ALBUM BUNDLE: All online ticket buyers can redeem a free download or physical version of the upcoming MAX album. The email will be sent by Sony RED and will go to the same email address that was used when purchasing tickets.

MAX is a New York City born pop-soul singer, actor & dancer, known for his powerful acrobatic tenor which commands attention. His devoted fanbase and original voice has given him an incredibly strong social media presence with over 1.2 million followers on YouTube, 400,000 followers on Twitter and over 940,000 likes on Facebook.

2015 was a banner year for MAX -- in February, he signed with Pete Wentz's DCD2 Records and in March, he released the single "Gibberish" featuring Hoodie Allen. The song was one of the selected tracks featured by YouTube for the 2015 YouTube Music Awards alongside songs by Ed Sheeran & Charli XCX, and its groundbreaking music video accumulated over 4.5 million views in just one week and has racked up more than 12 million views to date. Additionally, he was one of MTV's 2015 Artists to Watch Summer Class list, named Elvis Duran's Artist of the Month (June), KISS-FM 's Artist of the Week, performed on NBC's TODAY show, and was nominated for Best Breakthrough Artist and Original Song for the 2015 Streamy Awards. MAX spent the summer on the road as a featured performer on the Boys of Zummer tour with Fall Out Boy & Wiz Khalifa before releasing his DCD2 Records-debut EP Ms. Anonymous in September. In October, MAX embarked on his first headline tour across the U.S., which included multiple sold out dates. A lifelong entertainer, music is not his only talent -- MAX starred in the Beach Boys biopic, "Love & Mercy," as Van Dyke Parks.

Currently, MAX is celebrating the release of his newest album, Hell's Kitchen Angel.

22-year-old Norwegian artist Jakob Ogawa kick-started his career in 2017 with “All Your Love” that quickly became a tastemaker favourite. Later that year, his anticipated debut EP Bedroom Tapes came out. The EP received critical acclaim both by domestic and international media, establishing Jakob as a strong name in the international music scene.

Jakob’s ethereal vocals make for a blissful contrast with the earthiness of his production, and it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that he is set to have a breakout year. He was selected as an artist to watch in 2018 by The FADER, leading to festival spots at Lollapalooza in Argentina and Roskilde, and a headline tour in GSA. Despite only releasing three tracks in 2018, the year was an incredible redemption for his career, experiencing exceptional streaming growth.

AMERICAN AQUARIUM
In the lush tobacco fields of North Carolina where BJ Barham was raised, people work hard. Families stay nearby, toiling and growing together. BJ loves those farms and his tiny Reidsville hometown, but he had to run off and start American Aquarium, a band now beloved by thousands. BJ couldn’t stay. But he couldn’t really leave, either: he’s still singing about the lessons, stories, and lives that define rural America––and him.

“I moved to the big city to go to college and fell in love with music,” BJ says. “But half the songs on our record are about small towns––little pieces of my childhood. I’ve had moments where it turns out a piece of broken English my father repeated twice a week is the most accurate way to say something. So I put it in a song.”

American Aquarium’s seventh studio album Things Change offers the band’s finest collection of folk infused Southern rock-and-roll to date. Stacked with BJ’s signature storytelling––always deeply personal but also instantly relatable––the record questions and curses current events, shares one man’s intimate evolution, and leaves listeners with a priceless gift: hope.

“In my early 20s, I was not as hopeful,” BJ says. “Now, as I’m getting ready to become a father, I think I have to be hopeful––especially with the situation our country is in now. For her sake, I have to be positive.” He pauses. “Her” is his daughter, due in the spring of 2018. BJ adds, “Being self-aware has always been a blessing and a curse. But that’s what’s always made my songwriting relatable to people. I don’t hold back. I’m almost too honest.”

BJ’s candor has fueled American Aquarium’s runaway appeal, visible most clearly in consistently sold-out shows across the country and throughout Europe – between 200 and 250 dates a year. Much has changed for the band and BJ since their acclaimed last effort, Wolves. In 2017, every American Aquarium member save BJ quit the group. American Aquarium has featured about 30 players since BJ founded the outfit in 2006, and while each member has left indelible marks, the band has always been anchored by the literary songs and sometimes roaring, sometimes whispering, drawl of BJ Barham. BJ’s personal life also underwent seismic shifts: He got sober. He got married. Soon, he’ll be a dad.

Featuring a new band lineup that includes Shane Boeker on lead guitar, drummer Joey Bybee, bassist Ben Hussey, and Adam Kurtz on pedal steel and electric guitar, as well as a reinvigorated frontman in BJ, Things Change is American Aquarium’s first release on a label after selling thousands of records on their own. “As an artist, your goal is for the newest thing you do to be better than the last. You’re slowly whittling away the bullshit to try and get to the truth,” BJ says. “With this album, I learned how to cut some of that fat so that it’s just truth. It’s our best record.”

Recorded at 3CG Records in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Things Change was produced by Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter John Fulbright and features cameos from Americana standouts including John Moreland and Jamie Lin Wilson. Brazen album opener “The World is on Fire” is a richly layered rock-and-roll anthem that documents BJ and his wife’s stunned reaction to the last presidential election. Emotional and conversational, the song taps into widespread feelings of confusion and fear: “She said, ‘What are we going to do? What’s this world coming to?’ / For the first time in my whole life, I stood there speechless.” But what begins as despair builds into defiant faith, as BJ growls a call to action to cap off one of his favorite songs he’s ever written. “I’m complaining about the state of things, and then the third verse almost serves as a challenge to myself: hey, you’re in charge of another human being. You can create change,” he says.

Driving rock-and-roller “Crooked + Straight” explores the small-town consequences of questioning religion, and the tightness of family in the face of one member’s rejection. His father’s advice anchors the song. “I come from a blue-collar family. I’m the only one who didn’t go into farming. I learned if you want something, you have to go out and take it. You can’t expect anything from anybody,” BJ says. “You can only go out there and work harder. My dad always said you can outwork anybody else.” Love for hard work and the people who carry it out appears repeatedly throughout Things Change. Guitar-heavy “Tough Folks” is a snarling ode to those with dirt under their fingernails, while bass- and pedal-steel-infused “Work Conquers All” spins a tale in praise and pursuit of Oklahoma’s state motto.

The album’s love songs are the kind of achingly beautiful that only comes with maturity and a willingness to expose one’s own flaws. Haunting “Shadows of You” recalls a lover’s flight as the protagonist longs for what he let get away. Gorgeous “Till the Final Curtain Falls” celebrates loyalty and pledges endless devotion. The moving title track takes an often doleful topic––people’s tendency to change––and turns it on its head, tracing BJ’s personal growth and recognizing his now-wife’s steadfast love.

BJ’s other two favorite tracks are album standouts. Moving “When We Were Younger Men” addresses the break-up of American Aquarium head on. As BJ professes love for his former bandmates over stripped down acoustic guitar, his voice is honeyed and deep. “It’s an open letter to five guys who I spent eight years of my life with seeing the entire world,” BJ says. “I think anyone who has ever had to walk away from a friendship or has had somebody walk away from them will relate to the song.” Stunner “One Day at a Time” is self-perceptive and vulnerable, detailing BJ’s battles with himself. Even within his career full of well-written gems, the song is a towering accomplishment.

“At the end of the day, if you’re not writing songs to affect other people’s lives, you’re in it for the wrong reasons,” BJ says, reflecting on the new album, where he’s been, and where American Aquarium is headed. “Money may come and go. You may never get fame. But if you sit down and write songs to affect people, you can do it your whole life and be happy.”

ALEX LAHEY - THE BEST OF LUCK CLUB
On her sophomore LP, The Best of Luck Club, 26-year-old Melbourne, Australia native Alex Lahey navigates the pangs of generational ennui with the pint half-full and a spot cleared on the bar stool next to her. Self-doubt, burn out, break-ups, mental health, moving in with her girlfriend, vibrators: The Best of Luck Club showcases the universal language of Lahey's sharp songwriting, her propensity for taking the minute details of the personal and flipping it public through anthemic pop-punk. Lahey's 2017 debut I Love You Like a Brother encases Lahey's knack for writing a killer hook and her acute sense of humor delivered via a slacker-rock package and, in a way, The Best of Luck Club picks up where that record left off. Lahey co-produced the album alongside acclaimed engineer and producer Catherine Marks (Local Natives, Wolf Alice, Manchester Orchestra), and dives headfirst into a broader spectrum of both emotion and sound through polished, arena pop-punk in the vein of Paramore with the introspective sheen of Alvvays or Tegan & Sara. Here, Lahey documents the highest highs and the lowest lows of her life to date. After a whirlwind of global touring in support of breakout debut I Love You Like a Brother, Lahey wrote the bulk of her follow-up in Nashville during 12-hour days of songwriting. There, she found the inspiration for The Best of Luck Clubís concept: the dive bar scene and its genuine energy."Whether you've had the best day of your life or the worst day of your life, you can just sit up at the bar and turn to the person next to you - who has no idea who you are - and have a chat. And the response that you generally get at the end of the conversation is, 'Best of luck, so The Best of Luck Club is that place.

Devastatingly powerful vocals and retro-rock guitar, with lyrics that run the gamut between vulnerable to all-out venomous: Jocelyn & Chris Arnd’s music has matured into what can only be described as a throwback to pure, authentic rock. Together with their band, Jocelyn & Chris perform coast to coast, including stops at The Sundance Film Festival, Milwaukee Summerfest, and a main-stage performance at Mountain Jam Music Festival this past summer, all while balancing college at Harvard University. Their recordings feature guests including G. Love, Cory Wong of Vulfpeck, Gov’t Mule’s Danny Louis, and keyboardist/Jade Bird producer David Baron.

In December, Jocelyn & Chris broke into the Billboard Triple A Top 40 with their single “Red Stops Traffic.”

Their team includes publicist Rebecca Shapiro and Andrea Evanson at Shore Fire Media, label services with Bridge Road Entertainment, and radio promotion specialists including Meg MacDonald and Rene Magallon at M:M Music.

Thunder Follows The Light, Jordan Lee’s ninth release as Mutual Benefit—one that finds balance between chaos and grace, beauty and devastation—began at night in rural New England. “There was a huge storm, so we decided to sit on the patio and listen,” remembers Lee. This patient and prismatic music, similarly, is so much about listening: to history, to the earth, to the person beside you, to yourself in a world that would prefer you didn’t.

“I became transfixed by the time in between the lightning and thunder. The silence thick with inevitability,” he continues. “While I was writing the record, everywhere I looked, I saw massive societal strain… from human-influenced ecological disasters to an openly white supremacist U.S. president to corporate greed exploiting people’s physical and emotional lives in new ways.” He wondered if the tumult we see today might even be just the initial strike of lightning, the warning sign before an imminent time more thunderous, more catastrophic.

Thunder Follows The Light contemplates the ongoing destruction of the outer world and how it shapes the storms of our inner ones. There are meditations on collective struggle, death, rebirth, reasons to believe it’s worth the fight. Following a pair of celebrated full-lengths, 2016’s Skip A Sinking Stone and 2013’s Love’s Crushing Diamond, Thunder was largely recorded by the band between Brooklyn and Boston and again mixed by Brian Deck.

It’s pretty easy these days to imagine the end times; it’s harder to imagine something different. For spiritual guidance, the songwriter turned to those who have done that work, like journalist Naomi Klein and sci-fi author Octavia Butler—thinkers with the apocalyptic imagination to see where things could go horribly wrong, but the compassion and diligence to outline routes towards justice. “If love is an armor, can we love stronger?” Lee sings, voice swelling, before painting an image of winds rising, clouds gathering, ions colliding—chaos on a molecular level.

For nearly a decade, Lee—who grew up in Ohio and is currently based in New York—has crafted pop experiments blending orchestral instrumentation and ambient electronic sounds, taking the role of songwriter, arranger, producer and multi-instrumentalist. Thunder is a testament to the power of music as a space for collective processing and emotional response. Like his past releases, it is highly collaborative, featuring many returning players—violinist Jake Falby, guitarist Mike Clifford, percussionist Dillon Zahner—as well as first-time contributors—vocalist Johanne Swanson (of Yohuna), drummer Felix Walworth (of Told Slant), saxophonist Gabriel Birnbaum (of Wilder Maker).

Early single “New History” is a rejection of unjust historical revisionism. “People in power benefit greatly from a general lack of historic memory in the US,” Lee says. The album’s truest folk song, with twangy harmonica and slide guitar, it came to him while spending time in Appalachian Ohio, where his parents grew up (“where rust and ivy intertwine / where past and present remain bound”)—a region previously devastated by coal mining, and decades later is now fighting similar battles over fracking. Later, “Come To Pass” similarly looks to the past for clarity on the present: “I think it’s better not to grieve for a fiction of how things used to be,” he sings, swiftly knocking down the idea that America was ever great, ever not a site of immense daily struggle.

“Thunder Follows,” informed by a book called The Hidden Lives of Trees, is a grand wondering about collective action based on wisdom gleaned from the ways different species of trees and mushrooms share resources to help each other survive. It pays mind to the tiny things happening underground upon which all else is built. “Even when the saplings bend / their roots will still expand,” he sings, building into a climax of sorts for this album: “Oh thunder, a warning shot, a bomb dropped elsewhere, how can we keep waking up the same?”

“Storm Cellar Heart,” an ode to taking shelter, the fraught impulse to hide from the loudness of the outside world, is more of a long question than an answer: “Is it storms that help make the heart grow?” Elsewhere, there are odes to the poetry and cycles of the natural world: in rotting logs, fallen trees, and the subtle musical poignancy of cicadas awaking, regenerating and leaving their shells behind (“Shedding Skin”); and in how the mountains play tricks with the light along North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Parkway (“Mountain’s Shadow”).

There is existential sadness in these moments of the Earth’s beauty juxtaposed with lines about human reluctance to hear the melting planet’s pleas for help: “That moon can pull and those waves can break, but we rarely listen,” Lee and Swanson sing together, solemnly, amid lines about rising tides, lands flooding, mountains toppling on “Waves, Breaking.” It’s the most musically chaotic, preceding the stark “No Dominion,” a somber piano ballad about the equally epic but often invisible storms that rage inside a person, written directly to one person coping with mental illness.

“Nightingale Sing” roughly recalls an Aesop’s fable, “The Nightingale,” where a king tries to capture a beautiful singing nightingale, eventually losing interest, so it escapes. “There’s more to it,” Lee says. “But I guess the moral is don’t make art for kings, make it for yourself.” Luckily, Lee’s aggressive pursuit of art-making for himself is also empathetic and outward-facing, looking both to the past and the future with warmth and hopefulness. “Peace is more than just a season coming ‘round again,” he sings on two different songs—and the emphasis seems intentional: suggesting that harmony of the mind and the heart do not just transpire but must be worked for, growing from deep-rooted foundations. In the world that birthed Thunder Follows the Light, it feels like medicine.

Joe Hertler & The Rainbow Seekers will make a sprightly young groove doctor out of anyone. With spectacular energy pulsating from every member of the band, the Rainbow Seekers could illuminate the very chambers of Heaven. Lead singer Joe Hertler splashes through lyrical puddles of golden rain, leaving his audience wearing flowery crowns and bubbling smiles. A ride on the Rainbow will take you across the mountains of Motown, through the fjords of folk, over the archipelagos of Americana, and-at last-into a funky firth, where only the fiercest of friendships can be found.

The Rainbow Seekers began their historic quest 8 years ago, revolving around the pure, unadulterated songwriting of their fearless leader, Joe Hertler. Ryan Hoger was the first among the Seekers to find this lonely songsmith and recognize the twinkling magic in his beard. The young boy gave up all his earthly possessions (besides his guitar, of course) and became the first disciple of the Rainbow. With this, the core of the Rainbow was thereby established, and it didn’t take long for the Rainbow Seekers to continue their expansion. Multi-instrumentalist and notable auxiliary percussion maestro Micah Bracken journeyed from the bowels of Atlantis when he heard tell of the Rainbow, and the earth trembled as saxophonist and all-around badass Aaron Stinson descended from Olympus on a golden rainbow of his own. Then came thunder from the depths of space and as it picked up the bass, a soft exhale escaped the lips of every princess within a hundred moons, “Bambis,” they cooed. All the while, on the other ends of the earth, a young boy was hard at work, honing and sharpening his sticks for the day that the Rainbow would come his way, and when it landed at his door, Ryan McMahon climbed aboard.

Since the early days, their quest has brought them across the nation and upon such noble gatherings as Bonnaroo, Electric Forest, and Summer Camp. As you'll know if you've seen the band, seeking the proverbial Rainbow is all about the live performance. "The live show is the purpose of the band. This is why we make music. Playing music is a symbiotic process, the crowd is as much a part of it as the musicians. We give as much energy and love as we can and we can feel that coming from the crowd as well" says Hertler. "We believe that performance is not a High Art operation, and that you should do anything you can to ensure that the crowd is having a good time. From piñatas to confetti, to fog, to flowers, to drum solos, to strobe lights, to Thor, to sword battles-literally anything goes.”

If you're still reading this, at least one thing is true: The Rainbow Seekers have been waiting for you. If you'll only let them, they will shake the dust from your wildest expectations. They will roar into your life with rapturous frequencies, exuberant tone, and a joyfulness of purpose that has truly become a rare sight on stage. Join them in their celebration, and they will take you on a never-ending journey to a place you'll never be able to describe in words.

Sheer Mag’s dizzying rise initiated in 2014, when the Philadelphia band self-released the first of three 7-inches and started playing the Northeastern DIY circuit. Ironically, the music stood apart because it sounded so familiar. Indebted to ‘70s arena rock, power-pop, and proto-metal, Sheer Mag’s songs reminded a lot of us of the music we grew up with, but maybe couldn’t relate to because it was big, brash, and unapologetically macho. Sheer Mag reclaimed some of that energy without perpetuating the toxicity. On their debut album, Need to Feel Your Love (2017), the band surveyed their contemporary political landscape through the lens of history. Singer Tina Halladay transported herself back to the 1969 Stonewall Riots, denounced redlining practices that undermine the popular vote, and paid homage to White Rose activist Sophie Scholl. On paper, it’s a mouthful, but accompanied by guitarist/lyricist Matt Palmer, guitarist Kyle Seely, and bassist/producer Hart Seely, those songs became hook-laden rallying cries.

Two years later, Sheer Mag have returned with their sophomore album A Distant Call. They’re still writing about surviving our current hellscape, but this time around, the politics get extra-personal. The album verges on being a concept piece, and the protagonist resembles Halladay herself. The songs document a particularly alienating time in her life when she was laid off from a job. Broke and newly single, her father (with whom she had a fraught relationship) passed away, leaving her with more wounds than felt possible to heal.

“We’ve been waiting to write these songs since we started the band and we were able to take these experiences and build a story out of them,” Halladay says. Palmer adds: “We don’t want people to be bogged down by pretension or theory. You don’t need to have read Das Kapital to know that capitalism is terrible. A Distant Call makes an argument for socialism on an anecdotal level. We’re talking about how late capitalism alienates and commodifies whatever is in its path without using the term ‘late capitalism.’” Palmer and Halladay’s new approach to lyricism extended to the recording process, too. Once the Seely brothers had laid down the tracks, Halladay recorded vocals with producer Arthur Rizk (Power Trip, Code Orange) as opposed to on an 8-track, which was the band’s preferred method on previous releases.

A Distant Call opens with Halladay’s measured scream before “Steel Sharpens Steel” kicks in. It’s a prologue that foreshadows our protagonist’s journey from feeling down-and-out and destitute to self-actualization. “It’s a chain reaction/ When you turn the other cheek/ Remember if you’re looking for action/ And you’re feeling dull and weak,” Halladay snarls on the chorus, channeling Judas Priest over the boot-stomping rhythm section. The story really gets started on “Blood from a Stone,” when we learn that our protagonist’s SNAP application was declined, and she’s “living check-to-check.” It’s heavy power-pop so sleek it gleams. “We had some more soul and dance songs on the last record and we’ll probably return to that at some point,” Palmer says. “But on this record we wanted to focus on making straight-up rock music.”

That isn’t to say that A Distant Call doesn’t draw from a wide-range of influences within rock. The twinkling lap steel guitar on “Silver Line” sounds-off to Fleetwood Mac, showcasing a softer side to Sheer Mag. The lyrics find our protagonist in a desperate state, self-medicating with alcohol. When she recognizes her own predicament in the headlines, though, her depression eases off momentarily. “Well there’s a picket line down in West Virginia/ The bosses caved but wildcats continue/ Today my job said to not come back/ So now I’m striking for nothing with no contract,” Halladay sings. In the next song, the jangling “Hardly to Blame,” our protagonist is dumped by her partner. Heartbroken, she wanders the streets of Philadelphia, which has turned into “a puzzle” that she “can’t solve ‘cause it’s not true.” On “Cold Sword,” she snaps back to reality upon learning of her father’s death. Forced to reconcile with familial trauma, our protagonist asks: “How could I learn to love/ From somebody so abusive?” The question goes unanswered but the undeniably catchy chorus provides some form of catharsis.

“I tend to think of ‘Cold Sword’ as the fulcrum that the album pivots on. The protagonist recognizes that this is the only life she has, and in spite of the pain and suffering she experiences, she starts to want to make the most of it,” Palmer says. The bright melody of “Chopping Block” brings levity, as Halladay sings, “Between the parties there’s no light/ We need workers to unite/ We can decide to have another world/ But we’re gonna have to fight.” Our protagonist’s confidence blooms on “The Right Stuff” when she addresses anyone who might think her weight is concerning: “If you’re worried about my health/ Shut your mouth and keep it to yourself.” In recognizing that beauty standards are a capitalist ploy designed to keep women imprisoned, our protagonist starts down a road to self-acceptance, and maybe even love.

The conflicts our protagonist comes up against coalesce on “The Killer.” The system at-large has been the culprit all along, and she recognizes that rich politicians running the country have more control over her life than she does. They’re “shaking hands on the senate floor” and brandishing their hypocrisy like a weapon: “He’s got you right between the eyes/ Waving the flag for human rights.” It’s the penultimate track on the album, and it best exemplifies Sheer Mag’s growth from those nascent three EPs to now; the production is razor-sharp, and the gang vocal motifs are as playful as they are ferocious. There’s a glimmer of hope in the struggle, and Sheer Mag close the album with a message of resilience. “They wanna see us fall,” Hallday sings, “But I hear a distant call.” In the background, a faint whisper beckons from just outside the realm of possibility. “Keep on running,” it urges.

It’s rare that a band founded on pushing sonic boundaries is conscious of not alienating the listener. In the case of Denver-based rockers, Flaural, their music feels like the spoils of deep exploration, brought back down to earth for all to observe in traditional rock outfit form.

Flaural / 'flôr?l / is the unified sum of four equal parts. The hypnotic pulse of Nick Berlin’s kraut rock drum grooves crystalize as the backdrop atop which sprawls the band’s ethereal art-pop-songwriting. Connor Birch’s expansive synths and keys, the unique virtuosity and aggression of Noah Pfaff’s guitar playing, and the resonant croon of Colin Johnson’s vocals and driving bass lines all coalesce into experimental psych rock that warmly invites the uninitiated listener into the unknown.

Following a string of EPs — 2015’s Thin King and 2016’s Over Imaginary Cigarettes — Flaural’s debut LP, appropriately titled Postponement, has been three years in the making. Over those three years, the band has endured the struggles of being an unsigned touring act while playing countless shows across the United States and experiencing both communal growth and personal loss. Early pieces of Postponement were initially recorded while touring through the Bay Area at the now defunct Animal Room Studio, but the album arrangements didn’t begin to take form until the band settled back in Denver and linked up with close friend and producer / engineer James Barone (Beach House, Tennis). Over the course of the next year and a half, the band found pockets of time to finish the recordings. Time becoming a central theme of the album as a whole.

On March 27th, 2017, frontman Collin Johnson’s father passed away after a long struggle with ALS. The album cover serves as an homage to his passing — an image resembling a clock with hands that read 3:27 — and the album’s first single, “The Thinker,” tells the story of his illness. “The Thinker” was originally written following his father’s diagnosis, with Johnson singing, “Nobody likes when you’re not well / Come up, come up, and feel better now.” The song’s lyrics were reworked after he passed, adding the line, “Unanswered questions still haunt me.” The emotional track ends with a dark, hectic, instrumental frenzy of piercing baritone saxophone squeaks layered over sporadic, aggressive guitar and driving drums.

“‘The Thinker’ definitely set a tone for the album in the sense of hardship and having no way out but just dealing with the way things are,” Johnson recalls. “Trying times have no grace and that manifested as a recurring theme through the rest of album.”

TRIPTIDES is a Los Angeles based psychedelic rock group led by multi-instrumentalist Glenn Brigman. It began in the summer of 2010 as a series of sun-drenched home recorded tape machine experiments. The band has since released six full length records and a number of singles and EP’s. Their music dives through realms of sonic clairvoyance complete with melted guitars, swirling farfisa organs and vocals like sunlight through the fog.

The band’s latest record “Visitors” was released in 2018 to critical acclaim, with AllMusic calling it “their best sounding record to date” and LA Record describing it as “an expansive expedition into the undercurrent of the late sixties.” From international tours to performances at Desert Daze and Barcelona Psych Fest, the band has continued at a strong pace and shows no signs of slowing down. 2019 will see the release of their new single “Nirvana Now” on Hypnotic Bridge Records and their return to Europe for another tour including several festival performances including Astral Fest (UK) and Plisskën Festival (GR). They will also be touring the USA in September with stops at Lincoln Calling Festival and Back Alley Ballyhoo. The group will be teaming up with Brooklyn based Greenway Records for a new release in the fall.

Chicagoan Ezra Furman’s second solo album ‘Day Of The Dog’ has finally gained him the attention that he deserves. Two BBC 6 Music sessions with Marc Riley and Marc’s enthusiastic support have helped spread the word.

Extensive touring with his band the Boy Friends in the UK and Europe in 2014 has built up a dedicated live following and a growing reputation as one of the most exciting live acts around. Ezra’s emotional honesty, howling intensity, frailty and humour combined with the bands honking rock’n’roll have proved irresistible.

‘Ezra Furman has made an album of classicist rock’n’roll that never feels like an exercise, but a living, breathing piece of self expression.’ The Guardian

‘Where has Ezra Furman been hiding? A bratty, ragged take on New York Dolls, Spector-era Ramones and E Street Band carnival rock. An unexpected gem.’ 8/10 NME

“Ezra Furman has made an album of classicist rock’n‘roll that never feels like an exercise, but a living, breathing piece of self-expression.” The Guardian

C.W. Stoneking: Musings from the Deep South to Kanye West
First published in fRoots issue 423, Winter 2018 

C.W. Stoneking is an artist for whom ‘unexpected’ is probably the default setting. How else to describe such a fine purveyor of American roots music who also happens to be a towering, youthful-faced white Australian man? He surprises first-time listeners, throws curveballs at long-time fans, and everything he does contains at least some background level of bafflement for all involved. ??

There are multitudes in Stoneking’s music. It’s probably easiest to describe him as a ‘blues artist,’ but the term disguises what makes his music special. There’s so much in there. A 1920s pre-war blues sound is key, but there’s almost equal helpings of New Orleans jazz, jug band music, hokum, country and calypso, and he’s lately brought in elements of jump jive, early rock’n’roll and gospel. His gift is that he brings them all together without anything sounding out of place. He finds the strands that connect all of these different styles and gently braids them together. It’s what he values more than anything: “It’s getting everything to unify really. The music, the flow of it, keeping it moving, with no dead spots. Then I guess having the lyrics and the meaning that flows in that too, you know? Getting it all to knit together in a way that, if you didn’t speak English maybe, you’d still be able to feel the melody, or the sounds of the words. If you did, then the meaning would also flow. That’s sort of what I’m trying to do, I guess.” When so many on the blues scene are trying to sound ‘authentic’ – whatever that is – it’s that unity of sound that allows Stoneking to actually achieve it, and with apparent ease, too. Back in the day, no-one was ‘just’ a blues musician, or a jazz or country musician, and so neither is he. ??

Stoneking’s work can never really be second-guessed; you never know what you’re going to get. After charming his audiences with acoustic parlour guitars, National resonators, tenor banjos and a band laden with brass on his first two albums, he dropped all of that to go electric with his latest, 2014’s Gon’ Boogaloo, which was all about his Fender Jazzmaster and doo-wop backing vocals. While acoustic is still in his plans (his most recent tour was a solo affair: just him and a gorgeous 1937 Epiphone Deluxe), it seems like he’s ditched the banjo for good; he’s been known to go on the occasional but vicious anti-banjo tirade. When I try to ask him about it, he suffices with “I have to be careful with what I say. People get angry about that sort of stuff.” Maybe he’s been advised by his lawyers. Maybe it’s just part of his own epic, enigmatic legend. ??

Storytelling is one of his most potent powers. That man knows how to spin a yarn. He started his musical life in high school, but asked if he was a blues artist back then, he says: “I wouldn’t have said I was an artist of anything, except for maybe a bullshit artist!” It would seem that never really changed. He has the air of an old vaudeville master, a carnival caller or maybe a market huckster. By 2008, the UK was in the middle of a mini blues boom sparked by the successes of Seasick Steve, and a good story was all-important. Each artist had to have their own romantic blues myth for cachet, and Stoneking had the tallest tales in his backstory, rejecting the down-home believability of the aforementioned Steve for way-out parody. His thing was that he had worked for a time as an assistant to a witch doctor in New Orleans, before getting drunk and finding himself on a ship bound for the Congo, only to get shipwrecked and land on a beach in Gabon…it was a saga that got more madcap and rambling with each retelling. I’m sure I recall hearing some sort of narrative detour to a dildo farm at one point. These are stories to be taken with a bucket of salt. ??

Naturally, his songs are similarly irreverent and fantastical. His albums are full of tales of talking animals, hoodoo gone wrong and a myriad of characters in unfortunate situations in locations from jail to the jungle to heaven itself. It’s probably easy to tell that a common thread in Stoneking’s music is his humour. If we’re talking about the authenticity thing, it’s one thing that makes him stand out from the crowd. It’s surprising how often musicians today forget how funny a lot of the old-time music really was, blues or otherwise. Almost all of his work is drenched in that humour, whether it be sly innuendo, ridiculous sitcom or his particular knack for extended conversations between fictional friends – the man holds a whole pantheon of personalities under his stylish fedora and slicked-back hair. Simply put, he’s just not so bloody earnest all the time, which is a breath of fresh air to be honest. It also makes the times when he is earnest particularly touching – an example is his straight-ahead ‘Charlie Bostock’s Blues,’ a heartbreaking ode to one of Stoneking’s former bandmates and his tragic end. 

How does Stoneking make that world so relevant to his own life? How does Australia impact on his sound? It’s not something he’s really pondered too heavily, but his answer is a musing that takes him off on a ramble about the nature of aesthetics. “When I first was driving around in the south of America, it was the first time I realised the Australian lens that I was maybe hearing stuff through. You know when you’re daydreaming, you hear music and you sort of feel like there’s a landscape emanating from the person’s voice or the sound of the music? Hearing Charlie Patton or Son House sing back in the old days, I realised that the landscape of that internal world wasn’t really the world that those dudes were actually in. It wasn’t cut-down jungle and floodplains and green, which is what it made me think of. It was more like where I grew up: desert, an Australian sort of arid. Which I’d never thought about, and I was like ‘huh, it might be different.’” Maybe his music doesn’t sound Australian, but those experiences as an Australian in Deep South America have informed the sound: that never-quite-real landscape he heard in the voices of blues masters certainly does emanate from his own. ??

And his voice is probably the most recognisable thing about Stoneking. It certainly helps with that authenticity too. It’s a voice that has been mistaken many times for an aged African-American porch-dweller of the 1920s, perhaps with some shortage of teeth. Except he’s not putting it on. Not really. The accent isn’t quite his own (although he owes that proficiency to his American parentage), but when he speaks, it is in that same soft, slow drawl that caresses his music. With another musician, it could all come across as somewhat tacky and distasteful, but not with Stoneking. He is so deeply immersed in the world that his music conjures that it’s hard to imagine him any other way, somewhat like a Lord Buckley of the blues. ??

That unique voice of his also has a habit of cropping up in strange places.

Really, who else would be better to provide the voice of a gentlemanly vegetable fellow, as Stoneking did alongside Elijah Wood in the charming cartoon short, Tome of the Unknown, in 2013? He could most recently be heard on notorious blueshead Jack White’s album Boarding House Reach earlier this year. Such things are unexpected even for Stoneking himself: his blues skills were not needed here; his contribution is a somewhat opaque spoken-word poem, written by White. “It was all kind of mysterious. I had to wear black and be at this plain-looking building on a certain floor at a certain time. They’d taken all the light bulbs out and put all black lights in. He had this sheet of paper with these words written on it, and I just read it. I didn’t really understand the content of it, it’s just…me talking something I don’t fully understand, or even partially understand. But he was into it, so that was his thing. He sent me the record just before it came out and I was like ‘Oh my god…’ Millions of people are going to hear this and it’s going to be a track that everyone goes ‘what the hell is this? Hit the skip button!’ Who cares, though?” ??

After such an odd experience, would he ever want to collaborate with other artists in his own work? His answer is immediate, and unsurprisingly surprising: “Kanye West. Yeah, I’d like to make a record with him. He’s about the only one.” That was an answer that hung in the air a bit. Does he care to elaborate on that? “I just like how he puts stuff together, his rhythmic piecing of sounds. I would like my flavour but using his ideas a bit, you know?” He definitely sounds sincere, but there is that bucket of salt from earlier… ??

Who really knows what is next in store for C.W. Stoneking? He does, maybe, although I wouldn’t bank on it. There was a six-year gap between his second and third albums. It’s already been four years since then, and he says the ideas for the next one are just about starting to emerge from the ether. Band or solo? Electric or acoustic? Old-time blues or some other star in that constellation…or Stoneking x Kanye? No idea. All that can really be certain is that it won’t be what you’re expecting.

Josiah is best known for being a founding member of The Head and the Heart. He took a break from that work a few years ago to learn how to live more wholly integrated and to work with and through problems with addictions. His expanding solo creations are transcendent, healing folk songs. Deep and soulful ballads that paint the imagination with rich and emotional landscapes of love, loss and transformation. Josiah's solo performances highlight a stripped down, emotive, lyrics-and-voice-first kind of song craft, inimitable in its sincerity and beauty, with the powerful joy of singing together.

Sequestered in the desert of Western Australia, the vibrant, red flowers of Eucalyptus macrocarpa stand out against the harsh landscape. The rare tree, nicknamed “rose of the west,” manages to prevail over the severe climate, opening its beauty to those who seek it.

It’s with this image that Gina Barrington (vocals, guitar) found solace and inspiration for her project Rose of the West. After five years of false-starts, the contemplative pop outfit has solidified its lineup and will make its debut on April 5th, with Rose of the West via Communicating Vessels.

Barrington grew up in a musical household, as her grandfather was an orchestra director. She would begrudgingly sit in front of a piano for hours, longing to tinker around and write her own music, and above all work her way through her grandfather’s instrument hierarchy to earn her first guitar. And while the guitar was never reached, this foundation is what helped Barrington find her way back to music amidst life’s tribulations.

“It gave me that space I needed, and encouragement I needed, to maybe just pick something up and see what would happen,” Barrington says. “It was an expression of that inner voice that you feel like getting out.”

After a six-year stint in Los Angeles, Barrington felt Milwaukee calling her home, and her writing began to truly take hold. After releasing a solo EP, Barrington formed Nightgown in 2014, but interpersonal issues permeated the group, and she was left to reinvent. From its ashes came Rose of the West, a dark, dream-pop five-piece.

Rose of the West opens with “Love Lies Bleeding,” which like the band’s name, also draws on the rare beauty of an exotic plant. A hypnotic chorus narrates the universal experience of uncovering a truth and gaining 20/20 hindsight. Barrington’s lush sound is bolstered by the musical backgrounds her band members have brought to Rose of the West: Cedric LeMoyne (Remy Zero, Alanis Morissette), Thomas Gilbert (GGOOLLDD), Erin Wolf (Hello Death) and Dave Power (The Staves).

The album’s lead single, “Roads,” is a volatile display of the long journey Barrington had to embark on to arrive at Rose of the West. Barrington’s gritty vocals softly-yet-sternly navigate temperamental layers of synth and guitar, ultimately resolving atop an oscillating bassline.

“‘Roads’ is really about duality: feeling torn, lost, overwhelmed and scared about, yet enthralled with, the possibilities in life,” Barrington says. “It’s one of the songs that’s been with me longest, and the first one that came together during the making of the album which pointed it, and the band, in its ultimate direction.”

The lead up to Rose of the West has been lengthy and turbulent, but Rose of the West is ready to share its sprawling debut. Despite the harsh conditions presented to Barrington, she pressed on and has found her voice with Rose of the West, crafting emotive indie-pop.

Hampton Yount (Mystery Science Theater 3000, Eric Andre Show, Suicide Buddies Podcast) was born, raised and educated by wolves. He’s also a writer and comedian who will perform jokes for you. Join Hampton Yount and his friends (who may or may not be imaginary) for a night of goofs, zingers, tummy rubbers, and floppers.

Dance Yourself Clean is an Indie-Pop dance party created by music lovers, for music lovers. What started as a small party in a tiny bar in Seattle has grown to a massive movement spanning the US from coast to coast.

Playing Music by: LCD Soundsystem | CHVRCHES | BØRNS | Glass Animals | Charli XCX | MØ | Grimes | Elohim | Broods | Empire of The Sun | Purity Ring | Twin Shadow | Icona Pop | Sofi Tukker | Miike Snow | Bag Raiders | Powers | VHS Collection | Sylvan Esso | Arcade Fire | Robyn | Tove Lo | Cut Copy | Neon Indian | 1975 | Capital Cities | St. Lucia | Goldroom | Cherub | STRFKR | RAC | Little Dragon | Miami Horror | Purity Ring | Chromeo | Chairlift | NVDES | The Naked And Famous | Phoenix | MGMT | and many more.

A Lights & Music Collective Event

“Is it too real for ya?”

“We were encouraging each other to be who we believed ourselves to be all the time” - Grian Chatten, lead vocals, Fontaines D.C.

With the best bands, it seems to happen fast. The trajectory is steep, the progression seemingly preordained, inexorable. Assembling whilst still at college in Dublin a mere three years ago, from the ruins of early nowhere bands, and having discovered a shared love of poetry and a common zeal for authentic self-expression, the evolution of Fontaines D.C. has been swift, sure and seemingly effortless. Three self-released seven-inch singles (the first of which, “Liberty Belle,” emerged in May 2017) each a confident step onward from its predecessor, and a relentless schedule of live shows have seen them progress at a prodigious, yet wholly logical pace. Through around 200 dates in the UK, Europe, and the US, one word has kept resurfacing in their characteristically eloquent yet direct interviews: authenticity. “I think there's an authenticity to what we do, and people have been starved of authenticity for too long,” Chatten said in one early Irish radio encounter. Not youthful bravado, but a truthful reflection of the shared code that has guided these five young best friends thus far, with what has occasionally seemed a preternatural combination of insouciance and self-belief. This commitment to the authentic, in their music and in each other, is key to understanding the Fontaines D.C. aesthetic. In the course of “going round bars, drinking and writing poetry and romanticizing it to bits,” according to bassist Conor Deegan, the band pushed each other to create, always keeping a collective eye on keeping it real. “We’d call each other out” Chatten has explained, adding, “through each other, we found ourselves a lot quicker.”

Alongside this commitment to each other and the shared goal, another overarching formative dynamic was at work: Dublin City itself; more specifically, the disappearing Dublin embodied most readily in their immediate surroundings, the old working-class neighborhood known as The Liberties. As with so many of our cities, the modern malaise of gentrification is steadily claiming vast swathes of the Irish capital. Sure, that's progress, but the underlying cultural cost of this air-brushing of an environment is something that has preoccupied Chatten, feeding into much of the Fontaines’ lyrical content, and indeed the early singles' artwork which featured long-gone, semi-mythical figures like Bang Bang and Forty Coats, real-life quasi-Dickensian characters, legendary in their own time but now becoming lost in the city's fading folklore. Chatten speaks of writing about “the dying romance of the city...the reason we love the Liberties is that seems to be where a lot of that action is happening,” It would be a mistake to view this as some sighing nostalgia, however. Rather, it speaks to the place of Fontaines D.C. in a broader Irish cultural lineage: the bloodline that is more Behan than Bono, evoking poets such as Kavanagh and Lynott, Chevron and MacGowan and yes, even Joyce in the expression of the universal and profoundly human experience through the prism of the local, the familiar, the real. As Lou Reed did with New York, or Ray Davies with London, or indeed The Smiths with Manchester. Write what you know, as the old advice goes. Or, in the words of guitarist Conor Curley: “From talking to these guys about literature, I saw Irishness as being easily romantic about what you see.”

It's a through-line that can be discovered in all the best of Irish art, whichever the medium, and the band's intent is drolly embodied in the album's knowing title: Dogrel. To give it its dictionary definition (or close enough for now): crude verse of little artistic worth. The ribald rhymes of the docks, the factories and the early houses. The authentic poetry of the people, which any smart Irish poet knows it is foolish to think oneself above. For in it all is an ineffable beauty, something these young men understand very well.

Not that Dogrel isn't rock and roll; it most assuredly is, the best example of the form that you are likely to hear this or any other year. It spits, it snarls, it snaps with the very best of them. But also it yearns, like the greatest Irish music must do. In songs like the almost unbearably sad “Dublin City Sky” there is a marriage of the lyrical to the poetic tradition that bears comparison not just with MacGowan's (the Pogues) best work but echoes the exquisite heartbreak of Luke Kelly's timeless reading of Kavanagh's “On Raglan Road.” This is an example of one of the great strengths of Dogrel; its diversity makes it feel less like a debut and more like the work of a band who have long since proven their point, as I suspect Fontaines D.C. may well feel that they have; to the very people who matter above all: each other.

From the short, sharp opener “Big” (surely rivalling “I Wanna Be Adored” as an irresistible opening statement of self-confident intent) the album delightfully surprises at every turn. The singles sit fully at ease along much more complex, emotionally loaded pieces such as “Roy's Tune” and “The Lotts,” both examples of a bruised but unbowed melancholia which is the record's true genome. “Television Screen,” shares its title with the first ever Irish punk single (by The Radiators From Space featuring future Pogue and another of the great chroniclers of old Dublin Town, the late Philip Chevron) and it is a different beast again: melodic and stately, it's a perfect example of the untimely, almost unnatural maturity that this band has already attained. “Boys in The Better Land,” in another twist, perfectly captures the spirit of the album's title. Among a blizzard of evocative couplets, “He spits out 'Brits Out" and only smokes Carroll's,” stands out as great a pencil portrait as you'll find anywhere. That Lou Reed thing again.

As a band, Fontaines D.C. are on fire throughout: witness the brief, urgent mechanical grind of “Chequeless Reckless,” which perhaps comes closest to a Fontaines D.C. manifesto: "A sellout is someone who becomes a hypocrite in the name of money. An idiot is someone who lets their education do all of their thinking. A phony is someone who demands respect for the principles they affect. A dilettante is someone who can't tell the difference between fashion and style. Charisma is exquisite manipulation. And money... is the sandpit of the soul.” Spat out by Chatten with palpable contempt, they are words that could come back to haunt him, but he's smarter than that, and anyway, somewhere Mister Wilde is wryly smiling.

Dogrel is a debut which is best enjoyed as a whole; it is very much in the grand tradition of the album as art form, just as this is a band very much in the classic band mold: great singles, an indefatigable work ethic and an utter aversion to standing still.

Reluctant to be viewed as part of any wider movement (“I get a bit uncomfortable with some of the comparisons that have been made,” says Chatten, as he must, though they inevitably shall be) Fontaines D.C. have delivered on their tremendous promise in a way that few bands have. It is to their credit and it augurs well that their collective eye is already on the next phase as they prepare for now to merely take on the world for real. Too real.

Words by Paul McLoone (Undertones / Today FM).

Boris was formed in 1992, reaching the current lineup of Takeshi, Wata, and Atsuo in ’96. Ever since the beginning, the members of Boris have explored their own vision of “heavy” with a unique methodology and stance that could almost be called aloof. A slender female guitarist who sings dusky melodies, a shadowy vocalist swaying with a modified guitar/bass double neck, and a drummer with a gong at his back who at times cries out both curses and supplications as he presides over the ritual...

Though Boris adheres to an unrelenting heaviness in everything they do, “thunderous roars” and “explosive noise” are too light of words for their singular musicality that can’t be confined to a set genre or style. Using overpowering soundscapes embellished with copious amounts of lighting and billowing smoke, Boris has shared with audiences across the planet an experience for all five senses in their concerts, earning legions of zealous fans along the way. Boris plays every day even when they aren’t touring or doing a show. As a result of single-mindedly delving into their sound in studio jam sessions and recording every bit of themselves, they now have a discography that includes 30 full albums like the iconic Pink (’05), Smile ('08), and Noise (’14), as well as nearly 20 collaborative works like Altar (’07) with Sunno))) and Gensho (’16) as Boris with Merzbow. All of their limited edition albums released with meticulous detail sell out almost instantly, and their already massive catalogue of albums shows no signs of stopping anytime soon.

Boris’ compositions have also been lauded for their visual aspects that have garnered attention outside of the music industry. This in turn has led to them providing songs to films such as The Limits of Control (’09) and Confessions (’10), as well as three newly written tracks and one freshly recorded track for Ninja Slayer From Animation (’15), thus amassing a whole new layer to their fanbase. In recent years the members of Boris have emphasized balance and mutual interaction, moving away from the grid in a shift towards a more organic style of musical composition and live performance.

2017 marked the 25th anniversary of the band’s formation and saw them release their latest album Dear that summer.

Boris would then embark upon their largest-ever world tour to celebrate their 25th anniversary, with the final date held at Shindaita Fever on September 22, 2018. However, this was not a sentimental finale so much as the roar of a new beginning.

Boris will continue their own musical creation and destruction while conjuring up fresh horizons.

“What is your wish? What do you expect?” Cross Record’s self-titled third album begins with Emily Cross’s disembodied voice intoning from an otherworldly vacuum. In the three years since her last album, Cross has divorced, quit drinking, become a death doula, started the observational podcast “What I’m Looking At,” and toured and recorded with Sub Pop’s Loma, the trio she formed with Dan Duszynski on drums and Jonathan Meiburg (Shearwater) on guitar/vocals. On Cross Record, she guides the listener like a sonic Virgil, delivering a textured soundscape of meditative curiosity, akin to Low’s Double Negative, Broadcast’sThe Noise Made By People and Radiohead’s Kid A.

Having recorded 2016’s Wabi Sabi at home between work and sleep hours, Cross did the opposite for Cross Record, writing the album while living on a secluded part of Mexico’s coast. The collaborative atmosphere of Loma challenged Cross to experiment with her sound, detuning her voice and obstructing its clarity in specific moments. As such, Cross Record is primarily a showcase for Cross’s singing, as she pushes her range and engages with a multitude of approaches at every turn.

Following her time in Mexico, Cross returned to the states with vocal-heavy demos in hand and finished the record with musician Andrew Hulett and producer Theo Karon. Karon assisted with production and arrangements throughout the creation of Cross Record, and the songs realized their ultimate forms at Hotel Earth, his studio in Los Angeles. Though her voice is always central, Cross’s songs developed with percussion, string arrangements and expanded production. The instrumentation is as nuanced and experimental as her voice.

In her songs, Cross reconciles her present state of being with her experiences of the past few years. “PYSOL My Castle” was inspired by a visit to an overstimulating Mexican street market teeming with people, and describes Cross’s search for an unencumbered mindspace. “An Angel, a Dove” frames death as spiritual departure; a haunting synthetic soundscape gradually gives way to increasingly dissonant, urgent melodies as Cross envisions herself alight on a dove she suspects may be an angel carrying her from life. “The Fly,” which envelops the listener in filtered drum loops and synthesizers, considers the fragility and the resilience of the mind. On “Face Smashed, Drooling,” Cross mourns her alcohol dependence. “There was a sort of grieving process to quitting drinking,” she says. “I associated it with comfort, fun in the evening time and fond memories.” The song slips in and out of consciousness before resolving in a place of clarity. “I Release You” lives in the same sonic chamber as late-stage Talk Talk, and explores the acceptance of change.

Cross Record’s themes of departure and separation were inspired by changes Cross made in her career. After years of work as a nanny and in customer service, Cross recently embarked on studies to become a death doula. Similar to the services provided by birth doulas, a death doula helps clients navigate decisions and hardships at the end of life. In her new role, Cross has created a three hour ceremony called a Living Funeral, which guides participants through the rituals of their own deaths. Cross’s work in helping others face their greatest fears inhabits the same space as her art, which has always explored the metaphysical in the everyday. The eerie experience of listening to Cross Record and the unsettling sense of songs slipping from coherent grasp share these same sensibilities. The oddness of these songs is nonetheless honest and truthful, and to understand them requires acknowledging notions of alienation in ourselves.

“What is your wish? What do you expect?” Cross doesn’t know what your expectations are, and she is still figuring out her own. Cross Record attempts to examine these questions with a lucidity that sometimes blurs into the realm of the unreal. The trip is extensive and finishes where it started, but the foundation has changed, clarified; while no closer to an answer, we have a greater sense of the question.

Separate from the shows, but in complement, Cross will be performing Living Funerals along her tour route.

Of Belgian, Egyptian and Lebanese heritage the 21-year-old musician has written and shaped an album of startling, visceral, sit-up-and-listen power. “Amir” features a handful of tracks from his debut EP, “Habibi” including Indigo Night which features Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood on bass guitar. Although the majority of the playing heard on “Amir” is Tamino himself, he is joined by a collective of Arabic musicians based in Brussels called “Nagham Zikrayat”. The Firka (orchestra) is predominantly made up of professional musicians from the Middle East, most of which have refugee status having predominantly fled from Iraq and Syria.

Over the course of “Amir”, Tamino captures a range of emotions from romance to desolation, and almost everything in between. It’s mood music, painted in a number of different shades.

Tamino: “Some of the songs on “Amir” are more on the romantic side, whilst others are more on the apathetic side. In my own life, I can look at the world and at life in both ways depending on my state of being. The conflict creates an imbalance. “Amir” is about balance”

There is a power present in the places where we’re invited to adopt the pace of nature. The same forces that patiently connect the cells of a sprig in the soil can uproot a redwood with a single winter storm. If you’ve listened to Daniel Norgren, you understand. The experience of Norgren’s music is marked by connection: the artist to the band, the audience to the music, and the body to the soul. His latest album, Wooh Dang, out April 19, 2019 on Superpuma Records, will be Norgren’s first worldwide release.

Produced by Norgren and engineered by longtime collaborator and Superpuma Records originator Pelle Nyhage, Wooh Dang was made during the Fall of 2018 in a single room of a 19th-century textile farmhouse in the woods near Norgren’s home in Southwest Sweden. “The interior looked it hadn’t been touched for the past 80 years,” says Norgren. “I moved a lamp and it left a dark red ring on the pink tablecloth underneath…goldmine! The house was huge, full of good, inspiring mustiness, creaking wooden floors, scary old portrait paintings on the walls, and an old, black German piano which I used in all the songs.” Recorded live and entirely on a 16 track analogue rig, without guitar tuners, the album captures the close chemistry between Norgren and his band, comprised of old friends Anders Grahn (bass), Erik Berntsson (drums), and Andreas Filipsson (guitar and banjo).

An intertwining of analog instrumentation, live performance, and rural field recordings, Wooh Dang is rife with a deeply hopeful creative intention. It’s red blooded, alive, and coursing with equal parts adrenaline and seratonin. “Wooh Dang was a real fun album to make and to me it’s been the world for the last few years,” says Norgren. “Thanks for taking the time. I hope you enjoy it.”

From their inception Generationals have existed at the convergence of classic style and contemporary technique. Students of an analog school actualized in a digital medium, Grant Widmer and Ted Joyner have always felt most comfortable reveling in this juxtaposition. Grounded in a catalog of infectious pop hooks that feel both familiar and radically new all at once, Generationals mastered their distinct voice as a means to widen the path before them.

Reader As Detective, their new full-length album, weds vintage pop canon and modern pop production in a way this duo has proven incomparably adept. From the cornerstone sample of “I Turned My Back on the Written Word,” (a recontextualization of an unreleased b-side) to the playful synths & stuttered drums of “Dream Box,” and jogging rhythms of "Breaking Your Silence," Generationals continue to push the envelope by playing by their own rules.

In the years following their last album, Alix, the band experimented by releasing one-off singles and videos immediately upon their completion, which eventually formed 2018’s State Dogs collection. This method – an exploratory dive in shirking the nature of traditional album rollouts – refined how they approached writing. Freed from the album-cycle mentality, the pair was able to focus on each track autonomously, rather than as a fragment of a larger batch of songs.

Reader As Detective is the result of purposeful time spent honing Generationals’ craft as progressive songwriters. With the help of producer and longtime collaborator Dan Black, they dug into new methods of creation with a fearlessness for experimentation that is equally vital to the experience of both artist and listener. With Reader As Detective, Generationals have reached a high-water mark in an already noteworthy career – isolation and celebration set to a major key.

Walker Lukens has been called ‘one of the best songwriters in Texas' (Free Press Houston.) The Austin- based, Houston-bred singer, multi-instrumentalist has been called ‘wonderfully inventive' (NPR World Cafe,) a ‘non-sexually intimidating version of Prince' (Austin Chronicle,) and a ‘veteran balladeer with sudden indie rock ambitions' (Indy Week.) Walker thinks its important that you realize his name is not Walter.

His first full length record, Devoted. It received praise from outlets like NPR's All Songs Considered, American Songwriter, Austin American Statesman, Austin Chronicle, and Billboard and took Lukens and his backing band, The Side Arms, all over the US.

After meeting Spoon drummer Jim Eno in a bar, Walker & The Side Arms started recording a new full length with him at his studio, Public Hi-Fi. His second full length, Tell It To The Judge, was released on September 22, 2017 on Modern Outsider. The single, ‘Every Night,' has been streamed over a million times now. ‘Lifted' spent 8 weeks on the specialty commercial radio charts and garnered Walker spots at festivals across the country including Savannah Stopover, Bonnaroo, Firefly, Austin City Limits, Mountain Jam, Free Press Summer Fest, and Summerfest.

Walker Lukens & Jim Eno have just finished a new full length, Adult, which you'll hear more about in 2019. For now, go listen to his last single, “Baby” which American Songwriter thought was good enough to premiere.

THE DEBUT ALBUM LOVE AND COMPROMISE OUT 6TH SEPTEMBER

Black Mountain’s Stephen McBean turned 16 after Woodstock but before Varg started burning down Norwegian churches. And yet, until just two short years ago, McBean had lived his entire adolescence and adult life without a proper driver’s license, that first and most coveted ticket to personal independence. Black Mountain’s new album, Destroyer, is imbued with all that wild-ass freedom and newfound agency (and anxiety and fear) that comes with one's first time behind the wheel.

Destroyer, named after the discontinued single-run 1985 Dodge Destroyer muscle car, is structured around the feeling of driving a hot rod. The album exists in the middle of the early-to-mid 80s Los Angeles war between punk and hair metal - it’s exhilarating, spirited, and dangerous. Throughout, youthful themes run rampant: “Boogie Lover” cruises down the Sunset Strip, “Horns Arising” is a fill-up at a desert gas station just in time to see a UFO hovering near a mesa, and “High Rise” rounds out a sense of teenage discovery.

To create Destroyer, McBean shacked himself up in his rehearsal space and invited over friends from the endless rock’n’roll highway, bringing to life 22 songs. While some were laid back into shallow graves to dig up once again at a later date, the others were left above ground and polished and given life, some transformed by longtime band member Jeremy Schmidt. This generation of Black Mountain also sees new members Rachel Fannan (Sleepy Sun) and Adam Bulgasem (Dommengang & Soft Kill) as well as familiar collaborators Kliph Scurlock (Flaming Lips), Kid Millions (Oneida) and John Congleton (St. Vincent, Swans). Collectively, there’s a renewed vitality to Black Mountain on Destroyer — a seasoned, veteran of heady hard rock that’s found new, young muscles to flex and roads to explore.

When you think of a typical English fete, you think of coconut shies and Punch & Judy puppet shows, children tearing around laughing and little old ladies selling homemade hams with smudged labels. The idyllic picture hardly seems like something that would inspire the concept of an album by an Australian psych rock band, but then Perth’s Psychedelic Porn Crumpets have always been hard ones to pin down.

On their third album, ‘And Now For The Whatchamacallit’, the four-piece take that very British image and reimagine a 1930s small town fair for the future, twisting the wholesome giddiness and mirth of such events into a madcap adventure that feels like a ride you don’t want to end. It was inspired by a documentary about Woburn Sands, the English town frontman Jack McEwan grew up in. “It felt like a homage back to home,” explains Jack. “That idea felt like I could write about these old times but give it a twist of the future, like what people back then would think it would be like.”

With the theme emerging a few songs into the writing of the record, the band decided to embrace the “nostalgic happiness” associated with it and write “the most fun things we could think of”. “Fun” is perhaps an understatement when it comes to describing ‘And Now For The Whatchamacallit’, which sprints through thunderous, wailing fuzzy rock (‘When In Rome’), sitar-led lysergic voyages (‘Native Tongue’), and stomping psych-pop (‘Bill’s Mandolin’). The latter was written in honour of a mandolin Jack was given on the band’s last UK tour, which became an inanimate observer of all sorts of capers, the likes of which informed the record’s songwriting. Tour lends itself to creating the kind of experiences you can fill an album’s worth of stories with, according to Jack. With nights not able to get properly started until after the show’s finished, you’re more likely to meet “the quirkiest people or the ones who are still awake or buzzing, or on magic potions of sorts.”

Recorded largely in Jack’s bedroom (with some parts recorded at Perth’s Tone City Studios), ‘And Now For The Whatchamacallit’ arrives as a more concise, thought out missive than its predecessors, 2016’s ‘High Visceral Pt 1’ and 2017’s ‘…Pt 2’. “I wanted to stray away from the 10-minute jams when writing the songs on ‘…Whatchamacallit’,” says Jack, explaining that this record taught him he likes “writing shimmery songs.”

The album starts with a call to keep the party going on the infectious ‘Keen For Kick Ons’. “If you kick on in Australia, that’s when you go out after and carry on drinking,” Jack explains of the slang title, adding that it could be written about “every time we go to the pub.” ‘Social Candy’, meanwhile, builds into howling psych as the frontman narrates the experience of “when you’ve taken too many fun tablets, you’re absolutely fried, your brain can’t handle it, and you’re like, ‘Why is that rabbit talking to me?’”

And then there’s album closer ‘Dezi’s Adventure’ with its plinky-plonky organ sounds, that’s meant to feel like “the closing of the circus curtains”. While ‘And Now For The Whatchamacallit’ largely takes you on a trip through nights out, its final song is more like a tour through Jack’s own life - or at least his most recent years. “I transitioned from working on a building site to going three years down the track and travelling around the UK as a band,” he explains. “It’s a completely different world so ‘Dezi’s…’ is almost that adventure and carrying on with tour. It sounds like me peering out of a window from a 20-year-old’s perspective but seeing everything happening right now. Rather than a memory, it’s a forward memory.”

As well as tons of punchy songs that make you want to get on their level, the album is also home to some experimental instrumentals, like the heavenly ‘Fields, Woods, Time’ and the warped noodling of ‘Digital Hunger’. Intended as transitionary tracks, they’re placed at points of the record you wouldn’t necessarily expect an interlude. “I wanted that element of wonder and what’s gonna happen afterwards,” Jack says. “You’re intrigued to listen a bit more to see where it goes next.”

After starting out as a project for Jack’s uni course, the last four years have taken the band - completed by guitarist Luke Parish, drummer Danny Caddy, and bassist Luke Reynolds - on an unexpected but brilliant journey, winning over fans across the globe with their exuberant live show and inventive, unpredictable songwriting. Where Psychedelic Porn Crumpets themselves go next from here is anyone’s guess.

It’s not uncommon to find Maggie Koerner singing on stage with a list of iconic acts that has included CharlesBradley, Trombone Shorty, Widespread Panic and Gov’t Mule, to name a few. The Shreveport born singer-songwriter jump started her career, spending the majority of 2013 and 2014 as the lead singer and front-woman for the legendary New Orleans funk-band Galactic. After spending 2015 back on the road as a solo artist, Maggie released her “Dig Down Deep (EP)”, produced by esteemed UK producer Fink (Amy Winehouse, John Legend, Banks) on Ninja Tune in December 2016. While touring behind the EP in 2017, Maggie’s undeniable voice and live show got her noticed by several record labels. She eventually inked a deal with Concord Records and is releasing singles this year and a full length project in the Spring of 2020.

The Winchesters make regular passage of the bridge between toe-tapping country jams (like those of The Lone Bellow) and heart-filled introspective poetry (inspired by the likes of Tom Waits and Bob Dylan). The group started playing for fun in a little apartment on Chicago's Winchester Avenue in the summer of 2014, and haven't been able to give it up since. A tight-knit bunch from the beginning, their closeness shows in their meticulously blended harmonies -- the Winchesters bring that same sense of living-room-intimacy to every crowd. In their spare time, The Winchesters are developing a folk musical based on Longfellow's epic poem Evangeline.

"These guys can make music and elevate a scene."
- Music City Roots

Waker was founded by childhood friends and songwriting duo Chase Bader (Vocals, Acoustic) and Conor Kelly (Electric Guitar). The group hails from Nashville, mashing soul, rock & roll, and jam into an eclectic, danceable sound, focusing on songs that aim for the heart, head... and feet.

From the East Coast to the West Coast, each member moved to Nashville to join Bader and Kelly one by one. The band originally began under the name Koa with bassist Ryan Ladd and saxophonist Alex Matthews. Percussionist Ryan McClanahan quickly joined adding a unique sound to the music. Finally, the band found drummer Dave Czuba to fuse Koa into Waker. Two years later, Waker welcomed Bobby Steinfeld to join to the band on keyboards as the 7th member of Waker.

The intention has always been clear, to “wake people” with their music. In a short amount of time, the band has already conquered festival stages at Bonnaroo, ACL, Hangout, SXSW, Firefly, and Wakarusa. They’ve toured with Blues Traveler, JJ Grey & Mofro, Moon Taxi, Galactic, the Wailers, recorded a session for Audiotree Live, and headlined shows across the country.

Since the release of their 2015 EP, the band has continued their nonstop regiment of touring & writing. Before the summer of 2017, Waker released two singles, "Wake Me Up" & "Pike", both of which will be featured on their debut album due early in 2019.

Waker is an experience meant to be shared with others.

BEDOUINE
Bedouine, a gallicized riff on bedouin, the nomad, the wanderer. Anyone can assume such a name, but Azniv Korkejian has an experience of what it means, the type of ground it covers. “Moving around so much caused me at some point to feel displaced, to not really belong anywhere and I thought that was a good title.” Her development was shaped by political landscapes and family opportunities, her adult life patterned by paths of her own. Born in Aleppo, Syria to Armenian parents, Korkejian spent her childhood in Saudi Arabia, moving to America when her family won a Green Card lottery. They settled in Boston, then Houston, but she split for L.A. as soon as she could. A casual offer to stay on a horse farm took her to the rolling hills of Lexington, Kentucky, followed by a year in Austin, and a trip east to Savannah for a degree in sound design. Returning to L.A., she discovered a close-knit community of musicians in Echo Park that started to feel like home. Maybe America is just a highway that leads back to L.A.

Korkejian works with sound professionally, in dialogue editing and music editing, a slice of Hollywood’s sprawling industry. She never set out to be a singer in L.A., taking a zen approach to that part of her life, thinking that if it happens, it happens. “I just kept meeting the right people, who were professional musicians, and even though they were going on these big legitimate tours, they were still coming back to this amazing small scene, still demoing at home, and I immediately felt welcomed to join in on that. L.A. actually made me less jaded.” One day she walked into the studio of bass player / producer Gus Seyffert (Beck, Norah Jones, The Black Keys) to inquire about portable reel-to-reel tape machines and ended up cutting “Solitary Daughter in a first take. So they began another kind of journey.

Bedouine has a sound. Sixties folk meets seventies country-funk with a glimmer of bossa nova cool. Lithe guitar picking and precise lyrical excursions. That mesmerizing voice and phrasing. Working on around thirty tracks over three years, with contributions from a remarkable cast of players like guitarist Smokey Hormel (Tom Waits, Joe Strummer, Johnny Cash), Seyffert and Korkejian brought a selection of ten songs to Richmond, Virginia. She specifically sought out Spacebomb, approaching Matthew E. White after a show in L.A. He remembers listening to the song she sent over and over, on and off the road, “‘One of These Days’ became our alarm when we woke up for almost all of that tour.” Anticipating this future collaboration, the tracks were created with breathing room for the Spacebomb touch and Trey Pollard’s sinuous symphonic arrangements. Back in California, Thom Monahan (Pernice Brothers, Devendra Banhart, Vetiver) brought all the elements together in a masterful final mix.

Eschewing notions of nomadic chic, Bedouine represents minimalism motivated by travel, paring down and paring down until only the essential remains. Her music establishes a sustained and complete mood, reflecting on the unending reverberations of displacement, unafraid to take pleasure along the way. At the end of “Summer Cold” Korkejian composed an interstitial piece to recreate the sounds of her grandmother’s street in Aleppo. Partly due to America’s role in destabilizing Syria, this sonic memory is the only way to return to her birthplace. Worlds that have been lost might only be accessed through a song, in a line or a melody or a trace of tape, but they must be looked for in order to be found, so she wanders on.

ORVILLE PECK
Combining the lulling ambiance of shoegaze with the iconic melodies and vocal prowess of classic American country music, outlaw cowboy, Orville Peck croons about love and loss from the badlands of North America. The resulting sound is entirely his own. He takes the listener down desert highways, through a world where worn out gamblers, road-dogs, and lovesick hustlers drift in and out of his masked gaze.

Orville’s debut album, Pony, delivers a diverse collection of stories that sing of heartbreak, revenge and the unrelenting tug of the cowboy ethos. Warm lap steel guitars and echoing drums move through dreamy ballads and sometimes near frantic buzzsaw tunes - all the while paying homage to his country music roots.

Pony’s lead single “Dead of Night” is a torch song about two hustlers traveling through Nevada desert. Their whirlwind romance takes us on a dusty trail of memories - racing down canyon highways, hitchhiking through casino towns and ultimately, ending in tragedy. Orville recalls the adventures of his young love, as he watches the boys silently pass him on the strip, haunted by the happy memories of his past.

On the campfire lullaby “Big Sky,” Orville sings about his past lovers - an aloof biker, an abusive boxer and an overly protective jailor in the Florida Keys - and the inevitable demise of each one, as he leaves them for the wide open, big sky.

Meanwhile “Turn To Hate” finds Orville struggling to keep his resentment from building into hatred. A continuous battle between embracing the strength and freedom of being an outsider, and the inevitable struggle of wanting normalcy and familiarity. It encapsulates Orville's dilemma as a cowboy. He sings about having to constantly repair situations in his wake, and fighting with himself over his decision making. To stay or go; to cry or not; whether to leave without saying goodbye in order to soften the blow; All the while wishing someone would tell him that they "can't stay," and to make the decision for him.

And “Buffalo Run” acts as a warning, a song built around the imagery of stampeding buffalo in the badlands of the Northern Plains. It begins peacefully, gradually getting faster and more frenetic, and ends in a release as the Buffalo are herded off the cliffside.

Pony was produced by Orville Peck, recorded and mixed by Jordan Koop at The Noise Floor on Gabriola Island, British Columbia and mastered by Harris Newman at Grey Market Mastering in Montreal, Quebec.

!!! - Wallop

Doesn't it seem like everyone's freaking out lately? !!! know the feeling well. The NYC dance-punk lifers have been chronicling the perpetual meltdown that is American society for nearly 20 years now, from the clattering full-band thrust of their instantly iconic 2003 single "Me and Giuliani Down by the Schoolyard (A True Story)" to the dark disco of 2017's wonderfully eclectic Shake the Shudder.

Their eighth full-length, Wallop, follows in the band's grand tradition of plugging straight into our collective nervous system and sending funky, rubbery shock waves through the body politic. If you've found yourself rubbing your temples while contemplating the collapse of everything around us? Well, !!! are bringing the soundtrack to your next nervous breakdown.

Like an apocalyptic jukebox, Wallop is jam-packed with various sounds and styles from dance music's rich history—from the pie-eyed psychedelia of Madchester-era English dance-rock to tunnel-vision techno and the flashy, bomb-dropping sound of UK grime. The candy-coated sounds of '90s rave loom large in Wallop's playful darkness, a callback to another era when everything felt like it was just about ready to fall apart. Diving into '90s retro nostalgia is good for us," frontman Nic Offer explains while discussing the sonic rediscovery at the beating heart of Wallop. "I know all the '80s stuff already, so it's like, 'What did happen in the '90s?' Because in the '90s, we were just listening to James Brown."

Wallop was recorded over the past year in Offer's Brooklyn apartment—a first for the band, as !!!'s latest was rife with experimentation throughout the creative gestation: "Our process was to get loose and get into uncharted territory," he puts it succinctly. This meant messing around with gear they didn't quite understand, conjuring new sounds and bringing in familiar friends to contribute vocals—including Liars frontman Angus Andrew, Maria Uzor of British dance aesthetes Sink Ya Teeth, and Glasser's synth-pop wizard Cameron Mesirow, who all join Offer and !!! co-vocalist Meah Pace on this barn-burning party of a record.

"We were sitting on these instrumentals that we liked, so we started sending them around to random people," Offer states while discussing the collaborative process streaked across Wallop. "We overwrite and overrecord, and send them out to our friends to vote. We don't know what we're making until it's done. This record could've been completely dark or completely pop."

"We're not the kind of band that sits down and says, 'Let's make a record now,'" producer and multi-instrumentalist Rafael Cohen continues. "We just keep going, which is good because it leads to less of a narrative for each album." With an array of producers lending a hand—including Cole M.G.N. (Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, Julia Holter), Graham Walsh (Holy Fuck), and longtime collaborator Patrick Ford—Wallop was eventually stitched together to reflect the colorful, body-moving tapestry that its end result represents.

Work on Wallop took place in understandably different sociopolitical circumstances than what surrounded Shake the Shudder—but addressing those circumstances head-on was initially harder than Offer and Cohen thought. "Every political song we wrote kind of sucked," the former admits, while explaining that the wide-eyed societal paranoia embedded within the record was naturally occuring. "When we stepped away from politics, it seeped its way back into the music.”

Indeed, Wallop chronicles these strange times through !!!’s personal lens, capturing the mere act of existing amidst so many shifting paradigms; the skipping IDM of “Domino” zooms in on the conflicting emotions that come with experiencing gentrification first-hand, while "UR Paranoid" throbs with the type of intensity reserved for existential spiraling and late-night k-holes alike—an urgency that also speaks to !!!'s admiration for club music. "We're always trying to make pure club stuff—that's where we get our sonics," Cohen states, while Offer elaborates, "We're very much classic songwriters, but the music that turns it on is club music. It's always moving, and it's a good well for us."

Meanwhile, "Off the Grid" ripples and pulses in a way not unlike XTRMNTR-era Primal Scream, “Slow Motion” dives headlong into the ecstatic energy of 1990s UK trip-hop and beat-driven rock, “This Is the Door” radiates crisp and effervescent disco, and “Couldn’t Have Known” is pure urban clatter topped off by Cohen’s soothed-out vocals. The splashy beat of "Serbia Drums" in particular comes from a surprising source: an iPhone recording that drummer Chris Egan captured while the band was touring in Serbia. "Chris is from D.C. and so am I, and that groove is so go-go," Cohen marvels on the song's propulsive sound.

Overall, Wallop is a testament not only to the rocky, worldly times it reflects, but !!!'s artistic lifeblood—a constantly-creating ethos that's kept the band going for so long and enables them to constantly innovate their sound. "We just work really hard and try to make the best records we can," Offer proclaims. "We have a strict policy of challenging ourselves—'What haven't we done?'" And if that sense of self-discovery resulted in Wallop's jam-packed, kaleidoscope world of sound, let's hope !!! never stop challenging themselves.

Larry Fitzmaurice June 2019

"IF YOU LOVE AN UPLIFTING BAND, THE COLLECTION IS FOR YOU" -BOB BOILEN, NPR MUSIC

“Entropy / 'entr?pe/ noun. ‘lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.’

On the surface, the name of NC band The Collection’s new album, ‘Entropy,’ may seem deceptive. Over the four years since the release of their chamber pop, 25-piece ensemble debut, ‘Ars Moriendi,’ the band shed enough weight to become an efficient touring band, garnered praise from NPR and American Songwriter, toured nationally with bands like The Oh Hellos and Lowland Hum, and performed dynamic sets at CMJ and New Music Seminar as an official “Top 100 Artists On The Verge.”

The trimming-of-the-excess was soon mirrored in vocalist David Wimbish’s spirituality, resulting in the band’s 2017 follow-up, ‘Listen To The River,’ The Collection’s first member-arranged group of songs. Inspired by Herman Hesse’s ‘Siddhartha,’ and the poetry of Rumi, the album took a step off of the fence walked between faith and doubt on Ars Moriendi, landing distinctly on the side of doubt. The constitutive single, Sing Of The Moon, received over 3 million streams between Youtube and Spotify, the release tour brought hundreds of people to venues across the country, and The Collection was featured at Wild Goose Festival, and Switchpoint Conference alongside PRI’s Marco Werman.

Even Entropy’s debut single Beautiful Life, which PopMatters called, “symphonic, poetic wonderment,” seems to be about finding order by watching the natural world. Beneath the surface of all of this, however, is another story.

During the recording of Listen To The River, then-married band-members David and Mira Joy ended their marriage. Though committed to finishing the project peacefully together, the next months were a chaotic chain of events that left them with a totalled car, no house, no work, few friends, and the dwindling commitment of some bandmates.

Starting over alone in a new city, Wimbish began to write for a new solo project, freed from the assumed expectations of fans and band-members. The result was the most focused, honest, and intimate batch of songs the 27 year old songwriter had written, lyrically and musically. As the writing progressed, and the band had to stare it’s impending death in the eyes, a solid and enduring core emerged. Members Hayden Cooke (Bass), Joshua Ling (Harmonium/Guitar/Vocals), and Graham Dickey (Horns/Bells) lent their performances to David Wimbish’s (Vocals/Guitar/Keys/Strings) fleshed out songs, birthing The Collection’s 3rd full-length record from the ashes of the unfinished solo project. With the addition of husband-and-wife Joshua Linhart (Drums) and Sarah McCoy (Keys/Synth/Vocals), the band finally found its firm footing.

And that is where the story of Entropy is revealed: Though meant to document David’s life’s gradual decline into, and subsequent recovery from, disorder, the album became a living testimony to The Collection’s own experience of entropy. Now, with the wisdom of hindsight, the band is back and focused, with a passion for sharing what they’ve learned: that on the other side of disorder lies a new sense of beauty.”

Hailing from somewhere in the great lakes state, Michigander was born out of restless feet and the need to say something. Though live shows and recordings consist of a full band, at its core, Michigander is a solo project formed by frontman, Jason Singer. Releasing music and touring since 2016, the band has attained recognition on a national scale while becoming a staple of the midwest music scene. Including being featured in Paste, NPR, NME, Huffpost as well as other publications. Michigander has also played festivals along side bands such as Foster The People , Father John Misty, alt-J, Local Natives, and Solange. As well as shared billing with Hippo Campus, Mt. Joy, Tokyo Police Club, Twin Peaks, and Ra Ra Riot (amongst others). The band has also done sessions with Audiotree and Daytrotter and has had music on MTV. Currently Michigander is working on a follow up EP to 2018’s "Midland”, which is due out in 2019.

The experiential music of City of the Sun is the sound you didn’t know you were missing. NYC’s powerhouse trio flip the perception of instrumental music, attracting a whole new generation to the genre.

Formed in 2011, City of the Sun features guitarists John Pita, Avi Snow, and percussionist Zach Para. The band’s sound has an array of influences including indie rock, American folk, flamenco, and blues; it’s been called worldly, cinematic, a mix between Rodrigo y Gabriela and Explosions in the Sky.

Like only the most insightful songwriters, Austin Plaine draws intense emotion from the subtlest moments. On his sophomore album Stratford, the Minnesota-bred, Nashville based musician shapes his lyrical storytelling with both precision and pure feeling, capturing every nuance of lost love and longing and fractured innocence. And while Stratford is steeped in a warm nostalgia, Plaine instills each song with a quiet optimism that speaks to bravely moving forward, even in troubled times.

Produced by Jay Foote and mixed by Steve Vealey (M. Ward, Phoenix, Hurray for the Riff Raff) at the legendary Electric Lady Studios, Stratford arrives as the follow-up to Plaine’s self-titled debut—a 2015 release that earned comparisons to Bob Dylan and Conor Oberst from Baeble Music. In a departure from that more stripped-down effort, Plaine assembled a full-fledged band who recorded in an apartment in Brooklyn, infusing Stratford with a homegrown feel and loose yet kinetic energy.

Taking its title from the Flatbush street where the album came to life, Stratford offers a classically arranged take on folk-rock that illuminates the intimacy of Plaine’s vocal work and the graceful candor of his lyrics. From track to track, the 27-year-old singer/guitarist reveals a refined sense of songcraft that he partly credits to moving to Nashville from his hometown of Minneapolis in early 2017. “Being part of a whole community of songwriters, you realize there’s a lot of different directions you can take a song,” he says. “It’s really opened me up as a writer, and it’s also helped me to hone in on every word of every line that I write.”

With its abundance of indelible images—night trains and the Northern Lights, backyard camping and drive-in romance—Stratford also bears a richness of detail that hints at the literary and cinematic influence behind Plaine’s songwriting. “People tend to think my songs are personal because I sing in the first person, but often it’s very observational for me,” says Plaine, who names Alexandre Dumas and Henry Miller among his inspirations. “I’m learning to understand new philosophies of life, love, and death”, attributing his passion for reading has helped him attain a better sense of his surroundings.

Proving the emotional depth of Plaine’s artistry, Stratford opens with the wistful reminiscence of “Something More” (a steel-guitar-laced track “like a movie I’ve seen before / way back when / we were something more” sings Plaine in the chorus), then slips into the bittersweet, burned-but-not-broken ache of “What Kind of Fool” (a rollicking, country-tinged number co-written with Sixpence None the Richer’s Leigh Nash and Stephen Wilson). Later, on “Lucky Ones”, Plaine presents a more hopeful portrait unconditional love, with singer/songwriter Soren Bryce lending her vocals to the chorus’s bright and beautiful harmonies.

While there’s no shortage of delicately rendered love songs on Stratford, Plaine also brings social commentary to tracks like “Rise Above It” (a soulfully understated anthem woven with intricate guitar lines, dreamy mellotron tones, and luminous organ melodies). And on “If Tomorrow Never Comes,” Stratford closes out with a powerful missive featuring the album’s most urgent vocal delivery (sample lyric: “I wake up every morning and I see the reddest sun/They’re shooting guns and sending bombs in a war that isn’t won/And through the lies I do disguise my heart inside my lungs/I live life today as if tomorrow never comes”). “That song is me showing my frustration with this modern world, and how we’re so consumed with social media that we tune out what’s happening right in front of us,” says Plaine. “We get so lost on the screens of our phones instead of seeing the world for what it is. I’m guilty. I love my iPhone”

Born in Fargo and raised in Minnesota, Plaine had his first foray into making music upon finding an old guitar of his grandfather’s in a family closet. By high school he’d started writing songs, tapping into the timeless sensibilities that still inform in his music today. “My first influences were anything my dad was playing in the pickup truck when I’d go out on rides with him,” he says. “He’d play Bruce Springsteen and Van Morrison and Neil Young, and that’s what I dug into. Then highschool came and Bright Eyes changed my life.” During his junior year at the University of Minnesota, Plaine began dedicating himself more fully to songwriting and playing guitar. After posting several of his songs online, he headed down to Nashville to record a few tracks with Jordan Schmidt (a producer/songwriter/engineer known for his work with Florida Georgia Line and Motion City Soundtrack). A major creative turning point for Plaine, his time in Nashville led to the making of his debut album and release of “Never Come Back Again”—a breakthrough single that’s now amassed over 10 million streams on Spotify.

Although Plaine notes that gaining more life experience in recent years has shifted his songwriting perspective, his music maintains an unaffected quality that’s deeply refreshing. “I try really hard not to force songs” he says. “But I am always songbanking and hopefully one finds the finish line”. As a result of that instinct-driven approach, Stratford emerges as an emotionally raw album that’s cathartic for both listener and artist. “It will always be therapy for me,” Plaine points out. “If I get through a whole day without singing or playing guitar, the day just feels really strange. I don’t think that will ever change for me.”

After growing up together on Long Island, Mr Twin Sister formed in 2008 under the name Twin Sister, releasing two EPs – Vampires with Dreaming Kids in 2008, and Color Your Life in 2010 – to significant critical acclaim. The band signed to Domino Records for their debut LP In Heaven (2011), and in 2012 their song “Meet the Frownies” was sampled by Kendrick Lamar and Dr Dre on “The Recipe”. In 2013 lead singer Andrea Estella was cast in the Veronica Mars movie, with two songs by the band featured on the soundtrack. Having left Domino and changed their name to Mr Twin Sister, the band self-released Mr Twin Sister in 2014, recognized as one of the best albums of the year by Pitchfork, Gorilla vs Bear, New York Magazine, Time Magazine, Huffington Post, and many others.

Sons of Mali, musical refugees, groundbreaking artists, virtuoso performers, survivors. Unforgettable & undeniable. Songhoy Blues are the future of African rock n’ roll.

Steeped in the deep traditions of classic Malian music & desert blues fused with a youthful & super-charged sound of today, these 4 young men from Timbuktu continue marching, playing & dancing their way into the hearts & minds of music fans everywhere with their electric, eclectic & kinetic songs.

The band’s sophomore album, 2017’s critically-acclaimed RESISTANCE, solidified them as a group to watch, and they’ve followed it up with consistent live touring on 5 continents, helping to make them a force to reckon with.

2019 sees the release of their new album and expectations are high, for good reason – Songhoy Blues make music that is unique, exciting, contagious & paradigm-shifting. The band already counts such luminaries as Nile Rodgers, Gary Clark Jr., Run the Jewels, Iggy Pop, Nick Zinner, Matt Sweeney & Will Oldham as fans, and are poised to put their musical footprint down for years to come.

Songhoy Blues will be supporting their new album with live dates across N. America this fall, setting the stage with month-long residencies in New York City (April) and Los Angeles (May)

Most recently, the band completed a sold out run of UK dates, recorded a live session for BBC 6 Music; filmed an episode of the new UK TV show ‘Noughts & Crosses’ in South Africa (where they’re featured performing in one of the main scenes); are featured in a new photography exhibit called ‘My Rockstars’ by Hassan Hajjaj at La Maison Europeenne de la Photographie in Paris; and will be collaborating with UK artist Andy Morgan on a multimedia exhibition called ‘Music & Conflict’ at the Imperial War Museum, which debuts June 2019.

The band are also proud spokespersons for the charity WaterAID, and have helped to raise money & awareness toward providing relief in their native Mali. They will be appearing in an upcoming documentary on climate change in the Sahara; and were featured in the award-winning documentary “They Will Have to Kill Us First”, about the plight of musicians in war-torn Mali (https://www.theywillhavetokillusfirst.com)

With a voice described as “warm, scratched, sad and sleepy,” Cardiff sings songs that expose the human condition, putting a magnifying glass to the clumsier and less proud moments. He can turn any setting into an intimate affair, infusing his music and lyrics with an uncompromising humanism.

Cardiff makes it a point to keep the relationship with his fans personal, inviting and accepting any opportunity to make his audience as much a part of the performance as he is.

Armed with an extensive catalogue of songs (that have garnered over 75 million streams), sharp wit and soft voice, Cardiff is considered a pioneer in alternate venue touring, often appearing in churches, camps, prisons, basements, festivals, kitchens and even taking to the streets, bringing his fans with him. Over the years, he has played with and opened for artists such as Glen Phillips, Lucy Kaplansky, Dan Bern, Natalia Zukerman, Andy Stochansky, Sarah Harmer, Kathleen Edwards, Blue Rodeo, Gordon Downie (Tragically Hip), Hawksley Workman, Sarah Slean, Skydiggers, 54-40 and more.

As the name that they go by suggests, The Hood Internet are quite clearly an act in thrall to the possibilities that the internet has opened up, these past few years, for hip hop as a genre; it’s especially true of alternative hip hop, whereby artists play by different rules and experiment more than the mainstream side of the style would really allow. The Chicago duo – comprised of ABX and STV SLV – were primarily concerned with mashing up other hip hop tracks to begin with, after they formed in 2007, but have since gone on to pursue original material, in the form of their one album to date, FEAT; the album features underground guest spots form the likes of Tobacco, Class Actress and Cadence Weapon. In addition, the pair have also pursued slightly sillier things, like Album Tacos, a series of photoshopped classic album covers with tacos covering the original content, but they’ve also played live sets, which has seen them mash up classic hip hop cuts in a slick and often comical manner; it’s little wonder, then, that they’ve managed to carve out a cult fanbase, one that’s no doubt eagerly awaiting the next move from the duo in the studio.

The Ocean Blue arrived as the 1980s drew to close, and their debut record on the famed Sire Records label in 1989 seemed to summarize the best of the musical decade. The band of four teenagers from Hershey, Pennsylvania quickly achieved widespread acclaim and radio & MTV airplay, with hits like Between Something and Nothing and Drifting, Falling. They followed their debut release with the subtle and atmospheric Cerulean, which included perhaps their most beloved song, Ballerina Out of Control, and followed that with their highest charting pop album Beneath the Rhythm and Sound and the single Sublime, featuring a video of the band in the sublime landscape of Iceland. The band's fourth record for Mercury/PolyGram, See The Ocean Blue, was a departure to a more guitar rock sound of the 60s and 70s, but with the band's 80s dna peeking through. After a busy decade of recording and touring, the band left the majors in the late 90s. Several independent releases and related touring followed in the 2000s, including 2000's Davy Jones Locker and 2004's Waterworks EP, and some international touring. In 2013, after much anticipation, the band released their first full length record in over 10 years, Ultramarine, on Korda Records, a Minneapolis-based label cooperative label the band helped launch that same year. The record was a welcome return for fans of the band and a younger generation of fans, and garnered widespread praise as one of their very best albums. In 2014, the band released and toured for an LP version of Waterworks, and in 2015, the band worked with Sire Records and Shelflife to reissue their first 3 Sire albums on vinyl. The band marked the occasion by performing the first 2 albums in their entirety at limited concerts throughout the U.S. In 2016, the band did a South American Tour, and is set to release a new full length record in 2019.

Amber Run are British indie three-piece Joe Keogh (Vocal/Guitar), Tomas Sperring (Bass) and Henry Wyeth (Keyboardist), who deliver cinematic pop with a moody and introspective tone.

Formed in 2012, the band met at the University of Nottingham and within their first year together self-released their debut 'Noah' EP, performing at Reading & Leeds Festival in August 2013. Their first album ‘5AM’, produced by Mike Crossey (Arctic Monkeys, The 1975, Foals, Two Door Cinema Club), broke the UK top 40 in 2015.

The band returned in 2017 with unrivalled passion and a sound to match in their second album ‘For A Moment, I Was Lost’; selling out their headline UK and European tours. Released to wide-spread critical acclaim, their sophomore record is a raw, deeply introspective album with rich electronic textures, moments of expansive beauty and full-blooded raw emotion.

Geowulf are a band of two halves. They are comprised of Star Kendrick (vocals) and Toma Banjanin (guitar/vocals) - two childhood friends from Australia's Sunshine Coast. But the duo can be divided in more ways than just their physical existence, too, from geographical location and what they bring to the band, to their musical histories.

It's the perfect mix of blissed out, beach-y pop - the aural equivalent of driving along the coast on a heavenly summer's day - and melancholy, heartbroken lyrics.

It’s impossible not to hear freedom and excitement coursing through the veins of Marco Benevento’s new studio album, ‘Let It Slide.’ Produced by Leon Michels (The Arcs, Lee Fields), the record introduces a gritty, soulful edge to Benevento’s brand of high-octane keyboard wizardry—an uptempo, uplifting sound he playfully describes as “hot dance piano rock.” For all Benevento’s virtuosity on the keys though, the songs here are driven primarily by intoxicating grooves, with spare drums and minimalist bass lines underpinning infectious, intentionally lo-fi vocal hooks. The resulting vibe is a timeless one, filtering elements of vintage R&B and soul through modern indie rock and pop sensibilities and peppering it with the kind of adventurous improvisation that Benevento’s come to be celebrated for worldwide.

Acceptance is a recurring theme on the record, and Benevento’s songs often find themselves recognizing that contentment can come only once you’ve freed yourself from the chains of desire and regret. Upon close listen, one can find Benevento’s own personal philosophies subconsciously bubbling up throughout the songs. “You’ll feel better, I’ll just say / When you finally let it go,” he sings on the funky “Say It’s All The Same,” which features vocal contributions from bandmate Karina Rykman. The hazy “Solid Gold” celebrates the simple joy of being in the moment with someone you love, while the Lennon-esque “Lorraine” (co-written with Simone Felice) grapples with loss and change, and the anthemic “Send It On A Rocket” contemplates loneliness and connection.

Dubbed “one of the most talented keys players of our time” by CBS Radio, Benevento’s released six critically acclaimed solo albums over the last decade, performed everywhere from Carnegie Hall and Newport Jazz to Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo, and worked in the studio and on the road with the likes of Richard Swift (The Shins, The Arcs), Jon Brion (Spoon, Aimee Mann), A.C. Newman (The New Pornographers), and Simone Felice (The Felice Brothers, The Lumineers) among others. “It’s safe to say that no one sees the keyboard quite like Marco Benevento’s genre-blind mashup of indie rock, jazz and skewed improvisation,” the LA Times raved, while NPR said he combines “the thrust of rock, the questing of jazz and the experimental ecstasy of jam,” and Rolling Stone praised “the textures and colors available in his keyboards and arsenal of manipulated pedals and effects,” along with his “deceptively rich, catchy melodies and straight-ahead grooves.”

Describing the Durham-based Hiss Golden Messenger is like trying to grasp a forgotten word: It’s always on the tip of your tongue, but hard to speak. Songwriter and bandleader M.C. Taylor’s music is at once familiar, yet impossible to categorize: Elements from the American songbook—the steady, churning acoustic guitar and mandolin, the gospel emotion, the eerie steel guitar tracings, the bobbing and weaving organ and electric piano—provide the bedrock for Taylor’s existential ruminations about parenthood, joy, hope, and loneliness—our delicate, tightrope balance of dark and light—that offer fully engaged contemporary commentary on the present. And then there’s an indescribable spirit and movement: Hiss Golden Messenger’s music grooves. There’s nothing else quite like it.

For over ten years, Taylor has spearheaded this prolific, perpetually evolving group. He’s toured and recorded relentlessly, earning devotees along the roads, deep in festival pits, and across the seas, delivering earnest performances that morph from jammy freakout to private prayer in a matter of measures.

“The work that I do requires me to be in a certain emotional place,” says Taylor. “My music depends first and foremost on being in a heightened emotional state and putting my vulnerability on display.” This vulnerability is also central to Taylor’s steadily growing fanbase, which continues to discover universal themes in his deeply personal work. The critical acclaim and attention for Hiss Golden Messenger—including features in The Atlantic and The New Yorker, glowing album and live reviews in Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and Consequence of Sound, and barn-burning performances on Late Show with David Letterman and Late Night with Seth Meyers—affirm the emotional power of Taylor’s work. This raw emotion is especially apparent on Hiss Golden Messenger’s new album, Terms of Surrender. Out September 20 on Merge Records, Terms follows Taylor’s journey through a tumultuous year of trauma and psychological darkness, hoping and working towards redemption and healing, and the conflicting draw of home and movement. “Another year older,” Taylor sings on album opener “I Need a Teacher.” “Debt slightly deeper. Paycheck smaller. Goddamn, I need a teacher.”

Later, Taylor tracks the complex dynamic between father and grown son on “Cat’s Eye Blue,” singing, “Is this wicked word too bad to be spoken? You let the heart attack in. One taste and it’s broken.” He later pivots towards his relationship with his own daughter on “Happy Birthday, Baby.”

Happy birthday, baby Go love your brother now It’s a strange gift, maybe Girl, you know me better—better than I know myself

I’m trying to repay you All these miles that I roam And when I’m far away, baby Know that I love you and sing this little song

Taylor says that he wanted to make Terms of Surrender “a wandering record. I wanted where we recorded it to mirror the searching spirit of the music.” Having written upwards of 40 songs—in motel rooms, his studio in Durham, and a secluded cottage outside of Charlottesville, Virginia—Taylor winnowed them down to the ten works that comprise Terms of Surrender. With regular collaborators—including Phil and Brad Cook, Josh Kaufman, and Matt McCaughan—and new friends like Jenny Lewis and Aaron Dessner (of The National), the crew decamped to Dessner’s Long Pond studio in upstate New York, Sound City in Los Angeles, and producer Roger Moutenot’s Haptown studio in Nashville to create the most fully realized and genre-defying Hiss Golden Messenger album to date.

Hiss Golden Messenger songs create feelings to which devoted listeners attach their own meanings and memories with each repeated spin. Throughout Terms of Surrender, those feelings range from fearful to celebratory. But perhaps the title track—with its refrain of “I’m gonna give it/ but don’t make me say it/ It’s one thing to bend it, my love, but another to break it”—best summarizes the nature of Taylor’s work as a musician, father and spouse, and cultural communicator on this album. He explains, “Terms of Surrender is part apology, part plea, part love letter. It’s about how much of the most important parts of ourselves we can sacrifice and still feel like we’re living the life that we thought we wanted.”

At first glance, the cover of Prateek Kuhad's captivating new EP, 'cold/mess,' seems utterly romantic. The artwork depicts two lovers, bodies intertwined in a deep and lasting kiss, oblivious to the world around them. Take a closer look, though, and you'll see that the couple is actually underwater, drowning as their embrace drags them further and further beneath the surface. In a flash, ecstasy has turned to agony, and the love that nourished and sustained them now seals their tragic fate.

"Relationships can be very dichotomous," says Kuhad. "They can be comforting and amazing and chaotic and suffocating all at once, and I wanted these songs to capture those extremes, that rollercoaster you experience between love and heartbreak."

Written primarily in his native India and recorded in Nashville, 'cold/mess' is Kuhad's first collaboration with outside producers and a brilliant introduction to a breakout star ready to take the world by storm. Hailed as "one of the country's leading singer-songwriters" by Rolling Stone India, Kuhad has garnered a slew of international accolades and honors since releasing his 2015 debut LP, 'In Tokens and Charms,' an album which prompted glowing features and reviews around the world. He took home an MTV Europe Music Award, earned Indie Album of the Year honors from iTunes, was crowned Best Pop Artist at the Radio City Freedom Awards, and captured first place in the prestigious International Songwriting Competition, which helped launch artists like Gotye and Passenger to global audiences. Sold-out auditorium and amphitheater dates followed, as did arena support slots with Alt-J and Mike Posner, and soon Kuhad was traveling the world for concerts and festivals in Australia, Singapore, Canada, and France. Nike selected him to join their #BleedBlue campaign, Converse invited him to record in Rio de Janeiro as part of their Rubber Tracks series, and when he landed in Austin for the first time, NPR selected Kuhad as an artist to watch among the thousands slated to showcase at SXSW.

While some musicians are born with an instrument in hand, Kuhad was a bit of a late bloomer. After an initial attempt at lessons as a youngster, he enrolled in a guitar class in high school and promptly failed it. None of that managed to dampen his love for music, though, and he consumed as much of it as he could growing up in the small city of Jaipur. The internet didn't arrive in his area until the end of the 1990's, which meant that Kuhad's childhood listening diet consisted primarily of the Indian pop and Bollywood soundtracks that filled the local radio dial, as well as his parents' CD collection, which contained limited Western music.

"After high school, I moved to New York to attend NYU, and that's when I discovered Elliott Smith" explains Kuhad. "His music changed everything for me. It was all I listened to my entire freshman year. After that, I started listening to Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie along with newer artists like Laura Marling and Fleet Foxes. It inspired me to get serious about the guitar and begin writing my own songs."

For Kuhad, New York might as well have been another planet. The culture shock was intense at first, but as he settled into his new life, he found that the same things that made the city so overwhelming also made it an ideal place to discover himself.

"Living in New York felt so culturally liberating compared to India," says Kuhad. "It was energetic and inspiring, without any judgment or expectation. Growing up in a small city like Jaipur, you feel like you're constantly under the lens. Everyone always has an opinion on what your life should be like. New York was the opposite. There was a sense of freedom in the anonymity that enabled me to be totally vulnerable and become whoever I wanted to be."

After graduation, Kuhad returned to India, where he decided to follow his dreams and pursue music full time. A pair of early EPs (one in English, one in Hindi) put him on the map, and his full-length debut was an instant hit. The record earned Kuhad widespread critical acclaim, as well as an American publishing deal with the LA-based Cutcraft Music (home to Chet Faker, Izzy Bizu, and CP Dubb), which led to regular trips to the States for writing sessions.

"I always used to be alone when I wrote," Kuhad says. "I felt like I needed the space and the privacy, so when I first started co-writing, it was really challenging for me to have anyone else in the room."

Something felt different about working with Nashville-based producers/songwriters Konrad Snyder and Peter Groenwald, though, and after two successful writing sessions, Kuhad proposed that the pair record and produce 'cold/mess' with him. Snyder and Groenwald proved to be an ideal fit for capturing Kuhad's sound, an arresting blend of organic folk intimacy and lush pop appeal. His songs are poignant and introspective, transcending genres and borders in order to speak to the deeper truths of our shared human experience in all its messy splendor.

"There are six songs on the EP, and each one fuses bits of truth and fiction together to convey a very personal emotion from a very specific moment in my life," explains Kuhad. "The tracks all work together to tell a bigger story about love, heartache, angst, and conflict."

Sometimes whisper soft, sometimes tenaciously resolute, Kuhad's voice is mesmerizing as it floats out over gently fingerpicked guitars and ethereal synthesizers. The music calls to mind everything from The Tallest Man on Earth to The Head and The Heart, but it's all filtered through Kuhad's uniquely global perspective, with vivid, richly cinematic lyrics. Each track is also accompanied by its own unique artwork in a series of stunning photographs that feeds into -- and off of -- the music.

"Every song has a color to me," explains Kuhad. "I wanted each track to have its own visual identity so that the images and the music could all combine to tell the story of this collection."

It's a story that's at once joyous and tragic, as life so often is. Much like the photo of the lovers on the EP's cover, Prateek Kuhad's music contains multitudes and demands closer inspection, but the emotional rewards are more than worth the effort. There's beauty in pain, freedom in loss, growth in heartbreak. Sometimes you just need to look beneath the surface.

Two years on from her blistering debut A Suitable Girl, Ali Barter has announced her triumphant return with Hello, I’m Doing My Best - a revealing collection of songs that track her most formative relationships: to her body, her instincts, sobriety and the old vices it counteracts, and the people she loves most.

Hello, I’m Doing My Best is set for release on October 18, via [PIAS]. Today Ali also revealed her first ever love song with, ‘Backseat’ which Australia’s Triple J premiered and her first ever global tour. You can pre-order the album and lock in your tickets via alibartermusic.com.

Hello, I’m Doing My Best follows Barter’s 2017 debut LP A Suitable Girl. A record that, by all accounts was critically and popularly acclaimed. Tone Deaf touted it as “an album that struck a nerve with Australia”, while Sydney Morning Herald backed her as a "star on the rise". Ali Barter, however, wasn't so sure. “The first record came out and for some reason I rejected it,” she says, listing the complaints she found with her own work: “it’s too polished and my voice is too high” being at the top of the list. Overcome with self-doubt, Barter pushed herself away from music, determined to never write another song.

But in the winter, a few months after the record's release, she went out of town to clear her head, with her guitar for company. "Stuff started coming up and I couldn't push it down," she says, and despite feeling like she "wasn't ready" for what these songs were saying, her and Dawson went about recording and testing the limits of her surprising new songs. She heard something in them she'd realised she didn't need to fight anymore. "When we demoed them up, I was like, Oh, there I am. The thing I was pushing against was me"

Hello I’m Doing My Best is a sentiment most can relate to, and therein lies the undeniable pull of Ali Barter’s output. From her breakout single ‘Girlie Bits’ to recent cut ‘Ur A Piece Of Shit’ Barter spins sobering honesty through sugary pop songs, like a one-two punch of staunch self assurance and touching vulnerability, in a way that is so uniquely her own. On her method, Barter explains “I really connect to the idea that you can say something really controversial, but if you say it in a nice way people are more likely to listen to it.”

Since winning the triple j Unearthed competition and releasing her debut album A Suitable Girl in 2017, the former choir girl has enjoyed support at home from triple j, FBi Radio, The Australian, Rolling Stone and Tone Deaf, while further afield, Beats 1, Clash and The 405 have all thrown support behind the unconventional pop star.

Barter has toured relentlessly, completing two sold out headline tours, countless festival slots and supported The Rubens, The War On Drugs, The Jezabels, Stevie Nicks, The Preatures, Chrissie Hynde and personal hero, Liz Phair.

Hello, I'm Doing My Best is out October 18 on Inertia Music / [PIAS] . Pre order it at alibartermusic.com.

“This band is therapy for me to bring myself back to being a better person, and I hope people come along with me,” says powerhouse singer Clinton Clegg of The Commonheart. The testimonial begins on August 16th when the 9-piece band issues its most potent and purposeful dose of grittily redemptive rock n’ soul, its sophomore album, Pressure (Jullian Records).

Clinton didn’t grow up in a Baptist church, and his soul machine of a band isn’t pushing religion. Live and in the studio, the Pittsburgh-based collective is offering feel-good positivity, Golden Rule messaging, and sweat-soaked performances that nimbly ease through blues, vintage soul, and rock.

The nonet is bonded by familial-like ties and a desire to foster spiritual uplift. Among its ranks are female backup singers, drums, bass, guitar, a horn section, and keyboards. Out front is Clinton, a lightning bolt charismatic front man with dynamically expressive pipes that effortlessly traverse bluesy pleading, and honeyed balladeering. Onstage and in the studio, Clinton evokes B.B. King, Al Green, Otis Redding, and Sam Cooke.

The Commonheart is known to have transformative powers. Case in point is the band’s own singer. During one gig, while singing “Do Right” from Pressure, Clinton experienced a revelation.

“Seeing the audience’s reaction to the positivity in that song made me feel like I was giving them something they may need.” He pauses thoughtfully, and then continues: “You know blues music is sad as hell, but it makes you feel good. I thought maybe my bad stories could make people feel good, and I could bring a little bit of love to the show.”

Previously, Clinton was in an eclectic indie band searching for some semblance of artistic focus. He had grown up loving B.B. King and soul music, and recognized the strength of his raspy emotive voice. After some soul searching, he and that band’s drummer decided to do a back-to-basics band centered around Clinton’s singing and a vintage R&B-informed aesthetic. At first the band’s name was a casual variant of The Commonwealth, as in “The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” but the moniker later accrued significance as the band began to explore the pent-emotionality inherent in its gospel-tinged tunes.

The Commonheart’s latest album, Pressure, is both rugged and refined. The 10-song album showcases raw-nerve soul musicianship pristinely recorded. The opening track boasts soulful sandpaper-y lead vocals, swoops of cosmic slide guitar, a driving Sly Stone groove, and rousing female backup vocals. It’s an up-against-a-wall tune about making a living while raising a family, and it speaks to the album’s title. The bluesy ballad title track, replete with pleading emotive vocals, drips yearning and melancholy redemption. “That’s about the daily grind—what it takes to maintain important relationships while you’re away from home, driving thousands of miles in van to pursue a dream,” Clinton confesses.

A spirit of a new-day optimism courses through the aptly titled “Different Man.” The song soars with stirring group backup vocals punctuated by Clinton’s vulnerable confessions. It’s a rousing and uplifting slice of R&B brimming with warm organs, clipped soul-guitar chanks, and triumphant horn melodies. “That song is about begging for a second chance, and building something beautiful after a sordid past,” Clinton reveals.

Pressure is an album by a band on a mission. “We are willing to take risks and to go at any lengths for this band,” Clinton says affirmatively. “We are ready to spread positivity and make a stretch of this thing.”

Mikal Cronin is a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist from Los Angeles, CA. Since 2011 he has released three full length albums under his own name, alongside contributions to various recordings with artists such as Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees, King Tuff, Shannon & the Clams and many more. He has been playing bass in Ty Segall’s touring band for the past 8 years. Mikal lives in Los Angeles with his cat Ernie.

ROOKIE was born in the summer of 2017 when a group of Chicago musicians decided to cast aside their respective solo projects and join forces to form a six-piece supergroup. Between Max Loebman, Joe Bordenaro, Dimitri Panoutsos, Kevin Decker, Christopher Devlin, and Justin Bell, most of ROOKIE’s members have been playing music for more than ten years and had formed a bond with one another during their time in the Chicago music scene. When they combined their longtime friendships with a mutual love of the rock 'n' roll bands Cheap Trick, Chicago, Dwight Twilley, and Neil Young, the creative chemistry was instant. Unlike a traditional rock band, there is no lead singer or frontman of ROOKIE; everyone contributes to the songwriting. Together, the bandmates collaboratively craft massive rock’n’roll anthems that will get stuck in your head for days on end. By expertly honing in on a distinctive sound of their own, ROOKIE’s music subtly nods to their collective classic rock influences without toeing the line of being derivative.

In their short time as a band, ROOKIE has played just about everywhere in Chicago— From house shows and clubs like Empty Bottle and Schubas to Lincoln Hall and Thalia Hall, you’d be hard-pressed to find a venue that hasn’t hosted the band. They’ve also shared stages with the likes of The Nude Party, Melkbelly, The Shacks, and Sunflower Bean, but no matter where they play, ROOKIE will always manage to get a crowd of any size moving and belting along to their songs like “I Can’t Have You But I Want You” and “Let’s Get It Right." The band has wrapped up recording and mastering their debut full-length album, which was done between their home studio and Treehouse Records Studio. At Treehouse, ROOKIE recorded some of their songs live to tape, capturing the same intense energy of their shows. From swirls of guitar feedback and an air raid siren to down tempo tracks, the record promises an eclectic mix of moods and genres, ranging from country to hard rock.

Sun Seeker has drawn applause for their unhurried breed of Cosmic American Music and with BIDDEFORD (Third Man Records), their 2017 debut EP, the Nashville-based band more than affirm their promise. The EP – which follows Sun Seeker’s widely acclaimed Third Man debut single, 2016’s “Georgia Dust” b/w “No One Knows” (TMR322) – sees Alex Benick (guitar, vocals), Asher Horton (bass guitar, vocals), and Ben Parks (drums, vocals) exploring nostalgia, melancholy, and emotional turmoil via laidback psychedelia pollinated with tight harmonies, classic folk songcraft, and country rock spirit, an ageless approach that is simultaneously archetypal and now utterly their own. Sun Seeker has toured extensively, supporting acts such as Rainbow Kitten Surprise, Peach Pit, The Districts, and Jessica Lea Mayfield. 2019 will see their long awaited full length album release (produced by Pat Sansone - Wilco, Autumn Defense), accompanied with much more touring and festival plays soon to be announced.

A few years ago, while in a tour van somewhere in Idaho, the members of Chastity Belt—Julia Shapiro, Gretchen Grimm, Lydia Lund, and Annie Truscott—opted to pass the time in a relatively unusual fashion: They collectively paid one another compliments, in great and thoughtful detail. This is what we like best about you, this is why we love you.

I think of that image all the time, the four of them opening themselves up like that, by choice. It’s hard to imagine other bands doing the same. But beyond their troublesome social media presence—see: the abundance of weapons-grade duck face, the rolling suitcase art—and beyond the moonlit deadpan of say, “IDC,” lies, at the very least, an honesty and an intimacy and an emotional brilliance that galvanizes everything they do together. Which is a fancy way of saying: They’re funny, but they’re also capable of being vulnerable. “Giant Vagina” and “Pussy Weed Beer,” two highlights from their aptly titled 2013 debut, No Regerts, were immediately preceded by a sublime yet easily overlooked cut named “Happiness.” I saw a younger, still unsettling version of myself all across 2015’s Time to Go Home.

This June marks the release of I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone, their third and finest full-length to date. Recorded live in July of 2016, with producer Matthew Simms (Wire) at Jackpot! in Portland, Oregon (birthplace of some of their favorite Elliott Smith records), it’s a dark and uncommonly beautiful set of moody post-punk that finds the Seattle outfit’s feelings in full view, unobscured by humor. There is no irony in its title: Before she had Chastity Belt, and the close relationships that she does now, Shapiro considered herself a career loner. That’s no small gesture. I can make as much sense of this music as I can my 20s: This is a brave and often exhilarating tangle of mixed feelings and haunting melodies that connects dizzying anguish (“This Time of Night”) to shimmering insight (“Different Now”) to gauzy ambiguity (“Stuck,” written and sung by Grimm). It’s a serious record but not a serious departure, defined best, perhaps, by a line that Shapiro shares early on its staggering title track: “I wanna be sincere.”

When asked, their only request was that what you’re reading right now be brief, honest, free of hyperbole, and “v chill.” When pressed for more, Truscott said, “Just say that we love each other. Because we do.”

This is who they are, this is why I love them.

—David Bevan, February 2017

“They’re funny, and slightly goofy, and gently vulgar, and they play with an appealingly loose, relaxed confidence.” – Pitchfork

“In between pelvic-thrusting sexual innuendo and self-mockery, Chastity Belt filter feminist theory, cultural commentary and general intellectual bad-assery…Chastity Belt isn’t the band 2013 wants—it’s the band 2013 needs.” – CMJ

“The guitars on this record…have a nice ring to them, like Liz Phair’s recordings.” – NPR

Every once in a while a band or artist comes along that changes the the musical landscape. They effect the temperature in the room in an undeniable way. This is Ours.

Ours, helmed by Jimmy Gnecco, is a band whose sole purpose is to capture what it means to be a human - the love, the loss, the highs, the lows. Gnecco’s songwriting and voice pull back the veil to reveal humanity at its core, and the band completes the vision with a dynamic and cathartic maelstrom of sound. Since the release of Distorted Lullabies in 2001, Gnecco’s writing, singing, and multi-instrumental accompaniment have captivated audiences, ever-evolving with each release and incarnation of the band. With Gnecco as its North Star, Ours has created a catalog of passionate music, the recordings of which are only rivaled by the unparalleled emotional power of the live performances. And now in its current form, Gnecco and Ours continue to push the envelope both lyrically and sonically, compromising nothing and forging new paths.

It's an old saying, time flows away like the water in a river. A comparison that has more to it than you might think at first glance. Whether its a raging torrent or a bubbling backyard brook, both water and time can hide, obscure, and keep us from seeing some of the priceless treasures that lie just beneath the surface. The key to finding them is simply knowing where to look, and when to listen.

Cat Clyde, a brand new artist out of Stratford, Ontario. A fresh take on the classic sounds of yesteryear; breathing new life into the velvety vocal, tack-piano, slide-guitar-style that can instantly walk you through the swinging doors of a packed saloon. With influences ranging from Etta James to Janis Joplin to Lead Belly, hers is a mix that goes down smoother than a neat glass of mellow Kentucky bourbon. No longer do you need to reach for your trusty sifting pan and river boots to find gold. You just need to know one name.

New Ways is a new album by Montreal’s Leif Vollebekk, his hotly anticipated follow-up to the Polaris Prize finalist Twin Solitude. It’s a record that lives between the kick and the snare, in that instant of feeling before the backbeat.

“The way that it was is the way it should be,” Vollebekk sings on “Phaedrus”—a line that’s a memory and a wish. New Ways is that too: the sound of desire in its unfolding. Two years ago, things were changing so fast, and the songwriter didn’t want to forget. “I often think of Leonard Cohen’s line, ‘I hope you’re keeping some kind of record,’” he says. “So I did.” It was like he was pretending you can compose a soundtrack to your own life (which perhaps you can).

In the end, New Ways is a document of everything Vollebekk felt, the way each moment arrived and moved through him. Whereas Twin Solitude was about self-reflection, New Ways is about engaging and changing, touching and being touched. It’s a physical record, with louder and tighter grooves, and the rawest lyrics the musician has ever recorded. A portrait of beauty, desire, longing, risk, remembrance—without an instant of regret. “She’s my woman and she loved me so fine,” goes the chorus to one tune. “She’ll never be back.”

“Anything that I wouldn’t ever want to tell anyone—I just put it on the record,” Vollebekk says: tenderness and violence, sex and rebirth, Plato and Julie Delpy. A story told through details—“the sun through my eyelids,” “a sign on the highway covered in rain.” The songs came fast—recorded a week here, a week there, initially just Leif and a drummer. “After each take, we’d go into the control room and listen back and see how it felt,” he says. “If it didn’t feel right we’d do it again, or switch from piano to guitar, or change the drum sound, or the microphones.” Once they got it, he’d move on. Never at rest, always in movement: 10 different tracks for 10 states of motion—each with its own pulse, drawing the listener in.

There’s the heat of the night and the cool blue of morning, hints of Prince and Bill Withers, the limbo of a lover’s transatlantic flight. “Hot Tears” is all hot-blooded memory. “Apalachee Plain” is a clamorous goodbye. “I’m Not Your Lover” would be a perfect love-song were it not for its chorus—a song that lets two opposites be true at once. “That last record I made for me,” Vollebekk admits. “This one is for someone else.”

Imagine the singer at the end of last September, performing at midnight in one of Montreal’s rarest and most intimate venues—a century-old porno theatre called Cinema L’Amour, a temple to the true and the carnal. He was sitting at a piano. The chords were moving like shadows on a wall. “She’s my woman and she loved me so fine!” Leif cried, singing to the rafters. “She’ll never be back.”

When everything was finally over—when the mixes were perfect and the masters cued up—Leif says listening to the album was like re-watching a film. “Now I knew what was going to happen,” he remembers. “Now the moments didn’t feel fleeting—they felt eternal, almost fated. The songs spoke to me differently, but they hadn’t changed. I just heard them in New Ways.”

From haunting acoustic ballads to gritty rock and roll songs filled with swagger and attitude, Matthew Mayfield has spent the past decade releasing music that has changed the hearts and lives of his listeners. His latest LP, Gun Shy, is a collection of songs as varied as the emotions each of us feels. If his previous release, RECOIL, was the fruit of an intense effort by Mayfield to depict the good, the bad, and the ugly in the world he inhabited, Gun Shy is a look into all worlds – those full of darkness and hope.

To connect with listeners and draw them into these worlds, Matthew created Inside the Song with Matthew Mayfield, a podcast dedicated to telling the stories behind the songs of Gun Shy - Mayfield’s most introspective and personal record to date. “Our Winds” speaks of true love and hope in the midst of pressure from external forces while “Broken Clocks” finds him accepting a relationship that is doomed to fall apart. The riffs and hooks found in “Gun Shy” and “Best of Me” show Mayfield as the rock and roller he is.

While Mayfield is known for crafting both gripping ballads and eclectic rock songs, Gun Shy’s greatest triumph lies somewhere in between. “S.H.A.M.E.,” the album’s third track, touches on what is currently Mayfield’s deepest concern – a world full of people that feel as if they are alone. “Shame is something that no one wants to talk about, but we’re all ashamed of something. We all have demons and things that prevent us from seeing our self-worth. The song is about connecting with people and letting them know they are not alone,” says Mayfield. “Connection is everything, and music has a unique way of helping people connect to others and to parts of themselves that they might otherwise be unable to access.”

Gun Shy is now available on all digital platforms worldwide. Physical copies are available on matthewmayfield.com.