The Fat Angel Sings

Dan Wriggins loves a slow burn. His band Friendship (whose members also play in 2nd Grade, Hour, and MJ Lenderman’s touring band The Wind) is an increasingly important staple of the current American DIY indie rock scene, but they don’t announce themselves with the types of big choruses that so many of their peers do. Instead, the songs on “Caveman Wakes Up” slowly unravel, with hypnotic guitar patterns and plainspoken lyrics that gradually build to climaxes that sound more satisfying with each listen.

In the spirit of artists like Phil Elverum, David Bazan, and David Berman, the calmness in Wriggins’ singing and song writing is always deceptive. It ever seems a little too mellow, the unrest is about to sneak up on you.

It’s an album for sleeping and waking, walking and driving, hunting and fishing, for loitering outside a roadhouse on the haunted tundra. Okay in elevators, not great for dinner. On “Caveman Wakes Up” ,Friendship’s second album for Merge Records, the band’s historically capacious definition of country music grows wider still. Shambolic guitars are offset by flute pads, bleary poetry is set against a Motown rhythm section, a song about Jerry Garcia and First Lady Betty Ford fades out with a drum solo, like if Talk Talk came from a dingy Philadelphia basement and was fronted by James Tate.

Songwriter Dan Wriggins’ ragged baritone cuts through eleven murky, swirling country-rock songs with profound lyrical substance and sincerity. Like an alarm clock incorporated into the edge of a dream, “Caveman Wakes Up” belongs equally to the conscious and subconscious mind, fraught with background, steeped in reference and experimentation, delivered casually and as a dire warning, dedicated, above all, to music’s creative soul.

An album for sleeping and waking, walking and driving, hunting and fishing, for loitering outside a roadhouse on the haunted tundra. Okay in elevators, not great for dinner. On “Caveman Wakes Up”, Friendship‘s new album and second for Merge Records, the band’s historically capacious definition of country music grows wider still.

Like an alarm clock incorporated into the edge of a dream, “Caveman Wakes Up” belongs equally to the conscious and subconscious mind, fraught with background, steeped in reference and experimentation, delivered casually and as a dire warning, dedicated, above all, to music’s creative soul.

Over the years, dedication has paid off. Friendship has become a kind of reverse supergroup, wherein the band itself and each individual member are located centrally in an increasingly prominent scene of young folk and country musicians and songwriters.

Drummer Michael Cormier O’Leary leads the instrumental collective Hour and, along with bassist Jon Samuels, runs Dear Life Records, home to friends and peers who count Friendship as a major influence including MJ Lenderman, Florry, and Fust. Guitarist Peter Gill’s band 2nd Grade records prolifically.

Wriggins began writing the songs of “Caveman Wakes Up” on a downtuned classical guitar of Lenderman’s and finished on a barely tuned piano in an apartment he shared with Sadurn’s G DeGroot.

In the summer of 2023, Wriggins had just left the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where his love for poetry and mistrust for the academic poetry world grew in tandem. A relationship fell apart, and Wriggins crashed for several weeks at Lenderman and Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman’s home in North Carolina, where he recorded the first demos of “Resident Evil,” “All Over the World,” and “Love Vape.”

Wriggins returned to Philadelphia, and the band got to work on new ideas, finally tracking the album in five days with engineer Jeff Ziegler. Wriggins recorded vocals with Love the Stranger engineer Bradford Kreiger, and organ, violin (Jason Calhoun), and flute (Adelyn Strei) were recorded by Lucas Knapp in a West Philadelphia church.

Lyrically, “Caveman Wakes Up” covers familiar Friendship ground – the sacred is profaned and the profane sanctified. Characters complain about work and marvel at love. Here, however, we get Wriggins‘ first real confrontation with depression, in “Hollow Skulls,” “All Over the World,” and “Resident Evil,” where the soul wages its perpetual war against darkness and stagnation. It often loses.

The verses of “Hollow Skulls” are punctuated by passages of musical emptiness, a single suspended chord, and brushes on a snare drum. When Wriggins complains about a roommate, shouting, “Who’s that shithead in my living room/ playing Resident Evil,” it’s abundantly clear there is no roommate, that the evil resides within.

“Caveman Wakes Up” showcases Friendship‘s particular genius for visionary arrangement, indebted equally across generations to the folk-rock canon of Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and Emmylou Harris, to indie stalwarts like Yo La Tengo and Merge labelmates Lambchop, to contemporaries like Lomelda and ML Buch.

As a work of music production, “Caveman Wakes Up” is Friendship‘s most advanced yet, another testament to the band’s devotion and care. This band is so good, it’s everything I love, with hints of David Berman, Okkervil River, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, or Vic Chestnutt.

Prewn is becoming a master of ugly beauty. The Izzy Hagerup-led project’s sophomore album “System” picks up where their great 2023 debut LP “Through the Window” left off and only improves upon its formula, putting a jagged edge on this otherwise-gorgeously-arranged batch of freak folk songs. At the core is Izzy’s gentle guitar and otherworldly voice, a voice that stops you in your tracks and truly cuts through the sea of indie rock singer/songwriters. And that core is fleshed out by warped cellos, rickety drum machines, and speaker-blowing grunge riffs.

Its juxtaposition of dirty and delicate leaves me reminded of cult fave albums like Joanna Newsom’s The Milk-Eyed Mender, Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Mitski’s Bury Me At Makeout Creek, and Hop Along’s Get Disowned, and I hope that one day we’ll all be talking about this album the way people talk about those albums now.

We’re older; Katie and Allison Crutchfield are older, 36 now. The surprise album Snocaps captures the growing pains, in bouncy, sometimes-country-fried, sometimes-punky, sometimes-elegiac songs. Broadly, the album is about the nostalgia of past mistakes turning into sage advice about aging. Specifically, it’s about cars driving down numbered roads, restless pride, loud bars, muses, being thorny girlfriends, addiction, big dreams, and toxic friendships. This is what well-rooted and courageous music sounds like. “Wasteland” welcomes a hailstorm of danger: “I’m running hot on empty, firing off some willful bottomline / Gave it everything I had, I am hazmat, I am radioactive / Caustic car wreck, off the rails and rude and ruining your life.” “Doom” ought to be one of the biggest damn things Katie’s ever done. Because her writing is so trenchant (“We may fall back into fiction / Know I always do / Make stale of me / No one’s immune”), a splashy arrangement would sound out of turn here, which is why Lenderman’s guitar pageantry comes with just the right amount of humidity.

Two other recent collaborators are rounding out the band this time, MJ Lenderman and Brad Cook. Together they pull from Katie’s country-inflected Waxahatchee material and Allison’s aptitude for punchy indie rock via Swearin’, and split the difference. Like so much of their material both together and apart, the results have the feel of an instant classic. 

But what’s most impressive is how good her sister Allison sounds in that same environment for the first time, her singing taking its most-distinctive shapes on “Avalanche” and “Brand New City,” the latter’s riffs and harmonies fluent in P.S. Eliot’s looser indie-rock language. Allison’s musicality has always served Katie well, and it’s refreshing to hear her become fully uncorked on “Over Our Heads”—an 8-foot tall pop-rock song dotted with cursive riffs and a crack of twang. No singles, no music videos, no interviews, no problem: Katie and Allison have brought us a world of good-sounding miracles.

Hannah Cohen’s first album in six years serves as a love letter to the Catskills, where she and her partner Sam Owens moved prior to the release of “Welcome Home”. The album cover for “Earthstar Mountain” sees the singer-songwriter, donning a blue suit in the middle of an 1882 lithograph of the Catskills. “I was trying to find an image to use for the album or something close to it,” she recalled in interview. “My mom works in the book art world, the antiquarian print press, and she said, ‘You should reach out to the Institute of History and Art in Albany. I bet they’d have that in their collections.’ And of course, they did.

So we reached out to them, and they gave me permission and licensing to use the image. I just fell in love with it. To me, the record cover has these little vignettes, and I felt like those could be a song each. I think about a song being like a window into someone’s life, a little keepsake, so I felt there was some synergy there.”

Named after a beautiful but inedible mushroom near her Catskills home, Hannah Cohen’s fourth album is equally otherworldly but far more digestible. “Earthstar Mountain” draws from lush ’70s textures, from Fleetwood Mac–ish opener “Mountain” (featuring Sufjan Stevens), to a Dusty Springfield homage filtered through Minnie Riperton and Buckaroo Bonzai, to a sumptuous take on Ennio Morricone’s “Una Spiaggia” with Clairo on harmonies and clarinet. Glittery standout “Summer Sweat” hints at disco-inflected futures.

Though guests abound, this is firmly Hannah’s show, and “Earthstar Mountain” marks a new plateau.

“Set My Heart on Fire Immediately” was the title of Perfume Genius’ 2020 studio album, and of course, there’s always the fear of burning out. ‘It’s a Mirror’, the confident lead single from his astounding new album Glory that marked a shift from the diffuse grooves of 2022’s “Ugly Season“, still bows down to the feeling of “a siren, muffled crying/ Breaking me down soft and slow.” But if there is a weariness seeping through the familiarly lush and vibrant tapestry of “Glory” – which reunites Mike Hadreas with producer Blake Mills, while elevating his backing band of Meg Duffy (Hand Habits), Greg Uhlmann, Tim Carr, Jim Keltner, and Pat Kelly – it’s not at the expense of catharsis, freedom, or indeed glory.

The album is tender-hearted and open-ended, loosening into a level of directness that not only feels new for Hadreas, but gives even its heavier subjects a weightless air. “My entire life… it’s fine,” he sings on ‘No Front Teeth’. The affirming going to keeps hanging in the silence.

“Glory” has a pristine surface and a tender, roiling underside. Mike Hadreas’ seventh album is muscular, filled out by his partner in life and songcraft Alan Wyffels and longtime producer Blake Mills alongside the fiercest band Perfume Genius has ever assembled: guitarists Meg Duffy and Greg Uhlmann, drummers Tim Carr and Jim Keltner, and bassist Pat Kelly. These players marshall their power, and Hadreas his macabre imaginings and gallows humour, to humane ends. Perfume Genius pries open a mildewed den full of alienation, longing and desire and lets it bask in the sunlight. 

The record’s central conflict, says Hadreas, is the “back and forth between internal and external.” Promoting his string of beloved, increasingly ambitious albums during the past decade and a half—touring the world, dwelling in the public eye—clashed with his innate impulse toward isolation. For Glory, he discovered a new song writing process because he welcomed the dynamics of a group, leaving room in his compositions for his friends to flesh out the arrangements. As Hadreas says: “I’m more engaged with the band and the audience. I’m still on some wild tear, but there’s more access and it’s more collaborative, in a way that makes it better, but also scary—because it feels more vulnerable. 

Lyrically, these 11 concise tracks reveal uncanny situations that we can just barely discern, scenes of domesticity and desperation projected through an idiosyncratic, queer prism. Each cut is a character sketch at its core, and Hadreas assembles a whole cast: Dion, Angel, Tate, the familiar Jason we recognize from his eponymous number on 2020’s Set My Heart On Fire Immediately and Hadreas’ last release “Ugly Season“. These figures float through an abstracted landscape even as Perfume Genius pins them down with a novelist’s specificity. The result is mesmerizing and life-affirming, a bonafide singer-songwriter record that’s both the most lyrically deft and musically eloquent statement of his career.”  

Black Country, New Road return with a new album, “Forever Howlong”, out now on Ninja Tune.

The long-awaited new record was produced by James Ford (Fontaines D.C., Arctic Monkeys, Depeche Mode, Blur) and sees Black Country, New Road settled into a new shape in which vocal duties – and most of the song writing – is split between Tyler Hyde, Georgia Ellery, and May Kershaw.

The band’s ability to respond to changing circumstances is not only down to their close-knit friendship but due to their talent, adaptability and long standing relationship together as musicians. A mix of classically trained and self-taught, the multi-instrumentalists gathered steam as a band in the late 2010s, regularly playing The Windmill in Brixton alongside friends and peers such as Squid and Black Midi, and soon found themselves being labelled “the best band in the world” by The Quietus.

When singer and guitar player Isaac Wood left Black Country, New Road just ahead of the release of their second album, “Ants From Up There“, that could have been the end of the band. They carried on instead, and this year “Forever Howlong” arrived as their first proper record with the changed line-up. With Tyler Hyde, Georgia Ellery (also of Jockstrap), and May Kershaw handling vocals and most of the songwriting, it’s a  different perspective from their last two albums, and their heady chamber pop, which builds slowly and bursts into bloom, sounds like it’s coming from a group fully locked in with each other. The soaring crescendos are particularly mesmerizing, and seeing them pull it off live this year, swapped instruments, flourishes and all, was thrilling. With their current incarnation, Black Country, New Road have become a more interesting band, and they’re making some of their best material yet right now.

Here in 2025, “Forever Howlong” is an ambitious, meticulously detailed record that includes everything from folk to prog via baroque pop and touches of alt-rock – with nods to everything from Joanna Newsom to Randy Newman via Fiona Apple and Janis Ian – yet all the while retaining that unmistakably unique sound that only this combination of musicians can come up with. Although hugely varied and expansive, the album also feels deeply cohesive and focused, as it takes three distinct voices and styles and seamlessly intersperses them into a new collective sound.  

Pool Kids are energy. Raw, sporadic, and indisputably authentic, the four piece group originally hails from Tallahassee, FL. Pool Kids, the band’s masterful self-titled album, fuses fan-favourite math and art rock familiarities with a tide of emotional and technical growth, engulfing the listener in a wave of impassioned indie rock angst. ‘Pool Kids’ is the first studio album to include writing contributions from new additions Nicolette Alvarez and Andy Anaya, seeing the band at their final, most kinetic form. Recorded in Seattle by producer Mike Vernon Davis, the latest LP is more crisp and polished than ever before, blending synth layers with post-hardcore guitar riffs and indie-pop textures with hot-tempered vocals.

While the universal pain we all feel as we stumble into adulthood serves as the connective thread that runs through each of the songs on the album, the individual songs subject matter cover a dynamic emotional range. From everything to coping with trauma, the dissolution of romantic relationships, disillusionment with and shedding of friendships, and more, all while maintaining the power, humour, and resilience that defines the band

As someone on the internet once said: “This album is all killer, no filler!” And they would be completely right. Florida indie-rockers, Pool Kids, self-titled record is a masterclass in math and art-rock. It is a powerhouse of raw heat and angst, flittering between post-hardcore guitars, pop sensibilities, and tangy vocals. Blending the raw ecstasy of indie-rock with emotional growth that weaves in and out of the record’s runtime, Pool Kids know exactly what they’re doing here, and with this strong effort it proves it’s only up from here for the band.

Writing, recording, manufacturing, and promoting this record would be impossible without the assistance, support, and hard work of numerous people behind the scenes. It’s a team effort and we would like to express our most sincere gratitude toward the following:

Sean and Morgan Hermann for all of your sacrifices, dedication, and undying love and support from the very beginning. We love you.

Mike Vernon Davis for your guidance, commitment, technical savvy, and heart; your exceptional creative vision lives inside each song. Jake Barrow for your assistance, and diligence; thank you for the innumerable hours of laughs. Sam Rosson for swooping in at our absolute lowest and reigniting our creative flame with your warmth and skill. This record could not have been completed without you three pushing us to heights we were unsure we could reach. We feel so lucky to call you our forever family.

released July 22nd, 2022

Pool Kids is:
Christine Goodwyne: Vocals, Guitar
Andrew Anaya: Guitar
Nicolette Alvarez: Bass
Caden Clinton: Drums

One of the leading lights of the contemporary country outlaw set, Tyler Childers has been evolving his sound with each new album, and giving less of a fuck about the country scene with each step. “Snipe Hunter” is his masterpiece. Including long-requested live favourites like ‘Nose On The Grindstone’ and ‘Oneida’, the real treasures here are a song about Indian religion (‘Tirtha Yatra’), a song about payback (‘Bitin’ List’), and the funkiest country vibe of 2025, Dirty Ought Trill. But then again, every song on “Snipe Hunter” is a treasure.

After toying with old-timey fiddle music (2020’s Long Violent History), gospel (2022’s Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven?), and Elvis impersonations (2023’s Rustin’ in the Rain), Tyler Childers returned with his most all-encompassing album in years. The record ranges from melancholic country-folk balladry to honky tonkin’ twang to jagged Southern rock to a Hare Krishna chant, while constantly toeing the line between “traditional” and “crossover” and sounding like no other artist in the world.

On “Snipe Hunter“, Tyler throws every idea at the wall and often sounds even more cohesive than he did on his “genre” projects. He just sounds at his freest on “Snipe Hunter“, and the freer he is the harder his songs hit. 

Australian quartet The Belair Lip Bombs call their music “yearn-core,” mixing indie rock with country and power pop. It’s a very 2025 combination, but their second album feels timeless, pulling from ’70s AM radio, ’80s college rock, the ’90s country resurgence, and modern Australian indie. With warm charm, clever wordplay, and the powerful voice of singer/guitarist Maisie Everett front and center — backed by a sharp band — they deliver one instantly likable song after another. It’s the kind of record that makes you want to see them live. Fans of Wednesday’s Bleeds and The Beths’ Straight Line is a Lie should feel right at home.

On “Don’t Let Them Tell You (It’s Fair),” the new single from the Belair Lip Bombs, Maisie Everett’s singing is a blockbuster, and the riffs curling around her spill out of guitars that wouldn’t sound out of place on, say, that great new Florry album. The song is a saga of unpredictable volumes, skating through post-punk and country-rock like it’s no one’s business. Last month, I declared “Hey You” as one of my favorite songs of 2025 so far. I still think that, because I love how infectious and anthemic it is, but “Don’t Let Them Tell You (It’s Fair”) is just as perfect, perhaps even more so.

Alex Lahey came up with the “you gotta make your own luck,” and the the debaucherous, twin-guitar chords twist, shriek, and crash into honky-tonk bedlam. And that dirty tone on Jimmy Droughton’s bass… Stick a fork in me, I’m plum captivated! This is the Melbourne quartet at its best, in a bluesy hailstorm of porch-playing impulse. Halloween can’t come soon enough; I need Again here right now. 

the upcoming album “Again”, out October 31, 2025 on Third Man Records.

Say what you will, but Steven Wilson never plans on doing anything the same way twice — and certainly never twice in a row. “In my studio, I have this whiteboard, and I write down all the things that I need to get to doing,” he said in 2023 with his seemingly always full schedule. “They’re all on there. The problem is, stuff’s coming in faster than I can get through, which is a great problem to have.” Besides the cavalcade of multichannel and stereo remixes he’s forever tasked with doing, Wilson never has a problem coming up with his own new material — and for his latest, and eighth, solo LP “The Overview“, he went all-in on the one-song-per-side concept, in turn delivering a post-prog masterstroke. “Objects Will Outlive Us” (which runs 23:17) encapsulates the entirety of Side A, and the title track, “The Overview” (which clocks in at 18:21), owns Side B — and they are both absolutely beyond-the-cosmic pale.

Wilson explained that the album’s concept is based on what’s known as “The Overview Effect” phenomenon, something astronauts experience upon going into space and looking back at the Earth. Many astronauts have since reported experiencing a “very profound cognitive shift” and then say they’ve come to understand “just how small, fragile, and beautiful the Earth is in relation to the cosmos, and therefore, by extension, just how small and insignificant the human species is.”

Each “Overview” track reflects those spatially heady concepts, and they are also partitioned into multiple sections so you can pick your interstellar poison each time through, so to speak. In “The Buddha of the Modern Age” — section two of “Objects” on Side A — Wilson (seen below, in fine planetary balance) takes a deliberately staccato approach to how he sings each compound syllable, each line getting additional vocal layers as this section continues. “Permanence” — the sixth and final section of the title track on Side B — is an instrumental duet between Wilson on keyboards and celesta (a struck idiophone with a keyboard that gives off bell-like sound) and Theo Travis on soprano sax, and their respective bleats, chords, and wails go all aswirl for the last 3-4 minutes; celestial seasoning, if ever there was.

Besides deep black half-speed-mastered 180g wax, “The Overview” also appears on limited-edition red and mint green colour vinyl. Given how “The Overview” is presented and arranged, you’re likely to find something new to focus your ears and mind on, upon each successive listen on vinyl — something I’d be happy to do again and again for the next billion years or so myself.