Last month, Lafayette based three piece Kaleidoscope Crux released single “Galactic Door”, a gloomy swirl of rusty guitar, textured samples and fuzzed out yearning. It was the first single off of Through the Portal, their debut EP out late this summer via Julia’s War, Pleasure Tapes and Candlepin. If approval from a sludge-lovers holy trinity of DIY tape labels was not enough to lead you to their music already, Kaleidoscope Crux is back today with their second single, shredding through a state of emotional fatigue on “Guided Away”.
The tone of “Guided Away” is instantly set with corroded vocal harmonies burgeoned by walls of heavy grungy goodness as Max Binet proclaims “it takes everything I have to keep holding on, hanging by a thread”. Sonically, the track mimics a sort of breaking point; a state of overstimulation amplified by blistering guitar riffs, unbridled vocals and tense percussion. “Self medication creeps into a lot of my lyrics, and this song is no different”, Binet explains of the track. “It deals with waking up and realizing that you’ve made an ass out of yourself. I came up with the first few lines during a shift at a kitchen job in early 2024, after a night that ended in a particularly chaotic manner.”
You can follow Kaleidoscope Crux on Bandcamp and check out the music video for “Guided Away” below.
Today, New York based noise outfit Docents released their latest EP Shadowboxing via Ten Tremors. A turbulent and tightly packed five track listen, Shadowboxing is a fervent push and pull, eliciting a ragged fun house of eerie post-punk experimentation as Docents obscures the line between controlled and erratic.
The earliest rendition of Docents traces back to Noah Sider (guitar / vocals) and Matthew Heaton (drums) playing together in college upstate, adding Will Scott (guitar / vocals) in 2018 and Kumar-Hardy (bass) in 2021. The project is driven by an emphasis on noise that feels almost sentient, toeing drastically between minimalist and maximalism without being haphazard. “There’s a pendulum that swings between writing straight-ahead-ish punkier “rippers” and, at the other end, maybe some “thinkers,” and a lot of our songwriting sessions constitute where we’re trying to place ourselves now”, Heaton explains. “There’s no principal Docents songwriter – these are very much struggle sessions, and there’s a lot of material in the discard pile. Our favorite tracks tend to either take six months to finalize or half an hour.”
The EP starts with the melodically winding “Garden”, where jerky sonic elements find grounding in assertive omens and warnings of “the land will pass judgement, it’s body keeps the score”. It’s unclear if the track “Shouldn’t We” is posed as a question or a proclamation, as Docents fervently chants the statement over a swelling of pulse-raising noise. The EP ends with “Workout”, where Docents offers both a resolution to the disorientation and a new dose of unease. An abrasive clutter of “what ifs” are countered by tranquil utterances of “then what, what now”, the dialogue unraveling against pounding walls of foreboding and flammable sound.
“Shadowboxing is our first release that feels like a cohesive unit since our first full-length from 2023, Figure Study. We recorded Figure Study to sound like a really clean version of a Docents live set – our incredible engineer Sasha Stroud ran a tight ship – Dan plays more of a producer role in our sessions. This led to more experimentation and iteration in-studio, especially on Shadowboxing”, Heaton says of the release.
Shadowboxing is out everywhere today, and can be purchased on CD via Ten Tremors.
If you have been following this site for a while now, you may have heard the name Wesley Wolffe tossed around at some point. Following the release of his sophomore album Good Kind back at the beginning of 2024, Wolffe’s sweaty and deliberate style of punk music has held a grip on those that have come across it, and those that have been even luckier to have caught the Wesley Wolffe band live in action. Today Wolffe returns with his new single “Words”, the first release he’s offering since his move from New Orleans to Brooklyn as he showcases his new band and marking the first taste of what is going to be a two song EP that he is releasing in full next month.
With a slick pronunciation of the drums, Wolffe’s roughly tempered wail comes through, unfretted and unguarded, as “Words” breaks apart instrumental fixations – shifting from an impenetrable wall to coordinated expositions of harsh post-punk melodies and commanding vocals. Playing with his longtime guitar maestro Jeremy Mock (Face of Ancient Gallery), Wolffe now introduces his latest bandmates Nick Pedroza and Sebi Duzian from Bedridden fame to bust open Wolffe’s dynamic and intuitive sound. “Words” is presented as a bad dream, a contusion of reality and what may lie beyond what we deem the subconscious. But after being diagnosed with OCD, Wolffe finds himself lingering in the paranoia that his brain plays with him, a white knuckled grip, a deck of cards slapped down beyond his command as he runs away, looking for a justification, a plea or an answer to anything that would ease the obsessions.
We recently got to catch up with Wesley Wolffe to talk about playing live with his new band, changing his writing process and how “Words” came to be.
Listen to “Words” premiering here on the ugly hug.
Shea Roney: You have two new songs coming out soon. The first two songs from Wesley Wolffe after you moved to New York. How are you feeling about it all?
WW: I feel pretty excited about it. I kind of have zero expectations for how it’ll do on the Internet just cause I think I had pretty lofty expectations for the last release. So this time, I’m just like, you know, whatever happens, happens.
SR: I know that balancing expectations was a challenge for you the past two album releases you had.
WW: Yeah, whenever I go back and listen, I mean, it’s cool and I really like the songs, but I think after some time passes you can approach your former releases with a clear mind.
SR: Looking back, I mean personally as a fan, I’m putting those records on quite often. But I can imagine them being part of you for so long, obviously anyone looks back and sees them differently. Is there a new light that has been shed on these previous releases?
WW: All the Good Kind songs I don’t really love the recorded version of them that much, but we’re playing a ton of those songs live. And recently, with this band, our live show has gotten really, really tight and much, much more aggressive. It was already pretty aggressive, but now it’s like we’re fully a punk band and we play these songs like a punk band does. And to me, that’s really exciting. So when I watch videos of us performing live in New York, I’m like, ‘oh, this is so fucking cool.’ But then I listen to the recordings, and I’m like, ‘damn it, just doesn’t hit the same’ [laughs]. But that’s also a really cool place to be, because I feel like it’s pretty rare for bands these days to sound better than their recordings, you know?
SR: Your music has always been aggressive, but saying it’s more aggressive live and having that need, that want and that pleasure you get from playing more aggressively, where do you think that comes from?
WW: I think for me, if I go to a show, and I’m watching a band, and they’re kind of just like statues and just sort of standing there, then I’m bored. So if I were to watch a band, I would want them to perform like the way that we perform, because we all move around a ton and scream and get in your face. And it’s also just exciting, like these songs are songs, like we’re not improvising, but the way that we play them now, there is a lot more room for just weird shit to happen. There’s just a new element that’s unpredictable. The way these guys will play it, too, because they’re all professionals, they truly make it their own. So, what happens is we end up playing them just really fucking hard and really fast, just because it’s fun as hell for us. To answer your question, I think it’s just fucking fun.
SR: So your new song “Words”, a lot of our conversations in the past have been about how your writing style has been this sort of detached lens, about these characters, but still aimed at you personally. Is this something that you have continued on as you start writing more songs?
WW: Recently, no. With every new song that I’ve been writing in the past year, I have kind of stepped away from that. Now, “Words” is just about a year and a half old, so the song is about a whole host of things. I’m the main character of the song, but it’s not necessarily about anything that’s ever happened to me before.
I wrote the song first and then wrote the lyrics later. The chords have a flat 5th, or a tritone, for every single chord in it, like an evil interval. The church, back in the day, that interval was banned because they thought it would summon the devil or something. It’s used to evoke a sense of unease, and it’s always one that I gravitate towards when I’m writing songs, because, you know, I feel uneasy a lot. The song is about paranoia and focusing on facial features and trying to read people. It’s like making up all these weird stories in your brain about what people might be thinking of you. The end of the song is about me getting pushed off of a cliff by this group of people because of something that I did, but I don’t know what it was.
SR: Did you allow yourself to follow this paranoia in ways that you didn’t see coming? Or was this story crafted with something you had in your mind previously?
WW: It just all sort of came to me. At that point in my life I was in New Orleans and I just recently got diagnosed with OCD. I was talking to my therapist about it, and just talking about all of the different ways that OCD can manifest itself, and one thing I was worried about was false memory OCD. The paranoia aspect, getting pushed off a cliff and murdered for something that I was unaware of doing was like, maybe I did do something, but I can’t remember it, or like, am I having false memory OCD? What’s the deal here?
SR: You mentioned that you wrote these songs a while ago while you still lived in New Orleans. Now living in New York, do these two songs represent a transitional period for you at all? Are there parts of you and New Orleans still in them, or are you looking to have them be a way to move forward?
WW: I wrote them in the midst of some OCD delusional spells. I think it’s understandable that I’d like to leave that in the past [laughs]. However, as you know, these are issues I’ll most likely continue to battle with for the most of my life. So they remain relevant to me. I see them less as a transition or more of a chapter closing. So I guess a way to move forward is a good way to describe how I feel towards em. These are the last songs I wrote in New Orleans that I plan to release. So I’ll be moving on pretty soon
You can listen to “Words” and Wolffe’s past releases everywhere now. The second single from the EP is set to be released next month.
Chicago, known for their erratic springtime weather, strikes once again. At first, what was once a bright and radiant mid-seventies day, the kind people dream about during the winter hibernation months, flipped into a sub-fifties wind turbine masterpiece within an hour. The vicious Chicago wind pierces our flesh like a Ric Flair knife-edged chop during the interview. Andy PK, who records music as Red PK, sits atop a hill in historic Humboldt Park overlooking the iconic skyline. There’s a feeling of endless amounts of possibilities in his burgeoning musical career, as there are skyscrapers in the mammoth metropolis.
PK welcomes me with his naturally warm smile on this blustery April evening, wearing a navy blue collared shirt, light wash jeans, and white low-top sneakers. Their hair is mixtures of orange, pink, and red like a perfectly scooped order of sherbet ice cream from Margie’s Candies. PK is still on an adrenaline high from a few weeks prior, performing in three separate bands (Free Range, Hemlock, Red PK) on the same night at the tucked-away hole-in-the-wall bar known as The Empty Bottle.
PK is a staple in the Chicago indie music scene, known for his powerful yet silky smooth live performances where he frequently plays on either guitar, pedal steel, or even both for numerous bands such as Free Range, Hemlock, Tobacco City, and under his solo work Red Pk which are his core four bands. But, there’s more; they’re also a touring guitarist at times for Options, Soft Surface, and starting this summer, Squirrel Flower. In each separate iteration, PK naturally melds his skills to whatever each band’s specific requirements are. There’s a reason why bands want PK around, he can shred guitar with the best of them.
This year, with their musical career blooming like a cherry blossom in spring, they quit their day job as a marketer to fulfill their dream of being a full-time musician. “I quit my job ultimately because I had no time for myself. I was saying no to gigs I wanted to do because I was working my job. Even on tours, I was working from the van the entire time. I would be on conference calls, five minutes before soundcheck, trying to wrap it up real quick so I can get out there.” PK says softly.
The sensation of being spread too thin can be a crippling feeling for anyone. Now, since the weight of a 9-to-5 job has been lifted, PK is starting to get a better handle on the freelance musician lifestyle with the assistance of a shared Google calendar with every band’s schedule. Maturing into their craft, PK is better now at keeping track of all their gigs and communicating more effectively on their booking dates. Also, realizing how critical it is to carve out personal time for themselves is necessary. These days, it centers on watching NBA Playoff games with Free Range’s Sofia Jensen.
Even when there are fleeting moments of struggle popping up every so often when keeping track of their gig calendar, PK can refocus themselves. “In times when I feel overwhelmed, I take a step back and ask myself, “What am I stressed out about playing music with my friends? I feel honored to have a bunch of work come my way. Five years ago, I never would have guessed that I would even be doing this stuff.”
Five years ago was when PK moved from the West Chicagoland suburbs to the big city in hopes of finding himself. This was a trying time with the COVID lockdown combined with a sense of being directionless from a passionless job and a search for a community connection. They turned to learning a new instrument with the hopes of putting themselves out into the world. “I picked up the pedal steel guitar, I always thought it sounded beautiful,” PK says.
Shortly after venues started to open back up in 2021, PK received their big opportunity that they were waiting for. Their first break came when the manager of the “Cowboy Crooner” himself, Andrew Sa, reached out to see if PK could do spot duty on pedal steel for a show. PK had only been playing the pedal steel for three months until that point. “I knew I could do that. I worked my ass off playing those songs a million times at home. After that, with Andrew, people started hitting me up to play in their projects.” PK says.
Through the phenomenon of twangy folk music, there was a surging need for pedal steel players across the city. For the next two years living in Chicago, PK became the “pedal steel guy” around the indie scene. But through that moniker, other artists started to notice PK’s prolific talent with the guitar. “I love pedal steel, but the guitar feels like it’s an extension of my body,” PK says. The two-year slow burn of becoming a full-fledged Ax man finally started to get some heat.
For guidance on his career, PK leaned on the community they were starting to build with the help of one of their best friends, recording engineer/musician Seth Engel. Engel served as essentially PK’s musical version of Yoda, minus the inverted style of speaking. The wise beyond his years veteran presence showed them the ropes around the local scene and connected him with like-minded people that gave them a sense of home.
“My family birthday parties or Christmas, after dinner we would get the guitars and sing songs together.” Think something similar to The Osmonds’ Family, but a thousand times cooler. Music was instilled at an early age for PK. They received their first guitar at age three from their parents. At age eight, they officially got their first lessons.
“Everyone in my family plays music, so there was always a lot of music going on at home that was like, definitely really influential to me.” PK reminisces. Through PK’s formative years, their father, who also played slide guitar in a lot of bar bands, influenced their early musical taste from the likes of guitar hero icons Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan. You can hear some of those classic blues riffs by PK sprinkled every so often on their projects with Free Range and Hemlock.
April 10th, Red PK’s gameday of being on the bill three separate occasions is here. A lot of preparation was put into all the performances to make sure they went off without a hitch. “I was rehearsing all day, every day, sometimes even three times a day,” PK says. The night couldn’t have gone any better. They were stoically strumming away from the opening set to the closing. They were in total command, like Steven Seagal in an action flick. I don’t think there was anything PK couldn’t have done that night at the venue. If they had asked them to sell popcorn or even to go start slinging vodka martinis behind the bar, there was no doubt they wouldn’t be able to execute it perfectly.
A celebratory feel was in the air the entire night. Free Range celebrated their terrific indie folk record Lost & Found, Hemlock celebrated their year-and-a-half journey touring, and of course, Red Pk’s five-year journey of not only becoming who they were always meant to be, but also doing it with the community and friends that they now love like family. “In a lot of ways, nothing’s changed. The vibe of my friendships is similar to that of being with my family; we get together and hang out, play guitar, and sing. I’ve felt such a sense of community, and I’ve made some of my best friends through the music scene. I cherish so many parts of that.”
So, what’s next on the horizon for Red PK? “I have my first solo record coming out this year. It feels like a culmination of a lot of firsts for me, so I’m excited to get that out there.” They currently have only two songs listed on their audio streaming pages, but that’s sure to change rapidly. PK promises to have some alternative folk elements, but also some power pop that will surely get people buzzing. They mentioned their affinity for the Y2k pop juggernauts Sugar Ray and having a desire to be in a similar ethos to them. The album sounds extremely promising, and they are looking forward to it being out in the world.
Finding one’s place in life is a grueling journey. Many people try to find the meaning of our existence and what they want out of life, but to no avail. The number of the actual amount of people living out their dreams is so minuscule that it can be frightening to think about. But there’s always hope behind that door. No matter your age or living situation, if someone puts the work in, they can find their purpose. There is a genuine beauty when a person finds that reason for being. Red PK has found that reason. This is a new beginning, just like a flower in bloom.
You can listen to Red PK’s previously released two song EP and other collaborations out everywhere now. Red is currently on tour with Free Range and is gearing up to play guitar in Squirrel Flower this summer.
“I mean, I have too much stuff,” Dan Wriggins says. “Shit, I’ve got a van full of too much stuff here,” shifting the phone to offer a glimpse to what was behind his driver’s seat; chair legs astray, boxes stacked with potential means, comforters keeping it all secure from the rough bumps of U.S. highway driving. En route from Iowa City back to Philly, Wriggins was parked, discussing a line he had stolen from folk artist Kath Bloom, recalling a time going through her garage that was also packed with too much stuff; “everything we have is given to us”, she said to him, the phrase now living on the song “Free Association”. “That line is something I wrote down while hanging out with her years ago. The song has nothing to do with her. It’s about other stuff, if it’s about anything really.” He continues, “it should go without saying that songs are usually lies. They are not a direct representation of things that happened.” It’s not necessarily a farce, breaking a “write-what-you-know” structure that every writer has been told at least once, but rather becomes an acknowledgment of the craft and how to embrace a story worth telling.
Dan Wriggins fronts the Philly-based group Friendship, who are sharing their highly anticipated new album Caveman Wakes Up this Friday. Following 2022’s beloved Love The Stranger, an album of epic road trip caliber. Marking the second release on their label home at Merge Records, Friendship continues to push the bounds of storytelling as Caveman makes a break for their most expansive release yet. Going further into the looseness of alt-country and Chesnutt-esque melodic fixations, there is a lost familiarity that a Friendship tune brings out from its hiding – the crunching of an unmarked gravel path, the intensity of humming a tune you can’t quite recognize. Caveman Wakes Up is litteredwith these feelings that begin to fill in the little gaps that we didn’t know were missing, and quite frankly, didn’t know were ever there in the first place.
“I think of it in the world of a Gary Larson The Far Side comic,” Wriggins says about the album’s title; primitive, comprehensive, funny –- a moment from the opening line off the standout track “Hollow Skulls”. A lot of the humor that resides in Larson’s use of Neanderthals is in the irony of trial and error, a glimpse at the earliest stages of habits that we consider to be of modern normalcy. Whether it be a spear falling short of a wooly mammoth with onlookers yelling “airrrr spearrrr”, or putting on a suit and tie to count rocks and sticks with corporate intensity, these quips become universal to cursing out junk radiators or watching dark clouds cover your wedding day, as Wriggins asks, “did people before us have the same grievances and annoyances that we do?” The line widens the lens from minor frustrations to asking if we’ve ever really learned how to balance very human concepts like dreams and expectations. “It’s sort of a joke about universality,” he says.
That universality is embedded in telling a good story, one that is easy to pick up, toss around for a bit, and put in your pocket for later on. These characters, some love-sick, some lost, other’s balancing grief with rusty reflections, feel like someone we know, but more importantly, someone we can see ourselves in. Wriggins’ writing gets coined often for playing with the ordinary, writing love letters of sorts to the mundane and the underappreciated, but it’s not something he particularly looks out for. “I’ve never really understood that,” he admits, questioning the description. “What do other people write about then?”
Whether singing of devotion or defeat, humorous quips mixed with an unpredictability that resonates just as casual as it is damning to the restless feelings in these stories, Wriggins doesn’t romanticize the specificity in the language he uses. But what Caveman does is build upon the spaces to confront whatever it is these stories set out to do. Where a song like “Free Association” plays towards love, yet we don’t quite know where it will lead. “I thought I was wise, thought I knew about love”, he sings, striking this contradiction in the very first line. But as a Friendship song goes, we put trust in the companionship that these feelings become, following each path that appears on its own, learning to question what we thought we knew, and knowing that the outcome will be worth it in the end. “In a real basic sense,” Wriggins says, “I think of it as you gotta follow the song wherever it goes.”
“If you started writing something that happened and that was about something that you felt really strongly about, like, if I came up with these lines because they had to do with this heartbreak. But then I get further in and write some more and end up writing a chorus that really has nothing to do with heartbreak and has something to do with some other emotion that I feel like I can write about better, well, then you gotta follow that. You gotta delete the first part that perhaps was what you started off intending to write about,” Wriggins says. “In a way it feels like a very technical way of writing. I know some folks who don’t like to do it this way, but if something actually happened that does come through in the song, it might just be a coincidence, you know? I certainly would always prioritize a really good line over something that truly actually reflects something that happened to me.”
“Anything you’re writing ever, you’re always looking for balance,” Wriggins recognizes in practice. “Sometimes you need to be heavy handed, but a lot of the time, if you’re saying something that’s too intense, you often want to, not make it lighter, but make it more reflective of the truth, which is going to be pretty complicated. So you might add some other type of detail. I think a problem that I still have is trying to put too much into a song,” he admits, the complications not lost on him. “I mean, this might be kind of cowardly,” he continues, “but I’ve really come to believe that the medium of popular song is geared towards communicating one emotion really strongly. That’s what a pop or a country song can do really, really well, better than any other art form. And of course, sometimes you want to be ambitious and you want to push what it’s built for, but at other times I feel like, man, I want to get back to basics.”
Beyond Wriggins’ writing, Friendship’s sonic explorations are brought to life by the crew he has surrounded himself with for almost a decade now, consisting of Michael Cormier-O’Leary (Hour, Dear Life Records), Peter Gill (2nd Grade) and Jon Samuels (MJ Lenderman and The Wind, Dear Life Records). Songs like “Betty Ford” and “Wildwood in January” play with patient pacing, finding solace in the contradictions of tempered folk music and former first ladies. “Tree of Heaven” rips the album wide open with Gill’s harsh, static tones and Cormier-O’Leary’s conversational drumming while the grueling demeanor of “Resident Evil” creates a stirring awareness to the intuitive focus that the band accomplishes on this record. Especially the experimentation with synthesizers and saxophone at the climax of “Free Association” stands out as a fresh new taste to the already rich arrangements that reside on the album. “Often if you try something that’s really out there in the moment, you’re going to think, well, of course, we’re not keeping that. That’s just me experimenting.” Wriggins says, recalling Gill’s idea to add in these new voicings on the last day of recording. “And once in a while you do keep it,” he laughs.
But over the years, as Friendship continue to push the bounds of their sound, it’s noticeable that there is a type of sonic progression that solidifies each album in its own territory. “You got to be experimenting with new things, both for yourself and for listeners,” Wriggins says. “But you also have to still be including stuff you’re good at because you’re the expert. Over the years I’ve been developing this theory that you have a spectrum,” recalling a time he was talking to Kurt Wagner, the stamina behind the prolific project Lambchop. “On one hand, you can keep doing the same thing over and over again that you’re really good at, and on the other hand, you could do a totally new project every single time you make something. If the next Friendship album was that we all decided to make sculptures, it would be pretty crappy, because we’re not sculptors, you know? But the other side of just doing the same thing over and over again kind of sucks, too.”
“The process of knowing what is really good and what to keep and what to cut for the production and the arrangement is a kind of democratic thing,” Wriggins says, discussing the functionality of the group. Each member has spent the better half of a decade practicing their craft in their individual routes, but when it comes to Friendship, it’s a constant back and forth on ideas. “I kind of trust their musical impulses better than mine,” Wriggins laughs. “But when it comes to lyrics, I do really know what I think is good. I’m usually able to hear it myself and say, yep, that’s the type of thing I would listen to. Of course, you always are second guessing yourself and doubting things. But often the doubt is like, well, this is pretty good. Could I make it better?” He continues, “I think the other guys especially really liked recording this one more than other ones because we’re just better at messing around. And hopefully we just keep on getting better.”
Embracing the characteristics that defined their past albums — the tenderness of Dreamin’, the solitude of Shock Out of Season and the camaraderie of Love the Stranger, Caveman Wakes Up is a powerhouse of enduring complexions. As each track fills the open spaces with both intuition and intensity, building up a collection of all the stuff they found and all that was once given, this band once again breaks the divide between what it means to experience and live art; a capture of the subtly, grace and often after-thought beauty that has become synonymous with the stories told by Friendship.
Along with this feature, the members of Friendship are taking over this week’s guest list at the ugly hug. Sharing The Cave Window, “three songs from each guy, all with some type of connection to the record itself, very loose inspiration.”
Caveman Wakes Up is set to be released this Friday, May 16th via Merge Records. You can pre-order the album now, as well as on CD and vinyl.
From the hills of Butte, Montana comes the pond, the latest project from longtime songwriter Jon Cardiello and his band: Noelle Huser (vocals/synth), Sandy Smith (bass/guitar), and Kale Huseby (drums/vocals). You might know Cardiello from his earlier work as Bombshell Nightlight or through his and Sandy Smith’s tape label, Anything Bagel. A Year as a Cloud invites listeners into a space where memory and sound intertwine, reshaping the past with each note. Shaped by a lifelong connection to creativity, Cardiello’s music doesn’t follow a path so much as carve one out for itself.
This new batch of songs is built from the small stuff—blurry snapshots, a walk around the neighborhood, a record playing while tea steeps. The writing lives in that quiet middle space—where grief lingers, wandering is allowed, and sadness can sit next to softness without contradiction. There’s room here for stillness and for slowly making sense of things that may never make sense.
If you’ve spent time with Bombshell Nightlight, you’ll hear the same patient pacing—songs that breathe and take their time. But with the pond, there’s more grit in the softness, more weight beneath the quiet. Listeners of Friendship, Hello Shark, Horse Jumper of Love, Mount Eerie, Greg Mendez will appreciate the transparent nature of songs with equal parts lightness and gloom. With each song a compelling story surfaces within the instrumentals; Grief cuts through the lo-fi vocals and raw guitar in “Brittle”; “Into the Room” embraces distortion without sacrificing its quiet depth.
Cardiello’s evolving sound reflects a subtle progression shaped by the nuances of life’s ever-shifting emotional landscape. It’s shaped by the subtle turns of feeling that come with just being alive. It raises the question, “Where does a song go when it dies?” and forces you to think about the songs that have stayed with you long after you stopped playing them, or the ones that suddenly pop back into your head at the strangest, most unexpected times. Songs seem to live their own lives—they become companions, change shape, fade into the background, then return when we least expect it. But do they ever really disappear? Maybe they just shift, taking on new meaning as we move through different moments in our lives.
And in these tracks, there’s something undeniably alive. They carry a quiet, emotional weight, filled with questions that don’t have clear answers. “Cup of Lilacs” and “Hungry” take small, everyday moments and turn them into something worth pausing for making those tiny, fleeting feelings, like the sound of a song or a cup of tea—become significant. “Burnt Plant” is a banger for the anxious and ashamed; it’s restless and raw, with jagged guitars and a relentless beat that mimics the feeling of being trapped in your own mind.
The brilliance of this album comes from the band’s unified front, each member perfectly in sync with the spirit of each song. There’s a quiet trust in one another, never stepping on each other’s toes.
This album is meant for the liminal spaces—the haze before the coffee hits, the hush of 2 a.m. when your thoughts sit a little too close. It’s for sitting in a feeling, watching dust catch light, for witnessing, and to be witnessed.
Listen to A Year As A Cloud premiering here on the ugly hug!
Every Wednesday, the ugly hug shares a playlist personally curated by an artist/band that we have been enjoying. This week we have a collection of songs put together by Maine-based artist Jesse Guerin of the project jes.
With sincere delivery and eager expression, the music put out under jes is intuitive to the environment in which it was derived from. Playing to the limitless opportunities given by open spaces, Guerin leads with faith towards whatever may lie ahead, allowing guitars to interact, building layers of individual voicings until that open space holds a brand-new meaning.
About the playlist, Jesse shared;
“songs that feel like a sunset, maybe a sunrise too. songs that feel like my hands are in the soil. a playlist for gardening. a playlist for the dusky dewy evenings in the field.”
“We’re informed by the dump we play in,” Spencer Morgan amuses towards the end of my conversation with Devils Cross Country. It’s kind of a beautiful sentiment, though in no way a hyperbole – the location where the band currently plays in Cincinnati neighbors a “Recycle America” facility. “It’s just piled sky high.” Connor Lowry explains. “The other day it looked like it was going to spill onto the street. A bunch of washing machines and plane parts.”
It is natural for a band to grow into its sound, and for their discography to reflect shifts as they inch closer to the music they are meant make. This can be a gradual phenomenon, or it could be as radical as a Frank Ocean remix project flourishing into a robust “four and a half” piece indie rock band. Devils Cross Country exists in the latter, and as drastic as that sonic shift may sound on paper, the project’s 2024 debut record affirmed that their current identity is by far their most authentic. Possession is Ninetenths tells a story of desire in its most innate form, the ethos of the album contrasted by a swarming of maximalist sound. The record is a tightly packed nine tracks, warped by a sea of synths and abraded by rusty samples that peel and chip at the ends. The listen is guided by a raw honesty, simulating the complexities of intense inner conflicts and and guilt-drenched longings through experimental song structure.
Amongst the many facets that shaped the current disposition of Devils Cross Country, the most salient was Patrick Raneses’ return to Cincinnati. Home to an animated post-punk scene, it was there that he enlisted drummer Spencer Morgan and bassist Connor Lowry, the three of them planting the project’s early seeds into hardpan Ohio soil. They shifted to a heavier sound – an outcome of existing in an environment where noise is as much a necessity as it is a stylistic choice. “When you’re in these environments, you physically have to play louder because some dude’s doing a Rob Zombie cover underneath us and there are screeching trains just ripping through outside,” Raneses tells me about the city’s impact. It was in these lighthearted moments and deprecating jokes that the members of Devils Cross Country’s relationship to Cincinnati felt the most fervent; as the three of them reflected on cracked foundations, greedy landlords and of course, “Recycle America”, their persistence to create and sheer love for their scene came across the loudest.
We recently sat down with Devils Cross Country amidst their recent east coast tour to discuss the history of the project, “trudge” music and their experience in Cincinnati.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Manon: I know Devils Cross Country began during lockdown, I would love to start by hearing about the project’s initial roots and how it has evolved over the last few years?
Patrick: So I was in a band called Stem Cells at Fordham University with my friend Jake Lee and Frost Children. The last show we played was a day before lockdown, we did an acapella cover of “Numb” by Linkin Park, so we joked that we cursed the world with that one. Jake moved back to Phoenix and after graduation I moved back to Cincinnati, but we had always worked on remixes and that sort of stuff together so through the pandemic I was making music and writing songs that were definitely more indie rock oriented. I’ve known Spencer for a while, we were friends in high school and we started jamming together in 2021.
Spencer: Devils Cross Country became a band in 2022, when [Patrick] moved into our house. We lived in a house venue in Cincinnati, it was called “The Lawn”, it had AstroTurf in the basement that someone had stolen from the football stadium at UC and they kept it in the basement, at least that’s what the landlord told me when I moved in. Pat was looking for a room and then moved into our spot and the project just happened from there.
Patrick: That’s where Lawn came from. It was the perfect practice space and then we recorded that first EP there.
Manon: Do you still live in that house?
Patrick: No, they kept jacking the rent
Spencer: It doubled since we moved in, and the conditions were not worth it. Our house was falling apart and there were cracks in the foundation.
Manon: Okay so now you’re on your first tour since you released Possession is Ninetenths. Your music now has a lot of different layers and samples to it, how have these shows been, and how do you translate your recorded songs into a live format?
Patrick: We don’t feel super tied to like the recorded music, we are flexible and I feel like every show we have played has been different. We used to have two other guitarists in the band, and then we went to a three piece and now it’s kind of back to a five piece. Informally it’s a four and a half piece. I had come up with this plan a year and a half ago called the prosthetic plan, where we just add ’em on like extra limbs and it’s actually worked for the most part.
Our friend Nina, who is in another band in Cincinnati called Spoils, plays violin with us live now. It’s awesome, she was supposed to come on this tour with us but she got Covid on Sunday. I would say the past few months we’ve been working on a lot of new songs, we have a banjo guy too, Patrick number two, he is also named Patrick. It’s cool because we’re not reliant on them, but when they pop in it adds a lot.
Connor: Yeah, Nina and Pat can just jump into whatever we’re doing. Nina will just pick up a new song and instantly play the best she possibly can. It’s awesome, and a lot of what she does is straight improvisation.
Spencer: They need no instruction. Patrick and Nina are in another really cool band called Five Pointed Stars, it’s a slightly experimental dance project.
Manon: You mentioned you are working on some new music?
Patrick: Yeah, we played a couple of our new songs last night actually. I am trying to be more melodic because a lot of the songs on Possessions is Ninetenths are intense, so the new music is a bit happier and has more of a pop center, but still true to Devils Cross Country. I feel like Lawn was this bedroom pop, slacker rock EP and Possessions is Ninetenths went in a completely opposite direction. With the new stuff I want to push hard in both those directions.
Connor: Maybe in the middle somewhere
Patrick: No, other way. Stretch hard on both ends. Sometimes I’m like what genre are we even playing right now.
Spencer: Oh we’re playing trudge. That’s what we call everything, it’s a lax genre so we invented trudge. It’s a weird blend of guitar and electronic music and it sounds kind of blown out.
Manon: I like that, it beats you telling me some hyper-specific ‘-gaze’ with like four words hyphenated before it.
Connor: I feel like I struggle to understand any genre at this point, I just cannot process that information in my mind, so trudge makes it easier.
Spencer: It’s kind of just a lack of any real definition.
Patrick: We had been filming a music video for a song off Lawn called “Fishbone”, and were just driving back and some dude had gigantic boots on.
Spencer: And I was like, “that dude is trudging”
Patrick: Then the word just got stuck in my head.I feel like genre is not super useful anymore, but region can be. Like “Philly” music, that can be kind of trudge.
Manon: How would you describe the music in Cincinnati?
Spencer: There’s a big post punk scene there, a lot of hardcore guys. Corker is the other band I’m in, and a lot of the bands share members. The Surfs are there, Crime of Passing, also Feel It Records just moved there. Also, there are a lot of fresh faces, a lot of young kids making good stuff.
Manon: Do you feel like being in Cincinnati has a big impact on Devils Cross Country?
Patrick: Yeah for sure. When I started the project with Jake Lee, it wasn’t rock music. We were just fucking around, we made Frank Ocean remixes. Then [Spencer] put me on drums and I was in a hardcore band before this. Also, when you’re in these environments, you physically have to play louder because some dude’s doing a Rob Zombie cover underneath us and there are screeching trains just ripping through outside.
Spencer: They sound beautiful
Connor: Yeah they harmonize sometimes, it’s pretty cool.
Patrick: Some dude said it sounded like the studio was burning down where we were.
Spencer: We’re informed by the dump we play in
Patrick: Yeah, there is literally a dump right next to where we play
Spencer: Yeah recycling dump
Connor: Recycle America. It’s just piled sky high. The other day it looked like it was going to spill onto the street. A bunch of washing machines and plane parts.
Spencer: We are just practicing in the most bombed out areas of Cincinnati, but that’s cheap rent so it works. There are so many DIY spaces in Cincinnati, less houses these days but lots of gallery and warehouse spots.
Patrick: When we moved out of the lawn, we didn’t have a place to practice until we moved into this new place. We had to take a weird break, because you need space. I feel like a city’s DIY scene is so dependent on being able to have an affordable spot to make and play music. You need space to be loud.
You can listen to Possession is Ninetenths out everywhere now!
Sunflecks is the project of Bellingham-based artist Forrest Meyer, who earlier this month shared his debut LP under the name titled Fools Errand via Bud Tapes. Living a life pulled by creativity and moved by song, there is a casualty in the way Meyer interacts with music, having been writing, as well as working as a guitar repair hand at Champlin Guitars for some time now. But that doesn’t mean that the music that Meyer makes is lost from any sort of intense intentionality, but rather is as natural as his routine day-to-day, down to the breaths he takes without thought. Fools Errand embraces a collection of voices, a dedication to how music should be communicated between him and the open spaces in which he inhabits.
“And I don’t know what to do, my soul has a hole too, takin’ to leak out. Kettle is on, it’s singing its song, I grab a mug with Garfield on it” – an inherently brief story, but one that brings focus to both lingering pain and a singular moment of personalized characterization. There is something to be said when first listening to Meyer’s writing, where your own minor memories or complex feelings find ways to click with the images and individual lines that he writes such as this one. Sticking to the simple and worn in, Meyer recounts minor moments with clarity, like hanging out with a friend on “Proximity” or tossing a coin into a well on “Toss a Coin”. But this simplicity doesn’t get lost in a cluttered past, or even borrow from what may be in the future as it takes claim on the present, as open as it can be. It’s an album that not only plays with familiarity, but one that asks why these instances become familiar to us in the first place. Where placement and perspective are intertwined with who we’ve become; how much change has this Garfield mug really understood, and how does it see me now? Meyer’s words are experienced and beautiful, a dusty fortune, a prized keepsake to hold on to for when you need it most – and with each stagnant breath of musical instinct offered from his bandmates, Sunflecks paints a picture much larger than we could have ever expected.
We recently got to chat with Meyer about Fools Errand, restructuring collaboration within Sunflecks, and the practice of cone spotting.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Shea Roney: How does it feel to have your debut LP out? You had a nice run of tapes with Bud Tapes too!
Forrest Meyer: Feeling really good. We initially started with a 30 run of tapes, and they all sold out before the album was released, which was great that one single is enough to convince people to order one. So we did another run of 30 or so. I think there’s a couple left on Bandcamp, and I’ve got 12 here. It’s been a smallish run, but it feels like people have received it well and I’ve gotten a lot of nice words about it.
SR: That’s right, it was just one song! How does it feel that one song of yours has the capacity to build enough trust with people?
FM: During the recording of it I never really thought that “Proximity” would be the one. That one was funny, too, because we recorded that song in the session, and then when my drummer [Amanda Glover] and I went back to do the first round of mixing, we decided to fully re-record that song. So it’s just the drums and then I overdubbed the organ on top of it. It’s from a completely different session.
SR: What made you want to start over on “Proximity”?
FM: I felt like certain songs had too much going on in the first recording. The guitar part on it, the picking pattern changes for every chord, so it’s a complex guitar part that takes up a lot of space. But one of the reasons we re-recorded it was it just didn’t need the amount of instrumentation that the rest of the album had. It just worked well as a clean, small thing.
SR: What part of that sparsity do you think helped progress this song into something you were comfortable with?
FM: When you’re in a fun recording studio that has a lot of instruments in it, you’re going to feel like you should try and put melotron on everything. But then one of my bandmates had this idea for the album, because there’s six people in the group total, that we should have a song on the album where someone is not playing. Like, there’s one song with no drums, there’s a song with no piano, there’s a song with no violin, like everything comes in and out, but it’s all kind of equally coming in and out. It’s quite a fun challenge to figure out how to have a lot of instrumentation, but still keep a minimal kind of sound.
SR: How did this configuration of Sunflecks come to be? Have you been playing with these folks for awhile now?
FM: We’ve kept a pretty consistent band. I gathered all these people for that recording session for the most part, and the album’s been kind of a couple of years in the making. But I’ve been playing as Sunflecks as a solo thing for a couple years, and the lineup has been pretty consistent I’d say.
SR: You noted that this is a highly communal piece of work, taking inspiration from the people around you. What was the process of working with others, and in what ways did it push you to bring these songs to their newfound life?
FM: The way that this project has been run, for my part at least, is I write a song, or have something that feels good enough to bring to the group, and then we play with it a little bit and get everyone’s input and ideas on it. More recently, we’ve been going a lot deeper. We call it sectionals, it’s still the whole band, but say we’re orchestrating a violin and clarinet part for example, we’ll go in and all give ideas. It gets challenging when you’re in the group, but you’re working on a single person’s part of a song and then everyone’s just sitting around. But I think [sectionals] is a really cool opportunity to maybe ask Amanda on the drums, as someone who isn’t playing a melodic instrument, what do you think of what the melody’s doing in this part? Communication is always the hardest thing, but we’ve been working really hard on sharing opinions and preferences and ideas. It’s been a really cool and beautiful practice.
SR: What you were saying earlier, taking out voices every once in a while, did those sectionals help lead you guys to understand your sound and the roles of individual voicings, either in their presence or their absence?
FM: When I got the studio dates to record the album, half the band was invited with a two week turnaround to learn all the songs. There wasn’t a whole lot of time between, like, ‘hey, do you guys want to join a band?’ and then, ‘we have studio dates if you want to record?’. We recorded a fair amount of music, there’s a lot of really good stuff, but there’s almost too much really good stuff there. So in the mixing of the album, there were lots of decisions where I was sitting with the engineer, talking about, ‘we probably shouldn’t have pedal steel, piano and violin.all playing at the same time here, right?’. So mixing in and out certain things, depending on where they fit in the song, we wanted to be more intentional on the writing of the song, and then we mess more with harmony, or work out how violin, pedal steel and piano can play the same exact thing, but thirds apart, and maybe that would sound cool. We just wanted to practice more intentionality and listening and even experimentation as well. Especially hearing out everyone’s ideas and running with them to see where they go.
SR: A lot of the narratives you write seem to manage such large themes through such a miniscule and personal lens. What stories were the easiest for you to tell in terms of details, and did challenging yourself to think more locally help bring understanding to them?
FM: A lot of this album is processing. It’s very much using the everyday things that happen, like walking home — there’s a lot of walking on the album. I tend to write lyrics and songs that are very personal for me. It can be hard to talk with someone about complex feelings. So the way that feels better for me is I can sit, and I can use tonality and wordplay, because, like the human experience, it is very rich, but most of the time, you can only say one word at a time. And sometimes there’s emotions where what you’re doing is a happy thing, but there’s a sad undertone to it. It’s hard to communicate those things, so being able to have multiple tools in the toolbox to do that is important. In my head, I’ll toy around with words for a long time until something kind of clicks, and it feels like that’s what I meant. With the song “Proximity”, that song is about an afternoon with my friend Dolores, just listening to music. But the larger metaphorical meaning is thinking back on that time when I was in Olympia. It’s easy to be like, ‘wow! What a nice, beautiful time!’ But then there’s a lot of things around that time that were really challenging, but I’m not thinking about them as much as the nice little thing. A mirror is reflecting everything all the time, but you only see what’s directly in front of you.
SR: And as a listener, listening to your words about what’s in front of you really repositions your presence in a moment. How do you ground yourself and be present in your art and the way you approach storytelling?
It’s fairly automatic in a lot of ways. The way I’ve set my life up, it really surrounds music. I do guitar repair at a music shop, so every day I’m playing different instruments. So in the back of my head, I’m working through the chord progressions and just listening to so much music every day. As a writer and musician, there isn’t a whole lot of super scholarly stuff about my process. The people in my band I play with are all very gifted musicians, and most of them can communicate theory, and I’m starting to get there, but I just don’t think about that stuff. It’s funny when you go up to somebody and say, ‘I wrote this thing’, and then you play it and then they’re like, ‘whoa! That’s really interesting with the blah blah blah!’ I use music as a way to parse out my days. It’s our way of taking the things that I’m thinking and feeling and just trying to understand them – I feel like if I find the right sounds and tempo that make the words feel good and everything clicks, then it’s like, ‘well, maybe that’s how I feel?’ Also there’s so much play in it. It’s just a way to have fun, and I love the weekly excuse to hang out with my best friends and make music together in a scheduled way.
SR: I do want to ask about Champlin Guitars. In what ways has opening the door to your surrounding community impacted you both artistically and personally?
FM: Yeah, it’s a really beautiful thing! At the guitar shop we’ve hosted a lot of really nice shows. It’s kind of my way of giving back to the community. But these shows are also like a touring safety net for friends. A couple months ago, Lily Thomas was on tour, and a bunch of friends drove to Seattle to see her play. But it was when the LA Fires were happening, and they were supposed to go down south for the rest of their tour, but they had to cancel all those dates. So, with a two-day turnaround, we made a poster, found another person to play, and did a Wednesday show at the shop, and still a bunch of friends came out. In my mind, that’s the dream of what the shop shows are for. There’s a lot of trust and I’m eternally grateful for how sweet and thoughtful the Bellingham music scene is.
SR: And then I am curious about Cone spotting on your Instagram. What is this practice?
FM: It’s been going on for about two years now. Cone spotting is, I mean, especially now with the moral debacle of being on social media, it’s a nice thing to have so I can continue to let people know what I’m up to. I don’t have that much going on to please the algorithms, so the cone spotting thing started off with looking through my camera roll and noticing that I’ve taken a lot of pictures of traffic cones in funny situations. I posted those, but then I started seeing more traffic cones in funny situations, and I thought this could be a cool thing. I think there’s a funny aspect to it, and there’s the hunt for it which is really fun. But something I love is the cognitive dissonance of seeing something that’s supposed to be warning, something engineered to be obvious, but when it’s in the wrong environment, or not doing its job, those dissonant things are really fun for me. And it was a great foil to get away with posting semi-regularly without having to be directly personal. And then I started getting submissions and it grew into this thing where I feel like I accidentally trained people — it’s weird how many people think about me when they see a traffic cone. The amount of times that people have gone through the effort of seeing it, taking a picture of it and sending it to me. It became really interesting.
You can listen to Fools Errand out on Bandcamp now, as well as order a tape via Bud Tapes.
Written by Shea Roney | Photos Courtesy of Sunflecks
Every Wednesday, the ugly hug shares a playlist personally curated by an artist/band that we have been enjoying. This week we have a collection of songs put together by Durham-based artist Aaron Dowdy of the group Fust.
Today we would like to welcome you all to the “Big Ugly Hug”, a celebration of Fust’s third album Big Ugly, shared last month via Dear Life Records. With a name built on contradictions, one that offers limitless imagery, Dowdy’s use of storytelling is unshaken by truth, letting intentionality mix with what has been right in front of us all along, but tapping into the heart that often gets left behind. It’s an album of hardships and traditions. An album of friends and the ghosts that we have not been acquainted with yet. It’s an album of flaws and retribution, not to overlook the moments of goodwill and tales of redemption. It’s a piece of historical contribution, bringing old stories out to get a peak at life once more.
About the playlist Dowdy shares;
I am excited for this big ugly hug. not exactly preliminary notes but things i’m thinking about now that big ugly is done and i am dreaming of the next record. kind of two sets here: the first ten are sort of electric and the second sort of acoustic. the first set is harsh and I’m trying to figure out their harshness. the second set i can’t even begin to play, they totally elude me, and they are songs I sing along to in languages i don’t speak. we’ll see what happens.
Listen to Aaron Dowdy’s playlist here;
You can listen to Big Ugly out everywhere now.
Written by Shea Roney | Featured Photo by Merce Lemon
the ugly hug 