Best Fern is the ambient pop collaboration between New York’s Alexia Avina and Montreal’s Nick Schofield. The pair met while in residence at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, where they drew on the surrounding Rocky Mountain landscape to devise a style that sits in the ethereal middle ground between ambient and pop. The debut Best Fern album, Earth Then Air, releases early next year on Backward Music and Youngbloods, and lead single ‘Way Inside’ is an indicator of what is to come. A track at once soaring and earthy, the fecund mistiness eradicating any distinction between organic and dream matter. The song comes complete with a video directed & edited by Hugo Bernier. Watch it below:

Earth Then Air releases on 3^rd February via Youngbloods. Preorder it now via the Best Fern Bandcamp page.

CO-ED DORMS – Milk Drinker

Part of what they call the “Neo-Classical Post-Industrial Post-Punk Revival,” English four-piece CO-ED DORMS have shared new single ‘Milk Drinker’ as a statement of intent. A finely crafted track which grasps for a number of stylistic influences, the lush instrumentation held in line by almost marching percussion, while the near spoken-word vocals are sardonic and playful and wry.  Think Black Country, New Road fronted by Mark E. Smith, this time sponsored by Big Dairy. Drink the damn milk.

Cynthia Hamar – Where Your Love Lives

Back in June, we wrote about Alberta-born Métis singer-songwriter Cynthia Hamar, labelling single ‘Shaken’ as “a track which finds a balance between soulful confidence and poignant sadness, led by the kind of bitter assurance gained only from learning the hard way.” Again out via Neon Moon Records, latest track ‘Where Your Love Lives’ is no less mature and reflective in its tone, taking a nostalgic look at the past in all its bittersweet glory. Charting the things gained and lost along the way, and the slow change constantly unfolding. The song’s video furthers this excavation of bygone years, with director Korban Hamar and editor Jessica Lowe creating a collage of home videos from Hamar’s family collection.

‘Where Your Love Lives’ is out now via Neon Moon Records and you can listen in the usual places.

Dunebug – Still Dreaming

Now based in London, Dunebug is the project of Manchester-born Chi Limpiroj. Regular readers will be familiar with her work as we’ve covered a couple of singles in the last few years which, along with a self-titled EP released in 2019, have established a distinctively bittersweet lo-fi indie pop style. Now Dunebug has returned with a new single, ‘Still Dreaming’, the latest release ahead of a forthcoming debut album. Limpiroj describes ‘Still Dreaming’ as “a song about being afraid to sleep due to recurring nightmares of an abusive past lover,” but despite this heavy subject matter it’s presented as a surprisingly sweet laidback pop song. The track comes complete with a contradictorily bright video by Alyssa Mello, which you can check out below:

‘Still Dreaming’ is out now and available from the Dunebug Bandcamp page.

Esme White – Pearly Gate Crashers

Hailing from New York and now based in London, singer-songwriter Esme White started writing during the early months of the pandemic and has worked with Spiritual Records in Chalk Farm on new tracks. Single ‘Pearly Gate Crashers’ is a great introduction to White’s sound, an infectiously upbeat folk rock track with real narrative weight. God is real but heaven is closed, great crowds gathering at the gates demanding to be let in. Shady snakes in suits bribe angels for backdoor entries as old ladies threaten to burn the whole thing down, the rhythm building as a sense of desperation grows.

Yeah I may be human
but that’s not on me, that’s on you, man

‘Pearly Gate Crashers’ is out now. You can find Esme White on Instagram.

LIES – Camera Chimera

The new project of Mike and Nate Kinsella, LIES have won attention with a string of singles which combine beauty and strangeness into something fitting for the contemporary moment. Latest track ‘Camera Chimera’ further develops this style, an exploration of life online which starts out seductively mellow and soon morphs into something dark and unnerving. “It’s about not only feeling manipulated by others, but also being confronted with the reality and consequences of your own lies and manipulation,” Mike Kinsella explains, “and how that can mentally and emotionally cause one to spiral.” The song comes with a video directed by Rachel Cabbit of POND Creative which furthers these themes, amplifying the mood of shadowy mystery by printing and scanning frames to produce a distorted, lo-fi style.

‘Camera Chimera’ is out now via Polyvinyl Record Co. and available from the usual places.

Mizan K – Go

‘Go’ is the latest single from New York’s Mizan K, an effortless pop song that bubbles with quiet energy that she describes as a “four-minute fever-dream inspired by fragments of fantastical children’s novels.” Built on an infectious melody and adorned with quirky embellishments, the track is a strange, kaleidoscopic commentary on our hyperactive, money-focused world. As Mizan K goes on to explain: “A dozen celestial characters including myself, float in a space-casino and chase their fate in a speedy and unstable world. The singer (me) is a trickster, presenting glimmers of opportunity, then changing voices to relay worldly wisdom and warnings of failure. The song winds its way through a frantic universe while angling towards fun and optimism.”

My Politic – Cursing at the Night & the Morning

Next month, Nashville-based duo My Politic will release Missouri Folklore: Songs & Stories From Home, an album grounded in the landscape of the Ozark Mountains which looks to explore the nuanced and often conflicted identities of those who call Missouri home. “There are songs about judgment, existentialism, forgiveness, love, death, growing, and healing,” as Kaston Guffey explains. “It’s a lot of material focused on the nuance and mundanity, in some sense, of being a person.” Latest single ‘Cursing at the Night & the Morning’ captures this spirit of imperfection with a keen eye and careful charm, steeped in the wistful ache of all the best folk music but choosing to confront this nostalgia too.

What I know and what I’ve heard
Are different things I’m sure
But the differences all blur
Cuz time’s a warping glass

Siv Jakobsen x Ane Brun – Sun, Moon, Stars

With new album Gardening coming next January on The Nordic Mellow, Oslo songwriter Siv Jakobsen has unveiled latest single, ‘Sun, Moon Stars’. With Jakobsen joined by renowned Norwegian songwriter Ane Brun, the track weaves a plaintive mood scored with careful details and evocative harmonies. An ode to the people who stand steadfast through the worst moments, reliable points which allow us to navigate our own ways through. The song is “inspired by my least favourite month of the year and the heaviness I tend to feel during it,” as Jakobsen explains, “as well as the beauty and hope I’ve found in a companion that has the ability to pull me out of the dreariest corner of my mind, even during the darkest month of the year.”

Gardening is out on the 20th January via The Nordic Mellow.

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It is tempting to read the title as a reference to Bazan’s return to his old moniker, but the reference is more overtly geographical than mythological. Bazan and his family left Phoenix, Arizona when he was twelve, and the album focuses its lens back on that time. The songs are intensely personal, the irony that abandoning a solo career to pick back up as a band has led to music more introspective than ever not lost on Bazan himself. “I didn’t realize what calling my music Pedro the Lion again would mean to me,” he says, “but it’s re-connected me to parts of myself and my history (both sonic and personal) that I had lost touch with.”

After the organ-like synths of the opening instrumental, ‘Yellow Bike’ opens with a modest and ordinary scene. “On a desert Christmas morning, 1981,” he sings, “one month shy of six years old, in the valley of the sun.” Though the simplicity belies gravity of the song, the first movement of a deep dive into childhood—an anguished but unflinchingly honest reckoning with the past in attempt to reconcile the present.

The song fuses the freedom of his first childhood bike ride with the lingering pain of isolation, feelings that can be extrapolated through to today, projections or self-inflicted fantasies that can come to define a life. A single taut guitar line backs the opening verse, a systolic drumbeat heralding the arrival of the full band, like a new dawn after years as a solo artist.

Placed in the context of a strict Christian upbringing, ‘Powerful Taboo’ plays as an child’s confused attempts to become themselves amidst a maze of barriers, dogmatic rules undermined by forces intrinsic and personal. The experience becomes one of guilt and shame, the middle ground where truths both religious and intimate are betrayed simultaneously in doomed effort to remain faithful to both. Such a predicament haunts ‘Circle K’ too, a tale of a childhood Bazan trying to collect enough pocket money for a Santa Cruz skateboard. The song is ostensibly unremarkable, but the writing and vocal delivery make the image of his child self spending his savings on candy and soda pops suddenly momentous, a harbinger of a thousand adult decisions.

Fittingly then, the salvation imagined on ‘Model Homes’ comes not via self-actualization or some higher power, but rather the offer of better living, a time where scrimping and saving in a lonely town is ended by the lottery of the American Dream. The isolation made clear on ‘Yellow Bike’ is ever-present, and the biggest draw of such a prize is the magnificent company that surely awaits its winners—suburbs as they appear in made-for-TV movies, full of friendly kids and fun adventures.

However the reality is different, and making friends requires compromise and self-deception. The title character of ‘Quietest Friend’ seems to be a part of Bazan himself, a part he kept hidden like Bukowski’s bluebird in an effort to connect with “fickle friends” since he was a child. “I didn’t see it coming but now it’s pretty clear,” he sings, “I traded my own wisdom for a jury of my peers. I ignored you for 30 years.” The accompanying video, directed and shot on 16mm film by Jason Lester, sees Bazan come face to face with this persona, quite literally.

‘Black Canyon’ uncoils slowly into a hard, flat rhythm, as sparse and unforgiving as the desert plains themselves. Based on family stories recalled from his childhood, the song details the aftermath of a road accident from the perspective of the men and women called to the scene. “My uncle Ray was a paramedic,” Bazan’s sings, “one of the first boots on the ground, he saw the man beneath the truck in several pieces, obviously gone.” The song echoes ‘Car Crash While Hitchhiking’ from Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, displaying the same stunned realism in the face of sudden violence, beauty and the grotesque meeting in strange communion.

Such a juxtaposition lies at the heart of Phoenix. Childhood is remembered with intense dread and desperate fondness, a time to be blamed, pinpointed as the beginning of every adult hang-up and dead-end yet still somehow precious, even glorious. “My Phoenix still shines,” Bazan sings on ‘My Phoenix’, where the possessive ‘my’ highlights the track’s position. “My Phoenix will rise.” The idea extends to faith too, the cause of every destructive neurosis that still manages to command thought and awe, an idea hardwired into DNA, too deep for any rational writing off.

If the vision of the Christ
My family sees
Is my blurry vision’s greatest enemy

Then I still try to tune it in
When I get lonely
You know I chase around this desert because I think that’s where you’ll be

Closing track ‘Leaving the Valley’ finds the Bazan family crammed into a U-haul and moving on from Arizona, and, as is the way of things, the conclusion triggers affection. A perfect home it might not have been, but it was a home nonetheless, and nothing is more appealing to those destined or cursed to keep moving on. “How do you stop a rolling stone?” Bazan asks, “How will you know you’re finally home?”

The songs ends with a list of places and images from the desert, an incantation of pure nostalgia and also in many ways the recipe for the present day Bazan—the shaping influences, the unshakeable wishes, the things made forever sacred purely by happenstance. If Phoenix is, as Bazan says, “the result of mining your past for who you are now,” then listening to the record feels like spending a restless night at his side, watching as he examines a disparate series of scenes from his life, his origin story, projected onto the ceiling, the room cast in a wistful Super 8 glow.

Phoenix is out now on Polyvinyl Records. You can get it in a variety of formats from the Polyvinyl webstore or the Pedro the Lion Bandcamp page.

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Familial themes have always threaded through Owen albums and L’Ami du Peuple is no different. However, in a ‘real life’ example of Kinsella’s progression, he is now father to two children, and the lyrics have changed accordingly. The pressures on him have shifted, now pressing from a new direction. How long have I been sleeping? he sings on ‘Vivid Dreams’. I’m a dad and my dad’s dead. On an album that is always going to be compared to previous work, this shift in focus and point of view serves almost as a metaphor for his development, a signal that he is charting new territory, as eager to learn as ever.

The album is produced by Neil Strauch, a prolific producer who has worked with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and Iron & Wine to Andrew Bird, Ben Weaver and Hot Club de Paris. Kinsella and Strauch worked together throughout a recording process that was spaced across a few months, allowing them to pursue different moods and ideas, pushing songs in direction that would otherwise have not existed. Having a producer adept at different genres seems to help Kinsella, allowing him to explore different influences with the album.

It is the combination of styles that you really take away from the record. Kinsella has plied his trade with bands like Cap’n Jazz, American Football, Joan of Arc and Owls, and Owen has been reserved for his explorations of his singer-songwriter side. L’Ami du Peuple feels like a convergence of the two, with the best bits cherry picked from all of his previous projects to make an album that has surprising diversity and depth.

L’Ami du Peuple is out on the 2nd June on Polyvinyl Records.

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