The Brian Jonestown Massacre

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When you hear Marielle Kraft’s music or experience her candid live shows, you feel as though you already know her. The Nashville-based indie pop singer/songwriter, originally from Rhode Island, displays craftsmanship beyond her years, evident through her use of salient detail, raw emotion, and poignant word choice to describe moments “exactly as they feel.”In spring 2018, she was crowned Grand Champion of the Mid-Atlantic Singer-Songwriter Competition, and the following June she delivered a Tedx Talk at Firefly 2018, discussing the importance of honesty rooted in her songwriting process.Marielle Kraft’s debut studio EP, “The Deep End” officially released on July 12th, 2019, is described by The Music Mermaid as “song after song of mini pop addictions.” In February 2020, Marielle Kraft co-released an “anthemic” and “heart-filled” single with Joshua Howard entitled “In It Together”, which quickly gained traction across platforms. Her October 23rd single, “Portland,” breathtakingly captures the moment we find ourselves in, and speaks volumes of the young artist’s songwriting abilities.Marielle Kraft has shared stages with names as big as Jon McLaughlin, Ava Max, and Betty Who. Her “winning personality,” “genuine connection,” and “gift for story telling” on stage have fueled the ever-growing crowds at each of her shows, with no signs of slowing down. Without missing a beat, Marielle Kraft released back to back singles to kick off 2021, both of which found major traction on Tiktok before becoming fully studio produced releases. “Everyone But Me” (February 19th) and “We Were Never Friends” (March 24th) feature a more developed sound than seen from Marielle before, and have cultivated her biggest streaming debuts to date. With more new releases on the way, Kraft is on track for an even bigger 2021.Since leaving her full-time teaching career to pursue a life committed to creating music, Marielle Kraft has promise to follow suit to artists like Julia Michaels and Maisie Peters as the young songwriter makes a growing impact in the indie pop scene.Links: Website | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Soundcloud

Dogs in a Pile

The sandy shores of Asbury Park, New Jersey are hallowed ground in the northeast; the rolling waves have ushered generations of venerated musicians to worldwide acclaim. Dogs in a Pile, an eclectic quintet, has emerged as the heir apparent to the town’s rich musical legacy. Merging funk, jazz, and rock and roll with psychedelia, the quintet presents a completely original vibe built on kaleidoscopic soundscapes eerily reminiscent of the days of yesteryear.The Dogs employ a unified approach to performance and songwriting, crafting aural mosaics through adept instrumentation and humble precocity. As avid storytellers, they draw inspiration from personal experiences, balancing life’s foibles with ever-present youthful sanguinity.Dogs began when Philadelphia University of the Arts guitar gun-slinger Jimmy Law began playing with young Joe Babick (drums), a student at the Count Basie Theater program in Red Bank, NJ. Lightning struck when they were introduced to Berklee School of Music student and bass player Sam Lucid, who immediately suggested fellow Berklee student and keyboard player Jeremy Kaplan. The addition of fellow Berklee student Brian Murray (guitar) in 2019 made for the quintessential final piece in the Dogs’ puzzle.A string of successful local shows drove the development of a massive northeast fan base, affectionately known as the Dog Pound. The band’s astronomical growth culminated in an epic, sold-out performance at the legendary Stone Pony in Asbury Park during the summer of 2021. Armed with a fresh batch of new material, Dogs in a Pile is taking its perpetually evolving testament to the Great American Songbook on tour in 2022, visiting plenty of new cities and spreading good music and good energy to good people along the way.Links: Website | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Soundcloud

Beach Bunny

Few artists can pinpoint an emotion as clearly and honestly as Beach Bunny’s Lili Trifilio. On Honeymoon, the excellent debut album from Trifilio’s songwriting project and four-piece band, it’s as if she’s singing about things everyone has felt before but never had the courage to put in words themselves. It’s the stunning culmination of her evolution as a songwriter and artist, which started in 2015 as a bedroom pop solo project. Recorded at the iconic Chicago studio Electrical Audio with producer Joe Reinhart (Hop Along, Algernon Caldwaller), the nine songs on the LP burst with energy that capture their vital and life-affirming live shows. Songs like the swooning and anthemic singles “Dream Boy” and “Ms. California” encapsulate the highs and lows the exiting the honeymoon stage of a relationship. It’s album for anyone whose felt uncertain and doubtful about their future and had the courage to dive in and choose optimism and love. Unlike Beach Bunny’s self-released EPs which were largely written in a single month, Honeymoon came about patiently, over the course of nine months. The result is a more confident and clear- eyed band that make some of the most charming and relatable rock anthems of the year.Links: Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | Soundcloud

ADULT.

Over the course of the last two decades, Detroit-based duo ADULT. (Nicola Kuperus and Adam Lee Miller) have released six albums and nineteen EPs and singles across some of our favorite labels: Mute, Ghostly International, Thrill Jockey, Clone Records, Third Man Records, and their own label, the revered Ersatz Audio. November 1998 marked their first release: the five-song 12” “Dispassionate Furniture”. This September, twenty years later, Dais Records is proud to announce ADULT.’s seventh full length album: THIS BEHAVIOR.The album began as 23 demos written and recorded in a remote cabin in the woods of Northern Michigan during the dead of winter. In total isolation, and with a reduced amount of gear (a modified version of their live setup) on the cabin’s kitchen table, the duo were completely immersed in an incessant inescapable studio of their own making – looping, repetitive analogue sequences grinding away day and night. At the end of the intense demo session, a handful of peers were enlisted by the band for the difficult task of paring down the demos into the final album.The result is 10 tracks of uncompromising dark electronics, showcasing ADULT.’s return to aggressive and energetic dancefloor mastery. Album opener “This Behavior” alongside the follow-up “Violent Shakes” (which ascends into synths wailing like warning sirens over Kuperus’s commanding vocals) set the stage for an on-edge listen, while the heartbreaking “Silent Exchange” unfolds as a beautiful sad synth dirge. “Perversions of Humankind” breaks the mood – driving the listener into a slow and low groove before the frantic album midpoint of “Irregular Pleasure”. “Does The Body Know?” is the album’s post-punk anthem, with irresistible singalong “we’re out of order – we’re undefined!” The latter half of the album drives forward with “On The Edge (You Put Me…)” and “Lick Out The Content”, refusing rest and demanding movement and response. “Everything & Nothing” emerges slowly from sparkling synth textures, snowballing with nervous energy into an acid techno stomper before the album comes to a close on the icy landscape of “In All The Debris”, a goose-bump inducing slow electronic mantra that closes the curtain on a massive album.Dais Records is proud to present ADULT.’s THIS BEHAVIOR. Available on digital, digipack CD, and vinyl LP in stores 9/7, with exclusive limited vinyl colorways for UK & Europe.Artist statement on the album’s writing process:“It’s confounding how often we negate the importance of disconnecting, getting weird, getting lost. Discomfort and joy intertwined. Day to day, theatrical self-presentation set to rest in our frantic social world. Public becomes private, almost too private. Looking out into frozen woods as you deliver your vocals. For who? For what? Taking walks along icy shorelines as you try to overcome writer’s block, as you try to overcome yourself. Not seeing anyone for days and weeks on end. Overwhelming thoughts and feelings come rushing in; anxiety, fear, purpose, banality, futility of task, power structures, power struggles, pointlessness, collapse. You’re faced to face yourself. Your awareness is heightened. You are neither here nor there. You are in a liminal state. As you work in this isolated cabin your windows become mirrors.”Links: Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook

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

Genre: Miscellaneous