Their full length debut finds the trio equally freaked out and aggravated, as they grapple with identity, acceptance, and primal emotion that comes from grappling for your place in the world. Mixed and mastered by Todd Rittmann (Dead Rider, US Maple), every moment of their record feels appropriately unhinged and decisively unwound.
Motorists are a new band from Toronto but the members grew up together in Calgary, lifelong friends who have played in various bands for well over a decade. Set to release their debut EP, From The Wreckage, later this month via Planet of the Tapes, the album is a combination of well-worn power-pop, slacker punk, and the gentle side of krautrock.
Regardless of which direction each song takes, the band never loses its momentum with its thoughtful storytelling and melodies that are at once heart pounding and heart wrenching. In these ten songs, Ratboys are sifting through the past like one would open dusty, nearly forgotten boxes in an attic, but hey’re also embracing future adventures.
Surrender Your Poppy Field, Guided by Voices’ first release in the 2020s, marks an important point in the band’s history. As their 30th studio album, one might expect the band to rest on their laurels as unofficial royalty among the indie crowd and phone it in. Instead they remain true to themselves and put out music that sounds fun, all while finding ways to build upon it and stay fresh.
Chicago’s Sorespot are very good at what they do. If you aren’t familiar with the band, here’s your introduction: there’s heaps of feedback and sweetly subtle harmonies, and they go together perfectly on the band’s upcoming album, Gifts of Consciousness. Due out next month, its bursting with shoegaze bliss that’s steadily heavy.
Louder, thornier, and more unreservedly aggressive than their past EPs, Total Restraint offers a title that skews paradoxical at first blush. Dig deeper and the title holds some weight. Total Restraint and, by extension, Tosser, understand the value of additional room and have found a way to weaponize its effect.
What’s Tonight To Eternity, the third full-length project under the name, maybe Cindy Lee’s most fulfilled and fulfilling record yet, with moments 1950s and ’60s-tinged pop fighting their way to the surface of feedback and abstracted noise, poignantly investigating the intertwining nature of love and hurt, beauty and horror.
Settle is back working on Psychic Flowers, set to release his latest album, Gloves To Grand Air, on March 13th via Living Lost Records. Recorded in his basement to an 8-track cassette recorder, the album is willing blown-out power-pop that balances lo-fi fuzz and tape hiss with inescapable melodies. It’s full of home recordings magic.
Mush’s 3D Routine reads as a living credo for the contemporary slacker-class malaise. The Leeds foursome deftly balances personal with political, at the same time toeing the line between id-driven punk and a little headiness for good measure. Their debut LP is music for millennial drifters, art-rock nerds, and disillusioned leftists all alike.
Demonstrating Visible Differences of Height is the latest release from indie project Babehoven— a Philadelphia-based duo of songwriter/vocalist Maya Bon and coproducer/multi-instrumentalist Ryan Albert. In context of their past pair of EP’s, the release establishes Babehoven as a prolific project with remarkable consistency for quality songwriting amidst lots of changes for the band.
New York psych pop extraordinaries Lake Ruth are set to release Crying Everyone Else’s Tears, their latest EP, on March 6th. After a string of spectacular singles, the trio continue to explore futuristic jazz and krautrock tinged pop, adopting the templates of bands like Stereolab and Broadcast while subverting them into their own unique shapes.
New Petal Instants is what the Traveling Wilburys might have sounded like if Wilco and the Meat Puppets were on board alongside Bob Dylan. It’s fitting for there to be an undercurrent of anxiety in an album released by an American band in 2020. Arbor Labor Union addresses that while expertly offering a solution simultaneously.
0 Stars is the brainchild of Mikey Buishas, and the latest of many beloved musical projects the New York City-based songwriter has been a part of in recent years. The debut album Blowing on a Marshmallow in Perpetuity, released on Babe City Records, contains many facets of Buishas’ unique style that listeners can expect from his brainy brand of guitar-forward music
Whether playing solo or as part of Lily and Horn Horse and Eyes of Love, there’s always a radiant nuance to her music, built entirely without borders but always with song structures that reside brilliantly within the confines of “traditional pop”. It’s Just Like All The Clouds is out March 13th via Wharf Cat Records, a beautiful exercise in experimental bedroom pop.
Richard Dawson is a folk troubadour for all times. His last album, Peasant, was a concept album about Medieval England. With his newest album, 2020, he blasts into the future with an exploration of contemporary England. The riffs are heavy, the tone is dark and Dawson proves himself to be an adept observer of our present condition.
