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.
The four-piece’s third full-length record, Patience, is an effortless display of femme power, unbridled rage, and candid introspection. Despite its short 26-minute runtime, the album is a diary of sorts that sees guitarist and vocalist Marisa Dabice explore past memories and possible futures in a bid to figure this shit called life out.
Listening to Seattle’s The Berries for the first time will place you in an intersection of nostalgia, mood, and genre. Their latest ten-track LP Berryland, released via Run For Cover, continues with the band’s bending of orthodox spheres of music, hinting at mid-1990s alternative rock, a touch of southern twang and Americana.
Can’t Talk, Being Chased is densely layered, complete with tasty country flourishes like fiddle, lap steel, and horns, but still feels appropriately rough around the edges. You could imagine the band honing the album highlight “Mute ‘Em All” in a Philadelphia basement, adding every possible overdub to try and make it sound like it wasn’t honed in a Philadelphia basement.
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.
Fire-Toolz’s Orange Milk debut is a dense amalgamation of maximalist prog and quantum physics, the holographic principle of glitched jazz fusion. Field Whispers (Into The Crystal Palace) is Marcloid’s experimentation with calculated mayhem, as the producer jukes fluidly through acerbic breakdowns and splintering blast beats.
This collection of new work by iji's Zach Burba feels like a homecoming. It's a collage of home-studio tracks for which Burba casually incorporated friends and absorbed their worlds. It takes a bevy of styles and moods and places them under the same warm haze. Your Music lends credence to an embrace of process, method, and habit.
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.
Upon the 20th anniversary of Robert Pollard and Doug Gillard’s Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department we get a remaster of one of the shining moments in Pollard’s never-ending discography. This record was birthed from Pollard sending Gillard songs he had written for Gillard to compose music for separately which Pollard would add vocals to later.
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.
