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
Last Friday on Halloween, New York-based label Toadstool Records shared their latest compilation, Trick N’ Treats’, to benefit mutual aid in Gaza. All the profits raised from the compilation will be donated to the label’s pen pals, Saleh and Dana, to support them, their families, their education and their dreams. The compilation features some familiar faces to the Toadstool world, including Youth Large, Joe Fox and Mystery Choir, as well as including some new contributors like screen bride, Volena and Moki.
Toadstool Records is an artist-run independent label and creative hub based in NYC. Started by Caroline Gay as a space for her ethereal instrumental project Ghost Crab, Toadstool Records has become a home to a world of other creatives, offering a supportive and inspiring place to expand on their own and create art with those with similar mindsets. The label is helped run by friends Michelle Borreggine [Dreamspoiler, orbiting] and Jonathan Hom [Mystery Choir]. Trick N’ Treats marks the labels fourth benefit compilation.
The album artwork was done by Lia Kantrowitz.
TRACKLIST & CONTRIBUTORS
Ponytail music – Black Lagoon
Radicchio – Bone Tax
Asyla – exorciser le cœur sacré
Mystery Choir – Horseshoe’s Gone
SOJOURNS – In the Afternoon [MGMT]
dreamspoiler – Little Fang [Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks]
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 Vermont/Chicago-based artist Hannah Frances.
Last month, Frances released her latest album, Nested in Tangles, a project rooted in sincere articulation as she unravels the various distinct knots that have become too tight around her. Highlighted throughout is her guitar work, tapping like bugs in a glass jar, gently caught, culminating curiosity towards the most minute details of her abilities. Although at times wild, playing to pattern shifts and divine accent points, France’s vocals are freeing, like the wisp of smoke from a candle just blown out, that make these songs feel nothing but natural. Following the release of 2024’s LP Keeper of the Shepard, Frances leans into more brash, unpredictable instrumentation, diving deeper into her avant folk voicings that fall into step amongst sharp jazz stylings, heavy distortion and pronounced sonic strain. But through it all, Nested in Tangles showcases an artist invigorated to try something new, taking the good with the bad, as those knots begin to loosen.
The theme of this playlist is Nested in Tangles inspiration / What Hannah was listening to when making the album.
the ugly hug 