The seventeenth studio album by American singer-songwriter Ryan Adams. Originally slated for release in 2019, it was delayed following abuse allegations against Adams. It was eventually surprise-released digitally on December 11th, 2020 through Adams’s label PAX AM. Physical editions are scheduled for March 19th, 2021. — “Right out of the gate, the honesty of Wednesdays hits full force, with the track “I’m Sorry and I Love You.” It’s unclear how much more this record may have changed since 2019 besides the decision to alter the cover artwork, but this opening track definitely feels like an apology from Ryan to the fans who may have felt betrayed or hurt by the allegations that came from the Times article.
There’s just something more earnest at play here, a next level of unbridled honesty that makes the effort behind Prisoner seem almost trivial in comparison. And it only gets deeper the further you go into the track list. For me, the standout tracks of the album are definitely “Poison and Pain” which has lyrics such as: “I was so bad on my own Drawing maps inside my soul to places nobody goes Woke up confused, just staring at my telephone Waiting like I’d ever hear your voice again,” Every song on this record has lyrical moments that take your breath away.
There isn’t a track that I would skip upon re-listening. Each one has its purpose and as a whole, the album functions as one cohesive unit of emotive gravity. As far as I am concerned, this is a perfect album.”
Ryan Adams new album ‘Wednesdays’ is now available to stream
This record was recorded, mixed and mastered by Ben David in his studio house in the Adelaide Hills in Australia in February 2020. Lande Hekt of UK based punk band Muncie Girls has released a new song. The song is called “80 Days of Rain” and is off of her upcoming solo album Going to Hell due out January 22, 2021 via Get Better Records. Lande Hekt released her last album Gigantic Disappointment in 2019.
All instruments were played by me except for percussion which was by Ben. He also sang on the songs. “80 Days of Rain” is a chiming track about a constant downpour that keeps you down. Its chorus is especially gripping, Hekt’s muffled voice singing: “Is this another string of bad luck?/ Is this just another week where we don’t fuck?/ This is where I think I go insane/ I can’t do this again/ 80 days of rain, 80 days of rain.” Hekt says the track “is about moving away and missing someone, and how that person taught me to get angry about climate change,”
Get Better Records 2021 Releases January 22nd, 2021
The porcelain figurine on the cover of this album tells you enough: if you want to smile, you better not do it with this music in your ears. We don’t expect anything else from Keaton Henson. This troubled musician always brings us convulsive emotions into his compositions, but oh, he always does that more than well. He agrees in opener “Ambulance”, where he sighs: ‘I’m empty but don’t it sound so good?’ “Monument” released through Play It Again Sam is Keaton’s first album since 2016’s Kindly Now. Keaton Henson’s new album “Monument” is a rare thing. It is an album about loss, and dealing with losing the ones we love, but told, in incredibly candid detail, through the aspects of our lives that surround the trauma itself, about love, ageing, recovery, life, seen through the prism of grief.
With the posting of an enigmatic and cryptic goodbye in 2016; Epilogue, Henson’s next project ended up becoming Six Lethargies, a complex and ambitious symphony for string orchestra, dealing with the minutiae of mental illness. He put away the guitar and retreated to his home for three years to compose it. Monument now finds Keaton re-emerging with an album of songs about grief, and how it permeates our lives. The record began when, having recovered from both Six Lethargies and the circumstances that inspired it, Henson moved from London to the wilds of the English countryside, spending long days outside chopping wood, tending to the grounds, and watching birds of prey soaring above. It was from this remote outpost that he finally felt ready to look at a subject he had been avoiding for his entire song writing career; the decades long illness, and imminent death of his father, who passed two days before he finished recording the album.
While the singer normally opens up about heartache or fear of people in his lyrics, Monument has a possible even more personal theme: the death of his increasingly ill father. This is most strongly confirmed in “The Grand Old Reason”, where he writes some of his most heart breaking sentences: ‘But like you / I have tried for so long not to cry / That I don’t even know if I can when you die’. Yet we gasp most when, after “Prayer,” an excerpt from an old home video is heard saying Keaton’s father “Keaton, wave to daddy.” This spirited, delicate folk hits a whole new set of strings, with Henson only expanding his emotional empire even more.
Monument” released through Play It Again Sam Records,
The follow-up to her 2018 sophomore release First Flower, the breathy, romantic “Only One” serves as the A-side to Molly Burch’s new 7” Ballads, out now on Captured Tracks. “I decided to call the 7” Ballads as an homage to the powerful female vocalists I idolized growing up,” Burch said. “Seems sort of classic. Both songs really embody what I love to do—sing with emotion, and drama, and romance, taking as much time as I need. Following the release of her critically acclaimed sophomore album, ‘First Flower’, last October, Texan chanteuse Molly Burch returns with two heart-stopping tracks. Entitled ‘Ballads’ in homage to the strong and powerful female vocalists that she admires, this 7” EP embodies what Burch loves to do and what she does best: crafting music with emotion, drama and romance, giving her voice all the room it needs to burn bright.
“Only One” is off of Molly Burch’s 7″ Vinyl, ‘Ballads’. released August 2nd, 2019
The 17-year-old star of High School Musical: The Musical: The Series has dropped her first official song, and the music video, Olivia Rodrigo may have earned a name for herself by scoring the lead role in the hit Disney show, but she’s now dipping her toes into a musical career of her own. After months of teasing her debut single, Rodrigo shares a lovelorn video alongside her track “Drivers License.”
Speaking about her inspiration behind the track, she describes the disorienting emotions of her recent heartbreak. “When I came up with ‘Drivers License,’ I was going through a heartbreak that was so confusing to me, so multifaceted,” she said in a statement. “Putting all those feelings into a song made everything seem so much simpler and clearer and at the end of the day, I think that’s really the whole purpose of song writing. There’s nothing like sitting at the piano in my bedroom and writing a really sad song. It’s truly my favourite thing in the world.”
The graceful visual offers a vignette of Rodrigo’s post-heartbreak healing. She earns her drivers license but instead of going to her old fling’s house, like she used to dream of, she finds herself instead aimlessly circling side streets. All the while, Rodrigo replays scenes of her fleeting relationship. At first she’s only confronted by the happy memories, but eventually, all the toxic traits of her ex-partner come flooding back to her.
Music video by Olivia Rodrigo performing drivers license. Under exclusive license to Geffen Records
Quavering vocal harmonies and delicate acoustic accents roll through a blissful backcountry scene on Valley Maker‘s “No One Is Missing”, in part recalling the dusky lo-fi plains of Kurt Vile and Cass McCombs – lyrics interpreting the organic unison of nature and the art of music as a form of remedying the pandemic’s myriad social repercussions.
Seattle-based for the last ten years, Crane, along with his family, recently decamped to South Carolina – an uprooting and re-assimilation that finds a voice in the upcoming third album “When The Day Leaves”. Crane expands upon the bearing this had on the premise of his latest track: “I wrote this song, along with much of When The Day Leaves, as a way of grappling with the partiality and temporality of how we connect with one another, I guess as an attempt to collect and reflect on recent experiences of loss, love, leaving, returning, missing, etc. While recent months of social distancing have often felt isolating, I’m continually grateful for how music and the natural world can remind us we’re not alone.”
Auckland-raised Molly Payton relocated to London two years back, as a 16-year-old and dropped her debut EP Mess in Spring of last year. Her brand of lyrically mature, angsty, shambolic pop juts between extremes of melody and discord, and found a fan in schoolfriend Oscar Lang, who produced her first tracks.
London-based artist Molly Payton takes us down the dark, emotional bottom of our own monophobia in her latest single “Warm Body” Over the luminescent, gauzy production, the gal breaks down the carnal distractions we indulge in when we want to avoid confronting our own feelings of loneliness. Directed by Silence Aitken-Till, the video features Molly on her own as she passes the time within the confinements of an RV: “I’d much rather go through bad stuff, feel it completely and write about it, and work through it in all those ways than protect myself from it and not have anything good happen ever. I think it’s tied together— you can never feel bad without feeling good. And vice versa.”
‘Warm Body’ is about looking for comfort in people when you’re lonely and letting yourself make mistakes. The first time I met my producer Oli-Barton Wood, we wrote ‘Warm Body’ together, and by the end of the day I knew that I wanted him to produce the whole EP. Oli is insanely talented and was so lovely to work with, and recording ‘Porcupine’ was easily one of the best times of my life. He brought in Swedish band Francobollo to do some live band recording, they ended up becoming my live band and have been really good influences musically for me. The EP title relates to keeping people at arm’s length for fear of getting hurt, plus when I was recording it, I bleached my hair so many times that it broke off at the top and I spent three months looking like a porcupine.”
“Warm Body” is the first single from Molly Payton’s sophomore EP ‘Porcupine’
Having come out with an EP earlier this year, which is also fantastic, Kathleen comes back with another four-song EP. There is a lot of dread as the EP was mostly written during quarantine, but then again who wasn’t filled with dread. “August” kicks us off with a song revolving around how love sometimes doesn’t turn out the way you thought it would. Kathleen’s voice roars with emotion that she couldn’t hold back while thinking of her past love. “Dark Side of the Moon” was written at the beginning of the quarantine as Kathleen packed her car and drove through four states, with many of her belongings to her family’s home. There is some hope in the beautiful folk song with learning to take what you can, including watching the birds sing and the grass grow. The song ends as nature takes over the track, giving us all hope.
“Can’t Sleep” is that feeling that everyone has: that everything currently happening is a dream, but if we can wake up it will all be over. There’s so much uncertainty and while it would be nice to just snap awake, we need to figure out how to come together to defeat everything that is happening. It’s the song off the EP that would find the dancehalls, if we could get there right now. “Glass Piano” closes us out with a song that seems like it could have come from Fiona Apple, with some great piano work and layers of vocals on top of each other. It’s a beautiful track showing what Kathleen is capable of and what could be coming next.
Kathleen is one of Warner Records newest signees. Raised in Steamboat Springs, Colorado but now based in Los Angeles, she draws from her poetry and environmentalist background in her conscious spin on the singer/songwriter formula. On her debut EP, Kathleen I, listeners can hear traces of Joni Mitchell’s down-to-earth folk, Fiona Apple’s idiosyncratic art pop, and touches of contemporary pop production, an engaging combination that showcases the depth of Kathleen’s vocals and her song writing potential.
Make sure to listen to both EP’s if you haven’t yet. Released by Warner Records
On Hachiku’s debut album, Anika Ostendorf and collaborators build on the lo-fi foundations of their earlier material, making atmospheric yet achingly visceral off-kilter pop gems. While the familiar vintage keyboards and minimalist drum machines still punctuate throughout, there’s a gritty dynamism that anchors ‘I’ll Probably Be Asleep’, propulsive rhythms and distorted guitars underscoring its dreamy melodies and Ostendorf’s softly sung vocals.
Loss, long-distance romance, arguments with climate change deniers and bureaucratic immigration processes: On ‘I’ll Probably Be Asleep’, the debut album from dream pop artist Hachiku, even the topics usually relegated to inflammatory newspaper op-eds take on new depth and heart.
The project of 26-year-old Anika Ostendorf, Hachiku emerged onto the local Melbourne scene in 2017 with a suite of minimal electronic songs inspired by the folk artists she aspired to emulate as a teenager. On her 2017 EP and successive singles – all released by Milk! Records, the label whose massive merch operation Ostendorf runs with her partner, photographer Marcelle Bradbeer the now-signature Hachiku sound began to take form: Hopeful keys, occasionally anxious production and Ostendorf’s cynical lyricism, so clear-eyed you felt it had the capacity to permanently change its subject.
But even Ostendorf admits that sometimes the ideas occupying her mind aren’t clear at first. Like sediment in a glass of water, the true meanings need time to settle. Two years after subconsciously processing her grandmother’s death in a song on her EP, she noticed a “lyrically obvious” reference to it that has previously passed her by. The same is true of the territory she covers on ‘I’ll Probably Be Asleep’. “Thematically, what each song [on the album] would be about is so all over the place,” Ostendorf tells NME from her home in Melbourne. Over Zoom, I can see she’s tucked in the corner of what looks like an all-purpose room – there’s a couch next to her and on the other side, instruments she used to record a sizeable chunk of the new album.
That sonic turn pairs perfectly with the album’s themes of loss and grief, the exasperating experience of being a young woman in the world, and displacement (Ostendorf explores the limbo of waiting to be granted permanent residency on album highlight ‘Bridging Visa B’). The album charts a timeline of around four years, but is punctuated less by dates than the places Ostendorf found herself: “Some songs would be [written] while doing long-distance. Some were when I was back in Germany and while my dog was passing away.”
While the sense of place isn’t always noticeable for listeners, it informs Ostendorf’s understanding of not just where she was in her life when writing each song, but where in the world, too. Ostendorf was born in Michigan, grew up in Germany and studied in London before a university exchange gave her the choice to spend a year in either Singapore, Auckland or Melbourne. On the advice of her worldly grandmother, she chose the city with the fewest major cultural differences and most promising music scene.
While ostensibly in Melbourne to continue studying biology, she could already feel herself being pulled in a different direction. “I had already told my parents, ‘I actually don’t really want to do biology. I kind of want to do music instead.’” She recalls, “I think I told my father first, because he’s always good at giving life advice. And, I think growing up, he would have always wanted to become a musician if he hadn’t grown up in Germany in the ’60s and ’70s.”
Ostendorf describes hers as “a Ford family”; grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles alike all went to work for the company. It’s the reason she moved around so much as a kid, and she thinks that the stability of life with the auto manufacturer left her father with a lingering sense of ‘what if?’, exacerbated by the knowledge that childhood friends found success as professional musicians. “I think there’s always a little bit of like, ‘Ooh, that could have been me, but if I had done that I wouldn’t have met my wife, I wouldn’t have my children, I wouldn’t be financially stable’,” she muses.
Ostendorf’s father was both her greatest encouragement and “probably one of the best guitarists I know, actually”, but her mother wasn’t far behind. She plays the accordion and takes opera singing lessons, and as a teen Ostendorf played in her band, a troupe of IT staff at the Ford factory that performed pop songs they hijacked and rewrote about the inner-workings of the office.
“They play in a duo at friends’ birthdays and sing songs together,” Ostendorf says of her parents. “They always wanted me to start learning an instrument early on and join the choir. Never discouraging, but never pushy.”
The perfect balance, it sounds like. Ostendorf describes her father taking her to a studio when she was 17 so she could record a CD. Influenced by Regina Spektor and Fleet Foxes mostly, but also featuring a cover of a song by hardcore band Fucked Up, the formative record set her on a course as an artist – even if the medium didn’t stick around. “My dad would be happy if you mentioned this, because we still have around 800 of those CDs left that we made,” she tells me. “I don’t know why we made a thousand CDs; for our upcoming album, we only made 500.
Recorded over years spent flitting between focusses and countries, ‘I’ll Probably Be Asleep’ feels nonetheless resolved and settled. The song ‘Busy Being Boring’ is testament to that. Ostendorf wrote it in 2018 while applying for a partner visa to stay in Australia for a further two years. “At the start of being here I’d never really seen myself as being in one place longer than two years. For some reason when I’m not stimulated with a new thing, I get distracted really easily.”
She imagines the life of a professional dabbler: “Ooh, I can do two months of farm work! Ooh, afterwards, maybe I could move to Iceland and just work on a wind farm, or like maybe I could go to the Maldives and become a professional diving instructor!”
‘Busy Being Boring’, Ostendorf says, is her coming to terms with staying still after a lifetime of moving. “Like maybe it’s OK to just be… determined to make something work and stick with something because you think that it is worthwhile and not be so cynical and negative about it.”
She saves the cynicism and negativity for the record’s title track, which is also its opener. In a press release, Ostendorf explained the song: “In essence, it is like an escapist’s testament about the wish to gain sovereignty over your thoughts. Freud’s id vs superego. The thought of wanting to be part of something but the idea of it being way more enticing than the reality.”
The record’s only song recorded with the full Hachiku band – guitarist Georgia Smith, bassist Jessie L. Warren and drummer Simon Reynolds – ‘I’ll Probably Be Asleep’ is murky and cheeky, channelling a beautiful inner brattiness. Like much of the record, its driving motivation is want.
But where tracks like ‘You’ll Probably Think This Song Is About You’ and ‘Dreams Of Galapagos’ project that wanting outwards, here the song wrestles with itself internally. There is a delicious kind of petulance at play, as if having lived a life full of options has left Ostendorf with just one thing left to do: stay in, stay still and sort through her stockpile of confrontational conversations and tough experiences until, in time, she’s ready to have the last word.
I’ll Probably Be Asleep’ is out now on Milk! Records and Marathon Artists. From the forthcoming album ‘I’ll Probably Be Asleep’ released November 13th, 2020.
This is an all-acoustic EP recorded at home during lockdown. Surprised that this has not been mentioned yet, but a couple of months ago Richard Thompson released a new six song EP “Bloody Noses” on download / streaming (no physical release that I know of). Richard Thompson records 6 new acoustic tracks at home during lockdown and fires them straight onto bandcamp. His solo sets streamed from his living room have been most enjoyable for us fans. Here the songs cover topics like confusion, resilience and loneliness which echo in our current times for sure. Richard keeps the songs sparse with just acoustic guitars and mandolin, a little bit of percussion and his partner Zara on harmonies.
I’m especially fond of ‘If I Could Live My Life Again’ a slow blues with a wonderful vocal, ‘Survivor’ and ‘Fortress’ on the other hand shows the new guard of acoustic folkies like William Tyler and Ryley Walker they still have some way to go to get close to him. Not had the requisite six listens yet, but a couple of listens in and its very good – an acoustic EP with help from his partner on backing vocals. He also did a “launch party” on Facebook where it was played in full . I regard Richard Thompson as not only one of the great singer song writers but also the finest guitarists ever. Acoustic or electric, he is simply brilliant. And “Bloody Noses” is an acoustic EP – sounds like Richard has multi – tracked rhythm & lead – at least on the first song “As Soon As You Hear The Bell” which is a terrific opener- the second track “If I Could Live My Live Again” – which rocks along nicely and is of course beautifully played.
“She’s A Hard Girl To Know” is one of Richard’s darker songs – actually for a chap who is so funny live, his songs tend to be dark. And it is quite brilliant. “Survivor” is more folky – I think that is a mandolin as well as guitar beautifully played.
The Fat Angel Sings 