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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Based in Humboldt County, California, songwriter and producer Gabriel Izak makes contemplative, emotionally earnest songs which fall in the centre of a venn diagram between folk, pop and rock. Latest single ‘Sin Eater’ is the ideal entry point for the uninitiated, embodying the spirit of the project and the mood which results. It traces how personal pain so often has familial roots, and how one might go about absolving themselves of this weight. “[I] wrote this three years ago, after I had a conversation where someone told me I should visualize sending family guilt ‘up to the cosmic compost heap’,” Izak explained in an Instagram post. “Couldn’t manage to fit that line in a song but wanted to write about intergenerational stuff. And how it can feel like you don’t deserve to move through it and let go, but you totally do.” Supporting vocals from Marley Jarvis only deepen the emotion of the track, and fans of acts like Big Thief and Hovvdy are sure to find plenty of admire.

Cut the cord, but still we’re tied
To the shame of legacy
Prehistoric, hollow eyed
No man is my enemy
And all I ever wanted was to set you free

JJJJJerome Ellis – Evensong, Part 1 (for and after June Kramer)

“A space carved out of the hectic every day into which the listener is invited, Ellis using the album as a kind of intermission within ordinary time where we might consider histories both personal and communal, as well as those of the natural world, and thus come to honour and understand ourselves more faithfully.” So we wrote of Vesper Shadow, the new album by JJJJJerome Ellis coming next month via Shelter Press. In the preview, published back in September, we described how the title track “breath[es] new life into the Gospel mainstay ‘His Eye is on the Sparrow’ in a way only Ellis could” to introduce “the dynamic between detail and space which marks Vesper Sparrow, but also the sense of reverence and possibility inherent within the style.” With the record’s release steadily approaching, Ellis has unveiled album opener ‘Evensong, Part 1 (for and after June Kramer)’ to allow audiences another glimpse inside. “The stutter can be a musical instrument,” they say in the opening line, before proceeding the prove the statement with such invention and grace.

Jordan Whitlock & Memory Spells – False Lights (Reprise)

“Suffused with the lush, shadowy grandeur of Lynch at his most romantic.” That’s how we’ve described collaboration between Jordan Whitlock and Matt Bauer‘s Memory Spells, tracks like ‘Take My Hand‘ and ‘Heaven and Here‘ demonstrating an orchestral, cinematic brand of folk rock fit to support the poetic songwriting of the duo. New song ‘False Lights (Reprise)’ reimagines a track from Bauer’s 2015 album Dream’s End, evoking the old maritime legend of wreckers luring vessels onto rocks in order to plunder their goods to explore more personal ideas of loss and ruin. As you might expect from such a description, the track sits at the darker, more melancholic end of the project’s spectrum, though within its tales of deception and devastation flickers something more hopeful or defiant too. A true light to match the malicious mimic, however black the night.

Oh how many wrecks like
Run aground chasing all false lights
Broken apart with want
For what‘s not there’s to have?
From the shore, strangers rifle their pockets
Rip the lockets from around their necks
Gentle waves lap the decks
And still the stars shine ever brighter

‘False Lights (Reprise)’ is out now and available from the usual places.

Joyer – At the Movies

We’ve featured a couple of tracks from Joyer‘s new album On the Other End of the Line… in recent weeks, with ‘Cure‘ showing how the pair have “sand[ed] down the shoegaze scale of the previous record while maintaining its pop melodies […] pushing the Joyer arrangements into newly ambitious territory.” While ‘Glare of the Beer Can‘ “sit[s] in [the] half space between reality and daydream,” as we wrote, “breathing a sense of romance into the ordinary, even if the longing at its heart seems destined to go unsatisfied for a good period yet.” With the album coming soon via Julia’s War Recordings, the duo have returned with ‘At the Movies’, a song which paints another method of retreating from life’s pressures. Where its predecessor used romance as a way to overcome the everyday, the new song champions the safe harbour of the pictures. A space away from the world, even existence itself, if only for a few hours.

Watch the video animated by Sabrina Nichols below:

On the Other End of the Line… is out on the 24th October via Julia’s War Recordings and you can pre-order it now from the Joyer Bandcamp page.

Lisa SQ – Make It Up to You

Recording under the moniker Lisa SQ, Montreal-born, Hamilton-based multidisciplinary artist Lisa Savard-Quong creates indie rock with an avant garde edge, bending the conventions of the genre with a playful, curious and slightly surreal personality. With debut album Reel Me In coming next month, Lisa SQ has released new single ‘Make It Up to You’ to introduce the style. A delightfully bittersweet ode to self-destructive tendencies brought to life with a team of friends and collaborators, including Tyler Kyte, Adam Hindle and Michael Brushy (all of Dwayne Gretzky fame), Simeon Abbott and producer Ian Docherty (July Talk). “Tyler Kyte (Dwayne Gretzky) and I were talking about people who always invite drama into their lives, and I kept picturing these classic tragic heroes, doomed but relatable,” as Savard-Quong explains. “The song grew out of that and my own pacing, daydreaming, and writing in the attic.”

‘Make It Up to You’ is out now and available from Bandcamp. Reel Me In is coming soon.

Rivulets – Came

Under the moniker Rivulets, Portland, Oregon-based songwriter Nathan Amundson has created stark, emotionally charged music which sits at the intersection of folk, slowcore and electrified rock for several decades. Latest single ‘Came’ sits at the dark, downbeat end of this spectrum, a lonely song stripped back to its essential features, the guitar and murmured vocals enveloped by a shadowy emptiness, as though the real weight of the sound lies in its negative space. Amundson’s voice plays within this atmosphere as something hushed and half-defeated, his questions rhetorical and addressed to nothing but the night itself. Like the words of a man clinging on through the dark hours in the hope of glimpsing some streak of light on the horizon.

roman around – Moves pt.2

We last wrote about roman around (AKA Fresno, CA’s Roman Rivera) a year ago upon the release of full-length The Toll of Unconditional Love on Trailing Twelve Records, describing how the album drew on intensely personal experiences to explore how love can persist and flourish within the most difficult circumstances. Now Rivera is back with brand new release Wish (Tapes EP) which looks to both continue the style and evolve the project to chart new sonic territory. Fittingly, single ‘Moves pt. 2’ serves as a extension of the track ‘Moves’ from the previous album. A meditation on the passage of time which explores not only that which changes but also those things which remain. Not least those features of US policy, be it the long years of military occupation or the contemporary rise of mass deportation.

Wish (Tapes EP) is out now via Trailing Twelve Records.

Silver Liz – Dream More Vivid

Early next year, Brooklyn-based dream pop duo Silver Liz will release III, a brand new full-length album put out on their own Extremely Pure label. Carrie and Matt Wagner have made a name with an imaginative, idiosyncratic style of shoegaze and dream pop, previous albums I Can Feel the Weight and It Is Lighter Than You Think owing as much to the contemporary cutting edge as the nineties classics, expanding the possibilities of a genre often prone to imitation. The new record promises to be their most ambitious to date, embracing a maximalist approach to create something colourful and shifting, each track its own kaleidoscope packed with texture and detail. Listen to lead single ‘Dream More Vivid’ now:

Sulka – Halloween

The recording project of Glasgow-based songwriter Lukas Clasen, Sulka originated as a DIY effort, Clasen not only playing all the instruments on the early releases but producing and engineering them too. That era of the project peaked in 2021 with the release of Take Care via Lost Map Records, and by the time 2023 full-length Distractions came around, Sulka was recording in a studio with a full-band for the first time. The first release since that album, latest single ‘Halloween’ finds Clasen still evolving his sound, pairing subdued vocals with an eerie backdrop of distorted guitars and synths to evoke the season of its title. The track which emerges captures the duality of Halloween, where nostalgic comfort meets the shadowy unease of the unknown.

It’s Halloween, we’re out tonight
But your mask can’t hide your eye
I’ve been down, but I’m alright
The world can end, but you’ll survive

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