“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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With the album’s release via Third Eye Stimuli Records and Earth Libraries looming, Arbes have returned with a brand new single, ‘One Metaphor’. The record’s closing track, the song represents a suitably epic send-off. One which again combines rock and pop sensibilities and sees a textured, smouldering opening morph into something altogether more intense, the angular guitars and ethereal vocals again offering that trademark juxtaposition which marks the collection. And that’s not the only thing which keeps the audience guessing, with the tempo shifting at the drop of a hat and the mood evolving from dreamy spaciousness to layered complexity and back again.

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The mononymous creative moniker of songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer Allie Cuva, allie has served as a vehicle through which to explore personal relationships, from the study of a break-up on debut album Maybe Next Time to the perspicuous details of connection seen on 2022 single cast iron // infinite jesters. With new album Every Dog coming this September via Snack Shack Tracks and Anxiety Blanket Records, allie has shared new single ‘Radio Shower’. With its compassionate vocals and ache of longing, the track is every bit as heartfelt as anything allie has so far released, with Cuva matching a romantic present against the sense of loss always looming, as though to love is to anticipate the absence of love, and loneliness is always approaching from some distance to reclaim you under its grip.

Arbes – Impasse

Anne Carson once wrote that “perfect desire is perfect impasse,” an idea Naarm/Melbourne indie pop outfit Arbes explore on ‘Impasse’, the lead single from the debut full-length Counterways, coming later this year on Third Eye Stimuli Records and Earth Libraries. “I picture this unruly character, going back and forth on an ultimatum,” lead Jess Zanoni explains of the single, “trying to toy with the emotional limits of a situation—weighing up permanence vs non-existence.” This indecisive spirit is brought to life with a sound caught between angular post-punk twitch and smooth pop grooves, and Zanoni’s vocals evoke a personality full of contradiction too. Where a certain arrogance sits alongside vulnerability, the sense of a person in competition with themselves, their two halves struggling for dominance.

Haley Heynderickx – Seed of a Seed

Her first new music since 2018’s debut album I Need to Start a Garden, ‘Seed of a Seed’ is the new single from Portland singer-songwriter Haley Heynderickx. Again released via the good folk as Mama Bird Recording Co., it’s a direct and sincere folk song that strips back  contemporary life’s complications to get at the heart of what really matters. With a wisdom that may be intentional or incidental, what this entails to Heynderickx is not lofty or grandiose, but small and mundane. “It’s so simple, but I didn’t realize how much angst I’d woven into it,” she describes of the song. “A desire for simplicity, and how far away that felt.” What’s remarkable is how, from a few spare lines on modest hopes and dreams, emerges something of a self-portrait. As Heynderickx concludes: “It seems I accidentally pressed my story—the last four years of my life—into a tiny little tune.”

Macro/micro – Balaclava

Having worked as an audio engineer for Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for soundtracks such as Watchmen, Mank and Waves, as well as Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts V & IV, Tommy Simpson cut his teeth among some of the best. Now recording his own music as Macro/micro, Simpson works across various fields with his dark electronic soundscapes, the latest of which being the soundtrack for Streets Loud With Echoes, a documentary by Katerina Suvorova. Made on the ground with activists amid unrest in Kazakhstan, the film follows the fallout after the murder of Olympic figure skater Denis Ten and a population’s attempt to instigate political change. Macro/micro’s score is every bit as shadowy and charged as you might expect, with single ‘Balaclava’ introducing the use of field recordings and building rhythm to bring to life the paranoia of the moment.

The Streets Loud With Echoes OST will be released later this year.

Maripool – Twist

“The ostensibly frolicsome nature of the song is undermined by a shadowy edge. Something sinister lurking just beneath the surface.” So we wrote of ‘This Time Again’ by Lisbon-born, London-based artist Natasha Simões, AKA Maripool back in 2022. Now Simões is back with a day that feels like nothing, a brand new EP which builds upon this ambiguous style. The Maripool sound blends bedroom pop emotion with a punk personality to fall between the sincerity of Frankie Cosmos and the deadpan charm of the likes of Patio. Single ‘Twist’ is a great place to dive in, its lo-fi textures ebbing and flowing as the vocals switch between yearning and embittered defiance.

Tape/Off – Paris, Texas, Queensland

With an album slated for release early in 2025, Australian rockers Tape/Off have shared brand new single ‘Paris, Texas, Queensland’ via Coolin’ By Sound. Half love letter, half furious screed, the track does for the band’s home of Meeanjin/Brisbane what Last Quokka’s Red Dirt did for Kimberley, caught between the nostalgic fondness for the familiar and a simmering anger at its many downfalls. Hence sunnies, ciggies, singlets and footy shorts worn by Alfie Langer are matched with images of gentrification and colonisation. More proof the current crop of Aussie punk rock is ahead of other countries in its willingness to confront the imperialistic violence which underpins contemporary society.

I had this dream, you see?
I was holding a lump of coal in my hand
And it exploded in a spray of dead Coral
That covered all of Queensland

Watch the video filmed by Luke Henery and edited by Branko Cosic below:

‘Paris, Texas, Queensland’ is out now via Coolin’ By Sound and available from the Tape/Off Bandcamp page.

Trace Mountains – In A Dream

“You’re in a dream,” sings Dave Benton on ‘In a Dream’, the first single from the latest Trace Mountains full-length, Into The Burning Blue, coming next month via Lame-O Records. “You’re in a dream you feel the world busting at its seams you’re coming clean but you don’t know what the fuck it means.” In an album which sees Trace Mountains explore the whole range of the colour blue, the single and opener finds Benton very much at the darker end of the spectrum. A dispatch from whatever stage of capitalism we’re calling contemporary America as delivered from a breathless nighttime bike ride. The effect is passing through a dark passage full of eerie shadow without quite knowing if there’s an exit at the other end.

Into The Burning Blue is out on the 27th September via Lame-O Records and you can pre-order it now.

Video Age x Esther Rose – Out In The Country

A reworking of the title track from their 2023 LP Away From the Castle, ‘Out In The Country’ is the new single from New Orleans duo Video Age. Except, for this song at least, Video Age are no longer a duo. Ross Farbe and Ray Micarelli are joined by alt-country singer-songwriter Esther Rose, who brings her signature vocals to a stripped-back take on the track that dials back the technicolor psych of the original in favour of something soft and swaying. The collaboration was inspired by a live performance of the song Farbe and Rose played in Nashville, a moment captured on video and shared as an added bonus with the proper studio-recorded version. Check out both below:

‘Out In The Country’ is out now via Winspear and available from the Video Age Bandcamp page.

Vince Nudo – Everyone Here Reminds Me of You

Having started out as a drummer, founding Priestess and touring and recording as part of Kurt Vile’s backing band The Violators, Vince Nudo has since turned his attention to composing, with films he’s scored having premiered at Cannes and the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). His latest score is for Mary Heilmann: Waves, Roads & Hallucinations, Matt Creed’s intimate chronicle of the New York artist renowned for her abstract geometric forms and use of colour. Nudo’s ambient soundtrack is suitably lush and fluid, drawing on Heilmann’s minimalist sensibilities and overarching playfulness to create something which matches her daydream ethos of creativity.

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The concept is fitting for a project which so overtly straddles the old and new. Hot Apple Band draw from right across modern music history in weaving their sound, from the sixties pop of The Beatles through classic seventies country right up to contemporary acts like Drugdealer and Weyes Blood, knitting these threads into something distinctively new. Take latest single ‘So Long’, where duelling electric guitars and honky tonk piano exude a languid confidence and the retro golden polish is matched only by the intuitive fun of the sound.

The easygoing vibe might be explained by the song’s origin tale. “Lou and I recorded this at my place when I was living in Strathfield. It’s actually the last track we recorded for the album because it wasn’t meant to be on there,” Kinder told Pilerats. “We have another acoustic version of the song that was meant to be the only version and this is what we played live.” But true to the spirit of Hot Apple Band, the live version won out, and now serves as the ideal introduction to what makes the outfit so special. Watch the video shot on camcorder by Fabian Svejkar and edited by Sarah Pilbeam:

So Long, Noodle House is out via Third Eye Stimuli Records and Earth Libraries on the 24th November and you can pre-order it now.

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