Mayer & Mayer is the new brother and sister duo of Atlanta’s Mick Mayer (of Red Sea) and Elle Mayer. While Elle contributor guest vocals to the last Red Sea record, the pair have decided to start their own project with their debut album set to arrive sometime in November, a record dedicated to their families Golden Retriever, Tulsi.
With a new video for “Hydraulic Saint," directed by Larry Bovick, the band breath new life into the record, a stirring reminder of the band’s deranged charm and caterwauling minimalism. For all the insanity and experimental nature of their sound, the construction remains fairly simple, an elastic riff that rings hard as warped rhythms.
Freezing Cold’s debut album, Glimmer, sounds like a lot of things: muscular art-rock, power-house emo, refined post-punk, and even mid-90’s alternative rock. One thing the album doesn’t sound like, however, is a debut. Glimmer comes to us confident & perfectly realized; the trio’s chemistry could not be more complementary.
Bursting out of the Japanese knotweed of intersecting rhythms and notes is the wonderful new track “Against Nature” by Portland band Lubec. They carry that same kind of punk dressed in dream pop vibe you’re used to, but the composition this time around feels more complicated and frustrated, properly mirroring its subject matter.
Seattle’s Ian Kurtis Crist returns with the latest Béret record, Jesus White, due out on October 18th via the project’s new home at Born Yesterday Records, a record that captures the broad scope of post-punk among its nine tracks. While so much of the genre has become stagnant, Crist’s sonic vision is one peppered with variety.
For the past six years New Jersey’s own Francie Moon has been standing proudly in a class all their own. Led by Melissa Lucciola, their mix of soul, folk, country twang, garage punk, and psych pop is brilliantly unique, bolstered by the undeniable strength of Lucciola’s vocal howls and melodic swells.
New Paltz’s Chris Sunshine make that good mopey slacker rock, the kind that’s engaging and detached, similar to bands like Peaer and LVL UP before them. Set to release their fourth release of 2019, the young band are churning out syrupy rockers that stick like glue as they blend dreamy melodies with a fair bit of shoegaze.
Led by Joseph Farago, the queer pop band started playing together in 2016, and has since expanded into a quartet to bring to life the unabashedly pop-centric songs. Dealing with the anxieties of being queer, Joey Nebulous use sparkling lo-fi and what they describe as “Nintendo-inspired synth melodies” to capture both love and heartbreak.
Following Big Ups’ hiatus and Lal’s move to Oakland, he’s set to release his debut solo album, Gardening, on September 27th via Never Content. After years of noisy output, Gardening, much like the album’s title, is a calming effort, an ambient record built on a backlog of tranquil ideas, field recordings, and gorgeous textural synths.
Oakland’s Half Stack find that perfect space between the alt(ernative) and country in “alt-country.” While the band are a decent way from the South, their dusty twang and down-home hooks feel natural, authentic, and easily settled. There’s no tension, just open sky and big melodic relaxation, the type that never feels stagnant.
Woongi’s video for their single “Antiques” starts off on a good foot and then just keeps getting progressively more fun until it’s thrilling (yet casual) finale. It’s a real cinematic experience of the highest variety, kinda like Repo Men condensed into three minutes… with more dancing. Okay, it’s not really like Repo Men, but both are excellent.
“Self-Love” is a warped pop exportation accompanied by a drifting, playful video. In Clay’s words: “This exercise was a great learning experience for me as I began to understand pop production, sound design, composition, & songwriting on a fundamental level, taking the genre's various elements & altering them to fit within my own style.”
It may be a stretch to call much of anything that Sweet Williams do to be joyous, the tonality of this one is definitely more upbeat than their formula often allows. The guitars are still layered thick and with that kind of distortion that removes rust from scrapyards, each stretched progression and melodic vocal line pulled just shy of warping.
“Suspicion,” the album’s centerpiece already had a cinematic quality of sorts, but their new video takes the song’s warped twang and runs with it. Shot on a farm in rural Pennsylvania with director Ben Hammock, the band play a gang of cowboys just moseying about, with one cowboy’s mind fixated on past memories.
The moody trio make something akin to doom-punk: sprawling, commanding vocals glide over a thick swamp of locked-down low end and fried-out fuzz, climbing and falling in headbang-worthy spurts. If “Sucker” is any indication of what’s to come, their new album, Hell Was Full So We Came Back, promises to be a worthy follow-up.
“Monkey Bowling” is a dense and fun song packed with tons of sounds that mesh to create a charmingly catchy tune. Lyrically, the song is a collection of distended and surreal moments. There's enough pop sensibility here to leave you humming, and just enough lyrically to make you want to piece together the story being told.
The Richmond, VA based post-punk band are creating a dark mix of punk that draws elements from the raw burn of The Wipers to the shadowy romanticism of The Cure. Their sound is definitely informed by 80’s post-punk and it’s many shapes, but the quartet are re-purposing their influences into their own.
The melodies are big and memorable, sounding something like Elliott Smith writing Weezer songs, every hook hitting just between sugary exuberance and self-reflective introspection. The band self-released their latest album, I Never Said I Didn’t Care, a fully realized LP that hangs heavy on the blistering anthems.
