With the release of their exceptional debut EP, “What’s On Your Mind” and a second one on the way, things are only looking up for Brighton four-piece Thyla. What’s On Your Mind highlights like “Only Ever” and “Blue” cultivate a misty dream-pop wonderland with frontwoman Millie Duthie’s enigmatic lead vocals as their euphoric centerpiece. Then add a framework of palatial, lush guitars and a dash of moody post-punk for good measure, and you have all the bearings of a band worth obsessing over.
we are throwing a release party where it all began at Brighton Electric – this year has been about focus and channeling everything that Thyla has become. Big thanks to Joy. for helping us curate what we promise to be a statement of intent for 2020.
single’s from “What’s On Your Mind” EP out 1st February 2019 on REX Records.
On her song, “Forgive Yourself,” Nicole Rodriguez, who records under her moniker Pearla, details events in her past, from the routine (“Can you forgive yourself for missing the last get together? / It’s alright to stay inside if you think that will make you feel better”) to the traumatic (“Can you forgive yourself for turning your back in fear / When that man died on the welcome mat at the coffee shop that you worked at last year?”). Quilting & Other Activities,Pearla’s consistently beautiful debut EP—and first release on EggHunt Records, Lucy Dacus’ former label—is full of flashes like this. Rodriguez cleverly tosses a lot of curveballs: a bizarre drum fill here (“Daydream”), building guitar feedback there (“Somewhere”).
This is the sort of dependably gorgeous singer/songwriter release that almost sounds like a lullaby at times, but Rodriguez refuses to allow you the nap, using creative methods to throw the listener for a loop.
She demands your attention, and it’s nearly impossible to turn away, frequently recalling the best of Phoebe Bridgers or Julien Baker.
Connecticut-via-Los Angeles band Milly is the lo-fi slowcore project of Brendan Dyer, and they recently dropped their debut EP on cassette, “Our First Four Songs”, via Dangerbird Records. The EP is a collection of three singles plus a previously unreleased eponymous track, and it’s a slow-drip of steamy guitars, casual yet heartfelt vocals and ephemeral, abstract love songs. “Milly” and “Talking Secret” lean into warped guitar ferocity while “People Are Forever” and “Crazy Horse” embrace crawling tempos and dazed, cinematic lo-fi, their warm-hearted, syrupy rock songs make them a band to watch in 2020.
As the title suggests, this cassette EP contains Milly’s first four songs. The first two songs “Milly” and “People Are Forever” were originally self-released by Dyer in 2018 and the following two songs “Talking Secret” and “Crazy Horse” were originally released by Dangerbird as part of our Microdose single series.
“Talking Secret” is the A-side of Milly’s installment in Dangerbird Records‘ Microdose monthly music series.
It’s a shame Toronto-based quartet waited until the very end of November to release “Get Bleak”, an EP so perfectly suited for summer that it’s almost making me angry thinking about all of the rooftop parties and barbecues it could have sound tracked. A perfect combination of contemporary modern indie rock à la Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever and classic jangle pop bands like Belle & Sebastian or The Sundays, the four songs on Get Bleak is pure indie-pop bliss, filled to the brim with warm, swirling guitars. Lead singer Tom Mcgreevy leads the way with his calming but sure-handed vocals, singing songs about hopelessness that sound anything but. Sure, the band called this release Get Bleak, but there’s no chance you’ll feel any of the emotions they sing about throughout these four tracks—in fact, you’ll feel the exact opposite.
Get Bleak is the debut release of a band that has just achieved something that’s become increasingly rare in today’s rather finicky indie-rock community…There’s a reason the Toronto group has cut through on the first try, though—and you can quickly find out why by hitting play on the title track, which will jangle its way straight into your life,
Georgia Maq has released “Pleaser”, a solo album produced with Katie Dey and Darcy Baylis. It’s a pop record that sounds like “Paul Westerberg meets Robyn.” “Is it real?” Georgia Maq is standing patiently in the front bar of Melbourne’s Tramway Hotel while I gape in awe at the Louis Vuitton handbag that sits under her arm. It’s a beautiful object that feels especially glamorous considering its owner — the lead singer and guitarist of Camp Cope, one of the most popular and prominent punk bands to come out of the Melbourne DIY scene in a long while.
Maq’s caustic vocals and frank, powerful lyrics have made her an indie rock celebrity of sorts, and while she often flaunts a compelling and idiosyncratic sense of style on her prolific Instagram account — a lot of leopard print, a lot of Calvin Klein — the pristine LV piece still throws me. “It’s real,” she tells me gleefully in her now-familiar drawl, “I got it on Facebook Marketplace. You should definitely buy one.”
The eight-track record is a sharp left-turn from a musician who many have assumed to be punk through and through; produced by Maq alongside Melbourne-based experimental luminary Katie Dey and Melbourne-born, Berlin-based producer Darcy Baylis, it’s a sleek, wounded pop record that crackles and pulsates like an exposed tesla coil. Released today through Boston indie label Run For Cover, “Pleaser” is perhaps best thought of like that secondhand baby LV under her arm: a pop record with all the glamour of the real thing and little of the unsettling capitalist intent.
Written and produced over the better part of 2019, Pleaser is shockingly and wonderfully unfamiliar territory for a musician familiar to scores of die-hard fans. These are songs that soar and swoop, fitted with repeated phrases and expansive choruses — elements that have never really been present in Maq’s past work. Camp Cope’s music is typified by Maq’s narrative-based storytelling and her distinctive sing-speaking, while Pleaser finds her flexing a newly-trained voice and a knack for writing sticky, surprising melodies.
The product of a period in which Maq found herself pining after someone who didn’t love her back, Pleaser offered the chance to, in her words, “repetitively scream about how I feel” — in other words, perfect conditions to write a pop album. The finished product doesn’t squander Maq’s first step into this shinier, more surreal corner of the music world; as evidenced by songs like the record’s title track — the chorus of which finds Maq sighing “I am dooooomed to be in love with yoooou,” elongating her words like the best stadium divas — Maq sounds as powerful as she’s ever been
“All Mirrors” is the type of record Patsy Cline would have made if she had access to synthesizers. It’s a dazzling tour de force, a record that centers on Olsen’s alternately pleading and commanding voice, surrounding it with lush, rococo swells of strings and electronics. That Olsen was always a great singer was not the question, but never has her prowess shone as brightly as it does in these stately, turbulent songs.
Angel Olsen’s second release, Burn Your Fire for No Witness, was a collection of her early work, where the production was dark-folk sparse. But for “All Mirrors”, she returned to the lush tapestry audiences first experienced on 2016’s My Woman, and the resulting recording is a taut, mesmerizing forty-nine minutes of sonic poetry. While there’s a bevy of modern elements at play—Stereolab-style space grooves on “Too Easy,” warm analog synth lines on “New Love Cassette,” a bouncy electronic twang on “What It Is”—the music here shimmers with a timeless patina. These songs are portraits of heartbreak, triumph, and love that could have been penned fifty years ago, yesterday, or a century from now. So despite its electronic flourishes, All Mirrors feels simultaneously of the moment and firmly embedded in the American songbook.
Olsen is a virtuoso vocalist, and across eleven tracks, she whispers as much as she wails, the oscillation of her instrument intoxicating. Opening track “Lark” sets the tone and finds her in the midst of a romantic detonation, offering up lines like, “This city’s changed, it’s not what it was / Back when you loved me.” By the wash of the strings on “Tonight,” where Olsen’s voice is husky, tired, and confessing that while her love remains, she’s better off alone, listeners are firmly in her grip. With its Spaghetti-Western guitar strum, “Summer” is another poignant peak, where Olsen radiates the kind of strength you only get from going through hell and coming out the other side. The closer, “Chance,” balances her extraordinary voice along with her silence against a sentiment that every lover knows but hates to hear: “Hard to say forever, love.” It’s a perfect punctuation for the album’s emotional odyssey, and it’ll make you want to experience it all over again.
On the title track she compares a lover’s smile to being “buried alive,” and on the bleak, ghostly “Impasse,” she icily sings, “Go on, on ahead / tell your friends I was wrong / Take it all out on me.” All of the album’s potential energy exploded in the live setting, where it became something else entirely—grand, gothy, doomy, and spectacular. All Mirrors is a tornado in an antique teacup: elegant craftsmanship and detailing, containing a powerful storm.
“House of Sugar” is the type of album that gets you banned from having access to the aux cord—(Sandy) Alex G’s latest collection of bedroom-ideated folk and pop songs may feel like it would set the perfect mood for a road trip, but in reality it is, for lack of a better term impossible to make heads or tails of upon first encounter. Lead single “Gretel” probably stands as the best candidate for introducing the Orchid Tapes–reared songwriter to the rest of your car, a pristine pop song built upon an inexplicably functional formula of obscure instrumentation, venturing beyond that—through the faux-Southern accent of “Bad Man” and the numerous over-the-top experimental fillers might prove an exercise in defending an acquired taste.
A glitchy abstraction like “Near” may not grab your over caffeinated co-pilots’ attention immediately, but House of Sugar’s appeal ironically isn’t as aggressively sugar-coated as Alex G’s previous earworm singles. Taking his bedroom ideas to a Domino Recordings-signed artist’s bevy of resources, Sugar lucidly displays facets of the songwriter’s personality we’ve yet to see, both sounding the most alien to his previous discography and the most comfortable in terms of taking creative risks.
There’s as much of Alex’s character in the dream-inspired hoedown “Southern Sky” as there is in the shimmering interlude “Taking,” while the live recording of “Sugar House” that closes the album serves less as a bonus track and more as a crossing over from the surrealist House of Sugar universe into a palpable reality. There’s certainly an argument to be made for Sugar being a great record to listen to while drifting across state lines, though it feels more like an album to jam while drifting in and out of conscious states.
“Southern Sky” appears on (Sandy) Alex G’s new album ‘House of Sugar’ – out September 13th, 2019 on Domino Recordings.
Father of the Bride is Vampire Weekend’s fourth album, It’s the long-awaited follow-up to 2013’s Modern Vampires of the City. Since then founding member/producer Rostam Batmanglij left the band as a full-time member.
It’s been almost six years since we last heard from New York’s Ezra Koenig and co. Here they have gone deep into the address book and called upon a wide array of collaborators from Danielle Haim to Hans Zimmer to Mark Ronson. It all comes together thanks to careful indie-pop curation from Koenig.
Previously Vampire Weekend shared two songs from Father of the Bride: “Harmony Hall” and “2021,” as well as a video for “Harmony Hall.” Then they shared two more songs: “Sunflower” (which features Steve Lacy of The Internet and “Big Blue.”Then they shared a video for “Sunflower” directed by actor Jonah Hill and featuring comedy legend Jerry Seinfeld and rapper/visual artist Fab 5 Freddy. Then they shared another two songs: “This Life”and“Unbearably White.”
“This Life,” which features backing vocals from Danielle Haim of the band HAIM, “We Belong Together,” a duet with Haim, .
This year Vampire Weekend released a new album, Father of the Bride, today via Columbia. The band already shared six songs prior to the album’s release, but the album features 18 tracks so there are 12 other songs . Three of those songs are duets with Danielle Haim of HAIM, including album opener “Hold You Now.” Our favorite of the non-singles is probably another duet with Haim, “We Belong Together.” In it the band’s Ezra Koenig and Haim sing about all the ways they belong together, but also admit that it might not be enough to actually keep them together.
There is a simple rule in pop music: if you find yourself with a double album to fill, make a bloody mess out of it. You can eventually locate unity or conceptualism à la The Who or The Kinks—but for god’s sake, have a mad blast either way. For their first album in six years, Vampire Weekend and singer-songwriter Ezra Koenig sailed beyond the alterna-nerd pop Graceland cover act usual. Here, Koenig and VW jump through piano-rich ballads, bachelor pad lounge music, jam sounds, outlaw country, samba, emo, and cinematic atmospheres, making it all sound unified and blissfully cascading in a fashion you’ve never heard from them before. The not-so-haunted proceedings of Father of the Bride are more theatrical and orchestrated—but with just a smidgen less quirk and busywork—than their music of the past. We knew that Vampire Weekend was charmed, but on Bride, they’ve actually become charming.
Father of the Bride feels like Vampire Weekend has grown up emotionally, and their music is richer for it. It’s an ambitious double album, sweeping through the joy, the pain, the success and the failure of young adult life.
The catchy hooks and sing-a-long lyrics are still there in tracks like ‘Harmony Hall’, ‘Bambina’ and ‘This Life’, and there’s some impressive collabs with Danielle Haim, Mark Ronson, and The Internet’s Steve Lacy.
Father of the Bride is the band’s fourth album. The band’s last album was 2013’s Modern Vampires of the City.
This record is an incredible listen , yes. It is also more than that. It is an artistic touchstone. It stands as an example of how great art should make you feel, of the line between accessibility and profundity, A forward-facing album with a focus on the theme of rebirth, it does, at times, look over its shoulder, taking inspiration from classic country.
Prince Daddy & the Hyena’s ability to transform rock-bottom defeatism into a raucous group activity. “Lauren (Track 2)” was, without a doubt, among the most fun song released in 2019, and the way Prince Daddy carry this energy over to other tracks on the album Cosmic Thrill Seekers, where Kory Gregory opens “Trying Times” by bellowing about how “every day’s been a bad day for so long,” or wails lines like “stupid fucking life, it’s only getting harder” moments before a killer outro on “Klonopin,” signals an optimistic turn for a genre that often invites isolation among its listeners.
Even the softest moments on Cosmic Thrill Seekers such as the acoustic intro to opener “I Lost My Life,” or the mid-track breather on closer “Wacky Misadventures of the Passenger”—are disrupted by Gregory’s yawps before heavy electric guitars hit as hard and unexpectedly as the depression that fueled so much of the record’s lyrics. There’s never really a moment of peace, but such brief periods of seemingly personal anxiety spouted by the vocalist are immediately filled by a massive support system in the form of Gregory’s dense backing band, at times even featuring a full brass section. The cyclical structure of the album—“Passenger” transitions smoothly back into track one—has been widely noted for its analogue to mood cycles, but there’s been little talk about the group-therapeutic nature of the record’s sound.
For plenty of bands of this caliber, an album is just a springboard for hectic live shows. But Cosmic Thrill Seekers offers anyone who feels pretty confident that they’ll die the next time they’re alone in their bedroom an opportunity to thrash in each others’ company.
No wonder Sasami Ashworth sometimes delivers her stage banter in an alien voice: To listen to the dour, greyscale rock songs of Sasami is to learn what it’s like to live and love as a human on earth. On “Morning Comes,” she alternates quiet, driving verses with sweeping, blood-boiling choruses and implores her former lover to move the fuck on. On “Pacify My Heart,” she treads a sluggish pattern of melancholic guitar plucks toward accepting that she and an ex will never quite be on the same page (plus, “Sometimes I wish I never met you” is the best opening-line burn since last year’s winner in the category, Forth Wanderers’ “Nevermine”). Both tracks end in extended, harrowing guitar outros that wordlessly depict Ashworth’s respective growth and ire and mark two of the album’s most cathartic stretches. Sasami, it turns out, is human after all.
Sasami Ashworth isn’t the first indie rock musician to suffer heartbreak, but her debut album SASAMI is among the sourest, most dissonant breakup records in recent memory. An LP about “everyone I fucked and who fucked me last year,” SASAMI chronicles how touring poses challenges to relationships (“Not the Time”), how unequal desires topple romances (“Pacify My Heart”), and how friendships, too, can fail (“Callous”). Ashworth’s caustic but not overwhelming guitar acrobatics—which she in part credits to her brother JooJoo Ashworth, of fuzz-drenched shoegaze institution Froth—pair with calmly delivered lyrics to propel her bitter dirges beyond the standard indie-rock sound of romantic fallout. The tales she recounts give her plenty to be mad about, but even as her guitar scythes through its surroundings, her music rarely rises to a full-on roar. In restraint, Ashworth finds the power to heal.
