A collaboration between long-time friends Katherine Dohan and David B. Greenberg, New Jersey‘s Ambrosia is a project based around spontaneity and sincerity. Their Tears EP draws on elements of bedroom pop, indie rock and psychedelia to realise this goal, their style as stirring as it is playful and full of affirming joy. With its upbeat rock rhythm, eponymous opener ‘Ambrosia’ shows the duo at their most energetic, while ‘I Saw Your Heart’ offers a more cryptic tone—an off-kilter pop sure to win over fans of acts like Dear Nora.

Billow – Swimming Pool

Based in Veselí Nad Moravou, Czechia, Billow is a lo-fi pop three piece led by Lenka Zborilova. Ahead of latest EP IV coming later this month on Z Tapes, they have unveiled a brand new single, ‘Swimming Pool’. Taking an altogether lighter tone from previous album III, the single is indicative of the intimate warmth of the new release, though its fond textures are shadowed by a pervasive melancholy too.

Crake – Winter’s Song

Exploring grief and cruelty through an evocatively cryptic style, Humans’ Worst Habits by Leeds-based outfit Crake take Nan Shepherd’s focus on the natural world and add the unsettling dark of Shirley Jackson. A collision of the organic and metaphysical which sees lead Rowan Sandle conjure a world both alien and very much our own. Such a paradox is just one of the complexities at work on the record, and is nicely captured by latest single, ‘Winter’s Song’. “That time I saw the moon rise / And I swore it was a sun set,” Sandle sings. An image remarkable or ominous, or perhaps both simultaneously.

Fontanarosa – OH ID

Are You There ?, the debut album of Lyon-based Fontanarosa, is coming next month on Howlin’ Banana Records and lead single ‘OH ID’ gives a glimpse into the excitable sound which awaits. Combining agitated post-rock angles with smooth pop energy, the band practices tight execution within an off-the-wall playfulness, leading to something of many moving parts that will get your parts moving too. Check out the video by Documavision below:

Are You There ? is out on the 18th March via Howlin’ Banana Records.

Frog Eyes – When You Turn on the Light

Despite supposedly splitting up four years ago and repurposing as Soft Plastics, Toronto-based indie rock stalwarts Frog Eyes are set to return this spring with a brand new record, The Bees. Lead single ‘When You Turn on the Light’ captures the idiosyncratic style lead Carey Mercer has made the Frog Eyes M.O. A song somehow both sprawling and understated, partially inspired by the time Mercer painted a fresco on the wall of his rented Vancouver apartment. “A hellish umber landscape” which poisoned the air with paint fumes and accelerated if not wholly caused Mercer’s subsequent eviction. Check out the video directed by Derek Janzen below:

The Bees is out via Paper Bag Records on the 29th April and you can pre-order it now.

Granny Smith – Out Of My Head

The recording project of Toronto‘s Jason Bhattacharya, Granny Smith is a one man band indebted to the classic pop of yesteryear. Latest track ‘Out of My Head’ is a bite-sized meditation on the dissociative episodes Bhattacharya faced after being put into a coma by a series of seizures. An unreal swirl of piano and dreamy vocals are underpinned by a variety of bass lines shooting off in different directions. “I wanted to express the feeling of having multiple narratives going on at once,” Bhattacharya explains, “trying to listen but your mind is telling you a thousand things.”

KMRU – shela

Under the moniker KMRU, Nairobi’s Joseph Kamaru has made a name crafting expansive yet intimate compositions through a layered variety of ambient, drone and field recording styles. A sound at once thoroughly immersive and thematically probing, examining the relationship between people and their surroundings, as well as change both spatial and temporal. Taken from latest release there was nothing in between, ‘shela’ exists within the slipstream of the present moment. An energetic bustle already haunted by its coming absence.

Melanie MacLaren – Deep Dark Sleep

Writing of single ‘Graveyard Shift‘ last summer, we described the music of Nashville-based songwriter Melanie MacLaren as “indebted to the past and the present without being beholden to either, managing to possess the timeless country spirit without sacrificing any sense of immediacy.” The final single from her EP Kill My Time, ‘Deep Dark Sleep’ continues this style. Its classic wistful tone rooted in the acoustic guitar, the sound made richer with washes of synths, all coalescing around the piercing clarity of MacLaren’s vocals.

Kill My Time is out now and you can find out more from the Melanie MacLaren webpage.

Ross Jenkins – Small House

Next month sees the release of Free All Day, the latest album Vancouver-based songwriter Ross Jenkins. Building upon the DIY style first shown on 2019’s Green EP, the records sees Jenkins joined by Ryan Jewell (drums) and Barry Walker Jr. (pedal steel) and making his richest, most considered songs to date. Spacious first single ‘Music is Sweet’ showed both the sharp writing and easy-going confidence which informs the new album, and latest track ‘Small Houses’ not only doubles down but opens up new avenues too with a subtle mysticism.

Sadurn – snake

Originally the solo project of Genevieve DeGroot, Philadelphia‘s Sadurn have evolved into a quartet and announced their debut album on Run For Cover Records. Recorded in a DIY studio the band created in an Airbnb in Pennsylvania’s Poconos Mountains, Radiator sees everything that was good about the lo-fi early Sadurn recordings polished up, dusted off and matured into a folk-inflected style that draws as much genuine emotion from its melodies as it does its introspective lyrics. Lead single ‘snake’ is a good example and you can check it out below:

Sooner – Thursday

Ahead of the debut album Days and Nights on Good Eye Records, Brooklyn’s Sooner have unveiled a brand new single, ‘Thursday’. The track is an encapsulation of the band’s style. A melding of dream pop lightness with heavier alt/shoegaze elements, the vocals of lead Federica Tassano proving equally malleable in their ability to pivot from soft croon to urgent energy as they chart a toxic relationship. Juxtaposition lies at the heart of the Sooner sound, and ‘Thursday’ is the perfectly bittersweet introduction.

Days and Nights is out via Good Eye Records on the 25th March and you can pre-order it from the Sooner Bandcamp page.

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The latter felt fully focused on endings, the sense of finality before new directions, so it is fitting that forthcoming record Visitations, out this autumn on Z Tapes, sees new possibilities come to fruition. Even if the directions are not necessarily those Howard set out wander. “I wanted to make a really quiet, droning record without any electronics; something slower and moodier than what I’ve done before, which didn’t really end up happening,” Howard explains. Because amid work on the record, his personal circumstances underwent significant changes for the better, something mirrored in the compositions that emerged. “I was writing and recording incessantly about this one thing, and ended up with something really focused and hopeful.”

Which isn’t to say the original intentions were shelved entirely. “There’s a lot of acoustic guitar,” he continues, “a choice that carried over from my original ideas for the project. I really wanted to make something more organic.” This desire extends further on several tracks, the live instrumentation extending to pianos, clarinets and sampled saxophone, though it is telling that Howard says these are the older songs on the record, as though the release serves as a kind of map for his progress from one frame of mind to another.

Lead single ‘Never Knows Best’ invites us inside this newfound optimism. With its combination of the organic and electronic, whatever nostalgia present in the soundscape is shaken up by the pressing drum line. The track as a whole feels like an attempt to push beyond the past, keeping a clear-eyed focus on the present and what comes next. So while the imagery is often strange and haunting, with references to angels and ghosts and beams of light, Howard refuses to take his eye from what is before him, and emerges with a steadfast will to progress.

and never knows best
whatever comes next
i’ve made up my mind
i’ll see things through
to the end of the line

Visitations is out on the 1st October via Z Tapes and you can pre-order it now from the Orchid Mantis Bandcamp page.

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This balance between intricacy and plain sincerity is a common strand throughout the record, the humble focus of the songs—from cats in alleys to pennies in draws—lifted to greater significance by the bright sound. On A Garden Everywhere You Go, Birdspotter transcend the ordinary and lift the small details of life into high meaning.

This month sees Birdspotter return with Gusty, a brand new full-length record again to be released with Z Tapes. Joined by drummer Braeden Reinoso, the band continue to develop the sound that emerged on A Garden, pushing into a newly realised and varied style to continue their growth. The evolution is clear from opener ‘Peaceful Man’, a song of melancholic yearning that retains the curiosity of the past album but finds darker and more threatening sights in the process. For the personal struggle and changes of direction take place within a confusing and hostile world, a backdrop against which one must try to do right. “And I start thinking to myself,” Gandolfo-Lucia sings, “Is there a point in this suffering? Am I just acting out my conditioning?”

Driving Fargo to Michigan.
Counting streetlights at dawn

When I see two men fighting to death on the shoulder of the interstate.
Goddammit I’m a peaceful man
But goddamn I gotta do what I can

There’s a juxtaposition of wonder and pessimism on ‘Water’ too, the rich and warm sound balanced by a sense of things crumbling. How can the powers that be—America, God—be capable of such good and such bad simultaneously? This mystery hovers over the record, from the sweeping electronics of instrumental ‘You Can Smile Again’ to the sincerely conflicted ‘Return’. “Well anything can happen,” Gandolfo-Lucia sings, and truly means it. From lost loves returning to environmental collapse.

‘Hey at the Party’ returns to the sad romance familiar to the genre, and Birdspotter commit to it earnestly, but it is difficult to shake the uncertainty introduced earlier on the record. There might be comfort in the warmth of others for now, the half-drunk wonder of a shared dawn, but there is no final answer there. The idea that anything can happen used to be a positive idea, the space of dreams coming true, but now even cherished moments are shadowed by the future, for with every dream sits a nightmare in wait.

Gusty is out now via Z Tapes and you can buy it now from the Birdspotter Bandcamp page, including on limited edition cassette.

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The pair have been writing on new material since the spring of 2019, and teamed up with producer/engineer Bradford Krieger at his Rhode Island studio to make their third full-length, Sun Into Flies. Continuing along the same path that they tread on last year’s Peeled, the new record again focuses on “climate change, interiority, and the complex relationship between the two,” but does so on an increasingly personal level. Sun Into Flies is preoccupied with this relationship between the personal and the global, how individual mistakes and decisions leak out into the surrounding ecosystem, what Eli Zeger describes in the blurb as “the ways in which greed poisons relationships and, ultimately, the surrounding world.”

Exploring such complex themes is no mean feat, and as with previous releases Joyer achieve it via a combination of atmosphere and imagery. Downbeat melodies and mumbled delivery combine with opaque but evocative writing, conjuring a lingering feeling of disquiet. The band cite filmmakers Luis Buñuel, Harmony Korine and Andrei Tarkovsky as influences, and the startling image of opener ‘Gond’ lives up to the sense of visual spectacle. The ordinary rendered surreal with careful placement and lingering focus.

“Rotten fruit hanging from the ceiling fan
broken glass from the TV,
spill your wine
it’s okay to feel alive”

Sun Into Flies sees Joyer expand their sonic palette too. Tracks like ‘Astray’ and closer ‘Even Here’ embrace poppier sensibilities, standing in contrast to ‘Concrete’ and its laboured, weary progression. There’s even an electronic element, the instrumental ‘Windswept’ glittering as synths shiver and ache behind a menagerie of percussive samples.

‘Forget’ is something of a halfway house, alternating between lulls of morose simplicity reminiscent of early Trace Mountains and relatively heavy rock sections, particularly the hectic catharsis of the opening. This sense of juxtaposition is key to the Joyer sound, and forms the spirit of Sun Into Flies. A record that combines the organic and inorganic, the natural and not, collecting these images and placing them side by side. A record for our time, in fact, a world driven to death by its own mortal fears, nature’s collapse all watched over by machines of loving grace.

The album is released tomorrow (28th August), and we have the pleasure of presenting it in full a day early:

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Medosch says the album is a tribute to and celebration of the “absurd yet strangely dignified world” that Berman created in his music and writing. As she goes on to say:

In every piece of his writing at any point you might stumble upon the most stunning view of the miraculous beauty of decaying American life. Every line had the same opportunity to blow your mind with it’s brutal and transformative honesty, achingly encompassing a landscape of tragedy-turned-comedy and vice-versa.

The roster of artists plays like a who’s who of contemporary bedroom pop, Florry and Fog Lake and Cormier joined by twenty four other artists who each provide their own unique and respectful take on one of Berman’s songs. There are too many to describe in detail, but rest assured that filler is nowhere to be found. Chad Maheny dials back the usual manic intensity of his Emperor X project with a version of Bright Flight’s ‘Horseleg Swastikas’, while Molly Drag provides a suitably melancholic take on ‘Suffering Jukebox’, a lament of a lonely artist playing to themselves in the corner of an otherwise happy room.

Greta Kline (of Frankie Cosmos fame) covers ‘Death Of An Heir Of Sorrows’ under the moniker Franz Charcoal, transforming The Silver Jews original into their characteristically simple and subtly emotive bedroom pop. Pickle Darling’s contribution is even more of a departure, turning ‘Nights That Won’t Happen’ into a stripped-back contemporary pop song. There are some louder moments too, notably as Joyer play ‘Night Society’ and The Funs share a wonderfully scrappy and lo-fi take on ‘Trains Across the Sea’. Final track ‘We Could Be Looking For the Same Thing’ by Hothead and the Baby also has a nice depth of sound, fittingly capturing Berman’s countrified indie rock.

All proceeds from the compilation will go to Shatterproof, an American nonprofit that takes an empathetic and evidence-based approach to combating the devastating effects of addiction. They work to remove the stigma around addiction, campaigning to Congress that it should be regarded like any other disease. It’s incredibly important work and a fitting tribute to the life and legacy of David Berman.

You can get Late Homework – The Songs of David Berman from the Dear Life Records Bandcamp page. And if you haven’t listened to Purple Mountains yet, now seems like a good time.

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Written over the course of a year which saw the brothers drift away from the musical style that defined their adolescence, the record is built on acoustic guitar and narrative song structures, resulting in a collection of songs that the band say explore the “transcendental strangeness of our relations to the people in our lives.” As they describe:

“As songwriters, we were molting: we had moved away from the twinkly riffs and inconsolable lyrics that constituted our adolescence, but were still trying to find a sound that felt natural to us. We started writing on acoustic guitars, adopted narrative song structures, explored the transcendental strangeness of our relations to the people in our lives. Over the course of a year, this sensibility grew into a catalog of songs, which became A Garden Everywhere You Go.”

The delicate beginning of ‘Oracle’ highlights the new feel, the airy emotion rising into the acoustic bedroom pop of single ‘Daze’. With a gentle opening reminiscent of a Drunk With Love Records release, the track grows in complexity as it advances, conjuring its own atmosphere in a way that will appeal to fans of acts like Bellows. This balance between intricacy and plain sincerity is a common strand throughout the record, the humble focus of the songs—from cats in alleys to pennies in draws—lifted to greater significance by the bright sound. On A Garden Everywhere You Go, Birdspotter transcend the ordinary and lift the small details of life into high meaning.

The modesty of lyrics extend to their substance too, with many of the tracks having no more than a few simple verses, and sometimes a lot less. Take ‘Red Rover’, which takes six lines and weaves an entire lived moment, or the even more succinct ‘Sunbathing in November’, a song that utilises three short lines, wringing every piece of feeling from eight simple words.

one window open
house a mess
nobody home

Which is not to say Birdspotter do not try their hand at painting a complete picture. As its title suggests, ‘Going on a Nice Walk’ is about strolling around a city with a loved one “when spring splits the winter open.” It has a wide-eyed sense of wonder, bright guitar pealing softly behind earnest vocals, the relatively verbose lyricism allowing the curious mood to flourish, which could be said to stand for the spirit of the record as a whole. “I am learning something,” Gandolfo-Lucia sings, “I am learning something good.”

A Garden Everywhere You Go is out now via Z Tales and you can get it from the Birdspotter Bandcamp page.

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This year sees the release of Barlow Hill, a second full-length Swim Camp album via Z Tapes, and this sense of emotion is now the cornerstone of the record. The album was engineered and produced by Watter, at the Headroom Studios in Philly, and Morris cites his influence as vital to the final atmosphere of the album. “[Watter was] the key that allowed me to enter into this sort of emotionally muddy world,” he explains, “while maintaining a structural narrative that made sense in a larger context.”

We’re delighted to be able to share the first single, ‘Pretty Bird’. With violin from Molly Germer (who played on Alex G’s most recent record), the song’s mood is striking, executing a deft balance between lonely melancholy and a kind of quiet triumph. “The song is kind of about moving on from being in love with something or someone in a relatively unhealthy way,” Morris explains. “In the narrative of the song it’s all about having the correct perspective on the things in your life and how cathartic it can be to work through this stuff.”

The track comes complete with a video from the ever-impressive Bob Sweeney, where the themes of perspective and moving on are explored further. Rendered in a lovely lo-fi tone, the film sees Morris carry a mysterious box through the woods and eventually bury it in a ritual of letting go. That the box’s contents remain cryptic lends the whole thing further metaphorical weight, standing in for whatever load a person might need to shed in order to find something like peace.

Barlow Hill will be released by Z Tapes and you can pre-order it from the Swim Camp Bandcamp page.

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Howard is back with a brand new record, Yellow House, out now on Z Tapes. The album feels like a logical progression from his past releases, developing and expanding his aesthetic into its brightest, most compelling form. “I conceived Yellow House as a response to (and continuation of) my previous work,” Howard confirms, “driven by an unshakable feeling that I was in the position to do everything that album did better and more cohesively, and that the loose narrative thread connecting these last few albums (Flashbulb Memory onward) continued to extend directly into the new songs I was writing.”

Indeed, Howard sees Yellow House as something of a companion piece to his most recent album, Kulla Sunset, which came out last march. The records are sisters in that respect, born of the same creative influences and circumstances, and the shared DNA is apparent from the very first song. Like the tracks on Kulla Sunset, ‘lanterns’ feels indebted to the past, a representation of or longing for times and places now sealed in memories, inaccessible save for the need to remember.

when you work this out
i’ll help you burn it down
inside an empty house
i know only embers now

Where Yellow House departs from, or at least pushes beyond Kulla Sunset is in its thematic focus. Where the previous record focused on the influences particular memories have on not just the time in question but our entire view of the world, Yellow House delves further into the esoteric folds of the brain. Both the samples and lyrical imagery are suggestive of a supernatural or metaphysical position, where time is not some ever lengthening chain of events but something far more plastic and strange. Tracks such as ‘rift’ and ‘phantom limb’ call into question the authority of the tangible world, probing into the grey areas beyond where all is not as it seems.

As such, the oneiric consistency of these tracks is not some adolescent lesson in performative weirdness, but rather an attempt to engage with reality beyond its strict physics. If the lo-fi guitar and tape hiss backing of ‘porch song’ lends a surreal edge, then it is only a surreality born of Howard’s own experiences, where coincidence and happenstance prove a little too convenient, and strange connections form between moments in his life. “Last year, an emblem of my childhood, my grandparent’s yellow house in Sweden, was sold and repainted, forever altered,” he explains, though, far from being relegated to the deep recesses of his brain, the memory found a way to haunt the present and leave a sense of connect and logic to seemingly random events:

As if predestined, that same year my friends and significant other rented out a new yellow house – in physical terms, this is where I spent the last year writing and recording this album (and parts of the last), but in a larger sense, the yellow house represents the synchronous, cyclical patterns the trajectories of our lives seem to adhere to: nothing is ever truly here, and nothing is ever truly gone – leaving and returning, reoccurring.

Yellow House is out now via Z Tapes and you can get it from the Orchid Mantis Bandcamp page.

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The EP opens with ‘Pretty Bad, Man’, which serves as a great introduction—an indie rock song with some sunny pop thrown in for good measure. Lyrically, the track exists in that space after a breakup, and although our narrator seems to be doing well (“My skin is cleared and I am cured / I’m getting ten hours of sleep at night”), there’s still a lingering sense of yearning.

‘Say No’ is equally fun, despite its talk of faked suicides and graveside flowers, while ‘The Princess and the Queen’ offers a twist on the lovesick pop trope. ‘Clueless Vibes’ is tinged with disappointment, a lean indie pop song where van Kampen’s lines are laced with previous hurt, before finale ‘Somewhere’ looks back on a tumultuous relationship and forward to a better future.

“Somewhere
It’s better
Somewhere”

You can get Dinner Party on cassette via Z Tapes or a name your price download from the Elsa Lester Bandcamp page.

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‘i can see’ throws us straight into gorgeous bully’s signature lo-fi pop. It’s catchy and fuzzy and reassuringly DIY, the perfect introduction to a band that’s been consistently making home-recorded pop gems for a while now. The chorus is the first of many which expresses discontent (“I can see a thousand places I would rather be”), buts it’s somehow heartening rather than miserable, an endearing trait that’s present across the entire album.

Lots of the songs are short and sharp, shots of a super-sweet mixture of punk sloppiness and pop sensibility. Take for example ‘in my defence’, a sub-two minute blast of slapped drums and catchy vocal lines, or ‘i can’t make it right’, a bummed out pop song that’s infectious despite its pessimistic tendencies, the wordless ooh’d chorus adding a dash of sunny garage pop.

“Days are such a drag
enough is all you have
I sit up all night
i can’t make it right”

‘Time’ is all surfy guitars that defy the sleep-encrusted lyrics, while ‘oh why’ is an anthem for the lonely kids, the stupidly catchy chorus of “oh why am I alone again? Oh why am I alone?” guaranteed to be in your head hours later. This is followed by the title track, which signals a change to Washboard Abs-style acoustic bedroom pop songs, the first of a few that presumably were to make up the great blue EP. The gloomy atmosphere takes over on these final tracks, gentle guitar gathering like dark rainclouds, the vocals soft and subdued. The vibe shows another side to gorgeous bully, stripping back the sardonic punk and the fun pop to uncover the disarmingly tender core, something perhaps most apparent in final track ‘in my life’:

“Always been a joke, never stayed afloat
in my life, and when I go you will be there
yeah you will be there waiting for me”

gorgeous bully make music that doesn’t shy away from the pains and banalities of 21st century living, existing on the self-deprecating and misanthropic end of the spectrum. But somehow things remain catchy and fun. They’re a band who understand the power of a catchy tune beneath lo-fi fuzz, who are able to make the weird kids feel great and dance around, at least for a little while.

You can get great blue now as a name-your-price download from the gorgeous bully Bandcamp page, or on a nicely designed cassette via Z Tapes.

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