The initially Chicago-based indie rock band Young Jesus released their debut album Home in 2012, and were basically ready to break up not long after that until frontman John Rossiter moved to LA and ended up writing its followup. He says the album is “the product of one of those heavy moments of confusion and depression,” adding, “Essentially, I thought I knew a lot, I realized I knew nothing. Classic angst.” Home’s followup is called Grow / Decompose, and is out via Hellhole Supermarket . That’s the artwork above, with a picture of Rossiter in drag as one of the album’s main characters, Neil. Three tracks from the new album have been released so far, and a fourth called “Milo” makes its premiere in this post. “Milo” has roots in ’90s slowcore and early ’00s home-recorded indie, and it’s propelled by the kind of anthemic melody that feels instantly familiar without sounding like anything in particular.
“Gulf” will appeal to fans of Built To Spill and/or people looking to fill 20 whole minutes with glacial emo music.
Young Jesus – Gulf From the album The Whole Thing is Just There – Out Now!
There’s a new Jeff Rosenstock record. Jeff Rosenstock wrote Post- in a double-wide trailer in the Catskill Mountain town of East Durham, the snow-covered hills surrounding him like a landscape of blank pages. The serene, empty space was a big change of scenery for a guy who bounces around the world like a human comet, playing super-catchy, super-devastating shout-alongs to dedicated fans around the world. After playing with Bomb the Music Industry! for a decade, Jeff switched gears and produced records for The Smith Street Band, Dan Andriano, Mikey Erg and more, and started putting out records under his own name. After the release of Worry, things started to get way more intense for Jeff and his band. They made their first TV appearance on Last Call with Carson Daly, USA Today called Worry the number 1 album of 2016, and the band took to the road, touring endlessly for the past two years, taking breaks only to record new albums. Written in the days after the 2017 Presidential inauguration, Post-‘s lyrics get (really) heavy but the melodies are so catchy and the builds are so big and bright that the end result is more of a rallying cry than a surrender.
The album was recorded in a one-week, 86-hour marathon recording session with Jack Shirley (Joyce Manor, Deafheaven) at the Atomic Garden in East Palo Alto, CA. “The four of us stood in a room without headphones on and just played the songs live to tape, and after that we had some friends (Dan Potthast, Laura Stevenson, Chris Farren, Pup) fill out some of the sound,” So, if the record feels even more unifying than usual, like a party that turns into a sleepover that turns into egg-n-cheese sandwiches on the beach that turns into a protest march that unites a gang of buddies for eternity, well, maybe that’s why.
“9/10” is taken from Jeff Rosenstock’s new album, Post-, out now!
“Pastel Blues” is the new single – the band’s Cameron Wade says “it’s the least serious thing we’ve written in years. It’s a playful exploration of the phrase on repeat in the chorus, “wondering how it feels bad to be good all the time”. It’s a really dumb set of words, but a funny thing to think about in depth. So we’re exploring that with this kind of wandering commentary, reconfirming that life would be super bland if we only ever did what we were told we should. I think you can almost feel the music taking a few steps back and lazily fall into line with the idea.”
I just love the spirit and the pace of this poppy groover. C’mon let’s all go out, swing in the streets and save this troubled world, at least today…The Attics claim it’s the least serious thing they have written in years and the whole song focuses around the phrase “wonder how it feels bad to be good all the time” and is an exploration of those words. ‘Pastel Blues’ is wrapped up in a nice little package, measuring three minutes and ten seconds long, containing catchy lyrics, cool guitar sounds and a heavier break-down towards the end.
Acid Dad, a gang of Brooklyn rockers injecting a healthy dose of psychedelia into their livewire punk, dropped their self-titled debut LP back in March. Now, in advance of a sprawling fall tour of North America, the band has shared a brand new single, “Living With A Creature”.
Written and released with the dim, leaf-strewn milieu of Halloween in mind, the stormy, rollicking track conjures images of insomnia and claustrophobia. It all swirls around the song’s central monster, which lives “under my house,” “under my floors”, and, most tellingly, “up in my head.” The accompanying music video channels the song’s bleary melodies and vampiric vocals, with blurry horror clips conjuring the warped TV antennas of yore. To watch the video is to relive those bygone midnights in the TV’s glow, knowing that a little bit of static isn’t enough to keep the Wolfman, Dracula, or Frankenstein from clambering through that screen.
Since forming in 2016, Acid Dad has put out a handful of well-received singles and releases, toured the US and Europe, and shared stages with bands like Oh Sees, Diarrhea Planet, and Night Beats. They’re currently working on LP 2, Out October 26th via Greenway Records
Today, UK psych rockers TOY announced the release of their fourth album. With the announcement of the new album, the band also released a video for the lead track “Sequence One”. It is a perfect mix of psych and kraut rock. You can also listen to the two previously released tracks via Bandcamp .
The album is offered in a few different variants, so make sure to check out all your options before you buy. I went with the Tough Love variant that is limited to 300 and comes with a bonus LP of remixes. Rough Trade has 200 copies on white vinyl as well as a ‘Dinked’ version limited to 700 that you can grab from various UK distros . There will also be an indie store exclusive on blue vinyl, limited to 1000.
‘Sequence One’ taken from the forthcoming album ‘Happy In The Hollow’ available 25th January 2019.
Three years after their seminal album “Painted Shut”, Philadelphia’s Hop Along returned with their third Saddle Creek-released LP, Bark Your Head Off, Dog, their most cohesive release to date. Few vocalists can evoke the emotion thats packed into Frances Quinlan’s delivery, and it’s on full display on early singles like the epic “Not Abel.” Quinlan’s songwriting has become more self-aware and outwardly present to the mechanisms of the world around her, and Hop Along is as tight a unit as you’ll hear on record.
Hop Along – How Simple From the album Bark Your Head Off, Dog
Hop Along, who are playing across the UK and Ireland next month, and they’re super treble lush. The video gives a moreish taste of their live show too.
Nov 11th | Nottingham, UK @ Rock City
From the album Bark Your Head Off, Dog – Out Now
Band Members
Frances Quinlan (vocals, guitar)
Mark Quinlan (drums)
Tyler Long (bass)
Joe Reinhart (guitar)
By titling their fourth full-length You Won’t Get What You Want, Daughters send a crystal-clear message. The quartet once again follow the same internal compass that guided them to blur the lines of fickle heavy music sub-genres in the first place and quietly ignite a cult fervor typically reserved for grindhouse phenomena. In fact, the best way to describe the philosophy and the sound of the quartet is simply: rock ‘n’ roll.
The bludgeoning Rhode Islanders have blown our ears and left us breathless, back from the dead to unleash their-highly-evolved grind on the world anew. maintaining and expanding on their intense trademark sound with an explosive sonic-takeover, their music is now a thing of calculated chaos. the record delves into some seriously haunting and neo-gothic John Carpenter stylings alongside its relentless industrial dirge-ing. its exhilarating and quite unlike anything else – like Swans got mangled with napalm death’s speed-death in a sonic world invented by nine inch nails. on acid. mad. “after an eight-year-long hiatus Daughters reach their peak” 9/10
The first new music in eight years from DAUGHTERS
Daughters new album, You Won’t Get What You Want, in stores October 26th By titling their 2018 fourth full-length and debut for Ipecac Records, You Won’t Get What You Want, Daughters send a crystal clear message. The quartet—Alexis Marshall [vocals], Nick Sadler [guitar], Jon Syverson [drums], and Sam Walker [bass]— follow the same internal compass that guided them to blur the lines of fickle heavy music sub-genres in the first place and quietly ignite a cult fervor typically reserved for grindhouse phenomena.
In fact, the best way to describe the philosophy and the sound of the quartet is simply: rock ‘n’ roll.
Band Members
Alexis Marshall
Jonathan Syverson
Nicholas Andrew Sadler
Samuel Moorehouse Walker
E-mail is cool and all, but Antarctigo Vespucci‘s (Chris Farren and Jeff Rosenstock) PERFECT new album, Love in the Time of E-mail, is the best! . Don’t believe the hype? Check out all of these highly regarded and totally real press quotes: “A POWER POP MASTERPIECE FROM START TO FINISH” ALL OF THE PRESS COMBINED, BASICALLY
“THESE LYRICS CONTAIN INCREDIBLE EMOTIONAL DEPTH AND MATURITY” – CHRIS FARREN’S THERAPIST “ANTARCTIGO VESPUCCI IS THE MOST POWERFUL POWER POP BAND SINCE MY OLD GROUP, THE BEATLES” – PAUL MCCARTNEY
BEST BAND EVER” – ANTARCTIGO VESPUCCI
“CHRIS HAS DONE IT AGAIN” – JEFF
“JEFF HAS DONE IT AGAIN” – CHRIS
In 2013, Chris Farren faced an uncomfortable certainty: his band was breaking up. For the last eight years, the one constant in his life had been Fake Problems, the indie punk group he had started as a teenager and successfully steered for almost a decade. In that time the scrappy group of Floridians had put out two albums on LA label SideOneDummy, toured all over the world, and even landed a few songs on TV. But now, that was all over. Not knowing what else to do, Chris went to New York.
The idea was to collaborate, to find writing partners, something the musician had never done before. After a few days in the city he ran into his friend Jeff at a party. At the time, Jeff was fronting the band Bomb the MusicIndustry!, a Brooklyn-based punk collective that Fake Problems had often crossed paths with on tour. The two decided to give writing together a try.
It was only the next day, as Chris was walking up the three flights of stairs to Jeff’s apartment, guitar in hand, that he realized the two of them barely knew each other. Fake Problems and BTMI had toured together once, half a decade earlier. Every few months they’d play a show together, and hang for a few hours. But was that a close friendship? Up at the top of the stairs, listening to Chris come up the narrow stairway, Jeff was having similar thoughts. What if the collaboration was a disaster?
Something clicked that first day. Though neither musician had written collaboratively before, they planned another session a few months later. During that time, they made Antarctigo Vespucci’s first EP, Soulmate Stuff (an album whose name should put to bed any lingering fears). Written and recorded over a few days in a 3×6’ shoebox, 2014’s Soulmate Stuff was a natural combination of the Springsteen-like excess of Bomb the Music Industry! and the bubblegum melodicism Chris had cultivated in Fake Problems. Six months later, Antarctigo Vespucci self-released their second EP, I’m So Tethered. A year after that, their first LP, 2015’s Leavin’ La Vida Loca.
Shortly after Chris came to New York knowing his band was ending, Bomb the Music Industry! played their final shows. Like Chris, Jeff had spent the better part of a decade on the group, and had arrived at the end of an era. Throughout 2015-2017 both musicians launched successful solo careers: Chris’s defined by “pure power-pop goodness” (AV Club), and Jeff’s leading to Pitchfork calling him “one of punk rock’s greatest, most effusive living songwriters.”
Which brings us to today. After three (let’s say “eventful”) years, Antarctigo Vespucci have returned from the 3×6’ closet with Love in the Time of E-Mail, their first album for Polyvinyl. While by this point there is something of an established Antarctigo sound, Love in the Time of E-Mail finds the group expanding their sonic palette in exciting ways, reaching out further to unabashedly embrace all their poppiest instincts.
“I wanted to see you, to see if I still wanted to see you,” Farren sings, quoting Jean-Paul Belmondo on the insanely catchy “Breathless on DVD.” The mid-album track might get its bridge lyrics from Godard, but with its shimmering synth pads and Tom Tom Club-esque chorus, its lineage is equally New Wave pop as it is French New Wave cinema. On single “White Noise,” the tightly wound verse leads seamlessly into a chorus of “Can’t get you out of my head, I’ll listen to white noise instead,” a chorus that, between playful blasts of speaker fuzz, will stick with you for days. Elements like these are littered throughout Love in the Time of E-Mail, some flying by so quickly you might miss them on the first pass. And while the raw material for songs like “Another Good Thing,” “So Vivid!,”or the restless “Freakin’ U Out” could have easily fit on a solo record by either musician, the studious pop flourishes here bring them to new heights.
It may have all started on a whim in a cramped apartment, but like the friendship at its core, Antarctigo Vespucci has blossomed into something much more. And like the non-existent explorer they’re named after, Antarctigo Vespucci chart a map of something at once new and familiar: missed connections, texts lingering on “read,” and the words that go unspoken. Maybe it’s just a passing feeling. Or maybe it’s…Love in the Time of E-Mail!
“Freakin’ U Out” is taken from Antarctigo Vespucci’s new album, Love in the Time of E-Mail, out October 26th, 2018.
Find it now at your favorite local record store or online and then catch the band on tour this fall in a city near you!
Following the release of 2014’s Alix, Generationals decided to forego the traditional approach of writing, recording and releasing music in one large batch in favor of putting out singles as soon as they were completed, which resulted in a slew of standalone tracks throughout 2017 and 2018.
Now, for the first time, these singles (along with an exclusive track) will receive a physical release via State Dogs: Singles 2017-18.
Pre-orders are live, including a limited edition vinyl pressing, along with CD and digital options. Order now and receive 8 tracks instantly! The entire collection drops on December 7th.
Aoife O’Donovan, Sarah Jarosz and Sara Watkins are bound by a love for bluegrass, chamber music, jazz, storytelling and singing. Each of these three musicians, now united under the I’m With Her name, have performed at the Tiny Desk before. Sara Watkins was here with Nickel Creek (2014), Watkins Family Hour (2015) and The Decemberists (2011). Sarah Jarosz was here in 2013 and Aoife O’Donovan came along with Yo Yo Ma and Chris Thile as part of the Goat Rodeo project back in 2011. All three are brilliant players with an ever-shifting array of stringed instruments, guitars, ukulele, fiddle, mandolin and banjo. As I’m With Her, they know how to gather round a microphone and sing directly from their heart to yours. Purity is the brilliance behind I’m With Her.
The three singers who perform together as I’m With Her sound like sisters. It’s as if they’ve known each other all their lives and share common roots and musical memories.
The three songs they perform here come from the trio’s debut album, See You Around. It’s a sound made for the intimacy of the Tiny Desk and they all feel right at home.
Set List “See You Around” “Game to Lose” “Overland”
Musicians Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O’Donovan
