I have a tendency to fall into anecdotal rambling when I try to write about a project I find especially moving. This achilles heal is most inflamed when a song makes me cry – which does not happen super often – but when it does, I have to fight the urge to cite my own tears. It’s usually a desperate attempt to articulate the gravity of a track without turning to some dry technical dissection, but it doesn’t matter. No one gives a shit about the time I cried at my roommate’s roller blading competition, seated in a patch of grass above the park with Shallowater’s There is a Well in my ratty noise-cancelling headphones. So I will not tell you about it.
What I will say is that Houston based Shallowater is not doing anything new. At least not in a way I can cite on paper. Their soundscapes are familiar and rather organic, and I could write a laundry list of band comparisons ranging from emo and posthardcore to alt-country and slowcore, and they would all be valid. I suppose that is the real root of this apprehensive music journalism crisis I have so generously decided to include in this single review – the chasm between the abstractly unprecedented feel of a band and a reality that they are not technically doing anything unheard of. But perhaps that is the foundation for the most touching projects; an ability to pull from motifs seen countless times before and churn it into something that stops you in your tracks.
Today, Shallowater shared “Sadie”, the second single off their forthcoming record, God is Going to Give You a Million Dollars. The track starts on a gentle note, finding its footing in drawn out enunciations and a cautious rhythm section. As vocals grow in urgency, the soundscapes inflate into an eventual riff –lathered with mucky distortion, indulgent percussion, and a suffocating amount of poignancy. In the span of seven and a half minutes, Shallowater pursues this sort of escalation more than once, leaving you unsure of which buildup is the buildup. Perhaps the answer is neither? Perhaps the mud-slides of twangy sludge are less a destination than they are a means of amplifying slivers of delicacy and desperation between them. In the case of “Sadie”, soft vocals tend to cut deepest when they follow moments of sweeping cacophony. It’s enough to subdue even the sturdiest of poker faces.
You can listen to “Sadie” everywhere now, and pre-order God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars on Bandcamp.
Sometimes the most harrowing heart break tracks are not necessarily the most immediate. Rather, they draw from a wound that is neither fresh nor healed, loitering in a state of emotional limerence and nourished more by romanticized illusion than reality. Think Yo La Tengo’s “My Heart’s Not In It” or “Antenna” by Sonic Youth. What makes these narratives so brutal lies in their inward nature – when dust settles and time dulls at the ration behind a relationship’s dissolution, there is space from a “what if” shaped hole begging to be filled with one’s own yearning. Or, in the case of bloodsports, patched up with a surge of jagged percussion. Out today, “Rosary” nods to the wistful sensitivity that lies beneath an enamel of exasperated song structures and tough sounding band name, as bloodsports paves a robust buildup sure to knock out even the worst case of self-inflicted longing.
“Rosary” comes as the lead single for bloodsports’ debut record, Anything Can Be A Hammer, announced today as well. The track builds on feats found in bloodsports’ existing discography – the melodic tensions that grip their self titled EP, the pensive lyricism bottled in 2024 single “canary”, the potency of their live sets. It also veers into new textures, leaning into a sharper sound and hinting to the dynamism we can anticipate on their debut.
I noted the nature of their sets, but for those who have yet to experience bloodsports live, I will emphasize that the four piece is well versed on the impact of oscillation. They have a knack for suspense through contoured structures, assertive drumming, and compelling buildups. The latter serves as the foundation for “Rosary”, which leads with tender vocal harmonies over bare chord progressions and ends on a blazing riff. The track’s gentle onset is armed with unease, inciting tension as you wait for an impending sonic inflation.
About the single, Sam shares, “This song was written about a relationship that I ended, and reminiscing about the feelings months after the fact. Lyrically, it’s a very bittersweet song. It looks back positively on the time that was spent but there’s also a layer of regret about the things that never quite came to fruition. It’s strange to sing live now because the relationship that it’s referencing has since been rekindled but I can still connect to those feelings from back then.”
Anything Can Be A Hammer is set to come out October 17th via Good English Records. It marks the first release for Good English, a New York and Nashville based label dedicated to creative freedom and a DIY ethos.
You can pre-order Anything Can Be A Hammer on Bandcamp.
In Kim Gordon’s memoir, there is an excerpt from a 1988 tour diary that ends with the sentiment: “I like being in a weak position and making it strong.” It serves as a sort of conclusion to an unraveling reflection on gender and performance, on her relationship to playing bass and her own femininity, on wondering how she’s perceived next to dozens of boys with guitars she deems “ordinary as possible.”
The statement itself is simple, but I think it encapsulates exactly what makes Gordon one of the greatest female musicians in the sphere of experimental noise rock. I don’t mean that in a good-for-a-girl kind of way; rather, she is good because she’s a girl, because of the sharpness within her dissonant sound, the hunger within her seemingly wandering melodies, the harrowing authenticity wound into her abrasion. A perfected scream vocal is nothing without nuance, and the most compelling noise artists wield a caustic sound for subversion, not mere shock value. Among the contemporary artists cultivating dimension within auditory hostility is Flooding, and the Kansas-based project’s latest EP is a testament to their propensity for making weak positions strong. Out last week, object 1 is a sonically full display of satire, blistering yet astute song structures, and cunning juxtaposition.
Rose Brown, Cole Billings, and Zach Cunningham started Flooding in 2020, releasing their self-titled record the following year. While it leaned into a melancholic, slow-core feel, their debut also hinted at a darker and more intense sound – one Flooding would fully sink their teeth into on their 2023 release, Silhouette Machine. The latter revealed how compelling Flooding can be if they refrain from diluting their art for the sake of likability. “The first one was before I really knew how to write music; it was one of the first things I’d ever written, so I approached it in a way of ‘how do I make this what I want to hear,’ but I also still felt kind of pressured to make it palatable for people listening,” Rose tells me of Flooding’s early years.
While it’s true that Flooding’s more recent releases have veered in a creative direction often deemed “challenging,” there’s a slight contradiction in her statement – one that prods at longstanding discourse on music and palatability. The success Flooding has found by embracing a harsher identity speaks to the fact that Rose is not alone in the sounds she craves. Acknowledging the disconnect between that and the music she felt pressured to make for the sake of a general listener begs the question: why do these notions still pervade the industry so aggressively?
What makes art palatable? Is it comfort, something that can appease a wide demographic of perspectives? But what about successful media that isn’t “comfortable”. What about the prominence of violence in the film industry. Is violence palatable? What about sex, is sex palatable? An intro to marketing class will tell you it sells. But can it sell authentically? What happens when it’s not strategically packaged? When it’s honest, when it’s explosive, when it doesn’t prioritize comfort?
My biggest issue with the “palatability” conversation is how little faith it places in the general listener. Perhaps that’s an idyllic stance, but as I listen to Flooding, I have a hard time imagining a reality in which you do not take something from the experience; the hair-raising percussion, the catharsis of Rose’s vocal volatility, the eerie beauty of the chord progressions. Is it challenging? Perhaps. But why is that a bad thing?
When I asked Rose about performing such brash songs live, she explained it had been challenging at first, “I was just so nervous and shy, I wasn’t screaming back then. I was just trying to sing and I could barely do that then. Preforming is my favorite part of music because I like how it can evolve the songs and evolve you as a person too.” Flooding’s appetite for discomfort has been as a catalyst for their own growth, and their latest release encourages you to do the same. You can listen to object 1 anywhere now.
We recently chatted with Rose to discuss music inspirations, shame, and Flooding’s new EP, object 1.
This album has been edited for length and clarity.
Manon: I wanted to ask about the length of object 1—at 17 minutes, it’s a lot shorter than Silhouette Machine. I think something that makes your music so powerful is your contrast between delicate and abrasive. On your last album, you had a lot of time to really manipulate and explore those extremes. Was this project always meant to be an EP, and how did you approach creating a more condensed body of work?
Rose: The process was a lot different from our first two albums. The first one was before I really knew how to write music; it was one of the first things I’d ever written, so I approached it in a way of “how do I make this what I want to hear,” but I also still felt kind of pressured to make it palatable for people listening. For the second album, I really wanted to challenge myself with different ways of approaching writing music. I’ve always been an album person, I really like listening to albums, and that’s what I want to produce. This EP is a lot different. It’s very ironic and sarcastic, and I’m approaching a lot of subjects from different people’s points of view, so it felt right to make it a more condensed work. It felt so different from what we’d been doing that I kind of wanted it to be an endcap or a starting-off point for future things.
Manon: I read that the name Flooding comes from an intense, “face your fears all at once” style of exposure therapy. What sorts of fears or general notions were you hoping to contend with on this EP?
Rose: I’m talking about shame a lot, and I’m talking about shame from other people’s perspectives, because I think it’s pretty hard to explore if you’re just talking about your own shame. I feel like for me, the themes kind of come together and make sense after I’ve recorded everything and it’s ready to go.
Manon: I’m curious about the notion of fragility in “your silence is my favorite song.” I feel like your use of repetition there creates such an interesting skewing of the word fragile, it feels as if “I’m fragile” is a warning, especially in the context of your volatile song structures. What does fragility mean to you, and why did you choose to emphasize it in that song?
Rose: I think it can mean a lot of different things. When people think of femininity, they think of “fragile” in the way a flower is delicate. But there’s also the fragility of a bomb that could explode. The EP has a lot of contradictory elements, and I think that’s a very interesting juxtaposition.
Manon: You mentioned that for the first album, you were still learning how to write songs and were trying to create something more palatable. Since then, you’ve moved toward making what you want to hear. What are some influences that have shaped your recent releases—and yourself as a songwriter in general?
Rose: Thinking about our first album, I hadn’t really delved super deep into slowcore yet. People started referring to us as “slowcore” and I was like, oh shit, yeah, we are. So then I started listening to that. I also got really into screamo and hardcore because Kansas City has a huge hardcore scene, that’s just what’s around us. That definitely influenced our second album a lot. Recently, I’ve been really into pop music and jazz, so I tried to find a way to combine those elements with something that’s still kind of aggressive and noisy.
Manon: Then “object 1,” the track, has no lyrics. Since your vocals are such a powerful instrument in Flooding, how was your experience writing a song without them?
Rose: That’s maybe the only song we have without my vocals on it, besides like one interlude track. It’s also the only song we’ve ever all written together, me, Cole, and Zach. It felt a lot different to me. I approached playing guitar in a different way, where it wasn’t the main structural element. It felt weird to try to put vocals on it, and I couldn’t figure out what to do, nothing felt natural.
Manon: I feel like when you have a more experimental and noise-heavy sound, it often gets clumped into this category of “cathartic music.” Would you consider playing Flooding live to be cathartic?
Rose: For sure. It’s definitely an emotional experience for me.
Manon: Is it always? Or are there times when something you’ve written doesn’t resonate anymore?
Rose: Honestly, we don’t even play the songs we don’t want to, we have enough of a catalog now to just play what we want. It’s definitely different playing the new EP because it’s not as extremely personal as a lot of our past music has been, but it’s still cathartic, just in a different way. You get to act out the perspective of being a pop star, or just some arrogant guy who doesn’t give a shit.
Written by Manon Bushong | Photo by Fabian Rosales
The discography of People I Love boasts potential for an excellent horror movie score. Not so necessarily a grotesque blockbuster (though I would love to hear “Holyness” in Smile 2), perhaps more of an emotionally abstract, artsy thriller. The kind of film where the real “horror” is not derived from cheesy SFX or supernatural antagonists that cease to exist when the credits roll, and instead through the realistic, human characters it features. His latest single might present like the latter (though I suppose that hinges on whether you believe in witchcraft), though underneath halloween emblems and mildly sinister cover art is a track that fits perfectly into his raw and sensible discography. Out today, “The Witch” toes between warmth and melancholy as it begs the question of what is more terrifying; the fact that someone hurt you, or the fact that you let them.
Brooklyn based Dan Poppa has been releasing music under People I Love since 2019. He usually keeps his canvases minimal, eliciting tension through wilting chord progressions and airy layers of organic and eerie synthetic sound. There is a heaviness amidst his sparsest arrangements, armed with sneakily contagious melodies and introspections that scrape deeper upon each listen.
At first, “The Witch” appears less fragile than People I Love’s 2024 releases. There is a volatile feel to Poppa’s vocals, which often assume a more tender and withering shape. It also builds up fairly quickly, as the early reserved guitar and thin percussion bleed into a fuller sonic atmosphere just after the one minute mark. The motifs from the beginning of the song return, offering an unsettling intermission between charged pleas of “are you a friend or you just a witch” and chipping away at a facade paved by animated melodies and moments of upbeat tempo. Though the tone of “The Witch” is murky, bending between skepticism and clarity, the track’s catchy nature is irrefutable. You can listen below.
“We were really heavy for a minute there. For Dizzy Spell and that era we were so hyper-focused on what we can get out of our amps and our pedals, just the sonic width we wanted live and the thickness we wanted”, Isaac Kauffman explains of Abel’s 2024 record, Dizzy Spell.
The Columbus based band released Dizzy Spell just shy of a year ago, a record armed with an arsenal anxious intensity carved with heavy guitar and hazy feedback. There is an immediacy to the listen, as Abel wastes no time reaching a heightened emotional state as they shred through ridiculously catchy pop structures and pedal suffocation. It is an intense album in an all consuming way, thought drowning sort of way. The lyrics are poignant and often heart wrenching, but they are approached in a manner that feels distant, as the album succumbs to a sea of shoegaze-fueled dissocoation. On Dizzy Spell, noise is a lifevest. On How to Get Away with Nothing, Abel leaves this cushion behind, exploring new ways to manipulate their soundscapes as they prod at what can be found, and more importantly, felt, when they slow down.
Released last week via Pleasure Tapes, Julia’s War and Candlepin, How to Get Away with Nothing marks Abels shift towards a slowcore leaning sound. The stylistic decision stemmed organically, pulling from a chapter the band was in whilst they made it. “My bandmates go through phases, and I think it makes the most sense to take those moments and run with them”, Isaac tells me. “It really lends itself to emotional music when you take things as just a section of your life”.
The authenticity that comes with this philosophy can be felt through Abel’s discography. While How to Get Away with Nothing leans away from the density and shoegaze feel of Dizzy Spell, it also attests to the strength of the project’s identity, and their ability to experiment with genre without alienating the feel of Abel. Their “phases” do not come at a cost to the band’s ability to extract beauty from a raw and gritty sound, a consistent pillar in their releases.
How to Get Away with Nothing boasts a sound that is expansive, challenging and profoundly textured. It leaves space for near silence. It toys with manipulations of pitch and speed. It flirts with the thickness of Dizzy Spell. It experiments with a hyperpop feel. All of this could be a recipe for auditory whiplash, but How to Get Away with Nothing is grounded by the deliberate and balanced nature of its structure. Abel maintains an equilibrium while exploring various means to express melancholy, as well as a range of vocal approaches. Volatile deliveries scrape away at minimal guitar arrangements on “Dusk”, while on “Parasympathetic” earnest and gentle vocals exist in the shadows of a track guided by imposing percussion.
The record commences with warm and earthy lo-fi track “Grass”, which features twangy contributions from fellow Ohio-based project Cornfed. As implied by the title, it’s a song about grass, though the abundant plant is viewed as a concept rather than a reality, as Abel admits to a laundry list of fear that comes with walking barefoot in the grass. Fear as a barrier is carefully weaved into both Dizzy Spell and How to Get Away with Nothing, though the notion finds itself more crushing on the latter release. As they adhere to a slowcore style, drawn out moments of instrumental minimalism carve space for ideas to be questioned, and for emotional paralysis to be expressed through achy chord progressions.
“I think taking that into slowcore and slower songs lended itself to offer more of a minor space for lyrics”, Isaac reflects. “Although the lyrics still take up emotional width, I think we wanted to focus on keeping those tones and atmospheres that we created in a slower sense, and that lended to the emotional guitar parts having to be pushed. I feel like we’ve always had this kind of disconnected vibe to our songs, and I think that leaves our own playing styles and emotions on the table while also keeping the atmosphere thick”
The most devastating tracks on the record are followed by songs that toy with elements of hyperpop, and although they still tackle heart-break and dwindling self assurance, the blow is softened by their twinkly, bedroom-dance-party shape. Isaac tells me though he usually does all of the production and engineering for Abel, for How to Get Away with Nothing, the band collaborated with Quinn Mulvihill from Glaring Orchid, offering him extra time and capacity to experiment.
“I think that with the extra mixing help, I felt like I had more space and time to put some weird mixing energy into a few songs, and I wanted to do that just to break up the album in a way that felt different than using interludes or something like that”, he explains. “I think my melodies always come out in a pop way, and I think putting that over slowcore stuff is really good a lot of the time, but there are certain melodies where you’re like, how will this work over an emotional, drawn out guitar riff? It was almost just the easy way out to make something more poppy and more straightforward.”
The humbly deemed “easy way out” elevates Abel’s already textured sound, as well as the How to Get Away With Nothing’s intricacy as a whole. The hyperpop motifs and eccentric sonic manipulations contort themselves into moments that feels mechanical or almost alien-like, offering a complex juxtaposition to the album’s organic bones and painfully human lyricism. “I think there’s always been this production heavy side of Abel simply because I’m still teaching myself how to do certain things and I need to try it before I feel comfortable. So I think those hyperpop songs are just a testament to handling my growth,” Isaac says.
While it stands as proof to their skills as songwriters and range as musicians, above all How to Get Away with Nothing attests to Abel’s exceptional ability to harvest a poignancy in all that they create. You can listen to it everywhere now.
“Climb the ladder in the cage,” Simeon Beardsley leads in the opening track of Pry’s debut record, Wrapped in Plastic. Gently packaged in a soft wall of synthy sound, the line is the first of several zoo innuendos the record maneuvers in its exploration of self-sanctioned confinements and external surveillance. These metaphors exist alongside other forms of stifling visual imagery, ranging from intrusive ghosts to grotesque feelings of frozen, refrigerated meat. Conceptually, it’s a suffocating story; though I write that under the assumption you are reading the lyrics to Wrapped in Plastic in silence. If you have caught any of the singles Pry has trickled out thus far, then you would know there is nothing suffocating about the soundscapes they pave. Or maybe there is, but it’s a different kind of suffocation. A pop-driven spattering of sound. Fervent spats of drumming and potent guitar riffs. A hotboxing of synthesizer. Moments of almost silence that exist just as loudly as their maximalist counterparts. Out tomorrow, Wrapped in Plastic finds power in its nuance, shying from insulated timelines and distinct personal details as Pry yields a malleable listen of juxtaposition, sonic dexterity and disruptive wit.
When I met Pry members Amara Bush and Simeon Beardsley – at a coffee shop that happened to share a name with a track off Wrapped in Plastic – they were both a bit tired. Amara from a night at Knockdown Center and Simeon from a day spent estate sale shopping, which concluded with the hauling of a pull-out couch up into a fourth floor walk up apartment. In the face of depleted energy and minimal sleep, the duo’s ability to elaborate on the history of Pry and their trust-driven creative relationship remained unscathed. Between sips of iced coffee, they told me about past variations of the project, sonic shifts and being briefly pigeonholed as a “New York Shoegaze Band” (they are not opposed to this label…it just does not align with their own perceptions of Pry).
“This was my first time ever playing music with anyone. Simeon was just so open and welcoming, and we decided that in whatever context, we should continue creating stuff together”, Amara reflects on the start of their friendship; which began a typical New York tale of haphazard mutual friend introduction, catalyzed through the act of an Instagram story slide up. Shortly after, the two began meeting in the back room of a coffee shop Simeon managed at the time, writing songs, programming drum tracks and dissolving Amara’s apprehensions to creating music collaboratively.
The record is composed of nine tracks, some predating Pry, some written early on in the project, and some that came together towards the end of the album’s recording process. On Wrapped in Plastic, these songs find their most confident and full iterations yet. “It was a very unique recording process for me, I feel like it was the most I have collaborated with the producer”, Simeon notes of working with Ian Rose. “I was so nervous before, I was like ‘I’m going to have to sing these takes over and over again, this is going to be so embarrassing.’ Ian was so encouraging and really helped me break out of my shell,” Amara adds.
Though I noted that the record represents these song’s strongest iterations yet, like many aspects of Pry this verdict is hardly crystallized. In fact, it’s likely subject to change later this week, when the band occupies the late slot at Nightclub 101 on May 31st for their album release show. “I think I will be screaming more. I think before when we were playing shows I wanted to sound like the recording, but now I just want to have fun up there. It’s been really sweet to have Simeon and our drummer, Dave, really encouraging me to push myself. I would only do that in a space where I feel really safe,” Amara tells me. “If something feels boring, we can just change it,” Simeon adds. “That has been really exciting because we want the live performance to feel fun, and maybe we do something we haven’t done in rehearsal. It’s nice to have total freedom and be in the moment and just trust that we have each other’s backs.”
The malleability of their live sets, and the perpetual growth of these tracks represents the ways in which Pry is a space where Amara and Simeon can nudge at previously defined ‘comfort zones’, paralleling ideas of self-inflicted cages that Wrapped in Plastic works to contend. As swelling sonic atmospheres and charged vocals dig the duo’s own personal ruminations into sugary pop hooks, Pry patches gaps between their own multiplicities, or at least creates a space where various sides of themselves can coexist. For Amara, who tells me she never considered herself a singer in the past, this has also meant experimenting with a range of vocal approaches. Her deliveries stretch from tender in tracks like “Greener”, to the hostile feel the duo embraces in “Tether You”.
“I played ‘Tether You’ for the girl I nanny for, and she was like, ‘That’s not you! You sound weird,” Amara says.
Pry probes heavily into this idea of multiplicity on “World Stopped Spinning”, a track where the duo follow an intense guitar solo with a heated dialogue relying only on the word golden. “I don’t know how it’s perceived by people who don’t know me, but I’m a pretty sarcastic person, and I think we want the way we’re singing ‘golden’ to feel sarcastic,” Simeon explains. “I think the repetition makes you start questioning like, is it golden? That’s the hopeful intent. When you say something so much, does it start losing its meaning? I think that song is a hundred percent about that, and having a frame of reference for yourself that with time, you hear the same thing over and over to the point it may not have the same hook into you it once did. I feel like using repetition really makes you curious about what’s being said versus the substance of what’s being said.”
The skewing of a word through delivery is just one of the many ways Pry cleverly dismantles their own cages. It is not necessarily your sanity that they beg you to question, but perhaps the rigid outline of what you deem sanity to be. Or maybe they just want you to get out of your own head and have some synth-filled fun. You can find out tomorrow.
Innocents in Babylon doesn’t always work. Maybe it’s an extension of the fact that all of your reporter’s favorite musicians in the local New York City music scene right now just happen to be in their mid-twenties or mid-thirties (Renny Conti is such a Brooklyn-based musician). Either way, Conti’s self-titled is a refreshingly human record. It’s a well-timed, heat-seeking missile to the grown-up adolescent who’s just a few years past being able to relate to their favorite coming-of-age films anymore, and acutely aware of that distance/separation/isolation. For this cosmically stultified demographic, Renny Conti is solace.
Conti’s musky, different lyrics are delivered with intention and purpose, but not eagerness. Our singer brings a slightly chilly air to this record that keeps it cool instead of overly jejune. More akin to Pavement’s “Slanted and Enchanted” or, if things go poorly for all of us, Purple Mountains in fifteen years. Walk-with-you lyrics rip in on “South Star”: “It could’ve never been this way. I mean, it could’ve been this way, but it’s not.” Later, on “Room to Room,” Conti confides, “I feel your pain, I too want everything, wanting the world to stop, or just for life to change.”
On “I Find It Hard” (which might be the star track for your reporter), Conti brings a unique vocal delivery that doesn’t appear anywhere else on the album. Conti is singing differently here and it works. This New Voice is backed by an unconventional chorus, a few voices loosely strung together in a melancholic drone. Like if the Greek chorus in a Homeric drama repeated every line after Falstaff’s soliloquy, it’s surprising in a way that makes you smile, but it’s a bitter smile. The lyrics are bleaker and more honest on this track than any other on this dimensional, all-seasons record – self-conflicting like its just-past-ripened audience.
With Renny Conti, the artist rides the neo-wave of Neil Young worship, but not with such piety that it’s a faithful adaptation or in any way lacks originality. Not unlike MJ Lenderman, but tougher on the ears, toothy with dissonant key chords, especially on “Room to Room,” which ends in a broken mirror guitar solo that belongs on “Metal Machine Music.” Conti’s album is all about tension and release, but a release that doesn’t let you off the hook entirely. If “Manning Fireworks” found a place in your Best Albums of 2024 roundup, but you want it darker, Conti brings the flame.
This, as aforementioned, is a human record – not a perfect record – but that doesn’t stop it from being a masterpiece. The prickly-world-weary gauntlet has been thrown down and Renny Conti has answered. A rare and welcome reprieve from the fear panic white noise of Modern Life On Mars (a volume his track “Life on Earth” aptly points out). If you partake in general anesthetics or arylcyclohexylamine derivatives, put on “Life of Earth” and lie face-up on the rug (and thank us later).
This new voice on the indie scene is marked by a lived-in feel. Although not his musical debut, it feels fitting that this album is the artist’s self-titled. Still, “Andrew Plays” is arguably the most important song in this collection, and Conti’s voice isn’t on it at all. It’s an instrumental track less than two minutes long. If music has the power to move you – or, more accurately, if you’ve managed to stay un-soul-hardened enough that the power of music is still able to reach you in 2025 – to not give this one a listen is to cheat oneself. “Andrew Plays” is on-par with such powerful, wordless movers as Cobain’s “Letters to Frances” and Ed Harcourt’s “Like Sunday, Like Rain.”
Renny Conti is a mature evolution from the artist’s 2020 “Figurines.” Five years later, this is that record’s older brother, who went away and got cooler and a little wiser and tucked some more experience and technical mastery under his belt. Now, he’s back in town, and everyone at the dive’s tugging on their friend’s shirt sleeves in a whispered chorus of “Do you know that guy? Who’s that guy over there?” Lookin good. Renny Conti is detail-oriented down to the cryptic, evocative cover art, promising subtle magic and mood swings that can give you jet lag. Cloudy romanticism meets eyelash-searing realism. Happily, the album totally delivers on that promise. Expect to hear more of the name Renny Conti.
You can listen to Renny Conti out on all platforms now!
President TV of the United States, the project of Terese Corbin, shared with us her latest single “Greatest” late last week. Having artistic roots that cover both Tallahassee, Florida and Asheville, North Carolina, the single comes as a one-off following the release of “I Love You” featuring Jordan Tomasello, as Corbin begins to find comfort in blending new forms of sonic production with her tender lyrical prose.
With steady drums and warm piano runs, “Greatest” sets its own pace within the still environment from which it was made from. The subtleness becomes its strength, as a swell of synths sweep us up into the song’s passion-fueled movement and the melodic grip of the whispered vocals that flow with persistence yet lay low as if to bare caution as to who may be listening in the peripherals. But it’s in these hushed displays that hold the melody, making Corbin’s presence the tension point in the track as we lean in for every word that hangs on with poetic intuition and personal reverence, always playing with the idea of potential release.
We recently got to ask Corbin a few questions about her project President TV of the United States and the story behind “Greatest” in our latest track deep dive.
the ugly hug: What sort of things were you inspired by when writing “Greatest”?
Terese Corbin: Sonically, “Greatest” kind of came out of thin air while messing around with the ambient and piano instruments on a free sound pack I was recommended. In that way I can’t say that I directly set out to make a song like this, but I recognize I was unconsciously inspired by the arrangements and strange moods of bands like Chanel Beads, PJ Harvey, Model/Actriz, even a little bit of Geordie Greep. I’m also totally obsessed with the album Morning Light by Locust, particularly the song No One In the World. If you know that song (and if you don’t, do yourself a favor and listen!) you might feel like there’s some 1:1 references in the instrumentation between that song and “Greatest”. But like I said, not at all an intention of mine, but just a product of that being the music language I’ve surrounded myself with.
My writing and my art in general draws from a couple of usual places, but honestly, most of the time I become obsessive about moments I’ve experienced and phrases I hear that ring around my head for a long, long time before I understand why. This is definitely the case for “Greatest” —the lyrics and the whole drive of the song come from a moment I shared with someone who I loved very much and who I knew loved me too. In an intimate moment, this person told me, “I’ll be Jesus, and you’re Mary Magdalene…And I’ll be at your deathbed.” Like, you can be the judge, but I think that’s an insane thing to hear lol. Especially in the context of that relationship, but also in general–it held so much weight and poetry but was said so simply, so truly. The phrase had stuck with me for reasons I couldn’t articulate at the time, but recently had been repeating in my brain over and over. I went to write it down and what came out was the first lines of the song: “Who was it that said that I was Mary Magdalene, you were Jesus, and you’d be there to see me at my deathbed? I don’t know….” The bookend of being uncertain and questioning the source of this phrase came out of me while writing it down, and was not the phrase as I’d been thinking for so long, nor part of the original memory. But that told me that both poetically and personally I wasn’t sure how many times I had heard something like this, or been subject to this exact situation in different relationships–or, even deeper, if I was just as guilty for assigning myself that role in the relationship as Mr. Jesus was. Which is just my favorite thing ever, probably my biggest inspiration, that being the moments where the music or the lyrics show itself to you, and it then becomes your job to be curious about it and find a structure and meaning for it. It’s like therapy, or like tricking yourself into figuring out what you’re so obsessed about. I definitely don’t try to intellectualize it at the beginning and just let phrases come to me, and once I’ve gotten a good chunk of those phrases I sift the meaning out and piece them together with bridging ideas.
UH: What weight did these religious allegories in the story hold for you? Especially in the context of a complex, and rather, challenging relationship.
TC: The allegory of Jesus comes from that moment I mentioned, and the realization of how true that sentiment was, not only in the relationship I shared with that person but honestly in so many of my intense (and particularly romantic) relationships. The song is about what happens when you fall in love with someone that is the Jesus of their environment or their art—someone (often a man) who is revered, someone who exudes endless love and friendship and encouragement in a true way to their community and in their work. When they funnel this into romance, it seems full and true, they see you for who you are and often this has to do with a shared art. But because they’re Jesus, it’s tumultuous, complicated. You rely on their love, but their greatness might stand in the way of being able to pursue that, or their righteousness or their inability to actually believe that you, the Mary Magdalene in the relationship, can be as great as them — “when I try my hand you hold it, say you understand my depth, but it scares you when you hear all of the wanting on my breath.” But that wanting—for the same greatness they’re pursuing, your desire for them and their love—was fed to you earlier in the song when they laid you down and gave you their blood, desire, and encouragement, and saw you for who you were—“I don’t know, but please lay me down and bring wine to my top lip, I seem to drink your wanting and the sound that it came with.” Mary is the thing that gets left behind when Jesus has to go be pure and Jesus, and it leaves a whole mess of complication. Mary always comes back though, and Jesus always lets her back, because their connection is addicting. I think there isn’t really a bad guy in the situation, I mean Jesus had to be Jesus after all. It’s just the way life and love goes… but it doesn’t mean I’m not going to write a song about it!
UH: The landscape that you create with the instrumentals and whispered vocals bring out these moments of tension and release. Where did you push yourself when engaging with this fuller sound? Was there anything outside of your comfort zone you were drawn to?
TC: I love that you describe the instrumentals as “tension and release,” because I think that relates to so many aspects of this song—the relationship it describes, the feeling it’s based on, and my experience making the song itself. I wanted to lean into the idea that there is a part of the song that is sort of danceable, or at least fun to drive really fast to. I just wanted to see how many textures I could fit into it—the distorted strings add this drama and greatness, but there’s also this strange little synth rhythm in there at the end for humor. I didn’t feel out of my comfort zone exactly, but I was definitely trying to embrace having fun with the music, especially because the lyrics are so confessional and dramatic. My therapist always suggests that in times where you can’t see your way out of thinking patterns that you should laugh at yourself, be like, “Girl, you’re being ridiculous,” and literally laugh at yourself out loud. I definitely have been trying to do this with my art, and it’s very easy to do it in music since it’s such a hobby and therapy for me and I have no bigger expectations for it.
UH: Has your relationship with the way you record music changed as you begin to focus on more dense instrumentals and sounds?
TC: This is such a good question, one I hadn’t really considered directly. “Greatest” was the first track I’ve ever made completely within Logic with software instruments, sans the vocals of course, and I have to say, it was a lot of fun. The freedom you get with a fully produced track is insane. The amount of control you’re afforded and the quality of the sound is really delightful and not necessarily simpler but in my experience easier than recording acoustic instruments. There is a fullness to the sounds I can create on my computer that I can’t do at my novice level with real-life instruments. I’m still at the point where I’m either recording from my phone and manually syncing it to the tracks or borrowing an interface (from one of my best friends and fellow artist Jordan Tomasello ;3… in the few hours of the day they’re not using it lol). So when I am drawn toward these deeper and fuller sounds I am most likely reaching for something electronic, even if I am pairing it with an acoustic instrument. I really like that this choice built from necessity—to combine acoustic and electronic—becomes a language of my work and a seemingly creative choice. Like I sort of touched on earlier, I love the process of music that comes to me or has to arrive to fix a problem that ends up shaping the meaning and larger structure of what it is I’m making and trying to say, and I think this has come out in the way I record my music as well.
Alice Rezende wants you to enter Olivia’s World. Inside this world, you’ll find that almost anything goes, and you’ll also encounter multiple characters embodying traits of complete debauchery, where people react on their most primitive self-destructive instincts that come off as either crude or cringeworthy, but also fighting your damnest to retrieve your sense of self while battling the obstacles that life has to offer.
As a native Australian, Rezende is a part of the Dolewave music scene that is heavily popular down under. Dolewave can be best described as Australia’s response to jangle pop with more of an edgy twist with some tongue-in-cheek sarcasm thrown in for good measure. It’s a scene that birthed bands the likes of the Twerps, The Goon Sax, and Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever. Rezende’s rendition is part Dolewave, part romantic pop punk with a twinge of garage rock thrown in for good measure.
Rezende’s debut record Greedy & Gorgeous is a loosely based concept album about self-discovery. The themes are further illustrated as the record progresses on topics of self-care, inferiority, and authenticity. Rezende’s ingredients are put through a blender of angsty lyrics mixed with a bubblegum-sweet delivery that is engaging in a way that keeps getting better with every listen. I am reminded of another concept album TotallyCrushed Out! by That Dog, which is a mid-90s cult classic that is a supremely underrated collection of songs that is ever rarely mentioned.
The new supporting characters entering Oliva’s World are drummer Daan Steffens and lead guitarist Jordan Rodger who greatly contribute to the lively and crunchy sounds that live in Greedy & Gorgeous. They make themselves heard loud and clear on the punchy lead single “Sourgum” which flies out the gates at breakneck speed with pop punk-charged guitars that would have kept even Jason Statham’s adrenaline flowing at an all-time high in the film, Crank. Rezende’s sugary-sweet chorus matches the energy of the riffs to a tee, creating pure unadulterated entertainment.
“Empresario” is a song about an imaginary Brazilian band manager who’s not quite the best at his job; the manager should probably be headed to the unemployment line for their negligence. The song is fun as hell, with a groovy riff that I imagine Herman Monster doing the twist while wearing Bermuda shorts. The guitars have a proper 90s fuzz that gives the song a vintage sound. As the song comes to a close, Rezende has a conversation in Portuguese, and as a fellow speaker of the language, I felt like the Leonardo DiCaprio meme pointing at the television during the outro.
There are moments sprinkled throughout the album that remind me of another Dolewave superstar Tell Me How You Feel era Courtney Barnett. Most specifically on “Baby’s Bathwater” and “Chemlab,” with the former turned up with wailing, forceful guitars and the latter being a breezy, careful sonic experience. Both songs display a richly diverse, yet colorful array of sounds Rezende is capable of delivering. But also her quirky vocal style sticks out similarly to that of Barnett’s at her best.
“Healthy & wealthy” has a sonic influence that makes me think about what if The Breeders somehow got a hold of a Slanted & Enchanted Pavement era demo. The song has a fun-loving melodic chorus with a guitar sound that lies in the middle of the Venn diagram where slacker and garage rock merge. Rezende’s witty lyrics center on that adage of people preaching “just say no” and all will be cured, and is one to think about as she sings, “they say to level up don’t drink to get a buzz/all the while the morale is seriously low.”
The final two songs deal with internal and external social destruction. “Weird guy” is laden with noisy guitar riffs on the creepy male adults ruining the vibes of the surrounding women who just want to enjoy the simpler things in life. While “Beauty bar” is the slowed-down closer that vacillates between self-loathing and despair being around high-ranking people in the industry, singing “climbing to some lofty heights/giving off some awkward vibes/am I just a peasant here.”
After listening to Greedy & Gorgeous it’s easy tovisualize a scenariowhere your cool older sibling has just come back home from their freshman year away at college to nonchalantly bestow upon you an awe-inspiring album they found tucked away in a vintage record store. This is Alice Rezende’s world and we all are just living in it.
James Keegan, known under the moniker Kitchen, slowly comes to a quiet realization as he sings the haunting outro of his newest single “Real Estate Agent.” “There is no place of perfect connection, no light on the water sweeping the waves.” His voice, embedded with an aching sense of acceptance, reveals his gradual understanding that the pursuit of an idealized, perfect experience is futile. Through each line of the outro his hesitant sense of acceptance starts to wear down as he acknowledges the impermanence of seeking something that doesn’t truly exist.
A song that starts off with the image of a real estate agent’s headshot on a “for sale” sign and a fake ocean breeze blowing back her hair effortlessly turns into a reflection on indifference and apathy in the face of catastrophe as he challenges himself to sit with the uncomfortable feeling and see if it will force him to “stop sleeping.” After paralleling the disconnect between an image of the natural world disrupted by the commodification of space, Keegan cleverly comments on the way we jokingly process the decimation of our world, “calling disaster like sides of a quarter, unlucky enough to never get bored.”
“This isn’t a concept album but one of the main recurring concerns of the lyrics is the destruction of the natural world and climate change. There is a lot of nature imagery but it’s juxtaposed with imagery of the post-industrial human world,” Keegan says.
Over the past two months Keegan has been sporadically releasing singles on Bandcamp and YouTube leading up to the announcement of his newest album, Blue Heeler in Ugly Snowlight Grey on Gray on Gray on White. Keegan cited the simplicity and directness of Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush as an influence while also finding freedom in the loose and unpredictable nature of Pavement’s Wowee Zowee when pacing his longest record yet, a 20-song double record.
“I haven’t made something this long before and I always operated under the assumption that I would be better off cutting a larger project down to a more direct, more easily digestible scale. But most of these songs are not as emotionally direct as the songs on my past albums. There’s not really a simple emotional arc to these songs in the same way as the songs on Breath too Long.”
While Keegan’s newest material might lack a clear, concise storyline, and the themes feel less deliberate than his previous work, as the influences of each song jump from straightforward rock songs, to lengthy layered and droney pieces, each single desperately deals with the struggle of trying to hold onto what is left of our decaying world.
On “Bike Uphill” he sings helplessly, “I wanna be the one to live outside the world” creating an eerie almost apocalyptic feeling while contemplating a world in flux, where cities “melt away” and familiar spaces shift into surreal, dreamlike landscapes. Keegan reflects a sense of waiting, as though he is unsure whether he will be consumed by the unraveling of the world or find a way to belong within it. He imagines a world of isolation and loss, “is there a dream that i have not let pass through my hands” creating a sense of foreboding as the absence of certainty about our world and his place within it creates a dystopian feeling of being adrift in an unknown, shifting reality.
Keegan builds upon feelings he started to uncover and work through on his previous album, like on the lead single “Fall” where he sings “when the bombs go off, will I be with you.” There’s a cryptic sense of inevitability that led to the budding themes on these four new singles. Through very few words on “Ugly Snow in Ugly Moonlight” Keegan poignantly reflects on disillusionment, as if the purity and wonder of snow and moonlight have not only been tarnished by time and growing up but also tarnished by the post-industrial human world. There’s a feeling of longing for something that can’t be recaptured, a quiet surrender to the inevitability of change and the fading of youthful wonder and naivety.
The first single from the album “Sali” calls upon childish imagery by personifying the Finnish liquorice, Salmiakki, which is flavored with a type of salt that’s a byproduct of a chemical reaction according to Keegan. While it remains a spacious song, the use of textural layering and droning parts creates an overwhelming feeling that connects each of the singles.
“Before I could write songs I was even remotely happy with, I was making noise music and doing little recording experiments on audacity on the family computer and on a little digital four track I had, so making more abstract music is just part of what I do. I definitely think carefully about how ambient and drone pieces fit alongside the songs on things I make that are song oriented. In the case of the last album, Breath too Long, the ambient pieces served a structural purpose and helped to elaborate on the emotional content of the songs. The songs approached emotions in a semi-direct way and the ambient sections took them a little further into abstraction. I felt with this album that there was less of a straightforward arc than with past albums, so there wasn’t really a structural justification for ambient sections.”
Salmiakki’s unique taste might evoke a similar bittersweet nostalgia, where something initially foreign or uncomfortable becomes familiar, even a part of us. Something that may seem innocent and natural to us as children can later be revealed to be harmful and unhealthy. Keegan builds upon this feeling of escapability and a looming omnipresent fear of the future. The salty nature of Salmiakki serves as a metaphor for the bitterness that comes with growing up, where the world transforms from the innocent, carefree days of childhood into something more complex, painful, and ultimately decaying. The “salty swell” could symbolize the encroaching weight of reality, coming in waves — first subtle, then overwhelming.
“Writing lyrics that I’m happy with is hard. At the same time I try not to agonize over them. Usually the lyrics that I’m happiest with didn’t have a lot of conscious thought put into them. I’ll realize a couple weeks or months later what I was getting at. That’s sort of rare though. Mostly I try to be honest and to make sure the words sing. If the words technically work or are cool in writing but they don’t sing naturally I rewrite them. Really good lyrics feel like they arrived with the melody as a unified whole.”
Keegan has an unbelievable ability to craft stillness within his songs, a stillness that lingers even amidst the most driving rhythms. In “Real Estate Agent,” this is particularly evident as he delivers the plantitive second-to-last-line, “I learn how to live as my body decays.” Here he suggests that meaning and understanding are gleaned not in some perfect, transcendent moment but through accepting the slow process of decay and imperfection. It’s in this acceptance of time’s passage and the fragility of life that Keegan’s songs come alive in an almost meditative way.
As he repeatedly asks, “Do I know you?” on the outro, Keegan invites listeners into a reflective space, where the urgency of life slows down. Time seems to stop as his vulnerable voice hangs in the air, allowing listeners to pause and consider their own sense of connection and understanding. It’s this rare ability to create a sense of stillness, even amidst movement, that makes Keegan’s work so powerful. His vulnerability, paired with his ceaseless search for meaning and connection, creates an atmosphere where listeners can feel safe to take their time with their own reflection. Keegan’s music becomes a space in which time stops, and introspection takes precedence, offering a quiet sanctuary for those willing to sit with it.
“Overall the album ended up dwelling a lot on the feeling that I don’t know what to do about the horrible things that are happening in the world. I tried to put a few hopeful things in there but unfortunately it ended up kind of a bummer in some ways,” Keegan said. “One song on the album ‘Song for You’ was previously on a compilation by Bee Sides benefiting the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. I wrote the words intending for it to be a sort of hopeful song about trying to do good in the world rather than getting stuck in shame and guilt and fear and all that.”
Blue Heeler in Ugly Snowlight Grey on Gray on Gray on White will be self-released on April 4, 2025. Preorders of the album can be found on Kitchen’s bandcamp, including cassette tapes.
Written by Eilee Centeno | Featured Photo by Steven Coleman
the ugly hug 