Universally praised, shortlistedfor the 2024 Polaris Music Prize, and already hailed by Pitchfork as the 3rd best album of the 2020s, anticipation and conversation around the record has been high.
Cindy Lee is the performance and song writing vehicle of Patrick Flegel (who previously fronted influential indie group Women). Over several albums, Flegel has combined delicate melodies and sheer beauty with moments of experimentation. With “Diamond Jubilee”, Flegel’s undeniable songcraft comes to the foreground, embracing a more instant connection and accessibility. Timeless tales of love and longing, surrounded by sticky hooks, take the listener on an unforgettable journey.
It’s a testament to the quality of “Diamond Jubilee” that despite songwriter Patrick Flegel’s anti-establishment efforts — only distributing it via YouTube, a retro GeoCities webpage, and an eventual vinyl pressing and Bandcamp stream — it nonetheless became one of the most talked about records of the year. The towering, hypnotic double LP finds Flegel’s Cindy Lee project shedding some of the noisy abrasion found on projects like “What’s Tonight to Eternity” in favour of ghostly melodies and psychedelic soundscapes. The resulting listening experience feels unreal and fleeting, like lying on the couch half-awake and mid-acid trip .
Over several albums, Flegel has combined delicate melodies and sheer beauty with moments of experimentation. With “Diamond Jubilee”, Flegel’s undeniable songcraft comes to the foreground, embracing a more instant connection and accessibility. Timeless tales of love and longing, surrounded by sticky hooks, take the listener on an unforgettable journey.
“Diamond Jubilee” was written and recorded over several years by Patrick Flegel in Toronto, Durham, Calgary and Montreal at Realistik Studios. The album was mixed by Steven Lind, who also contributes to several tracks and co-wrote “Baby Blue,”
Superior Viaduct and our new artist label, W.25TH, are proud to continue to be the home for Cindy Lee with the physical release of the celebrated album “Diamond Jubilee”. Universally praised, shortlisted for the 2024 Polaris Music Prize, and already hailed as the 3rd best album of the 2020s, anticipation and conversation around the record has never been higher.
Hovvdy’s self-titled double album, co-produced with Andrew Sarlo (Big Thief, Bon Iver) and longtime collaborator Ben Littlejohn, is their most cohesive and ambitious record to date: The definitive Hovvdy album. Across the 19 track sequence ranging from expansive celebratory anthems to quiet acoustic meditations, Hovvdy displays deft and catchy pop songcraft with touches of indie folk and southern Americana.
Hovvdy’s self-titled album is not meant to be a total encapsulation of their sound. With its sprawling, double album format and intriguing left turns, “Hovvdy” serves as a more expansive, risky experiment from the Texas duo. But just as their voices seem to blend together in a perfect, homespun mix, Hovvdy make everything they do sound natural. The hooks, like on standouts “Forever,” “Jean,” and “Meant,” can come seemingly out of nowhere, and they land harder than ever.
The duo began their career releasing an EP in 2014. The following year, they released a split with the band Loafer. Hovvdy released their debut album, “Taster”, in 2016. In 2018, Hovvdy released their second full-length album titled “Cranberry”. In 2019, the duo released a split with musician Hannah ReadLomelda, . The split found Hovvdy and Lomelda covering each others songs. The duo’s third album, “Heavy Lifter”, was released in 2019. The band’s fourth album, “True Love”, was released on October 2021
releases April 26th, 2024
Co-produced by Andrew Sarlo, Charlie Martin, Will Taylor, Bennett Littlejohn Performed by Charlie Martin, Will Taylor, Bennett Littlejohn, Andrew Sarlo
Everybody loves a good indie-rock origin story like when the Replacements Paul Westerberg was holding it down as a janitor in the office of a Minnesota senator before joining the band. or Dayton, Ohio’s Robert Pollard teaching school while biding his time before Guided By Voices became a thing.
Here’s a new one for you: Meet Mike Maple, who is the mailman in the small college town of Marquette, Michigan who spends his time walking the postal beat dreaming up relentlessly fun punk-rock tunes to play in his band Liquid Mike. “Given what you know/The American dream is a Michigan hoax,” he informs us on their excellent new album “Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot”.
On “Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot” they play short, fast, muscular songs that split the difference between Nineties pop-punk and Nineties indie-rock, tempering the petulant angst of the former with the latter’s winning resignation.
Liquid Mike debuted in 2022 with the EP“A Beer Can and A Banquet,” The press photo that went out with “Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot” shows the band sitting around a fire pit cooking hot dogs, and the LP opens with “Drinking and Driving,” a song that highlights a life skill the members of Liquid Mike may have had down before they were out of high school.
On “K2,” they build a song about a wasted summer out of stupid Coldplay allusions (“The rush of blood straight to your head/You pissed your pants/And they were all yellow”), making the goofy conceit work because the music is so charged up and fun. On “Drug Dealer,” which sounds like Blink-182 by way of GBV, Maple sings about being stuck getting stoned with his friend and her scary new boyfriend, processing a bunch of weird feelings in a high-as-hell torpor. “USPS,” a bouncing ode to Maple’s place of work, suggests Weezer with a working-class soul. On “Small Giants” he offers the sage piece of advice: “You can shoplift any store you want/It’s not pathetic if you don’t get caught.”
“Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot knocks” through 13 songs in just 25 minutes, including a thirty-second Superchunk tribute and a minute-long Built to Spill throwback. But it leaves a lasting impression. In fact, you might have to go back to the 1971 debut by John Prine to find a record by an employee of the United States Postal Service that wins this hard.
Mike Maple – Guitar, Monica Nelson – Synth, Dave Daignault – Guitar, Zack Alworden – Bass, Cody Marecek – Drums
An album boasting 13 absolute rippers packed into a tight 25 minutes, hummable riffs, huge choruses, and sticky refrains hit listeners at an incredible pace, resulting in one of the most fun, midwestern-hearted works of 2024.
Shellac return with their sixth album and the first in ten years “To All Trains” is the unexpected, tragic swan song for the late Steve Albini’s long-running post-hardcore band Shellac — but what a project to go out on. Clocking in at less than 30 minutes in runtime, the record distills the Shellac formula down to its essentials: off-kilter riffs, powerful drumming, and an aging punk’s sense of humour. It’s idiosyncratic, irreverent, and beautiful, offering longtime fans and newcomers alike a concise introduction to the trio’s magic.
Wishy’s debut “Triple Seven” scratch a very specific itch: they’re fuzzed-out, honeyed takes on the kind of pop-punk, alternative rock, emo, and grunge that pervaded radio airwaves in the late ’90s and early 2000s. But even divorced from their nostalgic influences, the music is simply brimming with life. The guitars burn and smear, the drums whizz with momentum, the vocals from Kevin Krauter and Nina Pitchkites oscillate between high stakes belts and an earnest swoon; each piece of the Wishy rock song puzzle fits perfectly, even as their songwriting takes unexpected, lopsided turns.
You could call Wishy’s story a lucky one. After prior monikers and iterations, Wishy was born as a kaleidoscope of alternative music’s semi-recent history, with traces of shoegaze, grunge and power-pop swirling together. On “Triple Seven”, Indiana songwriters Kevin Krauter and Nina Pitchkites’ musical synergy proves itself to be a rare one–the kind that sounds like someone striking gold. Part sly wink and part warm gratitude, it’s only fitting their much anticipated full length debut is titled “Triple Seven”, where Wishy’s penchant for indelible poppy hooks is couched equally in pillowy atmospherics and scathing distortion.
By day Krauter works as a music teacher, giving drum and guitar lessons to students, while Pitchkites is a seamstress by trade and often makes embroidered merch for the band. Coming up in a scene defined by hardcore and emo, Krauter and Pitchkites instead found themselves writing melodies in their heads while driving to work, pulling music from the air and arriving at a blearier, more ethereal interpretation of Midwest expanse. Initially, their music oscillated between hazy dream-pop and heavier alt-rock.
The subject of their songs create a loose web of vignettes and snapshots, capturing Krauter and Pitchkites in a whirlwind couple of years — exiting the pandemic, embarking on an embryonic project, making sense of their musical pasts while forging a musical future alongside one another, each of them on a journey of self-acceptance and self-understanding. Sometimes gorgeous, sometimes festering, and always cathartic, “Triple Seven” is a vibrant and exhilarating document of self-discovery with the scope and heft of the bygone big-budget rock albums that inspired it.
Wishy’s debut LP ‘Triple Seven’ – out August 16th, 2024 via Winspear.
“Mahashmashana” ushers in a new chapter of existential reflection, as Josh Tillman captures the restless energy of society in decline. His latest album combines explosive rock anthems with poignant, mournful ballads, His new album is nine years after his breakthrough album “I Love You, Honeybear” turned Josh Tillman from a minor indie singer-songwriter (and the former drummer of The Fleet Foxes) into a critical cause célèbre, most people with any interest know broadly what to expect from a new release under the Father John Misty name. There will be blackly comic depictions of existential angst and apocalyptic dread. Songs that suggest life in the 21st century is basically unbearable and that the world is irredeemably screwed will vie with fourth wall-breaking moments where Tillman confesses his own complicity in screwing up the world. There will be barbed drawings of human relations, bleakly funny ruminations on ageing, self-lacerating reflections on his own music and career, stuff about Los Angeles, Tillman’s adopted home town, and, frequently, a lurid microcosm of all that’s wrong with the world.
Suffice to say that “Mahashmashana” ticks all those boxes. Indeed, it ticks quite a lot of them over the course of the opening title track, which sets a melody that evokes Father John’s most enduring musical touchstone, maybe the early 70s Elton John, to an arrangement that recalls the overripe Phil Spector production of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass. It takes its name from a Sanskrit world meaning “great cremation ground” and alternates between describing “the next universal dawn” breaking over a silent world, and a troubled relationship between a man whose body is metaphorically compared to a chain of southern Californian gourmet food markets and a woman whose soul is a “fallen star”.
Modern-day life is “a scheme to enrich assholes”, Tillman avers, before poking his head through the fourth wall and taunting himself for his pomposity: “Such revelations,” he sings, with a parenthetical roll of the eyes, “which only singers can describe.”
But if “Mahashmashana” essentially occupies emotional territory that Tillman has mapped out over his last five albums, he keeps finding enthralling new ways to describe it: humanity, he suggests on “I GuessTime Makes Fools of Us All”, resembles “a himbo Ken doll” that God has made to “parachute into the Anthropocene” in order to “make things interesting”; “Against your will comes wisdom and 40 more years ahead” offers Summer’s Gone of the onset of middle age. He’s also very funny, as on Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose, a kind of sequel to 2015’s scabrous “The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apartment”. Once again, the singer finds himself in trying company (“She put on Astral Weeks, said ‘I love jazz’ and winked at me / This is the last place I oughta be”), his discomfort compounded by the fact that the LSD he’s been microdosing has suddenly started to work a bit too vigorously, causing a painting of a clown on the wall to start speaking to him: he ends up in the street at dawn, apparently convinced, as the ruefully hungover often are, that he’s come to see things as they really are, ie unbearable.
Indeed, you’re sometimes struck by the sense that Tillman is saying things that plenty of other artists have already said, but putting it noticeably better than they have. “Mental Health” certainly isn’t the first song to opine that contemporary culture is making us unwell, the internet having helped create a culture of constant surveillance that encourages people to project a version of themselves that has no connection to reality, but it’s hard to think of anyone who’s put it more elegantly. We are living in a “panopticon”, where there’s no need for “guards and narcs” because we’re all spying on each other; online life reduces your identity to a “milk-white shadow”. Nor with more wit: “Mental health, mental health, no one knows you like yourself,” runs the chorus, adding: “You two should speak in the presence of a licensee” – whether marital, to conjoin these alienated souls, or publican.
You could argue that “Mahashmashana” is not an album built to change anyone’s mind: if you’ve already decided that Tillman is an insufferable smartarse, you can doubtless find evidence to support your claim among its dense, allusive songs. But you’d have a harder time arguing that he’s not a fantastic writer in both terms of melody – all nine tracks bear a tune that’s both beautiful and beautifully constructed – and the scope of his musical ambitions: the album nimbly leaps from Screamland’s white-knuckle take on electronic pop, strafed with the distorted guitar of Low’s Alan Sparhawk, to the sublime Great American Songbook pastiche of Summer’s Gone; from the gently discofied yacht rock of “I Guess Time Makes Fools of Us All” to Mental Health, which arrives drenched in strings and cooing, wordless female vocals redolent of late 50s/early 60s ballads and film soundtracks. He can, “Mahashmashana” suggests, master the lot: in fact, for a man who apparently spends a lot of time consumed by angst and portents of doom, Josh Tillman seems to be doing just fine.
A totemic presence in indie and rock for decades as a member of Pixies and The Breeders, American musician Kim Deal presents her first ever solo album. “Nobody Loves You More“, as well as featuring the single ‘Coast’, includes songs that date back as far as 2011. Boasts engineering from the late Steve Albini plus contributions from her sister and bandmate Kelley Deal, Teenage Fanclub’s Raymond McGinley and members of Savages among others.
For her first-ever full-length solo album, Kim Deal leaned into the fact that she is fucking Kim Deal — indie rock legend of Pixies, The Breeders, and more. The record, “Nobody Loves You More”, is Deal through-and-through, from the personal stories that hide within the lyrics to the instantly recognizable brand of slackery perfectionism that makes her song writing so compelling. Deal didn’t need any more proof that she is indie royalty, but “Nobody Loves You More” still further cements her position as such.
Delighted our new album ‘People Like Me & You’ was released 11th August. It’s the best album we’ve ever made & we can’t wait to share it with you all. These South Yorkshire lads are unstoppable! Each release has seen their star shine bigger and brighter and this one is no different – expect a right good tear up!. The Sherlocks are back with a bold statement with their fourth album and there’s no doubt that they mean business and with ‘People Like Me And You’. There’s an intensity that is palpable through every single track.
Sonically, the quarter has taken somewhat of an evolutionary leap taking inspiration from the likes of The Killers and Coldplay and it feels very much like a ‘coming of age’ record for the band who are offering an anthemic indie alt-rock sound that is atmospheric and euphoric in equal measure. It feels both fresh and nostalgic at the same time thanks to its indie-rock sensibilities with an electrifying injection of post-punk attitude for good measure. “Sirens’ is edgy but exhilarating with the band digging deep with a grittier and darker approach that is leaps and bounds away from their 2017 debut ‘Live For The Moment’ which weaved in stories of the hedonism of youth. Those quintessential Sherlocks themes are still there, but this is a more mature and dynamic sound that shows their sonic progression.
Opening track ‘Remember All The Girls’ sets the scene and is chock-full of pulse-racing rhythms. The hooky, guitar-driven energy is juxtaposed with poignancy and reflection with lines like ‘Everything is gonna change /How could it ever stay the same?’.
The Sherlocks thrive on playing live and the intensity from this has translated into the album. There’s plenty of crowd pleasing bangers and each of the 11 tracks have impressive arena-sized singalong choruses. ‘People Like Me & You’ is guaranteed to get you on the dancefloor where as the album closer ‘Watson’ see the Sherlocks really pushing their boundaries even further with a spoken word piece about their old bandmate ‘John Watson’ and expanding upon that into the complexities of the human condition.
Their biggest, brightest and most expansive record to date with production elements and fresh sonic touches that broaden their guitar/bass/drums foundations. It’s a collection filled with personal and quintessential Sherlocks lyrical themes that are informed by the passing of time and the realisation that everyone is stepping into different stages in their lives – touching upon nostalgia, ageing, flawed relationships and escaping the rat race on wild, woozy weekends.
“PARANOID” Super Deluxe Edition includes the original album, in addition to a rare 1974 Quad Mix of the album folded down to stereo, plus two concerts from 1970, from Montreux and Brussels, that are pressed on vinyl for the first time. The five-LP set comes with a hardbound book with extensive liner notes featuring interviews with all four band members, rare photos, and memorabilia, a poster, as well as a replica of the tour book sold during the Paranoid tour.
PARANOID: Super Deluxe Edition first two LPs feature the original album plus a Quadraphonic Mix of the album. Originally released on vinyl and 8-track cartridge in 1974, but subsequently long out of print, the Quad Mix has now been made available as a fold-down to stereo mix on vinyl for this set.
The collection’s final three LPs mark the official vinyl debut of two 1970 live performances. The first was recorded on August 31st in Montreux, Switzerland shortly before the release of “Paranoid”. It captures the band, already a tight musical unit, thundering through new songs like “Hand Of Doom” and “Iron Man” while mixing in “N.I.B.” and “Behind The Wall Of Sleep” from their debut album. The second concert was recorded a few months later in Brussels during the band’s performance for Belgian television. Unofficial versions of this classic show have circulated in the past, but they’ve never sounded this good.
The Fat Angel Sings 