Their first new material since In the Garden, and a debut release on Audio Antihero, Josaleigh Pollett’s new single ‘Radio Player’ is both a continuation of this style and something of a new beginning. For one it is the first track made after Watko moved to Japan, the pair deciding to use what might have been a collaboration killer as a kind of creative impetus. “Instead of letting distance dampen our collaboration, we really tried to lean into the chaos and confusion of creating from different ends of different days while an ocean apart,” Pollett explains. “I think a lot of that anxiety and newness mixed with the dedication of friendship drives this new music.” The track also sees the project open up to wider collaboration. Nashville’s Andrew Goldring helps with production and playing extra instruments, and Pollett invited their live band to add their own stamp to the song. The result harnesses some of the energy of live performance without sacrificing the sound’s electronic dimension, and hints at a possible future direction for the project.

Inspired in part by seeing Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist as a child, ‘Radio Player’ explores ideas of memory and childhood with all the unease of a horror movie, its soundscape strange and suggestive and moving with a kind of dream logic. A place full of images, threat and possibility, the complexities of life reduced to their fundamentals. A meditation on a time we perceive as a kind of heightened experience, one which imprints itself somewhere near the back of our minds and often surfaces without warning. Something that’s a form of haunting in its own right “It is a journey through the hallways of childhood that we leave a light on within,” as Pollett puts it. “A pink light flickers on and beckons the listener through, releasing them changed and covered in ectoplasm five minutes later.”

When I fell asleep, it was dark,
Now a light is coming from the TV

I told you that I saw a ghost
I just need you to believe me.

Photo by PJ Guinto

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Perhaps best known as a founding member of legendary left-field hip hop act Anti-Pop Consortium, Beans has been making abstract and poetic rap music since the mid nineties. His latest release is ZWAARD comes out next month, a collaboration with Finnish producer Sasu Ripatti (aka Vladislav Delay and Luomo) that sees a fusion of the pair’s singular and uncompromising styles. Latest single ‘ZWAARD 2’ is a great introduction, Beans hitting his formidable flow over Ripatti’s plinky and ramshackle backdrop which has all the homebrew complexity of a Rube Goldberg machine.

ZWAARD will be released on 13th March and is available to order via the Beans Bandcamp page.

Casters – Lines In The Sand

We last wrote about Casters back in 2023, describing how single ‘Memory’ saw Andrew Strader and a rotating cast of musicians create “a dreamy drift that marbles fondness and regret into sound so rich you could suspend yourself within it.” Latest single ‘Lines in the Sand’, again released via  Like You Mean It Records, sees Casters invoke a trip from Santa Fe to Great Sand Dunes National Park to weave another rich soundscape, this time coupled with a sweeping wistfulness fit for the vast environment in which the first seeds of the track took hold.

‘Lines In The Sand’ is out now via Like You Mean It Records.

 Dinah – Winter Black Lake (Stripped)

Released at the end of last week, Dinah! is the almost self-titled sixth album from Toronto‘s Dinah (FKA Dinah Thorpe). It’s comprised of 17 short sharp jabs of raw emotion, possessing a tactility that you can almost feel sock you around the head. This is thanks in no small part to Dinah’s distinctive voice, full of smoky feeling and tender physicality. Much of the album is made up of restrained electronic pop songs, but my favourite is ‘Winter Black Lake (Stripped)’, a reworking of an early track that comes towards the end. Here, the staccato, mechanical rhythms of the original give way to clear air, allowing the vulnerable side of Dinah’s music to flow in and fill the space.

Dinah! is out now and available from the Dinah Bandcamp page.

Kaycie Satterfield – Jetsam

Following debut EP Sweet Tooth and last year’s single ‘Dog Year’, LA-based songwriter Kaycie Satterfield is back with a new single, ‘Jetsam’. Released via Earth Libraries, the song is at once dreamy and punchy, shifting from bendy elastic guitar and peppy percussion to a soaring, shimmering chorus. Satterfield says it’s a track “for the girls. Specifically, the girls who always stay a little messy, who could never quite get their hair to fall neat.” A duality which shows up in the very sound itself as it shifts from attitude to sweetness and back again, refusing to settle into any tidy box.

I hope somebody on this airplane’s talking to God because
I lost touch, it would be impolite
to show up asking favors after all this time

Minor Moon – Under Beyond

“Well they found us / We were fresh off the bridge / With strange new lives / Oh! and in strangers tongues / They sang a new sound into our minds.” So sings Sam Cantor of Minor Moon on ‘Under Beyond’, the latest single from upcoming album The Light Up Waltz on Ruination Record Co. The title refers to a fictional band who tour the bleak landscape at the end of the world, and the song paints the act in a mythic light as a wider comment on the strange magic of being on tour. “Most of the time, for me at least, traveling around playing music tends to be comically unglamorous and humbling,” Cantor explains, “but within that experience there can be a feeling of intense, private freedom, like you’ve tapped into some collective secret that allows you to transcend the mundane. There’s something endlessly romantic about all of that to me, even if it’s kind of untethered to reality.”

Rose Brokenshire – Habit To Help

Canadian songwriter Rose Brokenshire makes warm and gentle music that is suffused with kindness and patience. Drawing on folk and dream pop, her songs convey powerful messages of healing and self-belief in a whisper rather than a shout. Latest single ‘Habit To Help’ is no different. “This song is about learning to be there for yourself in difficult times,” Brokenshire describes, “the way it is easy to be there for your friends.” The track unfurls with a hushed intimacy, though beneath the hazy croon lies something firmer and fierce. As though under the surface sits an unyielding conviction in the value of empathy, even if we sometimes need to run our hands over it in order to remind ourselves of its presence.

Could you tell me again
what you felt when I said
it would get easier
I know I said it myself
It’s just a habit to help
a friend feel better

Rose Hotel – Not Like That

A Pawn Surrender, the forthcoming album by Rose Hotel (Atlanta songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jordan Reynolds) on Strolling Bones Records, is an album concerned with relationships in all of their guises. Across the ten tracks which combine folk and indie rock with psych sensibilities, Reynolds considers romantic, platonic and even environmental relations, not to mention the relationship one holds with their own internal self. Single ‘Not Like That’ explores the dissolution of a friendship in a way which attempts to make personal opinions clear while acknowledging the other person’s feelings too. “I’m calling them on their bullshit, but also trying to have empathy for how hard it is for them to see it themselves,” Reynolds explains. “Wishing they could be honest with themselves and the people who love them about who they really are, but knowing that they don’t have the capacity to do so.”

 Scott Lippitt X Josaleigh Pollett – Is This a Good Time?

Across a series of albums and EPs, Salt Lake City‘s Scott Lippitt has made a name with a bittersweet brand indie pop, combining bright sincerity with pensive reflection to produce songs which possess tangible feeling. Upcoming album Me, You, and the Avenues sees Lippitt evolve this style with the help of a whole host of other musicians, with each of the twelve songs a collaboration with a Utah-based artist. The likes of Rachael Jenkins, Yuccas and Maren Gayle are involved, but single ‘Is This a Good Time?’ is the turn of Josaleigh Pollett, whose stellar album In the Garden, By The Weeds won our attention last year with what we described as “an excavation of the present which inevitably tends pastward, tracing a presiding cynicism back to its roots in search of a cause.” The combination is a strong one, with Pollett’s talent for nuanced emotion the perfect foil for Lippitt’s own heartfelt style.

Shaina Hayes – Kindergarten Heart

Following advance singles ‘New Favorite’ and ‘Sun and Time’, which we said “combine whimsy and serious emotion,”  Montreal songwriter Shaina Hayes has released her second album, Kindergarten Heart via Bonsound. As its title suggests, the record explores life’s ups and downs with childlike wonder, its fresh and vibrant sound a reminder that one need not grow cynical and world-weary with age. This message is delivered most directly on the title track, a song of soft piano and bubbling acoustic guitar which captures childhood’s fizzy sense of curiosity and excitement. Its message is clear, these feelings and ways of approaching the world can and should be preserved into adulthood, and in fact are one of the few true paths to meaning and joy.

Sparkle. Sunny days. I get older
In every way that won’t matter
Kindergarten heart in me
Magic. Green and blue. I am wilder
In every way that I choose

Kindergarten Heart is out now via Bonsound. Get it from the Shaina Hayes Bandcamp page.

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MUNYA – Benjamin

“I don’t really understand how I make music,” says Josie Boivin, who records under the moniker MUNYA. “I feel like it’s coming from another world.” The sentiment feels apt for the Montreal-based songwriter, her vivid and crystalline style drawing from synth pop and psychedelica to form a languid, dream-laden sound. After three EPs in 2018, Boivin is back with the debut self-titled MUNYA full-length, and single ‘Benjamin’ sets the tone for the release.

With a natural elegance and bilingual lyrics, the track explores how prior experiences can get in the way of present events with an intuitive feel, past heartbreak undermining the possibility of new love. However, MUNYA takes this with a light spirit, acknowledging the ubiquity of such vulnerabilities and in doing so relinquishing the neuroses that can develop around them, clearing the way for new relationships.

Control Top – Chain Reaction

Philadelphia-based trio Control Top are set to release their record, Covert Contracts, next month on Get Better Records. “With a covert contract, the trick is that the agreement is only known by the person who makes it,” explains vocalist and bassist Ali Carter of the record’s title. “The other person is oblivious. Consent is impossible. A void of communication opens up a world of misunderstanding.” Hence Control Top’s scathing style of post-punk that looks to shine a light on the insidious systems that have a hold on society, all in the hope of rekindling some sense of autonomy with patriarchal capitalism, as made clear by single ‘Chain Reaction’.

Ricochet downward spiral
One more word and it goes viral
Light the wick, pull the trigger
What started small is getting bigger

I’m looking for an open door
But all I see is a broken mirror

la loye – to live underwater

Based in the Netherlands, la loye is an indie folk outfit built around the songwriting of Lieke Heusinkveld. With a hushed tone and restrained style, the sound belies the fact that there are six members in the band, though close listening reveals the depth and detail that constitutes their delicate soundscapes, as gauzy and intimate as a spider’s web and catching Heusinkveld’s warm, whispered vocals for all to see. Latest single ‘to live underwater’ is the perfect example, formed with craft and care, the subtle emotion emerging slowly but with great conviction.

Spectator – Waves

The recording project of Megan Rooney and Jeffrey Albert from St. Louis, Spectator is a collaboration in the most fundamental sense. Both were writing songs before they met, though once together these ideas interacted and merged, leading to hybrid songs that were neither Rooney’s nor Albert’s—they were Spectator’s. Ahead of a new album Charlie, Baby on Nordic Records, Spectator have put out a brand new single, ‘Waves’. The song gives an insight into the evocative and richly emotional style of the duo, Albert’s vocals bringing to mind the compassionate grandeur of Frederick Squire and bringing to life a song that finds hope in even the darkest of places.

Charlie, Baby will be released on Nordic Records and you can pre-order it now.

The Exbats – 2027

A father/daughter duo from Bisbee, Arizona, The Exbats make a brand of frenetic punk that they describe as “more troublegum than bubblegum.” Earlier this year, they put out an album, E is 4 Exbats, on Burger Records which collected their favourites songs from previous tapes in a full-length release. Single ‘2027’ gives a good idea as to what to expect from the band, racing into life with feverish drums before Inez McLain’s vocals enter with a tangible attitude, confident and fierce and taking no shit from no one.

minihorse – Drink You Dry

After lending his talents to a variety of Michigan bands over the past few years, Ypsilanti’s Ben Collins started his own band, minihorse, with a debut EP released in 2016. Their forthcoming record, Living Room Art, will be the band’s debut full length, and guest stars a number of familiar faces including Fred Thomas, Kelly Moran and Anna Burch.

The latter appears on lead single, ‘Drink You Dry’, a thundering introduction to the minihorse sound that tempers into gentle lulls periodically. Collins’ vocals lend the whole thing a soaring quality, the heavy cloud of guitars not blotting out the lyrics but holding them aloft.

Tyler Burkhart – Waiting For You

Tyler Burkhart is a DIY artist from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who operates in the classic bedroom pop territory of melancholic nostalgia. After releasing a full-length album back in 2018, Burkhart is back with a brand new single with Berlin label, Feel Flows Records. ‘Waiting For You’ is trademark Tyler Burkhart, with a intimate, almost vulnerable sound, his words emerging with such earnestness that they sound like secrets told in confidence.

‘Waiting For You’ is out now on Feel Flows Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.

Sharkmuffin – Serpentina

Consisting of Tarra Thiessen (guitar/vocals), Natalie Kirch (bass/vocals) and Jordyn Blakely (drums/vocals), Sharkmuffin makes a raucous brand of indie rock that straddles both the artistic and anthemic poles of the genre. After the success of the previous album, the trio are back with a brand new EP, Gamma Gardening, out via Exploding in Sound Records.

The release is a concept album centred on “a space dominatrix named Serpentina that takes a job as receptionist [and] has an affair with a genetic engineer scientist who she codes a designer baby with that can withstand crazy atmospheric pressure, breathe underwater and never age.” As ever which such schemes, things don’t go to plan, with “The Atomic Gardening Society” getting wind of the situation and stealing the baby, causing Serpentina to hang herself with a belt. So… just your average dystopian EP with a narrative arc that would be at home in Ancient Greece.

Trevor Stott – Halfway in the Night

Trevor Stott is a songwriter from St. George, Utah, who makes a stirring brand of country rock that blends existential concerns with cathartic energy. The title track of his debut album, ‘Halfway in the Night’ is a great place to start for those wishing to grow acquainted with Stott’s music, his gravelly vocals offering an organic emotion as the instrumentation pushes an insistent sense of motion. Stott’s voice is prone to stretching and almost breaking, the feeling so keen as to appear almost desperate, and the result is a sound that sweeps you up within its earnest course.

Walking Bicycles – Fat Cat

Chicago post-punk outfit Walking Bicycles have been on hiatus ever since releasing To Him That Wills The Way back in 2014, an album which told the story of guitarist Julius Moriarty’s three-year spell in prison. This year is going to change that, with the band’s fifth record, Chooch, coming this spring via Highwheel Records. If lead single ‘Fat Cat’ is anything to go by, the time away has done nothing to quell Walking Bicycles’ cynical and boisterous attitude, the break only providing more time to stew in the mess of inequality and greed that marks our time. Hence this song, a cutting and caustic middle finger to the men pulling the strings.

Downhaul – Wires / Enough

Richmond’s Downhaul craft a lyrical brand of emo that balances intelligent songwriting with the sincere, pensive style of the genre in a way that fans of The Hotelier no doubt appreciate. Their album Before You Fall Asleep is set for release on Refresh Records at the end of the month, and lead single ‘Wires / Enough’ does more than enough to whet the appetite. Taking the alienating process of growing up with an honest vulnerability, the song probes the psychic cost of becoming yourself in a society fraught with expectations and preconceptions.

Gold Connections – Like a Shadow

Gold Connections is the recording project of Will Marsh of Charlottesville, Virginia. Marsh was a school friend of Car Seat Headrest’s Will Toledo, and the latter helped record and produce the self-titled debut Gold Connections EP which came out last year on Fat Possum Records. This was followed by the full-length album Popular Fiction on EggHunt Records, and this year sees Marsh unveil Like a Shadow, another EP on EggHunt that continues his guitar-driven, brooding sound that is very much of our time. “Like A Shadow,” Marsh explains, “and especially its single of the same name, is about the struggle to move forward into a world that seems both infinitely precarious and abundant.”

Well you know I see them waves rising
Don’t say I never said nothing
Just I’d rather be a dead man
Than love like a shadow

Like a Shadow is out via EggHunt Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.

Witching Waves – Eye 2 Eye

London’s Witching Waves have a reputation for ferocious energy and an uncompromising post-punk aesthetic, as displayed on 2016’s Crystal Cafe. The band are now back with a new record, Persistence, on Specialist Subject Records, and as the title suggests the album is committed to “continuing in spite of difficulty,” as displayed by its urgent and assertive sound.

Lead single ‘Eye 2 Eye’ shows off Witching Wave’s distinctively frenetic style, drummer Emma Wigham providing the lead vocals with backing from guitarist Mark Jasper, leading to a shout-a-long chorus that rises above the angular instrumentation. The album was recorded directly to tape without over-dubs, and the unprocessed energy is the band’s greatest strength—possessing a bite that cannot be reproduced by any amount of technical wizardry.

Black Belt Eagle Scout – Indians Never Die

We have been big fans Black Belt Eagle Scout, the project of Portland’s Katherine Paul, since we first heard their latest album, Mother of My Children, back in 2017. Since then, The Black Belt Eagle Scout stock has risen immeasurably, re-releasing the album on Saddle Creek last year. They recently released a video for ‘Indians Never Die’, a song we previously described as “about the strength and persistence of indigenous peoples, their power and will in the face of oppression and attempted annihilation, not just of themselves but of the entire planet.” Directed by queer Diné filmmaker Evan James Atwood, the video was shot on the ancestral lands of the Chinook, Chinnuk Wawa, and Tillamook tribes and provides a beautiful backdrop to a powerful song.

Mother of My Children is out now and you can get it from the Black Belt Eagle Scout Bandcamp page.

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As part of Whited Sepulchre Records’ split cassette series, Skye-Briggs has adopted the new alias Sabriel’s Orb and teamed up with Sydney’s John Atkinson to produce an EP that delves into a more ambient-based sound. The new direction grants a degree of space that might not be allowed in pop or techno, each song a slow-burning longform piece that is allowed to rise and collapse under its own volition.

Take first track ‘Secret’, the faint yet warm backdrop a canvas across which things can shoot and streak, synths radiating, pulsing and surging, regressing to silence and flickering back once more. The result is something mysterious yet comforting, outside of our existence or else above it, a place or space so timeless that anything might happen there.

‘Holding’ continues the sensation, the lead-on from the previous track near seamless. However, the latter half of the song sees an increasingly sweeping atmosphere as Skye-Briggs’s techno leanings show through, as though, having been lead through a beautiful vastness, we are greeted by some sublime sight or sound that transcends all that came before. The swell recedes back into relative quiet, though the possibility has now been made clear—the supraworld of Sabriel’s Orb could contain anything.

On the other side of the release, John Atkinson offers his own meditative brand of synthscape. Atkinson, who used to play in the hypnogogic Brooklyn band Aa, also creates scores for film, his “uneasy atmospheres” providing the backing for documentaries about contract killers and “listless graduates in arthouse comedies.” The experience might well inform his offering here, as the tracks are immersive and strange, conjuring their own environments of foggy atmosphere. ‘Backwaves // Rye’ unfolds within this misty world, the slow calm of contemplation colouring each drift.

‘First Rain of the New Year’ is equally evocative, though the pensive mood here tends toward a subtle, worming dread, the steadily growing drone portent of some far-off yet ever-approaching tumult. The punctuating calls of birds only serving to heighten the feeling, reinforcing an absence of humanity and grounding the piece within the natural. Whatever might come will be beyond our control, and there is beauty in it.

Sabriel’s Orb / John Atkinson is out now via Whited Sepulchre Records and you can buy it from Bandcamp.

Artwork by Dustin Bowen

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However, while the album is united by a certain mellowness, to label it one-paced would be to do it a disservice. Opener ‘Beautiful, OH’ is a sparse, elegiac number underpinned by the gentlest swells, the cyclical pattern interspersed with irregular rises in tempo which never quite culminate in anything like a climax, playing like time passing across a landscape. This is followed by ‘The Carter Starter’, a track positively chirpy in comparison, though violin still sweeps across at various interludes to add a wistful dimension. ‘Still New To This’ creeps out of its beginnings with a playful edge. The cyclical motif utilised once more, though each iteration is altered and built upon so that a sense of organic life is imparted to the flow.

As highlighted in the next three tracks, much of Tiny Houses is pitched somewhere between insular and expansive, the echo and hum suggesting loneliness, though one which could apply to a crowded room or wide open plain. Put another way, the sadness Hour conjure could be either external or internal—a mindful person living within a lonely space, or a lonely person trying to feel more at home within an indifferent one. “This collection of songs explores the cracks and crevices of the spaces we occupy and call home,” the press release explains. “Each song balances the transcendence and claustrophobia that can come with sharing those spaces with others, and the decision, at times liberating, at times painful, to leave and start the process over again.”

With its more insistent percussion and experimental sound, ‘Town Meeting’ has a disorientating undercurrent, the intermittent field recordings of wordless babble adding to the perturbed vibe. Samples are a key part of the title track too, with subtle birdsong and the great rush of wind filling out the background of the simple acoustic sound. The ambient hiss of this track continues onto the grand, slow-burning ‘Doxology’—the most cinematic, post-rock inspired song on the record, bringing to mind talons’ minus the lyrics.

The album is closed by ‘From a Bus Window in Central Ohio, Just Before a Thunder Shower,’ and the sincere preciseness of the title is a good indicator of the sound. Again, the song emerges in gentle waves, a naturalistic patience that eventually rises into some of the most affirming moments on the record. As a finale, it feels like a message of sorts, Hour’s insistence that there can be value and meaning within the simplest of things, beauty within quiet calm, a home within any place, no matter how great or small.

Tiny Houses is out now on Sleeper Records and you can get it from Bandcamp. Also, Hour recently put out three videos which, speaking to The Line of Best Fit, Cormier describes as “attempts at capturing slices of three distinct artistic lives and visions, in process and imperfect, connected by songs from the latest Hour release.” Check them out on Youtube:

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The Meanest Creature Ever Known is Matthew Healy and Oliver Roditi from Edinburgh, and they have just put out their first album, You, Having Fun. Apparently the album is about “being alive and a bit sad.” As you might expect from that description, You, Having Fun is folky slowcore release that brings to mind quite a range of influences, from Phosphorescent to talons’

The album is available on a pay-what-you-can basis over at bandcamp.

Kississippi – I Can Feel You in My Hair Still

Kississippi is a sad girl from Phildelphia. She writes songs that are not mere catchy ditties, but instead full blown poetry. Stuff like this:

“You were swallowing god damning dogmas 
rough palmistry your hands could not align 
unsexed you borrowed callow spit, not lost 
no, looking for a space, just not mine 

redolent with skin of unknown 
unwary hands, nomadic ghost 
levied words from my spiteful throat 
understanding where my thoughts go 
you’d build a boat out of my bones.”

You can buy her album on Bandcamp for whatever you can afford.

James Junius – I’ll Hide Myself/Sleepers

Salt Lake City’s James Junius combines folk, ambient and jazz music to make atmospheric tracks “in an attempt to portray the world as he sees and the people he has met in various late night conversations out under the ferments.” Further details on Junius are few and far between, but you can download both tracks via Bandcamp.

Thad Kopec – Noble Neighbor

I stumbled across Thad Kopec’s cover of ‘Fake Empire’ a few days ago (and included it on our latest mix), and as luck would have it, he has a new(ish) album out right now. If folk music (with a touch of ambient music thrown in) complete with Biblical lyrics is your thing, Thad Kopec is probably your thing too. You can buy the album from Bandcamp, or grab it for whatever donation you can muster via Noisetrade.

Sea Wolf – Song Spell, No. 1: Cedarsmoke

The first release from Sea Wolf frontman Alex Brown Church’s Song Spell series, Cedarsmoke is a welcome reminder of how good Sea Wolf are. My listening relationship with the band is eerily similar to that of Jeremy over at HI54LOFI, and I am very much enjoying catching up with what I have been missing. There will be more Song Spell releases in between the ‘proper’ studio albums, so keep your eyes peeled and ears open for what Sea Wolf have to offer. Don’t make the same mistake we did.

Miss America By Wheary – All is Not Lost

Miss America by Wheary have been whetting our appetite over the past few weeks with singles from the EP All in Not Lost. Well you can stop dribbling and chow down on the full release. They make a brand of Americana that brings to minds acts like Jason Isbell and Water Liars, with an added experimental/ambient lilt which gives the whole thing a nice cinematic feel.

You can grab this one from Bandcamp too.

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