Due out on November 4th via Hex Records (Still/Form, Multicult), Making Friends’ is dense and well… unfriendly music, revolving around deep low end, a primal sense of dread, and harsh rhythmic fury. They teeter between noise rock and grunge in a way similar to Helmet or Unsane, bulking up their scourge with sustaining melodies.
Brooklyn band Jobber’s love for wrestling coming through in their name, artwork, song titles, and lyrics. On their debut EP Hell in a Cell, Jobber adopt wrestling’s insider language to explore workplace discontent and the struggle to be a good person in a shitty world. It’s a gimmick, sure, but it works.
On Lemons, the third full length from Fake Palms, the band strips away a little of the density of their previous albums and sprinkle in a bit more cheer and brightness. Their songs still carry a bit of anger and anxiety within their clattering guitars and slower tempos, but the melodies just hit with more force and clarity than previously displayed.
The world is about to get more Smirk, as Nick Vicario (Crisis Man, Public Eye, Cemento) returns with his first true full length, Material. Due out November 18th via Feel It Records, the album is a whirlwind of twangy post-punk and raw garage rock, picking up somewhere between The Gun Club and a dizzyingly raw knack for basement punk.
For Squirm Records, a new label founded by the members of New York duo Gorgeous, the catalyst of the label is Anyhow, the solo project of Asheville’s Matt Giegerich. A screenwriter and USA Today bestselling mystery author by trade, Longtime Sunshine is Giegerich’s full length debut as Anyhow, due out November 11th.
DIY/riot grrrl veterans Christina Billotte, Kathi Wilcox, and Steve Dore—released The Casual Dots in 2004, apparently with little press or self-promotion, but still establishing a fan base through blog-era word-of-mouth. After an 18-year hiatus, last month the band re-released their debut at the same time as their surprise second full-length, Sanguine Truth.
Fans of bands such as Night Sins, Old Moon, and The Cure, assemble! One of Boston's best alternative bands, The True Faith’s upcoming LP, Go To Ground, is just around the corner in January 2023. "Feet Held To The Fire" immediately gives you a floating sensation and feeling of romanticizing heartbreak through Travis Benson's yearning vocals.
Mt. Surreal acts as an amalgamation of their previous work while journeying into something completely new. It’s an album of ambitious instrumentals and even more ambitious ideas. An album that wastes no space and never falters in its attempts to be what it’s trying to be, the best Disco Doom album yet.
Quagga is the project of Philadelphia’s Josh Mackie, a musician and artist best known as a member of Gunk and Dark Mtns, among a cavalcade of other increasingly experimental projects. In the past six years, he’s released over fourteen releases, and he’s got a new album, 77.7FM "The Spirit”, due out November 18th via Strange Mono.
On their third full length, Nicks and Grazes, Palm fully lean into expanding their electronic and dance urges while the conversational guitar skronkings and creative rhythm section embellishments bubble underneath. The flexibility that they continue to expand upon and the language they all speak between each other is astonishing.
London’s Shake Chain make “unhinged” music. That really isn’t up for debate, and the band prove it throughout their upcoming debut album, Snake Chain, due out November 18th via Upset The Rhythm. While the sound of their music is nestled snuggly within the energetic side of post-punk, it’s vocalist Kate Mahony that really sets the band apart.
“I want it to,” Eliza Niemi begins, little rattle, chucking her limbs to stay underwater–except the water is the present around her, its depth the curt end of her fingertips. Staying Mellow Blows is her third album; it is inside of her. She is a child the way Fiona Apple is a child: She is right. What she says is true.
Musically and lyrically Preoccupations has always been a band which focuses on the impending doom that will befall earth and humanity and Arrangements continues that dark manner of thinking and perhaps takes it even further. The bleak lens that Preoccupations view the world with has an even darker tint to it.
There is no escape from the decimation of Faceless Burial’s impenetrable new album, At The Foothills of Deliration. It’s fitting that an album title that alludes to losing your mind is able to bend, contort, and utterly obliterate our senses through the sheer dexterity of the band’s brutal riffs and earthquaking rhythms.
Julia Jacklin’s songwriting can be so intimate and direct that it can be, at times, discomforting for the listener. She gives voice to many of our own unspoken thoughts. We mistakenly assume we’re alone in our feelings, but when Jacklin hits an emotional nerve, we’re reminded that many of our suppressed thoughts are universal.
Sick Day is a hard working band and they also happen to be fronted by a thoughtful and introspective songwriter who isn’t afraid of being brutally honest with herself, or with you. Olivia Wallace is a visual artist and songwriter who has been active in Chicago for long enough to know how it feels to work.
Unfold is a lost album, recorded right after her debut with Tame Impala's Kevin Parker, who co-produced and played along with Prochet on the seven songs. Whatever the reasons were to delay the release of this album are irrelevant now, as all the seven tracks here show that she has her ear on the essence what psychedelic pop should sound like.
