The Fat Angel Sings

Lily Konigsberg premieres the second single, “Sweat Forever,” from her forthcoming LP Lily We Need to Talk Now . Recorded (like the rest of the album) with producer Nate Amos, whose project Water From Your Eyes recently released their critically-acclaimed LP Structure, “Sweat Forever” departs from the album’s guitar-based first single, instead showcasing Konigsberg in a more electronic environment in something closer to her pure pop mode, bringing her unique perspective and melodic sensibility to a song about a moment of transition.

“‘Sweat Forever’ was the first song successfully recorded for the album,” Konigsberg explains. “It’s mostly about the bad part of going through a huge change in your life and the confusion surrounding that. But now I’m in the good part, so there’s something to celebrate. Sweat on brother!”

Lily We Need To Talk Now is a record Konigsberg – a Pitchfork Rising alum, Fader Gen F artist, and member of the beloved art rock band Palberta – has been slowly chipping away at since 2016, revising and re-recording the songs over the years (by her estimation, there have been 12 different versions). The eleven-track collection is her first proper full-length, following her anthology of EPs and unreleased tracks, The Best of Lily Konigsberg Right Now, released earlier this year. Catchy the whole way through, like much of the poppy and plainspoken indie rock output that’s made her a fixture of the NYC underground in recent years, “Lily We Need To Talk Now” is a record about processing the aftermath of a loss. In her own words, it’s about “overcoming heartbreak in all those different phases,” or, in even more universal terms than that, “it’s the stages of grief.” And part of going through those stages, as is evident on witty bangers like “Sweat Forever”, is getting ready for the the funny and exciting things that come next.

“Lily We Need to Talk Now”  will be released on October 29th.

At the beginning of 2020, Church Girls signed to Anchor Eighty Four Records, a Los Angeles based label that had just celebrated a decade in business and carried weighty alumni like The Story So Far and Grayscale. From across the country, out of Philly, came Mariel Beaumont (vox/guitar), Mitchell Layton (guitar/vox), Vince Vullo (bass/vox), and Julien Varnier (drums/vox) with their sophomore LP, The Haunt, that grounded the band in a gritty, chest-pounding sound.

Now, a little over a year later, they’ve continued to grow with A84’s roster of similarly anthemic acts, and while remaining on the label are also announcing their signing to Big Scary Monsters (American Football/Proper./Illuminati Hotties) for UK . With labels like these, who needs enemies?

The saying goes that home is where the heart is, but sometimes there’s a shift in location. From an environment that traps you, even when surrounded by people you love, to a lengthy stretch of I-85 where you finally recognize the power you have to establish your own freedom, Church Girls is a band that finds comfort in change. Based in Philly, the band’s latest single “Basement” finds revelation in escape while channelling the spoken-word delivery of The Hold Steady and the sheer force of Mannequin Pussy.

Vocalist Mariel Beaumont (she/her) explains. “It’s about realizing home was no longer what we thought it was when a family member’s battle with alcoholism came to a head. The song is still hopeful in a way since we knew we’d always have a home in each other.

Mariel Beaumont: vocals, guitars, trumpet, piano, op-1
Mitchell Layton: guitars, vocals
Julien Varnier: drums, vocals
Vince Vullo: bass, vocals

“Basement” written by Mariel Beaumont and Mitchell Layton.

The new album from Church Girls ‘Still Blooms’ is out 10/8/21 The song is out now via Anchor Eighty Four Records (world wide) and Big Scary Monsters (EU/UK).

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds have announced B-Sides and Rarities Part II, the sequel to their 2005 b-sides and rarities comp. It features 27 rare and previously unreleased songs that were recorded between 2005 and 2020, including one featuring Blondie’s Debbie Harry and one recorded live with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Nick said: I always liked the original B-Sides & Rarities more than any of our other albums. It’s the only one I’d listen to willingly. It seems more relaxed, even a bit nonsensical in places, but with some beautiful songs throughout. There is something, too, about the smallness of certain songs that is closer to their original spirit.

B-Sides & Rarities Part II continues this strange and beautiful collection of lost songs from The Bad Seeds. I love the final side of the last disc because it reveals the small and fragile beginnings of some of my favourite Bad Seeds songs. ‘Waiting For You’ complete with bizarre ‘canning factory’ rhythm track, a gorgeous ‘Life Per Se’ deemed too sad for Skeleton Tree, and ‘Earthlings’ that some consider the finest track of the Ghosteen sessions.

The first single released is “Vortex,” which Nick, Warren Ellis, Martyn Casey, and Jim Sclavunos recorded in 2006 and apparently shelved because they couldn’t decide if they should make it a Grinderman song or a Bad Seeds song. It sounds pretty massive, as you can hear for yourself below.

B-Sides and Rarities Part II comes out October 22nd via self-release. You can pre-order it from Nick Cave’s webstore, and there’s an option that pairs both installments of B-Sides and Rarities as a 7LP set. 

Marissa Nadler is releasing a new album, “The Path Of Clouds” on October 29th via Sacred Bones and Bella Union. shared its second single, “If I Could Breathe Underwater” via a video for the song that fittingly features Nadler underwater. The song features harp playing from longtime friend Mary Lattimore of Nadler’s. Jenni Hensler directed the video, which was partially shot with 16mm film camera.

Nadler had this to say in a press release: “When I wrote ‘If I Could Breathe Underwater,’ I was contemplating the possibilities of possessing various superhuman powers: teleportation, shapeshifting, energy projection, aquatic breathing, extrasensory perception, and time travel to name a few. As a lyrical device, I married those powers with events in my life, wondering if and how they could change the past or predict the future. I loved working on the melody for this song and bringing the choruses to their climaxes. Mary’s layered, hallucinatory shimmers really echo the netherworld of the story.”

Hensler had this to say about the video: “This song took on many meanings to me and I love that about it. How beauty and tragedy collide. Dreaming of having supernatural powers to change reality and have the ability to live and breathe underwater. It could also speak to the duality of existence. That we all have inner personas or shadow selves, and how we envision those different masks we wear. I chose to make something that touched on the idea of duality and the inner persona. To connect to the two worlds.”

Previously Nadler had shared the album’s first single, “Bessie Did You Make It ?” via a video for it. Nadler wrote and recorded the album during the pandemic and was partially inspired by binging reruns of Unsolved Mysteries as she “began to notice parallels between many of its stories and her own life,” as a press release puts it. On The Path of the Clouds she worked with various collaborators, including Mary Lattimore, Simon Raymonde (of Cocteau Twins and Lost Horizons and the head of Bella Union), multi-instrumentalist Milky Burgess, Jesse Chandler (Nadler’s piano teacher and a member of Mercury Rev and Midlake), Emma Ruth Rundle, and Black Mountain’s Amber Webber. Seth Manchester (Lingua Ignota, Battles, and Lightning Bolt) mixed the album.

If I Could Breathe Underwater, off of my upcoming album The Path of the Clouds. The album is out October 29th on Sacred Bones Records and Bella Union Records.

Toronto-based duo Ducks Ltd. are releasing their debut full-length album “Modern Fiction”due on October 1st via CarparkRecords. They have just shared its third single, “Under The Rolling Moon” which features backing vocals from fellow labelmates New Zealand band The Beths . It was shared via a video featuring the band in a Hearse in the desert. Ambar Navarro and Max Flick directed the video and they were aiming for the feel of a low to mid budget video from 1985, such as some of the videos by The Cure.

The band features Evan Lewis on lead guitar and Tom McGreevy on vocals and rhythm guitar.

“‘Under the Rolling Moon’ is about trying to be there for a friend who is in a moment of crisis,” says McGreevy in a press release. “Some of the frustration maybe of witnessing someone else’s extremely recognizable self-defeating behavior, but mostly just the feeling of caring for them, knowing they can be ok and hoping that they can find their way to seeing that.”

Previously the band shared its first single, “18 Cigarettes” via a video for it. Then they shared its second single, “How Lonely Are You” which also features The Beths. “Modern Fiction” follows their “Get Bleak”, which was originally put out in 2019 and given an expanded reissue by Carpark this past May. includeding the new song, “As Big As All Outside” .

Producer James Cecil (The Goon Sax, Architecture in Helsinki) put finishing touches on the album and Carpark labelmates The Beths did backing harmonies on three of the album’s songs. “18 Cigarettes” features Eliza Neimi on cello.

Ducks Ltd.’s forthcoming album, “Modern Fiction”, out on Carpark Records / Royal Mountain Records on October 1st, 2021.

This week new project Coco, a trio consisting of Maia Freedman from Dirty Projectors, Dan Molad of Lucius, and Oliver Hill Pavo Pavo, shared a video for their new single titled “Come Along” It is the latest release from their forthcoming self-titled debut studio album, which will be out on October 29th via First City Artists/Awal.

The band states in a press release: “The skeleton of ‘Come Along’ was recorded live, all together, with Oliver on guitar, Maia on drums, and Danny on bass. The underlying chord loop plays throughout as other instruments are weaved in one by one, picking up momentum and rolling forward as everything joins in harmony. The video mimics the song in this way, portraying our individual days-in-the-life with each of us filming one another on handheld camcorders. The day culminates in our first performance together as Coco, at a house show in Oliver’s garage with our friends as backing band. When it all came together we were pleased with the juxtaposition of the comically low fidelity and fast-paced editing, like a homemade action movie. Just as releasing music anonymously felt natural in 2020, it now feels natural to share ourselves and delight in the connection we make with our listeners.”

Last year, Dirty Projectors shared an EP anthology album, 5EPs, released via Domino Recordings. 

Three years after dropping her much-adored debut album “Lush”, Snail Mail has announced her new LP “Valentine”, out on October 5th. The project’s title track, out today, is a sunburst of unrequited love with one very scream-worthy hook that will find a special place in the heart of anyone with a soft spot for anthemic alt-rock. Josh Coll directs the music video, streaming below, and turns in a tale of aristocratic affection with buckets worth of blood.

Many young female musicians who were heralded as prodigies have made music this year revisiting the barbarity of that early renown, the powerlessness they felt as teenagers trapped in an all-consuming gaze. Lorde described having “nightmares from the camera flash”; Billie Eilish observed “a stalker walking up and down the street” Clairo spoke about being “just useless and a whore” but still getting cosigned by “your favourite one-man show” after being sexualized in the industry. To deal with the aftereffects of a “young life colliding with sudden fame,” Lindsey Jordan of Snail Mail who became an indie rock phenom after she released her debut album, “Lush” at 18—spent time at a recovery facility. There she charted out arrangements for what would be her upcoming second album, Valentine, later building on and refining those sketches in North Carolina with producer Brad Cook. Her intimate worlds, usually confined to a “you” and “I,” now face unwanted intruders: “Careful in that room,” she warns a lover on Valentine’s title track. “Those parasitic cameras, don’t they stop to stare at you?”

The most striking change on “Valentine” is Jordan’s voice, which is deeper, hoarser, and more mature than before. It cuts through foggy, cinematic synths as she lays out the unsteady dynamics of a relationship (“You’ve gotta live/And I gotta go”) while emphasizing the force of her devotion (“Fuck being remembered/I think I was made for you”). “Valentine” is accompanied by a gory, high-drama music video in which Jordan plays a chambermaid to a high-society woman with whom she has an illicit affair; crestfallen and crazed after seeing her lover with a man, she binge-drinks, stuffs her face with cake, and eventually murders him. The song ratchets up from slow-jam to power pop, souring in an instant as Jordan reels from betrayal: “So why’d you want to erase me?” she cries, speeding into the question with all of her might. Jordan is shattered yet hopeful, anticipating future envy upon seeing her lover with someone else and preparing for when, not if, they change their mind. Undergirding all these emotions is a simple truth: “I adore you.”

2/18 – Manchester, England – Manchester Academy 2
2/20 – Glasgow, Scotland – QMU
2/22 – Bristol, England – SWX
2/23 – London, England – O2 Forum Kentish Town

Valentine, the new album, is out on Matador Records

Hatchie the dream pop project of Australian musician Harriette Pilbeam, shared a new song “This Enchanted” via a video for it. It is her first single for Secretly Canadian and her signing with the label was also announced on Tuesday. “This Enchanted” again finds Hatchie ably putting a modern spin on early ’90s shoegaze music, producing a song that’s at once pleasing to old school fans of the genre but is also accessible to contemporary listeners with no proven affinity for shoegazers. The video finds Pilbeam wandering around a city at night while wearing angel wings, as well as showing her performing the song with her band.

“This Enchanted” is Hatchie’s first single since the 2019 release of her acclaimed debut album, “Keepsake” which came out via Double Double Whammy. The song came together in February 2020, while Pilbeam and her romantic partner, and Hatchie guitarist, Joe Agius (who also releases music as Rinse) were writing in Los Angeles and working with producer Jorge Elbrecht (Sky Ferreira, Japanese Breakfast, Wild Nothing).

Pilbeam had this to say about the song in a press release: “‘This Enchanted’ encapsulates everything I wanted to do moving forward from my first album. I started writing it with Jorge and Joe in February 2020 and completed it from afar in lockdown later in the year. We had been talking about making something dancey but shoegaze.

“It’s one of the more light hearted, lyrically vague songs of my new recordings about falling in love; it’s not a perfect relationship, but you’re enthralled by one another and it’s an easy love. It’s one of the most fun songs I’ve written, so it was a no-brainer to pick it as my first solo release in almost two years. It feels so right to be working with a label as exciting as Secretly as I step into new territory with Hatchie. I’ve been counting down the days until its release for a long time.”

“This Enchanted”, the new single out now on Secretly Canadian and Ivy League Records:

Liverpool post-punks Clinic have released their first new album in seven years, Wheeltappers And Shunters, today via their long time label Domino Recordings. Previously they shared a video for its first single, “Rubber Bullets”. Then they shared another song from the album, opening track “Laughing Cavalier” also via a Joseph May-directed animated video .

The band’s last album was way back in 2012’s “Free Reign”. “We’d released albums like clockwork every two years, so it seemed natural to have a break,” explained frontman Ade Blackburn in a  previous press release about the long gap between albums. “It allowed everyone to do some quite oddball stuff, away from Clinic. I think we all wanted a bit more freedom.”

“Wheeltappers and Shunters” album title is inspired by a 1970s British variety show The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, which was hosted by Bernard Manning and according to the press release “recreated the smoky, boozy atmosphere of Northern working men’s clubs for a sofa-bound audience.”

“It’s been a pisstake thing between us for quite a few years,” Blackburn explained. “Whenever we’d talk about a song sounding too ‘cabaret’ or too nice, we’d say, ‘That’s a bit Wheeltappers and Shunters.'”

Wheeltappers and Shunters looks back on the culture 1970s era Blackburn and “his collaborator-in-chief” Jonathan Hartley grew up in. “It’s a satirical take on British culture – high and low,” Blackburn said. “It fascinates me that people look back on the 1970s as the glory days. It’s emerged that there was a darker, more perverse side to that time. When you look back on it now it was quite clearly there in mainstream culture.”

The previous press release set the scene for Wheeltappers and Shunters: “The Great Britain that Clinic are evoking is not that ancient, bucolic past of village green cricket, half a mild and hanky-waving Morris Dancers that many seem so determined that the country should return to, but a rather more sleazy past. Clinic’s reverie is for a time when Blackpool was the pleasure capital of the kingdom and the public was kept entertained by traveling circuses and the dirty glamour of the funfair; tacky end of the pier merriment and enforced fun at Butlins; when bell-ringing town criers bellowed their nonsensical broadsides into the ether.”

The album was recorded last year at Hartley’s Liverpool studio. Then Dilip Harris (King Krule, Sons of Kemet, Mount Kimbie) mixed the album. “We thought it felt right to make a fun, dancefloor album in these dark and conservative times,” said Blackburn.