Growing up in Eau Claire, WI, Adelyn Strei is a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, who has spent the last decade expanding and defining her rich and improvisational type of folk music, mainly through arranging and performing her friend’s music and releasing under her previous moniker, Adelyn Rose. Now based in Brooklyn, Strei is preparing to release her new record, Original Spring, set to be released November 15. Today, she shares the third and final single before the release, “Clouds In Your Eyes”.
Bare, yet empathetic, “Clouds In Your Eyes” builds upon the opportunity of open spaces. As tinged guitar strings rattle and a sullen piano begins to find its voice, step-by-step, new textures form underneath Strei’s footing as they play out with gradual depth. “To know her was to love her / To love her was the natural way”, she sings, candid and clear, holding on to every word with thoughtful phrasing and cherished presence. Carefully, amongst ghostly echoes, tempered effects and a flurry of woodwinds, vivid and unique – like the song’s natural plumage – she repeats, “Sun in the shadows and / Clouds in your eyes / You say to let it”, gradually fading into that same open space where it began.
About the single, Strei shares, “Clouds In Your Eyes’ completes the 48 minute arc of the album. The guitar and drums together have a determined resolve, carrying lyrics about loss, but the kind of loss that feels like wonder and gratitude,” she continues, “[it’s] very much a feet on the ground/eyes on the sky kind of song.”
Today, Adelyn Strei shares a music video for “Clouds In Your Eyes”. Watch it here.
Original Spring is set to be released this Friday, November 15th via Brooklyn’s Mtn. Laurel Recording Co. and produced by Dex Wolfe. You can pre-save Original Springhere.
Hailing from Wiltshire, England, Tom Brown is known for projects such as Teenage Tom Petties and Rural France, proving himself to be a highly effective and cherished voice in the world of underground pop. Today, Brown shares “Dunno”, the debut single from his latest creative endeavor, Lone Striker. Five years in the making, Brown has set the jangle-pop aside as Lone Striker embraces the warmth of wobbly homemade loops, found sounds and moody, wistful arrangements, while still having his well-crafted melodies continue to be a testament to his artistry at hand.
First a drum fill, a sort of laissez faire jumpstart into this dirty, melancholic groove, “Dunno” finds its footing within a clanky backbeat and a curtain of weathered horns, offering an off-kiltered, yet reassuring presence to get lost in. Although Lone Striker finds Brown working mostly alone, “Dunno” also includes the work of Billy Fuller (BEAK>) on bass. Swirling with disillusionment, questions asked and questions left unanswered, Brown sings with a tender clarity, “And I can’t think about tomorrow if the past is gonna be so cruel” – the subtlety in the chromatic digression helping him find his footing as he keeps moving forward. As “Dunno” begins to fade, the layered textures of modulated synths, simple rhythmic movements and those same weathered horns continuing on, Brown has already laid the groundwork for a triumphant rebranding to an already beloved career.
Last month, Devils Cross Country announced their first full length album and shared the fiercely catchy single “San Miguel”, titled after the beloved Filipino beer. The Cincinnati based band nails the divine grit of Midwest post-punk so well you’d never believe the project began in the pristine realms of Zoom mid pandemic, with frenzied hours of Google Drive demo exchanges between initial members Patrick Raneses and James Kennedy Lee. In the last few years, Devils Cross Country graduated the confines of virtual meeting rooms and is now a live constituent in the Cincinnati scene, featuring Spencer Morgan on drums, Connor Lowry on bass, and several rotating collaborators on strings, synths, and stretched samples. Today, they’re back with the second single off Possession is Ninetenths, out via Candlepin on December 7th.
“That person takes again, you let them take again — repetition, a musical act, as an offering. Romantic stuff, weirdly,” Patrick Raneses explains of “Second Sin”, a hazy, slacker rock track that bulldozes notions about ownership. The song explores a relationship with a thief, unfolding a narrative where the act of stealing a possession back and forth yields more fulfillment than possessing it in the first place. Perhaps a commentary on materialism, perhaps an unconventional love song, it’s a maverick of a track both lyrically and sonically.
While its initial melodies have softer edges than the jagged, guitar heavy moments of “San Miguel”, “Second Sin” is sneakily energetic, kindled by surging drum sequences and dense bass lines. Layers of creaky synths, swirling guitars, and warped vocals follow a recipe of twinkling distortion that evokes contemporary Pennsylvania shoegaze, but at its core the track is shaped by local influence, with a grisly sense of Cincinnati post-punk rawness welded into each note.
Today, New York’s Toadstool Records has shared Let’s Be Friends: A Tribute to the Beach Boys, a 28-song compilation album of beloved Beach Boys songs benefiting the Billion Oyster Project and Mutual Aid Disaster Relief.
In a statement, Toadstool’s founder, Caroline Gay, shared, “In the lead up to the United States presidential election, climate change has become a hard reality. The United States’ support of Israel’s military assault on Palestine is not only a humanitarian disaster, but has had an immense effect on the climate. Combined with Donald Trump’s outright denial of climate change and rollback of over 100 environmental regulations during his presidency, the United States’ hand in the global climate catastrophe cannot be ignored.”
The comp includes contributions from artists like Joe Fox, The Fruit Trees, ghost crab, ebb, orbiting, djdj, Billy Plastered, Gavin Serafini, Luca Vincent, Bill Hagan and Friends, Luke Lowrance, Cephalid Breakfast, Daniel Um and many more.
All profits will be split between Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, a grassroots mutual aid network whose mission is to provide crisis relief based on the principles of solidarity, mutual aid, and autonomous direct action, and Billion Oyster Project who works with local communities to restore oyster reefs in New York City. Oyster reefs provide habitat for many species, and can protect New York from storm damage — lessening the impact of large waves, while aiding with flood and erosion control.
About the comp’s album cover, Caroline also shares, “Beach Boys fans will appreciate the artwork for this compilation, a custom piece by Matthew Durkin. It contains references to Smiley Smile (the house, plant on the backside of the album) and Friends (using a very similar typeface as seen on the album cover) all combined to make an original piece for this compilation.”
You can purchase Let’s Be Friends: A Tribute to the Beach Boys exclusively on bandcamp.
“There is a song on the album where I play saxophone,” McClellan says, falling into a brief pause before letting out a quick laugh, “I’m not a good saxophone player.” When it comes to songwriting, control isn’t always a given, a beneficiary to circumstances in most cases, but can be just as effective an artistic choice as what basic instruments you chose to record. “We could have easily asked someone else to do it,” she continues in regards to her saxophone skills, “but, to me, it’s not about the technique or the form here. It’s about being very committed to the vision.”
Anna McClellan is a singer-songwriter from Omaha, Nebraska whose aptitude for presence has always held an edge to her poetic and faithful ventures. With three previous albums under her name, McClellan’s range of sounds have become, and quite frankly always have been, reactionary to the environments in which her narrations are taken from. The short plights of pounding piano keys take the piano ballad to a more enticing, and oddly eloquent, arena fit for indie-rock slackers and tempted swooners alike. Her melodic phrases croon over deep feelings of devotion and defeat – humorous quips mixed with this unpredictability that resonates just as casual as it is damning to the restless confessionals at play.
Today, McClellan offers her latest work, a sincere and eclectic album called Electric Bouquet. The stories that she writes about, now sitting with accumulated interest as the years pass by, sing of a time when boredom will cost you – the hope for something to happen sits out like soggy cereal in the late-morning. Yet, the details of this foundational mundane begin to blend in amongst personal and societal changes, hitting with such deliberate delivery and personal conviction that is only fitting coming from her singular voice.
I recently caught up with McClellan as she prepared for the release of Electric Bouquet, where we discussed her time growing up in Omaha, becoming an electrician in the TV industry and sticking to the vision she had set out to complete for some time now.
Photo by Madeline Hug
This interview has been edited for length and clarity
SR: You wrote the songs for Electric Bouquet over a range of years. What was the timeline and where were you location wise in the process?
AM: All of it was really written in Omaha, where I grew up. I moved back to Omaha in the fall of 2018 and then recorded my last record in the summer of 2019, and then basically started writing songs for Electric Bouquet right after that.
SR: Growing up in Omaha, which is referenced a few times in your writing, what did the city come to symbolize in this narrative path that the album takes?
AM: Yeah, “Omaha”, the song, is a very love to hate relationship with the city, and then there’s also “Dawson’s Creek”, the last song, which is all about my childhood. It ties up thematically to a lot of the stuff around being a kid and having too much time on your own unsupervised and alone. I wasn’t doing anything bad [laughs], I was mostly just ruminating hardcore, like I was really bored. I just didn’t have enough stimulation. So, Omaha represents a lot of that for me because I have so many rooted memories, restless ones, of wanting something to happen, something exciting or surprising, and I’ve just been looking for stuff like that ever since.
SR: You obviously write from a very personal lens, telling your own story, but there is so much to be said about this larger scope that you utilize, especially on the song “Jam the Phones”, which catches you going through all of these big changes in your life as you also think more critically of how the world changes around you too. Did you find that the identity at which you write from change throughout the album’s process the more you focused on these larger themes?
AM: I’ve been thinking about social justice issues and trying to figure out how to write about them for a long time. Before shit started, like really popping off, at least for our generation, there’s a collective whole that I’ve noticed, where we’re all starting to tap into more and more of what’s going on. So it felt really organic with everyone wanting to talk about this stuff more, but the framework for talking about it is tricky because everyone has such different ideas. I feel like talking about it from the ‘I’ is always the best, because people can’t argue with your feelings. That song specifically [“Jam the Phones”] was written in 2020 around the George Floyd uprisings, when I feel like everyone was, for the first time asking, ‘what do we do?’
SR: There are many songs that reflect on different kinds of relationships throughout the record. Were there any relationships that you struggled with articulating and did you find a way to solidify their meaning on this album?
AM: Of course, most of the ones that I’m thinking of are romantic. When I wrote the first song back in 2019 called “I’m Lyin”, I was with a person, he plays music too, and we played music together. I played the song for him, and he was like, ‘do you not want to be with me anymore?’ I hadn’t thought about it like that, but then after he said that, I was like, ‘wait, maybe that is what this means, shit’ [laughs]. Then we broke up not long after that. Sometimes songs will explain things before my mind catches up to them. I think “Dawson’s Creek” is very much about familial relationships and it was a long time coming. I’ve been trying to figure out how to write about my struggle with my family and our dynamic, because so much of it is about not saying things, and like this sort of repression. So I feel like we’ve had lots of conversations over the past five plus years about this stuff, and through those conversations enabled me to voice these things more and have the courage to do it.
SR: I’ve never actually seen Dawson’s Creek, but I am familiar with the lore. Was there any significance of using that show as the title of the song?
AM: It’s not really about the show at all, but more about watching the show. I used to watch it in the summer, it was on TBS at 9am and 10am every morning. So I’d wake up and watch Dawson’s Creek with my cereal, and that’s sort of how I’d start the day in the summer. It embodies this sort of lost, wistful feeling of just waking up and immediately being swept up in someone else’s narrative, like a fake narrative instead of feeling like I had my own narrative.
SR: Television and film is pretty consistent throughout the record, like on the song “Co-Stars” which plays out like this very Hollywood-esque progression of love and expectations.
AM: Yeah, it’s funny, when I wrote that song I knew I’d wanted to get into TV at that point, but fully was not working in this world at all. It’s funny, a lot of things about this record have grown in their meaning since, not like a manifestation, but there’s been through lines that have carried past the songs. Even the cover is me with a bunch of lamps, and now that is what I do on the show, I get all the lamps to work for the sets. It’s just kind of crazy.
SR: Yeah, I wanted to ask, now working as an electrician on television sets, where did you get the concept of the ‘electric bouquet’ and what does it mean to you?
AM: I was going to electrician school at the time, so I think that the word was just really prevalent. I was also sitting and thinking about live shows and imagining me bringing lamps, like so many lamps to every show and setting them up and that being a part of the load in and out at night – it’s like an electric bouquet. You create the bouquet around you as part of your set design, and that’s what the poem at the end of the album is about. ‘I have lamps – 20 lamps at night, I bring inside, set them up all around me, like an electric bouquet.’ But I think realistically I could only do like three, maybe four lamps a night [laughs]. It’s a small operation.
SR: When I picture a bouquet, obviously it’s like a bouquet of flowers. But thinking further on this word, a bouquet is never naturally occurring. Someone has to put it together.
AM: Totally. Calling an album a bouquet is a cool idea. That’s another way of thinking of it.
SR: Bouquet is a great word for an album. It makes sense.
AM: Yeah, I was really happy when I came up with the title. It’s the first time I’ve ever had the album name before I recorded the album.
SR: That’s gotta feel so good, right? Did that guide the outcome of the writing or recording for you at all?
AM: I just felt very empowered, like I knew what I wanted it to sound like and how I wanted to feel through the whole thing. Through the experience of doing this before, obviously writing the songs, but not necessarily being as assertive production wise, I knew this time that I really wanted that control and to be more uncompromising in my decisions. I was really excited about that because there’s not a lot of places that you get to do that in life, but when it’s your songs and your name, you can just be like, ‘no’ [laughs]. In that case, maybe this thing isn’t going to sound the best or be the most convenient, but I like it when things are impractical. To be honest, I think that it makes for something more interesting.
Photo by Madeline Hug
You can stream Electric Bouquet on all platforms today, as well as order a vinyl or cassette copy of the album via Father/Daughter Records.
Chicago’s own Kristyn Chapman, performing under her new project name Morpho, has shared her latest single “Half of Two” today, marking the second single released from her upcoming debut EP, Morpho Season, out November 15 via Hit the North Records. As an expansive guitar player, having played across Chicago’s beloved underground scene for some time now, Chapman melds ferocious grit with alluring delicacy as “Half of Two” expands on natural endings and the fear within the uncertainty that can follow.
Partnering up with Henry Stoehr of Slow Pulp to mix the EP, “Half of Two” sets out with a determined drive, waiting with astonishing patience to explode, as little glimpses of feedback manage to escape throughout Chapman’s steady melody. Written back in 2021, “this song’s about finally making peace with endings,” she explains. “Untangling from the past and old stories.” The song soon breaks from its enduring groove into a vivacious guitar solo, swarming amongst crushing distortion, toned feedback and melodic temptations, finding its own ending as Chapman sings, “It’s beyond mending / Can’t undo the unraveling / Beyond mending / Can’t undo the unravel,” settling within the layers of her gentle vocals.
Listen to “Half of Two” here along with an accompanying lyric video.
Morpho Season is set to be released November 15 via Hit the North Records. Morpho will also be embarking on an East Coast and Midwest tour with fellow Chicago group, Rat Tally. They will be celebrating the EP’s release with a show at Schubas in Chicago, IL on December 12 with support from Rat Tally and Sprite. You can buy tickets here.
Written by Shea Roney | Featured photo by Leah Wendzinski
Last week, Lindsey Verrill (Little Mazarn) and Genevieve Poist (Virginia Creeper) banded together to share ATX x AVL with Love, a 26-song compilation album of local Texas artists benefitting Hurricane Helene victims in western North Carolina. The funds raised by this comp between 10/11-10/31 will all be donated to ROAR Western North Carolina. You can purchase the comp here at the Little Mazarn bandcamp page.
The comp, made up entirely of local Texas artists, includes contributions from A.L. West, Proun, Will Johnson, Other Vessels, Joey Reyes, Crushrose, Creekbed Carter, Virginia Creeper, Middle Sattre, Gilded Lows, Felt Out, Little Mazarn, Bill Baird and Large Brush Collective.
It’s collaborators, Verrill and Poist, shared in a statement, “watching helplessly as the news of Hurricane Helene tearing its way through the heart of Western North Carolina reached us here in Austin, Texas, we banded together with some of our favorite local musicians to create a collection of songs to help raise funds for mutual aid efforts in WNC. It is difficult to know how to tangibly help in moments like these, especially when need and attention is called for in so many directions, but we hope this compilation will help contribute to North Carolina’s rebuilding efforts in even the smallest of ways, further Central Texas’ solidarity with those affected by the hurricane, and share some of our favorite music with you as you go about your days.”
In a telling glimpse of both devastation and redefined beauty, Toronto-based artist ZINNIA, the pen name of Rachael Cardiello, shares “Always A Romantic”, the next single from her upcoming album, Dollar Store Disco, set to be released February 7, 2025. Described as a divorce rager, Cardiello searches for self-preservation and joy throughout the record, as “Always A Romantic” echoes within the hollow feelings of solitude and the comfort lead by newfound clarity.
Like the weight of heavy eyelids, “Always A Romantic” drifts into a soothing moment of stillness, blurring out the world as an absorbing piano fluctuates with intensity, animating only what we can feel around us. Although the instrument is isolated in this rather spacious track, the singular voice that it leads becomes the benchmark for retainment and release as Cardiello’s powerful vocal range explores the room. “I really thought I was a romantic / I really thought you were worth it,” she sings, reflecting on a once fulfilling relationship now broken and fading with a tender and soaring performance.
About the song, Cardiello shares, “‘Always A Romantic’ arrived years after the wreckage of my divorce from the quiet of a hard-fought-for stability. There is a stickiness in letting a new truth settle into your body when you believe another story to be true. There is an almost physical whiplash of coming to terms with, and integrating that change.”
“Always A Romantic” is accompanied by a music video, both filmed by and starring Oriah Wiersma. In a decaying house, flashing hints of a once connected appearance, what is left becomes a search for the stories now lost, only to live within the people that once called it home. “When Oriah and I talked through possible movement for this piece, I kept returning to the way Ginger Rogers used to bend back in Fred Astaire’s arms when they danced. How she was so terrifyingly open and malleable amidst the dips and twirls,” Cardiello shares about the video.
Watch the music video for “Always A Romantic” premiering here on the ugly hug.
Dollar Store Disco is set to be released February 7, 2025 via the Montana tape label Anything Bagel. Preorders of the record will be available this Friday, October 11.
Fronted by Diego Clare, a local spearhead to the New York community and a project of influence and vision, their penname D.A. Crimson has shared a new single called “Barrel to Heaven” this week, along with an accompanying music video. Within a controlled burn of sonic dismemberment, Clare’s performance withers and writhes in the face of loss and the complexity of familial altercations when emotions and memories begin to conflict.
Leaping in strides like a choreographed dance, “Barrel to Heaven” begins with a guitar that quickly establishes the thematic weight, further brought to life by an array of sonic voicings and deliberate timbres – dilapidated yet concise; harsh yet sobering when face-to-face with its grand scheme. “When I wrote it, my grandmother had just passed away after I’d spent a month staying with her and my dad at her house in Costa Rica. There was a lot of familial drama between her kids throughout this process, which I just found really upsetting,” Clare shares about the song. As the chorus follows the movement below, singular harmonics flash out at the end of each repeated stanza, “There’s a way out” – reverberating before screeching in exasperation – “Looking down the barrel to heaven”. “I felt especially attached to her home, my memory of which now feels sort of embedded in this song. In any case, those are the things that came through, or morphed into this kind of Hamlet-ass soliloquy about loss and what remains in the wake of it,” Clare finishes.
Along with the release of “Barrel to Heaven”, D.A. Crimson has shared an accompanying music video made by the creative duo known professionally as “The Valdez”, which features both Clare and movement by choreographer, J Gash. You can listen to “Barrel to Heaven” out everywhere now.
While history has proven that amity amongst band members is not necessary to create good music, it’s always special when the depths of a bands’ friendship is palpable in their work. Years of experience playing in bands like Sloppy Jane and Water From Your Eyes speaks to the technical talent of Al Nardo and Bailey Wollowitz, but it’s ultimately this sense of camaraderie that makes their prog-rock band, fantasy of a broken heart, so compelling. The duo’s collaborative friendship dates back to 2017, though up until now, fantasy of a broken heart was confined to a relatively low profile of house shows and occasional single releases. The time spent cultivating fantasy’s identity, or perhaps lack thereof, is discernible in their debut album, Feats of Engineering, a captivating experience doused in honest introspection and eccentric charm.
While fantasy of a broken heart claims that “only isolated artists make original material”, Feats of Engineering is a harmonious dialogue sung in a language that feels completely their own. Lyrically, Nardo and Wollowitz are masters at fusing vulnerable with whimsy. It would be easy to assume an album with imagery of Tony Danza preparing buttermilk pancakes and a possessed Evil Kenevil wielding an “as seen on TV magicians novelty arrow” would amount to a goofy but hollow listen, perhaps engaging in a bit of post-irony ridden social commentary at best. Instead, fantasy’s amusing tangents and bizzare imagery work to enhance the project’s emotional depth. In its entirety, Feats of Engineering is somewhat of an auditory hallucinogen, inviting us deep into an unrefined subconscious reality where the strangest of thoughts are met with rather hard to swallow existential notions. Instead of coming across as a joke you aren’t in on, the album’s vulnerability factor feels somehow amplified by each lyrical peculiarity.
In an auditory sense, fantasy is a maximalist quilt of 70’s prog-rock, 90’s dream-pop, and modern indie-pop, though if you tried to create a list of every subgenre their sound touches it would rival a CVS receipt. Each song on the album has a distinct identity, with its own unique formula of layered instrumentals and varied time signatures. However, amidst their most enigmatic structures, Feats of Engineering successfully stands as a holistic body of work, unified by a discernible sonic ethos and enriched by the soothing harmonies of two voices with an undeniable musical rapport.
The album commences with the trance-inducing “Fresh”, a minute long track that starts off with a steady high pitch car beep, the one reminding you to buckle up or perhaps shut your door. Though the beep is initially attention-seizing, it is soon lost in a mesmerizing synthetic organ melody, and in a brief, word-less 60 seconds, the magnetizing pull of Feats of Engineering has begun. The vibrant “AFV” follows, providing an auditory finger snap to the meditative state induced by the intro song. At its core, “AFV” is a humorous tale of a romantic interaction gone wrong, a palm to the face detailing of a flirting effort mistaken as an attempt to buy weed. The earnest anecdote is paired with an uneasy chorus, as the two harmonize on the repeating lines of “All I wanted was a little sensation”, and “I thought a devil called my name”. Through satisfying hooks and a lavish layering of instrumentals, fantasy of a broken heart harvests structures of an addicting pop track, while balancing a lighthearted story with a desperate longing to feel.
It doesn’t take long to establish that fantasy of a broken heart has perfected the art of writing tearjerkers that pass as chic remixes of vintage television jingles. Loss is the archetype for this, offering a vulnerable testimony to the umbrella concept of “loss”, supplemented by buoyant guitar riffs and animated vocals. The track is burdened by the weighing question of “have you lost it”, but not without the comedic relief of “Where did you put the sword”. “Loss” is not the only song on Feats of Engineering where fantasy sugar coats dreary ideas in bubbly melodies adorned with quirky references. At a recent Brooklyn show, Wollowitz led with “this song is about Pizza”, before diving into “Doughland”, where the duo’s craving for inner peace becomes increasingly harrowing with every “I can’t stand this” they chant. In “Mega”, the toll of an ambiguous relationship dynamic takes the shape of a catchy tune about an extinct giant shark. The title track might hold the most intense juxtaposition of heavy and eccentric, with imagery of tiny men and their adorable miniature safety gear following shortly after a painful reflection of “thoughts of jumping off a broken bridge in Middletown”.
The compelling effect of Nardo and Wollowitz’s harmonies excels in “Ur Heart Stops”, a sonically melodramatic track about the tethers of depression and stagnation. When Wollowitz’s droning is met with Nardo’s shimmery vocals over a series of jolty instrumentals, the repetitive chorus of “Ur Heart Stops” becomes hypnotic, transforming a devastating existential dialogue into a catchy prog-pop masterpiece.
“Tapdance 1” and “Tapdance 2” are back to back tracks that take contrary approaches to exploring the crushings of doubt. In “Tapdance 1”, the lyrics rarely stray from “Nobody knows what you’re talking about”. In “Tapdance 2”, Wollowitz embarks on a tangent of reflective commentary and what ifs, confessing to a habit of overindulging in Pitchfork reviews and dwelling on a “surplus of vision”. In the midst of an excess of thoughts and questions, fantasy of a broken heart gets honest about the blurring between art and interpersonal, while once again toying with the idea that “nobody knows what you’re talking about”.
The album wraps up with “Catharsis”, an appropriately titled delicate ballad that matures into an impassioned crescendo of realization. Around four and a half minutes in, Wollowitz’ soothing vocals erupt into an emotionally charged shout, and the lyrics shift from guarded thoughts of “it means so much to me that it happened at all”, to fervent revelations of “Love is collision, destroying your soul for another”. The two offer one final harmony, repeating “catharsis of the heart is the narcissist’s nightmare” over a pulse-raising arrangement of drums and fierce orchestration. While the album hurdles through a docket of unresolved questions and heavy notions, the intensity of “Catharsis” offers closure to a lyrically and sonically consuming experience, solidifying that Feats of Engineering is not only a collection of quality songs, but an extremely well structured album.
Like many of their fellow Brooklyn-based genre-bending contemporaries, fantasy of a broken heart isn’t here to resuscitate a subculture from decades prior. At the same time, it is abundantly clear the duo has spent ample time listening and deconstructing the most successful structures and sounds, creating arrangements that are equal parts pragmatic and avant garde. Through every nonsensical twist and earnest turn, Feats of Engineering engages in sonic nostalgia while paving a completely original identity, verifying that fantasy of a broken heart is a major band to watch.
You can listen to Feats of Engineering out everywhere now.
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