Laveda’s Love, Darla opens in a haze – distortion pushing against reality, vocals in between presence and distance. A feeling only capable in the fading summer hours of this early autumn album. The Albany group is no stranger to working in pieces, creating records that stand on a strong hill of no resolution. For duo Ali Genevich and Jake Brooks, instability is not a flaw so much as it is a pedestal – shaping every note, every pause, every moment that pushes against the noise.
The record unfolds starting with “Care” – which doesn’t provide so much as the title may suggest. The guitars are ragged, distortion pulled nearly threatening collapse, with vocals sounding half-dubbed from an alternate tape. It sets the stage as a mosaic of disorder and shoegaze revivalism. Not unlike the rawer moments of their influences like Paper Lady and Holding Hour, Laveda chases the sensation of the unsteady. The impulse extends with high velocity into “Cellphone” and “Strawberry”. These songs feel made for the VFW Hall, the local house show, the dusty dive bar where the PA system will blow out.
It’s the quiet moments, however, that complicate and bring a certain fragile depth to the album. Songs like “Dig Me Out” slow the frame, with admissions like “I know you’re gonna kill me / I need your love it’s endless” cracking the worship of volume with matter-of-fact clarity. It’s not a plea, but a Didion-like observation. It’s one of the only times we find comfort in the record, in a bizarre way – as the honesty feels buried within us, too. The almost hushed nature reappears in the closing track, asking “when you come around, will you think of me?”. Beneath a rock hard surface, the album ultimately serves as a love letter.
Yet, lyrically, Laveda avoids the temptation towards confessional sprawl. The words arrive clipped, anchoring the sound rather than explaining it. Self doubt, dislocation, the struggle to inhabit one’s own life; they’re all present themes, but rendered bluntly, almost sparsely, while the guitar does the emotive work. In this way, this record is separated from the melodrama of its peers: the restraint is sharp and cutting.
Laveda’s Love, Darla feels like the kind of record you stumble into sideways: half-buried on Bandcamp, just caught on your college radio that still gets it right now and then. This record belongs to the East Coast DIY circuit, where distortion is structural and vocals barely cling to the surface. Give it a listen on Bandcamp and check out their current tour dates!
You can listen to Love, Darla out now as well as get it on vinyl and CD.
“If it meant that much to you, would you say it, would you shy away?” Carolina Chauffe asks this not as a challenge, but as a kind of prayer. Their voice doesn’t seek an answer; it simply opens a clearing for one. This is an invitation anyone who has spent time with hemlock knows well. There is no backing away—only a breath reaching towards you, hands grabbing the warm fabric draped across their body to wipe the fog from your glasses, so you can see how delicate yet beautiful things are when you allow someone else to see you, too. And then, when a hemlock song ends, the wires are tucked behind your ears again. The world feels a little nearer, like you’ve been returned to it. This is the gift they give: revealing precision, refusing possession.
The five songs that make up Orange Streak Glow appear as bursts of light. Sometimes brief, sometimes steady. One may be the extra birthday candle, wedged into the layered sponge. Proof that the laces stayed tied for another lap. The next, a bulb that flickers back on, revived when you jostle the shade. And then it’s a color stretched across the sky, or smeared like a melted popsicle on hot pavement. Or perhaps you’ll see it as the kind of light that lives in storage: a tangled string collecting cobwebs, placed in a box beneath the stairs, until December arrives and the glow is asked to return. And what a miracle it is when you plug that string in, and each tiny spark strikes—ready to be temporarily wrapped and tucked around a tree standing straight and tall. Already dying, but displayed and danced around for a moment, as if it could not be more alive.
There is a glow, too, that arrives in the middle of the night and lights up a screen. A notification that makes you sit up, unplug, and walk over to the fire, letting the flame catch in the corners of your teary eyes. This is how I was introduced to “In That Number,” a song that mixes the familiar, “When The Saints Go Marching In,” with a feeling that pours out like smoke from a chimney. Now awake in a pitch black room, I removed myself from a twin-sized bed that was not mine, scared to be the stranger leaving stains on white pillowcases. Before I knew it I was curled up on the floor with my hands cupped beneath my face, rerouting the tears through the creases so I could watch them disappear down my sleeves. In the background, whistling like a teakettle, I could hear Maya Bon (of Babehoven) confidently coo: “I’m not scared of the water / I’m here comin’ back down / Feel the burn, face the fire,” and every word rang true. I was not scared of the stream coursing through me. Nor was I scared to realize I wanted something to reach out and touch me, unafraid to squeeze my soaked palm.
What does it mean to ask for that contact? What does it mean to offer it? Nestled in the center of the EP, I hear Carolina circle the same sentence, ink digging deeper into the page, “I am a clothespin and you are the laundry line,” and like playing musical chairs, I start looking for my line, wondering if I’ll find it before the music stops. I ask myself: What spool can I wrap around? What ear will hold my voice when I cannot listen anymore? I send a signal (a burst of light) to someone I’ve begun stacking piles of laundry beside: ‘What do you make of this lyric?’ They respond and talk about what provides structure and what provides support. I propose that maybe it’s about how we view our purpose. I am gently reminded that there are clothes involved too and someone must be mindful of the weight as they are hanging them. The spring between my two fragile limbs decides it wants to hold on tighter and longer. Binding is less daunting when you are choosing to endure and weather the same storms together, finding there is light in the shared strain. Or sometimes, there’s no strain at all. Just light.
The songs on Orange Streak Glow echo both the pain and the pleasure that come with admitting you have been altered by something—by someone. They are songs that understand that all communication is an act of faith. That to name something is to risk misnaming it. That in the end, the words that slice us open might also stitch us back together. That we hold the same power that someone holds over us. Because the truth is the safety we find in honesty might someday become the thing that tells us we need to pack up and leave. Taking what is now unburied with us, along with a basket of our deconstructed fragments, eager to hold onto something again.
In the days before hemlock’s latest EP landed like a feather in my lap, I was hiding away in a town near Hudson, NY, not far from 12lb Genius, where it was recorded. I was stumbling and circling the same sentence, tracing the thin lines between my teeth with my tongue. I was looking at a faded ‘You Are Here’ mark on a map, not really sure where ‘here’ was, or where ‘there’ was either, for that matter. The rain followed me and sometimes I was too slow to outrun it. Wet leaves stuck to my socks and became the inner linings of my boots. I found a frozen blue raindrop one morning, after the storms passed, and put it in my pocket. Something told me that even if I were to hang my jacket on the line, that one drop—if it ever thawed and pooled—would not dry. It would stain, it would burn a hole, it would leave a mark. And I wanted nothing more.
So what does it truly mean, to look at something you long to care for and reflect it back, offering structure and support? To say you will choose something even if it doesn’t choose you back? The first time I held the title track in my ear, in those final moments before the engine turns off in the driveway, I thought: This is the hemlock I know. A season returned, a holiday, a solid oak. There are some people who don’t just reach out for you, but remind you that it is possible to place your own finger on the map. They show you that what surrounds you has a pulse—hums—and you are welcome to join its choir, as both a listener and participant. It’s there, somewhere between the glow and the dark, as something you cannot see chirps, that you realize you were never outside of the equation at all. To choose nothing is not an option when every rustle has its own weight. What better choice is there than to take the thing you long for and turn it into a melody of your own? While there’s no knowing, you might just find that someone will push past the branches, look right at you, and sing it back.
Where did your summer go? Not just this one, but all the long ones in the past: you look back through hazy memories, blurred by six-packs of Miller High Life, “a pinch of good luck / a hit of bud,” the seesaw back and forth between the mundanity of your shitty job along with the joys and perils of your weekend haunts, and playing guitar in bed. The trip you had planned and failed to take with your friends recedes in the distance. We’re Headed to the Lake from Guitar doesn’t just take us into the lake: its songs circle its edges, reflecting the frenetic energy of youth via the twists, turns, warmth, and searing heat all present in the songwriting.
Following last year’s Casting Spells on Turtlehead and his 2022 self-titled, Guitar, the solo project of Portland musician Saia Kuli, expands and refines his maximalist bedroom rock project with this new LP from Julia’s War. At its core, Guitar’s music is fuzzed-out indie rock, but while the album retains the self-produced quality of his past work, there are some noticeable changes, with Kuli looking back to push his music forward. “It’s kinda corny,” Kuli admits over email, “but this album really was me going ‘back to my roots’ both sonically and lyrically. That’s why I think it made sense to focus-in on places from my past and present.”
It’s hard to pinpoint Guitar’s pretty idiosyncratic sound. As an artist, different aspects of Kuli’s music have been described in the past as slacker rock, post-punk, no-wave, “warped shoegaze,” “negative, angular rock.” Pointing to his label contemporaries, both formerly on Spared Flesh and currently on Julia’s War, gives you a rough constellation of where his music is located. All of this is genuinely helpful, though I find that pointing out three major strands to his songwriting is most useful for wrapping my head around Guitar and this project in particular: 1.) Guitar as a producer, 2.) Kuli’s involvement in Portland DIY, and 3.) his adoration of 80s and 90s indie rock.
Especially with his last EP, past coverage of his work have rightfully acknowledged Guitar’s hip hop origins, making instrumentals for his brother kAVAfACEunder the moniker of KULI. It feels most evident with the Stones Throw Records-type samples he’s often included in past projects, but you can sense his talent as a producer by his use of Ableton as a central tool in his songwriting in the past: his jagged songs get much of their character from Kuli dramatically shifting the listener between different dynamics, using bizarre guitar tones, and introducing other weird sounds that you might only land on by scrolling through a list of synth patches and dragging them onto the Arrangement View of your DAW. These sounds are littered across the entirety of the album. The third and final single “Chance to Win“, featuring sweetly-spoken vocals from Jontajshae Smith (Kuli’s wife who he’s featured on the standout track “Twin Orbits” from Casting Spells on Turtlehead and other tracks on his self-titled), which by the end of the track features these floaty violin synth stabs that weave in and out of the bass groove that remains. The end of “Counting on a Blowout” repitches a vocal sample of a “hahaha,” chopping it up alongside the final riff.
But with this in mind, it’s important to note that this album feels pretty distinct from his last project precisely because of Guitar’s different approaches to engineering, mixing, and production. “Largely due to my friend Morgan [Snook] (who co-produced the album), I played parts all the way through in one or two takes (instead of looping and chopping takes), had a real bass (as opposed to pitching down my guitar), and my homie and former bandmate Nikhil Wadha laid down ripping drum parts for all the songs,” Kuli explains. Influenced by touring with the previous EP, this project was written with a live band in mind, and it’s felt.
Things sound noticeably brighter than before, opening the floor in the mix for more foundational elements of his music to shine a bit more. Programmed drums are traded in for Wadhwa’s tasteful live recordings on kit, giving the album newfound energy. Instead of the warped and pitch-shifted murmurs he would often deliver in his early work, Kuli’s vocals are much more at the forefront, evidenced by his initial two singles. Kuli’s goofy, easeful scatting on “Pizza for Everyone” feels like a vocal line Stephen Malkmus might sing; he belts out emo harmonies on the heart-pumping “Every Day Without Fail” (in addition to the hardcore screams at the end screamed with vocalist Zoe Tricoche). Instead of replacing the weirdo charm of his previous work, the more polished production on the project, done alongside this broader list of collaborators, actually enhances the wide breadth of ideas Guitar has always explored throughout his work.
“This album was shaped by Portland in a big way,” Kuli declares. “I think part of that was a reaction to people thinking we were a Philadelphia band a few times on the East Coast and in the Midwest. That’s something I definitely take as a compliment, but it also made some hometown pride well up in me.” The aforementioned collaborators aren’t brand new. In addition to his production, Kuli cut his teeth in Portland’s DIY punk scene, playing with artists like Nick Normal, Gary Supply, and alongside his former labelmates on the unfortunately defunct local label Spared Flesh, that gained him associations with the egg punk and DIY rock and roll associated with underground rock tastemakers like Tremendo Garaje and tegosluchamPL.
This grimy, weirdo rock energy is infused throughout his work, and when we’re plunged into dissonance, it never feels out of left field since it already feels like we’ve been there from the start. The warm acoustic plucks at the start of “A+ for the Rotting Team” lead into a singsong-y buildup before Kuli remarks “time to go,” and a dissonant riff rings like an alarm before shuffling us into the power pop of the rest of the song. His song structures will have an A section that goes into a B section that goes into a C section into a D section, often never looking back (the lead single “Pizza for Everyone” lands far from where it starts) – out of a playful sense of indulgence and a gut instinct for the most interesting place for each song might go. Late 80s and 90s indie rock, the jangle and pop sensibilities of artists informed by the C86 / Glasgow scene like Jesus and Mary Chain, Teenage Fanclub, and more, but most evidently the lo-fi playfulness of American cult indie darlings like Pavement and Guided by Voices, the latter of whom Kuli has frequently cited as an influence in the past. This third pillar of Guitar’s music feels incredibly clear on We’re Headed to the Lake, where Kuli often sounds like he’s invoking Robert Pollard on several tracks, both in voice and creative tendencies: Kuli is also a songwriter brimming with a million ideas that he’s compelled to explore, even the short sparks of inspo. Tracks like “Ha”or “Office Clots”, with their brevity, serve less like interludes and more like the concise, brief song ideas of Bee Thousand. This influence is worn on the sleeve of this album. Kuli’s love for the lo-fi, slacker, and jangly indie rock infuses the project with a sun-drenched nostalgia that, when paired with a lot of the lyrical ideas that Guitar explores, gives the whole album a conceptual unity that’s been somewhat missing compared to the more mixtape-y nature of his previous projects.
Kuli’s desire to look backward is important thematically to this album, with his appreciation for his home showcased by the sentimentality for specifically his weekend haunts. “When I think of Portland, it’s specifically the rundown parts of town that lack Portlandia shout-outs that stick out to me. Corner stores, self-serve car washes, pawn shops, payday loan places, etc.” Kuli envisions Benson Lake a little while east of Portland when referring to the album’s title. “Really only a place you go if you grew up here, and it’s mostly families of the working-class sort that hang out there and barbecue and cool off.”
As Guitar looks backward to the places he grew up, some classic motifs arise: youthful desire, an insatiable need to hang out and escape boredom despite your empty pockets (“Nickels in the furniture / but no cash”). Sometimes Kuli leans into a serious sense of disquiet from that restlessness through his lyrics, as he croons on “A Toast For Tovarishch”, “I can’t sit around and wait.” In other songs there’s a sense of playfulness toward invoking youth, like in the tongue-in-cheek refrain of “The Chicks Just Showed Up” that point to the simple wins in life that change things for the better: “The chicks just showed up / they’re super tough / the coffee’s free.” Kuli frequently references games throughout the project, both invoking literal images of sporting events, like seeing another person on the jumbotron in “Pizza for Everyone” or winning a parlay in the “The Chicks Just Showed Up” (“cha-ching”), but also more gestural images and mantras that apply beyond a field, like new seasons beginning, striving to not “give up just yet” at the end of “A+ for the Rotting Team”, and going for broke in The Game Has Changed.
Guitar continues to do the latter with his guitar work: Kuli’s focus isn’t on virtuosic solos — although he displays some impressive chops throughout the project, with highlights on the Weezer-y “The Game Has Changed”, where the acoustic meanderings in the verses are later traded for a scorching lead line by the climax of the track — but instead on stuffing songs to the brim with shrewd guitar lines that call, respond, and bend to each other in interesting ways. In the center instrumental break of “Cornerland”, Kuli pits two spider-y guitar lines against each other on each side of the stereo mix, both racing in parallel to the driving bass line in the middle. The main guitar riff for “A Toast For Tovarishch”, though its continuous pedal tones maintain a warmth throughout the track, reveals a sense of unease with its stilted phrasing. Kuli is undeniably great at his instrument, but the real strength of Guitar’s guitar is the arrangements. This album continues Guitar’s sharp decision-making when it comes to stacking complementary guitar parts on top of and in response to one another and knowing when to hold back so those explosive moments of layers stacked upon layers feel even grander.
The ninth track on the album, “Pinwheel”, is a great encapsulation of the whole project: the lo-fi yet newly polished mix, the expansion on both his own style of songwriting and indulging his influences, the sound of youthful angst, and a maximal showing of all his cards by the end. In opposition to “Office Clots”, where Kuli is “stuck on the carousel,” rotting at work, this song spins the other direction. It’s a continuous buildup of elements, starting with spare, downstroked guitar chords, with Kuli looking through his memories and recalling his need to prove himself, “Now we got them where we want / All the usual weekend haunts / distant memories / we curse you first / we’ll catch up, somehow,” building and building until the final hook: “How we multiply / we formed a line / tear in your eye / need to send it off.” The song culminates with my favorite instrumental outro of the year, with the drums finally arriving to catch the groove of a brick-headed, gloriously simple chord progression, glistening synths soaring overhead, and a monstrously saturated, low-end lead guitar that brings us to the song’s end. It feels like fireworks set off over water.
We’re Headed to the Lake sees summer spinning again and again, the endless taking of risks to fulfill that “need to send it off,” to jump into that water. Guitar treads the usual weekend haunts, ground that’s been walked before, both by leaning into his beloved influences and by maintaining his other various idiosyncratic approaches to songwriting, bringing us bleeding-edge indie rock colored both by his eccentricities and memory. Even as we move into autumn, We’re Headed to the Lake brings us back into the heat anew even as we often meander away. “The sky glows in my window / the mind wanders from the light / it’s alright.”
You can listen to We’re Headed to the Lake anywhere you listen to music as well as order cassettes and CDs from Julia’s War.
Written by Patrick Raneses | Featured Photo by Ryan Belote-Rosen
Charlotte’s own Motocrossed – a seven piece made up of members Blaire Fullagar, Carolyn Becht, Colin Read, AJ George, Todd Jordan, Austin Currie, and Sofie Pedersen – make sounds that make me miss the southern music scene so deeply. Recorded mostly in bedrooms and basements, you can hear the closeness in every take. It’s humid and handmade; a mosaic of rural quiet and cathartic noise. As if the fragile spaciousness of Florist met the unpredictable nature of Advance Base, it settles into the scene with a precision rarely even touched on the first try.
The opening track, “A Mouse in the Field of Our Benefits” unspools slowly, tracing a feeling of smallness into something beyond our reach. Fullagar sings with a voice that is simultaneously definitive and searching with gripping lyricism, begging questions like “were we meant to see these lives play out on screen?”. The song’s pacing is omniscient of the classic slow-motion folk – unhurried, modest, but piercing when it lands.
“Crows Come Down” is brief but essential. The stripped arrangement gives the lyric space to breathe; “something’s gotta grow, if you water at its roots”. It feels less like a studio snippet, and more of a field recording, transporting us to the vast lands under a Carolina sky.
Songs “Drown (Country Grl)” and “Yearning” show range with restraint. The form aches with late-night jam energy, like a Hailaker track warped by the heat and eaten by the cicadas. “Yearning” certainly drifts towards dream pop, guitar melding together until the words are barely held. There’s a teetering between confession and abstraction that carries the soul of the south without leaning heavily into nostalgia – think more Dear Nora than Dolly.
Ten-minute track “Possum Dog” serves as the record’s center of gravity; messy and gorgeous. It moves like a childhood fever dream, parts shimmer, parts collapse. The moments are caught rather than built, making a statement in the strum, clash, and twang. It carries an emotional sprawl where memory feels half-erased, never gone.
By the closing tracks – “Motocrossed” and “Under the Moon” – the band leans into the looseness. The title track feels like friends tumbling through an inside joke, while “Under the Moon” exhales everything, and leaves nothing to be unsaid. It’s patient, unresolved, and strangely comforting in its indecision.
But Motocrossed isn’t just another lo-fi diary from the south. It’s sharper – more deliberate in its unraveling. These songs don’t wander out of lost conscience, but a search for something greater. Each cracked voice, creaking bass, crawling beat – it all feels right. This is a debut that doesn’t beg for attention, and rather earns it through intimacy, through the courage to stay small in a world of high gloss and sheen. In a space that can be dominated by the artificial, Motocrossed makes the quiet, confident argument for the deliberate in music.
Motocrossed was released on October 3rd via Trash Tape Records. You can listen to Motocrossed anywhere you find your music!
‘Talulah’s Tape’ is a swirling tapestry of trebly pop demos that conjures the best of Midwestern suburbia and its bubble gum-tinted memories of adolescence. It sounds like recess fourth downs—where strategy boils down to “Go out long,” like little fingers caked in loamy dirt searching for roly-polies, like popped driveway tar bubbles, and dreadful school hot lunches. It’s a record that hisses, shakes, and nervously asks to dance. It is the sound of youth; it is the sound of the youth beat.
The Indianapolis music collective formerly known as ‘Talulah God’ offers forty-five minutes of beautiful twee pop songs on their debut record. The record, ‘Talulah’s Tape,’ is a collection of sixteen warm 4-track demos recorded by the band over a four-year period (2021-2024). Despite the record finding its origins in scattered demos, it never feels desultory. Every song and every non-sequitur feels perfectly necessary and is sewn in a way that simply makes sense. Each part fits the technicolor whole; it exists as a series of frames that, when run together, create a coherent and honest picture.
The record begins with ‘Down on Me,’ a charming gem of a pop song fit for a tween coming-of-age film. The guitar is jangly, and the harmonies and melody are delicate. The lyrics are fragile and earnest, projecting a distinct sense of longing—a theme throughout the record. Despite this, the instrumentation and melody draw warmth; it sounds like the first breath of sun coloring the sky’s uniform of TV-grey. ‘Wallace,’ another standout track, finds the Good Flying Birds turning the gain up on their amps for a fuzzy, driving number that demands attention. ‘Every Day Is Another’ is a beautifully delicate love song that separates itself from the rest of the tape by featuring a drum machine as opposed to acoustic drums. This works beautifully for such a fragile number that elicits the more anxious moments and pitfalls of coming of age. The lyrics read like a diary entry, or the words you’d wish you could write in your crush’s yearbook.
In between the earnest tracks exist many sound bites, which keep the listener on their toes and give the record a distinctly fresh and modern edge. “Bruh,” Spongebob clips, and various other comedic sound bites read like a Gen-Z brain-rotted Robert Pollard, and I’m absolutely certain that the listener, like I, will be 100% here for it. The songs dance between echoes of ‘Guided by Voices’ in the catchy choruses and treble, the candy-coated shimmer of ‘The Pastels,’ and Glasgow’s twee pop scene.
‘Talulah’s Tape’ is a beautifully earnest and well-crafted record. It sounds like the soundtrack to a tween coming-of-age film you watch and love, then forget about for twenty years until a rainy afternoon matinee with your family reminds you of just how good that soundtrack was. If this is the future of the Indiana music scene, it makes me not so hesitant to want to come home on breaks. The young vignettes that I’ve assigned to the candy-colored melodies are ones I wish I could live in forever—little popped tar bubbles I’d gladly occupy. I adore this record, I adore ‘The Good Flying Birds,’ and I cannot wait to see what they do next.
Talulah’s Tape was originally released on Rotten Apple in 2025. It is set to be reissued October 17. You can preorder Talulah’s Tape now one vinyl, CD and cassette.
As Summer wrings out its final moments of heat, allowing for the subtleties of Fall to appear, Deadharrie introduces Slow Rock, one of two albums released just this year alone, on September 9th. William Harries, the name orchestrating the sound and image of Deadharrie, assembles a concept so candidly raw. Throughout the album, you’ll feel their disheveled demeanor peak through whichever digital veil you stream from. Enhanced by unsettling nostalgia and exciting experimentation, the Florida based artist offers a cohesive, yet daring, addition to their discography.
Hidden in the third slot of the track order is the album’s shining jewel: “New Creep.” We’re taken out of the stumbling rhythm found in the surrounding numbers, and pushed into a confrontation with the aggressive melody. Eventually overpowering the senses, “New Creep” uses its outstanding guitar solo and full volume to keep you under its influence. Where other areas of the album ease the listener, Deadharrie takes the liberty to feed a flame of rage and confusion in this piece.
“Nightshade” allows for a more introspective look, with lines like Beat to submission / Impatient mind / Lean on my family / When times are tough / Will love resolve me / Am I enough? The five minutes allotted to “Nightshade” paints Deadharrie to be the guide through a psychedelic night filled with reflection, regret, and curiosity. The hallucinogenic feeling rises as Deadharrie’s percussion shows the fun in freedom. Our trip is safely brought down by a shimmering lullaby-esque strum.
Introducing the album is “Alibi” in all its slow rock glory. Deadharrie sets the tone of the album with an intimate and relaxed voice–-the artist renders a space for the listener to feel clued in on something only they’re aware of. The secrecy behind the interaction between Deadharrie and the listener secures trust and comfortability. Immediately we’re familiar with the gentility of the soft pace, but eager to explore different sides of the artist. Which is shown in the contrasting track, “Fumble.” Electric strings instantly permeate your hearing and vision. All you see and feel is the effect of Deadharrie’s relationship with music. If “Alibi” is an introduction to their work, “Fumble” can be considered an introduction to the reason behind their work.
Harries approaches each track with creativity emboldened by reflective lyricism. On Deadharrie’s website, Harries mentions, “I really puke this stuff out in the best way. Songwriting feels a lot like throwing up.” Deadharrie’s alluring music production can be accredited to their unfiltered methods. Creating without thinking. Living without guessing. As precise and honest as the title itself, Slow Rock, Deadharrie exemplifies the transparency needed in music today.
You can listen to Slow Rock now anywhere you find your music.
Listeners may recognize Zoë Pete Ford from some such illuminated, genuinely killer acts as Friendly Company (drums and vocals) and Big Garden (drums, guitar, keys), both based in Brooklyn, NY. If so, forget that. “One of the Guys” is a sound entirely Ford’s own.
Fans of Suzi Quatro will quickly find that Ford blows straight past Suzi Cinco and turns up the VU knob to a blistering Suzi Diez. Which is not to say that “One of the Guys” is a faithful reimagination of any existing work. But that Ford picks up where The Anemic Boyfriends and Linda Manz in “Out of the Blue” left off and keeps the good work going – labor that demands strong shoulders. She’s got ‘em.
“One of the Guys” brims with songs about debauched bootleggers and cars with bad gas mileage. Ford arrives at some strange, sacred intersection that is at once playful and deadly serious. In return, listeners on the other side of the exchange are left drenched in cowboy perfume and desperate to believe that we are more than the sum of our urges. Assemble your most world-ragged friends, or a coupla wayfarers on a Wednesday – this one’s for audiences who are ideologically opposed to the nutrient shake. Ford has done the impossible by forging identity and tipping the scales in under an hour.
Any attempt to pigeonhole “One of the Guys” is to betray a dewy-eyed misunderstanding (or inability to understand) what the record is about. Zoë Pete Ford sings with a voice polite but not friendly. She has not come lightly to the wax. This is evidenced immediately by “Mint Juleps,” the opening track (and your reporter’s favorite on the record): “If you were a place you’d be a shopping mall. So scared to ever say a plain thing, wind up saying nothing at all. I might be Humphrey Bogart, but baby, you’re no Lauren Bacall. I wish I had a Ford Ranchero, wish I sang like Nat King Cole, wish I had a little money in my wallet. Sweatin this job that’s suckin my soul. I wanna drink mint juleps. I wanna play the leading role.” Our Holy Orator bites into every lyric with teeth like a waxy-eyed zen koan on speed. Ford has penned the breathless antidote to 2025’s influx of reactionary chickenshit fad muzak, dullsville and flabby (which, alack, has infiltrated even “the cool scenes” of America’s major cities). No modern bloat here, officer.
For the uninitiated, songs like Ford’s “Backseat Beauty Queen” may act as a guide into some altered way of living. (Your reporter has been lucky enough to walk the subterranean rock beside our Hero.) After a guitar lick straight out of “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly,” the tale begins, “Adam and Eve were seventeen. He was dealing coke and weed, she was his customer and backseat beauty queen […] on weeknights underneath the oak tree, the smoke and shadows of sex and nosebleeds.” Ford isn’t just an unassailably Cool Girl, she’s also a Master Storyteller – and, indeed, storytelling songs are sorely missing from today’s radio. Ford spins macabre yarns that the kids can dance to.
The record shines brightest in the moments where its authorial voice is at once man and woman, driver and passenger. “Over the Line” paints, “She’s equal parts ventriloquist, sorceress, and alchemist. She buys you drinks when you see her at the bar. Then she makes you hesitate when she racks the shots and makes you wait for the dozen other people she’s got in her pocket that night.” Caught your breath yet? “Saturn” confronts us with another American Gothic vignette: “He drives a hatchback Saturn, she doesn’t have a license. She told me, ‘Oh, he doesn’t mind driving me around town all the time. And besides, why would I get a license with Saturn by my side?’” The sense of becoming a victim of someone else’s fantasy. Once you get over it (or find some way to cope with it), nod tough and light a shag rollie (I checked and that’s what Zoë smokes. She also used to smoke Marlboros, if you can’t roll your own. I can’t). This writer dares you to put on “Mean Reds” (track seven) when your feet first hit the floor in the morning and watch how your internal ecosystem sharpens throughout the day, An off-balance but no-less-nourishing breakfast.
With “One of the Guys,” it takes Zoë Pete Ford just 29 minutes to convince listeners that “acting like you’ve never broken a pact before” is no way to live. How long does it take you?
You can listen to “One of the Guys” anywhere you find your music, as well as purchase them digitally on bandcamp.
I’m sitting here, writing this review after running into an old friend at the Logan Square train stop, remembering and examining the guilt and embarrassment I feel for what happened to this friendship I stopped cultivating. We planned to meet up over coffee this coming weekend: there is hope. Clover, an album that explores the experience of being an exactly real person, a “three-leaf clover,” and all the remorse, regret, and quiet weight of simply existing, taps directly into those same gnawing emotions. It reminded me of what it means to acknowledge your simpleness, to be human, and to sit in it — the good and the bad soup of it all.
Released this past February, Clover, the debut album from Chicago’s beloved Sleeper’s Bell, feels like a diary being read aloud. But done in such a way that you start to wonder if it’s your own, the one you keep in your sock drawer. With poetically simple and realistic lyrics like “I exist” (“Bored”) and “We watched the Triple A guy take his cables and jump the engine” (“Phone Call”), Blaine Teppema sounds like she’s speaking directly to you.
The songs pull you into a world that just makes sense. Clover doesn’t draw a line between the band’s world and yours. Instead, the artistry anchors both in something more collective: the beautiful ordinariness of real life. Listening to Clover doesn’t feel like stepping into someone else’s story. Instead, it feels like being gently reminded of the unified human landscape in which we are all growing.
Musically, the addition of saxophone to the usual trio of guitar, piano, and drums adds a deeper, more complex mood. Tempos and temperament change throughout the album, and Teppema’s sharp, clear vocals cut through the instrumentation with a directness that makes you pay attention. The “jam” bridges create atmospheric space that’s almost like the author is thinking about what to tell next, as if it’s happening in real time.
Played by Teppema, Evan Green, and other bandmates Leo Paterniti, Jack Henery, Gabe Bostick, and Max Subar, playing together feels spontaneous, carefree, while maintaining clear, intentional musicianship. Sleeper’s Bell plays with arpeggios, ambient noise, bass-heavy build-ups, cheerful melodies, distortion, and even touches of jazz, like a child building with Legos, unafraid to mix pieces that don’t traditionally fit. Clover leans folk at its core, but it’s this sense of curiosity and craft that sets the band apart in a saturated musical landscape.
Clover feels youthful, not in a naive way, but in a way that feels familiar and lived-in. It’s introspective and honest, filled with the kind of self-awareness that only comes with personal growth. The track “Over” captures the feeling of moving through an emotional numbness; its steady, chugging guitar strumming mirrors that sense of pushing forward despite emptiness. The lyric “but I’m just a three-leaf clover” carries a quiet resignation, a sense of being let down by the ordinary, yet learning to accept it.
In contrast, “Road Song” uses dissonant chords and a faster, skippy rhythm to convey a different kind of motion: one that feels restless and searching. It’s about trying to reach a place that may not exist, but holding on to the idea that it could.
Clover doesn’t beg to be heard. It just kind of sits with you, like a quiet thought you didn’t realize you needed to say out loud. It’s not trying to solve anything, but it does make you feel a little less alone in the figuring-it-out part.
Sleeper’s Bell has made their debut album, something that feels deeply personal but not isolating — a moment shared, like running into someone you thought was long gone and realizing you’ve changed and so have they.
Clover is for the in-between weird times, like growing up while staying the same, feeling anger with embarrassment, having regrets while fostering renewal. It reminded me that even in the human mess, there’s value in just existing through it.
Maybe that’s what being a three-leaf clover is about.
You can listen to Clover anywhere you find your music as well as purchase it on vinyl and cassette.
Singer-songwriter Caleb Jefson, best known as Marble Teeth, has always made music that sounds like it could fall apart at any second – that’s exactly why it matters. there was a huge crowd of people gathered in the street reads small, uneven, and at times uncomfortable. Yet, it’s one of the clearest statements from a project that has built a world on imperfection.
Five songs, acoustic at their core – this EP extends the small central Illinois artist’s commitment to small-scale intimacy while pulling harder on collage and interruption. Memory fragments, incidental noise, disjunction; it’s a continuation of the lofi folk lineage that runs through Phil Elverum’s The Glow Pt. 2 and the early Alex G. cassettes – but also belongs to the current ecosystem of Bandcamp folk that refuses polish as a matter of principle.
“Celebration Story” plants its feet in a space that feels domestic and immediate: guitar and voice in close proximity, neither heightened nor diminished. The voice reads in a tone reminiscent of Shel Silverstein, folk stripped to its infrastructure. Following into “Power Bill Blues”, the EP’s stakes are made clear: everyday life not as metaphor but as material. Like Daniel Johnston or Jeffrey Lewis, it insists that the banal is narratively significant.
The center of the record – “Sudden Remembrance, Unfinished Business” – stretches the form outwards. The intrusion of collage, half-baked thoughts, disruptions of fidelity, places Marble Teeth closer to the restless experimentation of Told Slant or Lomelda than to any cleanly defined folk category. “When the Water Broke the Dam” serves as an interruption to the streamlined melodic twang that follows through the record, dropping octaves into a sharp, decisive burst that may or may not land with the listener – yet packs that punch necessary at the core.
Closer “Big Glass… The Lousy Lifetime of a Lowly Cog (icantseemyfaceinthemirror)” sprawls without release. It circles the anxieties with no exit strategy, pulling the listener into its own sense of exhaustion. It fully embodies the EP’s refusal of resolution, staying raw, unadorned, uncomfortable.
This is music less designed for playlists and more designed for personal archives – the kind of record that gets passed from hand to hand on blogs and reviews sites, accruing weight through repetition rather than reach. Marble Teeth isn’t making folk to scale up; they’re refining its scale down to the point of friction.
You can listen to there was a huge crowd of people gathered in the street anywhere you find your music and you can purchase the album now on bandcamp.
It’s the end of the summer. The moon is uncomfortably warm, the air is stale and still, and it’s so thick you could cut right through it. The late August nights bleed together with machine-like efficiency, and in the atonal drone of the remaining cicadas’ final chirps, an intangible feeling of intense dread swarms all daring enough to step out into this unforgiving night. The drive home is white-knuckled. The hypnotic glare of oncoming traffic engulfs the reddened retinas of the late-night travelers. The machine whirs. It feels as though everything might come crashing in at any given moment.
PORTRAiTS, the debut full-length from Kentucky-based art-rockers PARKiNG, captures this unforgiving sense of dread, unease, and mania with haunting accuracy. Its sprawling and oftentimes politically charged sound is a perfect fit for the ledge, for the cusp of collapse, and for the dreadful isolation of twenty-first-century America. Spanning ten tracks and clocking in at nearly forty-five minutes, ‘PORTRAiTS’ features pulsating post-punk explosions, haunting orchestral abstractions, and fresh takes on the last half century of art and noise rock.
‘Siren’ starts the record with Frankie T. Moore and Lizzie Cooper’s hypnotic, driving rhythm section. They’re accompanied shortly thereafter by Boss Benson’s guitar, which dances in the nostalgia of late 70s UK post-punk. Moore exhales over the sprinting track as he shouts one of the album’s defining decrees, “Feed into the sirens/Everyone knows the silence.” As the song chugs, it grows more manic, more disjointed. Benson’s guitar growls and shrieks in feedback, Moore’s wails grow more pressing, and Cooper’s bass never relents. The song crescendos into a swirling wall of sound around Moore’s non-lexical vocables.
Immediately following is ‘Thirds,’ a quasi-sung-spoken art-rock track that features the first of Moore’s manic, drowned-out narrators. Moore rambles his dissatisfactions and disillusions over Cooper’s stabs and Benson’s beautifully shambolic guitar. The monologue wanders and backtracks through conversations about the plausibility of a higher power, distressed linens piling up, poor reading material, and frustrations with socially constructed hierarchies. Its verses read like a dejected manifesto on disillusionment with the general state of well—just about everything. The singular glimmer of hope amidst the disillusionment is shouted in the chorus; Moore empathizes with our collective frustrations and isolation as he shouts, “It’s not your fault you’re out of place.”
These frustrations are further explored in ‘Lantern’ and ‘Mike Johnson is a Mechanic,’ two of the album’s most politically driven songs. ‘Lantern’ drives and bounces like a lost Joy Division track. Moore’s frantic drums are reminiscent of Stephen Morris, and Benson’s jagged guitar reads like an amped-up Bernard Sumner riff. ‘Mike Johnson is a Mechanic’ is one of two songs with leading vocals by Cooper (the other being ‘Statements’). Her blasé delivery paired with the
dancey instrumentation creates the record’s catchiest song and one of its best. She encapsulates the recurring thesis of frustration, taking political aim at our inherited issues and apathetic leaders, saying, ‘Once more/I’ve grown so tired.’ Moore maniacally shouts beneath her, and Benson shreds the record’s catchiest riff.
‘DSGN’ and ‘Observation’ are two more extremely well-crafted songs. The band proves that not only does it have something to say, but it can also produce extremely catchy and well-engineered tracks. ‘People Running Madly to Some Kind of Monolith’ is the first of two orchestral tracks. The ghastly whines of Moore’s violin, cello, and bass haunt the three-minute runtime until it dies out into swirling static and feedback. The white noise bleeds crimson into ‘Monolith,’ a seven-minute post-rock exploration of mania, dread, and delusion. This is the record’s defining piece.
Chains rattle, Cooper’s bass stalks, Benson’s bowed guitar screeches, and Moore begins his sleep-deprived, haunted narration. Moore begins speaking of his premonitions, ones so vile and so filled with dread and hatred that he “can’t bear to watch.” Benson’s guitar moans in eerie notes, and Moore pounds his drums as his narrator grows evermore paranoid: “The lies brought to attention by no one of importance. Lies that I have brought to my own attention.” He stands beneath a nauseating night facing an unknown crowd, putting us face-to-face with one of his delusions, “The wind is dark/Their eyes all glistening in the rather unpleasant but warm moonlight.” He reads this exhausted and indifferently as if trying to justify and cling to his remaining sanity.
Moore’s mania grows, and the instrumentation follows; it feels as if everything might collapse in on itself. With one final attempt to retain his sanity, he shouts the thesis for the album’s mania, “I fear/I fear what I fear might not be real.” It’s not enough clarity, and the hysteric instrumentation—the mania—overtakes Moore. Benson’s guitar screams as he bludgeons it, the drums frantically sprint in every direction, and Cooper’s bass and backing vocals loom over the volatility like the “dark wind.” Moore shouts nondescriptly, but he’s silenced by his own mania.
It plays like the score to a lost Edgar Allen Poe text. Perhaps much of the record does. ‘PORTRAiTS’ deals in mania, but the issues its narrators face are very real and very pressing. In a culture and country where isolation and extremism have spread like a common virus, ‘PARKiNG’ offers a complex take on 21st-century America that is uncompromising and blunt in its horrors yet hopeful in its anthemic refrains. Maybe amidst all this dread and unease there is comfort; maybe that comfort is simply that it isn’t all our own faults. ‘PORTRAiTS’ is the announcement of a band that can craft intelligent, ornate, and catchy songs. Their voice is distinct, urgent, and sincere.
PORTRAITS is now available anywhere you find your music. Tapes are available on the band’s Bandcamp.
the ugly hug 