A. Savage
Parquet Courts frontman A. Savage presents his new single/video, “Thanksgiving Prayer,” and announces a fall North American tour. “Thanksgiving Prayer” marks Savage’s first new solo music since 2017’s Thawing Dawn — “a handy guide for keeping your cool as the world degenerates into a hot mess” (Pitchfork) — and follows the release of Parquet Courts’ acclaimed 2021 album, Sympathy For Life. “Thanksgiving Prayer” is anchored by Savage’s poetic musings, observations that are accentuated by saxophone flourishes from Euan Hinshelwood. “Thanksgiving Day is every day I write a song like this,” Savage croons atop instrumentation from Magdalena McLean (violin), Jack Cooper (guitar), and Dylan Hadley (drums/percussion). “When I get down on all four paws and drag myself // by my own jaws toward a feeling.” Of the single, Savage adds: “Well, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, and every year on that day I write down some words having to do with gratitude. Some years are better than others, but the last one I celebrated these words just sort of came out of me. It was a pretty special holiday actually, because in fact we were recording this song, but I made everybody take a day off. [Producer] John Parish and his wife Michelle were kind enough to allow me to take over their kitchen to cook the meal for everyone. Dylan and I were the only Americans, so there was a bit of explaining to do. So it was the band, the studio staff and the Parish family, and it was an absolutely lovely day. I was in awe of the kindness and mercy, and that’s what the song is about; being in awe of humans. When I got back to my room I was on such a high so I started writing and this song is what was on the page the next morning, when we recorded it.” The accompanying “Thanksgiving Prayer” video — directed by Tiff Pritchett —is a black-and-white homage to silent film, with Savage adorned in makeup and surrounded by his band and handmade decoration. Of the “Thanksgiving Prayer” video, Savage adds: “The video is directed by a brilliant young director Tiff Pritchett, and she had this idea to sort of do a silent film tribute. The scene from Renoir’s film Rules of the Game where Danse Macabre is played was referenced, as was Klaus Nomi.”
Arcy Drive
With time to kill and an attic to jam in, Arcy Drive, a group of four good buds from Northport, New York began forming their scratchy but spirited sound. Traveling in a 1989 Toyota van, they shared their music locally which they coined “Attic-Rock.” After a summer in their hometown and newfound passion of playing live, the four renovated an old school bus and began touring the US before their first official release. Many dive bars and music halls later, their “Barefoot Tour” landed the band a new cult following. So far, the group has released two studio singles and a Live Album amassing over 4 million combined streams. In March of 2023, the band launched their fully SOLD-OUT headline run — The Stattic Tour. This included a sold-out show at Bowery Ballroom in NYC and across the US, selling out LA, DC, Nashville, CHI, ATL, PHX and Philly. This April, the band will be announcing Part Two of The Stattic Tour and getting back on the road. This run will include playing Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza and City Gates’ Festivals. Hope to see you on the road this year and keep your eyes out for some new music coming your way soon!!! -Nick, Pat, Brooke, Austin
Yeule
yeule is the Singapore-born, Los Angeles-based nonbinary musician, performance artist, and painter also known as Nat Ćmiel. First self-releasing songs at age 14, they have since emerged as a cult art icon, whose experimental pop songs of emotional excavation and self-reclamation have attracted a dedicated following of fellow outsiders who seek catharsis from physical and mental struggle. A chameleonic auteur guided by a multidisciplinary ethos, they craft entire worlds and personas through their music, weaving together everything from the classical canon, hypermodern internet cultures, academic theory, the esoteric, and their own carnal desires. While their critically-acclaimed 2022 breakthrough album Glitch Princess was driven by the digital realities and intimacies they discovered to cope with the reclusion of their teenage years, yeule found themselves careening back into another self-made world—this time, more somatic and tactile—during the isolation of the pandemic. In 2020, yeule was forced to return to Singapore while in their final year at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London to finish their degree. In the midst of pandemic chaos and broken ties, grief was abundant when they lost a close friend from an overdose. They poured out their anguish into a total of eight journals, filled with handwritten dissections of these potent feelings. They began playing acoustic guitar obsessively for the first time since they were a kid and relistened to the early 2000s alt-rock music they grew up on, increasingly becoming immersed in their memories By setting these inner musings to cathartic punk riffs and ethereal electronics, yeule crafted Soft Scars, their debut album on Ninja Tune arriving September 22. On the blistering project, they closely examine the anatomy of their long held emotional wounds, making for their most penetrating and daring work yet. By liberating their repressed memories through images of blood, flames, porcelain, and angel wings, they honor the way that pain has shaped their past selves and built their instinct for self-protection Throughout, yeule also writes of relationships, either with themself or others, that were so transformational they feel almost metaphysical. “sulky baby” sees yeule having a conversation with their younger self, rekindling a childlike connection that they had long forgotten, while “ghosts” is written from the perspective of someone who is untethered to the physical realm, talking to the only person who can see them. Meanwhile, “aphex twin flame” is about meeting someone so familiar, you can’t help but suspect you were the same person in a past life. “I took the metaphor of the scar to represent each song, and each scar remains soft,” yeule says. “Whether you’re healing from emotional trauma or a physical wound, time never heals a scar completely. There’s no more pain, but you can still see the mark afterward. I have a deep feeling that the things my ancestors went through got passed down; there’s some trauma that just sticks. There was always decay and distortion in my life, there’s always been something wrong or ugly. So the scar reminds me that I’m being protected, and I should protect myself.” Though its subject matter is heavy and arcane, there is a sense of joyful catharsis that emanates throughout the project, which was written and produced by yeule and their best friend Kin Leonn, with additional magic from Mura Masa and Chris Greatti’s production (Yves Tumor, Willow Smith).
Djunah
Chicago-based Djunah spotlights the talents of Donna Diane, who pulls triple duty, simultaneously playing guitar, singing, and pulverizing a Moog bass organ with her foot — a feat some have described as “mind-blowing.” Drawing a broad range of comparisons from Diamanda Galás to Melvins, Djunah (pronounced “JUNE-uh”) pairs her powerful, unrestrained vocals and abrasive guitar with punishing drums courtesy of drummer Jared Karns (Their/They’re/There, Hidden Hospitals).Known for their massive, intense live sound, Djunah is fueled as much by big emotions as it is by love of gear. Diane, who has been featured on Premiere Guitar’s Rig Rundown, is a self-described gearhead who learned to build footswitches to make simultaneously playing both instruments possible. Shortly before the pandemic started, she launched a YouTube series called “Can I Touch Your Gear?” to help represent women’s voices in the gear space.CVLT Nation called Djunah’s first album, “Ex Voto” (2019), “an angular noise rock escalator run on power and beauty … a record that should be heard by all music lovers, no matter what scene you are a part of.” New Noise called it “an instant classic, like we’ve got a new Melvins on our hands.” Everything Is Noise raved, “Seismic guitar … 100% pure emotion … You gotta see it to believe it.” Djunah’s newest album, “Femina Furens,” fuses influences from formal poetry and heavy music to tell the story of diagnosis and continuing recovery from complex post-traumatic stress disorder, or C-PTSD. Animals, chariots/sleighs, and mythological figures appear prominently on the album as a way of exploring themes of emotional regulation, power, and control — some of the core features of trauma disorders. The album’s title comes from the Latin for a “raging” or “furious” woman.Website | Instagram | Facebook
Zoso The Ultimate Led Zeppelin Experience
ZOSO Celebrates 28 Years as America’s Premier Led Zeppelin Tribute BandOver the 28 years and over 4500 shows since ZOSO came together as a group in the mid-‘90s, the seemingly tireless quartet has continued to earn its well-deserved reputation as being, in the words of The L.A. Times, “head and shoulders above all other Led Zeppelin tributes.”ZOSO doesn’t cut corners on either the look or sound of Led Zeppelin. Instead, the band draws liberally and meticulously from Led Zeppelin’s recorded live and studio output to present a vivid performance picture of the classic live Zeppelin of 1968-1977. No wonder the St. Petersburg Times noted that, in addition to their virtuosity and spot-on visual presentation, ZOSO is also “the most exacting of all the Led Zeppelin tributes.” The Chicago Sun-Times put it even more succinctly: “[ZOSO is] the closest to the original of any Led Zeppelin tribute.”
Holy Fawn
three creatures making loud heavy pretty noises.Website | Bandcamp | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook
Rayland Baxter
For the making of his fourth album If I Were a Butterfly, Rayland Baxter holed up for over a year at a former rubber-band factory turned studio in the Kentucky countryside—a seemingly humble environment that proved to be something of a wonderland. “I spent that year living in a barn with the squirrels and the birds, on my own most of the time, and I discovered so much about music and how to create it,” says the Tennessee-bred singer/songwriter. “Instead of going into a studio with a producer for two weeks, I just waited for the record to build itself. I’d get up and go outside, see a butterfly and connect that with some impulsive thought I’d had three months ago, and suddenly a song I’d been working on would make sense. That’s how the whole album came to be.”The follow-up to 2018’s critically acclaimed Wide Awake, If I Were a Butterfly finds Baxter co-producing alongside Tim O’Sullivan (Grace Potter, The Head and the Heart) and Kai Welch (Molly Tuttle, Sierra Hull), slowly piecing together the album’s patchwork of lush psychedelia and Beatlesesque pop. In addition to working at Thunder Sound (the Kentucky studio he called home for months on end), Baxter recorded in California, Texas, Tennessee, and Washington, enlisting a remarkable lineup of musicians: Shakey Graves, Lennon Stella, several members of Cage the Elephant, Zac Cockrell of Alabama Shakes, Morning Teleportation’s Travis Goodwin, and legendary Motown drummer Miss Bobbye Hall, among many others. In an especially meaningful turn, two of the album’s tracks feature the elegant pedal steel work of his father, Bucky Baxter (a musician who performed with Bob Dylan and who passed away in May 2020). Thanks to the extraordinary care and ingenuity behind its creation, If I Were a Butterfly arrives as a work of rarefied magic, capable of stirring up immense feeling while leaving the listener happily wonderstruck.Baxter’s debut release as a producer, If I Were a Butterfly bears a dazzling unpredictability that has much to do with his limitless imagination as a collector and collagist of sound. “Sometimes the bullfrogs in the pond outside would pulse in a certain tempo and I’d apply that to a song, or I’d hear a bird chirping and it would inspire me to add harmonica in a particular place,” he says. “I could be walking around this massive building in the middle of the night and the air-conditioning would turn on, and it’d give me the idea to include a synth part that holds a similar note. I’d wait for those moments to happen and whenever I tried to force anything, the music usually rejected it.”A perfect introduction to If I Were a Butterfly’s elaborate sonic world, the album-opening title track begins with a recording of a Baxter singing at age four, then drifts into a delicately sprawling reverie ornamented with so many lovely details (lavish flute and cello melodies, radiant horns, the hypnotic harmonies of Lennon Stella and Baxter’s girlfriend, Sophia Rose). “I liked the idea of the first voice on the record being me as a little kid, not knowing where I’d be today,” notes Baxter, who embedded newly unearthed audio clips of himself and his older sister Brooke all throughout the album. Graced with the combustible guitar work of his bandmate Barney Cortez, “Billy Goat” kicks up a potent tension with its restless grooves and hot-tempered gang vocals.Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Petey
On his new album USA (due 9/22/23), Chicago-bred singer/songwriter Petey bares his soul about all the endless things that keep him up at night. As he muses on everything from masculinity to anxiety to the very nature of human existence, the Los Angeles-based artist drifts between warmhearted sincerity and delightfully warped humor—a deeply affecting dynamic that also defines the absurdist alt-comedy that’s earned him a massive following on TikTok. Built on his idiosyncratic but viscerally charged breed of alt-pop/rock, Petey’s Capitol Records debut ultimately brings a gloriously strange convergence of comfort, catharsis, and unrelenting joy. The follow-up to his 2022 debut Lean Into Life, USA finds Petey working with co-producers John DeBold (Wallows, Remi Wolf) and Aidan Spiro to piece together what he refers to as “an origin story of a typical American male in their 30s.” While the album includes decidedly autobiographical tracks like “Home alone house”—a real-life account of getting busted smoking weed on the beach in eighth grade—Petey’s songwriting often takes the form of impressionistic vignettes revealing the sheer depth and scope of his inner world. On “I’ll wait,” for instance, he delivers an explosive piece of pop-punk whose lyrics offer a candid perspective on mental health. “It’s a song from the mindset of an anxious man who’s acutely aware of the resources available to him, but for whatever reason decides to just wait it out,” Petey explains. “There’s some recognition that doing nothing will make the problem drag out longer, but there’s also an understanding that the uncomfortable moment will eventually end—just like everything else in life.” Mainly recorded at Gold-Diggers Sound in L.A., USA came to life with equal parts intention and spontaneity. “For me, making music has always been like throwing spaghetti at the wall, and working with John and Aidan allowed me to be reckless and experimental while giving each song the care it deserved,” says Petey, who plays guitar, bass, drums, and synth on USA. “It helped me fulfill the only real goal I had for the album, which was to make sure every single song would be super-fun to play live.” To that end, “Family of six” unfolds in dance-ready grooves as Petey shares a fantastically surreal meditation on gender expression. “We hear so much today about toxic masculinity, so the idea behind that song is trying to reclaim masculinity in a way that’s actually positive and helpful,” he says. “Each stanza is imagining a parallel universe where the laws of physics are different, and therefore I’m the best version of a man that I could be.” Website | Instagram | Spotify | YouTube | TikTok
Kate Bollinger
Kate Bollinger’s songs tend to linger well beyond their run times, filling the negative space of ordinary days with charming melodies and smart phrasings. She writes them at home in Richmond, Virginia, letting her subconscious lead, an open-ended process she likens to dreaming. From a chord progression appears a line, maybe a syllable will start to stick, enough to pursue, but she says sometimes the words don’t feel like her own, more like shapes that form in the mind’s sky. While many are personal and deal with the emotions that surface with finding her place in the world, she’d prefer they be whatever you’d like them to be, to connect with listeners in their own way. Bollinger’s musical universe is relaxed, tender, and unassuming; within lives a timeless sensibility, a songwriter’s knack for noticing the little things and their counterpoints. Darkness and light, pain and pleasure, reality and escape. These all have space to be seen on her new EP, Look at it in the Light, her first project on Ghostly International, arriving in spring 2022. Bollinger’s project is collaborative; she shoots music videos with her friends and colors each of her folk-pop songs with musicians in her community. An agile group of players with backgrounds in jazz, they recorded her first EP, I Don’t Wanna Lose, as live takes in a single day, then slowed it down to build out her 2020 EP, A word becomes a sound. Bollinger sings quickly at times; she jokes that can get her into trouble when it comes to playing live, “some of these songs are going to be a mouthful.” She’s always been drawn to singers in that free-flowing style and got into the habit of writing quickly while watching her longtime collaborator John Trainum work with rappers in the studio. Forced to finish her last EP in lockdown, Bollinger, Trainum, and players excitedly returned to sessions in the spring of 2021 to explore a new batch of songs. The parameters were different this time, Bollinger explains, “We wanted to make limiting decisions and to stick with them, rather than leave things open, and we wanted to hear certain flaws and parts of the process.” Inspired by the music of the ‘60s and ‘70s, particularly a lot of the old Beatles demos, they focused on the orientation and clarity of sound. “I like being able to hear the bass, the guitar, the drums, the keys, and for each instrument to be playing a singular part that is good enough to stand alone.”
Suzanne Vega – An Intimate Evening of Songs and Stories
This is a seated show. Suzanne will be joined on stage by her longtime guitarist, Gerry Leonard, performing a career-spanning show including favorites like Tom’s Diner, Luka, and more! Vega emerged as a leading figure of the folk-music revival of the early 1980s when, accompanying herself on acoustic guitar, she sang what has been called contemporary folk or neo-folk songs of her own creation in Greenwich Village clubs. Since the release of her self-titled, critically acclaimed 1985 debut album, she has given sold-out concerts in many of the world’s best-known venues. Known for performances that convey deep emotion, Vega’s distinctive, “clear, unwavering voice” (Rolling Stone) has been described as “a cool, dry sandpaper-brushed near-whisper” by The Washington Post, with NPR Music noting that she “has been making vital, inventive music” throughout the course of her decades-long career. Bearing the stamp of a masterful storyteller who “observes the world with a clinically poetic eye” (The New York Times), Vega’s songs have tended to focus on city life, ordinary people and real-world subjects. Notably succinct and understated, her work is immediately recognizable—as utterly distinct and thoughtful as it was when her voice was first heard on the radio over 30 years ago.
