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On Labyrinth, Heather Woods Broderick serves as our reflective host, subverting expectations of conventional songcraft with impressionistic language and quietly relentless explorations of the human experience that's at once light and dark, more circular and less linear. "Many of us yearn for stillness and peace, as an escape from the movement all around us," she explains when asked about the themes of the album. "Yet movement is perpetual, happening all the time on some level. It's as wild as the wind, yet eternally predictable in its inevitability. It is linear in part, but infinite in its circuitry. Our lives just punctuate it." Broderick began crafting Labyrinth in March 2020, when most forms of move- ment were brought to a screeching halt. The Maine-born, Los Angeles-based songwriter _ who, in addition to her work as a solo musician, built a life playing and touring with acts such as Sharon Van Etten, Beth Orton, Damien Jurado, and Efterklang _ was suddenly forced off the road for the first time in her career. She used this disruption as an opportunity to pare down her creation process and construct the scaffolding for Labyrinth in her apartment. Employing only the most crucial tools at her disposal, Broderick found herself opening different artistic doors as she focused on sharpening her recording skills, capturing the majority of the album on her own before finishing the remainder with co-producer D. James Goodwin. For all of Broderick's sage lyricism and vocal authority, Labyrinth never provides the listener with any easy answers. If the image of the labyrinth represents the enormity of modern life and the difficulty of navigating it, Heather Woods Broder- ick provides a guide to its endless kinetic wonders _ of being present, aware, and connected despite its disconnects. She describes the texture of its walls, its indifferent rhythms, and the inherent poeticism of feeling lost amid the dead-ends and unexpected turns. At this point in our history, perhaps that's all we need to keep moving.

Grey Vinyl

On Labyrinth, Heather Woods Broderick serves as our reflective host, subverting expectations of conventional songcraft with impressionistic language and quietly relentless explorations of the human experience that's at once light and dark, more circular and less linear. "Many of us yearn for stillness and peace, as an escape from the movement all around us," she explains when asked about the themes of the album. "Yet movement is perpetual, happening all the time on some level. It's as wild as the wind, yet eternally predictable in its inevitability. It is linear in part, but infinite in its circuitry. Our lives just punctuate it." Broderick began crafting Labyrinth in March 2020, when most forms of move- ment were brought to a screeching halt. The Maine-born, Los Angeles-based songwriter _ who, in addition to her work as a solo musician, built a life playing and touring with acts such as Sharon Van Etten, Beth Orton, Damien Jurado, and Efterklang _ was suddenly forced off the road for the first time in her career. She used this disruption as an opportunity to pare down her creation process and construct the scaffolding for Labyrinth in her apartment. Employing only the most crucial tools at her disposal, Broderick found herself opening different artistic doors as she focused on sharpening her recording skills, capturing the majority of the album on her own before finishing the remainder with co-producer D. James Goodwin. For all of Broderick's sage lyricism and vocal authority, Labyrinth never provides the listener with any easy answers. If the image of the labyrinth represents the enormity of modern life and the difficulty of navigating it, Heather Woods Broder- ick provides a guide to its endless kinetic wonders _ of being present, aware, and connected despite its disconnects. She describes the texture of its walls, its indifferent rhythms, and the inherent poeticism of feeling lost amid the dead-ends and unexpected turns. At this point in our history, perhaps that's all we need to keep moving.

Canto Ostinato is the new volume of classical minimalism from musician and producer Erik Hall. Written for four pianos in 1979 by Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt, the piece is freshly framed as an intimate, hour-long solo performance consisting of multitracked grand pianos, electric piano, and organ. Modern yet warm, ethereal yet tangible, Hall's Canto Ostinato expertly bridges a revered piece of meditative concert repertoire with a tactile and highly personal studio setting. Chicago-born and Michigan-based, Erik Hall is known as a multi-instrumental pillar for the groups NOMO, Wild Belle, and his own songwriting moniker In Tall Buildings. He has composed music for feature films, and as a producer/engineer he has shaped records for Natalie Bergman and Western Vinyl labelmates Lean Year. In a 2020 creative pivot, he chose to reinvent composer Steve Reich's monumental contemporary classical masterpiece Music for 18 Musicians as a solo undertaking, applying the piece's score to the familiar keyboards, guitars, and synthesizers in his studio. "At the time I think I was working through my identity as a musician and an artist," Hall explains, "and on a level there was some sort of exorcism of a long held pop spirit." The album was celebrated for being "freshly thrilling" and "legible in history but assertive of the moment" (Pitchfork) and "beguiling, meditational, and magical" (Electronic Sound). It won the 2021 Libera Award for Best Classical Record, and it quickly joined the canon of the piece's quintessential recordings. "There is a pseudo-meditational benefit to working on a longform piece that's built on repetition," Hall says. "Every stage- from internalizing the music, to executing the performance, to editing and mixing the record- requires deep and sustained presence of mind. I've always been drawn to a hallucinatory combination of harmony and repetition, and I found the entire process addictive." An apt second chapter, Canto Ostinato is inherently vast, and its score gives great creative license to the performer. Comprising 106 sections, complete freedom is given to repeat each one as many or as few times as desired. Additional leeway is given with regard to dynamics, articulation, and even instrumentation. On the heels of his previous, rather maximal arrangement, Hall chose to limit this album's palette to three foundational keyboards of his studio: a 1962 Hammond M-101 organ, a 1978 Rhodes Mark I electric piano, and his family-heirloom 1910 Steinway grand piano. "This particular piece brought the added challenge of rekindling my dexterity as a pianist, something I haven't maintained in earnest since I was a teenager," he admits. The ensuing five-note rhythmic motif- the piece's primary building block- is steady and workmanlike, forgoing virtuosic flare for depth, texture, and resonance, and eventually giving way to the stunning gratification of a gorgeously lyrical left turn. As with Music for 18 Musicians, Hall employed no loops nor quantization nor any programmed or sequenced instruments of any kind. Every part was performed live in a room and captured with microphones, one at a time, each informed by, and reacting to the last. In this way the record breathes with interplay and an organic humanity, complete with flaws, noise, and the faint sound of turning pages. The recording quality is nonetheless toneful and saturated, characteristic of Hall's production style and straying from the usual transparency of classical albums by using gear with tubes, transformers, and various stages of compression in the signal path. Always there is unmistakable realism and the feeling of being present in the room, sitting among the keys, hammers, and tines. Ten Holt said: "Time, patience and discipline are the prerequisites for making a genetic code productive." His landmark composition provides Hall once again with a wondrous space in which to reverently embody this sentiment and deftly convey the elegant beauty of this music.

On Origins Chris Bartels takes on the role of singer-songwriter for the first time under his Elskavon moniker, unveiling a voice that wouldn't sound out of place next to vocal-forward artists like Justin Vernon, Jónsi, or Baths, who master the balance between conventional songcraft and bold, idiosyncratic experimentation. Origins is vast yet intimate, fluttering yet cohesive, tattered yet clean, a little like rainfall during sunlight. Shedding the ambient-classical confines of his previous output, the album's opener and title track, offers a swirling mosaic of acoustic textures that recall the beloved duo The Books, laced with warped vocal utterances flitting in and out of a club-friendly beat. "Origins" is followed by the equally danceable "Coastline," which drives home the smiling melodies and intricate sound-design that form the spine of Origins, keeping Bartels' voice in a largely decorative and impressionistic role up to this point. "Blossom and the Void" dissolves the introductory tension as Bartels comes out lyrically swinging, his digitized voice chanting widely over the mutated New Wave-esque anthem. Here, Bartels shows his instinct for dynamics by rising to bombast and quickly dispelling it, making steep yet grace- ful descents into skillfully delicate sound-design. Throughout Origins, the patient glacial aesthetic of his previous work is still discernible-- there are wordless, expansive panoramas that stretch out patiently for minutes at a time and smartly resist the impulse to pack each moment with a persona made even more impactful when Bartels chooses to wield it. At other times, his spokesmanship is woven discreetly into a larger tapestry, like on "See Out Loud" (and its ambient reprise) where Bartels' voice shimmers from a distance, covering the scene in diffuse splendor. "There is so much warping, mangling, re-sampling, reversing and pitching," Bartels says of his intricate vocal manipulations. "I printed a lot of the vocal recordings onto a tape machine from the `60s, first at one speed, and then I'd halve, or double the speed going back into my comput- er," he elaborates, illustrating how this kind of analog processing freed him from his habits. "Sometimes I'd do this multiple times on one recording or layer-- it gave me such a unique and unexpected sound. At this point, I threw away any inhibition on what type of vocals to have, or not have, on the album." This newfound freedom is palpable in the peaks of soaring grandeur that dot the emotional landscape of Origins. "All These Years" cathartically reaches one such summit in its second half after laying a path of gently plodding indie-IDM in its first. The cinematic vignette "Dreymur Aftur" provides pause for reflection amid its brisk procession of string plucks and rhythmic synthesizer while marching wordlessly into album-closer "This Won't Last Forever." Here at the end, Bartels' guitar playing is laid bare in the mix, skeletally framing a single ribbon of his voice as it unfurls into the atmosphere. Though the track isn't expressly lyrical, its starkness still exemplifies the new leaf of vulnerability Bartels has turned over on Origins, an album that documents his hard-won evolution from musician, to producer, to composer_ and finally_ his confident arrival in the role of songwriter.

Hollie Kenniff's second LP for Western Vinyl, We All Have Places That We Miss, is a gallery of cloudlike synths, seraphic strings, and humming guitars, all coaxed into cohesion by Hollie's own wordless singing. The album's 2021 precursor, The Quiet Drift, landed on Bandcamp's Best Ambient list alongside the description "Drawing on the deep tones of drone, dream pop harmonies, and new age's bright tranquility, Kenniff evokes the forests, lakes and rivers of her past and present surroundings with a zen patience." Here on Places_ she strides even further into reminiscence, seeking and commemorating the fondly tragic ache of half-remembered locales lost to time: A grandparent's dim living room from an ambiguous decade; a lonely clearing beside a trail we can't remember if we walked or just dreamt; the calming light of a movie that aired years before we were born though our feelings insist we were there with the characters. We All Have Places That We Miss transmutes such glimmers into a palpable sonic kingdom that can be revisited at will, recalling the pedal-board ambience of Windy & Carl, Adam Wiltzie, and Liz Harris.

The Anne, EP is the afterword to Joseph Shabason's acclaimed 2018 harmonic suite Anne, through which he examined and processed his mother's struggle with Parkinson's disease. Employing a small supporting cast that includes vocalist Dan Bejar (Destroyer) and guitarist Thomas Gill (Owen Pallett), Anne, EP spotlights the Toronto saxophonist as he builds empathic tropospheres of woodwinds and synthesizers, deepening the sentiment established by the EP's companion album. In doing so, Shabason further cements jazz, ambient sound design, and new age revivalism into a timely new genre all his own. Also Available From Joseph Shabason: The Fellowship LP/CD, Anne LP/CD, Aytche CD. “gorgeous and empathetic ambient music.” – Pitchfork // “I love it…very original...so exciting." – Bob Boilen, NPR Music // “…densely textured ambient jazz that is wonderful to immerse yourself in…” - The Guardian // “...seriously engaging…” – Aquarium Drunkard // “…magical transportive healing vibes.” – Gorilla vs. Bear // “…rich, healing ambient jazz.” – The A. V. Club // “…at once intimate and universal, honest and hopeful.” - Resident Advisor // Tracks: 01 West Of Heaven 5:12, 02 1517 5:57, 03 I Don't Want To Be Your Love 4:30, 04 Broken Hearted Kota 5:12, 05 Face Chord 7:13, 06 Gymnopédie No. 1 7:26.

The Anne, EP is the afterword to Joseph Shabason's acclaimed 2018 harmonic suite Anne, through which he examined and processed his mother's struggle with Parkinson's disease. Employing a small supporting cast that includes vocalist Dan Bejar (Destroyer) and guitarist Thomas Gill (Owen Pallett), Anne, EP spotlights the Toronto saxophonist as he builds empathic tropospheres of woodwinds and synthesizers, deepening the sentiment established by the EP's companion album. In doing so, Shabason further cements jazz, ambient sound design, and new age revivalism into a timely new genre all his own. Also Available From Joseph Shabason: The Fellowship LP/CD, Anne LP/CD, Aytche CD. “gorgeous and empathetic ambient music.” – Pitchfork // “I love it…very original...so exciting." – Bob Boilen, NPR Music // “…densely textured ambient jazz that is wonderful to immerse yourself in…” - The Guardian // “...seriously engaging…” – Aquarium Drunkard // “…magical transportive healing vibes.” – Gorilla vs. Bear // “…rich, healing ambient jazz.” – The A. V. Club // “…at once intimate and universal, honest and hopeful.” - Resident Advisor // Tracks: 01 West Of Heaven 5:12, 02 1517 5:57, 03 I Don't Want To Be Your Love 4:30, 04 Broken Hearted Kota 5:12, 05 Face Chord 7:13, 06 Gymnopédie No. 1 7:26.

For Fans Of: J. Tillman, Phosphorescent, Low, Damien Jurado, Bill Callhan. “It’s going to be hard to talk about this when it’s done.” So begins A Mold For The Bell, the new album from Colorado singer-songwriter and producer Logan Farmer. What follows that enigmatic lyric is a collection of stark and ambient folk songs, tethered solely by Farmer’s unadorned vocals, acoustic guitar, and moving embellishments from contributors, including saxophonist Joseph Shabason (who also mixed the album) and renowned harpist Mary Lattimore. With the help of Grammy-nominated producer Andrew Berlin (Gregory Alan Isakov), Farmer tracked all of the vocal and guitar parts over two days in the early months of 2021. The tracks were recorded quickly, live in the studio to capture the raw intimacy and immediacy of Farmer’s live performances. The rest of the album’s creation occurred remotely, over texts, phone calls, and emails with Shabason and a handful of other musicians, as wildfires, insurrections and the pandemic raged around them. “I was working at a bookstore that winter,” Farmer explains, “and I’d walk to my shift every day, obsessing over lyrics and early mixes in a cheap pair of earbuds.” These daily walks would take him past a church, where he’d often stop on the sidewalk and listen to the bells at the top of the hour. “I’ve always loved the sound of church bells, but as the situation worsened, what began as a comfort began to feel ominous, almost threatening.” This experience, alongside influences as disparate as Tarkovsky’s film Andrei Rublev and the novels of Olga Tokarczuk, led to a collection of songs that are similarly foreboding, expanding upon the stark and spacious universe of Farmer’s last album (2020’s Still No Mother) to reveal an atmosphere that’s even more oppressively still, like an abandoned Victorian home. Tracks: 01 Silence or Swell 02 Cue Sunday Bells 03 Horsehair (feat. Mary Lattimore) 04 Crooked Lines 05 William 06 The Moment 07 Renegade 08 South Vienna

OLD FIRE - das Projekt des in Abilene, Texas, ansässigen Komponisten und Produzenten John Mark Lapham - kündigt sein zweites Album "Voids" für den Herbst an. Für das Album, das größtenteils aus Kollaborationen besteht, hat Lapham eine beeindruckende Liste von Sängern und Sängerinnen rekrutiert. Neben Gastauftritten von Julia Holter, Adam Torres und Emily Cross ist auch die lebende Songwriter-Legende Bill Callahan auf drei Songs zu hören. Einer davon ist die ergreifende, düstere Lead-Single "Don't You Go ft. Bill Callahan". Es handelt sich hierbei um eine Coverversion des britischen Singer/Songwriters John Martyn, bei der auch Thomas Bartlett alias Doveman am Klavier, Semay Wu am Cello und Robin Allender an den Tasten/Gitarren zu hören sind. Ein wunderbares Stück, über das Stereogum treffend schreibt: "If you've ever wondered what Bill Callahan singing a Radiohead dirge might sound like, it would probably sound a lot like this."

There is a moment on Sides, the new album from Richmond, Virginia-based duo Lean Year, in which a hospital room floor is filled with white chrysanthemums. This imagery, based on an opiate-induced hallucination experienced by vocalist Emilie Rex's mother as she recovered from surgery, is a perfect encapsulation of the band's second album: dreamlike and beautiful, yet burdened with cold, stark reality. Sides is a harrowing journey through realms of grief and memory, a meditation woven into a tapestry of synth pads, woodwinds, and Rex's instantly recognizable voice. The duo of Rex and Rick Alverson - who also works as a film director (The Mountain, Entertainment, The Comedy) - originally set out to write an album about conflict, but during the writing and recording process, they were confronted with a number of personal tragedies. Alverson lost both of his parents in rapid succession, Rex's mother received a cancer diagnosis, and the couple's beloved family dog, Orca, died. These events transformed the album into an exploration of loss - an attempt at processing the painful, complex, and private emotions that bubble to the surface when confronted with death. "We thought we'd do a concept album called Sides where we could reflect on all of the division in the world, and some in our own families, but then COVID transformed everything / everyone, and we suffered our own specific losses. The record became about loss and grief," Rex explains. "In this way, the title Sides was still appropriate: our individual grief and collective grief, the margins of before and after, the act and feeling of during and enduring. It felt like straddling a threshold between two opposing sides - the moment before conflict and the moment after it passes, life and death, the act of living and the memory of the act. Grief feels like a contention between what you knew and what you now know, and often both feel real and unreal at once." Sides - produced by Alverson alongside Erik Hall (In Tall Buildings) and featuring contributions from Elliot Bergman (Nomo, Wild Belle) and Joseph Shabason (Destroyer, The War on Drugs) - as a distinctly cinematic quality, perhaps due in part to Alverson's other career. Moments of jazz, slowcore, and dirgelike R&B find their way into the sorrowful, ambient suite, lulling the listener into a state of calm while the lyrics speak of ghosts, childhood, and mortality. Despite the gravity of the subject matter, Sides succeeds in mastering a balancing act between pathos and pop. Each song is indelible and haunting, with melodies that have the kind of broad appeal reminiscent of Karen Dalton, Aldous Harding, and FKA twigs.

Hailing from the vermin-saturated remains of upstate South Carolina, SLUGCRUST are preparing to release their debut full length, Ecocide, via Prosthetic Records this summer. Featuring members of WVRM, SLUGCRUST embodies true Southern grind in all its grimy, punishing glory. With two ferocious EPs already under their belts, the breakneck speed with which SLUGCRUST operate gives a fair indicator of their approach. However, their focus isn’t compromised by their accelerated work ethic. Drawing from various literary inspirations the political issues at the heart of SLUGCRUST’s output is given a darkly poetic twist. SLUGCRUST seeks to bring political issues to light in a way that galvanises action and activism. The title derives from the process of destroying environmental structures or ecosystems, either via natural means or - as is more pertinent in the case of this album - deliberate human actions. Depravity is a recurring theme throughout the lyrics; emotional and physical immorality and degeneracy permeates the twelve tracks that make up Ecocide.

Amid massive global paradigm shifts Dave Hartley (aka Nightlands) became a father twice over and left his native Philadelphia for Asheville, where the pace of daily life is slower and it's easier to maintain a zoomed-out perspective on modern life. From the newfound refuge of a studio he built using the bones of a barn attached to his hundred-something-year-old house in the mountains, Hartley has tailored a collection of well-crafted pop rock, pointedly titled Moonshine. Guided by some of the harmonic sensibilities that have helped make The War on Drugs a force in modern music, Moonshine combines immaculate-yet-dense vocal stacks and billowy clouds of effected keyboards with classic songcraft, revealing previously unseen acreage in the unfurling dreamscape that is Nightlands. The surrealistic album art by Austin-based illustrator Jaime Zuverza depicts an archway opening to the stars over the surface of an idyllic sea flanked by both moon and sun. Similarly, Moonshine reveals portals within portals leading to ever deeper places in Hartley's vocal-centered labyrinth…

Nightlands is the solo project of The War on Drugs’ bassist and multi-instrumentalist Dave Hartley. Amid massive global paradigm shifts Dave Hartley (aka Nightlands) became a father twice over and left his native Philadelphia for Asheville, where the pace of daily life is slower and it's easier to maintain a zoomed-out perspective on modern life. From the newfound refuge of a studio he built using the bones of a barn attached to his hundred-something-year-old house in the mountains, Hartley has tailored a collection of well-crafted pop rock, pointedly titled Moonshine. Guided by some of the harmonic sensibilities that have helped make The War on Drugs a force in modern music, Moonshine combines immaculate-yet-dense vocal stacks and billowy clouds of effected keyboards with classic songcraft, revealing previously unseen acreage in the unfurling dreamscape that is Nightlands. The surrealistic album art by Austin-based illustrator Jaime Zuverza depicts an archway opening to the stars over the surface of an idyllic sea flanked by both moon and sun. Similarly, Moonshine reveals portals within portals leading to ever deeper places in Hartley's vocal-centered labyrinth. Throughout the album, there are plenty of buoyant high moods where the pitter-patter of drum machine and humming digital organ hints at Hartley's low-key tropicalia streak, but the lyrics anchor the dreaminess in real-world sorrow and resignation. Nowhere are these sentiments more apparent than on the title track, a nearly acapella recitation of "America the Beautiful" that poignantly hovers over a mirage of soft keyboards before dovetailing into Hartley's own words about the hypocrisy of the American dream. "This was never intended to be an overtly political record" he admits. "I have so many friends who are able to process the frustration of current events gracefully or with wisdom or in a nuanced way, but I often find myself just consumed with anger about it all. I decided to just let that come out, and it manifested itself lyrically." Moonshine's wide-eyed, utopian instrumental backdrops provide sharp contrast to Hartley's lyrics, which sting even harder within the sweetness. Even in light of the album's vocal emphasis, Hartley's history as a bassist brilliantly beams through Moonshine, giving effortless and sprightly movement to songs like "Down Here," which also features an extended section of saxophone lent by his Western Vinyl labelmate, Joseph Shabason. In addition to Shabason, the album hosts a short list of remote collaborators including four of Hartley's bandmates from The War on Drugs, Robbie Bennet, Anthony Lamarca, Eliza Hardy Jones, and Charlie Hall, as well as exotica virtuoso Frank Locrasto (Cass McCombs, Fruit Bats), and producer Adam McDaniel (Avey Tare, Angel Olsen). Hartley was forced to keep the guest list small out of the necessity of pandemic isolation, coupled with his move to a smaller city, all of which challenged him to do most of the album's heavy lifting right down to the mixing duties, resulting in the most independent effort of his career. By that measure, Moonshine is also the clearest image yet of Dave Hartley as a person and creator.

Nachpressung des Albums von 2015. Obwohl er vielleicht nicht so bekannt ist, hat sich die sinnträchtige, deutlich amerikanische Musik von Kenniff zu einem allgegenwärtigen Sound gemausert, der im Radio, in Filmen, im Fernsehen und in Werbung von Apple, Facebook, Google und anderen auftaucht. Aufgenommen über drei Jahre hinweg fungieren die Songs auf seinem neuen Album ,Sometimes" wie ein Tagebuch, das die kurzen Momente am Tag dokumentiert, in denen Kenniff sich für Trost und unendliche kreative Möglichkeiten dem Klavier zuwandte. Kenniff schrieb und nahm alles auf dem Album selbst auf, mit der Ausnahme von ,A Word I Give", das eine Kollaboration mit dem japanischen Pianisten Ryuichi Sakamoto ist, der die Musik von GOLDMUND einst als ,so, so, so wunderschön" beschrieb. In einem Interview mit NPR diskutierte Keith Kenniff seine Vorliebe für Musik aus der Zeit des Bürgerkriegs und ihre Möglichkeit, ,in nur wenigen Noten solche Geschichten" zu erzählen. Auch die Improvisationen auf ,Sometimes" schaffen es, trotz ihrer technischen und kompositionellen Einfachheit, tiefgründig zu sein. Subtile Details und Dynamiken drücken das aus, was sonst nicht zu artikulieren wäre. ENG Though he may not be a household name, Kenniff's evocative, distinctly American music has become quietly ubiquitous in the past few years, often appearing on NPR, in films, on TV, and in ads for Apple, Facebook, and Google among others. Recorded over the course of three years, the material on his new album Sometimes functions as a journal, documenting brief moments in Kenniff's day when he could turn to the piano as a source of solace and unending creative possibilities. Kenniff wrote and recorded everything on the album with the exception of the track "A Word I Give", which is a collaboration with preeminent Japanese pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto, who once described Goldmund's music as "...so, so, so beautiful." In an interview with NPR's Weekend Edition Keith Kenniff discussed his appreciation of Civil War era music, and it's ability to covey "...so much story in so few notes." Similarly, these improvisations manage to be richly evocative despite their technical and compositional simplicity, using subtle details and dynamics to express what might otherwise be inexpressible.

FOR FANS OF: Big Thief, Parquet Courts, Cate Le Bon, Elliott Smith, LVL UP. On their debut for Western Vinyl, recording engineer and multi-instrumentalist Nate Mendelsohn and his band use lyrical maximalism for the powers of good. Where Market’s previous home recorded releases shifted genre restlessly, on The Consistent Brutal Bullshit Gong Mendelsohn took a core band of longtime collaborators to a house in rural Massachusetts where they carved out space for his words to speak through with humor and intensity. Though he comes from a background in experimental music, Mendelsohn’s ear for pop has prevailed. Certain moments on Bullshit Gong reveal his stranger side, as on the thundering bridge of “Scar,” which sounds like a more unhinged Parquet Courts, or the angular “I Would Do That,” which takes cues from Cate Le Bon. On the whole, though, this band of close friends insists on directness, their arrangements clear despite the intricacies. Guitars and synthesizers tangle fluidly atop the rhythm section’s tight bedrock, evoking the tenderness and backbeat-centric qualities of Elliott Smith or Big Thief. After college, where he met most of the members of Market, Mendelsohn became an engineer and producer at the Brooklyn studio Figure 8 Recording. Through that community he’s recorded artists like Frankie Cosmos and Wendy Eisenberg, and played with Yaeji, Vagabon, Katie Von Schleicher (who co-produced Bullshit Gong with him), and Sam Evian, who mixed the album. Creating intimacy out of manic self-reflection requires a delicate balancing act, one Mendelsohn tackles with abandon. His words never skew too poetic or grandiose, and when he invokes the ugly it’s met with a sonic tonality that sets him right again. In tender moments, his voice is often flanked by bandmates Natasha Thweatt or Von Schleicher, who help skew his words toward the universal. Still, Bullshit Gong is an obsessive look inward, one in which Mendelsohn simply asks himself if he is good to those he loves. It’s an act of trust between the artist and the imagined listener he takes with him. UK press campaign by Silver PR. Mendelsohn has worked in the studio as an engineer and musician with Frankie Cosmos, Yaeji, Sam Evian, Wendy Eisenberg, Thor Harris, Rebecca Black, in addition to touring as a member of Katie Von Schleicher’s band. Market developed a cult following emerge after being championed by British comedian James Acaster, who featured the band’s first album in his book Perfect Sound Forever and his follow-up podcast for BBC Sounds.

Previous album released on Dead Oceans. Previous album was a collaboration with Brian Eno. Past press coverage from Pitchfork, SPIN, The Guardian, Drowned in Sound, Dusted, The Quietus, and many more. Since the release of his last album 2017’s Finding Shore, a collaboration with Brian Eno pianist and singer-songwriter Tom Rogerson’s life has undergone a number of dramatic transformations. While writing his new album Retreat to Bliss, Rogerson had a child, lost a parent, and received his own diagnosis of a rare form of blood cancer. The new decade brought him from Berlin to the Suffolk of his childhood, composing profound pieces of minimal songwriting in the church next to his parents’ home. Rogerson studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music under mentors like Harrison Birtwistle, and he made his live debut as an improvising pianist in 2002, before releasing an improvised record with Reid Anderson (Bad Plus) and Mike Lewis (Happy Apple, Bon Iver) in 2004. He formed the band Three Trapped Tigers in 2007, expertly blending elements of electronic, jazz and noise rock into a cohesive whole. The band earned a reputation for innovative live shows and went on to perform and collaborate with artists like Brian Eno, Deftones, and the Dillinger Escape Plan. It was working with Eno, another Suffolk native, that eventually led Rogerson back to his roots and back to a place where he could write Retreat to Bliss, his solo debut album. “All my life, the piano has been my constant companion, my confessor, my best friend, and my worst enemy,” Rogerson explains. “I’ve always written music on and for the piano, but it felt too personal, too private to release.” Indeed, listening to Retreat to Bliss feels almost like eavesdropping, as though you’re crouched in the belfry of a Suffolk church, bearing witness to a form of musical bloodletting. For the first time in his noteworthy career, Rogerson has combined masterful piano playing and subtle electronics with the texture of his own voice, an attempt to express deeply private emotions that were difficult to articulate using instrumental music alone. “The last few years have brought some struggle, some joy, and a lot of change. My response has been to retreat to what I trust the most: the piano, my voice, and the landscape I grew up in. That’s how the album got its title, and how I came to be ready finally to release a solo record.” The eleven tracks that make up Retreat to Bliss were recorded by Leo Abrahams (Brian Eno, David Byrne, Grace Jones) over the course of just a few days, a process that emphasized spontaneity and the artist’s own commitment to improvisation. Secular yet devotional, intensely personal yet profound, the experience of listening to Retreat to Bliss seems to evade characterization. It’s physical and emotional, a glimpse into the mind of an artist who has chosen exposure over withdrawal, who uses his command of the piano to chart an unflinching path forward, never looking back. UK press campaign by Someone Great. Press Quotes "A meeting of minds that is full of rewarding surprises, challenging and surprising one another, and their listeners, with music that feels alive and wondrous…” Pitchfork // "Both mournful and dazzlingly optimistic, a taste of the conflict found so ofen in nature and reflected so elegantly across the course of the record.” The Line of Best Fit // "Many avant-garde instrumental albums exist to craf a mood; Rogerson and Eno merge these moods, sounds and themes together efortlessly and radiantly on Finding Shore” Exclaim // Track List 01 Descent 02 Oath 03 Buried Deep 04 Toumani 05 Drone Finder part 2 06 Chant 07 Rapture 1 08 Open Out Span Wide View 09 A Clearing 10 Retreat To 11 Coda

Emel Mathlouthi is a Tunisian author, composer,performer and producer whose music has crossed time, countries and continents.

‘Kelmti Horra’ celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. Ten years of passion, protest and free speech: this album marked the year 2012,
becoming the Arab Spring anthem.

Via tape loops and synth motifs sent from LA to NY, sound artist Christopher Royal King has teamed with violinist and composer Christopher Tignor toward richly timbral, emotionally gripping works of spontaneity that unfurl immense details with each replay while marrying west coast outboard-ambient to studied east coast modern classical. The resulting debut album, A Wave From A Shore, exhibits both artists' sonic identifiers falling in and out of cooperation before binding into a new entity distinct from either's solitary palettes. A visual artist whose work includes album covers for Thrice and Deftones in addition to video bumps for Adult Swim, Christopher Royal King spent his teenage years cutting his teeth on heavy metal and punk before gravitating, quickly and perhaps unexpectedly, toward experimental composers like Philip Glass and Terry Riley. This unlikely seesaw of influences led directly to King forming the post-rock pillar This Will Destroy You with fellow San Antonio native Jeremy Galindo. Similar to his former band's output, King's solo meanderings impart a mood of buoyancy and contemplation while hinting at darker, more shadowy hues beneath the glimmer, making his music stand apart from the glut of New Age droners and modular-synth influencers.

The Ring Orchestra is an eight-person effort, a collective coming together to tackle opera and one of the genre’s controversial poster boys. 18 compositions, the artists Born in Flamez, Gil Schneider, Simonne Jones, Leo Luchini, Legion Seven, P.A. Hülsenbeck, Isa GT, and Ixa create a collaborative musical score that uses Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen as the point of departure. Originally, the music was cre-ated for a staging of Der Ring des Nibelungen at Schauspielhaus Zürich, directed by Christopher Rüping and written by Necati Öziri. Far from being an affirmative tribute, the orchestra sets out to decon-struct and break down what Wagner and his opus magnum represent: collaboration over singularity and openness instead of conservative rigidity. The resulting score doesn’t shy away from ambivalence by de-centralizing authorship and encompassing everything from ambient to pop, reggaeton, and a wider vari-ety of non-western musical influences.

Mammoth WVH is the debut, self-titled album of Mammoth WVH – the band created by Wolfgang Van Halen. This collection includes the chart topping and now Grammy nominated "Distance” as well as “Don’t Back Down,” “Epiphany,” “Mammoth” and more.

This stunning debut is one of hands down one of our highlights of the year and is still available on a lovely Black Ice Transluscent vinyl.

Wolf began to embrace his voice, inspired by everyone from his father, to bands like AC/DC, Foo Fighters, Nine Inch Nails, TOOL, and Jimmy Eat World. In addition to writing and singing every song on the self-title debut album, remarkably Wolfgang plays every instrument.

Mammoth WVH will be touring Europe extensively in 2022 supporting Scorpions in Germany and headlining shows in Paris, London or Zurich.

"Scottish multi-talented artificer Lomond Campbell has announced the release of his eagerly anticipated ‘LŪP’ album, out via One Little Independent Records on October 22nd.
‘LŪP’ came about when Campbell was commissioned to build a custom tape-looper for prolific Fife-based independent singer-songwriter King Creosote. He tells us “I wanted the machine to embody the compositional ideas of the two esteemed New York avant-garde composers – William Basinski and Steve Reich. It plays 12 second tape loops which ‘disintegrate’ over time as the tape passes near to a rotating magnetic disc. This rotating disc also provides a clock and drives two eccentric cams which sends out ever-shifting phase patterns. You can hook the machine up to a modular synthesiser and process the disintegrating tape loops while generating Reichian phase shifting patterns.” "

CHORUSING ist das Projekt des in Raleigh im US-Bundesstaat North Carolina, ansässigen Songwriters/Produzenten Matthew O'Connell. Auf seinem Debüt "Half Mirror" überlagert O'Connell warme analoge Synthesizer mit "confessional folk". Ein laut Eigenbeschreibung gleichzeitig kosmisches wir irdisches Unterfangen. Aufgenommen wurde "Half Mirror" zu Hause in den Bergen von North Carolina mit einem Vintage-Tape-Delay, einer E-Gitarre und einem selbstgebauten Synthesizer, den O'Connell Balsam taufte. Das Album ist in gleichen Teilen ein einsames Hin- und Herschieben von Elektronik, die durch Folk-Elemente vermenschlicht wird, und Folk-Musik, die durch elektronische Verzierungen verfremdet wird. Die an einem Tag geschriebene und aufgenommene hypnotische Lead-Single "Watching The Beams" ist ein guter Einstieg in den Ambient- Klangkosmos von CHORUSING.

Director David Lynch once said "I long for a kind of quiet where I can just drift and dream. I always say getting inspiration is like fishing. If you're quiet and sitting there and you have the right bait, you're going to catch a fish eventually. Ideas are sort of like that. You never know when they're going to hit you." Inspired by this quote in both name and spirit, Hollie Kenniff's The Quiet Drift is an ambient gallery of cloudlike synths, seraphic strings, echoing guitars, and other celestial textures guided to cohesion by Hollie's own wordless singing. Though the album certainly creates (and originates from) the kind of space where Lynch's proverbial "fish" can be caught, The Quiet Drift is a fitting title for Hollie's own history, both recent and distant. During the course of the album's creation, Hollie and her family moved cross-country from an island in Washington state, to an island in Maine before ultimately relocating to Canada. "As a child I visited Ontario year-round," she explains in her own words. She continues "More than any other landscape, I think the lake, rivers, and woods there left the most enduring impression on me. The landscape and pace of life of these places will always stay with me." But the reverberant spaces Hollie crafts need no physical headquarters. Instead of conjuring views of nature at the ground level, her sound more readily evokes a top-down perspective, with the distinct features of the land shrinking underfoot as the listener becomes untethered from geography altogether. The Quiet Drift belongs more to the liminal spaces between life and afterlife, memory and fantasy, landscape and dreamscape, than any mappable locale. Describing her formative years, Hollie says "As a dual US/Canadian citizen who spent my childhood in a rural town-- one that I haven't returned to in many years - I have a sense of not entirely belonging anywhere. When I was a teenager my close friends were male musicians, so I was also an outsider to the degree that they were wild and anarchic in a way that I wasn't. I was a quiet book reader and avid music listener who enjoyed being around a creative group. I was also a radio DJ for alternative and punk music throughout high school." In this light, The Quiet Drift attests that creativity is placeless, and calls into question the stereotype of artists as scene-centric city dwellers. Having come of age in the absence of metropolitan sensory overload, Hollie learned to spot the muse in nature, and within herself, instead of the echo chamber of a frenzied peer group. On The Quiet Drift Hollie Kenniff wholly escapes from such pop-culture feedback loops into transcendent, shimmering realms, and she brings the listener along with her. In this age in which we have all been called to reevaluate our relationship to indoor spaces, and seek refuge in the great outdoors, The Quiet Drift provides an apt soundtrack for such rebalancing.

Repress! Seventh album by Minneapolis hip hop heroes Atmosphere. Producer Ant and lyricist / rapper Slug have been making music together as Atmosphere for over 20 years and have managed to continually tweak and strive to perfect their formula, while neither straying too far off their path, nor resorting to playing it safe and that holds true on the new set. Fishing Blues is a collection of songs that both define and redefine the Atmosphere sound and features 18 new tracks written and produced by Atmosphere with appearances from DOOM, Aesop Rock, Kool Keith, The Grouch, deM atlaS, and more.

Limited editon LP format with extra heavy textured jackets and metallic silver ink. LP includes 12" square insert with lyrics and images of the artist, and download. The raw inspiration for Vague Tidings came from a 2006 DIY tour of the 49th state. It was a trip that went off the beaten path-sometimes a bit too far for comfort. Now, over a decade later, listeners find Joe O'Connell aka Elephant Micah stationed at a creaky spinet piano, singing about the Alaskan sky. Throughout, his lyrics take a new angle on a pet theme: human encounters with the natural world. Vague Tidings places these encounters in the American West and, at times, in its sci-fi corollary, outer space. Its imagery draws from the allure of Alaska, the idea of Western prosperity, and the human relationship to wilderness more broadly. Often, O'Connell sings about the goal of capturing and commodifying nature. In poetic sketches of resource extraction industries and dark sky tourism, frontier lust runs amok. Pipelines catch fire and stars disappear, all to the tune of a stark, uncanny Americana. Vague Tidings is a sustained, hallucinatory rendering of this theme. In style, its eight songs follow a switchback path between foggy incantations and mountain anthems. Made with a small cohort of acoustic instrumentalists, the record is rough hewn, but easy on the ears. To put Vague Tidings down on tape, O'Connell assembled some of his favorite musicians in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina area, where he's lived since 2015: Libby Rodenbough (Mipso) bows and plucks a detuned fiddle, Matt Douglas (Mountain Goats) breathes life into various woodwinds, and Matt O'Connell (Lean Year) sets the pace on a two-piece drum set. Their loose, imaginative playing pushes Vague Tidings beyond the singer-songwriter genre into something richer in texture. Ultimately, this is foreboding but spacious music, with plenty of room for reconsidering life on earth. R.I.Y.L. Jason Molina, Bonnie Prince Billy, Bill Callahan, Damien Jurado.

Entwickelt über einen Zeitraum von zwei Jahren, in den auch die Veröffentlichung des 2019 erschienenen Albums ,Stray Fantasies" fiel, liefert das Ehepaar Hollie und Keith Kenniff mit ,In A Deep And Dreamless Sleep" nun ein deutlich schemenhafteres Kapitel ihres Technicolor-Pop-Projekts MINT JULEP ab. Wo das erste Album ein kristallines Gitterwerk definierter Pop-Strukturen trug, stumpft das zweite diese Schärfe ab und macht den Glanz weicher, indem es ein Gleichgewicht zwischen Songkunst und Hollies Solomaterial sowie Keiths Output als Goldmund herstellt. ,In A Deep And Dreamless Sleep" nimmt eine luftigere Form an und verströmt einen schweren Nebel von Shoegaze-Sensibilität, obwohl das ansteckende Pop-Know-How seines Vorgängers fest intakt bleibt. Im Gegensatz zu seinem Titel ist ,In A Deep And Dreamless Sleep" voll von Traumwelt-Neigungen, in denen Wachen und Schlafen, Lieben und Verlassen, Leben und Sterben austauschbar sind. Das Album ist durchdrungen von der sanften Betäubung der aufkommenden Liebe - oder vielleicht ist es die Trauer einer Liebe in ihrem Zwielicht. Oder es ist das Gefühl eines Ehepaares, das seine Liebe vor dem Hintergrund seines geschäftigen Lebens pflegt. ,In A Deep And Dreamless Sleep" ist ein Fenster in eine berauschend romantische Parallelwelt, die die Kenniffs aus analogen Synthesizern, meisterhaftem Sounddesign, nektargetränkten Hooks und luftigen Vocals, die weit in ein Meer von Texturen hinauswaten, erschaffen haben. Sie haben es geschafft, den Wert jahrelanger Rendezvous-Nächte in eine 46-minütige Sammlung von phosphoreszierendem Ambient-Pop zu verwandeln, der ein Gefühl von gekonnter Konsistenz vermittelt, das die beiläufige Entstehung des Albums widerlegt.

Limited edition cloudy clear vinyl. Combining processed recordings of wind and water with analog synthesizers and chamber orchestra, Elori Kramer's The Blue of Distance is an audio dissertation on the role technology plays in our relationships to geography and nature, unspooling into an examination of memory and longing across seven sections that layer filmic minimalism over churning electronic soundbeds. Half of the suite was written in the Adirondack mountains during summer amid lakes, rivers, and moss-laden forest floors, while the other half was conceived on a frozen Lake Superior island in deep winter, creating a subtextual dialogue between the two extreme settings. Kramer, who was born in 1990 and grew up alongside the internet, uses her music to explore nature in the actual and the virtual world, through direct experience and facsimile alike, focussing and blurring the line between the two. "Looking back at my videos of that summer-- which is where the processed audio came from-- I tried to remember what it had felt like to be there," she recalls, "thinking about questions of reality versus imagination; physical versus digital; and the ways in which memory shifts through our minds and technology." The title The Blue of Distance was derived from Rebecca Solnit's book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, referring to the phenomenon of faraway mountains appearing blue due to light particles getting lost over distance. "If we were to go up to the mountains that appear blue from far away, we would see that they weren't actually that color." she says. "This beauty is made possible because of their distance," much in the same way that the splendor of a lush season is only fully realized in the throes of a bleak one, and the joy of an event can only be felt when it has long since been consigned to remembrance. R.I.Y.L Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Josiah Steinbrick, Emily Sprague

Woolfy vs Projections (aka Simon James and Dan Hastie) strike back with their new album on Permanent Vacation. “Destinations” is their fourth studio album, which makes WVP the longest running artists on the label from their debut release back in 2007. Once again, Woolfy vs Projections make California (one of the few places where endless summer isn’t just a hollow phrase) an outpost of the Balearic islands and proof that they’re truly one of the greats of the genre. Over the past decade Simon and Dan created a prolific catalogue of modern day classics with tracks like “Absynth” (described by Resident Advisor as “Air covering ?Steely Dan?"), “Neeve", “Set Me Loose” or “Set It Up". “Destinations” definitely follows suits. 10 tracks that combine the classic West Coast sound, a twist of dark disco, with a deep balearic twilight vibe.??

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Chen Yi aims for a collective approach of art. As an isolated group of humans/numbers operating directly from a secret place in Chelmsford (UK), they developped a personnal and “bizarre” utilisation of guitars, machines, voices, distortion, giving as result an unconventional regroupment of compositions amongst a lot of lost/unreleased recordings. This is likely what got John Peel interested which leads to an inexplicable CBS contract. More couldn’t be finalised, because CBS suddenly pulled out of the contract. “Due to their raw and alternative ’self-made’ musical approach, they’ve been compared to the likes of Throbbing Gristle, Borghesia & Severed Heads or more underground names as Het Zweet, Biting Tongues…

In 2017, the musical term electronic' is nearly obsolete given the ubiquity of computerized processes in producing music. Even so, the prevailing assumption is that musicians working under this broad umbrella must be inspired by concepts equally as electrified as their equipment. Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith has demonstrated in her still-blooming discography that this notion couldn't be further from the truth, and that more often than not, rich worlds of synthesized
sound are born from deep reverence of the natural world. Smith (who by no coincidence, cites naturalist David Attenborough as a contemporary muse) has embodied such an appreciation on
The Kid in as direct and sincere a way as possible by sonically charting the phases of life itself.
The album, which punctually follows up her 2016 breakthrough EARS, chronicles four defining cognitive and emotional stages of the human lifespan across four sides of a double LP.
The first side takes us through the confused astonishment of a newborn, unaware of itself, existing in an unwitting nirvana. Smith's music has always woven a youthful thread befitting of the
aforementioned subject. Here she articulates it in signature fashion on the track An Intention,' which serves not only as a soaring spire on The Kid, but on her entire output. There is playfulness here, but it's elevated by an undertone of gravity into something compelling and majestic that is fast becoming Smith's watermark. The emotional focus of side two is the vital but underreported moment in early youth when we cross the threshold into self awareness. The subject is profound enough to fill an entire album, but rarely makes its way into a single track, indicating Smith's ambition to broach subtler and deeper subjects than the average composer. This side offers up another highlight in the form of In The World But Not Of The World' which serves its subject well with epiphanic, climbing strings and decidedly noisy textures over a near-Bollywood low end pulse.

Side three emphasizes a feeling of being confirmed enough in one's own identity to begin giving back to the formative forces of one's upbringing, which is arguably the duty that all great artists
aim to fulfill. This side ends with the exploratory album cut Who I Am & Why I Am Where I Am' recorded in a single take without overdubs on the rare EMS Synthi 100 synthesizer. This humble
piece of sound design serves as a contrast to side four's verdant orchestral moments, all written and arranged for the EU-based Stargaze quartet by Smith herself. This final side represents a
return to pure being, the kind of wisdom and peace that eludes most of us until the autumn of life. On To Feel Your Best' this concept is voiced in the bittersweet refrain one day I'll wake up
and you won't be there' which Smith intended to be a grateful acknowledgement of life rather than a melancholy resentment of loss. The song has both effects depending on the mood of the
listener, and both interpretations are equally moving.
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith belongs to an ilk of modern musicians who are defined by their commitment to creating experiential albums despite the singles-oriented habits of modern listeners,
and here she represents her kind proudly. The subjects on The Kid are not simple to convey, and yet through both emotional tone and lyrical content, Smith does just that. There is a similar
gravity to both birth and death, and rarely is that correlation as accurately and enthusiastically mapped as it is here.

Alan Watts, another logical inspiration of Smith's, once expounded that people record themselves to confirm their own existence, and as such, echoes and resonance are reminders that we are alive. You're not there unless you're recorded,' Watts muses, if you shout, and it doesn't come back and echo, it didn't happen.' The Kid speaks to this idea directly. As Kaitlyn Aurelia
Smith explores her existence through music, she guides us in gleefully contemplating our own.

1990s EBM / Industrial / leftfield Goth-Pop tinged club cuts

Speedy Ortiz is proud to announce their sophomore album, Foil Deer, which will be released via Carpark Records on April 20th.

'Major Arcana' released in 2013 won them glowing reviews , features and several UK tours (highlights below):

- 4 PAGE NME FEATURE

- 9/10 LEAD REVIEW IN NME: 'One of the reasons 'Major Arcana' works so well is because it's addictive and fun. The guitars and bass sound incredible, like the last Deerhunter album without the Yankee Doodle Dandy'

8/10 Drowned In Sound : ' Speedy Ortiz are way too euphoric and glorious to suffer for their artfulness. Stripping away the frills, at heart Major Arcana is a mournful treasure that asks to be celebrated.'

*NME RADAR FEATURE: 'What's miraculous, though, is that Major Arcana doesn't sound at all self-pitying; it's torrid Slint-meets-Pavement rattle bolsters Sadie's relished words so that yelling along is an exercise in gleefully exorcising your own demons'

8.4 ON PITCHFORK: : 'There's the squalling, guitar-on-guitar carnage of Archers of Loaf, the grungy mysticism of Helium (Dupuis lifted the title Major Arcana from a book she was reading on black magic), and of course the deadpan wit of vintage Liz Phair ('I was never the witch that you made me to be,' Dupuis tells a burnt-out old flame on 'Plough', 'Still you picked a virgin over me').

Standard LP is gatefold, single black LP with chapbook, plus digital download card.
Deluxe LP Is as above but with metallic gold coloured vinyl, and sticker.(200 ONLY FOR UK)
CD comes in digipak with a folded poster approximating the chapbook in the LP.

Speedy Ortiz said they would get the flowers themselves. What a lark! What a plunge!

When considering Massachusetts' Speedy Ortiz, that line from Virginia Woolf comes to mind. Not only for the obvious echoes to DIY, a form and function that's characterized the band's nascency, but in the proto-feminist undertones driving much of their sophomore album, Foil Deer. "I'm not bossy, I'm the boss," Sadie Dupuis sings on "Raising the Skate," invoking in spirit one half of the Carter-Knowles clan and echoing the other's wordplay. And wordplay makes sense, considering Dupuis-the band's songwriter, guitarist, and frontwoman-spent the band's first few years teaching writing at UMass Amherst. She's drawn to the dense complexity of Pynchon, the dreamlike geometry of Bolaño, the confounded yearning of Plath-all attributes you could easily apply to the band's 2013 debut Major Arcana, which fans and press alike have invested with a sense of purpose and merit uncommon in contemporary guitar rock.

The group, including Mike Falcone on drums, Darl Ferm on bass, and new addition Devin McKnight of Grass is Green on guitar, have spent the last year on an almost endless cross-continental touring jag, tagging along with the likes of The Breeders, Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks, and Thurston Moore. That shift into full-time musicianship brought with it an attendant reordering of priorities when it came to songwriting, and the band members' lives in general. They would get the damn flowers themselves.

Dupuis wrote much of Foil Deer at her mother's home in the Connecticut woods, where the songwriter imposed a self-regulated exile and physical cleansing of sorts, finding that many of the songs came to her while running or swimming alone. "I gave up wasting mental energy on people who didn't have my back," she says. "Listening to our old records, I get the sense I was putting myself in horrible situations just to write sad songs. This music isn't coming from a dark place, and without slipping into self-empowerment jargon, it feels stronger." Many of the songs deal with a similar sense of starting over, editing out the unnecessary drama. "Boys be sensitive and girls be, be aggressive," she sings on "Mister Difficult."

And while their debut album was recorded on the fly, Speedy Ortiz spent almost a month in the studio on Foil Deer. Falcone's drums are taut, mechanistic; Ferm's bass ranges from the aggressive rattle of an AmRep classic to smoother, hip-hop inspired lines. McKnight, meanwhile, lends spacier, textural riffs to complement Dupuis' wiry, melody-driven guitar style. "The demos for our songs have always had tons of small details and production experimentation, but we never had any money to pay for more than a couple days in the studio, so the songs came out very live-sounding and guitar heavy," Dupuis says. It was recorded and mixed at Brooklyn's Rare Book Room with Nicolas Vernhes (Silver Jews, Enon, Deerhunter), with the record mastered by Emily Lazar (Sia, Haim, Beauty Pill), lending a more polished sound and a pop sensibility that will stand out to existing fans and new converts alike. For all the lyrical complexity and guitar-based excursions Speedy Ortiz have built their reputation on to this point, Foil Deer has a sense of light-footed fun. What's the point of doing things yourself if you're not going to enjoy the trip

Standard LP is gatefold, single black LP with chapbook, plus digital download card.
CD comes in digipak with a folded poster approximating the chapbook in the LP.