The new album from Fontaines D.C.—‘A Hero’s Death’—arrives July 31st. Available on deluxe gatefold 2x 180g vinyl, limited edition stormy blue vinyl, standard black vinyl, two pocket wallet CD, limited edition cassette, and MP3, lossless or 24-bit WAV digital album. Each album purchase comes with an instant grat download of “A Hero’s Death” (the single), and the full digital album to be delivered on release day. Barely a year after the release of their acclaimed debut album Dogrel (which charted Top 10 in the UK, earned a Mercury Prize nomination, and No. 1 Album of the Year positions for BBC 6Music and Rough Trade), Dublin, Ireland post-punk outfit Fontaines D.C. return with an intensely confident, patient, and complex sophomore album. A Hero’s Death arrives battered and bruised, albeit beautiful – a heady and philosophical take on the modern world, and its great uncertainty.
Barely a year after the release of their hugely acclaimed debut album ‘Dogrel’, which earned a Mercury Prize nomination and Album of the Year 2019 , Dublin’s Fontaines D.C. have returned with an intensely confident, patient, and complex follow up album. ‘A Hero’s Death’ arrives battered and bruised, albeit beautiful – a heady and philosophical take on the modern world, and its great uncertainty.
Foxing has become one of indie-rock’s most juiced-up alpha-sluggers, calling its towering shots and clobbering homers into the Busch Stadium parking lot. The valiant six-piece led by singer Conor Murphy swung big with their soaring 2018 LP Nearer My God, which landed somewhere between American Football’s disconsolate debut and Radiohead’s blinking Hail to the Thief.
It’s a sincerely commanding effort; 90 seconds into the emphatic album opener “Grand Paradise,” as Murphy shrieks the unforgettable phrase “shock-collared at the gates of heaven!” and the full band kicks in, it’s an arena-worthy moment for a band that plays to hundreds, not thousands. Yet those live shows are teeming with the group’s unapologetic self-belief — Foxing plays like it wants to be the rock band that saves your life. If concerts ever return, you better believe those clubs will be full.
“Nearer My God,” the title track, in all its triumphant, anguished, soul-affirming glory — the Hotelier-worshipping Missouri grandson of Queen’s “I Want to Break Free.”
“We live in a punk-rock world / Oooh-oooh, oooh-oooh,” sings Peter Gill on 2020’s astounding Hit to Hit, which honours both sentiments by sounding like Big Star if Alex Chilton had Bob Pollard’s ADHD, across 24 tunes that only break the two-minute mark on a quarter of the record. Homemade-sounding music is often championed for its roughness-as-realism, but Gill’s band shows how gorgeous and pristine the DIY life can be, albeit by leading with the Beach Boys rockabilly of “W-2,” a tax-form lament for anyone just trying to get their fucking quarantine check. Treat their breakthrough album as a thought-experiment about what would happen if you straightened all the crooked lines in Wowee Zowee and marvel at how much fractured beauty is still there.
2nd Grade have shared the fourth and final single from their debut album Hit to Hit. It’s another short ‘n sweet taste of the humble power pop that defines the album.
“The record’s latest single “Boys in Heat” clocks in at just over a minute and is incredibly catchy, so it’s easy to find yourself on your fourth or fifth listen without noticing. It’s a confident indie rock jam that exudes carefree summer fun.”
“Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider” is their “September Gurls” for a generation that first experienced “Little Honda” via Yo La Tengo’s I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One. Philadelphia’s 2nd Grade has released the third track from their upcoming full-length Hit to Hit. According to the band, “Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider” is “a rip-roaring earworm about clueless machismo set in the world of the road dog.” It’s insanely catchy.
Second Grade is Peter Gill, Jon Samuels, Jack Washburn, Catherine Dwyer, and Will Kennedy.
Bad Moves’ brand of adolescent angst-fueled power-punk has gone to college, emerging older, wearier, and wiser, while retaining all of its rebellious energy. Aside from some inaudible vocals on the first few tracks, Untenable is a thoughtful, dystopian delight; though that’s no surprise from a band that writes and plays each song like it’s their last.
Bad Moves is four friends making upbeat power-pop about anxiety and identity, drawing on a sound that stretches from forbears like The Nerves and Cheap Trick to contemporary artists like Sheer Mag and Haim. After years knocking around the Washington, D.C. punk scene in bands of their own, guitarists Katie Park and David Combs, bassist Emma Cleveland and drummer Daoud Tyler-Ameen began playing together in 2015, with a few goals in mind: Songwriting would be collaborative, singing would be everyone’s job and arrangements would be generously staggered, blending voices and ideas to avoid centering any one member.
On its self titled 2016 EP, the band explored bleak adulthood, writing about bad jobs, corrupt leaders, frustrated dreams and gentrifying cities. Tours of the US and UK with friends Jeff Rosenstock, Martha, Nana Grizol and The Spook School brought a widening fanbase and a sharpening sound, with new material that dug into the wilderness of childhood and how its lessons ripple out later in life. As anticipation grew for a full-length album, the band made a breakthrough appearance on the Cartoon Network’s Craig of the Creek, voicing their animated selves in an episode about the show’s lead characters putting on their first DIY concert.
“Tell No One”, was released September. 21st, 2018 on Don Giovanni Records, was Bad Moves’ debut LP: 12 songs about confronting old secrets and stumbling into self-discovery, wrapped in a sound that hometown weekly Washington City Paper calls “exuberant catharsis, the type of pop that makes you breathe deep and shout.”
“Untenable”, released June 26th, 2020 on Don Giovanni Records, is the sophomore full-length by Washington, D.C.’s Bad Moves.
Spanish Love Songs, are a band much too sad to actually be from Los Angeles., has taken the Springsteemo cocktail mastered by Philly stalwarts the Wonder Years and the Menzingers and spiked it with more concentrated Hollywood angst, courtesy of tormented frontman Dylan Slocum. Ravaging tracks like “Routine Pain” and “Loser,” highlights from the band’s killer February LP “Brave FacesEveryone”, smack you square in the sternum — hurtling pop-punk riffs and tales of depression, addiction and existential crises, born from the band’s rigorous pre-pandemic touring schedule. But as with all good emo-punk, it’s only fun if there’s some catharsis tucked away, too. And deep within the bleak, there are glimmers of redemption. Maybe we’ll all be okay. Probably not.
The too-real opening verse of “Generation Loss,” where Slocum wails: “You 29-year-old panic attack / And not the fashionable kind / The kind where you wake up and say ‘Man, I just wanna survive.’”
Band Members
Dylan Slocum – Guitar and Vocals
Kyle McAulay – Guitar
Trevor Dietrich – Bass
Ruben Duarte – Drums
Meredith Van Woert – Keys
If Lush measures a 2 on the Swervedriver-O-Meter and My Bloody Valentine a 7, Hum is a definate solid 9. Unlike most American disciples of the shoegaze boom, this Illinois-based band delivered metallic riffs — riffs sludgy and heavy enough to earn fans like Deftones (Chino Moreno famously cited the band as an influence), Deafheaven, and possibly other metal bands beginning with the letter “D. Where have this band been or what have they been doing all these years.
On Hum’s overdriven “Waves,” you can hear the windy central guitar line try to outdo itself in real time as their pedal-fiddling reaches life-affirming heights. Its mythical scale is only enhanced by lines of an apocalypse—but a calming and poetic one at that: “And the traces of morning will lead us to the end / Where the dying landscape meets the water / And the waves of you roll over me again.”
”Hum’s appealing mix of fuzzy swirl, post-hardcore intensity, and interstellar imagery reached its peak on 1995’s You’d Prefer an Astronaut, which even produced a minor rock radio hit with “Stars.” The band’s brief major-label run concluded with 1998’s Downward Is Heavenward, which also seemed to be the end of the band’s recording career — until a month ago. Inlet, the band’s new, long-rumoured fifth album, evokes cosmic expanse with lengthy, extravagantly textured burners like “Desert Rambler” and “The Summoning.”
When an album this thick drops out of nowhere, it’s bound to reverberate. For years, Hum had been providing regular updates on their first album since 1998’s Downward Is Heavenward. Yet when Inlet emerged without an official announcement or rollout in June, it was the best kind of startling. An even better surprise: The album holds its own with the Illinois space-rockers’ best. Inlet is monolithic in its splendour, its dense, churning power-chord riffs glazed over with a faint hypnotic glimmer. Few artists measured up to its heaviness or its prettiness in 2020.
It doesn’t seem like a good idea for any band from the 90s to reemerge now, in 2020, with their first record in over two decades. So much has changed. But one incredible thing that happened this very strange year was that Hum yes, “Stars” Hum—dropped with an absolute banger of an album, their first in 22 years. In their earlier days, Hum were outsiders, never fully fitting into the boxes of alt-rock or shoegaze or grunge. But they influenced so many contemporary bands that now, they somehow feel more modern. Sculptural, exploratory, and meditative, Inlet is a continuation of a concept (perhaps most succinctly put, “space rock”) and an ambitious re-examination of the possibilities of texture. Proggy without being nerdy, hard without being not angry, and vast without being hollow, it’s a mushroom trip through the cosmos, from the oceanic opener “Waves” to the swirling “Step Into You,” which offers an escape to “a desert that blooms in our darkest days.” “I’m lost,” sighs singer and guitarist Matt Talbott. That’s fine; just take us with you
To date Hum has only made one album. So in terms of recent achievements, the wholly unexpected “Inlet”
Max Clarke, aka Cutworms returns with “Castle in the Clouds,” and an accompanying video. Clarke wrote “Castle in the Clouds” in April 2019, after tours supporting his 2017 EP Alien Sunset and 2018’s Hollow Ground. The songs came quick, then, too many to count. Eschewing demos for in-studio spontaneity, he finished “Castle in the Clouds” on a flight to Memphis, TN, and then recorded it the next day at Sam Phillips Studio with Matt Ross-Spang (John Prine, Jason Isbell, Margo Price). The resulting track is somewhere between a lonesome cowboy lullaby for the restless, and a doo-wop sci-fi elegy for the daydreaming teenagers of Mars. Its video, homemade by Clarke, pulls together luminous animations and mid-20th century stock footage.
Cut Worms, moniker of Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter and multi-disciplined visual artist Max Clarke, announces his new double album, “Nobody Lives Here Anymore”, outOctober 9th on Jagjaguwar Recordings. Today, he presents two new singles – “Sold My Soul” with an accompanying video and “God Bless The Day.” Nobody Lives Here Anymore is the haunted reverie of an American landscape in-and-out of Max’s mind. Recorded between May and November 2019 in Memphis, Tennessee, the album is a snow globe of the mid-twentieth-century’s popular music filled with jangling guitars, honkey tonk pianos, and Telstar organs.
“‘Castle in the Clouds’ was the first one we did,” says Clarke. “I remember being in the studio, thinking the control room looked like the bridge on a spaceship. It reminded me of the old Carl Sagan Cosmos, where he’s kind of hovering above, transporting you across the universe. I always really liked the theme song. I think that spirit found its way onto the recording.”
Max immediately started writing material for his sophomore LP after an extensive eighteen-months of touring in support of 2017’s Alien Sunset and 2018’s Hollow Ground. Mining his life-long devotion to the lost American songbook for inspiration, he stockpiled nearly thirty new songs Unlike earlier works that were meticulously demoed, Max opted for rough drafts to capture something more immediate and honest. Most of the initial takes were tracked live with Noah Bond on drums, while Max sang and played rhythm guitar. Max then built lush arrangements around these intimate performances. A skeleton crew of friends and Memphis all-stars were called in to lay down pedal steel, sax, and strings. When all was said and done, they had recorded 17 new cosmic Americana gems.
“Sold My Soul” and “God Bless The Day” follow previously released singles “Unnatural Disaster,” “Baby Come On,” and “Castle in the Clouds.” “Sold My Soul” takes a look back and ahead at the choices we make, with a thinly veiled punchline to soften the blow. Over jaunty guitar, Max’s voice is expressive as he sings “I sold my soul somewhere so long ago // Oh I didn’t think too much at the time I was young and I didn’t know // oh till I saw it late one night on the antique road show // expert collectors to appraise.” The accompanying video, directed and shot by Caroline Gohlke on Route 66 from Chicago to Oklahoma, captures the aura of stumbling through a deserted time.
Max sees this record as a figurative shot across the bow to the modern attention span. He says Nobody Lives Here Anymore is about “throwaway consumer culture and how the postwar commercial wet dreams never came true, how nothing is made to last.” He considers the golden years of a society on its last leg with poignant curiosity, suggesting not only that nobody lives the American dream, but that nobody lives here, in this moment, anymore. “It’s about homesickness for childhood, for a place that never really existed,” says Max.
A loss of innocence lingers through this 80-minute opus as Max attempts to harbour love and meaning inside a world that sold itself out. While his grand anthems overflow with timeless pop charm, his ability to dig deeper than lollipops and holding hands sets his work apart from the days of 45s and Top of the Pops.
“Nobody Lives Here Anymore” the new album by Cut Worms out now on Jagjaguwar Recordings.
Losing someone close to you creates an almost phantom limb-like effect. Often, it feels like they’re a phone call away. But that instant between when you reach for the phone and when your brain delivers the new reality to you is a strange, momentary eternity. It’s both an uncompromising void and maybe as close as you’ll ever come to communing with that loved one again.
Gordi wrote “Sandwiches” as a tribute to the matriarch of her family. Her late grandmother was, in Gordi’s words, “a great feeder of people.” So when she fell ill, Gordi and her mother took it upon themselves to nourish the visitors gathered around her hospital bed. As they passed around sandwiches, “someone called out that she was gone.”
Gordi called on long-time collaborators and Bon Iver production duo Chris Messina and Zach Hanson to make “Sandwiches” at her family home in Canowindra, Australia — an old cottage littered with some of Sophie’s favourite pieces of musical arsenal combined with some flown in from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. The tiny farm town where her family has lived for over a century, Canowindra, and the heart of the matriarch, is embedded in this song.
The writing of Our Two Skins began after a nervous breakdown while pacing around an Etihad flight from Australia to Europe in late 2017. Payten had finished exams to earn a medical degree and after trading her “nice, safe relationship” for a new one, she began coming to terms with a new truth in her identity. That identity struggle and her new relationship, which played out against the backdrop of the marriage equality plebiscite in Australia and her Catholic upbringing, led to an isolated internal state. That state was further fueled by distance, trying communication and lost loved ones. Our Two Skins chronicles the intense and impossible time Payten spent renegotiating who she is and how she fits in the world.
The imagery for ‘Our Two Skins’ was created during the drought and before the most extensive bushfires Australia has ever seen last summer.
It captured the unrelenting and deceptively positive blue sky keep watch over a dusty, dead orange landscape. A mirage of hope and dread.
The colour palette was actualised in my favourite variant of the 12″ vinyl. I’ve been told there’s only a few copies left. If you haven’t already,
In 20 anxious minutes on that lonely flight to an isolated six weeks in Europe, Payten penned the album opener “Aeroplane Bathroom”. She recalls that time, “I had that sensation of being trapped so I climbed over the other passengers and tried to escape to the bathroom. The fluorescent lights in those spaces are most unforgiving. A terrible mirror.”
“This song is about feeling isolated. It comes at a very strange time now given we’re all locking ourselves in our homes, ‘socially isolating’ from our normal functional lives. There is no more dehumanising experience than to be cut off from everything you know. It can plunge you into total despair.”
Payten’s disposition is open and charming. She says, “A big theme of the record is: there’s nothing to hide behind. We didn’t have all the bells and whistles. You’re just standing there, with your hands in your pockets going: this is me. This is it. This is all I have.“
“Extraordinary Life” the new song by Gordi off ‘Our Two Skins’ out June 26 on Jagjaguwar Records.
There was never meant to be a second Loma record. The collaboration between Cross Record’s Emily Cross, Dan Duszynski, and Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg released their challenging and brilliant debut album back in 2018, which topped our list of our the year’s best albums, and drew near universal acclaim. The gruelling tour that followed culminated at Sub Pop Record’s SPF 30 Festival and ended with Emily leaping from the stage, and heading straight for the sea. That was originally meant to be that – no more records, no more Loma. As Emily recalls, “it was the biggest audience we’d ever had. We thought, why not stop here?”. As you can probably guess from the fact you’re reading this, that wasn’t quite how the story ended. Courtesy of Brian Eno loving their music, On December 26th, 2018, Emily Cross received an excited email from a friend: Brian Eno was talking about her band on BBC radio. “At first I didn’t think it was real,” she admits. But then she heard a recording: Eno was praising “Black Willow” from Loma’s self-titled debut, a song whose minimal groove and hypnotic refrain seem as much farewell as a manifesto: I make my bed beside the road / I carry a diamond blade / I will not serve you. He said he’d had it on repeat. The members pursuing their own projects, and a return to Texas, Loma were inspired to keep going, and the result is “Don’t Shy Away”, the band’s second album, out in October through Sub Pop.
Ahead of the release, this week Loma have shared “Ocotillo”, the first single to be lifted from Don’t Shy Away. Lifting its name from a cactus-like plant native to the deserts around the border of Mexico and the USA, the band were inspired by the somewhat precocious nature of the plant. As the band explain, “Ocotillo is a graceful, spindly plant that flowers extravagantly after rain—but it lives in places where it doesn’t rain for months, even years. It’s not hard to identify with it“. The track is instantly intriguing, the band continuing their collaborative approach to writing, and shaping their creativity into something that’s both dense and dextrous; even as it gets loud and jarring it always seems to maintain it’s propulsion, always flowing, always moving, never standing still. The track seems to build around the prominent bass, as flourishes of brass, woodwind, percussion, and vocals drift in and out of earshot. Lyrically, it seems to channel the freedom that often comes with moments of chaos, “lead me to another life. All my ties are broken, I’m in wonderful disarray”.
The return of Loma feels like a second chance, a band who could so easily have slipped between the cracks, returning to give us the chance to make them realise just how loved they are, cherish their return, it’s a triumph.
Don’t Shy Away is out October 23rd via Sub Pop Records
The Maccabees‘ former frontman Orlando Weeks has announced new solo material, Weeks released four albums with the London indie outfit before they parted ways back in 2015. Announcing their split at the time, the band assured fans that they would “continue making music” in other forms. Now, the group’s singer has confirmed his first solo LP, In a statement, the musician revealed that he’s been at work on the record for the past 18 months, while promising that it’s “very nearly done”.
“For me, holding my nerve has been a large part of finishing a record,” Weeks said, “and there’s a certain confidence that comes from discovering a song can survive in a room full of strangers.
The collection, titled A Quickening, is about not knowing what to expect when you’re expecting. “There are all these feelings and insecurities. Where is my place in this? Am I ready? Am I being usurped?” On Safe in Sound he sings about being “caught between launch and landing”. St Thomas’ is about the blurred glimmers of early life witnessed in an ultrasound scan. On Milk Breath, the only song written after the baby was born, he finds common ground with his boy: “I’m a beginner/You’re a beginner.”
The former Maccabee has pulled off a totally enveloping feat of atmospheric song-writing. eschewing his indie rock heritage in lieu of sprawling multi-instrumental sound craft, he’s strode into the art rock territory of Talk Talk & Radiohead & hung up his hat like it’s where he’s always belonged. stirring floating synths together with warm brass & tender piano, his meditations on becoming a father create a gorgeous, detoxifying environment to bathe our little ears in. we’re just as smitten with the limited deluxe clear album with signed & hand finished print in special pvc sleeve!.
