Cavetown

Since the age of 14, Cavetown has created self-produced songs both intensely diaristic and touched with offbeat imagination. Now 22, the Cambridge-based artist otherwise known as Robin Skinner has built a global following based on that outpouring, forging a connection so personal he’s taken to keeping a cupboard full of letters he receives from fans. On his new EP Man’s Best Friend, Cavetown expands on the beautifully detailed bedroom-pop that’s brought him immense success in recent years (including headlining sold-out shows around the world), ultimately arriving at one of his most vulnerable projects yet.The follow-up to 2020’s Sleepyhead (his Sire Records debut), Man’s Best Friend took shape from a period of enormous change for Cavetown. Prior to releasing Sleepyhead, he’d found himself unmoored by the demands of his growing fame. With the album dropping right as the world went into lockdown, Skinner slipped intowhat he now refers to as “a very toxic place, mentally speaking,” and eventually stepped back from working on music to focus on his mental health. As he began writing again, what soon emerged was the raw introspection of Man’s Best Friend, a body of work made in deliberate solitude.Throughout Man’s Best Friend, Cavetown examines everything from hopeless crushes to toxic positivity to unhealthy coping mechanisms. Along with previously released singles like “Let Me Feel Low” ft. Miloe, the EP features four new tracks written, recorded, and mixed entirely by Skinner. On “Idea of Her,” for instance, Cavetown presents an up-close portrait of unrequited love, adorning his confessional lyrics with brightly bubbling effects. The EP’s most upbeat moment, “I Want to Meet Ur Dog!!” centers on the same crush, this time offering up a sweetly warped serenade to her pet. And on “Ur Gonna Wish U Believed Me,” Cavetown sets his self-reflection to a gorgeously sprawling collage of sound. “I wrote that song in the depths of a breakdown during lockdown,” says Skinner. “It’s about being angry at the situation and blaming everyone else, manipulating myself and other people. It came from a dark place, so it felt important to make the music a bit lighthearted.”Growing up in Cambridge, Skinner first explored his irrepressible creativity as a child. “I used to write these very emotional, dramatic stories about my imaginary friends, then staple the pages together and call it a book,” he recalls. Not long after learning to play guitar, he started writing and self-recording in his bedroom, then sharing his songs on Bandcamp. Soon after delivering his 2018 breakthrough album Lemon Boy, Cavetown landed his deal with Sire and began selling out major venues in the US and UK as well as taking the stage at leading festivals like Lollapalooza and Reading & Leeds. In addition to releasing a steady stream of projects over the years, he’s also ventured into producing artists like mxmtoon, Chloe Moriondo, and Tessa Violet. To date, Cavetown has amassed nearly a billion global streams (steadily streaming at 8 million per week), six million monthly Spotify listeners, and 1.7 million YouTube subscribers.Links: Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube

Free Throw

With Piecing It Together, their fourth full-length album, Free Throw grapple with hard truths. After three albums and a decade of hard work, including countless performances worldwide, the members — Cory Castro, Lawrence Warner, Justin Castro, Jake Hughes, and Kevin Garcia — have a fresh perspective on life. The band is through obsessing over what comes next and romanticizing the moments that have already passed. Instead, Free Throw is making music about the present and how seeking balance in our lives is far more meaningful work than the endless pursuit of whatever you deem to be ‘enough.’ “It’s very hard when for a band like us to take time off,” drummer Kevin Garcia explains. “We go home to write and record, then we go on tour. Rinse and repeat, you know? When we got into this writing process, we stopped feeling like we existed in a mold or on a path that Free Throw is supposed to keep going on with our contemporaries. We stopped worrying about what tour we may be fighting for next or what someone else does. We were just writing songs that we really like writing. ” Throughout the album’s twelve tracks, Piecing It Together finds the men of Free Throw abandoning childhood notions of success and happiness through a thorough exploration of personal fulfillment. It’s about reaching the heights that once felt impossible and everything that comes after. How no matter what we do or where we go, we must continue to wake up and find the strength to keep on keeping on despite everything we tell ourselves about ourselves. Piecing It Together is an exploration of self-acceptance, and Free Throw invites everyone to join.Links: Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Spotify

MØ

There’s no rulebook for pop, that’s the beauty of it. At it’s heart is a universality and freedom that makes it all so joyous. Someone who understands that better than anyone is Danish pop polymath Karen Marie Ørsted, aka MØ, aka the world’s best pop star. Having established herself with the raw, DIY-tinged agit-pop of 2014’s hugely influential debut album No Mythologies To Follow, she’s since expanded her sound and artistic vision via collaboration with a broad spectrum of some of music’s most interesting characters – from Diplo to Charli XCX to Cashmere Cat to SOPHIE. In 2015 she co-wrote and sang on one of the most streamed songs of all time in the shape of Major Lazer’s global smash, Lean On (she’d later repeat the trick with their 2016 Justin Bieber collaboration, Cold Water, a UK number 1), while these features have been peppered with hits of her own, most notably last year’s MNEK-produced Final Song, which broke the UK Top 15 and was a huge hit across Europe and Australia, and garnered MØ’s first Gold record in the US as a solo artist. As work continues on her second album, due in 2018, she’s unveiled a surprise six-track EP, When I Was Young, which aims to complete the circle that started with No Mythologies To Follow and hints at where she’s headed next. “Putting out this EP is just something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and I just felt it was right to put these songs out before I put out the album,” she says. “I’m a super nostalgic person and so these songs, and the meanings behind them, all fit into this personal journey I’ve been on.”To be fair it’s been quite the journey. Growing up in the sleepy village of Ejlstrup to a psychologist father and teacher mother, Ørsted always knew she wanted to sidestep academia and be creative. Her musical idols were typically polarised, with the Spice Girls dominating her pre-teen years before Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon took over as number one when she was a teenager. Early musical projects leant towards aggressive punk statements, with titles like A Piece of Music To Fuck To and Pussy in Your Face, before she started collaborating with Danish producer Ronni Vindahl in 2012 under the moniker MØ (Danish for virgin, by the way). From there the seeds of No Mythologies To Follow were sewn via the critically-adored early singles Glass, Pilgrim and Waste Of Time. After the album was released in March 2014, preceded by the Diplo-produced XXX 88, MØ launched into tour mode, traversing the globe and meeting a host of new friends and collaborators.That year saw her collaborate with Swedish rapper Elliphant on the Joel Little-produced One More and then, in 2015, everything went interstellar. Having been asked by Diplo to write some lyrics over a beat he’d made for his Major Lazer project, MØ came up with Lean On, singing the song initially meant for Rihanna with such conviction she knew it could only be released with her voice on it. And it was. Over 1 billion (!) streams later and it’s now one of the biggest, most recognised songs of the last decade. Its success was swift and sudden, but the aftermath has been a little more prolonged. “It was a fantastic thing, but this is the first year where I can focus more on my own project,” she says.Links: Website | TikTok | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | Soundcloud

Palomino Blond, MOLD – CANCELLED

Carli Acosta – Guitar/VocalsKyle Fink – Guitar/VocalsPeter Allen – Bass/Background VocalsMichael Arevalo – Drums/Background VocalsPalomino Blond started in 2018 and immediately developed a reputation as one of the hardest-working bands in the state, packing house shows and converted warehouses all over Florida with only a handful of demos to their name. From their humble beginnings in Kendall’s long tradition of DIY all-ages shows to getting recognized by Iggy Pop as “one of Miami’s brightest lights,” Palomino Blond has consistently grown its audience through a music-first approach with raucous live shows and an infectious, ever-evolving sound that is as inviting as it is intense in its mood shifts. The Miami New Times called “Supergalore” from their 5-Song Demos EP a “Propulsive bummer anthem, buoyed by floating vocals and brutal riffs built in to three musical acts,” also naming it one of the “Best Songs of 2018.” The band’s carefully crafted guitar-based songs sound as relevant in 2021 as they would have been in the 90’s, with roots in Grunge, Gothic Rock, Pop-Punk, and Shoegaze. Early 2019 saw the release of the single and striking video for “Creature Natural” (Directed by Michael Cuartas and Jonathan Cuartas – Director of the 2020 Patrick Fugit-starring film, My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To), with the Miami New Times going as far to say that “Palomino Blond is taking Miami by Storm,” and calling it one of “The 20 Best Miami Songs of 2019.” This organically led to Southeast US supporting shows and tours with Black Lips, Last Dinosaurs, Chastity Belt, A Place to Bury Strangers, The Casket Lottery, Born Ruffians, Unwed Sailor, Ceramic Animal, seeyousoon, Thelma and the Sleaze, and Spendtime Palace, along with appearances at The Fest, iii Points, Sing Out Loud, Pulp Fest, Bumblefest, and MadSoul. The band’s fiery live shows regularly garner glowing comparisons to such luminaries as: The Smashing Pumpkins, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Sonic Youth, and The Breeders. The coronavirus pandemic hit Florida in March 2020, just as the band’s 12″ Split EP with Las Nubes on BuFu Records was to be released. During the resulting quarantine, original members Raven Nieto (bass) and Jake Karner (drums) exited the band, with close friends Peter Allen (Bass/Vocals) and Acosta’s cousin, Michael Arevalo (Drums/Vocals) now in the fold as permanent members and key contributors.Summer 2021 saw the release of the forward-thinking, self-recorded and produced “Dead Hand”/”Lo Siento” double-single, two radically different offerings to tide fans over until the release of their debut 7-song ontheinside EP, which will be released on November 19th, 2021 by Palomino Blond and Limited Fanfare (The Sh-Booms, Astronautalis, Ex Norwegian, Heavy Drag.) with Vinyl, Cassette and CD available January 21st, 2022.Recording of the EP began in late 2019 with the lead single and fan-favorite, “Phoebe.” “Phoebe was the first ‘new song’ we started playing live after we released our initial batch of demos. It’s a favorite of ours and has been in our set for over 2 years by this point, but wasn’t finished until 2021 due to the pandemic,” says Kyle Fink, (who wants everyone to know that the song is NOT about indie songstress Phoebe Bridgers).Links: Website | Bandcamp | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube

Gang of Youths

Reptaliens, Yot Club

Inspired by sci-fi art, cult mentality and deep connections, creating low fidelity chameleon dreamscapes somewhere between abstract expressionism and surrealism both sonically and visually. Reptaliens is a project of exploration in pop culture.Reptaliens Links: Bandcamp | FacebookYot Club Links: Website | Bandcamp | Instagram | Twitter | Spotify | TikTok

Pom Pom Squad

When Pom Pom Squad’s Mia Berrin was 21 years old, she fell in love. Sure, she’d been in love before, but this time, something was different: “It just felt like a switch had flipped inside my head,” she says. “I realized I had been living a life that was not my own, watching myself from the outside.” As a kid who bounced from town to town growing up, and as a person of color in predominantly white spaces, Berrin had become accustomed to maintaining a constant awareness of how others perceived her—a “split-brain mentality” that she adopted as a necessary means of survival. But now, tumbling through her first queer romance—and her first queer heartbreak—some of that self-separateness began to mend: “Suddenly,” she says, “I was in a body that was mine.”Of course, displacement can start to feel like a life sentence when even the pop culture you’re trying to escape into doesn’t feel like home. “As a teenager, I was always looking to see myself represented,” Berrin says, “but I never really saw a path drawn out for someone who looked like me.” So she held tight to the glimpses of herself she could catch—from Death Cab For Cutie to Sade; from the camp and synth-pop of Heathers to the pastels and gloomy mellotron of The Virgin Suicides; from John Waters’s take on suburbia to David Lynch’s. “I absorbed everything I could and tried to make a collage that could incorporate every piece of me,” she says—and in the process, she gained a particular appreciation for the heady mix of music and visuals, how a great song could become even greater when woven into an artist’s overall aesthetic. But it wasn’t until Berrin got into punk and grunge—artists like Courtney Love and Kathleen Hanna, who were both unapologetically outspoken and unapologetically femme—that she knew she had to start a band.Enter Pom Pom Squad. Berrin first played under the moniker in 2015 after moving to New York to study acting at NYU—though she soon transferred to the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music—and it was at those early gigs that she linked up with Shelby Keller (drums), Mari Alé Figeman (bass), and Alex Mercuri (guitar). The group cut their teeth playing packed Brooklyn apartments, but they quickly graduated to packed Brooklyn venues alongside artists like Soccer Mommy, Adult Mom, and Pronoun. Following the release of their sophomore EP Ow, Pom Pom Squad was looking at a packed 2020, with shows at SXSW and opening for The Front Bottoms—but of course, plans changed.Lost in the free-fall of isolation, Berrin found herself returning to classic, familiar sounds: jazz vocalists like Billie Holiday, the warm tones of MoTown. “It was comforting, listening to music that’s so evocative and cinematic,” she says. “It takes you out of the world for a minute.” At the same time, though, she was confronted daily with the world’s stark reality as protests erupted against police brutality and anti-black racism following the murder of George Floyd. “[The protests] brought to the surface these feelings I’d been stewing on for a long time,” she says, “thinking about the history of American popular music, the way that black artists are constantly erased from the music they pioneered. How rock was invented by a black queer woman—Sister Rosetta Tharpe—but I grew up feeling like I was odd for loving guitar-based music.”Links: Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube

Born Ruffians

Juice, squeezed from soft fruit contains a floating melange of fleshy, fibrous pulp. The glass is before you: electric and vibrant. Naturally sweet and nutritious. Nature’s nurturing gift for body and mind. An abundance of good material, that’s what we had. We didn’t set out to write a trilogy. We just wrote a lot of songs that we liked and it seemed a shame to bury any of them. So, early on in our recording process we looked at this great big list of all the songs and said “let’s break this up into three records: JUICE, SQUEEZE and PULP.” It would be short selling it to call PULP a collection of b-sides and rarities. Rather, it is a group of songs who have been patiently waiting their turn. ‘Happy Parasites’ was at the top of the list when we entered the studio to record “Uncle, Duke & the Chief” in 2017 but it never made it into the sessions. ‘Husha’ has been kicking around YouTube and various hard drives, a bootleg of sorts, for nearly ten years. ‘Heat Wave’ is a head bobbing, slow-burn banger that just needed a little more gestation time. PULP, strained and separated for your convenience. You may now swirl them back into the eddying roil or consume each song independently. All we ask is you refrigerate after opening.Links: Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube

Penny & Sparrow

Written and recorded over the past year, Penny and Sparrow’s remarkable new album, Olly Olly, is a work of liberation and revelation, a full-throated embrace of the self from a band that’s committed to leaving no stone unturned in their tireless quest for actualization. The songs here are fearless and introspective, embracing growth and change as they reckon with desire, intimacy, doubt, and regret, and the arrangements are similarly bold and thoughtful, augmenting the duo’s rich, hypnotic brand of chamber folk with electronic flourishes and R&B grooves. The duo—Andy Baxter and Kyle Jahnke—produced Olly Olly themselves, working on their own without an outside collaborator for the first time, and the result is the purest, most authentic act of artistic self-expression the pair have ever achieved. “Andy and I talk about the process of making this record like a sort of musical Rumspringa,” Jahnke says. “It was an opportunity to truly become ourselves, to evolve outside of the roles we’d been put in—or put ourselves in—because of the way we’d grown up.”Texas natives Baxter and Jahnke first crossed paths at UT Austin, where they developed a fast friendship and a deeply symbiotic musical connection. Jahnke was a gifted guitarist with an ear for melody, Baxter, an erudite lyricist with a mesmerizing voice and crystalline falsetto, and the duo quickly found that their vocals blended together as if they’d been singing in harmony their whole lives. Beginning with 2013’s ‘Tenboom,’ the staunchly DIY pair released a series of critically lauded records that garnered comparisons to the hushed intimacy of Iron & Wine and the adventurous beauty of Bon Iver, building up a devoted fanbase along the way through relentless touring and word-of-mouth buzz. NPR praised the band’s songwriting as a “delicate dance between heartache and resolve,” while Rolling Stone hailed their catalog as “folk music for Sunday mornings, quiet evenings, and all the fragile moments in between.” The duo’s most recent album, 2019’s Finch, marked a turning point in their career, pushing their sound to experimental new heights as it wrestled with notions of masculinity and religion and transformation in deeper, more personal ways than ever before. The record debuted at #2 on the Billboard Heatseekers Chart and was met with a rapturous response from critics and audiences alike, racking up more than 40 million streams on Spotify and earning the band their biggest headline tour to date.Links: Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube

DRAMA

This show is co-presented with WUNC Music.DRAMA is the multicultural collaboration between producer Na’el Shehade’s chic Chicago house-infused production style, and vocalist Via Rosa whose soulful delivery is inspired by the improvisational nature of jazz and playful patterns of hip-hop and bossa nova. The duo play to the complementary dynamics of their unlikely pairing by blurring the lines between R&B and dance-pop, heartbreak and bliss.Rosa grew up in a musical household; her parents played in a reggae band and toured as a family, homeschooling Rosa into her early teens and limiting her listening primarily to Sade, oldies, Brazilian and Afrobeat music. She kept poetry journals and by high school started writing songs and making beats. After moving to Chicago in 2010, Rosa connected with THEMPeople, a collective at the center of the city’s sprawling hip-hop scene.Meanwhile, Shehade inherited a strong work ethic from his immigrant parents. Born in Chicago, he fell in love with DJ culture as a kid and took up music production and engineering; his interest eventually led to professional opportunities, including early studio work with Chance the Rapper, Kanye West, and music projects for MTV and Bravo. Since a chance meeting in 2014 lead to the creation of DRAMA, the duo has bootstrapped a subtle rise on their own terms, self-releasing several EPs and mapping multiple tours with Midwestern grit.In early jam sessions the chemistry was clear; Rosa’s soulful delivery interlocked with Shehade’s chic Chicago house-infused production style. A lovesick sound emerged over two EPs, Gallows in 2016 and Lies After Love in 2018, and continued on to their debut album Dance Without Me in January 2020.Links: Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | Soundcloud

Genre: Miscellaneous