The title of h. pruz’s Red Sky at Morning references a line from a 2,000-year-old phrase cited in the New Testament: “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight/ Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.” The expression, commonly used by mariners as a tool for predicting dangerous weather, was recited to Hannah Pruzinsky as a child by their mother when a storm was underway. But on Red Sky at Morning, Pruzinsky gives new meaning to the phrase, signaling the painful premonitions that hold them back in their own life and choosing to continue forward in spite of uncertainty.
The record was recorded in a small, quaint cottage in upstate New York by Pruzinsky and their partner Felix Walworth. “I really admire Felix’s tastes,” Pruzinsky said. “It’s hard to find a collaborator that I trust.” The record is peppered with Walworth’s Wurlitzer and electronics, drifting carefully through Pruzinsky’s finger-picked guitar melodies and delicate vocals. About a year after Pruzinsky wrote the songs, the two of them spent the month of January accompanied by their cat, recording equipment and the house’s collection of creepy dolls, making the cottage both a home and a studio for those few cold weeks.
Photo by Olivia Gloffke
Red Sky at Morning was described by Pruzinsky as being largely about a journey. Much of that journey involves looking inward and seeking comfort in the familiar. Their findings resurface as what feel like kaleidoscopic reflections – the skin of their lover’s palm, an old memory of gardening with their older brother, the sound of the creaking floorboards in their house. Traces of familiarity follow Pruzinsky, mirroring their movements and changes, unfolding in constant evolution. “I try to write about what has happened to me because it feels the most visceral and impactful,” Pruzinsky said. But even in its intimacy, Pruzinsky’s storytelling is steeped in mystery. “I think the ghosts are gone from the house/ But there used to be something,” they whisper on “Krista”, as if letting the listener in on a childhood secret before confessing: “I think it was something I wasn’t supposed to know about.”
Pruzinsky’s ability to play with perception is what makes the record feel like wandering through a place both otherworldly and deeply familiar. A self-proclaimed lover of narrative, adventure games like Dungeons & Dragons, Pruzinsky said they love any opportunity to “create and interrogate a world.” At some points throughout Red Sky at Morning, that world is as vast as an open sky, a lifetime of memory passing, followed by the promise of uncertainty. But often it is as narrow as the confines of one’s own body, every detail brought to focus under the stifling pressure of stillness. “We haven’t left the house in weeks/ I start to see you in the t.v. screen,” they sing on “Arrival” with a slow, sinking delivery, mirroring the feeling of being slowly consumed by motionlessness. The song is about the discomfort that arises from a static, domestic lifestyle and the ease at which familiarity shifts between a source of comfort and of anxiety. But in the face of inner turmoil, Pruzinsky makes clear their determination for acceptance in the repeated line in the song’s bridge: “I can clear the cycle.”
Photo by Olivia Gloffke
If Red Sky at Morning symbolizes a journey, that determination is the force driving it. On “After Always,” Pruzinsky depicts a slow descent into complete consumption: “I sink under you/ I am all of you/ And I breathe out the rest.” That imagery later returns on the album’s closer, “Sailor’s warning,” as Pruzinsky sings of being covered by mud with “eyes directed to the sun.” Their tone seems brighter here, as if they have chosen to allow themself to “sink under,” to willingly become enveloped in the unknown.
Between lush vocal layers and electronic swells on “Sailor’s warning,” all of the fears that Pruzinsky pours over throughout the record are whittled down to their core. “I know that you will change and I will too,” they remark before ending the record with a question that sings like an invitation, beckoning us forward into our own discomfort: “Don’t you know a warning sign when you see it?”
View more photos of h. pruz taken by Olivia Gloffke
You can listen to Red sky at morning out now as well as on vinyl released via Mtn. Laurel Recording Co.
Written by Emily Moosbrugger | All Photos by Olivia Gloffke
Sink is the new project from Colton Hamilton, who at the end of summer shared his debut album Sinking Stars. Playing guitar with fellow Columbus-mates Villagerrr, Hamilton has been well enveloped in that music scene, touring and recording with friends and collaborators whenever possible. Sinking Stars is hasty and hardy, recorded to a 4-track, that found Hamilton both conscious and explorative in the midst of what’s around him, leaning into the feelings and beings that he takes inspiration from in his day-to-days.
Sinking Stars is both a fresh start and a reflection point for Hamilton as he embraces a type of broken folk structure, one that feels fittingly clumped amongst late night DIY shows, curbside smokes and a passing midwestern prayer. These songs are minimal, with humming melodies that kick a tin can down the road as guitars cover its tracks with grit and charm. But the subtlety in these songs does not get lost in the weeds as Hamilton and co. animate the tiny yet tricky grievances of sitting still for too long. Hamilton’s focused writing is where curiosity and intuition link arms and sincerity and distrust break the hold, capturing that personal triumphant feeling of making it through another rough day while still looking forward to whatever is next.
We recently got to catch Sink at Cole’s Bar in Chicago where we got to talk about the new album, preservation and what’s next.
You just released your debut record under this project, Sink. How does it feel to get it out and about and being able to play some shows?
It just feels good to put something out there, to grease the way for some more albums. I already have another one written and ready to record. I’m just planning on doing the next one on an 8-track machine instead of 4 tracks. It feels good to practice.
You’ve been in the world of Columbus music for a while now, playing often with a lot of people and projects. When did you think this was the time to start your own thing? Did you have any initial goals?
I’ve been writing songs for a while and never really put too many of them out with a focus. But after playing live more with Villagerrr and other bands in Columbus, I just felt more comfortable doing that. I’ve seen my friends do it, so it just felt like a good time. I live in a house where everyone makes music. I just kind of wanted to document that time living in that house. It’s kind of how I view this first tape, my time living in that house. It just felt natural that way.
Were the people living in that house a big component to these recordings? Because you had quite a few contributors to the album.
Yeah, me and four other roommates, we all play music. And then just a street over, a bunch of my friends live who play music too. Zayn and Alec, Cornfed and Villager, they all live close by. It just feels like a tight-knit community right now with people playing in each other’s bands. I just wanted to make something out of that while I’m still there.
Photo by Sarah Franke
So is this your first release of songs that you wrote?
I’ve made a noise project called Western Collateral. It was 40 minutes of feedback between me and my friend over a Zoom call. It was during COVID and we didn’t feel like we could meet up, so we just fed back our guitars in a Zoom microphone for 40 minutes and put it out as an album.
You recorded everything on a 4-track. What did embracing that simplicity in recording bring out in not just the songs, but in the experience of recording them with your friends that you live with?
I think probably the same thing a lot of people find. You can only have so many takes. Keeping it pretty honest to the moment, if you can. All the mistakes that come along with that. They can’t avoid each other. The mistakes aren’t a part of the whole process, but it’s kind of like a documentation system that you set out to be.
Does that feel fitting in where these songs came from?
Definitely, yeah. I was inspired by a lot of my friends who played on the record. Henry [Schuellerman] on pedal steel was a huge inspiration. I feel like I was writing those songs a lot of times just for pedal steel. He has his own songs out with A-Go-Go. And Alec [Cox] plays bass, and watching him play in Cornfed. Mark [Scott] and Villagerrr, watching him play. Trevor [Hock] too, we wrote some of the songs together on drums. Just feeding off of his energy was an inspiration.
View more photos of Sink by Sarah Franke.
You can listen to Sinking Stars out everywhere now, as well as order a tape via Super Sport Recordings.
Before Talulah’s Tape ever hit streaming, it lived in the far corners of the internet, the kind of late-night rabbit hole where a forgotten upload might turn out to be something brilliant. Like a 1994 grainy VHS relic: no context, just a cryptic title and a thumbnail making you curious enough to click. That’s exactly how people first discovered Good Flying Birds, the solo writing and recording project of Kellen Baker, a 23-year-old musician from Fort Wayne and Indianapolis, Indiana, who wrote the album between ages 21 and 22. For a while, the album circulated through message boards, zines, and random YouTube accounts. A mystery with heart, shared like a secret.
A sound-bite from a 1985 interview with The Jesus and Mary Chain kicks in and you wonder what era you’re in, launching into a glint of tambourine flickers, a creeping brittle guitar line, and a voice too vulnerable to be casual cuts the haze. The production is raw and textured but it doesn’t feel thrown together. There’s intention in the chaos. The songwriting feels careful and knowing, like someone’s been up all night stitching feelings into melody. Then comes the lyric: “I see you in the mirror / every time I cry / I hear your voice / every time I try.” It’s plaintive, tuneful, and real.
The songs chug along with timeless melodies that feel like they’ve always existed. 60s pop hooks, 90s indie grit, glimpses of glam, and underpinning comforting basslines that pull you in. Harmonies drift through like Pastels b-sides, breakbeats slam in at wild angles, and random “bruh” samples or voicemail snippets keep things from getting too self-serious.
The album is cloaked in a warm layer of tape hiss, the audible texture of its analog recording. It’s not there as an aesthetic flourish so much as a natural byproduct, a backdrop secondary to the songwriting itself. It lives there like the sound of old home movies, like the hum of a VCR left running while you built lego sets with your siblings, like cartoons blaring in the background. It’s the kind of nostalgia that isn’t about retro trends or sonic throwbacks, it’s childhood nostalgia, it’s a feeling.
That feeling defines Good Flying Birds, and is what they are chasing and nail so instinctively. Not a revival, but a rebirth. Not a recreation of the past, but the spirit of it: curiosity, connection, and building something out of nothing. With hand-drawn visuals, stop-motion music videos reminiscent of Pee-wee’s Playhouse or Sunday morning cartoons, and songs written alone in bedrooms in single-day bursts of inspiration, Baker is creating not just a sound, but his own little world. He’s re-animating the emotional roots of DIY music altogether.
Before any labels or wider releases, Talulah’s Tape lived in obscurity, a self-released project passed around as handmade cassettes and YouTube uploads. But that changed when Smoking Room and Carpark Records teamed up to reissue it officially on October 17th. And while the songs have technically “been out” before, this moment feels different. “I’m just very ready for it to be out for good,” Baker says. “It’s been weird going through the excitement and humility of releasing your own music and now kind of doing it twice. I’m through that cycle with these songs. I want to move on.”
It’s a sentiment most DIY artists know all too well: the feeling of moving faster than the medium can hold. But in this case, the slowness was part of the charm. Before streaming services, before curated playlists and endless feeds, Good Flying Birds was spreading through word-of-mouth, zines, weekenders through midwest cities, tapes sold on Bandcamp, and an intentionally chaotic website full of GIFs and rambling posts that felt more like a 2003 blogspot than a sleek artist portfolio. It was all very deliberately analog and very personal.
“I’ve never felt like streaming was a healthy way to digest and interact with music,” Baker says. “It commodifies everything and homogenizes it in a way where everyone is being force-fed the same stuff. You don’t have to go to a record store and find something that looks cool and give it a chance. There’s less word-of-mouth, less curiosity. These playlists take the fun out of music discovery.”
This philosophy shaped the band’s early growth, but still the realities of labels and audience reach eventually pulled them into streaming, but on their own terms. “The labels wanted to do it, and being on those platforms was kind of a necessity to make it worthwhile for everyone involved,” he says. “And then of course, all this social and political pressure came right as we signed on.”
In the end, the compromise came with a purpose. Good Flying Birds joined the No Music for Genocide campaign, geo-restricting their music in protest of streaming services’ complicity in ongoing genocides. “If you want to do any damage to a system, you have to infiltrate it,” Baker says. “I’d rather use the platform now so that, when I say all this stuff about how much it sucks, people are actually listening.”
That balance between ethics and exposure mirrors the band’s whole ethos: finding meaning in imperfection, building connections in small corners of the internet and using the system just enough to remind people that music can still belong to its community. It’s not that things are “perfect,” or that this way of sharing music is “right” but it’s that they’re thoughtfully tried, tested, imperfectly human, and built with care.
Growing up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Baker’s relationship with music was forged in a kind of productive isolation. With no clear scene to plug into, he was left to piece one together, pulling from dusty record bins, old Indiana punk lore passed down from local legends, or whatever fragments of culture the internet would cough up. At age 10 he picked up a guitar because a neighbor looked “pretty cool” playing one. That spark eventually led him into a Beatles cover band and then an original project, the B45s where he wore suits, played 60s garage rock in local bars at age 12, and had to stand behind the merch table or with his parents when not on stage because of age restrictions.
Much of his early experience came via Sweetwater, a music gear behemoth, headquartered in his home town, where he joined the “build-a-band” program. It was a corporate setting more focused on sales than subculture, getting kids to play music, but not necessarily encouraging a punk ethos. “They’re trying to sell guitars, not have kids sending weird pages of art all over town,” he jokes. “There wasn’t a youth scene happening. Not in any facet, indie, hardcore, anything.”
“Good music comes out of Indianapolis because there’s nothing else to do except get in your basement and try to do something that is interesting to you and your friends,” Baker says. “It gets harder and harder when there’s nothing to do and you keep showing each other your music. I think that drives a creative spark, but it’s just a handful of people making really cool music and no audience for it so there’s not really a scene.”
DIY-by-necessity echoes through the Good Flying Birds project. There was no central sonic blueprint, more like a constellation of influences ping-ponging around in Baker’s head. “It wasn’t like one band or song was the guiding light,” he says. “It’s a mix of stuff from the 60s to now. I guess ‘indie pop’ is the closest term, but even that feels too narrow.”
What holds it all together isn’t genre, but emotion. That’s what Baker consistently returns to. The ability for a song to hold something that a diary or conversation can’t. “Songwriting is the closest I can get to actually understanding what I’m feeling,” he explains. “Sometimes emotions don’t make sense in a straightforward way, and you can’t really write them down clearly. But with songs, especially when things are abstract or fragmented, I can land closer to what’s actually there. It feels more accurate.”
That sense of emotional impressionism carries through the lyrics, too. Some lines hit hard, others feel more like passing thoughts or memories glimpsed through fog. It’s not about explaining everything. It’s about capturing something ephemeral before it slips away.
“Eric’s Eyes” might linger longest, a jangly standout that captures the ache of a memory you can’t let go of. The chorus, “It’s you and me / you and me / Eric’s eyes,” sounds like something you’d sing on a swing set or cry to in a parking lot or maybe both. “Wallace” reads like a postcard from a lost summer: “Founded on the broken vows to write you letters that I never seem to pen / walking through the fallen leaves across the Waldron Circle hill around the bend.” “Goldfall” flirts with blown-out noise-pop, its chorus folding back in on itself like a looped memory. And “Pulling Hair,” one of the final tracks, lands with tender vulnerability. “I know I shouldn’t admit this in song,” Baker sings, “but can I say that I was wrong?”
Live, the band leans into the same ethos. They’re not interested in coolness for its own sake or in curating an impenetrable mystique. “Everyone’s a little too concerned with image, whether they admit to it or not,” Baker says. “But I’m not trying to put on a face. I don’t think any of us are. I really admire bands who pull off that mysterious, careful aesthetic, but it’s not for me. I just want things to feel open and personable.”
That transparency fuels Baker’s maximalist instinct. The desire to cram everything in, to draw and write and build and share shows up across the whole project. Even during our interview he shares a drawing he made minutes before inspired by something one of his students said that day. The website, the visual art, the videos, the dense melodic basslines that run under everything like a second lead vocal. “I’ve always loved bands where the bass takes the melodic counterpoint role,” he says, citing Paul McCartney and James Jamerson as formative influences. “I ended up playing bass in my high school jazz band. I had tried out and got in for guitar and then the bass player quit on the first day. I had to learn all of these Stan Kenton and Hank Levy time charts and kind of intense material and I just had to figure it out. That was a good bootcamp.”
That sense of throwing himself into things before he’s ready and figuring it out in real time defines his writing and recording process. Almost every song on Talulah’s Tape was recorded as a one-day demo. “I procrastinate really badly,” he admits. “So I have to wake up and just decide, ‘I’m doing this song today.’ Otherwise, it won’t happen. I’ll just obsess and never finish anything. Working fast keeps it honest.”
There’s a kind of beauty in that pressure-cooker process. It’s the perfect representation of a feeling captured before it fades. “Even if the vocals come later, I try to get the core of a song done in one day,” Baker says. “I like the urgency of that. The way it locks the song into a specific moment.”
Even the recording process is stripped down for the sake of momentum. “I’ll often just go one mic straight into the four-track,” he says. “If I try to do it digitally, I’ll get stuck in plugins and endless tweaking. I need the simplest path from idea to recording or I’ll get in my own way.”
And maybe that’s what makes Good Flying Birds feel so alive. It’s not nostalgia for a certain sound, it’s nostalgia as a creative process. The emotional truth of a blurry memory. A snapshot of someone chasing connection in real time, building worlds from bedroom floors, and trusting the feeling over the format. A little chaos, a little tape hiss, and a whole lot of heart.
You can listen to Talulah’s Tape out now as well as purchase on vinyl, CD and tape via Carpark and Smoking Room.
Written by Eilee Centeno | Featured photo by Conor Shepherd
Prewn’s newest project, System, sees Izzy Hagerup pull back the curtain on her starkly vulnerable journey with depression. Unflinchingly she invites us to peek into her world, allow the cello-laden tracks to seep in, and to immerse ourselves in the sound of her chant-worthy refrains (my personal favorite is, “I wanna feel it all/ I wanna/ I wanna/I wanna” on “Cavity,” where she almost pleads with the listener to let her break free of the confines of her mind.)
Previous single releases accumulated in the 2023 album Through the Window, which received praise from the likes of Pitchfork and forged her a community of support. Hagerup’s roots in Western, MA undoubtedly laid the groundwork for her raw sound, a landscape of omnipresent hills that can sometimes feel like a threat, and weather with a penchant for the bleak. It is unsurprising that she recorded System on her own amidst the valleys, a space that begs to be infused with light. “I took my medicine but now I’m drinking just because I’m bored,” she quips on “My Side,” perhaps a nod to the monotony of rural life and the way that it begs to be sliced through.
What is the most striking on System is an unexpected sense of hope woven through the melancholy. “Don’t Be Scared” serves as a battle cry for the downtrodden, with the line, “Don’t be scared of the sound/Of your broken, beating, dripping heart,” serving as a thesis for the album. There is a sense of resiliency infused in the album, a call to action for one to transmute their pain into something beautiful. Despite the darkness, Hagerup looks forward, forging a path with self-made tools.
I caught up with Hagerup over email to discuss all things shame, self-recording, and notable influences.
“Easy” starts the album off with almost incantation-like repetitive lines. It feels equal parts holy and melodically sinister. What made you choose this track as the introduction to the project? How does it set the tone for what’s to come?
Izzy: I think “Easy” came about from a fairly casual and self-centered place that gradually unfolds into some type of self-awareness as the song goes. From a feeling in my shoe to the spinning world, I think it reflects where the album is to go; the banal to the existential, love to desperation and codependency to rage and destruction and then back to the gaping hole that accompanies existence. It’s also an “easy” start, it never quite lifts off the ground but rather lays a sonic foundation that grows and shrinks and grows again as you progress through the album. I like to see it as a not-too-flashy, warm welcome into the world of this album.
A lot of this album has to deal with shame and explores the role shame plays in my life and those around me, it’s a huge fuel behind the fixed ways of our culture and society and minds. On a more personal level it’s about getting lost and forgetting my wisdom, being young, making mistakes, being in my mid-twenties. A lot of this album feels like a journal of growing up. “Easy” addresses the issues that lie below the issues that come up in the rest of the songs. Of not choosing to go deeper, to think more critically, to be more thoughtful and curious, of giving into the comforts and distractions are being forced down our throats.
The strings throughout are a really stunning and cinematic touch, particularly on “System.” What prompted their inclusion?
Izzy: I just love to play the cello and improvise on top of any song I can, to weasel it into any place it could possibly fit. At the beginning it’s just self-indulgent ear candy but after the fact I think it can add entirely new dimensions to the music. I usually just riff around and make sure to record and something gets birthed in that process. Sometimes I try to make it work and it simply isn’t fitting but I feel that my whole musical process is prompted by intuition and it’s only after the fact that I can begin to make sense of all the choices. But if a string section can exist, I cannot resist.
You’re from Western, MA, which has a very supportive and often overlooked artistic community. How did your time there influence your work?
Izzy: Western Mass has a really special artistic community that I am so grateful to have stumbled upon. I went to college in the area with little idea of what a DIY scene really was. I didn’t have much experience playing with other people, going to dirty basement shows, I was thrilled when I found it. I joined my first band there called Blood Mobile, the project of my friend, Tuna, one crazy guitar shredder and musician. Playing shows and learning what it meant to be in a band from the Blood Mobile lens was pivotal for me. I had been playing guitar for a few years at that point, wrote one little song but really did not see music as something I would take seriously in my life. Now I was living in this world where music was just a way of life. The “systems” were set up by a bunch of friends just organizing shows every weekend for the pure love of music. It was this beautiful community that was so solid because of that binding force. Western Mass just has an energy that is seeping with creativity in all the cracks on the pavement and in all the little rivers.
On and off during the making of System I would ride my bike 30 minutes on the bike path to my studio and back and that was some of the most freeing, inspiring times I remember from the past few years. There’s something about how windy and green and fragrant the zone is that it makes perfect sense there’s a thriving creative scene.
Most of this album was written and recorded entirely by you. How did working in isolation impact the creative process?
Izzy: Working in isolation has felt entirely necessary for me to access my full creativity when writing music. I am growing through that and look forward to sharing the creative process. But as extroverted and open as I like to think I am, I am also quite introverted and sheepish when it comes to expressing my deepest self and inner workings creatively. When I’m working with other people, a level of self-consciousness is inevitable and I think self-consciousness is the antithesis to creativity and freedom. In order to get into that “flow-state” where time completely escapes you and you’ve gotten lucky enough to board the train that doesn’t stop until you have to forcefully fling yourself off of it cause it’s already 5 am and you’d like to experience a touch of reality the next day… I have to do that alone.
To be so vulnerable and real with myself, to explore the shameful or lonely feelings that I need to process and to the depth that this album goes, could only happen in isolation. But there are so many styles and worlds and different emotions that I know would come out of sharing the process. I will always need to explore the places that music takes me when I’m alone, but I’m excited to balance it more with collaboration.
You master the line between vulnerability and strength in how raw and honest these lyrics are. Tracks like “My Side” have a Fiona Apple-esque punch. Who are your biggest songwriting influences?
Izzy: Overall, my music listening is very scattered so it’s hard for me to dial in the answer to this question but to name a few, Shin Joong Hyun, Peter Evers, Aldous Harding, Elizabeth Cotten and many more have undoubtedly played a role in the creation of System and the evolution of mwah.
My first major songwriting influence was definitely Elliot Smith. I know I’m not alone in that. It was during my troubled era my freshman year of high school that he really spoke to the aches and pains of this existence. His chord structures and finger-picking styles have definitely left a lasting mark on my creative process.
I was listening to Harry Nilsson and John Prine a lot before and during the making of System. They have been a big inspiration on the lyrical side of writing for me. I really love their quirky, heartfelt storytelling and their ability to bring humor and light into their music.
But ultimately, it’s the riffs in my relationships or the aspects of myself that I struggle with or the overwhelm of existence or the complete banality and absurdity and beauty and horror of this world we live in that truly influences a song of course. It’s just a lot to process, goddamn.
You can listen to System out everywhere now, as well as on vinyl via Exploding in Sound Records.
Written by Joy Freeman | Featured Photo Courtesy of Exploding in Sound Records
“Had to put the dog down / Ninety-eight degrees out.”
Philly export Soup Dreams comes out of the gate swinging with slice-of-life lyricism and classic guitar fuzz on their debut LP Hellbender. It is an amalgamation of intimate confessionals with songs like “Nothing” and “Dust”, and heavier, electric-driven offerings on “Stray Cat” and “Radiator Baby”. Country sensibilities meld with alternative roots in “Familiar,” where pedal steel cuts through lines about a sweaty bike ride home and playing hooky à la Wednesday.
The indie rock four-piece have gained notoriety through the embrace of the local scene, one that founder Isaac Shalit discovered after they graduated from Oberlin Conservatory in 2021. Joined by Emma Kazal (bass/vocals), Nigel Law (drums) and Winnie Malcarney (guitar), the group found acclaim in their first EP “Twigs for Burning.” With a myriad of musical backgrounds, Soup Dreams teeters the genre line, tied together by the rawness of Shalit’s vocals which somehow always sound like they are imparting a secret to the listener.
I sat down with Shalit to discuss the album and the major themes of Soup Dreams, which they list as, “queer and trans identity, magic and the divine, animal familiars, and the siren pull of the open road.”
“Hellbender” is your first full-length release. Were these tracks all written for the album, or combined from past projects?
IS: I wrote the songs over a 3 year period when I moved to Philly in late 2021. The newest ones I finished writing right before we recorded – the song “Nothing” was kind of figured out in the studio, and I remember it feeling so free and exciting, like there was electricity flowing around the room. At the beginning I definitely wasn’t thinking about recording an album, a few songs even predate the band itself. It was always a dream for all of us to do a full length though, so once the body of work started to solidify it was a natural next thing. The name “Hellbender” is from way before we had even a tracklist, or probably half the songs, and I put it in “The Shining” lyrics as a little easter egg.
The songwriting throughout these tracks is poignant and vulnerable, with lines like, “Still don’t know if I’m a person worth keeping,” serving a gut punch. Often, they’re set to danceable melodies. Is this juxtaposition purposeful? What’s your compositional process like?
IS: As a songwriter I’ve always suffered from bummer disease and one of my biggest fears is having a whole set of songs that just makes people stand and nod their head. I wanted to be in a band and rock out so badly. I think the influence of everyone else in the band does a lot to create that juxtaposition you’re talking about. I’m not always happy with how vulnerable the lyrics are, but it’s what comes out so there’s not a ton of control involved!
“Dust” is a notable moment of tenderness, tapping more into classic singer/songwriter sensibilities. Who are the greatest influences on this folkier side of Soup Dreams?
IS: I was blatantly trying to write a Hop Along song when I wrote “Dust,” and landed literally so far off the mark I almost don’t want to admit that was the goal. It was a moment in my songwriting when I was trying really hard to diversify my chord progressions and add interest there. But I was clearly listening to a lot of softer stuff too – Florist (intimacy and environment), Lucinda Williams (we mention her a lot, the goat), Diane Cluck (freakishness/whimsy), Lomelda (harmony/chord motion, tone).
Which track are you most excited to play in upcoming shows?
IS: We’ve been playing all these songs for a long time actually, although it’s our “new album” there’s a whole other crop of songs that we were just starting to break in at shows right before Hellbender came out. We had to re-learn how to play the album. We’ve always had a tumultuous relationship with the song “Stray Cat” – everyone kind of hates playing it and we joke that sometimes it feels like a humiliation ritual, but I really like it so I sort of make everyone keep trying. When it’s good it’s really good.
Tell me about the Philly DIY scene. How have they embraced you, and what do you hope to bring to audiences from that community when you tour?
IS: The scene is the whole deal honestly. Our whole sound comes from it. Whenever we’re in other cities for tour I can’t help but think about how we’d be different if we came from there. Philly has this scrappiness and aggressiveness, and love for each other, that you really don’t find anywhere else (at least in the radius we can cover in Nigel’s Subaru). Also Philly has hands-down the most trans and leftist music community. So I guess we are trying to bring that, like we’re bringing our HRT injections and a PFLP flag.
You can listen to Hellbender out everywhere now.
Written by Joy Freeman | Featured Photo Courtesy of Soup Dreams
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
“Gerfety is pronounced Grafitti” … Tommy, the guitarist and lead vocalist of Geferty tells me, “I work at an elementary school as a janitor and one day a kid tagged the word “Graffiti” and spelled it wrong, I thought that was funny. We’re also inspired by street art.”
Naming themselves a nonexistent word is where the singularity of Gerfety begins. The band’s new LP Fight Songs is a testament to the craft of creative songwriting. What began as a bedroom bandcamp project in 2023, has developed into a fully fledged LP. The trio — Tommy (guitarist, lead vocals), Dominic (drums, backup vocals), and Grant (bass, backup vocals) — worked on the album for two years. Now, Fight Songs is out on all streaming platforms via Candlepin Records.
Speaking with Gerfety, it became clear how the congenial comradery between the bandmates shaped Fight Songs’ sound. Immediately upon entering the “zoom room,” Grant apologized for being a minute late because he had to jump his car. In need of some help, he Facetimed Tommy and Dominic to show him how to perform the rote mechanic job. A few laughs later, it was obvious: friendship is at the heart of Fight Songs.
Photo by Braeden Long
Your record Fight Songs drops October 24th. How are you feeling about the release?
Grant: I’m excited. I feel like it’s a very nostalgic record. Our friend Korgan did a great job of doing the mix on it, it’s very professional.
Dominic: I’m proud to have made something with love, with my best friends. I also feel very grateful and lucky to be able to create and release music.
Tommy: We started recording in February of 2023. We’ve been working on it for a while. We’ve all been excited about the album, and we’re excited to put it out. For how long we’ve been working on it, it still feels good.
Your first EP was all home recordings, did your writing process transition between creating your EP Come Back Bright, and Fight Songs?
Tommy: Yeah. We wrote all the songs together in our practice room. I usually come in with a song, essentially 85% done, and Grant and Dominic help make it a rock song. Everyone writes their own parts, bass and drums.
What made you choose Fight Songs to be the single and title for the LP?
Grant: I feel like it was one the first songs we played together where we felt in our element. Fight Songs also had a lot of different elements to it, you can hear it in the song, and it was one of the first songs we did that on. It set the tone for the record.
Photo by Braeden Long
Throughout Fight Songs, you incorporate a variety of sampled sounds—from bird calls in “In the Movie” to lo-fi textures in Into the Bark, which remind me of Smog’s debut album Julius Caesar. For me, these choices create a sense of intimacy and closeness with you guys, the artists. What inspired you to include these kinds of samples in your work?
Dominic: It was all Korgan’s idea. He produced and did the synth work on the album. When we were recording, Korgan had a mic on the entire time we were recording and would record everything. We called it the “fuck track.” Sometimes we’d mess around just to get cool sounds.
Photo by Braeden Long
Because most of the synths and samples are done in studio, for upcoming gigs, how do you translate Fight Songs live? Do you try to stay true to the recordings?
Tommy: We make up for the lost instrumentation with whatever energy we bring to the performance; sometimes high, sometimes low. Grant likes to dance around on stage and we all like screaming in the mic when we’re supposed to be singing pretty. We’ve found a cool way of translating the songs live by playing with as little as possible, no pedals or anything. Sometimes there are woodblocks or shakers. Maybe that’ll all change, but for now, we have a lot of fun filling up the space with chaos or quiet.
What’s next for Gerfety?
Tommy: We’re playing a few release shows. We have shows on Thursday, Saturday, Tuesday, and the record comes out on Friday. It’s exciting.
Grant: We’re also writing what’s going to be our next record right now and plan to record it this winter.
Tommy: Gerfety is now a record only band. Bring back the long lost art of the record.
Fight Songs is out today, and you can pre-order it on Cassette via Candlepin records.
Written by Maddie Breeden | Photos by Braeden Long
Around the time Combat Naps released Tap In back in 2023, I got to interview Neal Jochmann about the project and his creative practice. Combat Naps was such a mystery to me at the time, first discovering the project playing in the legendary B Side Records in Madison, WI – doors be propped, tunes be cranked – where it was easy to get lost in the whimsy of these stories and melodies that often felt too good to be true. But there was an eagerness to the music that forfeited any and all expectations of what counts as inspiration, where each song plays so close to real life, allowing Combat Naps to be so accessible. And in that initial conversation, Jochmann reflected on the project as it pertained to its larger purpose, saying, “I have so many corny, sappy and sweet little things in my songs. But this is a punk music experiment, you know? Make it sweet. Make it obvious. Make it do that. Don’t shut that out. It might lead to a nice impression of versatility”.
To this day, Combat Naps continues to be something entirely of its own. Jochmann began exploring the versatility of the simple pop song back in 2016 as he began to frequently share songs on bandcamp, collecting EPs, singles and full length albums in this vast, almost obsessive catalog of DIY imagination and melodic extra-ordinaries. These songs became a clear and animated response to Jochmann’s creative spirit and passion to fill in the gaps of undesirable silence with something worth exploring. And sometimes these stories get ahead of him, but that’s where he prefers to be – an observant scythe, a determined pawn, a reserved dad crying to 2001: A Space Odyssey, a lucky individual lucky enough to have infinite luck – all characters that allow Jochmann to become an observer rather than the story’s maiden explorer.
Combat Naps returned this year with a major vinyl reissue of This Was the Face, an albumpreviously released digitally to bandcamp only, and now getting full treatment from Will Anderson’s [Hotline TNT] label, Poison Rhythm. This Was the Face is a tried-and-true pop joyride – door be propped, tunes be cranked as it goes. As a collection, these songs live in moments, flashes of thoughts scribbled on the back of a junk mail, gum wrappers or the cover page of your most current novel excursion, just to make a note before the thought is running right past you and straight outta town. And to his credit, the Madison-based project has held to that mission Jochmann once stated two years ago; this is a punk rock experiment, a release of linguistic agency, where Combat Naps revels in demonstrative boldness, empathetic deliveries, and what it means to give up control for once and work from the back seat.
I recently caught up with Jochmann after night two in Chicago while on tour with Hotline TNT.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity
Alright Neal, I haven’t chatted with you since Tap In came out. That was probably almost exactly two years ago I believe. What’s new with you?
Well, a big new thing is this whole album that just came out now. The re-release of something I recorded last year, with a couple bonus tracks, and then this tour that you’re catching me on. That’s pretty new. And I also got two new cats this year. I got Simon and Penelope, and I love them. I want to just use them to sell records [laughs]. It could be a mutually symbiotic relationship. I love my cats. And then also I’ll post them, and then maybe people might be like, ‘oh my gosh, beautiful cats, I’ll listen to this song’.
You released This Was the Face last year, just self-released on the internet, and then you took it off. And now you’re doing this whole vinyl reissue followed by this massive tour. What were the conversations around these decisions like as it was coming together? Did you ever see this as a possibility?
Not necessarily, no. I mean, I didn’t think it would be done up this well. Basically what happened was that Julia saw Poison Rhythm’s call for submissions, and asked me to send a CD in. I love burning CDs, and I love mail. Turns out Will [Anderson] loves burning CDs and sending mail too. So I sent a CD with a bunch of music starting with a couple songs from This Was The Face. And then Will and I were chatting about things we liked, and he was like, ‘you know, I was thinking the next release could be a good reissue of that album. I was just game. Maybe it is an exciting listening experience to listen to something pressed to vinyl that was written not anticipating that. Maybe it’s kind of a fresh thing. Maybe there’s kind of a lack of expectation on the part of the musician, i.e. me. So I got it mastered through Justin Perkins for vinyl and everything. I always think it’s kind of interesting, like, what is it like to put out an album? It’s a very mini version of things I’ve seen other bands that I’ve known do. The sort of album cycle where you have a single and a video and you have a whole story.
Just your bandcamp alone, you’re a prolific cataloger of music. We call you a pop song factory over here. You just keep pushing out these excellent songs. But being a self-released artist for many years and now working with a label, was it what you expected? What was your mindset going into it? Were you game for anything or did you have expectations for yourself and the project?
I guess I just anticipated that it would be a beautiful vinyl album because I knew they were going to use Third Man Records pressing. And I think that my expectation was to use it as a spiritual exercise to kind of surrender to it a little bit. Because I don’t want to be the dogmatic guy who’s just like, ‘oh, there’s just always got to be shit out’ and you just throw it in there and it’s worthless. Because that’s not how I feel. I think I’ve only ever done that just because it’s just a habit. But I wanted to follow recommendations; let’s release it down this time, let’s release a video, try to learn that kind of patience and also try to use that as an opportunity to get a fresh perspective on the music. Because one of the disadvantages of putting things online immediately is that you don’t always give yourself a chance to think before you speak. That can lead to situations later where you’re like, man, that is kind of cringe to me now. It was validating to have a thing by the time it was released, I still kind of fucked with it. It was a cool kind of experiment, to give it that time. And then in September when it’s out, if I still like it, maybe I did a good thing and wasn’t just scratching a publication itch.
Once you took the original release of This Was the Face off the web, it’s been quite a long gap in releasing music for you. Now on the opposite side of that gap, and breaking that habit as you said, where are you sitting now looking at your back catalog but also looking at what could be next for you?
I’ve asked myself this question a lot. I guess there are some mornings it feels strange to just go right on back to more or less insignificant, unceremonious releases. And that has its appeal. Maybe there could be some sort of system whereby there are constant small releases of a type, and also, as a different animal, something worth being excited about – some massive statement that actually might sound rather different from the singles. It could be cool to try to split personalities and be like, I want to go deeper into both things. Maybe go even harder with the kind of first thought, best thought EP and throw it out there and just be proud of it. And then go even harder with something 40 minutes long that you’re not ready for. I don’t know, maybe the songs are longer than they’ve ever been. Maybe the songs are more non-fictional than they’ve ever been. You just kind of try to break new ground with the album and try to wave hi to people with the singles.
I love your lyricism so much because it feels like a healthy blend of nuance and nonsense. You create this world that is singularly Combat Naps. Do you find yourself placed in this world that is Combat Naps? In the world created by the amalgamation of stories, maybe even viewing them as a collection of linked stories?
Maybe like a king in a castle. Or maybe a journalist. A Studs Terkel, maybe? He’s this Chicago writer who made these amazing books full of first-person testimony. So, he has a book called Working, where it’s all interviews with people about their jobs, kind of this massive compendium of different first-person perspectives. And he also has a book called “The Good War”, which is all about World War II, and one about the Great Depression, called Hard Times. I think that’s kind of where I situate myself. I’m not really an authority on anything in the world, but I’m interested in talking to people in the world about what’s there. And that is kind of a justification for trying to write songs where I talk about experiences I didn’t have.
So you don’t think you have authority in the stories?
Ideally, you want to be an impassive observer, because that would allow you to write the surprising lyric. It would allow for some sort of simulation of ‘life is stranger than fiction’, where you’re just letting stuff happen, and you’re allowing things into the lyrics on the grounds that, yeah, if this is life, it’s stranger than anything I could come up with. So you’re allowing nonsense, for instance, things that don’t really quite make sense to you at first. And then I guess as it pertains to nuance, you’re allowing details that feel disproportionate to the story. For instance, like in the song “Queen N Pawn”, a small detail would be the orchard keeper has a scythe, and I feel like the scythe, I don’t know why they’re scything the streets, some sort of street sweeping thing, but allowing the scythe in there is a small detail that feels impassively observed. So I’m kind of excited by the story, almost in the way that Studs Terkel is excited by the first-person perspective of the people he interviews. So maybe something like that, a collection of first-person perspectives. But maybe a fictional version of that, kind of like Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, where they’re clearly all inventions of the same voice and limited as such. And so they can’t be nearly as good as Studs Terkel, but they can be like Faulkner. Where someone is trying to fracture themselves and getting some of the way there, but also failing, and not being faithful to the character at times.
Do you find yourself, as the storyteller, failing these characters at all?
I think so. I mean, that’s the little twinge you get when you’re singing the song, for instance, live in front of a bigger audience than you’ve ever played to. And you’re singing, and you’re like, is the character really flipping coins here? You get this little twinge, and it’s not really cringe, it’s just a little feeling of like, is that really what’s happening in the song? Am I telling the truth here? And I feel like that’s maybe what people refer to as authenticity in lyrics. That’s a lesson you have to learn the hard way by just getting up there and singing it. I don’t get those twinges very much from this set, luckily, because Logan [Severson] has selected songs that he thinks I’m delivering with conviction, that suggests I think I’m telling the truth in the song.
So, it kind of self-selects when Logan says, ‘we should do this song and this song and this song’. It turns out to be ones that I was able to feel were somewhat true. What’s interesting about this line-up that I’m touring with is it’s not the hometown line-up of me and Marley and Illich and Yvette. It’s hired hands who are able to do this big, long tour. But it’s people who have been to Combat Naps shows, so it’s interesting how that selection process happened. Because Logan just basically picked some songs. He was like, I think you should do this and this and this. And I was kind of like, you know, those are ones I feel comfortable singing.
And you said you felt good up there tonight. Way more relaxed than the beginning of this tour you mentioned?
I did feel good tonight. With the first few shows I remember we were being accurate. And then after one – one of Julia’s big insights that night was that we were very focused and we weren’t really looking at the audience at all. And tonight, it was fun to look at the audience. Of course it’s important not to read audience expressions and take much from that because people don’t display their emotions in their face. But it was fun to see impassive or kind of neutral audience members, unmoved audience members, and kind of sympathize with that and be like, you know, I am not moving very much either. And then see people who are dancing and being like, what are you dancing to? You know, it was cool to inquire that in the face of the audience. So that led to me being relaxed. Calvin, who played in early iterations of the band, showed me a voice memo of a song I wrote a long time ago about how I read expressions on people’s faces too much. I used to have that problem of if someone’s tired, RBF or whatever, I’m like, oh man, they’re pissed at me. You know, it’s just something you get to learn growing up, I guess.
Do you find that habit to write as these characters, almost as you’re seeing someone’s facial expressions and putting meaning into it, even though it might not be your story to tell?
Oh my gosh, wow, good connection. I think a clean way of saying it is that there’s kind of an entitlement to speech that is both queasy about the whole enterprise, but it’s kind of essential to doing the exploration. It’s fiction or whatever. But it describes a feeling that I have a lot about songwriting. My mom used to always say, ‘Neal, I just feel like you don’t really have anything to say’. And she said it lovingly, and this was in the course of complimenting me on my music. But I think about that every time I write a song, thinking, what do I have to say? I think arguing with that question is great. It’s very productive. What I took from her saying that is to simplify and maybe make a cleaner premise to the song. I think every song on this album has an easily summarized premise, and I’m proud of that. Like that fifth song, “Drifting Halfway”, that’s about being an early riser and knowing that that can wake people up. And that weird thing of like, I gotta get up and do stuff, but I wish you could sleep and I’m sorry.
You also run a YouTube channel called The Leafy Concern, dedicated to physical books. As a lover and a participant in literature, what does it mean to you having this, I’m going to call it an extracurricular, that’s outside of music, but still connected to the way you approach literature and the way you express yourself through literature?
It’s always vaguely connected to this desire I have one day of teaching literature or something. I always wanted to be like a cool literature teacher who makes kids love reading and books. But I guess it’s nice to be able to have that kind of validation from something. It’s not really validation; we’re kind of displacing attention onto these objects. I think that’s fun. I think maybe it kind of reacquaints you with the object as kind of separate from the artist, just like in a way that kind of reinforces a healthy separation. Because I feel like any attention, I get on those videos are not really because I ramble sometimes, they’re just want to see what’s happening in these works of art. And sometimes I give people a clue or give them my take. The book is kind of alive, you know? We don’t have to worry about ourselves. We just get to focus on that, and that’s kind of nice. It’s also just a nice excuse to keep a ledger in what I’ve been reading lately. I’m always dreading the day when I’m going to log on and do a video that’s like, ‘you guys should all check out my music video’. It turns out it’s just a long game to sell two vinyls.
You can listen to This Was the Face out now as well as order it on vinyl via Poison Rhythm. Follow along with the Leafy Concern here.
Samira Winter has always had a gift for turning daydreams into soundtracks, but on ‘Adult Romantix’ she sharpens her focus.
Now touring in support of the record, Winter’s live performances extend the record into something tangible, charged, and alive with feeling.
We caught up with the Brazilian-born, now NY-based artist to step into the album’s glow and talk about heartbreak, transformation, and how ‘Adult Romantix’ captures the strange, beautiful tension between falling in love and letting go.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity
Lucie Day (The Ugly Hug): This album is about a lot of different things – about leaving LA, about love, about walking away from something and how that’s good for you yet sad. I was really interested in the way in which you created kind of a mini movie out of all of these characters and all of this lore. How much of it is autobiographical versus fictionalized? Do you see yourself in these characters, or do they exist separate from you?
Samira Winter: I’d say in general with Winter, it is kind of an extension of me but it’s something beyond me. I do feel like with this album, there’s an interplay – even with the whole movie idea – of “what is fiction”? What’s stemming from a raw emotion or something that in my real life has happened, but then became something bigger through a song? Sometimes it’s just a very subtle thing that then gets expanded on. A lot of this album, I think, was a time capsule. I pulled a lot from the over a decade that I lived in LA. So there’s also a little bit of the fictional side too, I’d say, incorporating these people that I’ve met, these characters, this energy.
LD: Archetypes of people that you meet?
Samira Winter: There’s the LA “California slacker-stoner” character that’s a surfer, and this type of shoegaze that was very Californian. Years of just seeing bands and going to shows. I think it’s a mix of both, but I would say some of it is actually not biographical. Some of it is truly just incorporating different characters and playing them out.
LD: Pulling the parts that are you and the parts that play off of what is you and what’s not.
Samira Winter: Yeah, I would say it’s a very nuanced thing and it’s hard to really say this is this, and this is this, but I’d say it’s a mix of both and it’s kind of an interplay too. With the lore and the characters, when I was recording the album I had it as one of my goals to explore different voices. When the album finished – I used to have a harder time when I had to talk about the record or explain “What am I gonna write in my bio?What am I gonna tell people?” And so I preemptively, when this album finished, sat down in my house in Brazil over the holidays and wrote an essay. I wrote themes and motifs and a treatment of what a movie would be for the album. I just kind of kept writing and writing and writing, and that was a huge part of the process that ended up informing all of my decisions when it came to creating the visual world. And so in that essay I would be like, okay, there’s the friend group in “Misery”, there’s the couple from the album. It’s all these characters that all belong to this world. It feels really good to have been able to make that all happen in a visual sense as well.
LD: Love is clearly such a large presence within the record. Was that something you think that you were consciously experiencing during the making of the album? Or did making the album bring that to the surface? Did you set out to make a record that was so filled with love?
Samira Winter: I would say with the way I make records, I’m not really setting out. I’m very much subconsciously just making a lot of stuff over a long period of time. I like taking a couple of years to make an album and writing and recording at different times. I think for me it did kind of happen, but yeah. I went through a breakup, and then after the breakup had all sorts of nostalgic feelings. There’s definitely also a level of the album that is a bit darker. There is a doom to it.
LD: I know you’ve talked a lot about gothic influences on the record.
Samira Winter: There’s that side of it, but I think at the end of the day it just felt like when I was packing up and being a nomad I was capturing all the different feelings and things that were happening. When I started writing songs it was kind of as if it was a diary, so I think there’s a level to life experience that ends up inspiring me. But I definitely didn’t set out to make it about love. When we finished the record, I started piecing together the dots that connected and the throughline. I liked the idea of adult romantics and pondering these things because I grew up in the 90s. Watching so many rom-coms and having so many fantasies ingrained in my head and taking everything with a grain of salt. Being like: What is fantasy? How far can you go with a crush? What are these different bounds of the platonic and the romantic?
LD: The album does feel like there’s a light and a dark- falling in love while saying goodbye, leaving something behind to move forward. In that context, do you see the album more as a record about transition or about acceptance?
Samira Winter: I’d say it’s both.
LD: I know that’s a really hard question!
Samira Winter: I wrote it in a transitory state.
LD: So that colors it.
Samira Winter: Yeah, that definitely colored it. But I think in a way, finishing it and releasing it into the world led to an acceptance because I felt like after releasing this album I’d been fully able to close the door to the past of my LA life. I’m a believer that it’s important to release music that you feel really crazy about, and that you feel really excited about. It’s important to release it because it completes the cycle. I think releasing the actual album, you know how people say it’s not mine anymore? You release it to the ether. So I feel like I’ve been truly, truly able to let go.
LD: You’ve said that writing these songs and then thinking about performing them was scary, because they were so vulnerable and intense. Now that you’ve been actually performing them, how has that been?
Samira Winter: I think it’s been getting easier now. The very first practice where I had to play “Just Like A Flower”, I had so many butterflies in my stomach. With all the songs. We’ve been on tour for about two weeks now, I think now it’s just an excitement. And yeah, it’s been really fun to play the new songs.
LD: I love that line in “Just Like a Flower”: “all a girl could want is a girl friend”.
Samira Winter: I love that line too! It’s true, and it’s really not talked about enough. All of the songs that I’ve written that have a girl theme or a girl character like “Just Like A Flower”, “The Lonely Girl”, and “Sunday”, I still get chills when I play them. It just touches my soul. It hits in like a… I don’t know. I think it’s something that people can really identify with.
LD: Speaking of throughlines, Portuguese has always been a throughline in your work. Do you think that there are other things in addition to that that have stayed consistent through all the work that you’ve made and things that you find comfort within as anchors within the making of something new?
Samira Winter: Yeah, I think with Winter I’ve been able to explore different things and some of those things I’ve explored I’ve kept in my palette. I’d say a lot of the throughline is this girl character that’s an extension of me, and it’s like seeing the world through the lens of a dream language. I think there’s definitely a lot of the daydreamer archetype in Winter, of this act of trying to stay in touch with a sense of purity and a certain type of innocence. I’m always kind of in search of streamlining and perfecting the dream pop, shoegaze – I don’t want to add a ton of genres, but the language of Winter and finding the unique way that I can keep moving it forward.
LD: You’ve talked about all of these movies as your inspiration. Out of all the ones (10 Things I Hate About You, Kids, Gregg Araki films), what movie do you think that Winter as a character would fit the best in?
Samira Winter: The thing is, every record that is Winter is a slightly different character. I think I’ve really gotten better at honing in my concepts and finding that clarity. For ‘What Kind of Blue’, that character is this French girl named Juliet Blue. ‘Adult Romantix’ is this couple. There isn’t actually a movie that exists that’s perfectly ‘Adult Romantix’, which I guess makes sense because I created it. Yeah, that’s a cool thing for me to kind of chew on- where it fits in. If I had more resources, time, and money, I would make the movie. You never know- in 20 years, who knows what’s gonna happen? [The process] is really for me. It’s way more satisfying than it just being me. I love having this thing beyond myself as a muse, you know? When it becomes more than you in a project. I think art is beyond you. Maybe not at first, but it becomes its own being. I do think it’s like something in the ether that comes through you, and you are the filter.
Check out more photos of Winter live in Salt Lake City.
You can listen to Adult Romantix anywhere you find your music as well as on vinyl, CD and cassette via Winspear.
Sonically, the most authentic of the underground bands are the ones that are recording themselves, gigging around, and making an effort to create an all-around good music community. Bullseye, a New York City-based outfit are doing just that. Bullseye are among some of the most exciting bands that seem to just be flowing out of The Big Apple. They are a newer band who are highlighting NYC’s current underground scene through their commitment to making genuine music, fronting the wave of New York-youth-bands that are keeping DIY alive. With the release of their self-titled first EP, the band has cemented themselves as one of the most promising, having recorded and produced the whole EP on their own. Certainly “on the target,” so to speak, with their embodiment of DIY.
I recently interviewed Jake Barczak, the band’s frontman, on the band’s influences, recording process, and upcoming shows, in hopes of putting their music onto the radar of fans of Pavement, The Spatualas, Guv’ner, and perhaps even early Mirah.
The Roundabout is our newest column put together by Ruby O’Brien, brining a focus to youth bands across the country.
First, I’d like to start out by asking you to introduce yourselves and what you each play. Tell me how the band came to be!
OK, well, I’m Humberto and I play the drums. I’m Clara and I play bass. I’m Oliver and I play guitar. I’m Jake and I too play a guitar and I sing. I just typed all those responses myself but they all say hello. The band formulated around my (Jake’s) songwriting attempts about 5 years ago during Covid… I made some demos that I sat on for a while, and then eventually formed a band around. It really came together when I reconnected with Oliver who I knew a couple years ago, and Clara who I played in a band with in Minneapolis when I was 12, and met a number of Texan newcomers to NYC, Humberto, Leighton, Tyler, and the like. All crazy talented people.”
What are you guys individually inspired by, movies, art, music, etc, and how does that relate to what you collectively sound like? Do you think that your individuality creates a cohesive sound or do you ever find that songwriting can be a little more chaotic? I think this Tour Tape you guys put together last March certainly has one unified sound: I’m definitely picking up Pavement or Butterglory sounds through most of the EP, but then there are one-off songs like “Shine A Light On” with the Casio drum machine that sound a lot like Helevetia or something like that.
I think we all bring different backgrounds to the band (hah bet you didn’t see THAT coming). I’m like hardcore into melody and song I feel… Oliver has the ability to take that and make it slightly or even significantly more evil (still sounds like sunshine maybe right) and Clara has her own stripe of indie rock she’s bringing on the bass. Humberto, too, brings a certain type of Rock n Roll background, and I think like an eye/ear for detail that comes from his jazz-level drumming capability and schooling in the ways of design. He’s our wabi-sabi guy, maybe. I think we have a lot in common, but also pretty heterogeneous tastes… which, if you play enough with a scrambled mix of influences, eventually something textured and shiny and awesome is gonna come out. Not sure that’s happened, but I feel like that’s what we might be capable of doing on a good day.
The EPs you guys have out so far tend to be a mix of lo-fi and hi-fi. Do you guys track everything yourselves? I’m curious what your recording process is like.
I tracked like 60% of the songs that are out on the internet already with my phone. People talk about this a lot, but the compression that a phone speaker/system does can be kind of juicy. Other tracks I’ve done with friends and band members. Jasper Leach recorded the second two tracks on the Bullseye EP with a computer + interface and played bass. Oliver recorded “Shine A Light On” in a similar way. The recording process is patchwork and kinda case-by-case.
When you sit down to write a song, who is generally coming to the band with the ideas? Or is the songwriting process a jam with lyrics that come later?
So far it’s me… but the door is open…… I hear Jason Shapiro is doing commissions for songs so…… maybe he will write the next release.
What was the most exciting show you guys have played so far and why?
We had a good time playing Bazooka Fest, put on by pal of the band Jake Whitener.” Jake plays in another awesome NYC band called the Sunshine Convention. “We played outside during a hot sunny day. Friends, Good Flying Birds (amongst many amazing other bands) were on that bill, we’ve been happy to share a stage with them… like 3 times? They rock a lot.
Where do you guys hope to take the band in the future? Do you want to be DIY, or something even bigger?
I just want to keep writing and putting out music that I like and following it and supporting those around me doing the same thing. SO whatever that looks like.
NYC locals can check out Bullseye at Bread & Roses DIY indie music fest at the end of September, which will be happening 9/26-9/28. If you aren’t based in NYC, have no fear. Bullseye is certainly on the come up and will be in your city in no time.
You can listen to Bullseye’s two EPs anywhere you find your music as well as snag a tape of their Feb ’25 Tour now!
Written by Ruby O’Brien | Featured Photo Courtesy of Bullseye
the ugly hug 