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
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
Slippery Hill – Debut Album Release Show
Them Coulee Boys
Them Coulee Boys: With four full-length albums and an EP behind them, including 2019’s Die Happy (produced by Trampled By Turtles’ Dave Simonett on Lo-Hi Records) and 2021’s Namesake (produced by Grammy winner Brian Joseph), the band has garnered international attention and earned press in American Songwriter, Ditty TV, Folk Alley, and The Bluegrass Situation, as well as tours with Trampled By Turtles and a spot on the songwriter’s Cayamo Cruise. In 2020, they were named Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Band to Watch. In 2021, they won Bluegrass/Americana Band of the Year by the Wisconsin Area Music Industry. Website | Instagram | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube
Anthony Raneri – The Everyday Royalty Tour
With Nate Bergman. The latest solo project from singer/songwriter Anthony Raneri, Everyday Royalty is proof of the pure unbridled magic that happens when total freedom meets intention and experience. In a departure from the blistering sound he’s delivered for nearly 25 years as frontman for iconic punk band Bayside, the seven-song EP shapeshifts from anthemic alt-rock to soul-searching indie-folk to full-tilt country as Raneri simultaneously deepens his songcraft and follows his most unfettered impulses. “Most of this record came from getting into a room with friends and working on songs for fun, then walking out with a lot of cool material without really even planning on it,” says the Nashville-based, New York City-born musician. “It reminded me of when I first started out and everything was 100 percent DIY—I was just doing what felt exciting, with absolutely no rules.” His third EP and first solo effort since 2015’s Sorry State of Mind, Everyday Royalty finds Raneri joining forces with co-writers/producers like Sam Tinnesz (Dashboard Confessional, Royal & the Serpent) and Joey Hyde (Jake Owen, Ryan Hurd), ultimately bringing a new element of nuanced self-reflection to the unflinching honesty that’s always defined his songwriting. On the EP’s gritty yet hypnotic lead single “Bones,” that dynamic takes the form of an up-close portrait of emotional desolation, achieving a larger-than-life power at its hard-hitting chorus. But while “Bones” bears a moody intensity, much of Everyday Royalty radiates a strangely hopeful spirit—a quality fully echoed in the EP’s title. “The idea behind Everyday Royalty is that greatness can exist anywhere and in anyone,” Raneri explains. “With Bayside, I tend to make heavy music that’s meant for everyone to scream along and hopefully find some catharsis, but with this record the goal was to make people feel good right off the bat. It’s something I’ve never done before in my career, and it showed me that you can write happy songs and still create something with real meaning.” Instagram | Twitter | Spotify
