Having since moved out of Chicago earlier this year, a place in which the beloved and defined community was considered home for quite some time, Elijah Berlow has recently set off to write the next chapter in his life. Today, the now Vermont-based songsmith and multi-instrumentalist returns with his newest single, “Harvest Fields”, the first release since his 2022 EP, Put Out Fires. With a rich and thorough musical upbringing, learning the traditions of Americana music and literature, Berlow’s music is reflective of his life’s journey, both acknowledging the stories of how far he has come, and not forgetting where he has left to go.
With rolling instrumentation, “Harvest Fields” plays from the roots of a feel-good folk groove, both sincere and eager, as guitars swirl with heart and melody, a piano voices its gratification and percussion leads with full hearted faith to the unknown ahead. Following an ecstatic guitar solo, Berlow sings with gracious deliverance, “And we scraped up our knees / And we ran us around / Said that nothing can get better / Unless it can be found” – full of bewilderment and study, the understanding of both time and maturation as life continues on. Soon, Berlow and co. round the corner, elated trumpets soar before dropping out, the melody of a guitar, sparingly and lone, plays to the open sky – cherishing the newfound clarity that Berlow has to offer.
About the song, Berlow shares, “this song encapsulates the effort of betterment, the bereavement of not being witnessed within ones full capacity, steeped in naturalistic metaphor yet also a dialogue between a course of action, wild yearning and one’s own obscure place within the repeated seasonal cycles.”
“Harvest Fields” is accompanied by a music video shot and edited by Esteban Alarcon. Watch here.
Growing up in Eau Claire, WI, Adelyn Strei is a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, who has spent the last decade expanding and defining her rich and improvisational type of folk music, mainly through arranging and performing her friend’s music and releasing under her previous moniker, Adelyn Rose. Now based in Brooklyn, Strei is preparing to release her new record, Original Spring, set to be released November 15. Today, she shares the third and final single before the release, “Clouds In Your Eyes”.
Bare, yet empathetic, “Clouds In Your Eyes” builds upon the opportunity of open spaces. As tinged guitar strings rattle and a sullen piano begins to find its voice, step-by-step, new textures form underneath Strei’s footing as they play out with gradual depth. “To know her was to love her / To love her was the natural way”, she sings, candid and clear, holding on to every word with thoughtful phrasing and cherished presence. Carefully, amongst ghostly echoes, tempered effects and a flurry of woodwinds, vivid and unique – like the song’s natural plumage – she repeats, “Sun in the shadows and / Clouds in your eyes / You say to let it”, gradually fading into that same open space where it began.
About the single, Strei shares, “Clouds In Your Eyes’ completes the 48 minute arc of the album. The guitar and drums together have a determined resolve, carrying lyrics about loss, but the kind of loss that feels like wonder and gratitude,” she continues, “[it’s] very much a feet on the ground/eyes on the sky kind of song.”
Today, Adelyn Strei shares a music video for “Clouds In Your Eyes”. Watch it here.
Original Spring is set to be released this Friday, November 15th via Brooklyn’s Mtn. Laurel Recording Co. and produced by Dex Wolfe. You can pre-save Original Springhere.
Emerging from mystical excursions of remote stature and excavated from the depths of cherished indie-rock sounds and a determined DIY spirit, Perth, Australia’s new project, Away, Wretched Beast!, shares their debut single, “Juno The First” along with b-side “Miracle Moon” as the precursor of the artistic lore that follows in its path. Built around the one-man project of JV Krauss, Away, Wretched Beast! is also set to release their debut full length, The Great Telescope and Other Stories, December 13th via Brooklyn’s new tape label, TV-14 Recordings.
Battered but faithful, “Juno The First” finds Krauss grifting amongst the melodramatic folk offerings, famous from Elephant 6 projects of past – fresh and still alive – filling the space with rough and warm guitar layers, ghostly church bells and the weight of a dark mellotron that roots itself into the earth. “These four years have been nothing but trouble,” Krauss sings over a swaying progression. But with the crack of a snare, the signal we were waiting for, “Juno The First” erupts into a dance – a tender devotion of escape – as we are caught between a crushing world and what may lie beyond if we just take that first step.
You can listen to “Juno The First” and “Miracle Moon” here.
Hailing from Wiltshire, England, Tom Brown is known for projects such as Teenage Tom Petties and Rural France, proving himself to be a highly effective and cherished voice in the world of underground pop. Today, Brown shares “Dunno”, the debut single from his latest creative endeavor, Lone Striker. Five years in the making, Brown has set the jangle-pop aside as Lone Striker embraces the warmth of wobbly homemade loops, found sounds and moody, wistful arrangements, while still having his well-crafted melodies continue to be a testament to his artistry at hand.
First a drum fill, a sort of laissez faire jumpstart into this dirty, melancholic groove, “Dunno” finds its footing within a clanky backbeat and a curtain of weathered horns, offering an off-kiltered, yet reassuring presence to get lost in. Although Lone Striker finds Brown working mostly alone, “Dunno” also includes the work of Billy Fuller (BEAK>) on bass. Swirling with disillusionment, questions asked and questions left unanswered, Brown sings with a tender clarity, “And I can’t think about tomorrow if the past is gonna be so cruel” – the subtlety in the chromatic digression helping him find his footing as he keeps moving forward. As “Dunno” begins to fade, the layered textures of modulated synths, simple rhythmic movements and those same weathered horns continuing on, Brown has already laid the groundwork for a triumphant rebranding to an already beloved career.
Last month, Devils Cross Country announced their first full length album and shared the fiercely catchy single “San Miguel”, titled after the beloved Filipino beer. The Cincinnati based band nails the divine grit of Midwest post-punk so well you’d never believe the project began in the pristine realms of Zoom mid pandemic, with frenzied hours of Google Drive demo exchanges between initial members Patrick Raneses and James Kennedy Lee. In the last few years, Devils Cross Country graduated the confines of virtual meeting rooms and is now a live constituent in the Cincinnati scene, featuring Spencer Morgan on drums, Connor Lowry on bass, and several rotating collaborators on strings, synths, and stretched samples. Today, they’re back with the second single off Possession is Ninetenths, out via Candlepin on December 7th.
“That person takes again, you let them take again — repetition, a musical act, as an offering. Romantic stuff, weirdly,” Patrick Raneses explains of “Second Sin”, a hazy, slacker rock track that bulldozes notions about ownership. The song explores a relationship with a thief, unfolding a narrative where the act of stealing a possession back and forth yields more fulfillment than possessing it in the first place. Perhaps a commentary on materialism, perhaps an unconventional love song, it’s a maverick of a track both lyrically and sonically.
While its initial melodies have softer edges than the jagged, guitar heavy moments of “San Miguel”, “Second Sin” is sneakily energetic, kindled by surging drum sequences and dense bass lines. Layers of creaky synths, swirling guitars, and warped vocals follow a recipe of twinkling distortion that evokes contemporary Pennsylvania shoegaze, but at its core the track is shaped by local influence, with a grisly sense of Cincinnati post-punk rawness welded into each note.
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 Dominique Durand of the New York-based group, Ivy.
Composed of Andy Chase, Dominique Durand and Adam Schlesinger, Ivy’s musical contributions have shown to be a testament to how definitive and essential the group has been to underground music since their debut release in 1995. Rooted within their breathy and expansive art-pop sound, DIY determination and approach to the commercial industry, Ivy’s songs are just as important and beloved as ever. This year, Ivy is celebrating the 25th anniversary of their highly acclaimed third studio album Long Distance with a first ever vinyl pressing via Bar/None Records.
Along with the playlist, Durand shared;
I started making playlists when I was around 12 years old, living in Paris. Nothing made me happier than sharing the music I loved with my family and friends, or anyone who would listen. Even though I live in NYC today, I try to spend as much time as I can in France during the summers. When I leave, I like to keep the French vibe going for a while…to remain connected to my roots. The truth is, French pop music was never really perceived as being very cool in the USA. I’m hoping – perhaps naively – this playlist might change people’s opinion! I purposely chose both old and new artists, and some of them are even close friends of mine. I guess I’m just in an eclectic French mood these days… J’espere que vous aimerez!
You can now purchase the 25th anniversary vinyl of Long Distance, a double album that includes a side of bonus tracks: “Digging Your Scene”, “All I Ever Wanted”, “Edge Of The Ocean” (Duotone Remix) as well as an insert with track notes by Andy Chase.
Everyday for the last three-ish years my daily routine has been pretty simple. I wake up, make a fried egg, deliberate between sourdough bread and multigrain bread while my egg cooks, scroll through mind-numbing Instagram reels hoping to see some content that depresses me enough to put my phone down and spark a change in my daily routine, listen to music and mope around town until I have to go to work or school. And now that I’ve just graduated I thought I’d have more time in my post college life to create, or write, or at least listen to some new albums but playing drunksketball with friends and waiting for the pool table to open up at the local dive bar takes up a lot of my time.
Really the only thing that keeps me going sometimes is knowing I’m going to make a good breakfast in the morning that lasts me all of five minutes while I listen to Kitchen as the sun shines through my windows and I take my first sips of hot black coffee. Wearing the tape thin on my Breath Too Long cassette is maybe all the structure I need. Kitchen’s music is such a constant in my life that it almost feels impossible to take a step back and reassess why I love his music so much. It’s hard to break down the barriers surrounding his music and him because I hold him on such a pedestal, one that my friends kind of make fun of, and have thought that he was Phoebe Bridgers-level famous based on the way I talk about his music.
For those who aren’t my friend, and haven’t got the “who is Kitchen” spiel in my bedroom as I pick out a record to throw on to alleviate the stress of an awkward silence, Kitchen is the recording project of Rochester based artist, James Keegan. Before Kitchen, Keegan released dreamy bedroom-pop music under the moniker Loner(s) while he was in high school, and the first Kitchen release, the eclectic set of lo-fi pop tunes, Town came out his senior year. He went to SUNY Purchase where he studied Audio and Music engineering and has released a slew of full albums, EPs, and instrumentals consistently since 2017. I often describe him as the songwriter of our generation, adding a tired “he just gets it” at the end when it becomes too vulnerable for me to try and describe how magical his music is. Much like his music, Kitchen feels like a distant memory, and if you’re not there to hold on to the moment, you’ll miss it all.
I started re-reading some features on artists I love to determine how other writers painted them. I’ve read numerous MJ Lenderman articles recently that described whatever basketball jersey or 90s alt-country band-T he was repping to show how “he’s just some dude.” So I tried to describe James Keegan the same way. I pictured him in front of The Burlington Bar in Logan Square, where the rest of his bandmates and touring partners in the Conor Lynch band were grabbing post-show beers, as he stood outside with my brother and I in an oversized Attic Abasement-shirt answering our jumbled questions in a hushed murmur with his hands constantly moving between his pockets and the side of his face. “Intergalactic” by the Beastie Boys played from speakers inside the bar and flooded into the street where we all shared a distracted laugh and a sigh of relief breaking down the awkwardness that separated us a second earlier. I wondered if we were all thinking of that Diary of a Wimpy Kid scene or if we all just needed a minute to acknowledge our surroundings again. I can’t think of James as just some dude, I couldn’t paint him in that light even if I forced myself to. As the three of us shared a “see ya later and get home safe” yell to our friend Nathan as he ran to catch his bus home a few minutes into our interview, I realized that Keegan was so ingrained in my daily routine and life that, standing there, he didn’t even feel real. Minutes before I was thinking about how strange it was to be talking to somebody whose voice follows me everyday in a trail through my earbuds, my tape deck, my car, and then next I was thinking about how oddly in sync we all were.
There’s so much trust, comfort, and nostalgia embedded in his music. Sometimes it almost feels too vulnerable to me, sharing his latest album, Breath Too Long with somebody might be the most intimate thing one could do, and to write that is even more daring. The title track, a song for when you’re lovesick, or sick in bed with COVID as Keegan was when he wrote it, watching the world pass you by from your back flat on your bed staring up at the ceiling, unable to do anything but toss and turn and replay pathetic conversations and moments where you wish you had more to say. It’s in those restless nights where you finally have the time to confront your feelings and actions and recognize that you’re not as poignant or forward as you want to be. Keegan sings on the track, “you always take the leap of faith, I stay where I know it’s safe, a dream, a distant dream.”
Kitchen’s music is simultaneously so bare yet so cloaked in fuzziness that it gives this feeling of a distant daydream. His music quite literally feels like “snow on the dead brown leaves” as he sings on one of his earliest songs “November Prayer.” It’s the moment you hear wind gushing outside your window as you grab your comforter tighter and curl it around your toes. It’s the four step distance you walk behind your friends when you think you sense sparks between them and don’t want to be overbearing. It’s hesitant and it’s bold. It’s pathetic and abashed, yet confident and unashamed. Everytime I felt like I didn’t have the words, I wished I could send somebody a Kitchen song that matched my emotions. Keegan expresses your feelings and takes away the fear of sounding pathetic so you hold it in until the moment has passed and there’s nothing you can do about it now.
In our digital age, we share everything online; even our dumbest thoughts that consist of a new iteration of hawk tuah recalling a Silver Jews or Sparklehorse lyric find a home on Twitter and our most revealing selfies that also show off a new band poster freshly picked out from the local record store to make sure the person you like knows how indie you are can live on Instagram for 24 hours. It almost feels like nobody has a sense of shame anymore, yet we all do. We’re just looking for somebody who will relate to us and make us feel like our words and feelings hold some weight. Everything moves so quickly that we start to lose a sense of ourselves. We live in an age where a like on an Instagram story means more than a wave at a show or a nod at the bar, so we’re always thinking about our next tweet, or what song to post on our story and the most relatable Letterboxd review. I have less and less of an actual person to hold onto and more of a figure of a person, shapeless and malleable, nothing on the inside but a projection of what I think I want to be.
Kitchen’s music is so magical to me because it reminds me of moments and pieces of myself that I forgot existed. While losing yourself in the world he creates within his albums, you somehow become more aware of yourself and your environment. I fear sometimes that if I don’t listen to his music I’ll forget the streets I’ve walked down 100 times because I was always listening to his music while doing so. I’ll forget how the dying streetlight blinks in time with “I Want You” and I’ll miss the people having a fight outside of the bar while Keegan sings “when I was a kid so obsessed with love, a word with permanence, you fall and don’t get up.” Rain doesn’t fall as peacefully when it’s not being soundtracked by “World is Big” and smiles from strangers as I pass the gas station don’t seem as genuine when I don’t have the reassurance of “Already Going Home” in my headphones.
Photo by Eilee Centeno at The Attic in Chicago
During his performance at The Attic, a house venue in Logan Square, Chicago just a few hours before the interview, I felt myself slipping in and out of consciousness. Huddled around the five-piece ensemble framed by beautiful wooden ceilings and stained glass windows overlooking the neighborhood park, dripping sweat from the back of my neck, I wrapped my arm around my brother as tears swelled in my eyes, feeling a sense of belonging and comfort I had thought I’d lost. One moment I was zeroed in on every movement on stage, the next I was completely blacked out singing along to “Domino” and imagining every step I’ve taken mumbling along to that song in my hometown in North Carolina, being reminded of every time I looked up at a stop light and felt my heart sink and long to slip into one of the strangers passing me on the street.
I started thinking about how Hanif Abdurraqib profiled artists, usually making them seem larger than life. It feels like an innate human reaction to obsess over people and hold them up to standards that are above themselves. Maybe it was because I had just read a chapter in his book, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, about the Weekend and his superhero-like ability to turn a crowd of thousands of people into sex-crazed animals, and it made me think about the humor in how most people obsess over huge pop stars, people like Taylor Swift or Drake who have big personalities and heaps of charm and charisma, but the person I obsess over is an artist with the posture of Bart Simpson who works at a fast food restaurant, and maybe everyone should make that pivot, too.
Maybe looking up to figures that are larger than life is what’s stopping us from making the changes in our daily routine that will push us towards a realization that we can take small actions to get us out of this mind numbing repetition. If our inspirations are more grounded in everyday life and our peers, then the disconnect between our motivations and our willingness to delve into our passions will disappear.
Even Keegan’s recording process when making a Kitchen album is reflective and representative of how it seems our generation is feeling. There’s tons of kids who are getting into analog recording with the hunger to connect to a creative process that grows with you and naturally takes the shape of your environment. It’s harder to delete or record over a mistake on a tape recording, but it becomes easier to accept and work with it, forming the rest of your recording process around that moment.
“I was really inspired by Spirit of the Beehive for a while and I moved away from tape recordings, but then I stopped doing the computer stuff so much because it’s all MIDI and you can get any sound you want. You can make an instrument play any sound you want. Most of what I like about a lot of the music I listen to is that it feels very natural and feels like things happen almost by accident,” Keegan said when talking about the evolution of his recording process.
There’s a sense of satisfaction that you get when committing to things, whether it’s finally finishing that Cormac McCarthy book that’s been sitting on your shelf for a year, or completing a week of journal entries, or following through on plans to hangout with your friends, sticking to your word is one of the hardest things to do especially when we are constantly distracted by the endless cycle of Instagram reels from friends we have to watch or new Pitchfork articles we have to read and argue about on Twitter. We’ve become so scared to share any imperfection of ourselves or our work that we often lose all strength to do anything at all, but Keegan has learned to embrace imperfections during his recording and writing process and even finds stability in them.
“When I was recording ‘Pike’ years ago I accidentally recorded one second over every track so there was a gap in the song that I couldn’t fix and I ended up having to re-record the whole thing. This was one of the worst mistakes I ever made while recording and the track was shaping up to be exactly how I wanted it, but it ended up being even better when I re-recorded it.”
After years of recording, Keegan has found a method that works well for him, bridging all of his influences into a succinct and memorable writing and recording style. In a short period of time Keegan has been able to create a distinct sound for himself that goes past his abilities to write catchy and relatable pop tunes. From the minute you hear the tape hiss, to the first down stroke of his guitar, to his shaky voice breaking over the track, you immediately settle into the comfortability of his work, allowing yourself to let your walls down as he does in the same breath. The combination of digital and analog recording styles is a reflection of the world he wants to create, full of imperfections, insecurities, and timidness, as well as patience, desire, and care.
Keegan described how his most recent record was made through this process, “You can hear when it’s tape stuff. ‘Fall’ is all digital, but ‘Halloween in August’ is a blend. The first half was recorded on a boombox and the second half was recorded into logic. The vocals were all recorded into the boom box, and then I cut them up and put them on top of the track.”
There’s so much care that goes into Kitchen’s recordings. His music builds upon intense swells, yet they’re never emphasized by crashing symbols or heightened vocals. They’re intensified by the realization of seeing yourself in Keegan’s music more and more. The lyrics become more weighted and backed by the world he creates throughout his albums. While his records may not be conceptually planned, there’s lots of nuance that leads you from song to song. “I Want You” wouldn’t make you cry as hard if it didn’t follow “Halloween in August,” continuing in Keegan’s story pining over someone. He has such a unique way of making you see the beauty in the mundane, and genuinely walk away feeling it. Weaving instrumental interludes between songs carries the feelings over from one place to another, transporting emotional spells from one song to another.
The other night I watched the movie The Lunchbox by Ritesh Batra, and in it the main character passed a street artist who painted the same place every day, but in each painting there were small differences. A kid riding a bike, a guy walking a dog, a couple holding hands would appear somewhere in the painting. The main character thought he saw himself in one of the paintings so he bought it and held the painting to his chest the whole train ride home. Keegan’s music feels like bits and pieces of a larger feeling. Each time I listen to a Kitchen song I see myself in a different world. His music is instantly so familiar that you sink into his world so instantaneously, holding on to your own memories and creating more within his albums. In a time where feelings are so quickly passed through, especially in the way that we’ve become accustomed to consuming and processing feelings, Kitchen’s music is so permanent and tender. His music instills a sort of stillness that feels very important and impactful right now. “Everything I do is cautious, can’t make my arms do what I want.”
“I think I process stuff very slowly. It takes me a really long time to figure out how I feel about something a lot of the time. By the time I figure it out, it’s a little bit too late to do anything about it but write a song. Maybe that sounds fucked up.”
Unknowingly, Kitchen connects rooms full of kids acting like adults based around a sense of hope that while we outwardly try and project how unique we are, we all feel the same sense of desperation, hopelessness, and passion. At his show he closed with one of my favorite songs, “Demon (Yellow)” and it only feels right to me to end this piece by quoting my favorite lines from it because Keegan always has the words for when I don’t, “crossing oceans, desperate phrasing I can’t talk cause I’m too lazy.”
Keegan just announced that you can now pre-order the first Kitchen album, town, on both vinyl and cassette. You can purchase a copy here. Kitchen will also be playing a few upcoming shows with Hello Shark in Troy, NY on November 15th and in Buffalo, NY on the 16th, then in Rochester on the 17th with Spencer Radcliffe, Hello Shark, Attic Abasement and A Wonderful.
“I can be sweet as candy” is the opening line on Joyer’s latest EP, I See Forward and Back. The delivery is timid but sincere, like most of the gentle vocals on the project, maintaining a warmth throughout the three track stringing of hazy, slowcore melodies and contorted soundscapes. I See Forward and Back is both an extension of Nick and Shane Sullivan’s fifth album, Night Songs, and an entity entirely its own. Though unified as a collection of songs conceived in late hours, where Night Songs toys with catchy pop hooks and vocal-centered tracks, I See Forward and Back strips down to the themes of Joyer’s earlier work, with gentle vocals drowning in and out of an abraded, DIY production.
Along with offering a more home cooked annex to Night Songs, I See Forward and Back highlighted Joyer’s range as multidisciplinary artists. The brother duo strung all three songs into one video, a collaging of black and white clips. Akin to the EP’s sound, the visuals are texture heavy, ranging from the soft print of a thumb to brutalist scenes of a scrapyard.
Recently, the ugly hug caught up with Joyer to discuss their tour, the power of shelving projects, and I See Forward and Back.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity
Manon Bushong: Your EP, I See Forward and Back contains songs that were written in the early stages of your album Night Songs. Do you often revisit music once you’ve fleshed out a project, and how does that distance affect how you feel about your work, and what you want to do with it?
Nick Sullivan: I guess it’s kind of new for us. I feel like we let songs hang for a while, a lot of times we won’t really go back to them. A lot of these songs started with Shane, so I feel like he could speak to the distance.
Shane Sullivan: I started writing them a while ago and shelved them because I never really expected them to go anywhere, but I always really liked them. It was unique to revisit them, and it was cool to have Nick jump in and add new ideas, like a bunch of cool percussion that I hadn’t thought about when I was initially writing them. It definitely was a new process for us, but I’m glad we did it and might be something that we continue to try to do just because I tend to write something, but then my attention span is kind of short and I move on to the next thing. It was a cool exercise, forcing myself to revisit and put out older stuff.
MB: There’s also a visual element to this project, you put all of the songs all together for one video. What was the process for that and what made you want to pick those three songs specifically?
SS: Honestly, I started working on these as a part of a class project back when I was in college. I was always interested in doing a visual EP, or a visual component to a collection of songs. I was in a class where I had to make a video, and at that point I was realizing how much I liked making music, so I would come up with any excuse to write music and songs for other projects I had to. So it started as a class project, but I ended up really liking the songs and the video work and I felt it was really interesting having them inform each other. I hadn’t done anything like that before, so it was a really fun way of making something – sitting on it and releasing it all these years later gives me a new appreciation for them.
Further on the topic of visuals, the EP’s cover art has a bull/cow, similar to Night Songs, but the image is also a bit simpler and in black and white. What was the story behind the cover art for I See Forward and Back, and how it ties to Night Songs?
SS: I think we definitely wanted to highlight the link between this EP and Night Songs since it’s an extension of it. So similar imagery, it’s a still from the video – our grandma had a painting that I shot little fragments of. I remembered that being a frame that I really liked, and felt suited the songs, and also matched the album art of Night Songs. So we just wanted to highlight that link, since this was all birthed out of the Night Songs songwriting process.
MB: So these were all collectively part of the writing process for Night Songs, but while it is an extension, it also feels like its own body of work, and I think that a lot of that comes from different production styles. How did you go about production differently, and how do you think that it affected the overall feel?
SS: I feel like it’s a fun glimpse into how we approach the songwriting process because we usually demo a bunch at home, and the songs change a lot in the studio. Usually we’ll write a ton of songs and then pick a solid 15-ish to bring to the studio, and then from there cut it down to 10 to 12. These were ones we liked the way they sounded lo-fi, but in the past when we’ve tried to bring songs that we like lo fi into the studio, it doesn’t really capture what we were going for originally. It made me kind of nervous because it is a little bit more vulnerable, but I thought it would be something cool to highlight the home-recorded and stripped down nature of where our songs usually begin. Another thing about Night Songs is we recorded close to 20 songs, even though it ended up being 12, and there were a lot of different styles of songwriting within those 20. I think we ended up picking the track list that we have now because that was what fit, so it’s interesting to me because the whole album could have sounded more like this EP, and it’s cool to see what it could have been if we went forward with that.
MB: I know you explored some new sounds on Night Song, how has it been playing that album live? Do you think you’re going to incorporate some of these off the EP in your touring as well?
NS: Yeah, it’s been a lot of fun. I feel like Night Songs is way more fun to play live than some of our older stuff, so we’ve been really enjoying it. It’s louder and faster but also has some quieter moments. We will hopefully include the songs off the EP into our live set eventually – we never really thought about it, so a day or two ago, before we left for a tour, we were like ‘damn I guess we should have gotten those ready’. They’re a bit trickier because they’re so stripped down, and have a lot of ambient noises interlaced within them. It’s like a fun puzzle for us to figure out how to make live versions. We’re just excited to get on the road again, we’re touring with some of our favorite bands, so, I think it’ll be a blast.
You can now stream I See Forward and Back and Night Songs on all platforms as well as purchase a cassette of Night Songshere via Hit the North Records
Written by Manon Bushong | Featured Photo by Juliette Boulay
Today, New York’s Toadstool Records has shared Let’s Be Friends: A Tribute to the Beach Boys, a 28-song compilation album of beloved Beach Boys songs benefiting the Billion Oyster Project and Mutual Aid Disaster Relief.
In a statement, Toadstool’s founder, Caroline Gay, shared, “In the lead up to the United States presidential election, climate change has become a hard reality. The United States’ support of Israel’s military assault on Palestine is not only a humanitarian disaster, but has had an immense effect on the climate. Combined with Donald Trump’s outright denial of climate change and rollback of over 100 environmental regulations during his presidency, the United States’ hand in the global climate catastrophe cannot be ignored.”
The comp includes contributions from artists like Joe Fox, The Fruit Trees, ghost crab, ebb, orbiting, djdj, Billy Plastered, Gavin Serafini, Luca Vincent, Bill Hagan and Friends, Luke Lowrance, Cephalid Breakfast, Daniel Um and many more.
All profits will be split between Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, a grassroots mutual aid network whose mission is to provide crisis relief based on the principles of solidarity, mutual aid, and autonomous direct action, and Billion Oyster Project who works with local communities to restore oyster reefs in New York City. Oyster reefs provide habitat for many species, and can protect New York from storm damage — lessening the impact of large waves, while aiding with flood and erosion control.
About the comp’s album cover, Caroline also shares, “Beach Boys fans will appreciate the artwork for this compilation, a custom piece by Matthew Durkin. It contains references to Smiley Smile (the house, plant on the backside of the album) and Friends (using a very similar typeface as seen on the album cover) all combined to make an original piece for this compilation.”
You can purchase Let’s Be Friends: A Tribute to the Beach Boys exclusively on bandcamp.
As a small music journal, we rely heavily on the work of independent tape labels to discover and share the incredible artists that we have dedicated this site to. Whether through press lists, recommendations, artist connections, social media support or supplying physicals, these homemade labels are the often unsung heroes of the industry. Today, the ugly hug is highlighting the work of our friends over at Devil Town Tapes.
Devil Town Tapes is a deeply rooted indie tape label run by Jack Laurilla, based out of Leeds, UK. With a focus on the found community that comes with sharing music, Devil Town Tapes has not only established themselves as a spearhead in the UK, but continues to grow in pockets of the U.S. as well. With an expansive set, focused on the niche creative corners that the label handles, Devil Town has housed the work of artists such as lots of hands, Greg Mendez, Snowhore, Conor Lynch, Dilary Huff, boxset, Noah Roth and many more, all differing in styles and sounds but connected by a through line of the people that help make it so special.
We got to catch up with Jack to talk about how Devil Town Tapes came to be, what he sees in the growing community and what keeps him in the game to release physical music.
Jack Laurilla, Founder of Devil Town Tapes
This interview has been edited for length and clarity
Shea Roney: What made you want to start a label? Did you have a clear vision from the beginning, or goals you were hoping to accomplish?
Jack Laurilla: It officially started in 2019, I’d wanted to do the label for a long time before then, but I didn’t really know how. I mean, I still don’t really know how to do it [laughs]. I started seriously getting into music as a listener when I went to university in Kingston, which is just outside London. There was a really great record store there called Banquet Records, and that really shaped a lot of how I listen to music. That’s when I started collecting music physically as well on CD and vinyl. I started to see the same [label] stamps on every single record – a lot of stuff from Topshelf, Run For Cover and all those guys, and I kind of didn’t really realize how much these labels were shaping my tastes. I would go away and see what records that they had released, then I’d go to Banquet the next day and get them, and invariably I’d always like them. That idea of a record label being able to shape taste in that way was something I’d never really considered and that was kind of the start of thinking like, ‘oh, this is an interesting way of communicating to people.’
At the time, the only way I knew how to release music physically in that way would have been through vinyl, which, as a student, was just impossible for me to do. So I completely parked my idea while I was doing my degree. When I finished Uni, I moved back to Bournemouth, which is kind of a small, retirement town down South. Going from Kingston, where music was everywhere, crazy bands like The Hotelier and Foxing would be playing small pubs all around, all of this really formative music to me, to then going back to Bournemouth, where there were only a few people doing gigs, felt like more of a hostile environment for being involved in DIY music. I was really kind of craving that sense of music community which I had back when I was at Uni, and that’s when I started thinking about how I could start making that happen myself, rather than just complaining about it.
SR: When did the cassette tape become a feasible format for you?
JL: Around that same time as well I discovered Bandcamp. There were no record stores in Bournemouth so it really filled that void for me, particularly finding Z Tapes. The kind of music that was being released by them was really inspiring, and the idea of tape as a format was just not on my radar before. I mean, it was a format I loved when I was a kid, the first music that I owned was on cassette tape, but I didn’t realize that was still happening, particularly in the DIY space. It’s just so much more accessible and it felt like it was, as a medium, more democratic, so all of those things combined kind of gave me the push to be like, ‘this is something that I can do’.
omes and Cult Film at Vinilo Record Store, Southampton 2019
SR: When it came to the point where you could start releasing music, what kind of artists did you look for?
JL: At the time, because I was trying to seek that community more locally, a lot of it was local. There wasn’t an abundance of gigs going on in Bournemouth. A lot of it was just scouring through Bandcamp and Soundcloud, just trying to find stuff tagged to Bournemouth or neighboring cities. I was very lucky that I was able to stumble across some artists who happen to live nearby and were also making the exact kind of music that I was interested in. I mean at the time, although they were local to me, they only seemed to exist online, so it was kind of a happy accident how the first few artists I worked with came about.
SR: Who were some of those first artists you worked with?
JL: The very first one was Cult Film [Chapman Lee], who I just stumbled upon on Soundcloud. I just felt like I could immediately relate to it. I reached out to him over Facebook, and he was very, very gracious, and agreed to let me release his music. Looking back, retrospectively, I was just a complete stranger, reaching out to say, ‘I would like to put your music out on tape, please,’ with no track record of doing that before, so it was amazing that he took what I was offering in good faith. I think the success of that first release is still kind of the motivation to keep releasing stuff. Starting off with just a selection of tracks, and then taking it through to something that people can hold in their hands. We also did a launch gig as well, and seeing so many people share that space around music that you’ve had a small part in bringing to them was really, really special to me. I’m constantly chasing that feeling with each and every thing that comes out on the label.
Launch Gig Poster made by Jake Martin
SR: After you put out that first release and began looking for more artists, did you continue to search out music that you could relate to?
JL: Definitely, I feel like a lot of the music I release is always reflecting my taste at the time. I would never want there to be like a house style or sound to be expected, you know what I mean? I see the artist’s as kindred spirits in a way, and that’s how I like to approach deciding what to release on the label . Whether that’s through the emotion that they’re conveying through their music, or a shared DIY ethos. Stylistically the music can be really different from the last release, but it still shares that throughline, in a way.That’s what keeps it fun.
SR: With those first handful of releases being UK artists, you’ve since expanded to the U.S. putting out great music from artists like Edie McKenna, Greg Mendez, Conor Lynch and a few others. How did you discover this music and how did you connect with these artists?
JL: Yes, the first two were very local. Cult Film and omes [Omar De Col], who is also from Bournemouth. After those I kind of just naturally started finding artists from further afield. It was a healthy mix between people reaching out to me and me approaching them. I guess the label exists, not only in the physical space, but also online as well, so it only made sense that I was interested in music from outside my postcode. But there has always been this throughline of people feeling connected to others on the label, particularly with artists like Bedtime Khal, Conor Lynch and Edie McKenna. Bedtime Khal is good friends with Conor, Edie has sung on Conor’s records, and, Conor has also supported Greg Mendez in the past. So even though they’re far away from me geographically, I still feel like there’s that sense of community, and all the artists are still connected in a way that doesn’t feel scattered, you can still see the connective tissue between all of them, which is really important to me.
Cult Films, omes and Jack at DIY Southampton
SR: Can you share a few personal favorite releases or projects that you’ve worked on that left some sort of impact on you, whether that be the experience, something you learned or just from pure enjoyment.
JL: There are quite a few, and all for different reasons. The compilation that we put out, which was our 11th release, was a special project for me to work on, as it featured the first five artists that we’d worked with. They had original songs on side A and covers of each other’s tracks on side B. And just the idea of them having mutual admiration for each other’s music and covering each other’s tracks was really cool to me. It was also an opportunity for me to collaborate with my friend Bo, who did all the artwork for it. He’s always done the Devil Town Tapes logos and he did all of the artwork for this as well. It just felt like every single person who’d been involved in the label up to that point was involved in this thing and it just kind of commemorates that period of time that started everything.
Poster for Welcome To… Compilation Tape
There is also a record that we reissued from Snowhore, the solo name for Veronica Mendez, who is now playing as Mary Saint Mary. That was a great record to be involved in because I’ve never reissued anything before, and it got me excited about the idea of, how by releasing music, I can archive it. Being able to do that for a record that I loved, which hadn’t been released physically before but one that I think is a classic, brought on this realization of what the role of a label can be in preserving music as well. I’m always acutely aware that the online spaces that we inhabit aren’t going to be arond forever. But once something exists physically, you’ve got an archive of it, whether it’s the 30 or 40 copies like one of our releases, or whether it’s a thousand copies, they’re always going to be there. I’ve always liked the idea that the tapes will end up somewhere really weird, and someone will find them in a car boot sale or something like twenty years down the line and rediscover them all over again.
SR: Talking about the digital landscapes, as someone who cherishes the physicality of community that comes with sharing music, what keeps you in the game and excited to keep working with physical music?
JL: I feel like great music deserves to be remembered. So if I can help to preserve the legacy of a record, I want to do that. That’s what keeps me motivated to keep going for sure, and it will never not be exciting to hold a tape in my hands, especially with something I’m so involved in, like the physical products. I’m dubbing all the tapes at home, I’m printing out the sleeves and cutting and folding them. It’s a privilege to be involved in other people’s art in that way.
SR: How does collaboration shape the way the label functions?
JL: Although I’m kind of there to drive it, I do need that collaboration to keep it interesting. Each release is definitely a collaboration, it’s always a conversation between myself and the artist. If I have ideas for things that might work well with the physical release I will offer up my opinion, but it’s their music so I always want to be in service to the record and to their vision. Every relationship is built from a mutual respect for each other as well, so the whole process is always a conversation. Also my partner Tas does a million different things with the label as well, she’s an illustrator and graphic designer, and is always helping to advise me on the visual side of the label. It’s really important for me to have that second opinion, because I can definitely get lost in the weeds and obsessed over tiny details.
Tas at Merch Stand at Vinilo Record Store, Southampton 2019
SR: You brought up how the label is a conversation in practice. Do you ever feel like it becomes a conversation with yourself, in that you are trying to find that balance between your work and life and something you deeply care about.
JL: Yeah, a hundred percent. My release schedule can be either really intense or non-existent and that’s kind of just depending on my energy at the time, because I’m always like trying to just find windows when I’m busy at work, and when it’s quiet. But sometimes when I’m emailing all day at work, the idea of coming home and looking at a screen again for a few hours is the last thing I want to do. I’m always trying to keep a healthy and fun relationship with it all, allowing myself to feel like it’s okay to take a step away from it. The label is a constant and will always be there to return to when I’m ready, just existing [laughs].
SR: For those who are looking to start their own tape label, what do you wish you knew when you were starting out and do you have any advice for them?
JL: I didn’t necessarily know what I was doing when I started, which is okay. The main thing was being motivated to do it, and I feel like if you’re motivated to do it, then you’ll seek out those answers quite naturally and find people who can give you those answers. There’s nowhere to read a ‘how to’ on releasing a tape, but if you’re inspired to release a tape then that’s the most important thing. So much of DIY is operated in good faith as well, and being able to remain in dialogue with people and being honest is really important as well.
SR: Do you have anything on the horizon for Devil Town Tapes?
JL: Yes! We have the debut album from Bedtime Khal, which has been really, really cool to work on, because he was one of the first few artists that I worked with. I’ve released one of his EPs and reissued a couple of his releases and this debut album is really sick.
Along with this series, our friends at Devil Town Tapes are offering a five tape bundle giveaway in celebration of this collaboration! The bundle will include For Edie (2024) by Edie McKenna, Slow Country (2024) by Conor Lynch, Don’t Forget to Remember (2023) by Noah Roth, Hard to Find / Wake Up (2021) Bedtime Khal, batch_six (2020) by boxset and a Devil Town pin badge.
To enter the giveaway, follow these easy steps below!
the ugly hug 