Whitney was born from a series of laidback early-morning songwriting sessions during one of the harshest winters in Chicago. after Julien Ehrlich and Max Kakacek (former members of Smith Westerns) reconnected – first as roommates splitting rent in a small Chicago apartment and later as musical collaborators passing the guitar and the lyrics sheet back and forth.
Whitney have shared another new song from their forthcoming album “Forever Turned Around”, which is out August 30th via Secretly Canadian. It’s called “Valleys (My Love)” and arrives with a new music video from Kamp Grizzly. Directed by Nick Woytuk, it follows a truck driver. Watch it below.
Whitney’s sophomore album features production from Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Hand Habits) and Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado (who’s worked with Weyes Blood and Father John Misty). The new single follows “Giving Up.”
Whitney are performing later this year’s at Green Man Festival Brecon Beacons, UK
“Valleys (My Love)” from Forever Turned Around, the new album from Whitney, out August 30th, 2019 on Secretly Canadian
Louisville-based singer-songwriter Joan Shelley has released a new single, “Cycle” and announced her forthcoming album title “Like the River Loves the Sea”.
The acoustically mellow track, “Cycle” stays in the lane of Shelley’s normal folk music. Touching on the vocal and lyrical nuances of Joni Mitchell, as well as the folk undertones of Gillian Welch, Shelley’s sweetly soft vocals mixed with the wistful melody and building strings of the song are a match made in heaven.
The song is the second taste of music from Like the River Loves the Sea. The first, “Coming Down For You,” still finds Shelley diving into her singer-songwriter ways, but the track is sonically a bit bigger and less stripped-back than “Cycle.”
Due out August. 30th via No Quarter Records, Like the River Loves the Sea was recorded in only five days in Reykjavik, Iceland, and all 12 songs were written by Shelley. Following her 2017 self-titled album, Like the River Loves the Sea illustrates the ethos of love and comfort throughout nature.
“The best music would be a conversation with the divine that has seen all of it, or with the oldest trees that have witnessed the whole human story. These songs are partly that conversation, at times through the lens of lovers,” Shelley says in a statement. “They are also a longing cry born of all the dividing; a call across the slowly spreading ocean. Primarily, Like The River Loves The Sea is built as a haven for overstimulated heads in uncertain times.”
“Like The River Loves The Sea” out August 30th, 2019
House of Sugar – (Sandy) Alex G’s ninth overall album and his third for Domino – is a highly meticulous, cohesive album: a statement of artistic purpose, showing off his ear for both persistent earworms and sonic adventurism.
Alex Giannascoli’s new album, House of Sugar, is populated by gamblers, chancers, and conmen — the same spirits that have haunted his work for a decade. Now that (Sandy) Alex G has outgrown his status as indie’s best kept secret, he’s grappling with those demons in public. Alex — the 26-year-old singer, songwriter, bandleader, pitch-shift enthusiast, poet, session guitarist, book-lover, son, friend, brother, boyfriend, and aspiring pool shark better known as (Sandy) Alex G — is in New York for a few days to put some final touches on his new album a collection of haunted-feeling collection of off-kilter Americana.
“Hope” appears on (Sandy) Alex G’s new album ‘House of Sugar’ – out September 13th, 2019 on Domino Recordings.
Florist’s forthcoming third album “Emily Alone” is out next week, and front woman Emily Sprague has released its third and longest cut thus far, a resigned and solemn track titled “Celebration”.
“Celebration” is full-bodied and bursting with a lush atmosphere of water lapping, birds chirping and ambient noises. Sprague opens the track with spoken word articulated over field recordings, and recounts the mundanities of living and being alone against lackadaisical finger-plucking: “With these hands now as I know them, a new scar and wow, tons of plants / Plant-induced psychosis / Keep me close, I’m good invisible / Sitting in loss like a bean bag chair.”
“Celebration” eventually gives way to Sprague’s gentle, careful vocals and rhythmic, hypnotic strumming as she finds herself alone and one with the earth once again: “If I lose my mind / Please give it back to the earth / Fire water wind / Earth fire water wind / And lie down.”
Though much longer and intricate than Sprague’s previous two releases the pensive “Shadow Bloom” and last month’s “Time Is A Dark Feeling”—“Celebration” still captures the same feeling of wistful belonging and dark contemplation.
“‘Celebration’ is a love song for darkness and the peaceful end to all things,” Sprague said in a statement. “A song in three movements: reality, fantasy, memory. In a lot of ways this song is the thesis to Emily Alone. Minimal arrangements—acoustic guitars, synthesizers, and voice accompanied by the ambient sounds of earth. Birds and water. The song begins with an experience of the now. It falls into imagining the way that things will always return to what they should be. It ends with a burial of negative forms and the acceptance of a beautiful new path towards growing from nothing.”
Emily Alone on Limited Edition Vinyl Double Double Whammy Records.
Hi! We’ve just finished recording our 5th album (to be released in early 2020), and right now we’re releasing a teaser EP / 10”, Hourly Haunts, with six brand new songs that won’t be on the album. The limited edition record will only be available for sale at lives shows.
When I set out to write a new Surfer Blood record I had no idea I’d end up with thirty songs. Whenever I sit down to work a new batch of material it usually starts out as a reaction to whatever I was working on last. In this case it was our last record, Snowdonia: an inward-looking record with long interludes that were sparse and fragmented. Now I was ready for the opposite. I set out to write as many short, unrefined pop songs as I could.
It didn’t take long to get some inertia going, the material just kept coming and it felt like it was overflowing. Before I knew it I was sitting on an hour and half of music that felt raw and emotionally satisfying. I worked up the nerve to share the demos with the band and Tyler, Mikey, and Lindsey started sorting through everything. We couldn’t decide on a track listing, so we decided we were going to try and record it all. It seemed like a crazy idea, but I figured it was a good chance to put everything I’d learned about recording to good use.
We started recording the basic tracks (drums, bass, rhythm guitar) in the winter of 2018. Right away everything was sounding great; the arrangements were coming together, the songs were dynamic, and Mikey and Lindsey were filling the empty space with their delicate harmonies. After a few weeks of all night mixing sessions, everything was falling into place.
“Around Your Sun” is an up-tempo, triumphant love song (or a ‘sensitive banger’ as Lindsey called it). The material from this upcoming Hourly Haunts EP reaches in a lot of new directions, but this one feels like classic Surfer Blood. Loud choruses, straightforward drums, and a sampler of all the new pedal noises we’ve been splatter-painting all over this EP. It’s short and sweet and a great introduction to the next incarnation of Surfer Blood.
The track is a perfect distillation of what made Surfer Blood such a beloved band to begin with — sugary choruses, feel-good vocals and shredding guitars… ‘Around Your Sun’ and the rest of Hourly Haunts represents Surfer Blood’s most refined collection of songs to date.”
“Around Your Sun” by Surfer Blood taken from the mini album Hourly Haunts EP avaiable on The Orchard Music
All 27 minutes of Patio’s debut album “Essentials” are artful and purposeful. This Brooklyn three-piece—Alice Suh, Lindsey-Paige McCloy and Loren DiBlasi—aren’t the most adroit post-punk band going today, but what they create out of sparse sounds is impressive. The satisfying contrast between DiBlasi’s pointed deadpan and McCloy’s soft vocalizing is just one reason for their intrigue. The vocal interplay between DiBlasi and McCloy on “Boy Scout” is the best example, and it also displays the full range of their lyrical charm. Lines flicker between self-deprecating or violent to wry or just plain sad. DiBlasi sings, “I just feel like I always lose / I think I’m going to go home and listen to Washer / Instead of spending any more time with you.” McCloy’s delicate vocal harmonies on “End Game” are welcome pillows of melodic pop, and DiBlasi’s punky, disconsolate grandeur on “Open” struts slowly with grace.
Inspired by classic British post-punk, the songwriting of Cate LeBon, and the close-knit Brooklyn DIY community from which the band first sprouted, Patio now release their long-awaited debut full-length Essentials, a fundamental collection of new music for 2019. Building upon the delicacy of the band’s prior work, Essentials presents fuller sounds, heightened emotions, and grander thematic complexity. Its 10 tracks are dark and introspective, yet hopeful, and often humorous—from rambling spoken word meditations to sparkling melodies and soaring riffs. Melodramatic and grotesque expressions abound, as do soft, subtle moments of quiet self-examination. Mixed by Amar Lal (Big Ups, Ovlov) and mastered by Sarah Register (Protomartyr, US Girls).
Provided to YouTube by Redeye Worldwide Split · Patio Essentials ℗ Fire Talk Released on: 2019-04-05
Wilco have announced their 11th studio album. It’s called “Ode to Joy” and it arrives October 4th via their own dBpm Records. In addition to the album announcement, Jeff Tweedy and co. have shared a new song.
Listen to lead single “Love Is Everywhere (Beware)” below,
Jeff Tweedy said of a new song in a statement:
There MUST be more love than hate. Right?! I’m not always positive we can be so sure. In any case, I’m starting to feel like being confident in that equation isn’t always the best motivation for me to be my best self—it can kind of let me off the hook a little bit when I think I should be striving to contribute more love outside of my comfortable sphere of family and friends.
So… I guess the song is sort of a warning to myself that YES, Love Is Everywhere, but also Beware! I can’t let that feeling absolve me of my duty to create more.
Wilco are heading out on tour this year. Ode to Joy marks the first Wilco album since 2016’s Schmilco. Tweedy’s first album of original solo songs, Warm, was released at the tail end of 2018. A follow-up companion album, Warmer, was also released earlier this year for Record Store Day.
CFM is the project of one Charles Moothart, the California garage-rocker who plays in Ty Segall’s Freedom Band, Fuzz, and GØGGS. Last week, he released his third album as CFM, “Soundtrack For An Empty Room”, much of which he write while out on tour with Segall. And today, he’s sharing a new video for the dreamily psychedelic LP cut “Greenlight,” a black-and-white clip that follows a deformed humanoid wandering a desert landscape. As Moothart explained to The song “Greenlight” comes from a very vulnerable and surreal place in my mind. I wanted the visual experience to have a dreamlike quality similar to some Kenneth Anger movies. Josh had the idea for the humanoid wandering through a surreal feeling wasteland, and I thought the idea was great. Josh and Star did an amazing job making it feel like a dream sequence of confusion and conflict which is essentially what this song is to me.
From the new LP: Soundtrack To An Empty Room Available now at www.intheredrecords.com
Erin Durant’s music may be small-town and rooted in the traditions of the south, but its scale is immeasurable. Indeed, on title track ‘Islands’Durant sings “I’ve been to Pensacola but never to Rome, I’ve walked the waters of the gulf of Mexico” and she truly takes you there, the album acting more like an archipelago than a single island. Produced by TV On The Radio’s Kyp Malone, Islands (Released June 28th) comprises eight songs that deliver clarity within mystery and adventure in their uncluttered vignettes.
Rarely does an artist appear, as if out of thin air, with a full body of work where lyrically lush songs carry you into other worlds as if they were your own. Erin Durant’s second album, Islands is an odyssey of sorts, with songs that blur the line between reality and fiction. Born and raised in New Orleans, Durant has been based in New York for over a decade, all the while keeping track of the intricacies of life surrounding her and diligently developing her craft as a songwriter and performer. Lyrically, she composes most songs on piano, songs that tend to unfold structurally like a memory or a scene from a movie. As a performer, Durant usually transports a 232-pound ¾ size piano to venues without one. To hear her play the instrument makes plain her case for the extra effort. Her music is rooted in an ongoing dialogue between the physicality of her playing and the high, clear tone of her voice. Enmeshed with one another, it’s a display of an artist in full possession of herself and vision.
Islands sprawls out in front of you, weaving disparate stories into an overarching narrative. The songs touch on the ability to find meaning in minutiae. On “Take A Load Off” Durant tells a story of a weary traveler disoriented but pulled into revelry in an attempt to assuage their loss. The titular track “Islands” takes a similar tact, focusing on the conflicting process of attempting to find joy when joy seems lost. Islands is a continuously shifting landscape, with a knowing nod to the inevitability of these shifts.
Islands is preceded by Durant’s 2016 self-recorded album Blueberry Mountain released on New York label Flying Moonlight. Recording to tape in her apartment, the lo-fi quality and stripped-down arrangements led Durant to better understand the core layers of her music and from there where she wanted to go.
Durant’s collaboration with Malone introduced an expansiveness in sound. She knew she wanted the songs to be fuller. They welcomed instrumentation into the fold, including a complete rhythm section, the hum of pedal steel, and warm flourishes of brass and woodwinds. These are generous songs intended to breathe. They never fall into a grid. Instead, they pause and gallop, expand and contract, and pass through time unhurried.
Erin Durant’s second album Islands is released June 21 via Keeled Scales
Thanks to Paddy Kinsella // Someone Great PR for bringing this delightful sounds to our attention
paddy@someonegreatpr.com
Erin’s a vital addition to a taste making label that already houses Sun June, Buck Meek (Big Thief) Twain.
Sharon Van Etten presents the official video for “No One’s Easy to Love” off her latest album Remind Me Tomorrow, it’s her “most atmospheric, emotionally piercing album to date” (Pitchfork). The video was directed by mentor and previous collaborator Katherine Dieckmann, who directed the “Jupiter 4” video and whose photograph graces the cover of Remind Me Tomorrow, and was filmed at Empire State Plaza in Albany, New York.
“Happy to share another video I made with my dear friend Katherine Dieckmann. Stark, simple, raw,” says Van Etten. “She allowed me to be myself as she took the reins with capturing my performance in her favorite part of downtown Albany.”
Van Etten has had an incredible 2019 since the release of Remind Me Tomorrow. She kicked off the year returning to Jimmy Kimmel Live! and The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and performed on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Additionally, The New York Times Magazine named lead single “Comeback Kid” one of “The 25 Songs That Matter Right Now,” while “Seventeen” was discussed in depth by Van Etten on Song Exploder, and recognized as a best song of 2019 by ELLE and ESQUIRE. Remind Me Tomorrow continues to garner glowing praise: it’s Exclaim!’s #1 album of the year so far and is featured prominently in mid-year lists
Van Etten continues to sell out tours around the globe in support of Remind Me Tomorrow. She’ll play a slew of summer festivals, including Lollapalooza, Osheaga, Glastonbury, Roskilde, and Greenman, before supporting Bon Iver for two weeks in September.
“No One’s Easy To Love” off Sharon Van Etten’s new album “Remind Me Tomorrow” out now on Jagjaguwar Records
