The Fat Angel Sings

When Joe Pug snuck into a Chicago studio in 2007 to record his debut EP, he had more misgivings than songs. “My most vivid recollections from those sessions,” he says with fifteen years’ hindsight, “involve sitting in the studio between takes and thinking to myself, I have no idea what I’m doing. I can barely play guitar. I can barely play harmonica. I can barely sing on key. I can barely keep time. But there was still something about these songs—something extra about these songs.” They were austere and rough, wounded and bruised, yet they were full of vivid, visceral imagery and turns of phrase both clever and caustic, all delivered in a voice that came across as convincing precisely because it was so untrained and guileless.

A lifetime later, “Nation of Heat” remains his most popular release, with more than 20 million streams on Spotify alone, and he keeps these songs in his setlist even now, as though he’s still trying to puzzle out their implications. That’s partly why he decided to revisit and reinterpret them from a place of experience and perspective. “Nation of Heat Revisited” sounds livelier, rowdier, punchier, but also more sophisticated, headier. “It’s how I would’ve wanted the record to sound in the first place if I’d had the money and the ability to do it this way. But I knew this album couldn’t just be the original songs with a bar band behind me as I played an acoustic guitar. I didn’t want to just add a rhythm section. It had to be a complete reimagining.”

“Nation of Heat Revisited” isn’t meant to replace “Nation of Heat”. Rather, Pug intends this new album to comment on his debut and to sum up everything that has followed it. It’s more thoughtful than a greatest hits package, more revealing than a memoir, and it retains the extra-ness of these songs. “I’ve never been far away from them,” he says. “These songs are how I’ve paid my rent and my mortgage. They’re how I’ve bought my kids diapers. When I got out on the road, these are the songs that people want to hear, and they’re the songs I want to give people. I’ve spent more than a decade playing them in different cities all over America, all over the English-speaking world, and I trust that they’re able to convey what I want them to convey. For a certain type of listener, I know they’re going to connect.”

This is not a remix. This is not a remaster. This is an entirely new album…. But you know all the words.

I am absolutely thrilled to announce “Nation of Heat Revisited“, a full band reimagining of my acoustic debut. The album features performances by Brandon Flowers of the Killers, Carl Broemel of My Morning Jacket, Derry DeBorja of Jason Isbell’s 400 Unit, Courtney Hartman and many others.

The album artwork is by the legendary Tony Fitzpatrick, and the liner notes were composed by Steve Earle. The album is set to be released on July 22nd via NOH Records, as well as Loose Music in UK/Europe and Love Police Records and Tapes in AUS/NZ.

First single is out now…*Very* limited 10” neon orange vinyl available while it lasts at joepugmusic.com/store or by clicking “view shop” in my IG profile.

I’m so excited for you to hear this whole thing!!! Hymn #101 came out bonkers. Strap in here we go!!

It’s announcement day, AND release day! We’re really proud to say that our album “Vestli” will be released on August 19th, Following on from the success and rich promise of their debut LP ‘This Is Not The End’ in 2019, Oslo’s Spielbergs return triumphantly with their follow up ‘Vestli’.

The new record sees the band stir that huge melting pot of anthemic heart-on-sleeve indie/punk rock, with their own frenetic, 1000mph energy and intense heaviness – soaring and heartfelt but weighty and dark. The result is something that sits within the likes of The Replacements, Japandroids, Cloud Nothings, Titus Andronicus but also out on its own, a passionate, joyful record that demands to be heard.

And that’s not all, we’re also releasing two new songs! “When They Come For Me” and “Get Lost” are out now!,

“When They Come For Me”, taken from the new album “Vestli” out August 19th!

Hazel English’s brilliant and bold debut album “Wake Up” technically-speaking was only released in 2020. The album was produced by Jackson Phillips (Day Wave) after a chance encounter at a Bay Area book store blossomed into a creative collaboration. Today the duo have released a new video for “All Dressed Up,” which they also directed.

After exploring collaborations both with songwriters and producers on “Wake Up” (produced by Ben H Allen and Justin Raisen), Hazel and Jackson –both by now transplanted to from Oakland to Los Angeles- reconnected once again during the pandemic’s localizing parameters and began collaborating, sending ideas back and forth to their neighbour amidst peak lockdown. “Jackson and I have such a great flow when it comes to working on music that it was easy to essentially pick up where we had left off. Our process together is very quick and fun, no second guessing,” recalls Hazel of their rekindled creativity. “I also think the pandemic and time at home got me thinking a lot about my past and remembering high school experiences and those kinds of feelings that were so vivid at that time.

So I found myself writing lyrics that were inspired by some of those experiences and then I kind of created a whole new story out of it.”

Songwriter Jilian Medford capsulizes a hot-and-cold relationship — one whose temperatures were magnified by the pandemic in her new Ian Sweet single, “Fight,” a celestial dream-pop song that gets to the essence of things in the chorus, when it’s time to “f*ck and fight.”

It’s the second single (following “F*ckthat”) since her full-length “Show Me How You Disappear,” released last spring. Of what inspired the new single, she says: “Spending everyday with someone, doing everything together, not knowing if the world was going to end. Leaning on someone with such heaviness, putting our entire weight and being onto each other because it’s all we had. The song plays into both the monotony of the relationship and the catastrophe that I went through after it ended. I felt so content in the relationship but then my entire world fell apart when it ended and I didn’t know how to pick myself back up and move forward.”

Director Lucy Sandler’s video is anything but monotonous. Filmed at the Prime Time Pub in East Hollywood, it stars the singer-songwriter joined by freinds Liv Mai, Amber D’Amelio, Ed Taylor and Heaven Iriya as karaoke singers. “I can only describe making ‘FightT’ as a true celebration, a giant family affair,” Sandler says. “By the end of the day, all our friends became friends, the bar owners were taking shots with everyone, and Jilian got to crowd-surf, which made me tear up because she was so happy. I just wanted to capture the rawness and excited vulnerability that comes with a karaoke performance.”

“FIGHT” is the new digital single from IAN SWEET, available everywhere May 17th, 2022.

It’s hard not to get lost in the dizzying swirl of Jenny O.’s new single “Prism,” a heart-melting promise of love and the L.A.-based singer-songwriter’s first release since her 2020 album “New Truth.”

Jenny O. has blossomed since planting her roots in folk and folk-rock, and “Prism” — made with producer Kevin Ratterman, as “New Truth” was blooms as full-on dreamy.

Particularly alluring are the twining vocals of the chorus, in which she turns “I love I love I love I love I love” into vocables. Her love, she reminds, “Is a prism for your electric art / Is a castle for your magical heart / Let me be your magnifier, and meet you higher / A reciprocal spirit.”

Says the artist: “Love is a prism. It amplifies or alters how we see and conduct ourselves. Through love, I was able to write everything else on the upcoming album, so it’s right that ‘Prism’ comes out first. I am deeply influenced by ’90s slow jams and this feels like that to me.”

Jenny O. – Vocals, Guitar, Synthesizer, Moog Bass Josh Adams – Drums, Percussion

The Lassie Foundation were birthed in Orange County in the mid-1990s, California dudes through and through, but forging an aesthetic as beholden to the ’80s and ’90s underground as anything regarded as the West Coast sound.

Some called their sound popgazing “pink noise” — equal parts My Bloody Valentine/Medicine and the Beach Boys. It earned the Lassie Foundation a small but devout following, but after three full-lengths (their last in 2004), a split album and a couple of EPs, the members moved on to day jobs/careers, families and, in general, life outside of grinding it out as an indie act. The 2006 “Through and Through” compilation hit the high points of the band’s catalogue, and a trio of now-hard-to-find singles were released in 2008).

Recently, the Lassie Foundation has been taking care of old business — they released remastered versions of their “California” EP and “Pacifico” album last year, and finally they are on streaming services. There is more to do.

How they ended up in Josiah Mazzaschi’s studio, The Cave, to make the “Cave Sessions” EP (released today) is an interesting sidebar. The four-song release re-imagines four early Lassie Foundation songs, as played by the “Pacifico”-era lineup of the band: Eric Campuzano, Wayne Everett, Jeff Schroeder (who has been a member of Smashing Pumpkins since 2007), Jason71 and Frank Lenz. They turned out bigger and bolder than even the remastered tracks.

Isabel Whelan — singer-songwriter, the pride of Clovis and UCLA grad makes music under the name BEL, and with just over a dozen fairly radiant tracks to her name in under two years, she’s bidding to join the conversation surrounding artists in the indie zeitgeist.

BEL’s frank, vivid, often droll and deceptively dreamy indie-pop/folk-rock has a lot in common with artists such as Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, Talker, Alaska Reid and Tomberlin not to mention Girlhouse (Lauren Luiz), who collaborated with Whelan on the March single “PBR.”

“PBR” (written with Luiz’s bandmate in WILD, Tyler Thompson) circles the wagons for one of those “what-am-I-doing-here” moments: “Cigarettes and PBR / At a gentrified dive bar.” It finishes with a roar, as if BEL and Girlhouse could escape on the power of their harmonies alone.

BEL’s latest single is also a collaboration with Thompson. “Cake” is a simple but cleverly framed declaration of longing: “I’m eating cake right out the refrigerator / When I was with you it tasted way better,” she sings.

Those singles will appear on BEL’s sophomore EP, “Jet Lag” (release date TBA), the follow-up to her debut “Muscle Memory” and singles like last fall’s ’70s-embracing “Mason Jar.”

In director Thomas Lynch III’s video for Valley Queen’s new single “Falling,” singer Natalie Carol is alternately floating downward through a digital galaxy or appearing as an apparition, walking through L.A.

It is certainly not the first time Valley Queen has sounded celestial, but here Carol and bandmates Neil Wogensen and Mike DeLuccia realign the sonic stars, letting the twinkle of synth and percussion light the way for Carol’s lilting vocals.

“Soon after we recorded this song, someone shared with me the Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche quote: ‘The bad news was, I was falling. The good news was, there was no ground’” Carol says. “I think this song is about that. What you think is the ground is the trap door.

“I wrote the chorus of this song years ago with [former VQ guitarist Shawn Morones]. It was a passing refrain we’d come back to repeatedly. I love its simplicity. The verses came much later. Once lockdown hit, I was going up to the roof of my house in Los Angeles to play guitar, and that’s where I finished this one. It was the first song that Mike, Neil and I arranged as a three-piece band. It kicked off a whole new era of sound-making for us, and set the tone for the rest of the album.”

It’s another in a string of singles Valley Queen has released since their 2018 full-length, “Supergiant” and the first since a 2020 collaboration with Cosmo Gold and William Tyler.

“Falling” written by Natalie Carol and Shawn Morones, produced by Neil Wogensen and Mike Deluccia Arranged and performed by Valley Queen

“The Less I Knew” is the long awaited 6th studio album from James Vincent McMorrow. Produced by James the album was recorded in London, Los Angeles and Dublin largely before the pandemic struck. It embraces the fact that life is chaos, and the idea of growing up but feeling none the wiser.

“Hurricane” is now properly out in the world. It’s not exaggerating to say that this song and album have given me my life back, reminded me what a precious thing it is to be alive and surrounded by love and meaning. I didn’t realise how lost I’d gotten. I cannot wait to share the rest of these songs with you, I’m in LA right now finishing album no.2. Stay tuned for some show news in the next couple days too

The Irish singer-songwriter-producer James Vincent McMorrow has released the life-affirming single “Hurricane.” Filled with choral backing vocals, horns and sweeping refrains, “Hurricane ” bottles the emotional directness McMorrow was after when approaching this record. Last month, he announced two new albums due this year, with “The Less I Knew” coming June 24th. The companion album “Heavyweight Champion of Dublin8” will be released this fall. “The Less I Knew” was written and produced by McMorrow, mixed and engineered by Alex Borwick and recorded at Black Mountain Studios in Ireland.

There are certain songs you can just build your world around. For me it’s this song. I’ve stood on stage in the last 2 weeks and performed it and I can exist within every single line. I can’t say that about every song I’ve ever written. I listen to it, I get to certain moments, and it makes me smile every time. I believe it will always make me smile. And you’d think “fuck, shouldn’t everything you make be something you exist within totally, something that makes you smile?”. You’d be surprised. I spent a lot of time trying to convince myself the road I was on was the one I was meant to be on. because i could still see the reason I was doing it, but it was shrouded in trees. I thought catching glimpses of it was enough.  Now I know that wasn’t the case, because when I made this album, I did it all differently, never forced, never bullshit, I got to a place that i never honestly thought I’d get to, and not to sound like a corny idiot but I can see it all now and I fucking love it.

James Vincent McMorrow is a platinum-selling artist who has independently clocked over 1 billion streams and seen his music travel everywhere.  An always-unpredictable, multifaceted talent, over the last decade, James Vincent McMorrow has established himself as an artist of signature style. On his own intuitive terms, James’ bigger-picture approach to each project may vary, but the idea of doing exactly what you need to do, and at exactly the right time, remains a constant. He has emerged as that rare modern act as integral to the worlds of hip-hop and textured R&B as he is the singer-songwriter roots of his early days. Behind McMorrow’s instantly-identifiable voice was a heartfelt, sometimes-cryptic storyteller – who, on his new music, also appears to have come to understand himself on a deeper level.

South London singer/songwriter Cat Burns reveals her highly-anticipated “emotionally unavailable” EP via Since ‘93/Sony.

Underpinned by honest lyrics and undeniable hooks, “emotionally unavailable” explores the internal complex feelings people experience when going through the ebb and flows of mental health journeys, friendships, commitment, and abandonment issues – topics that are close to the Streatham lyricist’s heart. When speaking about the inspiration for her brand new EP, Cat says, “I wanted to create a personal yet relatable EP where I express the different ways you can be ‘emotionally unavailable’ in this generation.”

The six-track EP features new offerings, the melancholic ‘learnt to love goodbyes’, ‘anxiety’, and fan favourite ‘ghosting’. Dedicated to a friendship breakup, ‘we’re not kids anymore’ encapsulates the sombre feeling when childhood friends are no longer as close as they were. Title track ‘emotionally unavailable’ and Top 3 smash hit ‘go’ complete the project.

Breaking into the Official Charts for the first time in her career with ‘go’, Cat’s single is now #3 on the Official Singles Chart. The breakup anthem has now garnered over 55 million Spotify streams, is a permanent fixture on BBC Radio 1’s A-List, and dominating playlists across Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music worldwide.

Conquering the UK live music circuit this year, Cat recently joined Mae Muller on her nationwide tour and made her debut appearance at The Great Escape in Brighton. She’s  supporting Years & Years on their UK arena tour before headlining three sold-out shows of her own at London’s Omeara and The Deaf Institute in Manchester later this month. Adding to her exciting live schedule, Cat will be supporting Ed Sheeran on his European tour run before headlining the newly-reopened KOKO on 4th October.

Detailing the South London artist’s personal journey in an in-depth and profound way, “emotionally unavailable” displays Cat’s blossoming artistry and heartfelt lyricism, showing her maturity as a singer/songwriter. The EP is an incredible body of work delving into how society has become detached yet so connected in the current age of social media, with Cat unleashing her unique perspective for everyone to relate to.