“Recorded while the Canadian songwriter was pregnant and unsurprisingly explor[ing] motherhood,” we wrote of Abigail Lapell‘s forthcoming album Shadow Child, “the tracks emerged stripped back and stark, a stylistic move at least in part dictated by Lapell’s difficult experiences with IVF and miscarriage that comes to paint the journey to parenthood in all of its too-often unspoken truth.” After singles ‘Hazel’ (“soothes and mourns in equal measure, addressed to the existentially vague child, be they in the womb, the future or memory”) and the title track, Lapell has now shared latest single ‘So Long’ ahead of the album’s release this May via Outside Music. This time welcoming BC songwriter Pharis Romero in support, the track displays the maritime imagery which runs through the record, and explores love as something both elemental and haunting.

So long, my love, so long
Out upon the great dark sea
How long, my love, how long
How long away will you be?

Watch the video by FITDG, Fernando Iannicelli, below:

Shadow Child will be released on the 8th May via Outside Music and you can pre-order it now from the Abigail Lapell Bandcamp page.

Fugue State – So What Is There?

“A shape-shifting track which shimmers with a beguiling cyclical, or rather spiral, rhythm, constantly circling itself while still moving towards new ground.” That’s we described ‘Dark‘, the previous single from Fugue State‘s upcoming album, After Nothing Comes. An example of the unique approach Dan Langa and his collaborators took for the album, a process which blurs the distinction between solo and ensemble, composition and improvisation, as well as the human and the digital. As we continued: “once the ‘human’ element is complete, Langa and co. take the recordings and pass them through a myriad of digital manipulations, sampling, distorting and re-harmonising the sounds into strange echoes of themselves.” With the album now little over a month away, Fugue State has shared latest single ‘So What Is There?’ to further introduce these techniques, and highlight the contribution of Javanese singer, composer and educator Peni Candra Rini, who left a significant mark on the record after spending a day recording with Langa at the Figure 8 Studio. “That session with Peni ultimately shaped the sequencing of the record,” he describes. “Her presence offers potent moments of respite within an often dense, maximalist soundworld.”

Garet Camella – Balance

LA-based singer-songwriter Garet Camella spent the best part of a decade in the indie rock band Indigo Wild, but in the last few years has gone back to his roots, writing and recording under his own name. A couple of years ago he released Mont Michel Archives, a collection of demos and older songs that he had discarded. The release felt like finding an old box of polaroid photographs, snapshots of previous times and places made all the more evocative by the light leaks and specks of dust. Now Camella is about to return with a new EP, Just Passing Through, which resurrects five songs from his past, this time with an extra layer of polish. After first taste ‘Gnats‘, new single ‘Balance’ further introduces the release, an earnest indie rock song that hits like a breath of fresh air with it’s hopeful driving momentum and heart-on-sleeve momentum. Fans of the mid-2000s indie rock golden age will find lots to like for sure.

Hadnot Creek – A River of Love

The recording project of Charlottesville songwriter Robert Sawrey and an ever-changing array of collaborators including Ben Laderberg (Kendall Street Company), Zach Samel, Lee Sargent and Tyler Sargent (former members of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah), Colin Lagenus (USA is a Monster), Austin Patterson and Jimmy Williams, Hadnot Creek has established itself as a prolific, personality-filled vehicle for good old fashioned outsider folk music. Sawrey and co. are preparing to release the project’s sixth full-length The End of the Road this June, and single ‘A River of Love’ indicates the record will continue this authentic, idiosyncratic style with equal parts heart and invention. Fans of the likes of James McMurty are sure to find much to love, Hadnot Creek sketching a decidedly existential picture of life and death without losing a toe-tapping rhythm.

Jillian Lake – Apple

Vancouver-based songwriter Jillian Lake has been releasing a number of singles in recent times, from ‘Cold Where You Are‘ (a single “equally attuned to emotional forces and their significant gravitational pull”) and ‘Human‘ (“an intensely personal song which reckons with the self in the most intimate way possible, displaying Lake’s turn towards richer arrangements while still evoking the austere stillness of an empty room”). All in preparation for the release of her second release, Is All This Mess Mine?. The EP, now released, “is a project about stopping and looking around at all the chaos around and wondering how I got stuck right in the middle of all of it,” Lake explains. “This collection of songs are all different realizations about myself and the way my mind works, the way I react, the way I feel, the way I get stuck, and all the messy bits.” Latest single ‘Apple’ offers Lake at perhaps her rawest yet, using the image of spoiled fruit to delve into feelings of expendability within a relationship. “Apple came from a place of feeling disposable,” Lake continues. “Like someone had already decided you weren’t worth keeping, and you’d started to believe them.”

Is All This Mess Mine? is out now and available via streaming services.

Leah Senior – Mothersong

Naarm/Melbourne-based “folk diviner” Leah Senior has built a considerable following over the last ten years, releasing four albums and sharing stages internationally with the likes of Wilco, Jessica Pratt and Iron & Wine. In June, she will release new record Pt. Roadknight via Third Eye Stimuli (Australia) and SPINSTER (USA), a collection of 70s-style pastoral folk and psych-tinged pop songs that explore the natural world and the variety of ways we interact with it. Lead single ‘Mothersong’ is a great introduction. Written “to ease a friend’s anxiety as she transitioned into motherhood,” this is a bright and vibrant folk pop song that’s nevertheless wrapped in a healthy dose of British backcountry weirdness, gazing back fifty years or so to a time that itself was looking back toward much older traditions. Check the very apt video below:

Pt. Roadknight is due for release on 19^th June. Pre-order it now from the Leah Senior Bandcamp page.

Ruth Garbus – I Think I’m Ready Now

Ruth Garbus has announced her new LP Profound will be released this June via Orindal Records. It’s the follow-up to previous full-lengths Kleinmeister (2019) and Alive People (2023), and it seems the album will continue the journey set out across its predecessors. Kleinmeister presented “the environment as a museum of trash,” we wrote in our review, a state which mirrored Garbus’s frame of mind. A “great drifting detrital mass looms over both the landscape and conscience,” we continued, “the past not buried but everywhere, clogging up the present and the future too, refuse refusing to degrade.” While Alive People felt like an attempt to reach through or beyond this mess, reflecting on, among other things, “creative insecurities, irony as armour and the manifold dimensions of any one personality.” But Profound seems to have taken several steps further. More assured in tone and execution, newly willing or able to communicate directly, audaciously, and, yes, happily. The title of opener and lead single ‘I Think I’m Ready Now’ sets the tone, a song about relinquishing a certain degree of control over art so that it might emerge more easily and authentically.

Breathing where the dragon is hiding is a lucky game
In the pink of your surroundings you can let go of shame
The lemon drops of failure all dissolve
And the sick of sweet pretending just a veil of gauze

Watch the visualizer made by Garbus herself below:

Profound will be released on the 12th June via Orindal Records and you can pre-order it now.

Sasha Adrian – Always, Almost

Based in Copenhagen, Sasha Adrian makes emotive indie pop songs that combine diary-like earnestness and wryly humorous cynicism. She already has two EPs to her name, 2023’s Token and 2024’s Shell, and is now “stepping into her debut album era” with new single ‘Always, Almost’. It’s a love song, but not in the conventional sense. Focusing on a relationship that has run its course (and then some), it finds a narrator stuck between the immediate heartache of breaking things off and the slower, self-deceptive suffering of holding onto something that is already dead. It’s catchy, sassy and sad, delving into a messy life with gentle sincerity and blunt candour. “Oh it’s so easy to conflate longing with love,” as she sings, “It’s time I learned to separate wanting and not.”

Suzanne Vallie – River of Angels Wings

Suzanne Vallie began work on her new record, Moonshiner Springs, during a very difficult time. Dealing with both chronic illness and grief following the death of her father, she grew increasingly weak and isolated. “It occurred to me I should document my new songs while I had the strength to do it,” she says on her decision to record demos at home on an old Panasonic tape recorder. She shared some of these songs online, and thus began a period of revitalization. Old friends and new began to send encouragement, and as Vallie puts it “my gumption got amped and my medicine kicked-in.” She enlisted the help of Carly Bond and Mat Davidson, and together they created something special. “Moonshiner Springs is an album created by the illumination and gifts born in times of grief and frailty,” Vallie describes. “As steady as hardship arrives, so too comes friendship, flying to the rescue.” Lead single and opener ‘River of Angels Wings’ is an early glimpse, the perfect introduction to the record’s bewitching atmosphere.

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In February we previewed Shadow Child, the latest album from Abigail Lapell which was recorded while the Canadian songwriter was pregnant and unsurprisingly explores motherhood. “The tracks emerged stripped back and stark,” we wrote, “a stylistic move at least in part dictated by Lapell’s difficult experiences with IVF and miscarriage that comes to paint the journey to parenthood in all of its too-often unspoken truth.” With the release fast approaching, Lapell has shared the title track along with a video to further introduce this style. “I recently found all my old super 8 films, and I thought this odd little black and white claymation might fit well with ‘Shadow Child’, a song about pregnancy and childbirth – creation and transformation,” she explains. “But when I actually tried pairing the two, it was crazy. The unedited ‘backwards’ visuals fit the song exactly perfectly – like down to the second. Complete with the final reveal of the figure’s shadow, and then my own hands in silhouette, returning it to a formless blob. I couldn’t believe it.”

Shadow Child will be released on the 8th May via Outside Music and you can pre-order it now from the Abigail Lapell Bandcamp page.

Air Mail – Won’t You

Following on from singles ‘Wide Awake (a.m.)’ (“uses a melodic and melancholic style to explore the strange sensation of being faced with disaster at a distance”) and ‘Moss Song’ (“its warm tones and languid rhythms allowing in the outside environment, playing like spring blooming in real time”), Niko Francis’s Air Mail has unveiled debut LP a.m. Continental with latest track ‘Won’t You’. Again falling somewhere between Lenderman-esque alt country and the sun-drenched pop of acts likes Cut Worms, the track explores the sensation of a relationship being slowly dismantled by forces beyond anyone’s control. It meditates not only on the pain of a separation but the enduring fondness that survives beyond physical remove. “As long as words are sincere / and what you want is clear,”  Francis sings in the first verse, “as long as you still feel near, even when you’re far from here / won’t you stay and love me?”

Ben Auld – Red Bandana

This May, Norwich-based artist Ben Auld will release Loserdom, a brand new album via Safe Suburban Home and Repeating Cloud which signals something of a sea change. Whereas Auld’s previous work tended towards the twee end of indie folk, the new record draws on influences like Tony Molina and Teenage Fanclub to offer loud, scrappy and spirited style of power pop. Lead single ‘Red Bandana’ heralds this new sound, as well as the mix of unabashed sincerity and tongue-in-cheek charm which marks his writing. “I was trying to write something that captured the explosive pang that can happen when you reflect on places you’ve lived and people you’ve known,” Auld explains of the single. “That sudden reminder of a life you used to have, the impossibility of returning to it, and the pain of living in the past.”

Frog – Je Nes Sais Pas

When cult favourites Frog put out their 1000 Variations of the Same Song album last year, we didn’t think they were actually aiming for the big four figures. But follow-up The Count arrived hot on the heels of its predecessor and now the New York outfit are already gearing up to release the third full-length in the cycle, Frog for Sale. Described as an album “about how money sometimes gets in the way of love,” the record sees the Bateman brothers take inspiration from the likes of Buddy Holly and Paul McCartney, again switching up the Frog sound while maintaining that idiosyncratic charm that’s made them so beloved. Lead single ‘Je Nes Sais Pas’ is available now, a track of bright energy and fading dreams, not to mention a trademark wit and humour. “You’re just no good anymore since you went away and didn’t darken any door,” as Bateman sings in one typical verse. “Now you got your hair like Anna Wintour except poor.”

Jillian Lake – Human

“Attuned to emotional forces and their significant gravitational pull, namely the strange tension of watching a loved one attempt to navigate a difficult period, willing more than anything to save them from the turmoil but conscious of being dragged into the mire yourself.” So we wrote of ‘Cold Where You Are’ by Jillian Lake last month, a single which embodies the balance between compassion and suffering which marks the Vancouver-based songwriter’s work. Now Lake has shared brand new single ‘Human’ and this balance has never been more evident. It’s an intensely personal song which reckons with the self in the most intimate way possible, displaying Lake’s turn towards richer arrangements while still evoking the austere stillness of an empty room. A place where there is nowhere to look but inwards, no matter how uncomfortable. “’Human’ is a song I wrote about the fear that you’re losing pieces of yourself, and starting to not recognize yourself,” Lake explains. “I remember the first time I saw the Eiffel tower I was so amazed and astonished. When I went back to Paris years later I just stared at it and didn’t really feel anything. It scared me that I lost that sense of wonder. I missed the old version of myself.”

‘Human’ is out now via streaming services.

Matthew Squires & Sunk Coast – Wing Song

We’ve followed the idiosyncratic, ever-inventive songwriting of Matthew Squires for a number of years now, from his ‘Ballad of Norm MacDonald‘ and quasi-cover ‘Poor Men Southeast of Portland‘ to ‘Song of a Cactus‘ in 2024. Now, having moved to Ithaca, New York, Squires has teamed up with Zach Totta of Sunk Coast for a new track, and the result is no less distinctive. With vocals that rival Daniel Johnston in their ability to echo Kermit the Frog, the song is classic Matthew Squires, proving that genuinely compassionate music need not leave playfulness or strangeness at the door. “In the face of the absurd, it’s there I’ll find my answer,” he sings in one fitting verse, “I’ll decode the hidden words inside the movements of a dancer: / It’s the story of a king who forgot if he has merit / He sprouts himself some wings and then he sings ‘til all can hear it.”

Old Amica – Bländverk

“A record which explores time with Old Amica’s signature care and patience […] suspended in a negative space seemingly disconnected from anything tangible, memories floating by in abstract grace.” That’s how we described the Swedish duo’s album För alltid back in 2024, again noting how their blend of organic and digital sensibilities manages to evoke memory in all of its emotional depth. With a new full-length set for release next month via Whitelabrecs, Old Amica are now back with ‘Bländverk’, a spare piano-based track that again explores the poignant, often ethereal world of recollection. Stretched across ten minutes, the song mimics the gauzy filter memory can bring, where the reality of a moment is softened, a monument worn smooth by the passing of time.

Sulka – All Bets Off

This summer Glasgow-based songwriter Lukas Clasen, AKA Sulka, will release new full-length Bute on Lost Map and No Soap Records. Following last year’s single ‘Halloween’, that as we said previously combined “subdued vocals with an eerie backdrop of distorted guitars and synths,” he has now released a second track from the album to further whet appetites. Titled ‘All Bets Off’, it’s an ostensibly charming indie pop song that nevertheless delves into a toxic relationship. And not your average one either. Written from an equine perspective, it explores the exploitation at the heart of horse racing. “The song was partly inspired by a storyline in the TV show The Sopranos, where Tony buys a race horse and develops a genuine love for it,” Clasen explains. “I thought writing a song from the horse’s perspective would make an interesting device for exploring the ups and downs of a volatile relationship”

Tory Silver – Microwave

Pittsburgh-based Tory Silver makes a brand of indie rock that she says “[channels] the small joys and inevitable uncertainties of residing in a body.” She has a new record, In Through the Front with Lasers, coming at the end of May via Michi Tapes and has unveiled new single ‘Microwave’ in anticipation. The song is set in the cold chill of dawn, our narrator sat bleary-eyed in their kitchen, enjoying the quiet ahead of a day of selling their body for what Silver describes in an Instagram post as a “silly grocery job under crapitalism.” There’s a healthy does of existential dread sure, but there’s also enough garage rock crunch for it to feel rousing too. An anthem for the masses forced to drag themselves out of bed every morning to keep on keeping on.

Scrambled eggs
On my plate
Getting cold
Microwave

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The result is conflicted, reflective, braided from the twin threads of love and loss. A style captured by the ambiguous image of the title itself. Shadow Child refers to ultrasound scanning, that picture of “a liminal person that doesn’t quite exist yet,” as Lapell puts it. “Their status is ontologically blurry.” But across the nine songs, Lapell places this existenial uncertainty into a wider context, drawing on everything from personal experience and medical jargon to maritime myth, and in doing so allows the full spectrum of experience that is pregnancy the space it deserves.

Featuring fellow Canadian songwriter Jill Barber, lead single ‘Hazel’ introduces this nuanced style. What label Outside Music describe as “part lullaby and part elegy” which soothes and mourns in equal measure, addressed to the existentially vague child, be they in the womb, the future or memory. The single comes complete with a video by Lapell herself, cut from old super 8 footage filmed as a teenager and unearthed in the present. “Shot at a melancholy yet hopeful time in my life,” she explains, “the film features birds in flight and at rest, often shaky, scratchy or out of focus. I feel like this stuttering footage has its own fragile beauty that resonates with the song’s sweet message of a nascent love, half-formed but all-consuming.”

Watch the video by Abigail Lapell herself below:

Shadow Child will be released on the 8th May via Outside Music and you can pre-order it now from the Abigail Lapell Bandcamp page.

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Last month we previewed Anniversary & More Songs About Love, the deluxe version of Abigail Lapell‘s recent full-length which expands the album with eight additional songs. Alongside more intimate, acoustic versions of tracks from the original, Lapell also offers a handful of additional songs, and has now released a cover of Tame Impala’s Feels ‘Like We Only Go Backwards’ as part of the package. A minimal, electrified version of which mines the song for all of its stark weight, adding yet another dimension to the diverse picture of love and relationships which the album brings to life.

Anniversary & More Songs About Love will be released via Outside Music on 2nd May. Pre-order it now from the Abigail Lapell Bandcamp page.

Casper Skulls – Numbing Mind

The new album from Sudbury/Toronto indie rock outfit Casper Skulls, Kit-Cat is the product of a band confident enough to spread their wings. From the moody ‘Spindletop‘ and energetic ‘Roddy Piper’ to bittersweet Dylan-esque narrative ‘Dying in Eight Verses‘, each single offered a different style and set of influences, and culminated in a mosaic-like album able to confront a wide range of themes. With the release out now via Next Door Records, Casper Skulls have shared final single ‘Numbing Mind’ to further deepen the picture, exploring the vast media landscape of distractions into which we can retreat from contemporary existence. The song is itself a microcosm of the wider Casper Skulls style, presenting a collage of references (Ms. Rachel, Bob Ross, Macho Man, Rugrats, South Park, ASMR and Antique Roadshow and more) to paint the vast network of small comforts to which we turn.

Watch the video directed and edited by Bosmo below:

Kit-Cat is out now via Next Door Records and you can get it from the Casper Skulls Bandcamp page.

Classic Trucks – Oil

“Pairs a rich, warm sound with Jarman’s approachable, near-spoken vocals and a dark, distressed lyrical style. But instead of playing as a contradiction, the resulting track looks to solve the concern at its heart in real time, fashioning a cure to the complaint itself.” So we wrote of ‘Letting In Too Much Light’ by Classic Trucks last month, the first single from the new solo venture of Langkamer‘s Josh Jarman which introduced the empathetic nature of the project. With EP Century Songs set for release in late May, Classic Trucks are back with new single, ‘Oil’. A meditation on some of the grandest existential questions—free will, nature vs. nurture, the apparent futility of life—housed in a bright, pop-inflected brand of folk, again highlighting Jarman’s ability to approach difficult subjects without being overwhelmed by their weight.

Gay Meat – Champaign Ill

The recording project of producer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Karl Kuehn, Gay Meat has made a name in recent years with a distinctive blend of self-deprecation and sincerity, something embodied by 2022 EP Bed of Every. Mixing indie pop, rock and emo sensibilities, the release clocked in at barely thirteen minutes but managed to evoke a compelling inner world all the same. Recent single ‘Champaign Ill’ builds upon the style, a wistful lo-fi ode to the ways in which people change over time, as well as those who stay the same despite everything. Again the tone possesses a wry edge, but one which does nothing to limit the unguarded earnestness at its heart.

Gum Parker – Crocodile

“Draws on the considerable DIY history of its members to create good old-fashioned indie rock.” That’s how we described the debut album from Portland, Maine outfit Gum Parker, with singles ‘Two Subarus‘ and ‘Hive‘ packing a real punch despite the vastly different moods which underpinned them. With the album out now via Repeating Cloud, the outfit have shared final single ‘Crocodile’, and the song again embraces the chaotic, irrepressible energy of the do-it-yourself aesthetic to find joyous momentum within ordinary life. “Lately I’m trying to just write down phrases or bits of language that I like and scrape together a song from them,” as lead Galen Richmond explains. “It seems to have worked out for this joyful mess. The chorus is sorta a half-joke about how I couldn’t write a chorus for this one.”

Jangus Kangus – No Future In This

Christened by Emerson Dameron as “LA’s foremost purveyor of imagist garage surf,” Jangus Kangus is making a name with a sound at once hazy and raw, with debut album Fortune Cookie highlighting how evocative and playful such a contradictory style can be. Lead Jasmine Sankaran is joined by Steph Anderson (keys/backing vocals), Antonio White (lead guitar/backing vocals), Dan Perdomo (drums) and Ryan Kellis (bass), and together the band eschew genre convention in favour of instinct experimentation. Single ‘No Future In This’ serves as an ideal introduction, a track which preserves some of the DIY spirit of the project’s previous releases yet comes wrapped in a golden retro hue.

LEYA – Corners (Chanel Beads Rework)

Last year we wrote about ‘Corners’ by LEYA, a single from their EP I Forget Everything on NNA Tapes which displayed how harpist Marilu Donovan and vocalist/violinist Adam Markiewicz create “evocative and ambiguous” soundscapes, as we put it, which “explore the avenues open to us in the face of catastrophe.” Like much of LEYA’s work, the song occupied a strange space between medieval and futuristic tones, feeling like both a throwback and a promise of something new. Now rising pop favourite Chanel Beads has reworked the track to further deepen this contradictory tension. With additional layers of lush sonic textures and extra pop polish, the new interpretation serves 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.

Watch the self-directed video starring model Mariah Morvant below:

‘Corners (Chanel Beads Rework)’ is out now via NNA Tapes and available from Bandcamp.

LUCKY – Traveler

LUCKY are a new Bay Area supergroup featuring Half Stack‘s Peter Kegler, Andrew St James, Marika Christine and Zach Elsasser (Affectionately). A slice of upbeat country rock that also provides the obligatory shadow to its light, debut single ‘Traveler’ gives an indication of what to expect from the project. A song full of backward looking despite its forward motion, resulting in a mood at once wistful and affirming. Produced and mixed by Joe Santarpia (Mac DeMarco) and mastered by Timothy Stollenwerk (Kevin Morby, Woods, Rose City Band), there’s real talent behind the project too, making for a polished, accomplished sound that retains its authenticity via a subtle lo-fi edge.

Maryse Smith – Freedom

This May sees the release of Transience, the new full-length from Massachusetts songwriter Maryse Smith, via Ghost Mountain Records, and latest single ‘Freedom’ both introduces the album’s warm folk rock sound and furthers the thematic resonance of the its title. It’s a song about regaining a sense of ownership and agency in the face of apparent restriction, placing trust in the transience of any condition in the way all longing must. Fittingly, the track is the product of one such process of overcoming. “‘Freedom’ was written upon returning from a festival that friends put on every year in Vermont,” as Smith explains. “I didn’t play that year, I was feeling bummed about being in a long writing dry-spell and couldn’t bear the thought of playing songs I had written years prior. But I felt so inspired after seeing so much good music I pretty much came home, sat at the piano and wrote this. I remember feeling afterwards, on a deep level, that the dry spell was broken and it was.”

Steel Wool – Fading

What the band describe as “a collision of sound experiments wearing the borrowed work uniform of rock music,” the self-titled debut EP from LA shoegaze outfit Steel Wool brings together the varying tastes of each of its four members. Shoegaze fuzziness meets not only its natural bedfellows in dream pop and indie rock, but also folk and screamo too, resulting in something that uses familiar ingredients in a fresh and innovative way. “The band has always been more of a sonic game of tug-of-war than a regiment in lockstep,” Steel Wool continue. “Stepping outside these orthogonal backgrounds in search of common ground, we’ve ended up somewhere that isn’t quite home turf for any of us.” Opener ‘Fading’ is the best place to start, a hazy and soaring dream pop song that eventually boils over in a snarl of feedback and wailing vocals.

Yuno – Massive

Having won acclaim with 2018 EP Moodie and a number of subsequent singles, Jacksonville-based pop visionary Yuno is releasing debut full-length Blest this May with Sub Pop. An artist in constant flux, Yuno has moved from skate punk and Johnstonian anti-folk to downbeat pop across his career to date, and the new album not only continues this evolution but pushes the sound to its most expansive, inventive spaces to date. Latest single ‘Massive’ embodies the sound’s widescreen richness, pairing languid pop confidence with fuzzy rock sensibilities to create a rueful backdrop for what is a reflection on the passing of time.

Watch the video directed and Edited by Yuno himself below:

Blest will be released on the 16th May via Sub Pop and you can pre-order it now.

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Enlisting Tony Dekker (of Great Lake Swimmers) as co-producer, Lapell recorded the album at the historic St. Mark’s Church in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. The pair worked together to transfer the space’s majesty and haunting resonance into the songs themselves. What results is a sound capable of holding the dualities of the record, where space, patience and quiet can meet charged energy. Despondence and transcendence coexist. Be that the title track and its weighted symbolism, which presents, as we described previously, “romantic chemistry, as both otherworldly magic and physical reaction,” the poignant drama of ‘Footsteps’, or slow dawning warmth of ‘Count On Me’, where Great Lakes Swimmers join for a duet of gossamer light and steely determination.

Which isn’t to say Abigail Lapell sticks to the wistful reflection. “A toe-tapping, foot-stopping country rock song shot through with a determined energy,” was how described ‘Rattlesnake’ in a preview, where the “finger-picked electric guitar line charges the lyrics full of prophetic charge and esoteric weight.” The song not only displays the more rock-adjacent dimension of the album, but serves as the perfect example of the symbolism stitched through it. As though each track is a shorthand for something far larger, memories and even cultural histories coded in various objects and images presented within their lyrics.

‘Flowers in My Hair’ is perhaps the most direct version of this style. Great Lake Swimmers again join to lend the track a hymn-like quality, somewhere between communal sing-a-long and call-and-response, and the hand-clap rhythm offers a ritualistic edge. Factor in the repetitive lyrics and the song becomes something like an incantation. Moving beyond conscious thinking towards ingrained cadence and muscle memory. Something, then, a lot like love itself. Latent and mysterious and ever-present for those willing to search out the strange forces it can set in motion.

Anniversary is out now via Outside Music and you can get it from the Abigail Lapell Bandcamp page.

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If the lead single showed the slow reflective side of the album, latest single ‘Rattlesnake’ displays a different dimension entirely. A toe-tapping, foot-stopping country rock song shot through with a determined energy. A finger-picked electric guitar line charges the lyrics full of prophetic charge and esoteric weight. The effect is furthered by sound’s impressive depth, a product of recording at the two hundred-year-old St. Mark’s Church in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, a location which provides a stark, receptive space into which Lapell’s vocals emerge.

Bring me water, bring me wine / Bring me flower garlands
Will you be my valentine / Would you be my darling?

Sew a penny in your shoe / Blessings on the journey
I’ll cut a lock of hair for you / And keep the fire burning

Watch the video by Adam CK Vollick below:

Anniversary is out on the 10th May via Outside Music and you can pre-order it now.

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“Has it been a year or two? Will it be cotton or leather?” asks Abigail Lapell in new single ‘Anniversary Song’. “Mercury and iron, carbon, silver / bind us together.” Taken from the Toronto singer-songwriter’s forthcoming album Anniversary on Outside Music, the song encapsulates the marriage of symbolism and tangibility used across the record. Romantic chemistry as both otherworldly magic and physical reaction. Not that the love on the album is merely of the romantic sort, with a series of personal milestones prompting Lapell to contemplate the phenomenon in all its guises, offering a picture of relationships and commitment with all the complexities left intact.

Agent blå – Rain To You

Last month we wrote about ‘Discount’, the lead single from the upcoming album Stab! by Gothenburg‘s Agent blå on VÅRØ Records (Sweden) and Kanine Records (US). What we described as a song “simmering with eerie menace and charged with forward motion, splitting the difference between familiarity and strangeness.” With the album coming later this spring, Agent blå have returned with second single ‘Rain To You’ to build upon these beginnings. Squally and loaded with momentum, it looks to small details as sources of comfort within an otherwise overwhelming world, and submits itself fully to forces large and mysterious.

Never spoke it with a sober mouth
I’m drawn to the chaos, my sanity grown shy
Keep clinging to no time
You’re the moon to me
I was rain to you

Al Harper – Plaster of Paris

Later this month, San Francisco-based songwriter Al Harper will release album The Analemma Observation League via Take a Turn Records. An album which draws upon the solar phenomenon of its title to explore themes of change and growth. Analemma refers to the figure of eight plot made if one was to chart the sun’s position in the sky from the same position at the same time of day across an entire year, rendering what might otherwise seem a linear process into an infinite loop. Working in such a spirit, Al Harper draws on a variety of memories and experiences to offer the past not as some line trailing ever further into the distance, but rather something forever orbiting around us. Lessons to learn from, patterns to take comfort in. The suitably sunny sound of latest single ‘Plaster of Paris’ is the perfect introduction, and comes complete with a video shot by Harper and Craig Barclift and edited by Simon Linsteadt:

The Analemma Observation League is out on the 23rd February via Take A Turn Records and you can pre-order it now.

bedbug – postcard

We’ve long followed the work of bedbug, charting how Dylan Gamez Citron has taken the project through a trilogy of acclaimed bedroom pop albums before metamorphosing into a full band for a self-titled EP in 2022. This year sees bedbug return with pack your bags the sun is growing, a full-length album which builds more fully upon this change of direction to push the project closer to Cap’n Jazz than the hushed aesthetic from which they originated. A style which only furthers Citron’s ability to weave the personal and the political into a seamless whole. Vitally none of the heart or intimacy is lost in this transformation, as single ‘postcard’ attests, and while any project inevitably passes through various life stages as time goes on, you get the sense Citron and co. are rising towards their fullest potential. The first bedbug to ever sprout wings.

Dead Slow Hoot – Take It Or Leave It

Specialising in a style of atmospheric alt-rock that’s at once melancholy and anthemic, Sheffield/London outfit Dead Slow Hoot draw on a variety of genres to create something unique. Previous releases have drawn on poetic folk, shadowy post-punk and epic post-rock, sometimes within the same song, and new single ‘Take It Or Leave It’ is no different. Opening with just pared-back guitar and banjo, it eventually builds to a dramatic crescendo of wailing guitar and crashing percussion, straddling the line between an intimate acoustic ballad and a monumental rock song. The song is about “making necessary compromises for the good of your partner and growing together through that,” the band explain, “[and also] a more general realism, accepting the ‘competing intentions’ that you might have with another person… and actively engaging with them to make something better.”

‘Take It Or Leave It’ is out now via streaming services.

Emma Geiger – Reverse Bloom

We’ve featured Durham, North Carolina-based songwriter Emma Geiger several times over the last year or so. First with 2022 EP Haven, and then with several stellar singles. Excitingly, Geiger is now putting the finishing touches to her debut full-length, Reverse Bloom, which features those singles alongside four brand new tracks. To further whet anticipation, she has released the title track, a song which moves its focus away from romantic relationships towards the difficult loss of a friendship. Someone Geiger was formerly close to wrote a song detailing the dissolution of their friendship, and this is an exploration of the following emotions. “When I first heard it, I felt her anger, frustration and bitterness,” she describes. “That friendship meant a lot to me, and losing it really shook me. It brought up a lot of questions about who I am, and who I was in that relationship.” Watch the video filmed by Archer Boyette and directed by Boyette and Geiger herself below:

Reverse Bloom is out on 26th April. ‘Reverse Bloom’ the single is available now via the Emma Geiger Bandcamp page.

Eyesore & The Jinx – Float Like a Jellyfish (Sting Like a Subtweet)

“[A song which presents] the gym as the encapsulation of the country,” we wrote of Eyesore & The Jinx‘s ‘Nocturnal Athletes (Ode To Bruno)’ by back in September when previewing their debut album, Jitterbug, “where an assortment of lonely and overworked people run without going anywhere, lift with no purpose beyond some abstract penance, and stare at screens playing Top 40 videos on a loop.” With the record’s release fast approaching, the Liverpool-based outfit have shared final single ‘Float Like a Jellyfish (Sting Like a Subtweet)’, and fans will be reassured to learn it is every bit as twitchy and cutting as we’ve come to expect. Light-hearted, mischievous and a little hyperactive, winding taut with anxious energy to evoke a decidedly contemporary unease.

Jordan Whitlock & Memory Spells – Take My Hand

Memory Spells is the new project of songwriter Matt Bauer which takes the orchestral indie folk he puts out under his own name further towards “his love of contemporary TV, film and video game scores, cinematic post rock, early post punk, and 80s film music.” His latest collaboration is with San Diego songwriter and producer Jordan Whitlock, whose intimate writing and impressive soulful vocals have been wining fans all over. Suffused with the lush, shadowy grandeur of Lynch at his most romantic, latest single ‘Take My Hand’ is what the duo describe as “Emmylou Harris meets Cigarettes after Sex,” not only offering a new dimension to Bauer’s work but opening up a whole world of its own.

You can find out more on the Memory Spells website.

The Lostines – Full Moon Night

The recording project of New Orleans-based songwriters Casey Jane Reece-Kaigler and Camille Wind Weatherford, The Lostines are preparing to release their debut full-length Meet The Lostines this spring on Gar Hole Records. The album draws plenty from the Louisiana landscape, but ultimately conjures a world of its own. One in which time and space has gone a little strange, and a whole host of periods and places layer atop of one another to form something larger than the sum of its parts. Lead single ‘Full Moon Night’ typifies the result, where retro folk harmonies and spectral synths bring to life a languid longing for a love now past.

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The singles display different sides of this balance. ‘Pines’ is a piano-led folk song that has all the stillness and tranquillity of the breaking dawn. Written during a Rocky Mountain songwriting residency, it is steeped in the imagery of the mountains, that sense of raw reconnection that comes with wild rivers and starry skies and the smell of woodsmoke riding the breeze.

Walk through the pines,
down the mountain, follow the signs
Shadow birds circle slow,
high above the power lines

Listen to the song below, accompanied by an animated video by Tatiana Vaca.

Follow-up single ‘Ships’ is altogether more tumultuous, physically evoking the turbulent ocean as a metaphor for storms more personal. As Lapell says, it’s a song about “leaving versus staying, quitting versus relapsing—familiar shores and uncharted waters,” and this uncertain dichotomy manifests musically too. Things begin relatively calm, a subdued but potent drums ‘n guitar folk rocker. But it’s not long before it billows outward from within in squally bursts, adding layered vocal melodies, horns, and even a killer sax solo. It all comes together with a sense of immediacy and intuition, the feeling each element meshed into the whole not so much through careful planning but via a process more natural and instinctive.

The song’s video, recorded at hotel2tango recording studio in Montreal, captures this process as it happened. Check it out below:

Stolen Time comes out this Spring via Outside Music. Head to the Abigail Lapell Bandcamp page to pre-order.

Photo by Jen Squires

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This seemingly contradictory mood is apparent in new single, ‘You Think You’re Like the Rain’. An address to a friend experiencing a difficult period, the song’s poetic lyricism and distinctively melodic folk style offer an introspective air, though in pushing into these small spaces Jenny Berkel reveals the true depth within the human interior. What emerges is a communication intimate in tone but fully appreciative of the vastness within a person. An acknowledgement of all that is unknowable.

The track comes complete with a video, produced by Phyllis Rising Productions and directed by Meg Hubley, which utilizes the expansive Nova Scotian coastline to evokes these interior spaces. Check it out below:

These Are the Sounds Left from Leaving is out on the 13th May via Outside Music you can pre-order it now from the Jenny Berkel Bandcamp page.

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[Quiet Energies] takes the suffocating, nebulous shadow of grieving and distils it into something small and hard and strangely tactile, a mysterious object that will always be there in your pocket, radiating its secret and peculiar brand of comfort.

We were lucky enough to ask Bonnetta a few questions about the record and his musical career, exploring his influences, plans for the future and listening habits. Enjoy.

Jon: Hi Jonas, thanks for chatting with us! How has life been treating you since the release of Quiet Energies?

Jonas: All is well! Been getting ready to tour the new record around Canada a little bit and have been working on a bunch of new projects.

The album saw a shift in tone, with many tracks more cathartic and upbeat (for want of a better term). Do you have a better time when playing these songs live? And do you think the changes set a trajectory for where Evening Hymns are headed in the future?

Well I haven’t toured them long enough to understand them live yet so that’s kind of nice. Our current live setup allows us to explore the songs more than in the past and so that’s been satisfying so far. I’m not a huge fan of touring a record for a long time though so talk to me in a year from now and we will see. I’ve been writing so much new stuff that I’m itching to just keep developing new material live. I don’t think the next record will sound like Quiet Energies though. I’ve been working on some piano music that’s more rooted in soul and R&B so who knows… haha…

In my review of Quiet Energies I mention how you retreated into the countryside at various points, and recorded the album in a rural home studio. Is this escape an important part of your creative process? Are we talking escape-the-city rural or cut-off-wilderness rural?

I just need to be left alone with my thoughts. It’s too easy for me to get distracted and so forcing myself into solitude is my solution to fighting writer’s block. It’s not so much as escape now as a way of life as I moved out here permanently. And it doesn’t feel so much as an escape but more of a homecoming. This is how I grew up and it’s what resonates with me.

What else do you consider as influences on your writing and sound? Are there any musicians/writers/artists you consider important in your development? I’ve seen Jaan Kaplinski’s name bandied about, although it wasn’t clear if it came from you or a reviewer.

Huge Kaplinski fan. I own everything that has been translated to English and even recently acquired some Estonian books of his from a friend. He’s been a large shadow on my work since the beginning almost.
Space and environment are crucial to my work. I always come back to trying to explain this project as less a songwriting project and more of trying to create spaces for people to exist in.
And I’ve really recently been truly inspired by art itself. Just recognizing that I’m very fortunate to make a living by conjuring up things from nothing. I feel very lucky.

Recent months have seen you take a crack at the silver screen, what with an Evening Hymns song in the latest Cameron Crowe film and your score for the documentary Strange and Familiar. How did these projects come about, and how does the experience of making a soundtrack compare to recording as Evening Hymns? Is it something you’d like to do more of?

Well the Crowe film came about cause he got into the last record Spectral Dusk and we became Twitter buddies and chatted a bit. Next thing you know I got an email from Sony requesting the song for an upcoming picture. It was a trip. Very cool and I’m super thankful for that. The doc I scored I’m equally excited about it. It’s about this charming little island off the coast of Newfoundland. The first trailer for that film was cut to my music by an editor friend and the directors really liked it and they reached out. I’m working on mixing that music to release it sometime in 2016. That kind of work really suits my lifestyle right now. I have a home studio that I’ve just added a second room on and so I can work quietly on my own out there. I’m hoping I get to do more score work.

You can buy Quiet Energies now from Outside Music (US/Can), Tin Angel Records (UK/EU) and Kütu Records (France).

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