It could be tempting to view such efforts with pessimism. This prolific artist, releasing record after record, still covering new ground in search of a solution to the problem. Only to assume such a position would be to a) underestimate the achievements of Calhoun’s work to date, and b) misunderstand the reason the search is perpetual in the first place. It is not that there is no answer out there, more the answer needs to be continual. Rarely are we so lucky as to get a blinding light along the road to Damascus. The path to comfort and contentment is more like a thirst to be sated. We must constantly go to the well.

With this in mind, Jason Calhoun’s latest album, revelations of divine love, could be read as both a continuation of his ongoing project and a metacommentary on its purpose. Coming next month via Dear Life Records, the album takes its title from the collected works of Julian of Norwich, using the wisdom of the fourteenth-century anchoress as the catalyst for a meditation on what it means to find contentment. “Julian of Norwich says ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’,” Calhoun explains. “These days, I’ve been having my doubts that this is true. As no solution to the issue at hand, I look for the revelations of divine love in my life, and I find them—in my partner asleep on the floor in our studio, my survival of a social interaction with a stranger, being bad at chess.” None of these things can flip a switch and change a life, few will necessarily count for much a week or month away, but this steady accumulation of ephemeral moments is what sustains a life. Gives it colour and warmth and, ultimately, meaning.

The result is unsurprisingly intimate, if still shot through with the very sense of restlessness that drives its creation, meaning Calhoun’s picture is far more complex than a simple catalogue of sentimental charms. Consider the latest single ‘what we deserve’. An embodiment of the concision and curiosity which marks the record, the song clocks in barely over a minute yet is pulled in every direction by colourful lines of synths and below that a pounding drum which persists undistracted, ensuring the force of these flourishes is limited. As though for all the small delights we find before ourselves, the beat of something larger will always sound behind us. “‘what we deserve’ is perhaps the most simultaneously playful and relentless I get on this record, Calhoun explains. “The title comes from existential thoughts about daily joys against the backdrop of global politics […] Something I’ve been thinking about a lot is whether we deserve the mess we’re in and whether we’re in it due to our own callow joys.”

Watch the track’s accompanying video, courtesy of Calhoun’s dog and a Go Pro camera:

revelations of divine love will be released on the 7th August via Dear Life Records and you can pre-order it now from the Jason Calhoun Bandcamp page.

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The album was written in Mirzadegan’s childhood bedroom in the wake of a break-up, a collection of finger-picked folk songs which paints a series of memories, longings and confessions in the palette of the titular hue. But though the present loss hangs heavy, Mirzadegan also digs towards a deeper seam of sadness. One ingrained at her centre, accumulated not only across one life but an entire family history. Here, old wounds are not so much sources of pain as shafts leading towards something older and more fundamental, and Ava Mirzadegan follows these passageways as deep as they might allow her in the hope that allowing light into these dark spaces is to begin to process and heal.

But before Dark Dark Blue was another album. One which Mirzadegan could never quite finish to her satisfaction, and thus never saw the light of day. That is, until now. Because driven by the dehumanising experience of watching the country of your heritage being invaded illegally, as well as desire to do something tangible for the people suffering on the ground in Iran, she has decided to release that album, For the Light, via new imprint Vital Records, with all proceeds going to the Red Crescent.

“I want it to be known that For the Light is an unfinished record,” Mirzadegan says, though the fact it is being released speaks to the urgency of the moment and depth of feeling which accompanies it. The album is something of a time capsule of a specific period, one in which a personal bereavement came to reconfigure an entire understanding of death. Grief hurts beyond all expectation, and it hurts this way for everyone. If Dark Dark Blue was a passage towards healing, For the Light is the standstill before such a process might start. Those weeks and months where loss is nothing more than pain, and every link to the past seems to shine with a precious ephemerality.

Released into a present context, this effect is further magnified, and For the Light takes on an even more striking resonance. In a world where entire civilisations can be threatened and genocide is enacted freely, the album plays as an attempt to preserve the human in the face of almost unimaginable horror. Or at least remind some small section of the world that Iranians exist and feel and suffer like anyone else. “I uploaded a song about losing my mother while fearing the loss of the country in which my mother, and her mother before her, were born,” she continues. “It felt like the only thing I could do to keep from drowning in hopelessness and to remind myself that no matter whatever darkness came at nightfall, I will always carry their life light within me.”

That song, opener and lead single ‘Pavement’, is the first available ahead of the release on 10th May, Mother’s Day. “In this empty room / I can feel you,” Mirzadegan sings in the opening lines, before the track moves to its plaintive refrain: “She is gone.” But within the sorrow lies something else. A fondness, yes, but more than that. A strange kind of defiance. Which is all any bereaved person truly has left in the wake of their loss. The promise to remember, persevere, endure. As Walter Benjamin famously wrote: “The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.” We must take every available shot at this enemy, no matter how hopeless the action might feel.

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Now Nice Weather has returned with brand new track ‘Second Hand’. What Pittney describes as “a document of an improvisation,” performed and recorded live this past January directly to analog tape. Essentially double the length of its predecessor, the song takes the same brooding atmosphere but stretches it as far is it will go. The arrangement is expansive, spare and lonely, the negative space just as much a feature as the instrumentation, as though Pittney is creating not only sound but its dark and mysterious twin. If ‘Room Tone’ carried the ominous air of an empty room in the twilit hours of the day, then ‘Second Hand’ chases those same hours out into a starless dusk. A place where every shadow is long, every sight portentous, and human company few and far between.

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“Uses [a] melodic and melancholic style to explore the strange (but recently all too familiar) sensation of being faced with disaster at a distance. It’s laidback and understated, but with a quiet power, and ends on a note of defiance, if not quite hope.” So we wrote of ‘Wide Awake (a.m.)’ by Air Mail back in November, the song which introduced how Chicago-based artist Niko Francis uses a lo-fi indie pop to achieve a striking emotional clarity. New single ‘Moss Song’ might explore humbler themes but is no less resonant, its warm tones and languid rhythms allowing in the outside environment, playing like spring blooming in real time. The result is patient, unhurried and most welcome on a grey February morning. As though within its easygoing flow is a reminder that the world moves slowly yet surely, and the only real path to contentment is to learn to match its speed.

Blue Communications – Australian Summer / Simple Delight

Naarm trio Blue Communications have only existed for about a year, but have already begun to win  over hearts and minds with their eclectic and energetic live set. Now the band have released their first recorded music, double single Australian Summer / Simple Delight, via Southern Exposure Records. The two tracks are a fitting introduction to a band that combine catchy punk, sunny Antipodean jangle and lo-fi experimentalism. Aine Keogh takes the lead on ‘Australian Summer’, which as its title suggests is a hazy and sun-drunk folk-inflected song that evokes long and lazy summer days. ‘Simple Delight’ on the other hand is something of a tempo change, Billie Burrow taking over vocal duties in an urgent and barrelling punky pop song the band say is “about anti-fascist action and queer punk culture.” As captured in the joyously repeated line:

Pushing nazis to the ground
Such a simple delight man!

Australian Summer / Simple Delight is out now via Southern Exposure Records and available via the Blue Communications Bandcamp page.

Brightmoon – Lies About The Sky (Shudder to Think cover)

The recording project of husband and wife duo Billy and Becca Mohler, Brightmoon takes its name from the imaginary kingdom in the animated show She-Ra and the Princess of Power. In the cartoon, the land is dreamlike and shrouded in mystery, and it was exactly such sensations which the Mohlers wished to convey with their hybrid shoegaze, indie rock and dream pop aesthetic. However, make no mistake, Brightmoon offer more edge and emotional bite than simple nostalgia. “Poetry and songwriting are the best outlets for me. It’s cheesy to say this, but they’re like therapy. I put my struggles and demons in my songs,” Becca shares. Billy adds: “Our music is a catharsis. For us, it’s a break from the challenges of daily living, and we want to provide that kind of respite for others.” With their debut EP coming soon via Noon Records, the duo have shared a cover of Shudder To Think’s ‘Lies About The Sky’, the ideal introduction to a band that can provide shimmering textures and pummelling energy in equal measure. Watch the video below with animation and editing by Vincent U.

‘Lies About The Sky’ is out now via Noon Records.

Brown Horse – Twisters

Norwich-based purveyors of “slacker twang” Brown Horse are nothing if not prolific. They announced themselves to the world with 2024 debut Reservoir (which was one of that year’s stand-out records), and returned with sophomore effort All the Right Weaknesses little over a year later. Their style fits the zeitgeist perfectly, a rough and dusty mix of country and indie rock that very much in vogue at the moment, think (roughly) equal parts Jason Molina, Neil Young and Lucinda Williams. And they’re very good at it too. All of which is to say that expectation is high for the next Brown Horse record, Total Dive, which is due for release barely a year since the last one. Our first glimpse is ‘Twisters’, another confident and wearily optimistic mid-tempo country rocker that would sound perfect on a sunny afternoon cruise once spring has sprung in a couple of weeks.

Helicopter Leaves – Moreoff More Off Than On

“I wanted to invest in it myself—take the more adult serious step. Grow up.” So explains Anthony Vaccaro of Sabrina Nickels, the latest album from his solo project Helicopter Leaves. Having made a name as guitarist and co-songwriter in Chicago rock band Beach Bunny, Vaccaro’s solo work has thus far remained very much a side project, 2023 debut Get Stuck In recorded in the basement of his grandparents’ house. However, anyone who spent time with that record would have said considerable vision and potential within the idiosyncratic sound, and now Vaccaro is determined to level up with the new album and give Helicopter Leaves the attention it deserves. The basement was swapped for Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio and longtime Beach Bunny collaborator Sean O’Keefe’s home studio, and a newfound commitment followed, though Vaccaro still plays all the instruments and retains the same personal spirit. Just take lead single ‘Moreoff More Off Than On’, a track charged with all the adventure and experimentation that makes the project special.

Sabrina Nickels will be released on the 27th March via Noyes Records and you can pre-order it now.

JJerome87 – Brush Me Like A Horse

You likely know Joe Newman as part of the critically acclaimed indie rock outfit alt-j, though fans will soon come to know him as something altogether different. For having signed with Mushroom Music / Virgin Music Group, Newman is adopting the moniker JJerome87 and setting out solo. Lead single ‘Brush Me Like A Horse’ serves as the calling card for the new project. Recorded in Los Angeles with producer Carlos De La Garza, there’s a notable Californian flavour to the track, Newman reaching for elements of gospel, Motown and blues. But beneath the sunny spirit is something altogether more surreal. The almost Kafkaesque story of man who, as the title alludes, finds himself slowly turning in to a horse. Something between a cautionary tale and act of wish fulfillment which probes what can happen when the outside world begins to see us differently.

‘Brush Me Like a Horse’ is out now and available from the usual places.

Nice Weather – Room Tone

Based in Philadelphia, Nice Weather in an ambient project which, as per the artist, looks to explore “the baritone guitar as an environment rather than an instrument.” Serving as both an introduction and mission statement, lead track ‘Room Tone’ is atmospheric in an almost literal sense. A song named after the filmmaking term for the sounds within a space with no dialogue or intentional noise, that is, the audio presence of an ostensibly ‘silent’ environment, ‘Room Tone’ is a live to tape improvisation which owes equal debts to the work of Mary Lattimore and David Lynch. A soundscape in which apparently empty space carries its own mood and charge, and the contours of sound itself mark out the emotional landscape of a given space.

‘Room Tone’ is out now and available from the usual places.

Pearla – Be Around

Back in October we wrote about ‘To Love Something’, a single from Nicole Rodriguez’s Pearla which built upon the style of 2023 album Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming, “again searching for those small details which lift an otherwise mundane existence into something significant.” Now Rodriguez has announced a brand new full-length Song Room, and lead single ‘Be Around’ suggests the Pearla sound is continuing to grow. “This song is about the feeling of isolation that comes with being a highly sensitive and emotional person, and worrying that it makes you hard to be around or hard to love,” Rodriguez explains. “It’s about that feeling of being ‘too much’—the fear of what would happen when people see what is really within you.” This tension between interior and exterior worlds is a key concern of the record, notably how the outside threatens to change the inside, the ways in which love might expand or collapse us, and the relative impacts of resisting this change or else submitting to its inevitable pull.

The Rural Alberta Advantage – The Hunt In Edson

We last wrote about The Rural Alberta Advantage back in 2023 when the Toronto based indie rock darlings put out their fifth full-length, The Rise & The Fall. The album saw lead Nils Edenloff shake off the associated anguish inherent within the act of writing songs to pen another stellar collection and put his own self-doubt to rest. Fast forward two years and The RAA are back with ‘The Hunt in Edson’, a brand new single on Saddle Creek that shows Edenloff and co. are ready to put themselves through it all over again. Inspired by a pair of unrelated true events, the song explores the bracing experience of being under the most severe of pressure, be it caught in the jaws of a predator or stood on the edge with a rope around your neck. The result is every bit as thoughtful and cathartic as fans of the band will have come to expect, and we can only hope there’s a sixth album sitting somewhere down the line.

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With the release of the album fast approaching, Sam Wenc has returned with latest single, ‘Run the River Clear’. In contrast to the momentum of its predecessor, the new single is marked by a sound far more drifting and amorphous. One where passages of reserved, ruminative texture are punctuated by periods of intensity. Though each time one such chorus announces itself, a sense of unravelling tugs at the assertive tones, as though the song’s effort to coalesce into something more emphatic is held back by a denaturing of the fabric from which it is cut.

“This feels like the strangest song on the record to me,” Wenc reveals. “It ebbs between quiet, melancholic phrases and emphatic, near-shoegaze choruses. I was surprised by how large it all sounded when put together—it felt like a place I hadn’t expected to land. The title is a slightly modified wording of something a friend used to say years ago about creative practice: ‘running water clears itself.'”

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“They say it was a failed utopia / but it ain’t failed if you’re flexible.” So sings LA-based songwriter Dolly Creamer on latest single ‘Like Water’, two lines which could be said to serve as the mission statement of the song. With a loose, easygoing spirit, the track embraces this philosophy to create its own small world within the imperfect whole, leaning into the image of the title to stay attuned to the natural world and go with the flow of life. Sarah Harris, Sasha Massey, Joon Voigt, Riley Geare and Joel Crocco lend their talents to flesh out the sound, and Voigt also created a suitably lo-fi video to further bring the mood to life as part of their thunderwurld motion picture co. The result is an affirming reminder of the hope inherent within any community.

‘Like Water’ is out now and available from the usual places.

Erik Hall – A Folk Study (Laurie Spiegel)

Back in November we introduced Solo Three, the closing release in a trilogy of albums by Erik Hall on Western Vinyl which sees the Michigan-based composer and multi-instrumentalist reimagining contemporary classical pieces by passing them through the prism of his own unique minimalist sensibilities. Where predecessors Music for 18 Musicians and Canto Ostinato focused solely on the work of Steve Reich and Simeon ten Holt respectively, Solo Three casts a wider net, the release featuring reinterpretations of pieces by Glenn Branca, Charlemagne Palestine, Reich again and, as with the latest single, Laurie Spiegel. As though led by the title, Hall brings an added tempo and warmth to ‘A Folk Study’, favouring an acoustic palette to tease out the organic spirit of Spiegel’s original.

Hiding Places – Holy Roller

“I’m a holy roller / I move so much.” So sings Audrey Keelin of Hiding Places on single ‘Holy Roller’, invoking a phrase in the Holiness movement for those of the congregation so struck by the presence of God they dance and shake uncontrollably. Released to celebrate the Brooklyn-based outfit’s signing with Keeled Scales, the single embraces this sense of spontaneity in more ways than one, not only in how it explores the restless spirit of its creator but also in terms of its very construction. “’Holy Roller’ was a lesson for me, a song that happened with no planning, no ‘trying to write’, but a pure, detached channeling,” Keelin explains. “That metaphor made perfect sense to me after the fact, there is a voice in my heart that I have a complex relationship with that tells me to move around, be somewhat nomadic, not really settle down in one specific place. During that writing session, that bittersweet feeling of moving from my home state kept returning,”

Howling Bells – Chimera

Back in October we introduced Strange Life, the first new album from Sydney-born, London-based outfit Howling Bells for over a decade. “The album not only breaks the hiatus but reflects on it,” we described when talking of lead single ‘Heavy Lifting’, a testament to the effort and resilience required to persist within the music industry and develop a sense of confidence. Latest single ‘Chimera’ continues this meditation on making art, exploring the double-edged sword of ambition and how it can both cut you down and lift you towards higher achievements. “Chimera is a strange word. It means a few different and curious things; in this context, however, I’m using it to mean something of an absurd nature, unattainable, a fantasy. Such is the relationship we have with music at times,” lead Juanita Stein explains. “This song speaks to my experience as a musician, surviving the perpetual ups and downs of the game. But if you’re lucky enough, you have someone who can cut through the noise and help you realise that the fantasy is half the joy. That the longing is part of the journey and that our achievements along the way are deeply meaningful. At its core, ‘Chimera’ is a song about hope and relinquishing control.”

Strange Life will be released on the 13th February via Nude Records.

Ken Wohlrob – William

“A song is a stubborn thing. It’ll resist you with all its might. As you try to bend it and twist it, it will reject your strokes of genius, leaving you feeling like a damn fool for thinking they would work in the first place. A song will tell you, in no uncertain terms, what it wants to be.” So explains musician and composer Ken Wohlrob of new single ‘William’, a track which seemed to repel all attempts to develop it beyond its core guitar riff. You might know Wohlrob from acts like End of Hope, Swarm of Flies, Northern Heretic and Eternal Black, but his solo work offers space for something more meditative. And it was with that spirit he decided to drop the attempt to complicate the sound and let ‘William’ have its own way. “What I had was a single take of a repetitive guitar riff, played live through a reverse-echo feedback loop for eleven minutes,” he continues. “The feedback loop created oscillations and repetitions that took on a life of their own, extending past the riff, even re-absorbing it. There was a compelling journey in that single guitar line.”

No Singing – Care Takers

In recent years, Ben Godfrey has made a name with baroque, off-the-cuff recordings under the moniker Belaver, offering what we’ve called “a blend of deadpan humour and human heart which proves ideally suited to capturing the bleak and bizarre milieu to which it belongs.” Now Godfrey is back with new project No Singing, and there’s something of a stylistic change. Gone are the live arrangements and wry sensibilities in favour of something more considered, personal and nostalgic. Single ‘Care Takers’ introduces the sound, the tale of a character who intends to find a car and drive until the gas runs out. Only this yearning for forward motion is complicated by its very existence, both the lo-fi sound and Godfrey’s vocals betraying a sense of stasis. The stuck feeling of being young and lonely within a city which barely knows you exist, longing for any sense of speed which might allow an escape.

Sam Wenc – Limitless of Blue

Recording under the moniker Post Moves, Philadelphia-based composer, improviser and interdisciplinary artist Sam Wenc released fifteen albums across a variety of labels, establishing the sonic strand of his work as something intricate, finely crafted yet always surprising (just check out Cut Into Your Own Dimension or Heart Music). Wenc has decided to release latest album Language At An Angle under his own name, though it very much feels a continuation of an ongoing body of work. Inspired by and dedicated to pedal steel virtuoso Susan Alcorn who passed away earlier in the year, the record is a lesson in the possibilities of the instrument, one grounded in years of experience and deepened by an ongoing practice of sitting meditation, as well as a reminder of the raw power of art. Perhaps the only real way we can truly confront the unknowable and create meaning, this record suggests, is to continue the work of our forebears and never stop pushing the boundaries. Listen to lead track ‘Limitless of Blue’ now, and watch the video directed by Mikel Patrick Avery below:

Language At An Angle will be released via Lobby Art Editions on the 30th January and you can pre-order it now.

Sophie Gault – Is There Anyone Out There

We last wrote about Nashville-based songwriter Sophie Gault back in 2023 with the release of ‘Christmas in the Psych Ward‘ from album Baltic Street Hotel, a track which followed a lineage of Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams and Patty Griffin to delve, as we put it, “into highly personal experiences of bipolar disorder with a tone both steely and wry.” With new album UNHINGED set for release in January 2026 via Torrez Music Group, Gault has now returned with single ‘Is There Anyone Out There’, and the track is no less emotive or evocative. A version of the Gurf Morlix song of the same name, the track preserves the intimacy of the original while reaching towards something more connected and communal. Morlix’s album Kiss of the Diamondback came out in the heaviest days of the pandemic and its sound was very much informed by the isolation and solitude of the period, but Gault adds a certain layer of warmth to create a mood that’s still melancholic but a little more bittersweet.

Unhinged will be released via Torrez Music Group on the 23rd January and you can pre-save it now.

vireo – the great golden gloom

We’ve featured a couple of tracks from vireo‘s forthcoming album The Great Golden Gloom in recent weeks, firstly ‘catching minnows’ back in September and more recently ‘icanicanican‘. Both tracks highlighted the spirit of a project attuned, as we put it, “to the curative power of the environment and the small beauties therein, packed full of brightness and wonder as though written in honour of the joy of being alive.” With the record now out, Chris Beaulieu and co. have shared the title track as one final single. Serving as the conclusion of the album, the track is in many ways a culmination of its ideas and tones. One grounded in the richness of nature yet marked by a trademark sense of invention, its bright style is as earnest as anything vireo have put out to date, and perhaps more accomplished and assured. The sound of a band who have discovered both their musical style and view of the world and have taken great pleasure in committing it to tape.

Weirs – Lord Bateman (Live at Feast V)

“A hymn delivered not from the still air and stone of a cathedral but God’s own Earth,” was how we described ‘I Want to Die Easy‘ from Weirs‘ album Diamond Grove earlier in the year. “Where fellow contemporary traditionalists like Lankum and ØXN highlight the stark, foreboding tones of the genre to push towards the realm of folk horror, the Weirs sound is more in line with the work of Terrence Mallick. Songs heightened not by an emergent dread or the suggestion of the supernatural but rather an abundance of life itself. The humblest of details given the closest of attention and the latent beauty revealed.” To celebrate the album and kick off a new tour, Weirs have shared a live version of the epic ‘Lord Bateman’, complete with a video filmed at their album release show at the 5th annual Feast in Orange County, North Carolina. “Each year in the fall, friends and I host Feast, a harvest meal and music event that spans the first weekend of October,” explains lead Oliver Child-Lanning. “This year, to mark the release of Weirs’ new album Diamond Grove, we opened Saturday night by playing through ‘Lord Bateman’ from the album in its entirety, with shadow puppets by my sister Violet and other friends and family. Everyone gathered around the glowing puppet theater as we played and sang, accompanied by insects and the fall breeze.”

Diamond Grove is out now via Dear Life Records and you can get it from the Weirs Bandcamp page.

Where’s Beth – Overtime Waltz

Following on from 2024 album Bone Broth, a release we described as “a picture of domesticity in the weeks and days around marriage,” which “for all its tender fondness, still finds room for the peculiar and idiosyncratic details,” Sarabeth Weszely’s Where’s Beth has returned with a festive offering that uses the pressures of the period to highlight chronic struggles and loneliness. “I wrote ‘Overtime Waltz’ from a place of burnout,” Weszely explains, “working long hours in NYC, struggling to connect with loved ones even when we were physically together, and feeling a vague and relentless sense of grief.” Abbey Blackwell (Alvvways) contributes upright bass and harmonies while Steve Moore (Sufjan Stevens) adds Wurlitzer and synth, lifting the sound to its full, melancholic warmth.

Is the snow ever coming, will it always be rain?
Will the cold bring numbing to take away the pain?
I’m needing some kindness to show me the way

Watch the lyric video below:

‘Overtime Waltz’ is out now and available from Bandcamp.

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Now The Noisy have returned with their latest single ‘Grenadine’, and Mae and co. push the boat out to bring its ideas to life. Again the track comes complete with a video directed and edited by Sam Cush, though the style swaps out the cinematic sheen of its predecessor for a more intimate, home movie aesthetic. Both Mae and Cush came of age hanging out in downtown Annapolis, the place they both found a community of likeminded artists and had their eyes opened to the possibilities of life, and the film looks to evoke the fondness for the city which developed as a result. “This music video is a love letter to Annapolis, this town of annual croquet matches between Johnnies and midshipmen, cobblestone mornings with streams of last night’s liquor smell, watching boats round Ego Alley,” Mae explains. “Before I left for college, my coworkers threw a house party for me, and I remember feeling so loved, then driving back over the bridge home afterwards and crying with the windows down because I didn’t want to leave. All the things my teenage self desperately needed—queer friendship, a better haircut, to get to come back to Annapolis—filming this music video affirmed I have now, and then some.”

The Secret Ingredient Is Even More Meat will be released on the 24th October via Audio Antihero and you can pre-order it now from The Noisy Bandcamp page.

Photo by Morgan Kelley

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The new Star Moles release Snack Monster bears the fruit of such a mindset, with singles like ‘Key Changes’ actively pushing against expectations. A song which embodies Moales’s “growing boredom with idealised romance of polished pop,” as we continued, “choosing to instead get its hands dirty and dig into the messy guts of what love really means.” Or indeed follow-up single ‘Fate’, what we’ve described as a mission statement for the release. “A song which looks to address contemporary neuroses via traditional styles,” we wrote, “looking to break free from the strictures of established narratives and reclaim agency from the impression of predetermination.”

With the album out now via Earth Libraries, Star Moles has returned with a brand new single, ‘Tides’, and the track is every bit as impressive. Originally the release was intended as something of a concept album, with Moales coming across Andreas Capellanus’s Rules of Courtly Love during a course on medieval literature and deciding to write a song for each rule. There being more than thirty rules meant this was always an ambitious aim, so instead Snack Monster formed around specific points in the list which especially caught the eye. Like the second rule, around which ‘Tides’ formed: “He who is not jealous cannot love.” The resulting track is upbeat yet conflicted, caught in the competing forces of fondness and bitterness which comprise any envious character and never quite surrending to either.

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Now Blue Deputy are back with a new single ‘Big Fleece’, and again the track finds an outfit willing to mix and match their stylistic influences in order to craft their own singular sound. The press release sites Alvvays, Slow Pulp, Indigo De Souza and The Beths as touchstones and with good reason, the song retaining the emotional vulnerability of its predecessor but adding shoegaze revival richness and sunbleached indie rock wooze. The resulting mood is also a patchwork of conflicting feelings, where the allure of romance and rawness of pain compete for the upper hand.

Watching through a lens, and getting in my head
Paralysed and seeing ceiling eyes
I target a flare to whom I feel it’s fair
The nerve I pressed, maybe I guess I acted out of turn

When you sink to cruelty, I button up my big fleece
And iron over the crease
And I will love you for just a bit too long

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The Friendship sound has always existed within an ambiguous space. Each release plays as a stagnant dispatch from a world in motion, Wriggins left to pick the bones out of any given moment in futile hope of making sense of his existence. The grand narratives of life—be that love, work, success or self-improvement—are often revealed to be emptier than he had hoped, yet the inverse is also shown to be true. The ordinary, the everyday, that is where the sublime lurks for those with the time or motivation to look.

Caveman Wakes Up promises to delve deeper into this idea, a record which finds the familiar vocals and lyricism supported by Friendship’s most ambitious and exploratory sound to date. The core group of Peter Gill (guitar, synth, vibraphone, vox), Michael Cormier-O’Leary (drums, percussion, piano, organ, synth, vibraphone, drum machine, string and woodwind arrangement), Jon Samuels (bass, synth) and Wriggins (vox, guitar) are supported with occasional appearances from Adelyn Strei (flute, clarinet) and Jason Calhoun (violin), and the result further tests the boundaries between country and its adjacent genres—leaning out across the various schools of folk rock and even further still.

‘Free Association’ is the ideal entry point to this freshly curious sound. “Another one about love and other people and how the only hope we’ve got in the search for meaning is to make it up,” as Wriggins told Stereogum. “The Mellotron sax and voice patch were both jokes that we ended up loving. Also the only song with synth bass. We’re proud as hell of the production.”

Watch the video directed by Zach Puls below:

Caveman Wakes Up will be released on the 16th May via Merge Records and you can pre-order it now from the Friendship Bandcamp page.

Cover art: Matthew Reed, Tenant’s Rights, acrylic on canvas. Design: Daniel Murphy

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