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 Texas/New York-based artist Lefty Parker.
Last month, Lefty Parker shared Ark via Airloom Records. The album was recorded in October of 2023 with Buck Meek – of whom Lefty has built a hearty collaborative and personal relationship upon the foundation of a shared love for songwriting, surfing, and tender creativity. The record’s live band also features Adam Brisbin and Jesse Turley, with additional contributions from Adrianne Lenker, Germaine Dunes, James Krivchenia, Michael Sachs, Mat Davidson of Twain and Michael Bushais.
Recently, I spoke with Lefty about seeking the same impact from music as the one experienced during one’s teenage years. It was a notion that resonated with me heavily, despite the fact that neither of us could quite articulate it in a way that surpassed the complexity of feelings that “music hit harder” amidst a more youthful time. Whenever I find myself enamored and vigorously moved by music, I notice that it’s a feeling I associate with being eighteen and “discovering” music for the first time. Perhaps there are nostalgia factors at play, but I also think it marks a time where one simultaneously develops in identity, and (at least in my experience), discovers music outside the realm of what is merely fed to you. Music that is not on the radio, perhaps music hatched from a slimmer budget, music that is not perfect and music that does not boast dozens of names credited behind it. Music that is complex, personal, interesting, humble. Music that makes you fall in love with music.
We were not doing an interview, this was merely a fleeting conversational moment I pocketed in between visits to the heaps of overstimulating dollar stores on Broadway, but when I sat down to write about Lefty’s latest record, I found myself returning to my own conclusions about music’s potency and adolescence. Ark is an album that sneaks up on you; it’s warm and grounded, it’s raw, but approachable. You do not quite notice the ways it burrows further upon each listen until it’s too late. Until you feel completely ambushed by the intense emotional weight within Lefty’s unfettered vocals, and their subtle but profound shifts. Until you find yourself entirely enamored by the airy strings and stunning woodwind accents. Until the vulnerable vignettes of Ark feel like your own.
Ark is the kind of album that turns straw to gold. It’s a familiar twangy silhouette, relying on organic instrumentation and mosaics of heartache you have likely heard before. And yet, it manages to strike in a way that feels almost foreign, in the way that powerful art can elicit a feeling of hearing music for the first time. It’s a meandering tale of the diligence of experiencing life, of the never ending cycle of getting lost and finding yourself, of seeking guidance in things that feel larger than us. It’s a beautiful and comforting and human listen, and it’s one that can touch you regardless of the chapter of life you are currently amidst.
“If it meant that much to you, would you say it, would you shy away?” Carolina Chauffe asks this not as a challenge, but as a kind of prayer. Their voice doesn’t seek an answer; it simply opens a clearing for one. This is an invitation anyone who has spent time with hemlock knows well. There is no backing away—only a breath reaching towards you, hands grabbing the warm fabric draped across their body to wipe the fog from your glasses, so you can see how delicate yet beautiful things are when you allow someone else to see you, too. And then, when a hemlock song ends, the wires are tucked behind your ears again. The world feels a little nearer, like you’ve been returned to it. This is the gift they give: revealing precision, refusing possession.
The five songs that make up Orange Streak Glow appear as bursts of light. Sometimes brief, sometimes steady. One may be the extra birthday candle, wedged into the layered sponge. Proof that the laces stayed tied for another lap. The next, a bulb that flickers back on, revived when you jostle the shade. And then it’s a color stretched across the sky, or smeared like a melted popsicle on hot pavement. Or perhaps you’ll see it as the kind of light that lives in storage: a tangled string collecting cobwebs, placed in a box beneath the stairs, until December arrives and the glow is asked to return. And what a miracle it is when you plug that string in, and each tiny spark strikes—ready to be temporarily wrapped and tucked around a tree standing straight and tall. Already dying, but displayed and danced around for a moment, as if it could not be more alive.
There is a glow, too, that arrives in the middle of the night and lights up a screen. A notification that makes you sit up, unplug, and walk over to the fire, letting the flame catch in the corners of your teary eyes. This is how I was introduced to “In That Number,” a song that mixes the familiar, “When The Saints Go Marching In,” with a feeling that pours out like smoke from a chimney. Now awake in a pitch black room, I removed myself from a twin-sized bed that was not mine, scared to be the stranger leaving stains on white pillowcases. Before I knew it I was curled up on the floor with my hands cupped beneath my face, rerouting the tears through the creases so I could watch them disappear down my sleeves. In the background, whistling like a teakettle, I could hear Maya Bon (of Babehoven) confidently coo: “I’m not scared of the water / I’m here comin’ back down / Feel the burn, face the fire,” and every word rang true. I was not scared of the stream coursing through me. Nor was I scared to realize I wanted something to reach out and touch me, unafraid to squeeze my soaked palm.
What does it mean to ask for that contact? What does it mean to offer it? Nestled in the center of the EP, I hear Carolina circle the same sentence, ink digging deeper into the page, “I am a clothespin and you are the laundry line,” and like playing musical chairs, I start looking for my line, wondering if I’ll find it before the music stops. I ask myself: What spool can I wrap around? What ear will hold my voice when I cannot listen anymore? I send a signal (a burst of light) to someone I’ve begun stacking piles of laundry beside: ‘What do you make of this lyric?’ They respond and talk about what provides structure and what provides support. I propose that maybe it’s about how we view our purpose. I am gently reminded that there are clothes involved too and someone must be mindful of the weight as they are hanging them. The spring between my two fragile limbs decides it wants to hold on tighter and longer. Binding is less daunting when you are choosing to endure and weather the same storms together, finding there is light in the shared strain. Or sometimes, there’s no strain at all. Just light.
The songs on Orange Streak Glow echo both the pain and the pleasure that come with admitting you have been altered by something—by someone. They are songs that understand that all communication is an act of faith. That to name something is to risk misnaming it. That in the end, the words that slice us open might also stitch us back together. That we hold the same power that someone holds over us. Because the truth is the safety we find in honesty might someday become the thing that tells us we need to pack up and leave. Taking what is now unburied with us, along with a basket of our deconstructed fragments, eager to hold onto something again.
In the days before hemlock’s latest EP landed like a feather in my lap, I was hiding away in a town near Hudson, NY, not far from 12lb Genius, where it was recorded. I was stumbling and circling the same sentence, tracing the thin lines between my teeth with my tongue. I was looking at a faded ‘You Are Here’ mark on a map, not really sure where ‘here’ was, or where ‘there’ was either, for that matter. The rain followed me and sometimes I was too slow to outrun it. Wet leaves stuck to my socks and became the inner linings of my boots. I found a frozen blue raindrop one morning, after the storms passed, and put it in my pocket. Something told me that even if I were to hang my jacket on the line, that one drop—if it ever thawed and pooled—would not dry. It would stain, it would burn a hole, it would leave a mark. And I wanted nothing more.
So what does it truly mean, to look at something you long to care for and reflect it back, offering structure and support? To say you will choose something even if it doesn’t choose you back? The first time I held the title track in my ear, in those final moments before the engine turns off in the driveway, I thought: This is the hemlock I know. A season returned, a holiday, a solid oak. There are some people who don’t just reach out for you, but remind you that it is possible to place your own finger on the map. They show you that what surrounds you has a pulse—hums—and you are welcome to join its choir, as both a listener and participant. It’s there, somewhere between the glow and the dark, as something you cannot see chirps, that you realize you were never outside of the equation at all. To choose nothing is not an option when every rustle has its own weight. What better choice is there than to take the thing you long for and turn it into a melody of your own? While there’s no knowing, you might just find that someone will push past the branches, look right at you, and sing it back.
The members of ira glass do not agree on everything. They have varying music backgrounds, varying listening tastes, varying stances on the accordion. They are four different people, after all – simply being in an experimental noise rock band together is not going to file down their differences and turn them into one homogenous organism. Nor should it, I cannot imagine the music would be nearly as enticing if it were produced by an army of clones. However, if there’s one thing the Chicago-based four piece can agree on, it’s webcore. They love ARGs and “low-res digital stuff”. They enjoy grueling scavenger hunts on archive.com, sifting through mounds of digital muck for something that resonates with them. They have created projections that collage videos sourced from Youtube rabbit holes. ira glass like making their own sense of the vastness of the web – spinning the overwhelming mounds of data it holds into a narrative of sorts, whether or not it’s decipherable to anyone else. Whether or not it’s even decipherable to them. “It’s like a willed, forced synthesis,” drummer Landon Kerouac notes amidst the webcore portion of our call. “A montage that doesn’t make sense but kind of works.”
ira glass’ approach to music is not too different from their mutually savored internet practices. In fact it’s essentially the exact same – though they would probably never say that, because they are not really the type of band to overly anatomize and delineate their own creative process. If anything, they are allergic to approaching music with too much cogitation, telling me that the act of intentionally striving to create something acutely new and never done before is a “nebulous, almost flawed way to go about art.” ira glass is not trying to forge some cunning new genre, in the same sense that they have no interest in tethering themselves to one that already exists. They just want to make music that they like. Music that resonates with them. Music that feels genuine.
The result is some sort of epic auditory Frankenstein; its appendages pulling both from the band’s external inspirations and “the id”. Out today, their caustic sophomore EP, joy is no knocking nation, is a sensical quilt that honors fragments and facets of their life at the time it was created. Some are discernible, like post-hardcore and jazz influences, wrath induced by infestations of faux-alternative characters, ambitions to experiment with unorthodox instruments, etc. Others cannot be outlined as easily, yet manage the same authentic impact. It’s an abrasive and charged listen, but never in a way that feels forced. The emotions are real, finding themselves in a sometimes crooked composition that winds up and down and adjourns when it needs to. It’s intense in a human way, and it’s honest without overly earnest lyricism.
“I just don’t like relying on the same old tropes, old school screamo doesn’t appeal to me,” vocalist Lise Ivanova tells me about her thoughts on lyrics. “It’s all very misanthropic or self-hating and I don’t feel that.” Instead of honing this sort of cynical pity-party poetry or accumulating shreds of intense vulnerability from their own lives, ira glass’ lyrics are detached and labyrinthine-like. They can be funny and intense and idiosyncratic, they can mean something to you if you’d like or they can just exist as another enigmatic component of the EP’s experience. It doesn’t really matter, the point is they exist in the same way as everything else ira glass creates; free from functional pressures and dilettante natures. It’s an ethos that glues together the eccentricity of their latest EP, and it’s contagious within the listen. Even in joy is no knocking nation’s harshest moments, characterized by discordant clamors of noise and shrill screaming, there is a lingering sense of comfort – perhaps even a certain catharsis, chipping away at the weight of various pressures and demands and self-inflicted factors that prevent you from just being your fucking self.
We recently spoke to ira glass about curating discomfort, “lame fake-alt people”, and joy is no knocking nation, out today via Angel Tapes.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Manon: I’d love to hear how you guys just started playing music together. How did you meet and when did you start ira glass?
Lise: I moved to Chicago in October of 2022, I had lived in LA prior and had been trying to start a band there, but LA was not really fertile for bands. So when I moved to Chicago, I was dead set on starting a band, and I put up a bunch of flyers within a week of moving here, recruiting for a noise rock project and Landon was among the first to respond. We met at Whirl Away Lounge on Fullers End and talked about our influences and then we later recruited Jill – Jill and Landon know each other.
Jill: We used to work together at this french cafe.
Landon: Basically, Lise and I met in this almost romantic way – like a flyer, but then our two other members we know from day to day life.
Lise: Kaleb and I go way back. We lived in Albuquerque and were in a band called Thrush, it was a fake band because we only played one show, but it was still a good band. Even though it was a Big Black rip off. That’s how I know Kaleb.
Manon: It was fake because you only played one show?
Lise: Yeah. We practiced so much more than we played.
Manon: You mentioned that LA was not very fertile for bands. How does Chicago compare, and how would you say the scene there in general has impacted Ira Glass over the years?
Lise: I think there are more normal people here that aren’t, like, evil. So it feels better playing here.
Jill: There is a lot of collaboration, everyone is really friendly and they want to play a lot of shows with you and help each other out.
Lise: People are very sincere and driven. I feel like LA is very isolating and everybody is on a solo venture but there are a lot of bands in Chicago and people want to get together and play music with others.
Manon: You mentioned this idea of sincere and “normal people”. I feel like there is a presence of that on this new EP – maybe some exasperations about not normal people, or specifically, “freakos with hand tattoos”. How would you describe your relationship to sincerity?
Lise: Disingenuous people upset me deeply. Yeah. There are social climbers everywhere and there are lame, fake alt people everywhere. I don’t think that is exclusive to Chicago.
Manon: It’s definitely not.
Lise: But, I think there is more of a working class here. I guess that has something to do with it.
Landon: I can’t speak on it lyrically, but with our music and the composition, I think we are not necessarily striving for something new because that’s a really nebulous, almost flawed way to go about art. But also wanting to create something that comes from deep down.
Lise: Something from the id.
Landon: Yeah. [Our composition] is both really innate and also meticulous and thought out. I think that sort of synthesis gives us a sense of sincerity. I feel like we just go, “what feels right?”, and then meticulously work with and edit that material once it has come out of the depths. Would you agree with that?
Lise: Um, I don’t know.
Landon: Okay. Disregard what I just said.
Manon: I can also ask a more specific question about composition. I feel like when you make noise music, the ‘noise’ part is often rather defining, but you have a lot of interesting complementing instrumentals, and I really like a lot of the jazz elements within this EP – especially in the end of “fritz all over you”… that song is stunning. I would love to hear about your general music inspirations, and the kind of sound you were hoping to cultivate in joy is no knocking nation?
Lise: When we first started, I was super influenced by nineties Chicago noise, like classic noise rock, Albini, the Albini scene. And then, I was simultaneously also getting super influenced by mid-late nineties, early two thousands screamo, like Drones, Dream, and Orchid. So I think our first EP, compound turbulence, was definitely more influenced by those things. This EP feels a bit more post-rock, experimental, and post-hardcore. I think we are getting more into the jazz influence. Jill is a jazz head.
Jill: Yeah.
Lise: Jill, go ahead. Jill did jazz band.
Jill: Yeah. Jazz band. Throughout college.
Lise: You come from a jazz lineage.
Jill: Yeah, a lineage of jazz musicians.
Lise: And we all like jazz. I actually wanted a horn because of Brain Bombs, the way they use horns is so different. It’s not influenced by jazz at all. But Jill brings a very melodic kind of influence that I appreciate. Anything else about our influences?
Jill: We all come from relatively different backgrounds.
Lise: Landon, you like a lot of modern and contemporary noise rock.
Landon: Yeah, I definitely admire a lot of the nineties stuff, and I think what is happening with noise right rock right now is super interesting. Bands like Sprain and Shearling. Also Chat Pile. Then bands like Spirit of the Beehive.
Lise: Prostitute.
Landon: Yeah, Prostitute as well. I don’t want to keep listing band names, but I think Spirit of the Beehive is a huge influence compositionally because they don’t really have verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge – you know, it’s not a very orthodox song structure, but it flows really seamlessly. I think for us, maybe instead of seamless, perhaps our song composition is a bit more stitched together.
Lise: Contrived.
Landon: Not contrived.
Lise: Difficult.
Landon: It’s more stitched.
Lise: It’s a laborious taste
Jill: We figure out how to mesh different pieces together.
Lise: We are kind of math influenced in that way. Yeah math rock is also an influence.
Landon: Yeah, it’s this combination of “how can we do upside down music?” and the crazy math stuff and also stay true to the ethos of noise rock?
Lise: The banging rock and roll of it all. Kaleb, what do you like? Kaleb likes dark wave.
Kaleb: I’m more into industrial and German wave stuff. My stint with noise rock is more like Birthday Party and Scratch Acid.
Lise: Aw those are great bands.
Landon: I think some of that comes in with our experimentation with instruments. I think my symbol stacks can definitely be in the industrial realm. I think our horns too, and there is an accordion on the EP.
Lise: Which you hated. And didn’t want to use.
Manon: Anti-accordion?
Jill: He doesn’t like Organs.
Lise: He doesn’t like accordions or organs.
Jill: It’s the harmonics, right?
Landon: No, no. For the accordion…it was simply… I was fine with the accordion…
Lise: He has a fear of sounding goofy.
Landon: It’s a bit of a goofy instrument…
Jill: And the whistle…
Lise: The coaches whistle. He didn’t like that either.
Landon: It’s a bit on the nose.
Lise: Whatever, no big deal.
Landon: I think that the willingness to experiment with instrumentals, like real, storied instruments, is very seventies industrial. Instead of saying “what plug in can we use”, it’s using a kazoo, or a whistle, or something like that.
Lise: We haven’t used a kazoo yet, but it’s in our future. Our near future. Or a harmonica.
Landon: I don’t like the harmonica either.
Lise: You don’t like the harmonica either? Damn Dude.
Landon: No, I’m just joking.
Manon: Did you use the whistle? Or is that also in the near future?
Jill: There’s whistles. One coach whistle, two little whistles.
Lise: There are buried straggler whistles towards the end of the big whistle.
Manon: There’s obviously a level of discomfort to noise music, is that something you enjoy?
Lise: Yeah, we are all generally kind of awkward and uncomfortable people.
Landon: I don’t like music that sounds too pleasant or harmonic. I think the dissonance is really pleasing when it comes to melodies or chords. A word that is used a lot is angular.
Lise: Do you like that word?
Landon: Yeah.
Lise: Landon likes the word angular.
Landon: Angular is cool. There are different flavors of discomfort and dissonance, and I think angular paints a very particular picture to the sort of dissonance that we like. It’s a more intentional discomfort.
Lise: Yeah that’s true, we like dynamics. Contrast. We live for the contrast.
Jill: It can’t all be uncomfortable. You have to lure them in.
Manon: What do you hope to achieve when you play these tracks in a live setting?
Lise: We don’t like banter.
Jill: We don’t talk. We don’t smile.
Lise: Yeah I feel pretty distant from the audience, or I shut the audience out. I don’t even see them, my eyes are closed most of the time. I feel like it’s purely a live display of our music.
Landon: We’re obviously doing this for a love of music. But as we love music in theory, I think sometimes being on stage is like a compulsion. I feel like when I am up there, I’m just reacting to things, and trying my best to keep up with it.
Lise: Yeah, it’s like we’re floating. It feels so dissociative.
Landon: Which is a very unique experience. It’s not the most pleasant, but it can also be crazy rewarding if it feels right.
Lise: We’re playing aggressive and sometimes difficult music. It’s not like the songs come from this place of deep, dark self-loathing, but it still is very emotionally taxing and cathartic.
Manon: So the actual nature of the music is more taxing than the lyrics. Your lyricism is awesome though, very eccentric and a bit convoluted. Can you tell me a bit more about that?
Landon: That’s all Lise, it’s a black box to the rest of us.
Lise: Shit, I don’t know either. I do a lot of unconscious, ‘spitting it out on a page’ writing, or I have done the classic cut-up thing where I try to take lyrics from elsewhere. I like the Melvins’ way of writing, just nonsense that is still really evocative. I think you can use words that do not really make sense and they can still evoke a really strong image, and I think that’s what I am trying to do with my lyrics most of the time.
Landon: As an observer and not necessarily the author, I think it’s sort of like vignettes in a way. Would you say that?
Lise: Sometimes. I’ve been known to write a vignette from time to time. I like to think about strange situations that I haven’t experienced myself and try to describe them. I think about other people’s stories a lot.
Landon: There’s a depravity to it in a way.
Lise: People have said that. I guess it’s depraved.
Written by Manon Bushong | Photo by Derrick Alexander
Puberty serves as a first introduction to deep rooted societal taboos surrounding aging. The whole hormonal mess would suck enough without being met with shudders from adults and painful conversations packaged in animal + insect innuendos. It also never truly dissipates – it seems as though one could be decades removed from juvenescence and still dodge the word with such vehemence, as if so much as uttering “p*berty” might onset a conglomerate of pimples and a poorly timed voice crack. Not MX Lonely. The Brooklyn based four piece has a knack for complementing their harrowingly good melodies with anomalous and deeply memorable lyricism – whether that be chants of astronaut FMK, stomach-pinching anecdotes about substance use, or merely the choice to quote Elliot Smith amidst a face melting bridge. Today, MX Lonely announced forthcoming record, All Monsters, leading with a single about a trans puberty experience.
“Big Hips” takes a facetious approach to the impacts that bodily changes impinge upon someone who is gender nonconforming. The track is inherently satirical; a witty recontextualization of gender dysphoria armed with a brief comedic interlude. However, the visceral impact of “Big Hips” far surmounts its quips, and the track’s weight lingers far beyond its brevity of 2 minutes and 43 seconds.
I would advise your first listen to be via its music video (directed and edited by Owen Lehman). It leads with a few vibrant clips that set you in a school – a ticking clock, a vacant classroom, a fluorescent bathroom. Simultaneously, the track commences on a note of transient delicacy, luring you in with some coy basslines, Rae Hass’ vocals in their more angelic shape, percussion that feels rational. It’s an introduction, familiarizing you with the silhouette of the track’s melody and intentions (which you soon learn, are to inform you about having big hips for a boy) before it detonates into something you feel at the pit of your stomach, something you can’t possibly fit in a locker – no matter how much of your body weight you use to cram it shut.
The chorus is potent and erratic and catchy as hell (an experience amplified by my suggestion to experience with its visuals of blacktop shredding). It leaves you wondering why more “heavy gaze” projects are not reclaiming their juvenile gender dysphoria by shouting dick jokes at you. It makes you smile thinking of a thirteen year old in Ohio hearing it and feeling seen, and it makes you smile thinking of some cis dude in East Williamsburg boasting his big hips as he listens in the Whole Foods protein powder aisle – because god knows the rest of us have clocked enough hours singing along to his narrative.
“Big Hips” is a thrilling first bite of what we can expect from what MX Lonely will carve out on All Monsters, out February 20th via Julia’s War. About the track, Rae says, “Big Hips is a self-mocking celebration of youthful masculinity. Puberty imbues a sense of dread for everyone, but especially trans people. For me, the onset of feminine curves was met with a sort of voyeurism I didn’t feel I was made to be proud of. “Big hips” were something that happened to you rather than something you owned. The song recontextualizes the dysphoria of my youth in the way young boys would jovially proclaim the size of their phalluses (whether it was true or not). It’s a big dick joke.”
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 the New York-based band Docents.
Docents is a four piece with a knack for carving out an eccentric fun house experience in both their live sets and recorded discography. The project was conceived in 2018 in Upstate New York, and today exists as a Brooklyn-based four piece consisting of Noah Sider, Matthew Heaton, Will Scott, and Kabir Kumar-Hardy. In May, Docents released Shadowboxing; the EP a winding mixed bag of theatric, eccentric, and angular sound paired with lyricism that bends back and forth from earnest to outlandish. No matter what sound they are chasing, or how unpredictable their music may seem, it all feels tethered to some sense of reality – it’s as honest and sincere as it is fervent and tumultuous. Today’s Guest List consists of five picks from each member of Docents.
With his first release in four years, Morgan O’Sullivan returns with the latest track from his project, Boreen, titled “Don’t Die!”, the first to be shared from his latest album, Heartbreak Hill out November 21 via Bud Tapes. Beginning back in 2015 when he lived in Portland, Oregon, Boreen has always been a project of marked growth and personal hauntings as O’Sullivan’s writing leads with preservation and perseverance within these corroded love songs and tailored tales that he crafts and performs so well.
“Don’t Die” begins with a piano, one that holds weight to the sticky keys like a family heirloom – uneven, simple and fills the room – as it soon grows amongst the colorful instrumentation. “I was in my bedroom / and far away / the words I didn’t say came rushing forward and took my place / I start to see your face”, O’Sullivan sings, his words weighted against the lofty backdrop of instrumentation as he approaches grief and what comes to follow over time. Soon the track bursts with a gritty guitar solo while indiscernible voicings meddle in the back, filling the void of unanswered questions with the warmth in his production and the comfort in its final release.
About the song, O’Sullivan shares, ““Don’t Die!” is the first song I wrote for this album, and the first song I wrote after my uncle’s suicide in April of 2021. In a lot of ways this song shaped the rest of the album, and the themes that I started with here I kept coming back to over the past three or four years. I see this song, and this album as a whole, as a kind of a stubborn determination to survive. I’m thirty years old now. The older you get, the more life kicks you in the teeth. I wrote these songs at the times when I was most aware of that fact— as a way to record that feeling and visualize the better one that will come tomorrow.
Boreen has always been a solo project, but this album has felt the most collaborative. On “Don’t Die!” the piano was played by Garrett Linck, and the drums were played by Stevie Driscoll and recorded by Evan Mersky. The final version of this song was undoubtedly influenced by the way the Boreen live-band played it, so I feel indebted to Emmet Martin, Stevie Driscoll, and Chris Weschler for bringing it to life so many times over the years.
I started Boreen in November of 2015, exactly ten years ago, in Portland, Oregon. I moved away recently and now live in Champaign, Illinois. For me, Boreen belongs back in Portland, so I’m planning on this being the final Boreen album. To everyone that played a role in this project over the years, thank you.”
You can listen to “Don’t Die” here. You can preorder Heartbreak Hill, out November 21, now as well as on cassette and CD via Bud Tapes.
Written by Shea Roney | Featured Photo Courtesy of Boreen
The title of h. pruz’s Red Sky at Morning references a line from a 2,000-year-old phrase cited in the New Testament: “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight/ Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.” The expression, commonly used by mariners as a tool for predicting dangerous weather, was recited to Hannah Pruzinsky as a child by their mother when a storm was underway. But on Red Sky at Morning, Pruzinsky gives new meaning to the phrase, signaling the painful premonitions that hold them back in their own life and choosing to continue forward in spite of uncertainty.
The record was recorded in a small, quaint cottage in upstate New York by Pruzinsky and their partner Felix Walworth. “I really admire Felix’s tastes,” Pruzinsky said. “It’s hard to find a collaborator that I trust.” The record is peppered with Walworth’s Wurlitzer and electronics, drifting carefully through Pruzinsky’s finger-picked guitar melodies and delicate vocals. About a year after Pruzinsky wrote the songs, the two of them spent the month of January accompanied by their cat, recording equipment and the house’s collection of creepy dolls, making the cottage both a home and a studio for those few cold weeks.
Photo by Olivia Gloffke
Red Sky at Morning was described by Pruzinsky as being largely about a journey. Much of that journey involves looking inward and seeking comfort in the familiar. Their findings resurface as what feel like kaleidoscopic reflections – the skin of their lover’s palm, an old memory of gardening with their older brother, the sound of the creaking floorboards in their house. Traces of familiarity follow Pruzinsky, mirroring their movements and changes, unfolding in constant evolution. “I try to write about what has happened to me because it feels the most visceral and impactful,” Pruzinsky said. But even in its intimacy, Pruzinsky’s storytelling is steeped in mystery. “I think the ghosts are gone from the house/ But there used to be something,” they whisper on “Krista”, as if letting the listener in on a childhood secret before confessing: “I think it was something I wasn’t supposed to know about.”
Pruzinsky’s ability to play with perception is what makes the record feel like wandering through a place both otherworldly and deeply familiar. A self-proclaimed lover of narrative, adventure games like Dungeons & Dragons, Pruzinsky said they love any opportunity to “create and interrogate a world.” At some points throughout Red Sky at Morning, that world is as vast as an open sky, a lifetime of memory passing, followed by the promise of uncertainty. But often it is as narrow as the confines of one’s own body, every detail brought to focus under the stifling pressure of stillness. “We haven’t left the house in weeks/ I start to see you in the t.v. screen,” they sing on “Arrival” with a slow, sinking delivery, mirroring the feeling of being slowly consumed by motionlessness. The song is about the discomfort that arises from a static, domestic lifestyle and the ease at which familiarity shifts between a source of comfort and of anxiety. But in the face of inner turmoil, Pruzinsky makes clear their determination for acceptance in the repeated line in the song’s bridge: “I can clear the cycle.”
Photo by Olivia Gloffke
If Red Sky at Morning symbolizes a journey, that determination is the force driving it. On “After Always,” Pruzinsky depicts a slow descent into complete consumption: “I sink under you/ I am all of you/ And I breathe out the rest.” That imagery later returns on the album’s closer, “Sailor’s warning,” as Pruzinsky sings of being covered by mud with “eyes directed to the sun.” Their tone seems brighter here, as if they have chosen to allow themself to “sink under,” to willingly become enveloped in the unknown.
Between lush vocal layers and electronic swells on “Sailor’s warning,” all of the fears that Pruzinsky pours over throughout the record are whittled down to their core. “I know that you will change and I will too,” they remark before ending the record with a question that sings like an invitation, beckoning us forward into our own discomfort: “Don’t you know a warning sign when you see it?”
View more photos of h. pruz taken by Olivia Gloffke
You can listen to Red sky at morning out now as well as on vinyl released via Mtn. Laurel Recording Co.
Written by Emily Moosbrugger | All Photos by Olivia Gloffke
Sink is the new project from Colton Hamilton, who at the end of summer shared his debut album Sinking Stars. Playing guitar with fellow Columbus-mates Villagerrr, Hamilton has been well enveloped in that music scene, touring and recording with friends and collaborators whenever possible. Sinking Stars is hasty and hardy, recorded to a 4-track, that found Hamilton both conscious and explorative in the midst of what’s around him, leaning into the feelings and beings that he takes inspiration from in his day-to-days.
Sinking Stars is both a fresh start and a reflection point for Hamilton as he embraces a type of broken folk structure, one that feels fittingly clumped amongst late night DIY shows, curbside smokes and a passing midwestern prayer. These songs are minimal, with humming melodies that kick a tin can down the road as guitars cover its tracks with grit and charm. But the subtlety in these songs does not get lost in the weeds as Hamilton and co. animate the tiny yet tricky grievances of sitting still for too long. Hamilton’s focused writing is where curiosity and intuition link arms and sincerity and distrust break the hold, capturing that personal triumphant feeling of making it through another rough day while still looking forward to whatever is next.
We recently got to catch Sink at Cole’s Bar in Chicago where we got to talk about the new album, preservation and what’s next.
You just released your debut record under this project, Sink. How does it feel to get it out and about and being able to play some shows?
It just feels good to put something out there, to grease the way for some more albums. I already have another one written and ready to record. I’m just planning on doing the next one on an 8-track machine instead of 4 tracks. It feels good to practice.
You’ve been in the world of Columbus music for a while now, playing often with a lot of people and projects. When did you think this was the time to start your own thing? Did you have any initial goals?
I’ve been writing songs for a while and never really put too many of them out with a focus. But after playing live more with Villagerrr and other bands in Columbus, I just felt more comfortable doing that. I’ve seen my friends do it, so it just felt like a good time. I live in a house where everyone makes music. I just kind of wanted to document that time living in that house. It’s kind of how I view this first tape, my time living in that house. It just felt natural that way.
Were the people living in that house a big component to these recordings? Because you had quite a few contributors to the album.
Yeah, me and four other roommates, we all play music. And then just a street over, a bunch of my friends live who play music too. Zayn and Alec, Cornfed and Villager, they all live close by. It just feels like a tight-knit community right now with people playing in each other’s bands. I just wanted to make something out of that while I’m still there.
Photo by Sarah Franke
So is this your first release of songs that you wrote?
I’ve made a noise project called Western Collateral. It was 40 minutes of feedback between me and my friend over a Zoom call. It was during COVID and we didn’t feel like we could meet up, so we just fed back our guitars in a Zoom microphone for 40 minutes and put it out as an album.
You recorded everything on a 4-track. What did embracing that simplicity in recording bring out in not just the songs, but in the experience of recording them with your friends that you live with?
I think probably the same thing a lot of people find. You can only have so many takes. Keeping it pretty honest to the moment, if you can. All the mistakes that come along with that. They can’t avoid each other. The mistakes aren’t a part of the whole process, but it’s kind of like a documentation system that you set out to be.
Does that feel fitting in where these songs came from?
Definitely, yeah. I was inspired by a lot of my friends who played on the record. Henry [Schuellerman] on pedal steel was a huge inspiration. I feel like I was writing those songs a lot of times just for pedal steel. He has his own songs out with A-Go-Go. And Alec [Cox] plays bass, and watching him play in Cornfed. Mark [Scott] and Villagerrr, watching him play. Trevor [Hock] too, we wrote some of the songs together on drums. Just feeding off of his energy was an inspiration.
View more photos of Sink by Sarah Franke.
You can listen to Sinking Stars out everywhere now, as well as order a tape via Super Sport Recordings.
Before Talulah’s Tape ever hit streaming, it lived in the far corners of the internet, the kind of late-night rabbit hole where a forgotten upload might turn out to be something brilliant. Like a 1994 grainy VHS relic: no context, just a cryptic title and a thumbnail making you curious enough to click. That’s exactly how people first discovered Good Flying Birds, the solo writing and recording project of Kellen Baker, a 23-year-old musician from Fort Wayne and Indianapolis, Indiana, who wrote the album between ages 21 and 22. For a while, the album circulated through message boards, zines, and random YouTube accounts. A mystery with heart, shared like a secret.
A sound-bite from a 1985 interview with The Jesus and Mary Chain kicks in and you wonder what era you’re in, launching into a glint of tambourine flickers, a creeping brittle guitar line, and a voice too vulnerable to be casual cuts the haze. The production is raw and textured but it doesn’t feel thrown together. There’s intention in the chaos. The songwriting feels careful and knowing, like someone’s been up all night stitching feelings into melody. Then comes the lyric: “I see you in the mirror / every time I cry / I hear your voice / every time I try.” It’s plaintive, tuneful, and real.
The songs chug along with timeless melodies that feel like they’ve always existed. 60s pop hooks, 90s indie grit, glimpses of glam, and underpinning comforting basslines that pull you in. Harmonies drift through like Pastels b-sides, breakbeats slam in at wild angles, and random “bruh” samples or voicemail snippets keep things from getting too self-serious.
The album is cloaked in a warm layer of tape hiss, the audible texture of its analog recording. It’s not there as an aesthetic flourish so much as a natural byproduct, a backdrop secondary to the songwriting itself. It lives there like the sound of old home movies, like the hum of a VCR left running while you built lego sets with your siblings, like cartoons blaring in the background. It’s the kind of nostalgia that isn’t about retro trends or sonic throwbacks, it’s childhood nostalgia, it’s a feeling.
That feeling defines Good Flying Birds, and is what they are chasing and nail so instinctively. Not a revival, but a rebirth. Not a recreation of the past, but the spirit of it: curiosity, connection, and building something out of nothing. With hand-drawn visuals, stop-motion music videos reminiscent of Pee-wee’s Playhouse or Sunday morning cartoons, and songs written alone in bedrooms in single-day bursts of inspiration, Baker is creating not just a sound, but his own little world. He’s re-animating the emotional roots of DIY music altogether.
Before any labels or wider releases, Talulah’s Tape lived in obscurity, a self-released project passed around as handmade cassettes and YouTube uploads. But that changed when Smoking Room and Carpark Records teamed up to reissue it officially on October 17th. And while the songs have technically “been out” before, this moment feels different. “I’m just very ready for it to be out for good,” Baker says. “It’s been weird going through the excitement and humility of releasing your own music and now kind of doing it twice. I’m through that cycle with these songs. I want to move on.”
It’s a sentiment most DIY artists know all too well: the feeling of moving faster than the medium can hold. But in this case, the slowness was part of the charm. Before streaming services, before curated playlists and endless feeds, Good Flying Birds was spreading through word-of-mouth, zines, weekenders through midwest cities, tapes sold on Bandcamp, and an intentionally chaotic website full of GIFs and rambling posts that felt more like a 2003 blogspot than a sleek artist portfolio. It was all very deliberately analog and very personal.
“I’ve never felt like streaming was a healthy way to digest and interact with music,” Baker says. “It commodifies everything and homogenizes it in a way where everyone is being force-fed the same stuff. You don’t have to go to a record store and find something that looks cool and give it a chance. There’s less word-of-mouth, less curiosity. These playlists take the fun out of music discovery.”
This philosophy shaped the band’s early growth, but still the realities of labels and audience reach eventually pulled them into streaming, but on their own terms. “The labels wanted to do it, and being on those platforms was kind of a necessity to make it worthwhile for everyone involved,” he says. “And then of course, all this social and political pressure came right as we signed on.”
In the end, the compromise came with a purpose. Good Flying Birds joined the No Music for Genocide campaign, geo-restricting their music in protest of streaming services’ complicity in ongoing genocides. “If you want to do any damage to a system, you have to infiltrate it,” Baker says. “I’d rather use the platform now so that, when I say all this stuff about how much it sucks, people are actually listening.”
That balance between ethics and exposure mirrors the band’s whole ethos: finding meaning in imperfection, building connections in small corners of the internet and using the system just enough to remind people that music can still belong to its community. It’s not that things are “perfect,” or that this way of sharing music is “right” but it’s that they’re thoughtfully tried, tested, imperfectly human, and built with care.
Growing up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Baker’s relationship with music was forged in a kind of productive isolation. With no clear scene to plug into, he was left to piece one together, pulling from dusty record bins, old Indiana punk lore passed down from local legends, or whatever fragments of culture the internet would cough up. At age 10 he picked up a guitar because a neighbor looked “pretty cool” playing one. That spark eventually led him into a Beatles cover band and then an original project, the B45s where he wore suits, played 60s garage rock in local bars at age 12, and had to stand behind the merch table or with his parents when not on stage because of age restrictions.
Much of his early experience came via Sweetwater, a music gear behemoth, headquartered in his home town, where he joined the “build-a-band” program. It was a corporate setting more focused on sales than subculture, getting kids to play music, but not necessarily encouraging a punk ethos. “They’re trying to sell guitars, not have kids sending weird pages of art all over town,” he jokes. “There wasn’t a youth scene happening. Not in any facet, indie, hardcore, anything.”
“Good music comes out of Indianapolis because there’s nothing else to do except get in your basement and try to do something that is interesting to you and your friends,” Baker says. “It gets harder and harder when there’s nothing to do and you keep showing each other your music. I think that drives a creative spark, but it’s just a handful of people making really cool music and no audience for it so there’s not really a scene.”
DIY-by-necessity echoes through the Good Flying Birds project. There was no central sonic blueprint, more like a constellation of influences ping-ponging around in Baker’s head. “It wasn’t like one band or song was the guiding light,” he says. “It’s a mix of stuff from the 60s to now. I guess ‘indie pop’ is the closest term, but even that feels too narrow.”
What holds it all together isn’t genre, but emotion. That’s what Baker consistently returns to. The ability for a song to hold something that a diary or conversation can’t. “Songwriting is the closest I can get to actually understanding what I’m feeling,” he explains. “Sometimes emotions don’t make sense in a straightforward way, and you can’t really write them down clearly. But with songs, especially when things are abstract or fragmented, I can land closer to what’s actually there. It feels more accurate.”
That sense of emotional impressionism carries through the lyrics, too. Some lines hit hard, others feel more like passing thoughts or memories glimpsed through fog. It’s not about explaining everything. It’s about capturing something ephemeral before it slips away.
“Eric’s Eyes” might linger longest, a jangly standout that captures the ache of a memory you can’t let go of. The chorus, “It’s you and me / you and me / Eric’s eyes,” sounds like something you’d sing on a swing set or cry to in a parking lot or maybe both. “Wallace” reads like a postcard from a lost summer: “Founded on the broken vows to write you letters that I never seem to pen / walking through the fallen leaves across the Waldron Circle hill around the bend.” “Goldfall” flirts with blown-out noise-pop, its chorus folding back in on itself like a looped memory. And “Pulling Hair,” one of the final tracks, lands with tender vulnerability. “I know I shouldn’t admit this in song,” Baker sings, “but can I say that I was wrong?”
Live, the band leans into the same ethos. They’re not interested in coolness for its own sake or in curating an impenetrable mystique. “Everyone’s a little too concerned with image, whether they admit to it or not,” Baker says. “But I’m not trying to put on a face. I don’t think any of us are. I really admire bands who pull off that mysterious, careful aesthetic, but it’s not for me. I just want things to feel open and personable.”
That transparency fuels Baker’s maximalist instinct. The desire to cram everything in, to draw and write and build and share shows up across the whole project. Even during our interview he shares a drawing he made minutes before inspired by something one of his students said that day. The website, the visual art, the videos, the dense melodic basslines that run under everything like a second lead vocal. “I’ve always loved bands where the bass takes the melodic counterpoint role,” he says, citing Paul McCartney and James Jamerson as formative influences. “I ended up playing bass in my high school jazz band. I had tried out and got in for guitar and then the bass player quit on the first day. I had to learn all of these Stan Kenton and Hank Levy time charts and kind of intense material and I just had to figure it out. That was a good bootcamp.”
That sense of throwing himself into things before he’s ready and figuring it out in real time defines his writing and recording process. Almost every song on Talulah’s Tape was recorded as a one-day demo. “I procrastinate really badly,” he admits. “So I have to wake up and just decide, ‘I’m doing this song today.’ Otherwise, it won’t happen. I’ll just obsess and never finish anything. Working fast keeps it honest.”
There’s a kind of beauty in that pressure-cooker process. It’s the perfect representation of a feeling captured before it fades. “Even if the vocals come later, I try to get the core of a song done in one day,” Baker says. “I like the urgency of that. The way it locks the song into a specific moment.”
Even the recording process is stripped down for the sake of momentum. “I’ll often just go one mic straight into the four-track,” he says. “If I try to do it digitally, I’ll get stuck in plugins and endless tweaking. I need the simplest path from idea to recording or I’ll get in my own way.”
And maybe that’s what makes Good Flying Birds feel so alive. It’s not nostalgia for a certain sound, it’s nostalgia as a creative process. The emotional truth of a blurry memory. A snapshot of someone chasing connection in real time, building worlds from bedroom floors, and trusting the feeling over the format. A little chaos, a little tape hiss, and a whole lot of heart.
You can listen to Talulah’s Tape out now as well as purchase on vinyl, CD and tape via Carpark and Smoking Room.
Written by Eilee Centeno | Featured photo by Conor Shepherd
Prewn’s newest project, System, sees Izzy Hagerup pull back the curtain on her starkly vulnerable journey with depression. Unflinchingly she invites us to peek into her world, allow the cello-laden tracks to seep in, and to immerse ourselves in the sound of her chant-worthy refrains (my personal favorite is, “I wanna feel it all/ I wanna/ I wanna/I wanna” on “Cavity,” where she almost pleads with the listener to let her break free of the confines of her mind.)
Previous single releases accumulated in the 2023 album Through the Window, which received praise from the likes of Pitchfork and forged her a community of support. Hagerup’s roots in Western, MA undoubtedly laid the groundwork for her raw sound, a landscape of omnipresent hills that can sometimes feel like a threat, and weather with a penchant for the bleak. It is unsurprising that she recorded System on her own amidst the valleys, a space that begs to be infused with light. “I took my medicine but now I’m drinking just because I’m bored,” she quips on “My Side,” perhaps a nod to the monotony of rural life and the way that it begs to be sliced through.
What is the most striking on System is an unexpected sense of hope woven through the melancholy. “Don’t Be Scared” serves as a battle cry for the downtrodden, with the line, “Don’t be scared of the sound/Of your broken, beating, dripping heart,” serving as a thesis for the album. There is a sense of resiliency infused in the album, a call to action for one to transmute their pain into something beautiful. Despite the darkness, Hagerup looks forward, forging a path with self-made tools.
I caught up with Hagerup over email to discuss all things shame, self-recording, and notable influences.
“Easy” starts the album off with almost incantation-like repetitive lines. It feels equal parts holy and melodically sinister. What made you choose this track as the introduction to the project? How does it set the tone for what’s to come?
Izzy: I think “Easy” came about from a fairly casual and self-centered place that gradually unfolds into some type of self-awareness as the song goes. From a feeling in my shoe to the spinning world, I think it reflects where the album is to go; the banal to the existential, love to desperation and codependency to rage and destruction and then back to the gaping hole that accompanies existence. It’s also an “easy” start, it never quite lifts off the ground but rather lays a sonic foundation that grows and shrinks and grows again as you progress through the album. I like to see it as a not-too-flashy, warm welcome into the world of this album.
A lot of this album has to deal with shame and explores the role shame plays in my life and those around me, it’s a huge fuel behind the fixed ways of our culture and society and minds. On a more personal level it’s about getting lost and forgetting my wisdom, being young, making mistakes, being in my mid-twenties. A lot of this album feels like a journal of growing up. “Easy” addresses the issues that lie below the issues that come up in the rest of the songs. Of not choosing to go deeper, to think more critically, to be more thoughtful and curious, of giving into the comforts and distractions are being forced down our throats.
The strings throughout are a really stunning and cinematic touch, particularly on “System.” What prompted their inclusion?
Izzy: I just love to play the cello and improvise on top of any song I can, to weasel it into any place it could possibly fit. At the beginning it’s just self-indulgent ear candy but after the fact I think it can add entirely new dimensions to the music. I usually just riff around and make sure to record and something gets birthed in that process. Sometimes I try to make it work and it simply isn’t fitting but I feel that my whole musical process is prompted by intuition and it’s only after the fact that I can begin to make sense of all the choices. But if a string section can exist, I cannot resist.
You’re from Western, MA, which has a very supportive and often overlooked artistic community. How did your time there influence your work?
Izzy: Western Mass has a really special artistic community that I am so grateful to have stumbled upon. I went to college in the area with little idea of what a DIY scene really was. I didn’t have much experience playing with other people, going to dirty basement shows, I was thrilled when I found it. I joined my first band there called Blood Mobile, the project of my friend, Tuna, one crazy guitar shredder and musician. Playing shows and learning what it meant to be in a band from the Blood Mobile lens was pivotal for me. I had been playing guitar for a few years at that point, wrote one little song but really did not see music as something I would take seriously in my life. Now I was living in this world where music was just a way of life. The “systems” were set up by a bunch of friends just organizing shows every weekend for the pure love of music. It was this beautiful community that was so solid because of that binding force. Western Mass just has an energy that is seeping with creativity in all the cracks on the pavement and in all the little rivers.
On and off during the making of System I would ride my bike 30 minutes on the bike path to my studio and back and that was some of the most freeing, inspiring times I remember from the past few years. There’s something about how windy and green and fragrant the zone is that it makes perfect sense there’s a thriving creative scene.
Most of this album was written and recorded entirely by you. How did working in isolation impact the creative process?
Izzy: Working in isolation has felt entirely necessary for me to access my full creativity when writing music. I am growing through that and look forward to sharing the creative process. But as extroverted and open as I like to think I am, I am also quite introverted and sheepish when it comes to expressing my deepest self and inner workings creatively. When I’m working with other people, a level of self-consciousness is inevitable and I think self-consciousness is the antithesis to creativity and freedom. In order to get into that “flow-state” where time completely escapes you and you’ve gotten lucky enough to board the train that doesn’t stop until you have to forcefully fling yourself off of it cause it’s already 5 am and you’d like to experience a touch of reality the next day… I have to do that alone.
To be so vulnerable and real with myself, to explore the shameful or lonely feelings that I need to process and to the depth that this album goes, could only happen in isolation. But there are so many styles and worlds and different emotions that I know would come out of sharing the process. I will always need to explore the places that music takes me when I’m alone, but I’m excited to balance it more with collaboration.
You master the line between vulnerability and strength in how raw and honest these lyrics are. Tracks like “My Side” have a Fiona Apple-esque punch. Who are your biggest songwriting influences?
Izzy: Overall, my music listening is very scattered so it’s hard for me to dial in the answer to this question but to name a few, Shin Joong Hyun, Peter Evers, Aldous Harding, Elizabeth Cotten and many more have undoubtedly played a role in the creation of System and the evolution of mwah.
My first major songwriting influence was definitely Elliot Smith. I know I’m not alone in that. It was during my troubled era my freshman year of high school that he really spoke to the aches and pains of this existence. His chord structures and finger-picking styles have definitely left a lasting mark on my creative process.
I was listening to Harry Nilsson and John Prine a lot before and during the making of System. They have been a big inspiration on the lyrical side of writing for me. I really love their quirky, heartfelt storytelling and their ability to bring humor and light into their music.
But ultimately, it’s the riffs in my relationships or the aspects of myself that I struggle with or the overwhelm of existence or the complete banality and absurdity and beauty and horror of this world we live in that truly influences a song of course. It’s just a lot to process, goddamn.
You can listen to System out everywhere now, as well as on vinyl via Exploding in Sound Records.
Written by Joy Freeman | Featured Photo Courtesy of Exploding in Sound Records
the ugly hug 