“I wanted to write a record that I needed to hear in high school.” That’s the mission statement behind Blvck Hippie‘s Basketball Camp, a new album coming in June on The Record Machine. Backed by Casey Rittinger (drums), Tyrell Williams (bass, backing vocals) and Joe Kyle (guitar, talk box), lead Josh Shaw weaves elements of indie rock, dream pop, post-punk, jazz and emo into a sound as inventive as it is immediate, reflecting on past loneliness with with equal parts sympathy and catharsis. Lead single ‘Streetlights’ introduces the style by musing on a particularly low moment some years previous. “Oh how I wish things could have been different / Why can’t I be what you need?” they sing in the closing refrain, Shaw’s delivery maintaining its sincere yearning quality as the backing vocals descend into desperate yelps.

 Glom – Below

Based in Brooklyn by way of Washington, DC, Glom have established their weighty yet accessible blend of alt and indie rock across a number of releases, managing to repurpose the dark and heavy vibes of the genre into something textured enough to wrap around yourself for comfort. Ahead of a tour later this spring, the band are back with ‘Below’, a new single which furthers this style. A meditation on getting older which takes heart in accepting there might never be a moment where you become the person you always imagined. “I was 29 and creeping up on the next decade of my life, a decade where I thought I would have it all figured out,” they explain. “A year and a half later, I don’t have it “all figured out” and probably won’t for another few years, but the cathartic release of the final chorus illustrates me being ok with the fact that my journey won’t have all the answers I’m looking for right away.”

‘Below’ is out now and available from the usual places. You can find tour dates on the Glom website.

Kyle Andrews – Old Fashioned

“Somebody told you / You were nothing / Why was it easy to believe?” So asks ‘Old Fashioned’ the new single from Wisconsin-based songwriter Kyle Andrews. Having released his first album on Badman Recording Company back in 2006, Andrews went on to set up his own label Elephant Lady Records and put out a string of releases over the years, always sticking to his DIY bedroom recorded roots while pushing the possibilities of such a set up to new heights. Subsequent singles and their accompanying videos have won accolades from the Guggenheim, triggered mass participant water fights and launched cameras hundreds of thousands of feet into the air on a weather balloon. But for all the viral success of such ideas, it is the songwriting which has been the constant, as displayed on the new single ‘Old Fashioned’. The song lands on the reflective, wistful end of Kyle Andrews’s pop-inflected folk style, though is shot through with the kind of authenticity and warmth which has come to mark his every release.

Watch the video filmed and edited by Andrews himself below:

Grab ‘Old Fashioned’ now from Bandcamp.

Membra – Always Blue

The recording project of Brooklyn-based composer, sound designer and filmmaker Ned Porter, Membra utilises the full diversity of its creator’s artistic sensibilities to create experimental pop songs at once intricate and intuitive. Described as “a musical terrarium,” the appropriately titled debut Membra album Blocks of Color Blocks of Sound welcomes the audience into a miniature world which reveals itself in increasing detail the closer you look. Take single ‘Always Blue’, which on the surface can be enjoyed as a left-field pop number, though any listener willing to peer deeper will be greeted with a teaming environment of found sounds and tape loops, elements Porter expertly tessellates into something beyond even the sum of its many parts.

Molly Drag – Dogfight

Michael Charles Hansford’s Molly Drag has been writing atmospheric, often melancholic songs for almost a decade now, first appearing on VSF back in 2015 with Deeply Flawed and more recently in 2019 with album Touchstone. The latter saw a chink of light pierce the project’s gloomy mood for the first time, something subsequent albums have built upon while maintaining the original Molly Drag spirit. Out next month on I’m Into Life Records, new full-length Mammoth represents the next step in this evolution, as highlighted by lead single ‘Dogfight’. The lyrics are full of the visceral emotion and deep yearning which has long marked Hansford’s intimate style, but are delivered here against a sound charged by bright shimmering momentum. What results is a track again centring on raw emotion and suffering, but one which refuses to be buried by the accumulated weight of life, instead reaching towards the surface in search of reprieve.

Mt Fog – Drifting

Described as “a creation of love and a response to the world’s chaos and absurdity,” Seattle‘s Mt Fog employ a combination of folk, pop and electronic styles to conjure the antithesis of such disorder, welcoming the listener into richly woven soundscapes as a kind of safe harbour. With new album ultraviolet heart machine coming soon, the band have unveiled new track ‘Drifting’ as an early taster, and the track is indicative of Mt Fog’s ability to merge the earthly and ethereal. Or rather to position the earthly as its own kind of ethereal space, offering the natural world as a place to escape into and revealing the magic and healing potential therein.

My Dear Companion – These Words

Gothenburg‘s My Dear Companion is the recording project of Lea-Marie Sittler (Lea & The Loved Ones), Agnes Åhlund (Glitterfittan) and Hannah Shermis (Eldstorm), but listen to the way the trio’s vocals coalesce on new single ‘These Words’ and you’d be forgiven for thinking they had merged into single force. A tale of love and loss timeless in its themes yet full of the immediacy of yearning, each of the trio draw from the same well of emotion so as to collapse the space between them. The result is warm and fond and loaded with nostalgia, affirming with the knowledge that such sadness is omnipresence for us all.

‘These Words’ is out now.

Sofia Bolt (ft. Stella Donnelly) – Bus Song

Next month France-born, LA-based songwriter and producer Sofia Bolt will release new album Vendredi Minuit via Born Losers Records. Building upon the nostalgic tones introduced on debut full-length Waves and subsequent EP Soft Like a Peach, the record sees Bolt employ a hazy, reflective tone to explore her relationship with time—from the small personal moments which shaped her to the wider familial and historical forces which mould us all. And if Vendredi Minuit is a tour through the decades, then latest single ‘Bus Song’ encapsulates the theme most directly, inviting the audience onto an LA bus to contemplate life as it passes by the window. Welsh-Australian favourite Stella Donnelly lends vocals too, and the result is a careful balance between tension and catharsis as the taut vocals find release in the chorus’s languid rhythms.

Watch the video by Will Evans below, including Arthur H. Virtue’s footage as part of the Al Larvick Conservation Fund:

Vendredi Minuit is out via Born Losers Records on the 10th May and you can pre-order it now.

TESHA – Come Down

TESHA has made a name crafting evocative and often strange pop sounds, with Growing Pains II channelling the likes of Fever Ray to offer something “ethereal yet rooted in personal suffering” and singles such as ‘Like a Man’ seething with anger both personal and political. Latest single ‘Come Down’ is no less striking, simmering with a latent energy which collapses the difference between sensuality and rage. The final third sees something of a pivot in tone as the momentum decelerates into a languid croon, though the mix of allure and danger at the track’s heart never quite fades away.

‘Come Down’ is out now and available from the usual places.

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Tracklist:

Act Of – I am Fungus
Static Animal – See You Around
Skirts – Brite Boy (Alex G cover)
Space Mountain – Cloud
Alexander – Going To Sleep
German Error Message – Murmuring
Thelma – Take Me To Orlando
Jeffrey Silverstein – Make Yr Peace (And Have It Too)
camp counselor – museum of broken relationships
Spartan Jet-Plex – Stop
Lala Lala & Why? – Siren 042
Shrimpwitch – Leerers
Sir Babygirl – Flirting With Her
Spielbergs – Five On It
Stella Donnelly – Lunch
Mentalease – Avert a Gaze
Priests – The Seduction of Kansas
Mike Pace and The Child Actors – Hazy, Hot & Humid
Swim Camp – Circle K
BURLY – Kent Lame
Miserable chillers – Cider Palace
Imp of Perverse – Tripping Thru a Hallway On Fire
Go Fever – Olivia
Polyan – Dan Song
Morning River Band – Bury Me
Nigel Wright – Overcast
Denmark – I Know
Sister Wanzala – I Went Whaling in My Gap Year
Body Meat – Nairobi Flex
Derek Piotr – Repeating Bloom (Simon Whetham Remix)
Michael Chinworth – Good As It Gets
Mesa Luna – Dispel
yot club – jaded

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Stella Donnelly – Boys Will Be Boys

After the success of debut EP Thrush Metal, Australian songwriter Stella Donnelly is preparing to release her debut full-length album, Beware of the Dog, this spring on Secretly Canadian. The record looks set to continue the defiant tone that made her previous release so striking, confronting personal and social issues by looking them right in the eye, and refusing to move until they flinch.

That this is achieved through delicate folk rock is a testament to Donnelly’s writing abilities, and single ‘Boys Will Be Boys’ is a case in point. The track laps in gentle rhythm no matter how dark and violent the lyrics, Donnelly’s tone somewhere between earnest, wistful and searingly sardonic. A nightmare in lullaby clothing, that just so happens to be waking reality.

Go Fever – Olivia

The recording project of Australia born, Texas-based songwriter Acey Monaro, Go Fever look to explore themes such as love, sex, outsiderness and mental health through a feminist lens, using a New Wave-inflected indie rock as the vehicle. Following up 2017’s self-titled album, Go Fever are back this winter with a brand new EP, Daydream Hawker, and single ‘Olivia’ gives a hint as to what we should expect from the album.

Part dreamy, part surfy, and with more than a hint of 70s sensibility, the track is a vivid take on a friendship turned sour. “You don’t have to pretend anymore,” Monaro sings, hinting at the anger stitched into the warm textures of the song. “I’m tired of the sight of you.” Understandably, the song is far from a happy one, though the buoyant sound of the instrumentation lifts the tone from self-pity into grim celebration.

Nigel Wright – Overcast

Raised in Georgia but now working out of Bandon, Oregon, Nigel Wright is a songwriter, composer, artist and former carpenter’s assistant who put out his first record in 2010. After the experience of a European tour, Wright worked on his second album in 2014, and has since been storing up his songs for a new full-length, Kyht, that will see the light of day at the end of February.

‘Overcast’ serves as a strong introduction to the record, the instrumentation imbued with a sense of lightness and motion, Wright’s distinctive vocals like weather-worn rocks within the flow. Thematically, the track is clearly that of an artist, the push and pull of obsession and obscurity, where a keen vision burns brightly, but always just out of frame. Wright’s role it seems, is to get as close to that clarity as possible, and hope that it brings focus for others too.

“You said so long to my meaning
back to as you were
no it aint your assignment to measure your worth
you just gotta do the work”

Priests – The Seduction of Kansas

When Washington D.C.’s Priests put out Nothing Feels Natural back in 2017, the band cemented their position as one of the most interesting bands around, their fierce, freewheeling sound pitched somewhere between furious and funny. The band are back with a brand new record, The Seduction of Kansas, and the title track suggests a slightly different direction for Priests, swapping out the raw punk sound in favour of sinuous art rock. Still, the writing and delivery is as cutting and arresting as ever, the band taking on ideas of national identity and Americanness with acerbic wryness, referencing everything from the Koch Brothers to Castle Pizza.

The track comes complete with a video by singer Katie Alice Greer, and the film belongs to the valuable bracket of music videos that actually seem to add to the meaning and impact of the song. Check it out below:

The Seduction of Kansas will be released on the 5th April via Sister Polygon Records and you can pre-order it from the Priests Bandcamp page.

Polyan – Dan Song

Polyan are a psych-folk band for the post 9/11 age, their old timey twang having one foot in dusty campfire tunes and another in the twenty-first century. ‘Dan Song’ shows this off, the hypnotic flow of the instrumentation and the lazy slur of the vocals lendimg a dangerous, temperamental dimension, threatening to spill over into something altogether more unhinged. Eventually, the song follows through on this dark promise, the vocals rising into a deafening screech that blows through the mics and stings your soul.

Sir Babygirl – Flirting With Her

Sir Babygirl was born when new Hampshire’s Kelsie Hogue had an Ebeneezer Scrooge-style experience, the ghosts of pop past and present (the holy trinity of Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Whitney Houston) visiting her in a dream and convincing her that there is no higher form of art or self-expression. The epiphany saw ambitions in Chiacago’s DIY and comedy scenes dropped, Hogue now devoted to creating a pop persona worthy of her heroes.

Taken from debut album Crush On Me, single ‘Flirting With Her’ provides a tour through the gaudy pop world that has been crafted in response, the flashy plastic decorations and glitterball diva energy making what the press release calls “unabashedly bubblegum, unashamedly queer pop for a future free of genre boundary and the gender binary.”

Mesa Luna – Dispel

The recording project of Vancouver multi-instrumentalist Justice McLellan, Mesa Luna melds dream pop and shoegaze to form shimmering soundscapes, the rich textures tied together by resolute rhythms that pull you through the spacey haze. Taken from the debut Mesa Luna album that’s due out early this spring, ‘Dispel’ shows off McLellan’s balance between energy and space, where the fuzzy tones are guided by a lucid conviction, leading to a sound translucent yet crystalline.

Body Meat – Nairobi Flex

Philadelphia’s Body Meat is primarily a duo of Chris Taylor and Matthew Anderegg (of Mothers and Infinity Dance Complex). They create contemporary pop/R&B that’s made weird by skewed time signatures and superimposed polyrhythms. There newest song, ‘Nairobi Flex’, is a great example. At once jittery and smooth, the song combines collaged staccato samples and smooth pop vibes, creating something that’s as infectious as it is adventurous.

The song comes complete with a video by Daniel Patrick Brennan, which you can check out below:

Head to the Body Meat Bandcamp page for previous releases.

yot club – jaded

Not much information exists about yot club, the recording project of someone named Ryan that pitches a glimmering blend of dream pop and chillwave. This month saw the release of aquarium, the debut yot club release, a deliciously lo-fi synth pop album that combines sadness and bounce to create its infectious sounds. Bringing to mind the likes of Pizzagirl, lead single ‘jaded’ puts bummed out disaffection next to tropical pop, like watching a day end from the bottom of a chlorinated pool.

Lala Lala & Why? – Siren 042

Yoni Wolf and Lillie West of Chicago’s Lala Lala have known each other since the “golden, olden days when Lillie used to sneak backstage at Why? shows,” and have now come together to make a collaborative single. ‘Siren 042’ sees West take the lead, infusing the track with a sense of melancholic self-confrontation, while Wolf and some beautifully dreamy guitar brighten the palette. The accompanying video, directed by Scott Fredette, sees the pair running through a variety of landscapes, constant backward glances suggesting they’re desperate to flee rather than get somewhere new.

“and i’m sorry i was evil
i don’t do that anymore
i just copy other people
try to forget what was before”

Imp of Perverse – Tripping Thru a Hallway On Fire

In addition to drumming for Austin band Sherry, and his membership of now-defunct favourites π and The Halfways, Sean Lochridge also records solo as Imp of Perverse, where he gets to show off his skills as a multi-instrumentalist. As the title might suggest, new album Imp In Reverse collects four of Lochridge’s previous releases and presents them in reverse chronological order, creating what the label describes as “one gigantic, shifting, psychedelic auditory flashback totaling in 22 songs and nearly an hour and a half in runtime.”

Such a project might sound impenetrable, so why not cut your teeth on opening (and potentially most accessible) track ‘Tripping Thru a Hallway On Fire’? In opposition to the titular immediacy, the song is a detached dream-float prone to eddies and swirls in its tempo. For their part, Lochridge’s vocals remain even and barely audible. It’s is something of a trap door through which you fall into the truly weird recesses of the album, though it is certainly worth trusting Imp of Perverse to be as delightfully odd as possible.

Swim Camp – Circle K

Swim Camp is the bedroom pop project of Philadelphia’s Tom Morris. His latest single ‘Circle K’ is a soft and mumbled song that combines the intimacy of a home-recording with a touch of lush studio production. Guitar sits at the forefront, slowly unfurling as percussion ambles along in the background, creating something akin to slo-mo indie rock. Morris’s vocals only adds to the atmosphere, sounding weary and sober as he delivers minimal lines that nevertheless have distinct emotional resonance.

“to tell the truth
i forget what i want
so ill keep on asking
and praying to god”

Thelma – Take Me To Orlando

Natasha Jean Jacobs established herself as Thelma with a self-titled record back in 2017, exploring the pure/impure dichotomy with a tone at once delicate and caustic, proving a valuable meditation of self-worth. Much has transpired in the meantime, but this February sees Jacobs back with a brand new Thelma record, The Only Thing.

Lead single ‘Take Me To Orlando’ employs a similar ambiguity, drawing on the nirvana of simulacra that is Disney World to dig into ideas of performance, fantasy and longing. “I love how you play with illusion,” she sings to someone/thing she’d decided to call Orlando, “cause you know how badly we need them / to live our silly lives.” Check out the video directed by Stephanie Gould below:

The Only Thing is out on the 22nd February and you can pre-order it now.

German Error Message – Murmuring

We’ve covered German Error Message numerous times in the past, from the beautiful album Haunts and a spilt with Lung Cycles to standalone single ‘2017‘, the latter of which we describes as “quietly devastating […] late-night solitude made strange by stark, staccato forces emerging from the sky or within the skull.”

The good news is that German Error message is putting out a brand new record, Mend, in 2019, and we’ve been given ‘Murmuring’ to set the scene. As ever, the song is one of great atmosphere and feeling—joy and dread creeping side by side, twin forces of transcendence that promise to lift us from the contemporary loneliness.

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