follows a similar tone. A song loaded with searching emotion, looking for answers to questions too large to otherwise put into words. “I wrote the lyrics to this song shortly after losing one of my friends and longtime musical collaborators,” Brock explains. “I didn’t tell anyone what the song was about when we were making it, but I like to think some of the sounds Meg made, are the sounds of my friend floating around out there.”

You were going for it
Full send
Though you weren’t given a choice
What’d it look like from up there?

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Wasting no time, Van Chamberlain are already back with the album’s second single, ‘Solutions’, and the song highlights a slightly different dimension to their sound. Where the freshness and promise of ‘Miracle Drug’ carried an inherently hopeful, forward-looking vibe, ‘Solutions’ is more languid and ruminative. A song delivered from the mire of the present, dreaming of a fresh start that’s not yet quite in reach and all the more alluring for it. “I only need a chance to change / a thing or two,” as Chamberlain sings in the opening verse, “and I’ll be on my way driving / back to you.” A romantic vision of a possible future that’s so compelling it carries an urge to scrunch up your life and begin anew.

the more it takes
one more and i might break
the less it makes
solutions for anything
control alt & delete up til now

Watch the video below, directed, filmed and edited by Dinah Deming, featuring art by Michael Powers and further creative input from Ricky Lewis:

‘Solutions’ is out now and available from Bandcamp. As Far As the Eye Can See is coming soon.

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The recording moniker of Chicago-based artist Niko Francis, Air Mail makes lo-fi indie pop inspired by the likes of Alex G and MJ Lenderman. The latest in the Future Gods Unearth series, new single ‘Wide Awake (a.m.)’ uses this melodic and melancholic style to explore the strange (but recently all too familiar) sensation of being faced with disaster at a distance. Written amid news on the genocide in Gaza and wildfires in LA, Francis describes the song as “a quietly striking meditation on connection and collapse, written from the stillness of a bedroom but echoing far beyond it.” It’s laidback and understated, but with a quiet power, and ends on a note of defiance, if not quite hope.

Where you are, you belong
Can’t destroy, what you can do
Can’t erase, what is ours
Because we, we are wide awake

‘Wide Awake (a.m.)’ is out now via streaming services.

Basciville & Ailbhe Reddy – Your Own Head

Next year will see the release of the sophomore album by Basciville, the folk rock project of Wexford brothers Cillian and Lorcan Byrne. To announce the release, the duo have unveiled lead single, ‘Your Own Head’, a collaboration with Dublin singer-songwriter Ailbhe Reddy. It’s a stark and searing duet, beginning with the spacious emotion of a dark and empty room before swelling with the band’s signature cinematic intensity. “’Your Own Head’ was the first song written from the batch of songs that would become the second album. One of those songs that falls out in one go and thematically ties everything together,” Basciville describe. “It laments the ways we compromise the self in the name of love, religion and society at large. It touches on the balance between some global moral duty, the pull to be present and keeping the self safe.”

‘Your Own Head’ is out now via streaming services.

eillah – Amaranth / My Own Mouth

The best part of four years since release of album in my head, Peoria-born, Chicago-based songwriter eillah has returned with brand new double single Amaranth / My Own Mouth. With guidance from producer, engineer and drummer Jack Henry, eillah uses the tracks to push their sound in new directions, lifting the inherent ethereality of the lo-fi aesthetic which marked the last record and transplanting it into a newly rich folk style. The result exists in-between states—be that ambiguity and clarity, rawness and polish, reality and dreams—and opens up a whole new avenue for eillah to explore moving forward. A style uniquely positioned to mine the full depth of an emotional landscape and present an inner world in all of its beauty and contradiction.

Evelyn – Three Eagles

Evelyn is recording project of California-born, New York-based artist Dani Lencioni, who makes inventive indie pop that’s thick with the lived-in soul of alt country. Released later last week, the latest Evelyn single ‘Three Eagles’ is a great example, a rich and swaying song that “responds to the dissonance between everyday beauty and the grief of current events.” Produced by Kevin Morby and Waxahatchee collaborator Nick Kinsey, the song was recorded in his Hudson Valley studio and has all the warmth and authenticity of its analogue recording set-up. “I try to put myself to sleep, I try to take my time and breathe,” Lencioni sings in the chorus, which perfectly captures the track’s sense of desperately trying to feel ok in an often hostile world. “I try to think of something sweet, I’m screaming in my dreams.”

Laika Songs – Visitor

This December sees Evan Brock’s Laika Songs return with second album I can feel an ending, picking up the threads in the wake of debut record Slowly Spiraling Towards the Light while pushing the project in new sonic directions. Together with a band featuring Meg Duffy (Hand Habits) on guitar, Dominic Angelella on bass and Dan Bailey (Father John Misty) with drums and sequencer, Brock blends the organic and the digital to create songs full of curiosity. A sound fitting for a record all about the slow, circuitous process of self-discovery, where the truth is something caught in glimpses when you least expect it. Opener ‘Visitor’ embodies this style, embracing confusion and clarity as two parts of the same whole, though always reaching for those small glimmers where the path forward is revealed.

LEYA – Weaving (YHWH Nailgun Version)

Following on from a rework of single ‘Corners’ by Channel Beads earlier in the year, a reimagining we described as “a heightened version of the original, playing like the interstitial space between the Now and the Then with all the instinctive longing left intact,” LEYA have invited experimental rock outfit YHWH Nailgun to reconceptualise another track from their acclaimed 2024 EP I Forget Everything. Driven by Marilu Donovan’s harp, the original offered a mood somewhere between medieval and ethereal, though YHWH Nailgun conjure an altogether more subterranean vibe. One no less ambiguous or alluring, though this time glinting not with a celestial grace but instead the dark, metallic edge of the underground.

Peiriant – Pwls

“With an experimental sound that draws on everything from folk and post-rock to classical and sound art, mid Wales duo Peiriant combine traditional and electronic styles with samples and found objects for semi-improvised pieces [resulting] in an almost sculptural approach to music.” So we wrote of the work of Rose and Dan Linn-Pearl back in 2024 upon the release of single ‘Taflu D​ŵ​r’, a track born of the push and pull between violin and electric guitar. With new album Plant coming via Recordiau NAWR, Peiriant are back with single ‘Pwls’, and while it’s every bit as finely crafted as its predecessor, it also shows marked stylistic differences too. Because, living up to its title (‘pulse’ in English), ‘Pwls’ displays a newfound rhythm and movement, the violin, played pizzicato, skating over a Moog bassline and infusing the atmospheric sound with a constant sense of motion.

Sam Woodring – 1,000 Ways to Die

You might recognise Maryland-born artist Sam Woodring from a number of different projects, be it the post-hardcore outfit Two Inch Astronaut which made a name in the 2010s, or the genre-bending Mister Goblin which rose from its ashes. Each offered a chance at reinvention, and now Woodring is setting out under his own name to instigate another stylistic change. Though ostensibly a solo endeavour, Mister Goblin drew on a range of collaborators to bring its varied sound to life, but new EP Mechanical Bull, out via Pretzle Records, sees Sam Woodring eschew all outside influence, and indeed anything beyond simple guitar and vocals. Opener ‘1,000 Ways to Die’ shows how this modest arrangement lacks nothing for emotional power, submerging itself in childhood memories to explore ideas of fear, fondness and nostalgia with a style that’s at once playful and entirely heartfelt.

Me and my sister sitting on the sofa
Counting down death till our eyes glazed over
Didn’t register as such
Didn’t count for much too much
Back then
She said what’s on the other channel
I said Nick Cannon’s Wild N’ Out
But the kid next door has Faces of Death on VHS
We should see what that’s about

Tōth – Not Broken

Back in October we shared ‘Spiraling’, a single from Tōth (AKA Alex Toth from Rubblebucket), ahead of a new release via Egghunt Records and Northern Spy. “The song appears relatively spare on the surface,” we wrote, “but as Toth details an experience of precarious love it blossoms into something altogether richer and more immersive, the sound rising to meet the interior weather of its singer. The result manages to evoke the duality of human being, where benign surfaces mask roiling energy beneath the surface, always threatening to spill into the world.” The album, titled And The Voice Said and set for release next February, is full of such duality, as highlighed by new single, ‘Not Broken’. A track which confronts a default setting of negativity with its polar opposite, looking to puncture pessimism by sheer force of will. “I wrote this as a message to myself: a response to my darkest feelings about life,” Toth explains. “I may not show it outwardly, but my default is to be a pretty fucking negative guy. So I selfishly wrote a song that would hopefully help me feel a little better from time to time.”

And The Voice Said will be released on the 23rd February via Egghunt Records and Northern Spy and you can pre-order it now.

Wendy Eisenberg – Will You Dare

Earlier this year, New York‘s Wendy Eisenberg announced her signing to Joyful Noise Recordings with a standalone single ‘I Don’t Miss You’, which we said “meditate[d] on human connection from a novel perspective… [with] their trademark mix of technical intricacy and intuitive improvisation.” Now they are back with another single, titled ‘Will You Dare’, which displays another side to their diverse practice. What Eisenberg calls “a simple little song about true love and the passage of time,” the track is sun-dappled and deceptively simple, drawing inspiration from the greats of seventies folk and country in its disarming candour and ultimately proving audacious in its willingness to cut to the heart of the matter. ‘Will You Dare’ is the real question,” as Eisenberg explains. “Do you dive into the impossibility of true love, be shameless, even though if you’re doing it right it’ll rip you to shreds?”

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