Fib, Nick Normal, Guitar, Saturnalias
Guitar and Nick Normal are lo-fi rock bands from Portland, OR. Guitar recently released the well acclaimed record “Casting Spells on Turtlehead” this year and Nick Normal is known for their “egg punk” sound. If you want to include bio’s for FIB and Saturnalias: Saturnalias is a genre-bending rock band from the Raleigh-Durham area with a dreamy but frantic sound. FIB is a post-punk favorite in their home city of Philadelphia.
Ace Monroe
American rock n’ roll band Ace Monroe is getting people up and dancing all across the country with their swingin’ gritty guitar riffs, soaring vocals, and an electrifying larger-than-life show. The quintet consists of Robbie Dylan (lead vocals), Josh Alfano (lead guitar), Jack Kaiser (rhythm guitar, vocals), Jonathan Tatooles (drums), and Erik McIntyre (bass). Expect no facades, no mysticism, no pretenses. Expect only one thing with Ace Monroe, sleek, unapologetic, hard-driving music that not only rocks, but rolls. Website | Instagram | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube
Sankofa Reunion
Sankofa Instagram Lem Butler Matt Brandau Nick Baglio Brevan Hampden Hugh Swaso James Anthony Wallace Tay Noveljasme KellyMr RozziCelinskiTrinidad Rel O Period from Squeezetoy Courtney Scott Wright singing The Butterfly Collector Hosted by Josephus Thompson
Braless, Madisinn, Bella Peadon, Taylor Sharp
Madisinn is the solo project of Texas-born, NC native singer-songwriter Madison Grifaldo. Madisinn always dreamed of a world full of rich harmonies & whimsical instrumentation, so she created it. Her music has been described as “nurtured in a world closely occupied by beautiful voices” & “lavender and velvet lullaby voice.” She however describes it as a mixture of everything she loves and feels. Madisinn draws her vocal influences from her classical upbringing in music to her love for great American songwriting ( Judee Sill, Janis Ian, Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez, etc). Madisinn’s first studio EP “The Sun on My Skin” was recorded by artist Samuel Beasley at RFG Studio in Boone, NC. In the past year Madisinn released two singles “Bad Again” and “Go Away” which were both produced by Max Agee in Wilmington, NC at Suck Rock Records. Currently, Madisinn is working on all new material and plans to begin recording her second EP this summer. Based in the beach town of Wilmington, North Carolina, Bella Peadon began her music journey at the beginning of 2024 after releasing her debut single, ‘Red Wine’, produced by Jack Marcello of The Flotillas band. As a singer songwriter, Bella’s music is melodic and lyrically driven. Pulling inspiration from artists including Maggie Rogers, Gracie Abrams, and Kacey Musgraves, her acoustically centered songwriting includes hints of indie, pop, and americana styles. Bella has now taken the live music scene by storm, playing shows and festivals across North Carolina and filling up the roster with upcoming shows in Raleigh and Wilmington. With her first EP currently in production, Bella will continue to release new projects and play live across the east coast and beyond. Taylor Sharp is a singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer based in Raleigh, NC. He describes his music as retro jangle pop inspired by bands like The Smiths, Belle and Sebastian, and The Beach Boys. He has been releasing music since 2022, starting with the upbeat “Runaways”. His songwriting grew more sophisticated along with his production as he followed up with the synth-driven “I Will Wait” and melancholic “You’re Still Standing Near Me”, with its rich cornucopia of clean, jangly Telecasters. The next year, he continued to push his musical abilities with “When There’s No Music to Write”, the double-edged “Long Ride / Goodbye”, and, most recently, “No Help to Anyone”, which both proved he could work outside of the typical pop song structure. Outside of his bedroom studio, he has played local shows both solo and with his band, the Sharpies. Braless started as a student run band in Chapel Hill in late 2021. Comprised of 6 uniquely skilled musicians, Braless has been playing shows in and around the Triangle area for the past 3 years. From their start in basements and backyards, they made their mark on the local music scene by inspiring community at UNC through their passion for live music. Though Braless began as a cover band that rocked bars and frat houses, they now have an original single on Spotify as their second released recording. Braless is most notable for its high energy, improvised sets that fuse indie rock and jazz. They hope to inspire others to chase their love for truthful and soul-satisfying music in all aspects of life.
Lunar Vacation
Lunar Vacation, Everything Matters, Everything’s Fire As one would expect of any historic city, the houses in Decatur, GA are old, and while many have been renovated to suit the needs of the 21st century family, the one Lunar Vacation calls home has not. The porch is quaint and crumbly, the roof leaks, and there is a single bathroom shared by the band’s five members who insist that this is not, actually, a bad thing. “We go on tour and share a hotel room for a month and then all come back to the same house,” guitarist/vocalist Maggie Geeslin says cheerily, aware that to most, this scenario sounds maddening. “We’ve become homemakers together.” Just beyond the porch, the small vegetable garden produces enough to be proud of; in the cramped living room, there is always enough room for a house show, or a jam session. For ten months out of last year, engineer/bassist Ben Wulkan transformed the room into the ad-hoc studio wherein Lunar Vacation wrote and demoed their fearless sophomore album, Everything Matters, Everything’s Fire. “I used to be so protective of the songs when I gave them over to the band,” lyricist/vocalist/guitarist Gep Repasky says. “There’s so much trust involved, but this house helped us grow as best friends, as musicians, as a band.” That newfound sense of trust is apparent on Everything Matters, Everything’s Fire, whose title, taken from the concluding track “You Shouldn’t Be,” is a thesis statement. While Lunar Vacation’s last album, 2021’s Inside Every Fig is a Dead Wasp, happily bathed in the waters of indie pop, their latest effort is exploratory, a product of many hours shared experimenting in a living room together. Inspired by prolific shapeshifters like Yo La Tengo and Björk, Everything Matters, Everything’s Fire adopts an ethos that every idea has the potential to be a good one. “Our last album was super produced, manicured,” Maggie says. “This one’s organic. We embraced mistakes; it made the work even better.” In other words: everything matters, everything’s fire. Once billed as a band of high school friends, Lunar Vacation have transcended the cloying designation of “just kids” and have confronted the sink-or-swim mentality that overtakes you the minute you’re out of your parents’ basement. “Stop being so bitter,” Gep self-admonishes on the chorus of “Bitter” over a plodding, bony arrangement anchored by Connor Dowd’s drumming that summons Television. When they wrote the song, there was a lot to be bitter about; Gep had undergone a year of emotional tumult that led to a psychiatric hospitalization, which was both traumatic and transformative. Most of Everything Matters, Everything’s Fire documents that period, which the rest of the band witnessed as Gep’s closest friends. “When it happened, everyone was there. They brought me a note in the hospital, they brought me clothes, they brought me books.” Instagram | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube With Love: Bandcamp | Instagram | Spotify Visit this Gofundme to help Tasha & band replace stolen gear.
Soccer Mommy
Sometimes, Forever, the immersive and compulsively replayable new Soccer Mommy full-length, cements Sophie Allison’s status as one of the most gifted songwriters making rock music right now. Packed with clever nods to synth-filled subgenres like new wave and goth, the album finds Sophie broadening the borders of her aesthetic without abandoning the unsparing lyricism and addictive melodies that make Soccer Mommy songs so easy to obsess over. Sometimes, Forever is the 24-year-old’s boldest and most aesthetically adventurous work, a mesmerizing collection that feels both informed by the past and explicitly of the moment. It’s a fresh peek into the mind of an artist who synthesizes everything — retro sounds, personal tumult, the relatable disorder of modern life — into original music that feels built to last a long time. Maybe even forever. Sophie was only 20 when she put out Clean, her arresting studio debut, which became one of the most beloved coming-of-age albums of the 2010s. Its bigger-sounding followup, color theory, brought more acclaim and continued to win her fans far outside of the lo-fi bedroom pop scene she cut her teeth playing in. But with all the highs came inevitable lows. Navigating young adulthood is often spiritually draining, to say nothing of the artless administrative chaos associated with being a popular full-time musician. And yet she never stops writing, consistently transforming bouts of instability into emotionally generous music. The latest culmination of that process is Sometimes, Forever, which sees Sophie once again tapping into the turn-of-the-millenium sensibilities she’s known for. This time, though, she advances her self-made sonic world beyond the present and into the future with experimental-minded production, an expanded moodboard of vintage touchstones, and some of her most sophisticated songwriting to date.To support her vision, Sophie enlisted producer Daniel Lopatin, a.k.a Oneohtrix Point Never, whose recent behind-the-boards credits include the Uncut Gems movie score and The Weeknd’s chart-topping Dawn FM. While the pairing might seem unexpected, active listening reveals a kindred creativity; both artists are interested in utilizing memory-triggering sounds and melodies to make invigorating music that transcends its influences. On Sometimes, Forever, Lopatin employs his boundless synth vocabulary and knack for meticulous arrangements to complement Sophie’s well-crafted compositions. The result is an epic-feeling mix of raw-edged live takes and studio wizardry.Nowhere is Sophie’s exploration more spellbinding than “Unholy Affliction,” a first-half highlight with a paranoid post-rock rhythm and cursed-sounding synths. “I don’t want the money / That fake kind of happy,” she sings with dead-eyed disaffection. In addition to showcasing Sophie’s appreciation for textures that are at once pretty and unsettling, “Unholy Affliction” foregrounds one of Sometimes, Forever’s more compelling narrative tensions: the push and pull between Sophie’s desire to make meaningful art and her skepticism about the mechanics of careerism. “I hate so many parts of the music industry, but I also want success,” Sophie says. “And not just success — perfection. I want to make things that are flawless, that perfectly encapsulate what I’m thinking and feeling. It’s an unachievable goal that keeps you constantly chasing it.” Website | Bandcamp | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
Cassandra Jenkins
Like the night sky itself, the world of My Light, My Destroyer is always expanding. Cassandra Jenkins’ third full-length cracks open the promise of reaching the edge of the new, with a wider sonic palette than ever before — encompassing guitar-driven indie rock, new age, sophistipop, and jazz. At the center of it all is Jenkins’ curiosity towards the quarks and quasars that make up her universe, as she blends field recordings with poetic lyricism that is at turns allusive, humorous, devastating and confessional — an alchemical gesture that further deepens the richness of My Light, My Destroyer’s 13 songs. Jenkins suffuses My Light, My Destroyer with an easy confidence, which betrays the simple truth that the road here was not without difficulty. Referring to the 2021 breakout An Overview on Phenomenal Nature as her “intended swan song,” she explains that she was prepared to hang it up when it came to touring and releasing her own music. “I was channeling what I knew in that moment — feeling lost,” Jenkins recalls. “When that record came out, and people started to respond to what I had written, my plans to quit were foiled in the most unexpected, heartening, and generous way. Ready or not, it reinvigorated me.” Immediately upon finishing two years of touring An Overview, Jenkins approached recording a follow-up, only to find that capturing the creative spark while “running on fumes” was tough. “I was coming from a place of burn out and depletion, and in the months following the session, I struggled to accept that I didn’t like the record I had just made. It felt uninspired,” she confesses, “so I started over.” With her closest musical co-conspirators reassembled, and producer, engineer, and mixer Andrew Lappin (L’Rain, Slauson Malone 1) behind the board, Jenkins set the prior sessions aside and began constructing My Light, My Destroyer from its ashes: “When we listened back in the control room that first day, I could see a space on my record shelf start to open up, because the songs were finding their home in real time. That spark informed the blueprint for the rest of the album, and its completion was propelled by a newfound momentum.” Even as My Light, My Destroyer was developed over the course of a year, some of these 13 songs have been incubating in Jenkins’ notebooks for years; seeds of the cavernous New Age pop of “Delphinium Blue,” for instance, date back to 2018. There were sonic reference points in her mind during the album’s creation: Tom Petty’s deceptively breezy folk-rock classicism, the work of songwriters like Annie Lennox and Neil Young, her “high school CD wallet” (Radiohead’s the Bends, the Breeders, PJ Harvey, and Pavement), and David Bowie’s final gesture Blackstar; along with lyrical influences from writers like Anne Carson, Maggie Nelson, Rebecca Solnit, and the ever present work of the late David Berman. Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | Soundcloud
Heavy Makeup
Heavy MakeUp:🎤 Edie Brickell🎹 Trever Hagen🎺 CJ Camerieri Facebook | YouTube | NPR Podcast
Olive Klug
Olive Klug refuses to be put in a box. Working out who you are in front of an ever-growing audience is no small task, but one that the Portland-born, Nashville-based singer/songwriter is up for and thriving. Olive graduated with a liberal arts degree shortly before the 2020 pandemic derailed their plans of pursuing a career in social work. Though they’d recorded and self-released the 2019 EP “Fire Alarm” from a childhood friend’s bedroom, up until early 2021, Olive categorized their music as either a hobby or a pipe dream, depending on who was asking. However, after being laid off of a teaching job in late 2020, Olive starting working as a barista and decided to commit all of their extra energy to an ever-growing community of fans online. Olive can’t help but be unapologetically themselves, something their community of fans (dubbed the “Klug Bugs” on Instagram and Discord) appreciate most about them. Their debut LP ranges from a playful Americana romp about “watching all the rules disintegrate” to folk-punk anthem “Coming of Age,” which somehow manages to reference both pop singer Taylor Swift and existential philosopher Kierkegaard in one song, to “Parched”‘s haunting modern ballad about a doomed relationship, to an indie rock closer about learning to take up space as a person with a marginalized identity. Through this no-holds-barred documentation of the struggles of their early adulthood, Klug embraces all their inner contradictions with reckless abandon. Combining their knack for storytelling with a lilting soprano voice, Klug offers observations with an unflinching honesty. “I’ll stop seeking to find, start saying what’s on my mind,” sings Klug on Out Of Line, the lead single from their 2023 label-debut album, Don’t You Dare Make Me Jaded. The album takes on the world with visceral and tactile images: it finds them falling in love with reckless abandon, haunted by the ghost of an old lover, waiting for fairies in the backyard of their childhood home. Olive’s work is optimistic, but not naive. Klug emerged into the scene in fraught times: for the folk landscape, for the country, for themself. By combining Golden Age folk references and contemporary narratives with ease, Olive Klug is a singular voice for the future of folk: honest, compelling, often unsure, but willing to try anyway. 2024 finds Olive in Nashville, attempting to stabilize after a 3-year whirlwind of viral niche internet-fame, nonstop touring, and music industry naïveté. Olive’s social work background grounds them in community, a word they keep coming back to when ego proves unfulfilling. After attending Folk Alliance International for the last two years, Olive is excited to solidify themselves as a fixture of the greater folk community and return to what inspires them the most about music; the catharsis and social change that is possible when people come together and share themselves through song. Website | Instagram | Twitter | Spotify | YouTube | TikTok
MJ Lenderman & The Wind: Manning Fireworks Tour
No one paid too much attention when Jake Lenderman recorded Boat Songs, his third album released under his initials, MJ Lenderman. Before he cut it, after all, he was a 20-year-old guitarist working at an ice cream shop in his mountain hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, getting away for self-booked tours of his own songs or with the band he’d recently joined, Wednesday, whenever possible. But as the pandemic took hold just as he turned 21, Lenderman—then making more money through state unemployment than he had ever serving scoops—enjoyed the sudden luxury of free time. Every day, he would read, paint, and write; every night, he and his roommates, bandmates, and best friends would drink and jam in their catawampus rental home, singing whatever came to mind over their collective racket. Some of those lines stuck around the next morning, slowly becoming 2021’s self-made Ghost of Your Guitar Solo and then 2022’s Boat Songs, recorded in a proper studio for a grand. With its barbed little jokes, canny sports references, and gloriously ragged guitar solos, Boat Songs became one of that year’s biggest breakthroughs, a ramshackle set of charms and chuckles. Much the same happened for Wednesday. Suddenly, people were paying a lot of attention to what Jake Lenderman might make next. The answer is Manning Fireworks, recorded at Asheville’s Drop of Sun during multiple four-day stints whenever Lenderman had a break from the road. Coproducing it with pal and frequent collaborator Alex Farrar, Lenderman plays nearly every instrument here. It is not only his fourth full-length and studio debut for ANTI- but also a remarkable development in his story as an incredibly incisive singer-songwriter, whose propensity for humor always points to some uneasy, disorienting darkness. He wrote and made it with full awareness of the gaze Boat Songs had generated, how people now expected something great. Rather than wither, however, Lenderman used that pressure to ask himself what kind of musician he wanted to be—the funny cynic in the corner forever ready with a riposte or barbed bon mot, or one who could sort through his sea of cultural jetsam and one-liners to say something real about himself and his world, to figure out how he fits into all this mess? He chose, of course, the latter. As a result, Manning Fireworks is an instant classic of an LP, his frank introspection and observation finding the intersection of wit and sadness and taking up residence there for 39 minutes. Yes, the punchlines are still here, as are the rusted-wire guitar solos that have made Lenderman a favorite for indie rock fans looking for an emerging guitar hero. (Speaking of solos, did you hear him leading his totally righteous band, the Wind, on his lauded live cassette last year? Wow.) But there’s a new sincerity, too, as Lenderman lets listeners clearly see the world through his warped lens, perhaps for the first time. “Please don’t laugh,” he deadpans during “Joker Lips,” a magnetic song about feeling pushed out by everyone else. “Only half of what I said was a joke.” Maybe you hear a tremble in his voice? That’s the frown behind the mask, finally slipping from Lenderman’s face. Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube
