We introduced the record back in October with ‘De Algo Hay Que Morirse‘, a song about Craig’s habit of dreaming of accidently driving people to their doom which captures this spirit. “I used to drive people off of cliffs, bridges, etc to our deaths and wake up,” she describes. “When I dreamt the dream with my Argentine partner, he responded, ‘You have to die of something–De algo hay que morirse.'” As the song built from its gentle beginnings, it overcame the sense of loss and guilt. “I’m alive and I can’t believe my luck,” as Craig sings around the halfway mark, finding “a carefree joy in accepting her own mortality.”

‘Of Least Resistance’ follows a similar pattern. A song delivered half in English, half in Spanish where Weeper probe at the possibility of a freedom achieved via radical acceptance. The sense that a certain degree of surrender might encourage rather than limit agency. Allow one to shake free of the stifling attempt at control.

Working through such questions is central to the Weeper project. As though the camaraderie of the band members helps them extend a similar fondness and kindness to their selves. “I can’t seem to stop singing about being a friend to myself,” as Craig explains. “I have always been interested in what friendship is made of. As a band, Weeper has gotten to know itself through making this album—and like many bands, at the heart of what we do is a deep friendship.” The result is a tangible sense of trust and confidence which allows Weeper to push into difficult spaces—often within themselves. As highlighted on opener ‘Vipassana’, which confronts situations in which words perhaps fail, though music perhaps conveys what needs to be said.

All of this is aided by Weeper’s willingness to move with such fluidity. Be that between folk and rock styles, upbeat and melancholic moods, or indeed English and Spanish lyrics. “Weeper is down to move and be moved,” as their bio puts it, capturing the diversity of their aims. If the goal of their songs is to explore what friendship is made of, then the answer seems to be a little bit of everything. The fun moments, the dark, the times they show up for you and you them, and even those occasions where things are less than perfect. “Friends aren’t good or bad,” Craig as sings on the reflective pop of ‘Hard Friend’, “you show them what you have / and you give the benefit / of your doubt when you can.”

Weeper is out now via Ghost Mountain Records and available from Bandcamp.

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After the success of previous LP Cola, A Beacon School (AKA New York songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Patrick J Smith) has announced a return with brand new full-length yoyo later this year via Grind Select. The previous album was notable for its ability to combine bright pop with shoegaze and electronic elements, and lead single ‘Potion’ suggests the new record furthers this style. A song of sunny tones and pressing energy which provides all the lush textures of dream pop without sacrificing any of the detail or momentum. “‘Potion’ was written in one sitting back in 2019 and has been a live staple since then,” Smith explains. “It’s about feeling a burst of excitement about something new but also the fear that accompanies it.” Check out the video by Chase Wagner below:

yoyo is out on the 13th October 13 via Grind Select and you can pre-order it now.

Bo Milli – Making Friends

Be it the digital age dramas of ‘FOMO‘ or the climate anxiety of ‘Good Kid‘, Bergen-based songwriter Bo Milli is an artist dialled in to the pressing issues of the contemporary moment. Latest standalone single ‘Making Friends’ is no less immediate in its concerns, though its focus has a more timeless quality. A track which charts the rollercoaster ride of young life through the prism of a hectic night out, capturing a sense of both the carefree abandon and creeping loneliness of late nights, new faces and a sense of endless possibility.

‘Making Friends’ is out now and available from the Bo Milli Bandcamp page.

Cal Rifkin – Break My Heart

Based in Washington D.C., Cal Rifkin is the project of Erik Grimm (guitar/vocals), Keith Butler Jr. (drums) and Robin Rhodes (bass) who bonded over a “shared love for greasy Ledo’s pizza, early 90s baseball aesthetics, and rock ‘n’ roll music.” Late last month, the trio released Better Luck Next Time, a five-song EP that plays like a distillation of their signature style, namely hook-laden power pop with singalong choruses, vocal harmonies and enough noisy rock ‘n roll grit to keep the rock heads onside. There’s absolutely no filler across the record, but current favourite ‘Break My Heart’ might be the best introduction. It’s an energetic rock song that skirts the line between cool and sincere, complete with a ludicrously catchy chorus.

So come on and break my heart in two
Could be the best thing you could do

Isabel Crespo Pardo – la l​í​nea será

Based in New York, Isabel Crespo Pardo is a Latinx vocalist, improviser-composer and interdisciplinary artist. Combining music, visual art, text and performance, their work is a web of both composition and improvisation that sets out to explore (and then evolve in response to) what they describe as “the intra/interpersonal spaces they inhabit.” Later this month, Pardo will release an album, el rostro (des​)​cubierto, on Lobby Art Records, “forty minutes of wondering and wandering with hand over heart,” as they put it, “aching in solitude and giving and craving forgiveness.” Lead single ‘la l​í​nea será’ introduces the record’s sound, which sees Pardo joined by Afarin Nazarijou (qanun) Skyler Hill (electric guitar) and Seajun Kwon (acoustic bass) to create something that sounds somehow novel and timeless.

Katie Von Schleicher – Elixir

Since her last record Consummation released in 2020 on Full Time Hobby and Ba Da Bing Records, Katie Von Schleicher has released a handful of singles; first two b-sides from the album and then standalone piece ‘could’ which she described as “a fun foray into the world of strings.” Fast forward a couple of years and the Brooklyn-based artist has unveiled a new single, ‘Elixir’. Released via Durham, NC label Sipsman, the track is a duet with Aly Spaltro (aka Lady Lamb) and showcases a lighter, more playful side to Von Schleicher’s work, all droll delivery and cuttingly sincere lyrics. “How can I reach out to the poems that I’ve loved, embrace plain speech more,” Von Schleicher asks of the song’s inspiration, “and how, for just one goddamned time, can I bring my sense of humour into my music?”

my body with blood – Time and Again

‘Time and Again’ introduces the music of Asheville-based slowcore project, my body with blood. Together with Eli Whitlow (drums), Ivo Pestana (bass) and Cass Dayton (backing vocals), they make a melancholic but never morose sound, probing into the frustrations of a repeating pattern. “I lost a friend, his father tried / To bring me back to Jesus,” goes one of the verses. “The year will end / And I’ll count the ways that I’ve failed.” But there’s a certain sense of reflection to the tone, a perspective only gained by some modicum of distance, and with it the prospect that such cycles might at least be weathered if not entirely conquered.

It’s the same
Time, time and again
I’ve memorized the cycle
The cycle by now

You can find my body with blood on Instagram.

Pony Girl – Laff It Off

Following on from last year’s shadowy Enny One Will Love You, Pony Girl are returning later this year with new LP, Laff It Off, on Paper Bag Records. A release described as a sister record to the previous album, examining many of the same themes and situations but this time with a focus on the playful side of things. The title track is itself the twin of previous single, ‘Running in Circles‘, which we described as “a slow-burning pop number which slowly unravels into something more chaotic as another crushingly mundane day in work pushes the narrator to the brink.” The new single presents us with the same situation but reacts differently, a refusal in the face of the employment grindstone which emerges with bright humanity intact. “We first wrote [the refrain] ‘I don’t wanna be working every day’ as a lark,” the band explain, “but ultimately fell for it as a chant to get through the next shift.” Watch the video below produced by K Collective and directed by DELGATZ:

Laff It Off is out via Paper Bag Records on the 27th October and you can pre-order it now.

Quinn Devlin – Movie Scene

Back in April we featured ‘Lilian’, a single from Pennsylvania-born multi-instrumentalist Quinn Devlin, a track we described as “solo intimacy blown up into something communal, the sound’s careful richness developing into an affirming final chorus.” Devlin has since been picked up by Lorkin O’Reilly’s A For Effort Records, and plans to release full-length album Pair Of Threes later this year. In the meantime, new track ‘Movie Scene’ gives a taster of what’s to come. Its winding folk style paints a summer afternoon in all of its ideal fondness, channelling the country classics to invoke a nostalgically golden hue.

Pair Of Threes is out this September via A For Effort Records.

Stephen Steinbrink – Cruiser

With new album Disappearing Coin coming later this summer on Western Vinyl, Stephen Steinbrink has unveiled a brand new single, ‘Cruiser’. The record’s title refers to a magician’s trick Steinbrink saw on Youtube—where a coin is made to vanish in front of a viewing highschooler—speaking to the blend of ordinary and extraordinary which marks the songs. The new single aims to reach for the perspective of this amazed, awkward bystander. An attempt to write from the perspective of a character embedded within the “conservative defoliated suburban environments,” a landscape familiar to Steinbrink from his own youth, with Boy Scouts (AKA Boy Scouts) lending vocals too. As he continues:

This character feels he has to hide what he loves, hyper-vigilant for opportunities to mold himself into a shape that will be accepted by the people around him, independent because no one is paying attention. There are parts of myself in the character, but it’s mostly an amalgamation of friends I grew up with in the punk/DIY scene in Phoenix in the late 2000s before we all moved away.

Disappearing Coin is out on the 18th August via Western Vinyl and you can pre-order it now.

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This summer sees the release of Slight Return, a brand new CANANDAIGUA EP which pushes the boundaries of what such a sound can do. As highlighted by latest single, ‘Calm Through the Clearing’, a song written in memory of Deon Kay and Karon Hylton—two young Black men killed by police in De Leon’s home of Washington D.C. Occurring in the aftermath of the marches for justice that made up much of summer 2020, the deaths only reiterated how a disrespect of black and brown bodies is more than an aberration in certain men, rather some force ingrained in the national (or indeed Western) psyche.

Partly inspired by Black Arts hero Betye Saar, CANANDAIGUA overtly traces this flaw through the entire system of imperialist power, illuminating American violence as an inherent part of consumerism’s banal milieu. But running in parallel to this is a very personal, heartfelt plea. An expression of desperation captured in the lo-fi intimacy of the sound. The disbelief that we are still here, and heading nowhere fast.

When will the past be taken as such
A wretch of a beast, we stay in its clutch
The grip of the pain, its hers and its his
and all the while seeming to say,
“That’s just how it is”
When do we, become truly free
Delivered from oh such iniquities
The road remains long, and may outlast us all
one foot ‘fore the next till the day that we fall

Photographs by Farrah Skeiky, cover art by Maggie Famiglietti, 

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This month sees the release of Realm of the Warring Gods, the band’s debut EP to be released on This Could Go Boom! Illustrating the variety and depth of Rosie Cima’s influences, the title is derived from Buddhist cosmology, which they apply to contemporary society as a means to probe deeper into the metaphorical and spiritual lines below the surface. “Just before moving, I read a book that said the division between earth and the realm of the hungry ghosts—where desire and cravings and addiction go wild—is probably thinnest in places like Las Vegas,” Cima says, “and the realm of the warring gods—where egos clash and the will to power reigns supreme—is of course Washington, D.C.”

Rosie Cima supports these weighty themes with personal touches and emotional intimacy, using a poet’s eye for image and detail in order to evoke a sense of heart. So while pictures of warring gods conjure a sense of grandiosity, the album is in fact the opposite. A collection of songs rooted in the human experience, albeit one shaped by the larger outside forces of power.

Today we’re delighted to share ‘Waxwing’, the latest single from the record, and one of its most personal. “In March of 2019, a friend of mine was hit while riding her bicycle and died,” Cima explains. “It was the first time losing someone that close to me.” The song faces this loss with disarming honesty, from simple statements about the funeral (“the email said bright colours, I wore yellow / I hoped I wouldn’t be the only one”) to straightforward admissions of pain (“it wasn’t supposed to work out this way”), and circles around a line from Nabokov’s Pale Fire. “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain.”

But across its seven minute length, the song pushes beyond grief itself, digging into the love that underpins it. This is brought to life by both the swelling sound and Cima’s impassioned vocals, ebbing and flowing into a fiercely heartfelt climax. “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain,” is the opening line of a poem by the fictional John Shade, a sentence is completed in the following line. “By the false azure in the windowpane.” A bird killed, that is, by the illusion of sky and open space. But with ‘Waxwing’, Rosie Cima & What She Dreamed are not preaching a fear of freedom and the traps therein, rather an embrace of it. After all “I know everyone I have ever loved is someday going to die,” Cima sings. So why risk feeling alive?

Photo by Jake Godin

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“i’ll become a big oak tree and
let the beetles eat their way through me and
when they’re done you’ll carve your name
‘cause nothing can be like it was
before i met you and i felt your touch
(you laid your eggs in my stomach) “

“You can belong anywhere effortlessly like a sharpie mark or a cockroach”, begins ‘cockroach’, a song about about the constant need for attention and affirmation, about missing everyone in your life and trying to reconnect. ‘c’ is again suffused with a quiet sense of loneliness and isolation, this time swapping out the insect references in favour of avian metaphors, “we are feathered friends with different calls / I just can’t seem to decipher yours / and while I dream of your mouth/  you dream of heading south for the winter”.

‘suf’ is almost in slow motion, the vocals mumbled and sometimes barely there at all, before it takes off at the half way mark and things gain a little intensity, a song marked by the killer (quite literally) opening line of “all my stories involve dead animals”. The EP’s finale, ‘guts’, is about telling your deepest secrets to someone and feeling like “more and more of a monster, of a scary thing to harbour from”, about that irrational feeling of impurity about things that have happened in the past, and ultimately, about the all-redeeming qualities of friendship.

Get Tawl Friend on a name-your-price basis from the Tall Friend Bandcamp page.

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