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.”Links: Website | Bandcamp | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram

The Menzingers: On The Impossible Past 10 Year Anniversary Tour

Since forming as teenagers in 2006, The Menzingers have shown their strength as rough-and-tumble storytellers, turning out songs equally rooted in frenetic energy and lifelike detail. On their new album Hello Exile, the Philadelphia-based punk band take their lyrical narrative to a whole new level and share their reflections on moments from the past and present: high-school hellraising, troubled relationships, aging and alcohol and political ennui. And while their songs often reveal certain painful truths, Hello Exile ultimately maintains the irrepressible spirit that’s always defined the band.The sixth full-length from The Menzingers, Hello Exile arrives as the follow-up to After the Party: a 2017 release that landed on best-of-the-year lists from outlets like Clash and Noisey, with Stereogum praising its “almost unfairly well-written punk songs.” In creating the album, the band again joined forces with producer Will Yip (Mannequin Pussy, Quicksand), spending six weeks recording at Yip’s Conshohocken, PA-based Studio 4. “That’s the longest amount of time we’ve ever worked with Will,” notes Barnett. “We wanted to make sure these stories didn’t get lost in the music, so we kept it to a lot of room sounds with the guitar and bass and drums.”Despite that subtler sonic approach, Hello Exile still rushes forward with a restless urgency—an element in full force on the album-opening “America (You’re Freaking Me Out).” With its pounding rhythms and furious guitar riffs, the viscerally charged track provides a much-needed release for all those feeling frenzied by the current political climate. “We’re living in a pretty insane time, where all you can think about every single day is ‘What the hell is going on with this country?’” says Barnett. “But as I was writing that song I realized that it’s kind of always freaked me out, especially coming-of-age during the Iraq War. I love so much about America, but I think you can’t deny that there are some people in power who are absolutely evil.”Elsewhere on Hello Exile, The Menzingers turn their incisive songwriting to matters of love and romance, exploring the glories and failures of human connection. A wistful piece of jangle-pop, “Anna” paints a portrait of lovesick longing, complete with dreamy recollections of wine-drunk kitchen dancing. And on “Strangers Forever,” the band shifts gears for a searing tribute to parting ways, backing their spiky guitars with brilliantly barbed lyrics (e.g., “Maybe it’s for the better if we both stay strangers forever”).An album fascinated with home and displacement and belonging (or the lack thereof), Hello Exile takes its title from its heavy-hearted centerpiece. With its aching vocals, graceful acoustic guitar work, and beautifully lilting melody, “Hello Exile” draws inspiration from Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog” (a short story set in the Black Sea resort city of Yalta). “I grew up in a tiny town that’s essentially a cross between a summer-vacation spot for New Yorkers and a retirement home, so for most of my childhood there were always people coming in and out of my life,” says Barnett, who hails from Lake Ariel, PA. “Reading that story made me think of how isolating it felt when my friends would leave to go back to the city at the end of the season, and I’d still just be stuck way out there in the woods.”Links: Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube

Spring Summer (aka Jennifer Furches)

San Francisco-based artist Spring Summer, otherwise known as Jennifer Furches, is an accomplished multi-instrumentalist who spent much of the aughts playing with artists like Cass McCombs, Coconut Records, Sea Wolf and Ben Lee. After taking a decade off to raise her three young children, she’s returned to music, with a forthcoming album produced by Jenny Lee Lindberg (Warpaint) and James Iha (Smashing Pumpkins).Links: Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | Vimeo

S.G. Goodman

“No one escapes the marks left behind when it comes to love or the absence of it,” says singer-songwriter S.G. Goodman, describing the inspiration behind her sophomore album Teeth Marks. “Not only are we the ones who bear its indentations, but we’re also the ones responsible for placing them on ourselves and others.”When the Kentucky native released her debut album, Old Time Feeling, she was rightly coined an “untamed rock n roll truth-teller” by Rolling Stone. The roots-inflected rock n’ roll record saw Goodman lending her gritty, haunting vocals to narrate the dual perspectives of her upbringing as the daughter of a crop farmer, and a queer woman coming out in a rural town.Now with Teeth Marks, co-produced by Drew Vandenberg (Faye Webster, Drive-By Truckers, Of Montreal) in Athens, Georgia, she picks up the threads of Old Time Feeling. But where her critically acclaimed, Jim James-produced debut zeroed in on the South, reframing misconceptions in slough water-soaked tones, her latest album pulses with downtown Velvet Underground electricity, shifting its focus inward – though never losing Goodman’s searing and universal point of view. Teeth Marks is what you might get if Flannery O’Connor and Lou Reed went on a road trip.Drawing influences from the aforementioned Velvets, as well as Pavement, Karen Dalton, and Chad VanGaalen, Goodman brings 11 powerful vignettes to life, with a sound that ventures deeper into indie rock and punk territory than she ever has before. Though Teeth Marks is a love album, Goodman doesn’t aim her focus on romantic relationships alone. Instead, she analyzes the way love between communities, families, and even one’s self can be influenced by trauma that lingers in the body. Teeth Marks is about what love actually is, love’s psychological and physical imprint, its light, and its darkness. It’s a record about the love we have or don’t have for each other, and perhaps, more significantly, the love we have or don’t have for ourselves.Links: Website | Instagram | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | Soundcloud

Boris

Links: Website | Bandcamp | Instagram | Spotify | YouTube

Kelsey Waldon: No Regular Dog Tour

On her new album No Regular Dog, singer/songwriter/guitarist Kelsey Waldon shares a gritty and glorious portrait of living in devotion to your deepest dreams: the brutal self-doubt and unending sacrifice, hard-won wisdom and sudden moments of unimaginable transcendence. Revealing her supreme gift for spinning harsh truths into songs that soothe and brighten the soul, the Kentucky-bred artist ultimately makes an unassailable case for boldly following your heart—a sentiment perfectly encapsulated in No Regular Dog’s raw and radiant title track.“I wrote ‘No Regular Dog’ at a time when I was gone so much and working so hard and starting to wonder if I had the staying power to keep it going,” says Waldon, who now lives in Ashland City, Tennessee. “After putting in my time in the van on the road, after all the blood, sweat, and tears and the crying in parking lots, I’d finally gotten to where I wanted—but it was also a moment when I really started questioning myself. In the end I came around to answer my own question and realize that, yes, I can do this. I won’t be put down so easy. I am no regular dog.” Waldon’s fourth full-length and the follow-up to 2019’s White Noise/ White Lines—her debut release for John Prine’s Oh Boy Records—No Regular Dog came to life over the course of many charmed and freewheeling sessions at Dave’s Room Studio in Los Angeles, with production from kindred spirit Shooter Jennings (Brandi Carlile, Tanya Tucker). “I’d never recorded an album anywhere but Nashville or back home, and it felt good to get outside my bubble,” Waldon says. “We were able to hunker down and work till late into night, doing what we could to catch lightning in a bottle.”In a departure from the more guitar-heavy approach of its predecessor (a critically lauded album that landed on NPR Music’s Best of 2019 list), No Regular Dog unfolds in a lush yet understated sound that lets the singular character of Waldon’s songwriting and voice shine through each track. Featuring her longtime band members, Brett Resnick (pedal steel), Alec Newnam (bass), and Nate Felty (drums), along with musicians like famed guitarist/dobro player Doug Pettibone (Lucinda Williams, Keith Richards), the album also illuminates the immense depth of her musicality, mining inspiration from such eclectic sources as mid-century bluegrass, ’60s soul, and ’70s country-rock. “Everything’s in there, all the music I’ve ever known and loved,” says Waldon. “I wanted to show my whole color scheme and create something that’s less of a honky-tonk thing and more like a big, beautiful picture of everything I see in country music.”After opening on the luminous strings and pedal steel of its title track—in which Waldon self-identifies as a “prisoner of my mental cages, my own worst enemy”—No Regular Dog kicks into a much punchier mood on the brightly rambling “Sweet Little Girl.” “It’s about a girl who’s lost her way and now she’s trying to find it,” says Waldon. “I was inspired by real-life incidents, like all the thoughts that go through your head when you’re dealing with addiction and feeling like you’ve got this rage inside that you don’t know what to do with.”Links: Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube

Melt

Merci, My Kid Brother

Clem Snide and Jill Andrews

“The last ten years have been a rollercoaster of deep despair and amazing opportunities that somehow present themselves at the last possible second,” says Eef Barzelay. “During that time, the band bottomed out, I lost my house, and I had to declare bankruptcy. The only way to survive was to try to transcend myself, to find some kind of deeper, spiritual relationship with life. Once I committed to that, all these little miracles started happening.”‘Forever Just Beyond,’ Barzelay’s stunning album under the Clem Snide moniker, may just be the most miraculous of them all. Produced by Scott Avett, the record is a work of exquisite beauty and profound questioning, a reckoning with faith and reality that rushes headlong into the unknown and the unknowable. The songs here grapple with hope and depression, identity and perception, God and the afterlife, humanizing thorny existential issues and delivering them with the intimate, understated air of a late-night conversation between old friends. Avett’s production is similarly warm and inviting, and the careful, spacious arrangement of gentle guitars and spare percussion carves a wide path for Barzelay’s insightful lyrics and idiosyncratic delivery.“I look up to Eef with total respect and admiration,” says Avett, “and I hope to survive like he survives: with total love for the new and the unknown. Eef’s a crooner and an indie darling by sound and a mystic sage by depth. That’s not common, but it’s beautiful.”Named for a William S. Borroughs character, Clem Snide first emerged from Boston as a three-piece in the early 1990’s, and the group would go on to become a cult and critical favorite, picking up high profile fans from Bon Iver to Ben Folds over the course of three decades and more than a dozen studio albums.Links: Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube Acclaimed singer-songwriter, Jill Andrews gives the unsung moments the voice they have always deserved. From her days fronting lauded Americana group, the everbodyfields, to her successful solo career as a writer and performer, Andrews’ music has taken her far from her East Tennessee home. She has collaborated and shared the stage with countless celebrated artists including the Avett Brothers, Langhorne Slim, Drew Holcomb & The Neighbors, and the Secret Sisters. Her music has been featured on Grey’s Anatomy, This is Us, The Good Wife, Nashville, and Wynonna Earp to name a few. After the success of her critically acclaimed 2020 album and book, Thirties, Jill decided to dig back into her songwriting catalog. Her October 2021 release, Ellen, is one that feels as if it lives in a middle space between where she has been and where she is going as a musician, songwriter, mother, wife, and friend. Links: Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube

Bayside

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Genre: Miscellaneous