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Zzzahara and Ynes Mon Join Forces on Debut U.S. Velvet Video

Photo Credit: Robb Klassen

Like mixing baking soda and vinegar in a science fair volcano, L.A.-based musicians Zahara Jaime and Collin Davis couldn’t help but react explosively once their powers combined.

Jaime has been hard at work on their solo project under the moniker Zzzahara, as well as playing guitar with Eyedress and in The Simps (both with Idris Vicuña). Davis makes expansive ambient soundscapes as Ynes Mon, releasing his debut LP Holyhead in March of this year. But once the pair started bonding over drum machines and post-punk, their combustible collaboration as U.S. Velvet began to take shape, and last week, they released a video for their eponymous single, directed by Brother Adam Willis.

Angular dance punk guitars, disenchanted attitudes, and a skronky sax solo from the mysterious Folerio soundtrack the world’s weirdest pool-party, populated mainly by cardboard cut-outs that stand in for a bygone era of idealized Hollywood glamour. “To me, the song is this hedonistic embrace of nihilism in present day America and the video reads almost like the opening scene from Blue Velvet… playing into the white picket aesthetic of the MAGA ‘American Dream’ while exposing true darkness that is hiding underneath,” explains Davis. “Then there’s Z and I, subverting and wreaking havoc upon it, like the slasher in a ’70s horror flick.”

“We live to erase/Take me to a far gone place,” the duo shout-sings, building up an arsenal of surrealist imagery along the way. Their nihilistic critique of modern-day struggle comes from observing it first-hand in rapidly gentrifying Highland Park. Jaime was born and raised there; Davis migrated from the Bay Area after dropping out of college to pursue music. “Z and I both worked service industry jobs on the same block. I had known Z very casually for a couple of years and we would just give each other free drinks at our wack jobs,” Davis remembers. “I think Z thought I was Billie Eilish’s brother for a long time because he was also a regular.”

“Collin was so friendly – every time he’d come up to me and be super smiley, and I’m just like, dude… why are you so happy all the time? Like, I’m fuckin’ miserable in my life, why are you so cool?” Jaime says with a laugh. Davis suggested they go to The OffBeat’s regular Monday night drag open mic, and though Jaime scoffed at the idea initially, they both eventually wound up there.

“Looking back I was pretty persistent on hanging out in the beginning but now they are one of my closest friends and collaborators so I’m glad I did,” says Davis. “I just always thought they had such a cool vibe from afar and then my good friend booked them at a show so I knew they were homie verified.”

By then, Davis had started working as a producer and sound engineer at Stones Throw Studios, a job he got through a mutual friend after working in a couple of different studios around L.A. “Working with all the artists who come through has been a huge blessing,” he says. “I’m always peeping game in studio sessions and learning from other artists’ process.”

It was a blessing for Jaime too, who had been recording at home for years, to finally have access to a studio setting – and their musical chemistry was on point. “Collin has taught me so much about audio stuff,” they say. “He can just read my mind and that’s why I love working with him so much. He’ll be like, ‘I feel like you need to tap into a more emotional riff…’ He brings out the better musician in me and I think I bring it out in him too because we feed off of each other. We could put together [ideas] and it becomes this poppy dark wave instrumental and it’s so sick.”

Still, Davis says, he and Jaime had no intentions of starting another band at first. “We went into Future Music on York Boulevard to browse and I pointed out a cool drum machine. The next day Z showed up at my door with the same drum machine in hand. Within 48 hours we had recorded two U.S. Velvet tracks,” he recalls. “Z and I have pretty different taste in music but we both love late ’70s and early ’80s post punk and goth so even though it was never discussed I think that became a natural jumping off point for our sound.”

Last year, they released debut single “Sleep Paralysis,” which sprawls gorgeously into the goth territory of songs like The Cure’s “Lullaby.” While “U.S. Velvet” is decidedly more boisterous, making use of cool audio tricks like a chopped up, backward vocal, both provide a nice entry point for the band’s sonic touchstones. The version of “U.S. Velvet” posted to Bandcamp is a full minute longer than the cut used for the video, thanks to a chaotically transcendent guitar solo bridge that somehow conveys just as must angst as the song’s despondent lyrics. And yet, the overall sound is nervy, infectious, and perfect for an apocalyptic dance party.

Regardless of the darker influences and motifs they’re drawn to, Jaime and Davis clearly approach U.S. Velvet from a place of wanting to have fun with it, and they develop songs for the project on a rolling basis, not worried about where they’ll go. In the meantime, Liminal Spaces, the debut album from Zzzahara, will be out on Lex Records sometime next year; Davis says he has been working on “a good amount of psych-R&B where I’m singing, and at least two instrumental albums made in collaboration with a therapist for psychedelic assisted therapy.” He will also release a song and video called “Sun Eyes” as Ynes Mon soon, with “a couple full projects done waiting in the wings for the right time.” When it comes to U.S. Velvet’s prescient dark-wave nihilism, it feels like there’s no better time than now.

Follow U.S. Velvet on Instagram for ongoing updates.

Lauren Dejey Evokes Major Goddess Energy on Debut EP Kali Ma

Some people find Kali Ma to be enormously fearsome and dangerous to mess with, while others find her empowering. South London-based Lauren Dejey loves the labyrinthine perspectives and possibilities yielded by a goddess so mired in myth and magic, and draws on some big goddess energy on her debut EP Kali Ma.

“She’s both [empowering and fearsome], like every woman. Creation, destruction… We are so powerful and that can be scary to some people, but we also bring life and warmth which is the incredible duality of her and us. She is the antithesis of people-pleasing, being walked over, fitting in a box and being polite and quiet,” Dejey explains. “I found out about Kali only after I’d finished this EP, [but] I was so drawn to the power she embodies. What a Goddess.”

The five-track album rumbles up from the pit of Dejey’s broken heart to emerge triumphantly into the world. Her themes are not new: opportunistic exes, friends who let us down, feeling misunderstood or maligned. And yet these experiences unite us. These are the timeless stories we share through music, literature, poetry and dance. The universality of the album is meant to excite the imagination, as Dejey describes.

“In my opinion, [the album is] very much about finding inner power, so I think that translates sonically in a lot of ways…” she says. “If you were to visualise this collection of songs, I’d say to picture blood red, broken plates, scorpions, sharp shadows on your walls, misty sunsets and maybe strobe lights too.”

Opening track “Headache” is a seductive, piano-and-bass R&B ballad. Dejey’s voice is confident, melodious and multi-tonal. She sounds like fellow London-born Martina Topley-Bird sometimes, and the production – muddy bass, gothic atmospherics, and slippery, throaty interludes – is comparable to Billy Eilish. That mood takes a brighter turn on “Just Because You Said You’re Sorry Doesn’t Mean You Are,” a deceptively upbeat pop number that addresses that slimy ex who suggests meeting up when he’s lonely.

“Why The?” takes a haunting, minor key melody and adds industrial, gritty sampled noise as Dejey tries to untangle whether she is to blame for a toxic relationship: “I know this feeling would last for a while/But I can’t wriggle out the chains/And then they’ll say that it’s all in my mind.”

This writer’s personal favourite track, the glorious synth drama of “Like A Curse” is immediately compelling. If Dejey is truly losing her mind, as she confesses, then it sounds wonderful. Layered vocal harmonies build to a one-woman choir. It’s a gorgeous way to kick off a song, and it suggests there’s multiple personalities, multiple women all in one body, one song. Perhaps, more than any of the other songs, this is the one that most speaks to Kali Ma’s scimitar, sword and trident-bearing vengeful goddess. “You made me feel so small, you know,” Dejey croons, sounding totally broken. “Do you know how we’d go, do you know how far?” comes the snaking, sweeping harmony in response, and that juxtaposition between broken girl and furious woman is redolent of Kali Ma’s nurturing, maternal spirit co-existing with her brutal, raging elements.

Outro track “Yours” brings a benevolent end to the album. It is melancholy and sweetly captivating. Gently understated piano chords float into the ether, a sleepy trap beat keeps time, and Dejey’s multi-layered harmonies build into a blaze of synth-samples and the sound of a cassette tape being chewed up.

“All the songs were written during the first lockdown starting in March 2020 and they were pretty quick to write, except for ‘Yours,’” says Dejey. “That song was the hardest to finish because, for a while, it just didn’t have an ending. I was listening to Bring Me The Horizon’s new album at the time and was completely blown away by their energy so I sent the unfinished version of ‘Yours’ to my friend Matt Brettle and was like, ‘We need to create some kind of BMTH drum pattern,’ and he absolutely killed it. We went back and forth with tweaks for a while but that song has such a sonic journey. It’s definitely the most proud I’ve ever been of a song so far.”

Arrangement usually comes first for Dejey, setting the melody and the mood as a foundation to build upon. “I tend to have a vocal melody down and then I’ll sing gibberish until I find a rhythm I like, then the lyrics come naturally,” she says. “I find it crazy how unintentional I am with lyrics, but I always end up writing exactly how I feel at the time. Maybe it’s the lack of pressure – my subconscious just brings up exactly what I need to say.”

Dejey has got a DIY set-up in her room, where she records everything. The vocals on the EP were recorded as first takes, intended for demo use, but Dejey liked them so much she maintained them as they were.

“I just ended up loving the energy they had,” she explains. “It’s hard to recreate that energy the same way again, so I just left them in. I love that, because I can literally hear myself writing the song as I listen back. Each song varied with how long it took. Sometimes you think you’ve got a solid idea down in a day, then you listen again and hear a totally different way it could go. Using Splice for finding samples quickly is really helpful for staying in the flow of writing which massively helps my productivity for sure. I’d recommend it to anyone wanting to start out with production.”

Having whet our appetites with this gothic, hooky pop, Dejey assures us there’s plenty more on the horizon. “I’m currently working on some new ideas, which I’m really excited about,” she says. “I’m also planning a gig or two, which would be my first show in like, three years? Playing music live? Wild!”

Follow Lauren Dejey on Instagram and Facebook for ongoing updates.

MUSIQUE BOUTIQUE: Alice TM, Sarah McQuaid, ONETWOTHREE

Welcome to Audiofemme’s monthly record review column, Musique Boutique, written by music journo vet Gillian G. Gaar. Every fourth Monday, Musique Boutique offers a cross-section of noteworthy reissues and new releases guaranteed to perk up your ears.

Alice TM is described as the queer, art-pop project of Alice Tolan-Mee, an artist who’s worked in experimental theater and performance art as well as music. Her debut album, Little Body in Orbit (Whatever’s Clever) is an album that delves into the twists and turns of love; new love, queer love, or as Alice vividly describes it, “Sticky love, tumbling and joyful love, slutty love, and violence in love.”

It’s a range in perspective that nicely bookends the album, which opens with the skittering, giddy pleasures of “Generous” and its celebration of newfound bliss (“I will bathe in you completely”) and concludes with a slow, sad unraveling in “Wedding” (“You don’t wrap your arms around me”). Tolan-Mee’s high-pitched voice gives the songs an ethereal cast. And though the music is electronically based — cool synths and percussive pops — it’s not austere or remote, but beguiling and seductive. From a relationship mired in inertia (the aptly-named “Passive”) to the erotic delights of “Contact Electric,” this is a record pulsating with the excitement of making new discoveries, and learning from them. Dive in.

When the pandemic led to musicians around the world cancelling their shows, Sarah McQuaid decided to capture a live performance without the presence of an audience. The St Buryan Sessions (Shovel and a Spade Records) is the result – sixteen songs recorded at a medieval church in St. Buryan, a village in Cornwall, England. It’s a place that McQuaid, as a member of the church’s choir, knew well. She and her producer, Martin Stansbury, decided to set it up as if she were playing an actual concert, following a setlist, and playing straight through, with minimal breaks.

Songs like “The Sun Goes on Rising,” from McQuaid’s 2012 album The Plum Tree and The Rose, have a new resonance now, with lyrics about holding onto hope through the bad times (“I’m marking down the time/’Til I can get to a better place”). Similarly, “The Silence Above Us,” from her 2018 album If We Dig Any Deeper It Could Get Dangerous, is a perfect depiction of the isolation and uncertainty that descended upon the world last year.

McQuaid’s voice is deep and slightly husky, imbuing her songs with a haunting melancholy, underscored by the spare instrumentation (she variously accompanies herself on acoustic or electric guitar, piano, and floor tom). “The Day of Wrath, That Day” is a lovely instrumental; the standard “Autumn Leaves” turns out to be perfect for her voice. Already a compelling release, the concert was also filmed – there’s a short doc about the making of the release, as well as live videos of each track, on McQuaid’s YouTube channel.

ONETWOTHREE (hereafter OTT) have the spare, taut sound of post-punk groups like the Delta 5, the Au Pairs, and Kleenex (aka LiLiPuT) — which is no surprise, as Klaudia Schifferle was a member of Kleenex. Fellow bandmates Madlaina Peer and Sara Schar were also members of the Swiss punk scene in bands like the Noknows and TNT. In cheery defiance of convention, they didn’t let the fact that they’re all bassists stop them from putting a band together. And they do work in other instruments on their debut album for Kill Rock Stars (it’s officially untitled, but the band’s name is on the cover); scratchy guitar, keyboards, the persistent beat of a drum machine.

“Perfect Illusions” opens the album with a touch of pop swing. The relentless drive of “Buy Buy” makes you think it might be a critique of consumer culture, at least until you’re thrown a loop with absurdist lyrics like “We want flowers from outer space!” This is an element that’s at the heart of OTT’s work. The songs might seem deceptively simple on the surface, but there’s enough of an edge (especially in the sharp, often tense vocals) to make you wonder what’s going on underneath the surface. “Give Paw,” for example, has a sinister synth line and stern demands: “Give paw! Obey! Do as I say!” “Fake” rages against all that’s fraudulent around us. This is an album that taunts and teases, and, at 35 minutes, leaves you wanting more.

Bnny Set to Channel the Grief Behind Debut LP Everything on Tour with Fellow Chicagoans Dehd

Photo Credit: Alexa Viscius

Jess Viscius is going to break your heart, gently and slowly. In August, Fire Talk Records released Everything – her dreamy, fuzzy, captivating debut album as Bnny. It shows off the intense musicality and vulnerability the Chicago singer-songwriter has demonstrated since her first EP Sucker in 2017. That same year, tragedy struck when Viscius unexpectedly lost her partner, fellow Chicago musician Trey Gruber, who had been struggling with substance abuse issues; writing Everything became an outlet for Viscius to process her grief around his death.

It is a delicate creature, this album. It softly writhes, baring its naked belly for you to scratch then pulls away so that you can’t get too close. It is bristling with hurt, but sweetly surrendering too. Its delicacy and articulation of grief took several years to finely sculpt while Viscius mourned Gruber and tried to make sense of the dueling powers of love and loss. That is not to say that the album is morose or melancholy. Rather, it exists somewhere between dusk and dawn, hovering blurrily between the enormity of a new day and the possibility that the light will remain and memories won’t scar the senses.

The all-encompassing nature of “everything” offers so much potential for interpretation, but Viscius knows exactly what it means to her.

“I remember I was listening to the final track on our album titled ‘Voice Memo’ that I wrote with Trey. It’s the only recording I have of us singing together and I remember thinking… ‘Is this really everything?’ And that word kept coming back… is this everything I have?” she explains. “Everything feels like all my memories in one place. The word itself is at once all-encompassing and, in some ways, finite, which resonated with me, my own experience with grief and making this album.”

According to his friend and journalist Charlie Johnson in this Chicago Tribune editorial, Gruber was only one week out of a detox facility when he fatally overdosed on heroin spiked with fentanyl in 2017. The frontman of Parent was just 26. Viscius and Gruber’s mother, Desiree, released  a collection of Gruber’s work, Herculean House of Cards, in 2019. The songs are lo-fi, charming, funny and quirky while also revealing a musician who really loved the art of songwriting (“Do You Feel Fine” epitomizes the strangely melodic garage-folk feel of the album).

Without wanting to point out the obvious, Gruber was a different musician to Viscius, and Bnny. Everything is poignant in its multi-tonal, ever-changing hues – in some places, sky blue and soft, and elsewhere deepening into a star-speckled indigo night. It is not a commiseration, but a chronicle of love and a paean to life.

It is not a solo affair, either; Viscius is joined by her twin sister Alexa on bass. “She picked up bass when I started the band so she could play with us. She’s an amazing photographer and designer as well,” Viscius says. Tim Makowski plays lead guitar. “I really don’t remember how he joined the band… I just remember him just being there one day in the beginning and he’s been here ever since. He’s one of the funniest people I know,” she continues. “Matt Pelkey is our drummer, he joined about two years ago. He’s also an amazing writer. Adam Schubert is the newest member. He plays guitar and keys. He’s an incredible multi-instrumentalist and has his own solo project called Ulna.”

Viscius can trace her inspirational spark back to hearing an ABBA CD that her friend’s older sister was blasting at home and being moved to ecstatically dance, all her senses ignited and attuned to this novel sound. In terms of her career in music though, her humble beginnings came a decade later.

“In my early twenties I started casually teaching myself guitar and then became more immersed in the Chicago music scene,” she recalls. “That’s when I became interested in writing my own music, at first, as some kind of challenge to myself, like, can I play guitar? Can I write a song?”

There’s no doubt she can write a song; Everything proves it from beginning to end. It was not a painless process, and that is evident in the lyrics and the sound, but it is beautiful, and there are silver linings tracing all the ragged edges. There’s never a sense of being lost in someone else’s grief. Viscius may send you out to sea in a little rowboat, but she is always there ready to draw you towards the shore when the waves begin to rage.

On “Not Even You,” Viscius fools herself into believing her beloved is present despite the reality of their absence. She catches sight of her partner, mistakes memories for reality, allows desire to trump truth. When she swallows her heart, repeating “what we dreamed…” anyone who has lost someone they loved (all of us?) will understand. “Blind” is gently catchy, a slow-but-determined wander through busy streets lost in one’s own reflections and revelations, the elastic, deep bass strum keeping time with boots on the pavement.

“The first half of the record… was easy and fun. I was just starting to play music, learning how to be in a band, everything was new and exciting. The second half was written during a period of time when I felt like I was in hell; everything was difficult,” she says. “You can’t change the past, you can only learn from it.”

That sentiment is at the core of “August,” a gorgeously sepia-toned ride through sun-drenched folk, supported by woozy rhythmic guitar. “I’ll change, I’ll change, I’ll change,” Viscius chants with increased determination. There’s a lovely nostalgic quality to Viscius’ dreamy voice – not unlike Mazzy Star or Lana Del Rey in its romantic, hyper-feminine quality. “In ‘August’ I’m promising myself that I’ll change,” she explains. “It’s a promise I’m still working towards.”

Bnny heads out on tour in October with beloved “trashpop” Chicago rockers Dehd – performing the songs on Everything as though opening a time capsule, allowing her to simultaneously remember, and let go.

“I think of [this album] as preserving this period in my life that I can always access,” Viscius says. “The songs live on, and with them, so does Trey.”

Follow Bnny on Instagram for ongoing updates.

DEHD/BUNNY TOUR DATES:
Fri. 10/1 – Milwaukee, WI @ Cactus Club
Sat. 10/2 – Oberlin, OH @ Oberlin College
Sun. 10/3 – Detroit, MI @ El Club
Mon. 10/5 – Columbus, OH @ Ace of Cups
Thu. 10/7 – Brooklyn, NY @ Market Hotel – SOLD OUT
Fri. 10/8 – Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda’s
Sat. 10/9 – Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Made
Tue. 10/12 – Boston, MA @ Northeastern University

Hollis Premieres Self-Directed Video for Latest Solo Single “Let Me Not”

L.A.-via Seattle singer, songwriter, and spoken word artist Hollis Wong-Wear, known simply as Hollis, is redefining herself and going solo. Until now, Hollis has been best known for her contribution to Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ 2013 debut GRAMMY-nominated album, The Heist, with the song “White Walls,” and for her role as front-woman of popular Seattle group, The Flavr Blue.

But, come 2022, Hollis releases her debut solo full-length—an alt-pop album entitled Subliminal, which she wrote and recorded almost entirely during the pandemic. Today, Hollis premieres her third single from the forthcoming album, “Let Me Not,” a vibrant-yet-melancholy track that marks Hollis’ first collaboration with Ryan Lewis since their work on The Heist.

“Let Me Not” also marks one of the first music videos she’s ever directed—something she’d like to do more of going into 2022. “I have a lot of interests as a filmmaker,” says Hollis. “Between my work directing the ‘Let Me Not’ video and thinking about like moving forward with the other videos, I want to make sure they’re artistically cohesive.” 

Hollis, who is originally from Petaluma, CA, grew up immersed in the Bay Area’s spoken word and underground hip hop scenes, which played a big part in the trajectory she’s on today as an artist.

“I first sparked my own original creative work by being in spoken word poetry and slam poetry through an organization called Youth Speaks,” says Hollis. “When I was growing up in high school, there was the hyphy movement and Bay Area hip hop in general, underground rap, [with artists like] Hieroglyphics and DJ Shadow. That really was exciting to be a part of as a young person.”

After high school, Hollis moved to Seattle to go to Seattle University, where she studied history. When she wasn’t hitting the books, Hollis followed her passions for spoken word and music and found herself spending more time on her own creative work than she did in the Bay Area.

“I honestly didn’t make music myself until I moved up to Seattle. I sang in choir and performed in musical theater and stuff like that,” she remembers. “I was a performer but I wasn’t a songwriter by any means until I started my first band up in Seattle with my friend Maddy, which was called Canary Sing.”

Through performing with Canary Sing, networking within the slam poetry community, and hanging out at some of Seattle’s biggest hip hop hubs, like Hidmo, a now-closed Eritrean restaurant and bar that hosted regular hip hop events, Hollis got to know the pair that would soon become the biggest names in Seattle hip hop—Macklemore and Ryan Lewis.

“A lot of people came through Hidmo and that’s… how I ended up getting connected with Macklemore and Ryan Lewis in an official capacity. He had asked me to be the producer of a music video that would end up being [the] ‘Wing$‘ video,” says Hollis. “Basically four of us worked for months on a shoestring budget… and very scrappily made that first music video. The song wasn’t done – I actually ended up cowriting the hook of that song and working with a children’s choir to perform it. When I started working with them, I had no idea I was going to be a featured singer and songwriter someday.”

Hollis became closer with Lewis and Macklemore, and their friendship led to her eventual feature and songwriting on The Heist track, “White Walls,” with Schoolboy Q.

Since the success of The Heist a lot has changed for Hollis. In 2015, she left Seattle for L.A., where she currently resides. According to Hollis, she wanted the change in scenery to challenge her creatively—and it ended up giving her the courage to step out on her own with the forthcoming album, Subliminal.

“I don’t know if I really would have allowed myself to come into my own as a solo artist in Seattle,” Hollis muses. “I think I’ve always loved collaboration to the point that I’ve been dependent on collaboration and it’s scary to be a solo female artist. It’s freaky. And I think I didn’t feel I needed to do that in Seattle because I was like, oh I’m already this personality, people know who I am, I have this band. The challenge wasn’t really there for me to do my own solo thing and I didn’t know how to do my own solo thing.”

Starting over in L.A., Hollis realized the solo artist inside her needed nurturing—and by February 2020, Hollis released her first solo EP half-life, a tender-hearted, intimate 5-song project. Then the pandemic hit, thwarting Hollis’ plans to tour with Half Life. She took her YouTube series Hollis Does Brunch completely virtual to benefit those impacted by the pandemic. And she dove into writing the songs that would become Subliminal.

While creating Subliminal, social distancing took away her ability to collaborate in the traditional ways, so, with the exception of “Let Me Not,” all the songs on the new album were written remotely over Zoom with her collaborators. After making the album in this way—which she says felt bizarre and isolated at first—Hollis feels more confident in who she is as a solo artist. That new-found self-possession saturates “Let Me Not.”

“Figuring out how to collaborate with people remotely [meant finding out] how to feel really solid with myself and be literally alone writing, which definitely shaped the way this album came out,” she says.

“Let Me Not” is the only song Hollis recorded in-person—negative COVID-19 tests in hand—with Ryan Lewis, and is one of the most personal songs on the album. “That song was very much ripped from my journal,” she explains. “I was doing a lot of journaling towards the later half of 2020 and the chorus refrain, ‘let me not bring down the vibe,’ was just literally something I had written in my journal three days before our session.”

Now transformed into an upbeat headbanger with a sneaking, ominous keyboard line, the song and its video depict Hollis, obviously feeling weighed down by the heaviness of the world as she knocks her “head on the wall all night” and “feels like throwing herself out the window.” We see the artist’s helplessness and confusion as she sits in an empty theater, lies alone in the grass, and performs a house show with an angry grimace.

In the end, she doesn’t want to “bring down the vibe” by being honest and open about her emotional state and the state of the world—even to herself—a notion that captures the pain, anxiety, fear, and descent into numbness that has gripped many of us since March 2020. That said, the track is anything by upsetting— its honesty makes the listener feel a little less alone.

Why get so existential, even political, in a pop song? Hollis points to her long history of social activism and volunteerism and her firm belief in using her platform to promote social change and awareness. As is evident in “Let Me Not,” as well as another recent single “Grace Lee,” about Chinese-American social activist Grace Lee Boggs, writing pop music is not about Hollis’ ego, but about making a positive impact on the world.

“I’m not super excited about the premise of building my personal brand. If it’s for a larger purpose and I can do so to encourage connectivity, that’s when I feel most empowered and excited about the work,” says Hollis. “I love pop music and I think what really motivated me to come to L.A. was that I’m very passionate about my personal politics and about learning and how I can integrate that into [my music]. There’s so much potential in popular culture to shift and create change.”

Follow Hollis on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook for ongoing updates.

Eagle & The Wolf Showcase Musical Partnership on Two Lovers

New South Wales singer-songwriter Sarah Humphreys and her accomplished partner Kristen Lee Morris have proven with multiple solo albums respectively that they have a masterful understanding of Americana music. A strong vein of storytelling pulses through their body of work, and Two Lovers, their latest album as duo Eagle & The Wolf, is certainly no different, even as it diverges from well-worn alt-country territory.

The couple live and work in the scenic Blue Mountains region of New South Wales, a landscape lush in flora and fauna, boasting sunsets that cast whirls of blue, apricot, and violet over the horizon. It is a place that provides space and inspiration, evident in the feng shui of lightness, space and harmony on each song. The title track of their newest album, “Two Lovers” is the sonic equivalent of this organic, elemental light, sun, rock, earth, and space. “Stand here right with me/We’ll hold on for more/May we find ourselves on the highest blue mountain,” they sing. “Two lovers take their time/They don’t worry about what’s left behind.”

“Some songs came easily, and with some it was like pulling teeth, really,” confesses Humphreys. “We had to work hard at this album. The writing was easier than the recording of it. The first album that we did was so easy. We had our older kids at that stage and they were old enough for us to leave them for the three days [of recording]. We now have four kids… so we had to find little snippets during the day and then go and look after the kids. But we just kept at it and little by little, we pieced this album together over probably 18 months or so.”

As Eagle & The Wolf, the duo released their first, self-titled album in 2016. The intention was to release a second album sooner, but life intervened; their family expanded, they got married, moved house, and made solo albums which ultimately put Eagle & The Wolf on hiatus. Relentless touring had also impacted on the couple’s health and harmony, and the making of Two Lovers was not without creative conflict (Humphreys admits to a few walk-outs). Their first album had earned them support slots with The Blind Boys of Alabama, Charlie Parr, Kim Richie, Archie Roach and Australia’s queen of country, Kasey Chambers. It’s synergistic that Chambers produced Humphreys’ 2014 solo effort, New Moon.

“I’ve known Kasey since I was about 20 and she’s always been a good friend and taken me under her wing,” says Humphreys. “She’s taken us on tour with her and we hang out, our kids are friends. She’s on the Central Coast still. Anytime we can see each other we do, and we send each other pictures. She’s a real sweetheart. I think we’d always love to work with Kase, but now Kris and I, we’re producing our own stuff. With this last album we learnt so much about producing and engineering and we really enjoyed that.”

Humphreys and Morris were both born on New South Wales’ Central Coast, but moved to Blue Mountains after Humphreys’ father passed away on her birthday in February, 2018. One month later, they loaded their belongings into a van and made the big move.

“Kris and I both grew up in Long Jetty. I don’t think either one of us ever felt like we fit in there; it was a very beachy town and it felt like we were born in the wrong place. We’ve always loved the Blue Mountains,” Humphreys says of that decision.

Now that they’re somewhat settled in, the duo were able to record a large chunk of the album in their new home, and are in the process of building a home studio. Humphreys is audibly excited by the prospect of further engineering, producing, and recording within their own dedicated space. The lush sound on Two Lovers was achieved with the support of Jy-Perry Banks (pedal steel guitar), Jeff McCormack (bass), Stefano Cosentino (bass), Matt Cowley (drums and percussion), and Annie Leeth (strings).

“We recorded a couple of tracks with our friend, engineer Josh Schuberth at his home studio in the Blue Mountains [and] we recorded at a friend’s house up in Mount Victoria, also in the Blue Mountains. The rest of it we recorded at home,” Humphreys says. “We didn’t have a studio then, but we’re building one now so we can have a separate space. We mostly recorded it ourselves; Kris and I were the producers.”

On Two Lovers, the steely strum of acoustic guitar rambles along loyally like a canine companion, familiar with the route and just enjoying the togetherness: voice, instrument, harmony. “Something Good” picks up the tempo, introducing a rambunctious mood. Humphreys takes the lead, promising to reveal the beauty in every day. She hands the mic to Morris for twangy ballad “Darlin'” – which more than deserves a porch, a worn pair of riding boots and a flannel shirt.

“Kris and I are both very different musically, so it’s got bits and pieces of us both in there, and these little magical moments when songs just came to us from a very special place,” explains Humphreys. “We didn’t question it; if we thought it was good, we put it on and didn’t worry about it not fitting.”

The mood meanders toward psychedelia on bluesy, sunburnt “Mescaline,” layering woozy electric guitar over their interplaying intoxicated harmonies.

“That’s one that Kris brought to me mostly finished. He brought me a little demo; I heard it and I was like, ‘Wow, that has to be on the album!’ We’re very encouraging of each other. I was like, ‘Don’t take that for your solo band, put it on our album!’” Humphreys remembers. “I added to that song during the recording with some dreamy, howly sort of vocals. ‘Gimme Shelter’ by Rolling Stones has this amazing singer in the background who’s just wailing and it’s so great. I’m in the background but I feel involved in the song; like a wolf howling, Kris said. I love that song. That came from the depths of Kris’s imagination.”

Closing track “Ray” is an ode – not to the sun – but to Ray LaMontagne. It’s gorgeously bittersweet, like a rainstorm when you planned to go for a walk.

“When we first met, Kris and I, we would stay up late after a songwriter’s night or a gig and we’d listen to Ray LaMontagne. It was a beautiful time in our relationship,” Humphreys recalls. “We both had kids from previous relationships so we didn’t get to have much of a dating experience because we were full-time parents, but every now and again we’d get time to ourselves, maybe once a week, and we’d stay up all night, loving being together, talking and laughing. After being in relationships with other people that hadn’t worked, it was so incredible to find a person like that. We were so excited to be with each other. We were both big fans of Ray LaMontagne before we met – he’s one of our all-time favourite artists. His records are so beautiful and have been with us through a lot, both going through different things in different places in the world, then coming together.”

LaMontagne is but one of the sonic influences identifiable on the duo’s album. Their sound patchworks the classic American folk-country of James Taylor (and his wonderful, homesick “Carolina In My Mind”), the melancholy beauty of Joan Baez’s “Diamonds And Rust,” and the romantic, nostalgic Mama Cass and John Denver duet version of “Leaving On A Jet Plane.”

As a solo artist, Humphreys’ output has been prolific, her most recent LP Strange Beauty released in 2019. Whilst her sound unquestionably traverses folk-country ground, Morris rode his solo work into bluesy Americana territory on Ruins (2014) and Hillbilly Blues (2018).

“I started writing songs when I was about eight,” Humphreys says. “No one paid that much attention, but it was something I always did. I was always writing songs, singing and playing music. I’ve always written from a very truthful and heartfelt place. I put it all out there in my songs.”

Here on Two Lovers, the history and honesty of a couple deeply in love – with life, and with each other – is tangible in every nuanced note. In these fraught times, is serves as a reminder to all listeners that putting it all out there for love pays creative dividends.

Follow Eagle & The Wolf on Facebook and Instagram for ongoing updates.

Pop Duo Pearl & the Oysters Document the End of Their Stint in Florida with Flowerland

Photo Credit: Laura Moreau

On “Soft Science,” the opening cut to Pearl & the Oysters’ third album, Flowerland, Juliette Davis is the voice reminding you over a mellow disco groove to take some time out for yourself. “Hey, come to the beach,” she sings, “You studied all night long, you deserve a break.” But guest vocalist Kuo-Hung Tseng, from Taiwanese band Rollercoaster Sunset, responds, “I can’t talk right now/I really should work/It wasn’t enough/Soft science is hard.” 

“I didn’t really want to sing this,” says Joachim Polack, who, along with Davis, comprises Pearl & the Oysters. “I thought it was too close to me.” 

Flowerland is a reflection of the end of the duo’s stint living in Gainesville, Florida, where Polack was working on his PhD in musicology. He and Davis grew up in Paris— they’ve actually known each other since high school— and studied musicology in France. But, the postgraduate system in the U.S. was different, with more coursework and a shorter period of time to complete the program. In France, they could juggle school, a band, and side jobs. That proved to be harder in the U.S. “The album is also a little bit about disillusionment with going to school and the toll it took on my health,” says Polack. “Having a band and doing that at the same time was really more than I could handle sometimes, and I think that it was a difficult time to navigate, but I’m really grateful for all the people that we met.”

He adds, “It was a really beautiful time in our lives.”

It wasn’t just school that was different in Florida. “The seasons were different. Everything seemed so new,” says Davis. 

Over the course of Pearl & the Oysters’ three albums, all of which were at least partially made while they were living in the Sunshine State, Davis and Polack have drawn inspiration from an environment that was quite different from France. The terrain, plants and insects all played in a role in sparking the duo’s creativity on their 2017 self-titled debut, 2018’s Canned Music, and now Flowerland.

“I think one thing that is different in this record is that it’s still very sunny and, basically, it’s an upbeat record in many ways,” says Polack, “but I think, for the first time, it’s more melancholy, trying to address stuff that we were going through in those last couple years that we lived in Gainesville.”

Flowerland certainly has its moodier moments. “I think that we’re incapable of doing a full-on gloomy album, but it has a little bit more of that,” he notes.

“But,” Polack adds, “it’s more balanced in terms of the gamut of emotions than the first couple of albums, which were very much sunshine pop, like bubblegum almost. Everything was over-the-top cute and I think that, this one, we tried to keep that element because that’s the music we like, but also be a little more transparent with what we were going through mentally.”

The musicians that they met while living in Gainesville also helped shape the album. “In this way, the influence is clear,” says Davis. “We didn’t work with studio musicians that did exactly what we asked them to do. We really collaborated on the sound.” 

That includes the duo Edmondson, who Polack describes as having a Smile-era Beach Boys vibe. “Whenever we wanted percussion, we would go over to their house and they had this big box full of all kinds of percussive contraptions,” he recalls. 

They also incorporated collaborators from outside of the Gainesville area. Kuo-Hung Tseng from Sunset Rollercoaster is one. Davis and Polack are big fans of the band and were able to connect through a mutual friend. They also linked up with Jules Crommelin of Australian band Parcels through a mutual pal, and sitarist Ami Dang via their former bass player. As Polack notes, they had good luck with finding collaborators simply by asking. “I feel like the lesson that I learned from making this specifically is that people should not shy away from doing that, because people are down,” says Polack. “It’s something that, in indie pop or rock music, is happening more and more.”

Before mixing the album, Davis and Polack moved cross-country. “We loved living in Florida for many reasons, but it was definitely not a destination for us. We didn’t plan on staying there for long,” says Davis. “The question was where—do we go back to France? Should we try another city in the Southeast?”

They decided on Los Angeles after playing a show in the city and made the move in January of 2020. “We understood the potential that the city has for us as musicians, as pop music musicians and definitely thought that it would be a good move and we are so glad that we did,” says Davis. 

They had just enough time to play a couple shows and start meeting people before the COVID-19 lockdown began. “Now that things are reopening, we’re fully understanding the potential of this city as musicians,” says Davis. “We’ve already been part of a few incredible projects in the past few months. We’ve been invited to play a lot of different shows.”

Davis adds, “Even though we arrived at the worst moment, we managed to actually really settle ourselves in this time in a pretty good way.”

Follow Pearl & the Oysters on Instagram for ongoing updates.

OFTEN Turns Restless Uncertainty into Latest Sad Bop “Deep Sleep”

Genre-bending Atlanta artist OFTEN (who uses she/they pronouns) describes their project as “the queer love child of Donna Summer and Fiona Apple.” Such a description articulates the many intersections where the artists finds themselves: between their queerness and an intense Seventh Day Adventist upbringing, or being a Black student at predominantly white schools growing up. All these identities meet on their debut LP Dirty Saint, out October 8. Today, she premieres the video for “Deep Sleep” via Audiofemme.

OFTEN picked up their soul and jazz influences from their parents, but became obsessed with Fiona Apple once surrounded by mostly white classmates. “I was obsessed,” they explain. “I just really loved the way she wrote music. Her lyricism was really beautiful to me, and I was just like a really sad, angsty kid, so I just felt really connected to her.” Likewise, OFTEN’s lyrics are at turns poetic and melancholy, which might seem at odds with her love for Donna Summer, who she says “deserves so many more flowers than she gets.” They love Donna Summer for the way she showed the fullness of herself, slowing down her take on disco that was different for the time, and taking on sexualized subject matter without any fear. 

Summer’s influence appears mostly in the tempo of the album, which creeps along languidly like a breeze on a humid August afternoon, dense and heady. OFTEN layers vocals for a harmonizing effect, all placed over stark, slow synth beats. “I [call] myself a sad disco queen,” OFTEN says, “because I’m a really sad little person but I want to make sad bops for my people.”

And sad bops they are. While OFTEN spent the early pandemic reworking an EP they planned to release last year, life forced them to slow down. After losing the house she shared with her girlfriend, music “was just the only thing I had around for myself to keep me here, and stable, while so much of our life was unstable.” They wrote scores of new material in friends’ living rooms or spare bedrooms while they figured out their next move, reworking tracks from the EP like “By Summer,” “Deep Sleep,” and “Wake” to fit into a more cohesive whole.

OFTEN plays with the instability and uncertainty of this time in the new “Deep Sleep” video, which features a montage of footage from their pandemic year. She takes us from bedroom to living room to bedroom, interspersed with the natural settings in between, towering mountain ranges and smooth seas. You see OFTEN in several different beds, all with different bed linens and each time sporting a different make-up look. This articulates the passing of time, the journey from one place to another, the anxiety of a nomadic lifestyle but also the necessity of finding joy in the worst of times: her partner kisses her on the cheek as they stand outside a mobile home; she floats in the ocean on an inner tube.

The idea of sleeping is a theme that repeats itself on the record, or rather, examining the “places where you felt like you slept on yourself.” And by that, OFTEN means “feeling like I couldn’t, feeling like I wasn’t good enough, or just a lack of self confidence.” Dirty Saint is a re-worked iteration of an unreleased EP that dealt heavily with the fallout from a strict Seventh Day Adventist upbringing, one that doesn’t accommodate queer identities. They were working through what they had been taught, trying to deconstruct and rethink the concept of God on a personal level, but realized “I had a lot I needed to sift through for myself as just a person, and my childhood and upbringing,” before they could take on their complicated relationship with God.

“So Dirty Saint is more of me facing myself, and having a dialogue with my younger self, and realizing that she needed a lot of care and love from me she didn’t get,” OFTEN explains. “It’s kind of looking in the mirror and having a conversation with your earlier self. The things you did right, things you did wrong, places you felt you weren’t cared for.”

A previously-released video for “Palm Trees” articulates that struggle visually. We see two versions of OFTEN: one is more feminine, dressed in a flowing red sundress. The other reads more masculine, wearing pants and a crewneck sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off. They argue with each other, before walking together towards the ocean at sunset. These internal contradictions are ultimately able to coexist with each other, in the realization that we are allowed to contain multitudes, that we are allowed to be many versions of ourselves at once. 

OFTEN says this album is an introduction to herself, from herself, a person and artist that is constantly evolving and learning how to self-define freely, and their hope is that it will allow others to “feel seen” as well. A fan of astrology, they point out these internal contradictions at play even in their chart, where a Sagittarius sun meets a Pisces rising, a fire sign muted by the emotionality of a water sign. And for now, that self-awareness is enough, in many ways.

“Chani Nicholas has been telling me all year that the fruits of my labor are going to become something else,” they say. “So I’m really excited for what’s going to happen in the next few months, but all I can do right now is just keep making music. I don’t really know what’s going to come my way.” And really, none of us do. All we can do is keep making music, whatever that means for each of us.

Follow OFTEN on Instagram for ongoing updates.

Pony Hunt Explores Endless Variables in a Fluid Universe with VAR! LP

California-born, Chicago-raised Jessie Antonick, a.k.a. Pony Hunt, recorded her newest album VAR! in New Orleans, but inspiration came from light years away. Its title is a reference to the scribbled note of astronomer Edwin Hubble in 1923, upon realizing that what he’d previously identified as nebulae in the Milky Way were, in fact, something else. He’d identified a variable from another galaxy, which would lead him to discover the Andromeda galaxy, expanding our knowledge of the universe.

There is a sense when listening to Pony Hunt of being immersed in a universe of Antonick’s own construction. The many layers of instrumentation, and the intermingling melodies and atmosphere demand attention. In this way, VAR! is meditative and healing, especially when inhabiting an imagined time and place provide respite from our pandemic-affected lives.

“I hope that my music transports people into a feeling or a space,” Antonick confirms. “When I’m writing songs, I feel all-consumed by what I’m doing. The goal is to create space or an environment that wraps around a listener.”

On first single “Stardust,” there’s layers of ‘60s psychedelia and harmonic doo-wop vocals, the raw, steely sound of surfy guitars, and the contained fury of drums that want to become savage but remain firmly leashed. Atop it all, Antonick’s gorgeous, soulful voice teeters on the edge of being haunting in its romantic perfection. Her formative influences in Chicago punk, pop music of the ‘90s (Nine Inch Nails, Wilco) and ‘60s R&B, soul and rock reveal themselves in the layers of sound, and the tools used during recording.  

“We used a lot of vintage equipment,” she explains. “The AMPEX 351 [Reel To Reel Tape Recorder] is from the 1950s, I think, and we used a handful of vintage microphones as well in different places on the album. We used ‘60s tube amps for the electric guitar, and there was an older organ in the studio from the ‘60s and ‘70s that we used pretty consistently as well. We also used a Rhodes, for a vibey, dreamy sound. I really love the sound of that electric piano; it’s unique, different, beautiful. I had one song with violin and cello, also.” The violin and cello show up on “Who Are You,” recorded with a friend from New Orleans – strings player and vocalist free feral.  It’s a lovely, doomed love story cushioned in a waltzing melody. 

VAR! was recorded in home studios, with a number of engineers, Antonick says. “I recorded with a couple of my bandmates, Sam Doores and Duff Thompson. They had a little studio set up in the Holy Cross neighborhood of New Orleans, so we did a lot of recording on their AMPEX 351 reel-to-reel, then I took those base recordings and added to them. I had friends in Colorado do some overdub, I recorded some in my apartment, and we pieced it together over a couple of years.”

Since releasing her debut Heart Creak in 2016, VAR! has been in varying stages of creation. In the intervening period between albums, Antonick moved from her houseboat home in Oakland, California to Louisiana, New Orleans. “When I lived in Oakland, mostly I lived on a sailboat in a marina because a friend offered me a place to stay, which happened to be his houseboat. It was a run-down marina that was also a really fantastic artists’ community, so I was surrounded by musicians and artists of all kinds and the water, of course, that was beautiful. I was working as a sail-maker, so I was sailing a lot and working in the trades, a unique trade. I think all of that conspires to inspire my music,” Antonick says, and that’s certainly true of the fluidity, movement and tidal rhythms on Heart Creak; water, the tides and physical connection to nature underlie the themes of the album. The constant movement of living on the water and the sense of being carried in any direction, at any time, are central to Pony Hunt’s nature.

On VAR!, Antonick explores a different kind of fluidity. “Gender is definitely always coursing through my investigation in life,” she says. “I grew up classified as a tomboy. In pictures of myself as a teenager, I look like a 16-year-old boy. I was lucky enough to grow up in a family where I wasn’t pushed into a gender role; I only felt that in societal and cultural systems. Those questions have gotten more complicated as I’ve gotten older and experienced the world a lot more. Society really wants to push me into being a woman, being female, having sex with a male, all these things women are supposed to have. I’m gender-fluid, or gender-queer, but it’s something where I don’t feel satisfied when I say those things. I haven’t figured that quite out yet.”

Now 36, she says, “I feel like those things weren’t on the table when I was growing up. Later in life after being called ‘she/her’ all this time, I get to be called what I want? I’ve never had that before. I sexually identify as queer, but I remember, when the only things on the table were being a lesbian or bisexual, I cringed. When ‘queer’ landed on the table, I went, ‘I am totally that!’ It gives me breathing room to be what I want to be at any moment.”

Whatever else she may be, she is undisputedly channeling the formative sounds she grew up with. Chicago’s DIY punk scene awoke in her a sense of freedom to challenge ideas of womanhood, work, and identity. “When I was a teenager, I had older siblings who were really into the punk scene in Chicago, so that’s the music I was introduced to and loved being part of. It’s loud, abrasive, energetic and just so good… that was the first music that lit me up,” she remembers.

The undeniable element of roots and country in her music was the result of a very different Chicago band. “I remember listening to Wilco – the local Chicago band that everyone loved when I was growing up, and they were my gateway to more Americana-style music. My influences on VAR! are very much 1960s rock, R&B and soul influenced. The Velvet Underground are huge for me; they’re vibey in all the right ways. Irma Thomas – when I hear her sing, she’s just the Queen of New Orleans soul for a reason.”

Steeped in the culture of a historically musical, artistic city – one that is rich with stories, blood and tears – yet addressing very modern concepts of fluid gender identity speaks to the juxtaposition between vintage and new that Pony Hunt embodies. It’s fitting that the album was the first to be released on Antonick’s new imprint, Wing And Wing, on July 23.

“I’m a co-owner; it’s myself and a woman named Lindsey Baker who runs Wolfie Vibes [PR]. Lindsey is also a wonderful musician [and plays in] Guts Club. We met through the New Orleans music scene, playing some shows together,” Antonick says. “We wanted to shine a light on queer-owned, female business, overlooked musicians. There’s a lot of really amazing queer musicians out there.”

Follow Pony Hunt on Instagram for ongoing updates.

Anika Vents Pent-Up Pressure (and Sings for the Birds) on Sophomore Solo LP Change

Photo Credit: Sven Gutjahr

In Berlin, Annika Henderson, better known to listeners as Anika, was accustomed to seeing “these groups of gangster birds that try and eat your sandwich out of your hands.” Nature was different, though, when she temporarily moved from the city to the countryside to make her latest album, Change, released via Sacred Bones Records on July 23.

“The ones here are a little bit nicer and they don’t do that,” she says on a recent call from the small German town where she relocated in late 2019. Plus, there were a lot of birds. At least, that’s what Anika thought until her landlady mentioned that the population was decreasing. That conversation, plus Rachel Carson’s landmark 1962 book Silent Spring, informed the song “Never Coming Back.” 

“There are things that are happening and we don’t really notice,” says Anika. “When it’s gradual, you don’t notice and then, suddenly, you wake up and look outside and there are no birds. Maybe now we can do something, but, by then, it’s too late and then it’s like the Dodo.”

In a deep, languid voice, Anika sings, “I saw the signs, I chose to ignore them/I saw all the warnings.” If it sounds like a love song, well, that’s by design. “It’s kind of written like a love song, but it’s about other things,” she says. “It’s never about one thing. It’s always about many things. The main thing is about birds.”

The tell-tale lyric comes when Anika sings, “I found your body on the windowsill/lying on the grassy floor.” She says, “Either I just murdered my boyfriend or whatever and he’s lying on my windowsill or it’s the birds or it’s a slight reference to the Shaggy song.”

Several years earlier, Anika, who is also known for her collaborations with British band >BEAK, as well as artists like Tricky and Dave Clarke, had considered quitting music. A friend had invited her to Mexico, but she couldn’t afford to travel there without a gig and she didn’t have a band. Anika found a group of musicians in Mexico and they gelled so well that the group evolved into Exploded View, who released albums in 2016 and 2018. “It’s always when you totally give up that something happens and you think, oh, it’s just why I’m alive,” Anika says. 

Exploded View kept Anika busy enough to delay working on the follow-up to her 2010 self-titled release, so moving to the countryside seemed like the antidote to a busy life on the road. “I thought, great, I have a place so that I can chill out and it would be a contrast of extreme touring and then chilling out,” she says.

But her plans took a change of course after the COVID-19 pandemic struck early in 2020. “It wasn’t really just corona. Corona was a side note to what was going on in my personal life, where basically everything was so extreme in so many different ways,” says Anika. The situation, she says, was “complicated,” but Change kept her going.

“I think, just before corona, I was considering maybe I should quit,” she says. “This happens every so often and then some crazy thing happens where I have no choice but to continue.” But, Anika clarifies that “no choice” doesn’t mean anyone was forcing her to make the album. Rather, it’s “no choice in that it suddenly makes sense and it’s this massive liberation, or life jacket, and in this weird time.”

True to its title, the concept behind the Change morphed, too; Anika had been working with an entirely different idea for the album prior to the pandemic. “The script changed in so many ways, in terms of the actual lyrics, the music, the way I could record it, who I could work with and it just became something totally different,” she says. “But I’m really happy for the way it did turn out.”

For one thing, the situation prompted Anika to handle a lot of the album’s components herself. She was ultimately able to bring in friend and collaborator Martin Thulin, from Exploded View, as a co-producer for change Change. “He definitely wasn’t pitching any agenda,” she says of the collaboration. “He was there to help achieve what I wanted to and that was nice, but it was definitely a challenge to get him there.”

Change became a release for Anika. “The whole album is so much pent-up stuff,”she says. “ In the situation that I was in at the time, I wasn’t really able to say much or do much and it was a very difficult situation.”

On top of that were recent global events. “That added to things going on in the world, where it feels like you don’t have a voice. All this stuff is going on and how can I actually have an effect to stop this stuff from happening or how can I have a say?” Anika says. “There’s stuff going down and I want to speak up. Social media doesn’t really cut it when you want to have an opinion on something or actually make a change.”

Anika channels personal and universal sentiments into a collection of psychedelic synth songs that capture the global melancholy and frustration of 2020. “The songs were a way to get all of this out,” she says. “I have so much frustration and I hope it’s a vehicle for other people to have the same experience.” 

Noting that she suspects others have the same feelings and are asking the same questions she is, Anika adds, “I think that’s why it’s important to keep doing music that’s from the heart.”

Follow Anika on Instagram for ongoing updates.

Penelope Trappes Completes a Haunting Three-Album Opus on Matriarchal Healing and Self-Empowerment

Photo Credit: Agnes Haus

Penelope Trappes was sitting at her kitchen table when she realized that if she wanted to get her point across, she’d have to drag a dead body across a parking garage. She didn’t intend to commit an actual murder of course – just to use an anonymous woman’s corpse as a stand-in for the societal expectations, emotional labor, and even physical discomfort intrinsic to the experience of living in a female body. The sinister nature of her endeavor would evoke the work of dark auteurs like David Lynch and feminist art icons Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman, and Ana Mendieta, soundtracked with Trappes’ single “Blood Moon,” from the third installment of her solo LP series, Penelope Three, out May 28 via Houndstooth.

“Basically the whole album’s supposed to be a film, but due to time constraints that’s not gonna happen ‘til later in the year,” Trappes explains. She’s released equally haunting and gorgeous clips this album cycle, co-directed with Agnes Haus, for “Fur & Feather” and “Nervous,” the latter of which she says “was very much about channeling that sort of romantic gothic witchy stuff… borderline horror… tapping into some sort of subconscious response to what you’re hearing.”

Indeed, those aesthetics play out sonically across the album as Trappes delves into themes related to motherhood, aging, anxiety, grief and healing – the final chapter in a conversation she began in 2017 with her solo debut Penelope One and continued on 2018’s Penelope Two. Appropriately, Three feels like the most fully realized expression of Trappes’ vision, brought to life by atmospheric drones, ghostly vocal loops, mysterious samples, disjointed piano, guitar reverb, and evocative percussion.

“I believe in the power of three – life, birth and death… the holy trinity. There’s so many things that all revolve around the number three. When One came out it was very much about rebirth and birth and new life, and self empowerment. Two came about when a very dear friend of mine had passed away, and it brought up all these feelings of loss and grief. It doesn’t necessarily have to be an actual physical death – there’s all sorts of deaths that we have in our lives; la petite mort, all the way through,” Trappes says. “I found myself surrounded by a darkness in that sense, and the same happened with Three – there’s this struggle between the dark and the light that I’m interested in trying to sonically produce, to find that balance. So with Three comes the closing of the chapters – birth, death, and now life, which is, I believe, in order to live really happily, a constant state of working on healing.”

Trappes began her solo work in earnest after a decade as half of NYC-based electronic duo The Golden Filter, and says the shift in focus came from wanting to express her own personal story more fully. “I’d been very much part of a team. My partner and I, we’re a couple as well, we see eye to eye on everything and it’s wonderful. But it had got to a point of my maturity as a woman where I just wanted to be me, myself, and I, and explore things that were unique to my life to date,” she explains. “Very individual experiences, like being a single mum for a while there, and my childhood growing up in Australia, and traveling before I moved to America, all these things. I really wanted to make it very much as if it was, in essence, sort of a journal entry.”

Because most of her lyrics are more impressionistic than a typical diary, Trappes is able to extract what feels like ancient wisdom from every corner of her existence. From moving to a huge old house in Brighton after years of living in London, to the act of unpacking her anxiety, Trappes’ exploits take stirring, esoteric shapes. Opening with “Veil,” which she says was inspired by meeting a friend’s newborn baby, taking root with “Forest,” in which she visualizes all of humanity as a kind of inter-connected mycelium, and coming full circle with “Awkward Matriarch,” Trappes explores matrilineal bonds in atypical ways. This narrative was inspired by the eternal bonds shared with her daughter (who recently turned nineteen and left home) and her own mother, who has suffered with Parkinsons since Trappes was a teenager but is still “strong in spirit.”

“Motherhood was always going to be one of the main themes with my solo work,” Trappes says. “The music world’s changed so much in the last few years that it’s not a dirty word to say you’re a mother and active musician. It’s ridiculous, but when I first started out I didn’t tell a lot of people because I just didn’t want to hear the judgement, whatever way it comes, you know? There’s this self-empowerment, there’s these things that you struggle through, and the love – whether you ever have a child or not, we all have a mother, and whatever those connections are that people have with their mothers, they shape who you are and what you become or what you struggle with, what you need to heal from. That was really important to me, not just on a personal level about my own daughter and my mother, but on a sociological level.”

Throughout the album, Trappes’ intrepid production elevates these narratives to something intensely primal. “Awkward Matriarch,” for instance, starts off “deliberately super minimal and quiet,” but Trappes chose to build vocal layers over it to symbolize women across centuries and millennia singing together – “all the voices and all the struggle, and the joy in one song,” as she puts it.

“All the demos come from these drones, whether it’s with a synth or a guitar, like just reverb echoing. Meditation moments are sort of what creates the initial demos,” she adds. “And then, a track like ‘Nervous,’ for example, needed more. It needed to almost build that anxiety. At the end you’ve got this lift but there’s still the weight of it all.” Where the song goes, she says, mostly depends on its subject matter.

Though it was written before the pandemic, many will find resonance in the agoraphobic truths at the core of a song like “Nervous” as we begin to re-enter society. Trappes set out with the intention of making Penelope Three about healing, a concept that feels especially prescient now. “Self care has to come into play now, because everything is getting faster and weirder and systems are breaking down and the environment’s fucked,” Trappes points out. “It’s quite heartbreaking, but there’s also a lot of hope still. ‘Fur & Feather,’ for example, tries to address the polar opposites of my generation [and my daughter’s] generation and still trying to hold on to that hope and love.”

“Again, I believe in a very matriarchal sort of self-care and community care and those themes of caring; it doesn’t have to be a matriarchal or patriarchal thing, it’s just self-knowledge and self-care and self-love. Every song has an element of that,” she continues. “Songwriting, or writing of any form, for anyone, is very healing, just to get it out there. And for me particularly, that’s why being solo has been really good.”

Next up for Trappes is a UK tour, for which she’s hired pianist Hinako Omori and cellist Maddie Cutter (Trappes herself will focus on guitar and triggering samples and percussion at the shows). “It was really important to have women on stage with me for this story, this chapter,” she says. “The last album when I did some shows it was just me doing everything and it was kind of exhausting. I was always like a mad professor having to really focus and I couldn’t necessarily engage with the audience the way that I like to do.”

Photo Credit: Agnes Haus

Now in her forties, Trappes refers to herself often as a “mature woman,” and admits that there’s a confrontational, almost punk attitude to the overarching narrative across her three records. She appears nude on the album covers, often twisting her body into alien shapes in defiance of conventional beauty standards, or letting a slow camera shutter distort her form. “As a parent, or as a performer, or I don’t know, any woman out there, is constantly under some sort of microscope as to how she should behave and what have you. So each song is addressing an element of that,” she says. “In every other creative arts industry, you get better with age; a novelist gets better, a film director gets better. Why should a musician be considered somewhat washed up after the age of 35, 30, 25? I find it really fascinating that being a mature artist in music is still frowned upon by certain parts of society.”

Trappes does recognize there’s been a shift in acceptance when it comes to aging and motherhood in the industry, only that it’s been a painstakingly slow one. “Look at Patti Smith and Laurie Anderson. They’re still going,” she says. “And I’m not stopping. It’s what you do, it’s what you love, it’s your life, and creation is life, so it just keeps going.”

Follow Penelope Trappes on Instagram and Twitter for ongoing updates.

cehryl Builds Worlds Out of Distant Memories on Her New EP, time machine

Photo Credit: Jonny Ho

Nestled in a bed of mourning, in homesickness for that space between the first youthful lick of freedom and the whiplash that comes when you’re left completely on your own, comes time machine, the latest EP from Hong Kong-based musician cehryl. Breathy vocals glide over subtle, dreamlike instrumentals, seamlessly immersing you into a past to which you’re more tethered than you thought. Her enchanting EP translates to a moving photo album of her early college years, each track a high-saturation vignette blurred at the edges with the melancholy of loss. 

Clocking in at just 21 minutes, the concise EP covers much of its ground through cehryl’s ability to build worlds out of small, intimate experiences. Her lyricism goes hand in hand with the integrity behind production, intention permeating each second of time machine. From the somber opening track “philadelphia,” which recalls lost friendship, to “callus,” where energetic, bouncy plucks parallel the visceral bite of “thorns and scissors and clippers,” each sonic element carries as much weight as her words. By the time you reach the EP’s closer “outside the party, inside the dream” where cehryl wishes for “sugar and honey and trust,” a waltz-like structure lulls you into a wistful rest.

Cehryl is no stranger to transience, having spent time in the UK, Los Angeles, and Boston, where she attended Berklee College of Music. After COVID-19 put tours with Jeremy Zucker and Cavetown on indefinite hold (“I do have goals to play shows again,” she discloses when asked, “still in the middle of planning and gauging the situation!”) returning to her native Hong Kong took some adjustment. She recalls being “very pessimistic and bummed about it” in the beginning. With gratitude for those who surround her, from friends and fans to her management team and label, she’s “adapted to a very different lifestyle,” which includes juggling a day job and creative pursuits while “getting my feet in the tight-knit music community.”

Though her life is markedly different now, accessing seemingly ephemeral memories of her long-ago Berklee days comes second nature to cehryl, who calls herself “sentimental and nostalgic to a fault.”

“I have no problem recentering myself to channel older feelings,” she continues. “If anything, I have a lot of problems staying present and not reminiscing.”

These emotions drive her art in all its forms. She dabbles in drawing, describing herself as “not very good” (though her Instagram highlights will tell you otherwise), edits videos on occasion, and practices photography. “I think all of these outputs come from the same place even though my drawings can feel very different to my photography, which can feel different to my music,” she says. “Through them, I’m able to explore things I am technically incapable of saying in the other mediums.”

Aptly citing Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai as an influence on her videos, she puts songs together like patchwork. It’s her innate creative eye, an intrinsic precision that allows cehryl to immortalize moments in song through the eyes of a visual artist and director: expressive and earnest; reflective, yet raw enough to remain in the moment as though no time has passed at all.

“I find that routines can deaden the magic of making anything from scratch,” she says of her songwriting process. “Sometimes it starts with a phrase of words, sometimes it starts with a melody, sometimes it’s less ‘inspired’ and it just starts with experimenting with a chord sequence. I honestly don’t really evaluate or analyze my own lyrics after I write them. My editing process is just singing through the song and changing words to make the emotion or imagery stronger, but it all feels very ‘zoomed in’ like a small-scale, nit-picky kind of editing and not a pre-planned, big picture, conceptual rubric. More economically put, my process feels very subconscious.”

It’s a stream of consciousness style kept fresh by her commitment to concrete details that keep these songs so present in their stories. “laundry” is a standout for its effortless and poignant poeticism. She invites you to find childlike wonder in yearning for the mundane, singing of a moment “three piles down in our laundry.” cehryl notes that detail is not only “writing 101,” but “memory 101.”

“Without detail, we would not have our own stories,” she explains. “A lot of my writing comes from an autobiographical intent, so each song is like a memoir.”

And that’s the beauty of cehryl’s simplicity. time machine is a collection of songs so honest, they radiate warmth and adoration in spite of sadness, or even within it. When cehryl conjures vivid stories of people who’ve come and gone, though laced with longing, they offer hope, comfort in the belief that maybe you’ve made a mark on someone else’s life as profound as the ones made on yours.

Follow cehryl on Instagram and Twitter for ongoing updates.

PREMIERE: Bay Area Neo-Soul Artist Simha Examines Imposter Syndrome on New Single “Losing Focus”

Photo Credit: Holy Smoke Photography

Growing up in the musical melting pot of the Bay Area, neo-soul singer-songwriter Simha gained an ear for both western and eastern musical influences. He seamlessly weaves elements of the Indian classical music of his heritage with jazz and soul sounds, the result being a lush, ethereal vehicle through which he expresses his emotions. He premieres single “Losing Focus” on Audiofemme today.

The song deals with the idea of “imposter syndrome,” a term that’s entered the popular lexicon to loosely mean doubting your abilities and feeling like a fraud. Simha says that for himself, it manifested as “feeling like doing music was not really something I was good at.” Collaborating with others in the past has helped keep that feeling at bay, but the pandemic forced him to adapt, to look inward and write alone. Though his imposter syndrome initially saddled him with a bad case of writer’s block, “Losing Focus” helped him dig out of it.

“I ended up writing the whole song by myself, and it was a lot of just sitting with myself, and trying to be as honest with myself as possible,” he says. “I still deal with it…but I think now rather than it being, ‘Oh no, this isn’t good enough, no one’s gonna like this,’ it’s more leaning into it and just saying, well maybe the fact that I feel insecure about this might change something about the way I write, or create something new in the music that might capture a different feeling for me.”

And it worked! The solitary time helped Simha to dig into his roots in Indian classical music in a way he hadn’t before, inviting his mother to play the tabla, an Indian percussion instrument, on the track. Simha’s mother had enrolled him in Indian classical music classes as a child and practiced with him at home, but collaborating together as two adults was a new experience for them both. “Being able to recreate that experience [of making music with my mother] was really important for me, because it pulled me back to the idea that music isn’t just work for me, it’s fun for me, you know? It’s something that really grounds me to my heritage,” he explains. “We were charting new territory together, and it was really fun, because I think she also discovered new things about herself when it came to her creative process and her expression, just this new thing she’s never done before. It was really insightful and really a beautiful process.”

The result is profoundly unique. The tabla rhythms weave in with jazz and soul sounds, all layered under Simha’s smooth vocals and deeply personal lyrics. A lifelong fan of jazz, soul, and neo-soul, he lists Donny Hathaway, Stevie Wonder, Lianne La Havas and Erykah Badu as major influences. They all shine through, but spliced with Simha’s beautifully intentional cultural injections it becomes something all his own. 

He’s working on an EP to hopefully drop late in the summer, and seeking opportunities to perform outside under remaining COVID restrictions. As a queer artist of color, he says that the “biggest thing for me on this EP, that drives it, is mental health, and specifically mental health awareness for queer BIPOC in the music industry.” The EP will emphasize these themes, and while he works on it, he’s collaborating with artist Emma Timberlea Brown (who designs his cover artwork as well) and an organization he started with some friends called The Humxn Collective to drop a merch line where 50% of proceeds will go to an organization that connects queer BIPOC creators with therapists in their own communities. “I’m really excited about that because the biggest thing I really want to do with this project is give back to the community that has basically raised me,” he says. “For the longest time, if it wasn’t for this community, I would be so lost. The influences I get, the support that I get, is really through how tight-knit this community is. I can’t stress that enough, and I’m really grateful for it.”

There’s no doubt that Simha’s community plays a role in quashing that pesky imposter syndrome by allowing him to see the beauty he is capable of offering to the world. He notes that “there’s so much amazing art that has come out during this time, which has been inspired by so many different things, so it’s really beautiful.” Simha’s art was part of this, and even if he doesn’t always see it, it matters.

Follow Simha on Facebook and Instagram for ongoing updates.

BIIANCO is the Ex-Slaying, Banger-Producing BFF Everyone Deserves

Photo Credit: Scott Fleishman

Gabby Bianco is exactly the kind of friend you want in your corner – stylish and cool, equally down to provide the soundtrack for a night on the town or give you some pointers on how to make music in your bedroom. And when you need a reality check, she’s the type to tell it like it is, boost your confidence, and help you move on.

That’s the idea behind the LA-based producer’s latest single (released under her eponymous stage name BIIANCO) “that’s what friends are for.” Though she’s lived on the West Coast for over a decade, she still rocks her ride-or-die Italian New Yorker roots, best heard in ball-busting lines like “Screw you ex/He’s a bitch and so are all his friends/I wouldn’t say a goddamn thing to them/’Bout who you are or where you been/Thick or thin.” Atmospheric synths and a slow-burning beat give the track a cinematic, ’80s horror-redux vibe, so it’s only fitting that the video for the track take that motif a step further; in it, she and her gal pals fend off a series of exes who have come back from the dead – quite literally.

But this isn’t just a music video. It’s a music video game. Via BIIANCO’s website, you can test what kind of a friend you really are by helping the characters choose whether to give their exes a second chance, or slay their proverbial relationship demons (the version below is the “winning scenario,” but playing for yourself is much more fun).

BIIANCO had been percolating the idea for a while. “This was one of the first songs I had written and produced and I thought to myself years ago, this has to be a zombie video – like us destroying zombies in slow motion and stuff. But I was like, how do I nail this concept in a way that doesn’t just feel like a cliché horror kinda thing?” she recalls. “At the same time, over the past two years, I’ve watched my friends and also felt myself go through some really toxic relationships and breakups and [seen] people, especially in quarantine, not acting themselves or exes doing horrible things. Everybody has a relationship that ended in a way they’re not proud of – no one’s perfect. People become the worst versions of themselves, almost like they’re fucking zombies or something. It’s kinda this affliction of people just not having basic coping mechanisms in breakups, where no one’s the best version of themselves.”

It’s a salient metaphor, one that makes very clear that we shouldn’t indulge our desires to rekindle relationships that don’t serve us – but it’s a lot easier to make that decision when our exes’ flesh is rotting right before our eyes. Still, incorporating a decision-making element for the viewer felt central to BIIANCO’s concept – even more so as a self-professed “video game nerd” with a penchant for classic RPGS like The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy. Working alongside longtime friend and director Scott Fleishman, she combined the nostalgia of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Goosebumps novels with the modern tech of Black Mirror interactive movie Bandersnatch into an interactive, but streamlined take on the pitfalls of dating, even calling out bi erasure, a subject near and dear to her heart as a gender-bending, queer pansexual femme.

“When we realized what would be required in order to achieve this I was like, holy fuck! We basically shot eight music videos, and had to plot the whole thing out beforehand, and then had to edit eight music videos and code an entire website. It was wild,” BIIANCO laughs. “I’m such an Aries that if anything sounds hard, I probably wanna do it at some point.”

Being a loyal, trusted friend certainly paid off for BIIANCO – pooling her talented circle for everything from direction to motorcycle rental to special effects to building the website that allows viewers to play along, she was able to create what looks like six-figure shoot on a shoestring. “I basically have found myself in this fucking amazing collective of friends, where people are all in the creative industry in some way,” she explains. “Literally my best friend since friggin’ kindergarten is an incredible programmer; he coded the website. He wanted to buy a new motorcycle, so he rented a Ducati for the weekend [but let me] ride it for five minutes for the video.”

By casting her friends and styling the shoot straight from her own closet, she was able to allocate a bigger budget for special effects. “I was like, if we’re doing this, we’re doing this for real, not like shitty Frankenstein makeup. We’re getting makeup artists from The Walking Dead. Everybody knew somebody who was really great at what they did, and it’s such a passion project for everyone that you end up in this really amazing situation where everybody’s willing to work on a budget or work within the confines,” BIIANCO says. “It always goes multiple ways – I’ll help somebody set up their whole tour rig, or somebody will come to me with an idea and want to co-direct something. I try to be as supportive as they are to me. Get you a pod, a group of friends, where you have something to contribute to their lives and they have something to contribute to yours.”

BIIANCO doesn’t stop at contributing to her friends’ creative projects; on TikTok, she offers production pointers with a good dose of her exuberant personality. She started doing mini-lessons on how to achieve certain effects on a whim, but ended up amassing thousands of views, building her audience from there. Demystifying her process as a producer is essential, she says, to getting more women involved in the production side of music.

For her part, she started off as a classically trained pianist, eventually adding singing, guitar and drums to her repertoire before studying film scoring at UCLA. She’d been an early adopter of GarageBand and later, Ableton, expanding to production and musical direction for live shows as a member of Smoke Season. But a women’s Ableton retreat in Joshua Tree changed everything; not only did she meet talented women producers (some of whom, like Madame Gandhi, would eventually become collaborators), but it shifted her perception of herself as an artist in incredible ways and opened up her next creative chapter.

“That was such a pivotal moment in my career because I left that retreat like, I’m a producer, from that moment on. I came out of that like, I have a new solo project, I’m gonna use my last name, and I’m gonna produce everything myself and just lean into that. That was the birth of BIIANCO,” she says. “It’s been a really fluid thought process because it’s all coming from my brain. It tends to be really undiluted and actually very consistent. I’m just going for aesthetics I love. My music is darker, it has some creepy undertones; my aesthetic is darker so that ends up just coming very naturally. It sounds like it’s always in the same world; it’s very easy to write in it and create in it because it’s just basically in my head.” BIIANCO plans to release a mixtape combining some of her previous singles later this year; it will tie in thematically with a book of poetry she published in February titled This Will Wreck Your Heart, which centers on unpacking the four stages of surviving toxic relationships.

BIIANCO felt she needed to be “as loud as possible” to get more women involved in production, not only to earn her own respect, but so that other women, particularly younger women, could envision themselves in that role, too. “When I first started producing there was an emotional element kind of like despair, because subliminally and subconsciously, culture and society teaches [women] that’s not really your role,” she explains. “I never even thought about it being a viable route, so I never was in the room at the age of 21, or the age of 16, learning what a vocal chain should look like with a pre-amp and how it goes into a DAW and using an interface. I just realized the gap is so fundamentally huge in experience and it’s because of this very subconsciously perpetuated idea.”

Lately, she’s noticed an uptick – partly due to the pandemic – in women producing their own work, and though that’s heartening, she points out there’s still one huge hurdle for women producers to jump.

“We might have more exposure, but when it comes to money, like when it comes to getting in the room, the labels and the publishers and the big time managers are still fucking choosing the men to produce. I don’t blame the artists, though I hope that the artists start to understand that is where women are completely devoid from the conversation, except when an artist like Taylor Swift intentionally chooses a woman producer,” BIIANCO says. “That’s where the money is, really, like being a Mark Ronson or a Benny Blanco, getting called to do a Selena [Gomez] track. We have placated the issue into thinking like, this is really not that big of a deal anymore, cause don’t you see on Instagram so many women are producers? And I’m like yeah, but they’re not making the same money, they’re not given the same opportunities.”

Just like the no-nonsense advice she gives on “that’s what friends are for,” BIIANCO has a reality check for the music industry. “Don’t think that just because Fader put out a list of the top five women producers to keep an eye on, don’t think just because Grimes has made a couple of records, that you have fixed the problem,” she says. “We are devoid from the conversation in those big money moments. Labels don’t see us as viable options or they just don’t think about it, and that is the next frontier that I think we’re all trying to fucking blow up. Honestly.”

Follow BIIANCO on Instagram for ongoing updates.

With Faith, The Cure Crafted a Dark, Vivid Album

Photo Credit: Ebet Roberts

It began with upbeat demos recorded in his parents’ dining room, Robert Smith recalled in a 2004 Rolling Stone interview, but the sound of The Cure’s third album would change a couple weeks later when he wrote “The Funeral Party” and “All Cats Are Grey” in one night. 

Faith, released on April 14, 1981, marked the middle of the era that would come to define The Cure. Sandwiched between Seventeen Seconds and Pornography, it was part of a three-album stretch that, in the annals of alternative music history, would be remembered for both inner-band turmoil and the darker sound that resulted from it. 

It’s also during this trifecta of albums that The Cure earned its reputation as a “goth” band, a label Smith rejected and one that, really, is only true insomuch as they became a gateway band for later generations of young people who would fall down the goth rabbit hole. 

As for Faith, I’m hesitant to use the word “goth” to describe it. Goth is pulling up your best pair of ripped fishnets, teasing your hair and heading out to the club with your friends to turn pirouettes on the dance floor. Goth is dark and dramatic, but it’s still fun. 

Faith, on the other hand, is not a fun album. It is the nights when you flake on your friends and stay in bed, staring at the ceiling because the world is just too much. Faith is heavy. And, unlike so many other Cure albums, its weight isn’t offset by lighter moments. There’s no “Love Cats.” No “Just Like Heaven.” No “Lovesong” or  “Friday I’m in Love.” There’s not even a creepy “Lullaby.” The closest thing to a moment of levity on this album is “Primary,” Faith’s only single, which is a dance song in much the same way that Joy Division’s now-classic single “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is. Yeah, you can move to it (there’s even a 12″ extended version of “Primary” that’s killer), but it becomes a dance where you’re frantically shaking off angst. 

In 2011, Smith described the album in an interview with The Guardian. “Faith was the sound of extreme desolation because that’s how we felt at the time,” he said. 

It was a difficult period for The Cure, at this point a trio consisting of Smith, bassist Simon Gallup and drummer Lol Tolhurst. In a 1993 interview with Record Collector, Tolhurst notes that, at around the time of the making of Faith, his mother was sick and Smith’s grandmother had died. He also noted the bandmates’ mutual history with religion – both Smith and Tolhurst attended Catholic school – impacted the material. “Organised religion tells you one thing, then as life unfolds you realise that there’s an individual interpretation you can put on events,” Tolhurst told Record Collector. 

In a 1981 Trouser Press interview, Smith describes Faith as a response to the themes on Seventeen Seconds. “Everybody I know has gone through the emotional trauma of Seventeen Seconds, which is learning you can’t trust people as implicitly as you’d thought when you were younger,” he said. “Faith is about having gone through that and trying to discover what you can have faith in, the loss of innocence and growing older, as in ‘Primary,’ and trying to sort out what your life’s about.”

All of that is reflected in the sound of Faith; it’s a vivid album in both its lyrics and sound, from the religious imagery of “The Holy Hour,” to the dirge “The Funeral Party” to the allusions to Mervyn Peake’s mid-20th century fantasy series Gormenghast in “The Drowned Man.” Like all of The Cure’s best albums, it drops listeners into a series of scenes that manifest clearly with each song, even when you aren’t familiar with the specific points of reference. 

Faith didn’t garner widespread critical acclaim upon its release. In that 1981 Trouser Press interview, Smith counters accusations that it was a “self-indulgent” album, noting that the reason why it took a longer time to record than previous albums was a bit beyond their control. “It took so long because we kept getting thrown out of studios in favor of ‘more important’ people, and once we lost the mood we never quite got back the atmosphere we wanted,” he revealed.

Several years later, Smith readdressed the critics in a 1987 Spin interview. “Listening to our records like Pornography and Faith, I still think they’re good. They weren’t just the whims of this brat, even though they were horribly slandered,” he said. “It’s good that there’s been very little I would change. That gives you confidence.”

In time, Faith didn’t quite become the fan favorite that its follow-up, Pornography, did, but there are certainly people – myself included – who would argue that it’s one of the band’s finest albums. It’s an essential album in the band’s catalog, one best reserved for the days when you can play it start-to-finish and let yourself feel everything that’s packed within it.

Jenny Owen Youngs Paints Vignettes of Simple Childhood Joys on Echo Mountain EP

On her latest EP Echo Mountain, singer-songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Jenny Owen Youngs uses everyday storylines to dive into themes like powerlessness, self-compassion, and complicated relationships – big ideas rendered in small-scale details from childhood games to natural scenes. The songs give off a stripped-down, whimsical folk vibe, with languid guitar-strumming and mournful strings. Youngs wanted to make Echo Mountain a continuation of her 2019 EP Night Shift, but one more connected to the details of daily life than its predecessor, with a “body of vignettes that kind of melt into one another.”

“I was interested in, rather than a God’s-eye view, kind of a microscope,” she says. “I was excited to explore a sonic space that was a little more intimate.” Youngs pulled inspiration from pastoral scenes and childhood memories, her vocals sung slowly and clearly, painting vivid pictures of emotionally-laden events.

On her latest single “Dungeons and Dragons,” for instance, she juxtaposes the role-playing game she enjoyed as a kid against a far more foreboding reality: “Inside the game, you’re okay/longswords and spellcasting keeps all the bad away/and the monsters look how monsters do/not like neighborhood kids with their hands full of rocks for you/and not like the grown ups who should be protecting you.”

“When you have so little power as a kid to affect your surroundings or circumstances, it’s incredibly powerful to enter the world of a game like Dungeons and Dragons, where you can get wherever you want to be and whatever you want to do and the world can look any way the dungeon master wants it to,” she recalls.

“Sunfish” deals in a different way with escapism, recalling the New Jersey house where Youngs grew up and the woods, streams, and bears surrounding it, where she’d retreat when she needed time alone.

In “Little Bird,” she addresses her teenage self, who was struggling with being in the closet about her sexuality in high school, and offers herself the compassion she didn’t get at the time.

“I think at least for me, it’s very easy to look back on earlier iterations of myself and just kind of shake my head like, ugh, what an idiot! But I think the older I get, the more I’m able to kind of move past that and into a space where I can have compassion for myself,” she says. “I think it’s much easier to have compassion for other people than myself, but once I sort of let myself find some peace and stop stressing out so much about that part of myself, I think it became a lot easier to feel the compassion for somebody else.”

The EP takes a melancholy turn on “Long Long Gone,” a song grieving the end of a relationship with natural imagery, almost whispered vocal layers, and minimalistic instrumentals.

“Follow You,” a meditation on the inscrutable nature of relationships, has more of an indie pop aesthetic than the rest of the EP, with the catchy refrain: “Follow you all of my life/chances I can’t leave behind/I can believe what I want/but I can’t believe what it cost/how’d I get lost.”‘

Youngs’ friend John Mark Nelson remixed “Follow You,” giving it a fast-paced, fun, danceable feel by bringing up the tempo and using synths to add a dreamy vibe. “I sent him stanzas and just kind of said, ‘the reigns are yours, do as you will,’ and I think he has fantastic instincts and I love his sonic tendencies,” she says. “He brought in these elements that make me think of artists like Pale Saints and Kate Bush — there’s a certain kind of jangliness but also this sort of fretless, flighty feel he brought into the mix.”

Echo Mountain was released on March 10th, and in the absence of live touring, Youngs is playing the EP in a livestream performance at 8 p.m. ET on March 25th (tickets are for sale at NOONCHORUS).

Youngs, who is currently based in Southern Maine, released her first album Batten the Hatches in 2005, followed by 2009’s Transmitter Failure and 2012’s An Unwavering Band of Light. Over the course of her career, she has toured with Regina Spektor, Against Me!, and Motion City Soundtrack, co-written songs like Panic! At the Disco’s “High Hopes,” Pitbull’s “Bad Man,” and Ingrid Michaelson’s “Miss America,” and played in the band The Robot Explosion.

Currently, she’s in a new band called  L.A. Exes with Sam Barbera, Rachel White, and Steph Barker, which she describes as “a quartet of queer women making kind of jangly Beatles-y surf pop.” L.A. Exes released their first single, “Temporary Goodbye,” in February.

The highlight of her career, though, was having one of her songs, the emotional, key-heavy “Wake Up,” played during the credits of BoJack Horseman‘s season four finale. “I was a huge fan of the show, and when they reached out to me, it was a tremendous honor,” she says. When she’s not making music, she hosts two podcasts centered on popular TV shows: Buffering the Vampire Slayer and Veronica Mars Investigations.

Though her interests and professional activities have been wide-ranging, her goal with her music is simple: “What I hope is that somebody listening to a song that I’ve made will hear something that is true for them in whatever way it can be true for them,” she says, “and for that to make their experience of listening to the song yield a slightly better vibe for them than three minutes ago when they started.”

Follow Jenny Owen Youngs on Instagram and Facebook for ongoing updates.

Three Oregon Musicians Champion Inspiring Women with New YouTube Series “She’s Speaking”

Singer-songwriter and ‘She’s Speaking’ co-creator Beth Wood, as photographed by Rodney Bursiel

Last year, during the 2020 Vice Presidential debates, when Kamala Harris silenced Mike Pence with the measured reminder, “I’m Speaking,” three Oregon-based songwriters – Kristen Grainger, Beth Wood, and Bre Gregg – all had the same epiphany. “All three of us felt the lightning-bolt force of those two little words,” Grainger says. “In that moment, one indisputable truth hit home hard: women’s voices matter.”

Stirred by this feeling that women were finally having a moment—and that people were listening—all three individually brainstormed ways they could get their own voices out there. Grainger approached Gregg with an idea for doing a music festival in honor of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who’d just passed away. Wood had just written a song called “One Step at a Time” honoring the late Supreme Court Justice, and when she reached out about an idea she’d long been brewing, Gregg thought they all should do something collectively, in the vein of Wood’s lilting, melancholy RBG tribute.

“I was inspired by not only her life… She was a tiny woman, she was quiet, she wasn’t an extrovert, but she quietly calculated what she wanted, the change she wanted to see in the world, and she made it happen,” says Wood of Ginsburg. “The song is centered around a quote of hers where she says that real change, enduring change, takes place one step at a time. And I look at her life and — that’s what she did.”

Together, Grainger, Wood, and Gregg decided to meld their ideas into one YouTube channel dedicated to women musicians performing original songs about women that have inspired them. The channel, which they aptly named “She’s Speaking,” officially launched on March 8 with a live, pre-recorded virtual show featuring blues artist Lady A.

Wood, who is credited by the other two women for first proposing the YouTube channel idea, says she’d been considering starting something like this for a year or so. “I can’t believe how many amazing women artists there are in the world and how many I’ve had a chance to meet over 20-something years of touring. So I had this thought, like a year ago, like what could we do to bring attention and lift up women’s voices?” says Wood. “And then I was like, what if we write songs about women who inspire us? And all these things just came together at once.”

“She’s Speaking” is essentially a highly-curated video playlist including material from some of the best women songwriters in a variety of genres, from bluegrass and folk to blues. Along with contributing their own songs and videos, Wood, Grainger and Gregg garnered much of the channel’s content by reaching out to friends they’ve made during their decades in the music business.

“One of the really fun things about this is that each of us operates in a different world,” says Wood. “I’m in the folky singer/songwriter world and Kristen is more in the bluegrass world that overlaps with the folky world, and then Bre is somewhat more in the jazz world – they all overlap, but they all have their own separate orbit so we each made a huge brainstorm list of who could we reach out to.”

The response was tremendous. In a little more than a month they received more than 50 submissions of original content for the channel. Most of the songs are packaged as a video of the artist performing their tribute in a simple, straightforward way, much like how they would appear in a small, intimate house concert.

After one song ends, the next begins, forming this great, endless train creative, celebratory songs about every woman imaginable—from women’s right’s activist Susan B. Anthony to inaugural poet Amanda Gorman to many of the artists’ own mothers and grandmothers.

In the description of each video, listeners can learn information about the songwriter and the inspiration behind the song. As well, ways to support each artist are linked, and Gregg says many are taking advantage of the opportunity to support these independent, women artists.

“I was so heartened by the number of donations we got that there were from men. Probably 50%. And people who watched. This was not all women who were watching and giving,” she says. “So part of me thinks when we talk about how women are ready, this is our time to be heard, I think there are a lot of men who believe that as well.”

Though the playlist already contains more than 50 video performances of original songs from professional women musicians, currently—all three of them hope to continue to add more and more videos to the channel as time goes on, from any woman who wants to contribute. In fact, Gregg says her seven year-old daughter is working on a song she hopes to submit.

“We talked about doing this initial launch with artists that we know and curating it; the hope is to put out the call to anyone, any woman who wants to write a song and have her upload it to her YouTube and then let us know about it and we can add it to a playlist on our channel,” says Wood.

After all, Gregg, Grainger, and Wood hope this channel can be a more inclusive platform for women artists—one that generates visibility for all women musicians, regardless of their youth or appearance, and also a platform that exposes more listeners to more variety and talent than what they might hear on the radio.

“There’s frustration associated with the Americana charts and the country charts in seeing how few women’s voices are represented consistently. It can’t be that they’re not writing as good of songs as these men,” says Grainger.

“She’s Speaking” is also designed as a platform where women musicians can come as they are. No need for high heels and sexy costumes, just bring authentic yourself and submit a good song.

“It’s really great to glorify women artists on based on something other than their beauty. No offense to all the beautiful women, but I mean, there is also beauty in the things that [women] create,” says Grainger.

“These are not produced videos of people wearing fancy makeup and clothes,” adds Wood. “These are just people sitting down and being like, here’s a song. And that’s intentional. We want this channel to be about the song and about the artist.”

Gregg, Grainger and Wood also emphasize how much they want this platform to function as a source of role models for the next generation of women—to show them that they can be in the music industry, and in every other corner of the world.

“You can tell people that they can do anything they want to do, but if nobody like them is doing the thing, it doesn’t mean they can’t do it, but it means it is astronomically more difficult for them to think of themselves in that role,” says Gregg. “And if you think of yourself in a role, that’s where it all starts – it’s all about being able to visualize that even as a possibility.”

Follow She’s Speaking on YouTube and Facebook for ongoing updates.

Kelly McFarling Relishes the Lushness of a Lost Time on Deep The Habit

As we reach the year anniversary of the pandemic and all of the disarray it has brought into our lives, people have begun to reflect on how it’s changed them. One such person is Bay Area singer-songwriter Kelly McFarling, who released her latest LP Deep The Habit on March 12. She recorded the album pre-COVID but chose to delay the release until now. Rather than worrying about how some of the original meaning might be lost, however, she hopes that it has become all the more poignant; calling Deep The Habit “a very beautiful time capsule of this group of people who I really miss a lot,” McFarling admits that although so much has changed, “it feels nice to celebrate it right now.”

The delightfully mellow collection of ten songs is welcome in this new paradigm, comforting in its warmth and its new spin on old classics. McFarling intended for the record to sound like a feminine take on J.J. Cale or Dire Straits. She felt “like there was a little gap in that canon,” saying, “I wasn’t hearing a lot of female voices within that realm, and I kind of wanted to have more of a female-fronted version of that.” But McFarling infuses this traditionally masculine, bluesy-Americana sound with softness and vulnerability, giving us something refreshing and honestly soothing. Moments of pop sheen, like the hook on “Birds,” give the record a touch of witchy Stevie Nicks cool, and McFarling’s refinement of her folk sound on previous records (like 2017’s Water Dog, 2013’s Ridgeline, and 2010 debut Distractible Child) calls to mind Hiss Golden Messenger or Molly Sarlé. 

There’s a lushness to Deep The Habit, one born of McFarling’s effort to highlight the talent of the musicians she has playing in her band (Tim Marcus on pedal steel, Oscar Westesson on bass, Nick Cobbett on drums, Andrew Brennan on guitar, and Brittany Powers on backing vocals). “I think it’s kind of an evolution we’ve been doing, of folk music into a more lush, rock album,” she explains. “More instrumentation, more complex arrangements for a band. My previous album was a lot more stripped down, in a folk realm. [On Deep The Habit] I was going for something that would really showcase the band that I’m playing with right now.” 

She names family as the major theme of the album, but notes that the word has many connotations – “questions about family, about whether or not to have a family… the family I’m building in my life.” On a more macrocosmic level, the theme of “family” as it relates to humanity in general (and the demise of our planet as we know it) haunts the listener as McFarling croons “Am I the last of my kind?” over and over on the hook of “Last of My Kind.” “I think another major theme is connection to the natural world, and having that tie into family as being a citizen of the planet and the changes that are happening there – just feeling a lot of sadness about that,” she says.

These musings on family and humanity are more poignant in March 2021 than they ever could have been in early March 2020; many of us are at a point where we’ve never gone so long without seeing our families and loved ones, while having also been robbed of the daily interactions that instill our lives with a sense of familiarity and comfort. McFarling acknowledges this, saying, “It is interesting to me how many of those themes were coming up, and maybe even being foreshadowed before this all happened. I’m sure people will perceive it differently based on the pandemic, but it was all [written] before.”

This consideration makes the idea of a time capsule all the more dynamic, something living inside us and changing with us, as opposed to something buried deep in the ground. The resentments and frustrations we might have felt of those close to us maybe don’t glare the same way they used to, in the absence of these same people. And alternatively, the joy and pleasure we felt in their company becomes all the more precious and golden in hindsight.

The concept of family has become more dynamic for McFarling in this time as well, as it relates to her relationship with her partner, co-producer, and guitarist Andrew Brennan. Quarantined together, they’ve begun to collaborate musically more than ever, though she emphasizes that he already was a major part of Deep The Habit. “Andrew is one of the major evolutions of this record we’re about to put out as well, because he has a huge part in the arrangement and some of the writing, getting it ready for this big band,” she explains. “I feel like the record we’ve been making during quarantine has been the next step in that collaboration.”

While some bemoan long empty hours and too much togetherness, McFarling basks in the positive aspects of it. “I tend to get inspired when things are a little foundationless and tricky, so this time has been ripe for that,” she says. “My husband and I are stuck in a house and we are using that time to write songs together, which has been really beautiful.” 

She heads back into the studio to record another album in May, noting how weird it is to be recording and releasing an album at the same time, no album cycle, no tour. More than anything else, she wants the listener to take from this album its overarching joy, despite its deep themes and sometimes melancholy sound. “I think a lot of that has to do with the band and how joyful it was to play music together. You can hear that in the way that these songs came out,” she says. “The joy that comes through in the record makes me appreciate that we got to do that. I know that we’ll get to do it again, but not getting to do it, and then hearing the songs, and hearing the sounds together is bittersweet – but also hopeful for me.”

In the end, that’s all any of us can do when life throws us the unexpected – try not worry about what’s out of our control and find joy in what is. Kelly McFarling sums it up nicely on album track “Just As Small”: “You can see just how small you really are/While we aim for what is coming/And we ache for what is gone.”

Follow Kelly McFarling on Facebook and Instagram for ongoing updates.

PREMIERE: Szou Takes Snapshot of Pre-Pandemic Nostalgia with “Rose-Tinted”

Photo Credit: Mike Gardner

“I am the queen of self-doubt!” British electronic musician and producer Szou confesses over Zoom. It’s a feeling that many in music battle with, though it might seem contradictory to choose a career that requires this level of vulnerability on the face of it. But Szou takes it in stride, knowing that music is her calling.

Her conviction comes from remembering the feeling of going to her very first gig. At 12, her parents took her to family-friendly festival Camp Bestival in the UK. “On Sunday night, Friendly Fires were headlining and I had no idea who they were,” Szou tells Audiofemme. “At the time I remember feeling some kind of transcendent experience – something lifted me up, it was so euphoric… it was that first moment where I was like, I want to do that, I want to make music like that.”

Growing up in West Sussex, Szou went on to study at university in Manchester. Heavily influenced by the northern city’s vibrant electronic and dance music scene, her genre of choice is electro-pop and she cites Christine And The Queens as major influences.

“When I was in my teens I borrowed my mom’s laptop cause it had Garageband on it, so I started playing around with that and just wrote loads of songs about love that I’d never experienced. We all thought we were Adele at one point,” she jokes.

Though launching her career mere moments before the UK’s first lockdown in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic created its own set of unique obstacles, Szou has successfully weathered the storm, releasing two singles in 2020 and has since been championed by BBC Music’s Introducing in Manchester, the holy grail for many aspiring musicians.

With her latest release “Rose-Tinted,” premiering today via Audiofemme, Szou combines high-energy electronic beats with melancholic lyrics and rich vocals to create a wistful track high on the nostalgia of the freedom of choice before lockdown.

“Rose-Tinted” begins with a short intro and an off-beat melody. As the tempo picks up, Szou’s soft vocals materialise against delicate guitar. The energy of the track expresses themes of change, loss and nostalgia as she processes her yearning – not only for the good times, but also to the bad, and the general sense of how carefree life was before the pandemic.

“In June we were doing the whole Zoom thing and the quizzes and all of that and I was just really missing my friends and really missing the past life we all had,” Szou says. “I was feeling this really strong sense of nostalgia in a really unique way – when could we ever say, I’m nostalgic for the good, the bad and the ugly?”

This sentiment is evident in the lyrics. The line “I should be present but I get so swept up in it/The good and the bad/It’s all rose-tinted” conveys both the freedom to make mistakes that Szou misses and the inevitable nostalgia these memories have been painted with, juxtaposed with the “one big summer haze” that characterized her existence at the time of the song’s writing.

Not only did the pandemic restrict our physical movement but also created a pressure to make the limited interactions we enjoy with friends and family members positive and hopeful. “The small moments that maybe weren’t that good or enjoyable at the time – maybe they were even bad – but at least we were free, it’s a freedom that we don’t have during the pandemic. So it was this weird sadness, but I am also grateful that I have the friends I have so I could write about the good times,” Szou says.

“Rose-Tinted” follows Szou’s previously-released singles: her first release “Dystopia” is slowed by a heavy, rhythmic drum beat, while the lyrics and atmospheric flourishes draw from classic sci-fi; “Utopia” picks up the pace a little whilst keeping true to Szou’s signature style as her soft vocals convey an optimism for the future. But all three tracks tackle existential themes and have a the same sense of yearning; because they’ve coincided with a global pandemic, her work thus far serves as a sonic time capsule. “When this is over there’ll be one big party,” she promises on “Utopia,” and we can’t help but agree.

For Szou, “Rose-Tinted” also marks a solid step forward in her career. Recently signing to No Such Thing Records has given the artist the confidence to fight her own self-doubt and branch out. This confidence boost has encouraged her to begin collaborating with others. “I think it has confirmed that I’m on the right track. When I first started releasing music I was like, I’m independent, I’m strong, I can do this, and then I realised… that I’d need to get other people to give their perspectives who can give me solid advice and guidance,” she admits. “That has completely changed the way I work. For future songs I’ve decided to work with another producer; just getting the help has made me realise that [my music] does sound good.” It won’t be her first time collaborating with others, though – she’s appeared on tracks with Dirty Freud, Essa Weira, Waller and xato, and Goteki 45 as featured vocalist.

One of the most powerful aspects of sound is its ability to create a world within a world. Whether that world is in the flashing lights of the dance floor surrounded by friends or in the comfort of your own home, judged silently by your cat, music can take us places we never thought possible and inspire us. Szou’s music opens the door for her listeners to create any world; whether that’s the space-age influences of her previous singles or the hazy, sepia-filtered environment of “Rose-Tinted,” both can provide a haven.

Follow Szou on Facebook for ongoing updates.

PLAYING CHICAGO: 15 Songs to Usher in Spring

Spring is just around the corner – but this is Chicago. Anything can happen. It has snowed in April here (cue Prince). Luckily, neither the lingering chill in the air nor the ongoing pandemic can stop the city’s creative pulse. There are dozens of releases from exciting, rising musicians set to bloom later with the season – until then, these songs (some of which you might’ve missed in the last year) have been keeping us warm and dancing while the rest of winter melts away. 

Demetruest – “Blouse Undone”

In under two minutes, singer/rapper Demetruest (a.k.a Demetruis Spidle) delivers a tightly-woven rap allegory over a fierce loop of abstract beats on “Blouse Undone.” Tracking the end of day, when hardworking folks can undo a button or two and find some after-hours relief amid life’s challenges, their lyrical repetition echoes the monotony of the every day while leaving space to celebrate surviving it. Each of the songs on their EP Direction tells a story of identity, but this one’s catchiness sticks with you.

Rat Tally – “Shrug”

With this cold and fuzzy break-up tune, Rat Tally – the musical moniker of Addy Harris – reconciles the need for closure, with the help of her guitar (solo as well as swallowed by muffled layers of distortion). Her take on grunged-up pop bubbles beneath journal-like lyrics, underscored by just a hint of precociousness and wink-delivering stand out one liners like “I wanna throw a fit, fuck, then forget it.” Harris’ vocal quiver will no doubt draw comparisons to the likes of Phoebe Bridgers and others in her indie rock company, but nowhere in my book is that a bad thing.

Pixel Grip – “Pursuit”

The goth disco is open. A dark, seductive middle-finger to making “good” choices, synthesizers grind against the hypnotic thump grounding Pixel Grip’s exciting single, “Pursuit.” Described as being about “surrendering your desires to be someone who is bad for you,” singer Rita Lukea captures an almost-desperate longing vocally, as a sinister bassline heightens the track’s overall sense of urgency.

Serena Isioma – “Meadows in Japan”

“Meadows in Japan” encourages you to get lost in a fantasy before crash-landing back to reality, while warm melodies invite you into singer/rapper Serena Isioma’s sun-kissed idea of romance. A tempo change disrupts its easy simplicity and takes you to the other side – an “I love you, but I love me more” reflection that isn’t out of character on an EP titled The Leo Sun Sets. As the beat progresses, it unravels much like Isioma’s lyrical affections, culminating in a voicemail – which would be infuriating if it didn’t sound so good.

KeiyaA – “Negus Poem 1&2” Forever, Ya Girl

On her debut album Forever, Ya Girl, KeiyaA weaves observation and meditation into R&B poetry across 16 tracks – but nowhere is the synthesis more complete than on “Negus Poem 1&2.” The track captures the feel of live jazz improvisation, bucking conventional form with the exception of its chorus-turned-chant and fading into a spoken word excerpt, a sonic template repeated in interludes across the album. KeiyaA makes it clear why she’s making music and who she’s making it for: just listen.

Tenci – “Joy”

Tenci’s soft, warbly twang tells the story of “Joy” – the title could refer to a person or personified emotion, but either way, it’s devastatingly fleeting. A song that feels both hopeful and grief-stricken, the soft strumming of the guitar becomes hypnotic as singer-songwriter Jess Shoman outlines a lullaby of sorts. Set amongst other stellar tracks on My Heart is an Open Field, a bit weathered by time and heartache, “Joy” feels like the beginning of something a bit bigger.

Sol Patches – “Couleur” (feat. Dani Ochoa-Bravo)

Three years after 2018’s Blue Transitions, Sol Patches dropped Vivid Image in February. While the release itself was a surprise, its quality is not. A journey in itself, “Couleur” confronts realities of the Black, Trans experience in America. As Ochoa-Bravo leads you to Sol Patches’ no-holds-barred verse, expressing as much anger as resolution, Sol reminds you why they’ve been so missed.

Mia Joy – “Haha”

One of the most anticipated releases of the year, “Haha” was released in January as the first single from Mia Joy’s debut LP Spirit Tamer, due May 2021. Singer Mia Rocha’s amplified whisper floats above a gentle cascade of synths and strings; enveloping the listener in a beautiful – if not a bit melancholy – ambience. Ushering in change, be it physical, mental, spiritual or otherwise, can be chaotic at times. Let Mia Joy guide you with a more meditative hand.

HLDAY MAGIK – “LUV IS MDTATN (love is meditation)”

A collection of understated, lo-fi pop tracks, singer Pamela Maurer – known as Baby Money – introduced new project Hlday Magik in February with the Music 4 Ur Ears EP. Across seven songs, Maurer explores various vocal textures and the boundaries of her bedroom production aesthetic, but the must-hear is “LUV IS MDTATN.” Without overwhelming her hushed coo, minimal instrumentation serves as the glue holding the vulnerable confessional together. It’s simply lovely.

Jackie Hayes – “Eye 2 Eye”

A bass-driven rocker, Jackie Hayes found inspiration in new wave on latest single “Eye 2 Eye.” A little grimy – with the potential for a big, noisy payoff in a future live setting – the song details the frustration that comes with self-growth, reinvention, and expectation (or lack thereof). Luckily, Hayes left some space to take out said frustrations on the dance floor.

Carlile – “Restart”

A house music-inspired cardio circuit of a song, Carlile sends her brand of pop into overdrive.  A maximalist club track, “Restart” showcases the artist’s developing style and increasingly biting turn of phrase. Racing against time and dwindling patience, Carlile demands a breakthrough. Let it go.

Brittney Carter – “Prove ‘Em Wrong” As I Am

One of the best LPs of 2020, Brittney Carter’s relentlessly focused As I Am is a force. On “Prove ‘Em Wrong,” she makes sure you’ve been listening. Delivering every syllable smoothly, Carter raps with enviable self-assurance regardless of the story she’s telling. Rhythms unrushed (even sparse on other tracks), she makes sure to give every word the attention it deserves – respecting her music as a natural extension of herself.

Tink – “CAP”

Tink has had enough and she’s got a list of grievances for the fuckboys on “CAP,” appearing on 2020 EP A Gift and a Curse. She’s concise within the three-minute track, her flow poised despite “cleaning up the mess” she sings of. With a catalog of songs calling for women to stand in their worth, respect and desire, “CAP” and its earwormy hook (“too many lies, too many hoes, too many bitches”) is another one for the Tink canon.

Ashlee Bankz – “Big Boss Livin’”

Ashlee Bankz released a handful of tracks in 2020, but none were quite like “Big Boss Livin’.” In a year that needed any excuse for celebration, Bankz – undeniably dexterous vocally – directed that energy toward herself with this rapid-fire ode to moving up. There’s no filler here, no room for apology or humility. It feels good to flex; let Bankz take this minute and a half to remind you.

https://soundcloud.com/ashleebankz/big-boss-livin

Astrachan – “Ladakh”

A delightful familiarity rings from Astrachan’s “Ladakh.” Its folksy, Laurel Canyon-feel dances with bits of psychedelia to lull the listener into songwriter Ben Astrachan’s memory. Building a pretty dreamy atmosphere, heightened by clever flairs of clarinet and flute, the artist’s namesake band is as charming as it is promising; be on the look out for a self-titled release due May 2021.

RSVP HERE: Automatic stream via Bandcamp + MORE

Automatic are an LA post-punk three piece composed of Izzy Glaudini on synths/vocals, Lola Dompé on drums/vocals, and Halle Saxon on bass/vocals. Their 2019 debut record Signal sounds like Suicide and Broadcast formed a supergroup to play at the end of a David Lynch film.

I spent a month in LA last February and my only regret is not catching their minimal synth soaked vibes live. Luckily they’re playing a few Bandcamp livestreams – the first being tonight at 7pm ET! – leading up to the release of their remix album out March 26, featuring new versions of Signal tracks from artists like Sudan Archives, Peaking Lights, John Dwyer, and Peanut Butter Wolf. We chatted with Automatic about records they will never get tired of, watching The Parent Trap 500 times, and custom fretless bass magic.

AF: How was the writing and recording process of your debut record?

HS: It was such a blast. We recorded with my boyfriend Joo-Joo Ashworth at Studio 22 and it was just so fun that we’re doing it again for album #2.

IG: It’s interesting to write so collaboratively because ideas evolve quickly and change as they’re passed between members of the band. You learn to be open to songs evolving. And we’re all pretty close so it’s fun. 

LD: Recording is my favorite part of the whole process because you get to really hear your song for the first time and add all the fun details. Writing with Halle and Izzy is amazing.  We’ve always made an effort to create a safe and fun space for writing. I think we work really well together, and songwriting pretty much happens very naturally. 

AF: How did your upcoming remix album come together?

IG: Peanut Butter Wolf, who runs [our] label [Stones Throw], suggested it as something to release during these unholy Corona Times.  We contacted artists we knew and loved and had them rework the songs however they wanted. Remixes are fun because other people do all the work. 

AF: What are your favorite pieces of gear? 

HS: My favorite piece of gear is my old Egmond bass that someone manually ripped the frets out of. I don’t play it anymore cuz I changed its magic strings and now it sounds terrible. But it’s a relic that I’ll keep forever and has nothing but also everything to do with my current bass sound.

IG: Maracas, the Holy Grail reverb, and my Moog Sub25 synth.

LD: I just superglued a Roland trigger to my kick drum and I love it! You can make it trigger any sound you like. 

AF: What non-musical things inspire you?

IG: My boyfriend has a cat named Pepe, and he’s got such a lust for life. Prowling animals in general.

LD: Fashion, movies and nature.

AF: What movies would you watch over and over again?

HS: Izzy and I both watch the LOTR trilogy on a regular basis.

IG: The sweet inner child in me likes LOTR and anything with magic. The dark demon inside wants to watch American Psycho or Repulsion. 

LD: I watched The Parent Trap probably 500 times from age 9 to 11. These days I like to watch a movie once… unless it’s Love Actually around Christmas time. 

AF: What’s a record that you’ll never get sick of?

HS: I’ll never get sick of Neu! or Suicide self-titled albums.

IG: David Bowie’s LOW.

LG: David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust.

AF: What are your favorite bands to play with and/or see live?

HS: I think we all agree: Bauhaus. But I also loved watching Black Marble every night, one of my favorite bands.

IG: Yeah! Also, hmm. John Dwyer is always a maniac. He practices in the room across from us at our rehearsal space so we get to hear free Oh Sees shows.

LD: Oh Sees are always fun, and I definitely never thought I would get to open for Bauhaus! I got to play with my friend’s band, Body Double, and I was super impressed by their music and show. 

AF: What was your last show before COVID?

HS: Opening for Shopping at 1720 in Los Angeles! We had just circled back to LA and were about to pass it again when shit hit the fan. So we were extremely lucky in that scenario! I know a lot of people that were caught in terrible tour situations that day that basically everything shut down. 

AF: What’s the most important thing you’ve learned in the past year? 

HS: That capitalism is killing the earth and humans (duh, but I didn’t really get it before).

IG: I second that. I got pretty heavy into social/political theory. Chomsky, Marx, Foucault, Zizek. On a ‘chiller’ level, I got into yoga and meditation. 

LD: Staying open and curious and learning to love myself more. 

AF: What are your hopes for the next year? Next 5 years? 

HS: That everyone stops using Amazon.

LD: That people respect the earth and each other way more, so that humans, nature and animals can get their basic needs met. 

IG: Yeah it would be great if humanity stopped cannibalizing itself. But I’m down to make the soundtrack to whatever unfolds. 

RSVP HERE for Automatic via Bandcamp on 2/12 at 7pm ET.

More great livestreams this week…

2/12 Teeburr, Kola Champagne, Survivor Guilt (DJ Set)  via Elsewhere TV. 6pm Et, RSVP HERE 

2/12 Hyphenate with No Age’s Randy Randall, DJ sets by Action Bronson, Japanese Breakfast, Laura Jane Grace & more via Vans Channel 66 “On The Air.” 11am ET RSVP HERE

2/13 Proper, Eli¡ via BABY.tv. 6pm ET, $5, RSVP HERE

2/13 Mogwai via their website. 3pm ET, £15.00, RSVP HERE

2/13 Yeek, Jay Som, Ginger Root, Sosupersam via YouTube (88rising Lunar New Year). 9pm ET, RSVP HERE

2/14 Smashing Pumpkins, AWOLNATION, Portugal. The Man, Twin Peaks & more via JBTV Revolution Television Virtual Music Festival. 3pm ET, RSVP HERE

2/15 Shelter Dogs via FLTV. 8pm ET, RSVP HERE

2/16 Talib Kweli book launch via MURMRR. 7:30pm ET, $33, RSVP HERE

2/18 GZA, Scott Bolton, Sudan Archives, Quintron’s Weather Warlock, Via Imara via Atlas Obscura Rogue Routes. 8pm ET, RSVP HERE

Rowan Niemisto Returns with Relatable Sadboy Anthems on Once Again EP

It’s been three and a half years since Rowan Niemisto released his electro R&B masterpiece Gradient. In those three years, Niemisto says he was preoccupied with his first “big boy” job at Detroit’s NPR station, WDET, where he works as a sound engineer and the occasional cameo as a voice actor for various underwriter advertisements. The Rowan Niemisto who voices ads for the local pet daycare and arts university feels like a completely different person than the sultry singer-songwriter that authors and performs his latest EP, Once Again. But maybe that’s part of what makes him so appealing. Besides his universally loveable voice, relatable lyrics and nostalgic/soulful arrangements, Niemisto is just like us. He’s a regular adult with a nine-to-five job who doesn’t have any dreams of grandeur, but picks up the pen whenever he feels moved. 

“I just like making music and putting it out,” Niemisto puts it plainly. “I’m not trying to be the guy that makes it if that makes sense.” And it would, if his voice and guitar playing weren’t so goddamn angelic. Your everyday casual guitar strummer just can’t write the kind of music that Niemisto creates. With Once Again, he builds a world of hurt and healing, love and loss. His voice careens over a bed of masterful guitar playing and effortless live arrangements, which were recorded in a single studio session. 

After three years of writing and ripping up forgotten songs, pandemic downtime fueled Niemisto’s latest body of work. “I had an excuse to dig my heels in and get it done,” says Niemisto. “I had no real excuse about time commitments or whatever.” And while collaborating felt impossible to most of us during the pandemic, he says that recording with a few of his friends was surprisingly easy. 

They set up some glass walls so they could see each other, went into the studio, slapped on masks, and pretty much improvised the entire EP. Niemisto came in with skeletons of songs already written, but he credits the band – Jacob Sigman (keys), Junho Kim (bass), Huntley Chamberlain (drums) and Jonah Grey (synth on “Once Again”) – for helping shape the sound of the record. “I’ve been playing with these guys for years,” explains Niemisto, “so I kind of know their style and I had trust that they’d be able to put their own spice on it and have it come out the way I wanted more or less.” 

If the way he wanted it was Isley Brothers meets badbadnotgood, then they definitely succeeded. Once Again serves the listener an all-too-familiar cocktail of unrequited love, longing, and heartbreak. But there’s something about Niemisto’s soothing voice and nonchalant melodies that makes lost love feel it’s not the end of the road, but the beginning of a new one. It’s not that he’s constantly suffering from a broken heart, but more that the morose melodies are the ones that come most naturally to him when it comes to songwriting. 

“For some reason, I find it easier to write songs in minor or songs with melancholy feels,” Niemisto muses. “Especially with lyricism, if I try to write something uplifting… it always just feels a little tacky or forced to me.” Fair enough, especially seeing as warm fuzzy feelings were definitely in short supply this year. And even though Niemisto admits he’s “sticking to the clichés,” he has a way of writing about them that feels new. 

Like in the first few words of the record – “Tell me how long, how long has it been?/Since that night we took each other in?” – reflecting on a fleeting night of a romance as an act of care and compassion instead of a flippant act on desire. Especially during a pandemic, the idea of a “one night stand” can feel careless at best and guttingly consequential at worst. To think of a night of random romance as “taking each other in” is a refreshingly tender outlook, and one we can all daydream about in these solitary times.

Whether you’re ruminating on love lost or longing for that Tinder crush that you’re too scared to meet IRL, Once Again gives us plenty of possibilities to ponder, and reassurance that we’re not alone.

Follow Rowan Niemisto on Bandcamp and Soundcloud for ongoing updates.

MUSIQUE BOUTIQUE: Arlo Parks, Tamar Aphek & Juana Everett

Welcome to Audiofemme’s monthly record review column, Musique Boutique, written by music journo vet Gillian G. Gaar. Every fourth Monday, Musique Boutique offers a cross-section of noteworthy reissues and new releases guaranteed to perk up your ears.

There’s been a lot of anticipation for the release of Arlo Parks’ debut album, Collapsed in Sunbeams (Transgressive Records). The London-based performer broke through in 2018 with the understated, insinuating track “Cola” (quickly snapped up and featured in the HBO series I May Destroy You), followed up by two well-received EPs. When her first headline tour was cancelled in 2020 due to the pandemic, she then focused her energies on creating music that addressed the sudden upheavals in our world. “Hurt,” for example, deals with pain of relationships, but lines like “It won’t hurt so much forever”  resonate on a much deeper level. “Where there is this global sense of confusion and uncertainty and fear, I like to think my music provides something soothing,” she told Billboard, and while Collapsed in Sunbeams does have a cool, calming sound, Parks’ poetic self-awareness adds an edge to her work.

The most prominent elements of Parks’ songs are her vocals and the drumbeats; other instrumentation is spare, and somewhat in the background. It gives her work a heightened intimacy, especially so on this album, which she’s said is based around the writings in her own adolescent diary. Listening to her songs is like sitting down with an old friend, the kind who can get you to open up without fear of judgment. “Black Dog” is a remarkable depiction of a friend’s depression, vividly capturing the sorrow that can overwhelm you: “It’s so cruel what your mind can do for no reason.” “Green Eyes” sadly looks back at a relationship broken apart by homophobia.

But despite the somber subject matter, these aren’t songs of despair. There’s a light touch to Parks’ delivery that makes a beam shine even in the darkness, and not just in the songs that are obviously geared to that theme (e.g. the reassuring “Hope”). It’s the recognition of pain, while refusing to be brought down by it, that gives Parks’ music a buoyancy that ultimately leaves you with a sense of optimism. This is an album of multilayered delights.

Israeli musician Tamar Aphek came to my attention when I discovered the highly entertaining video for “Russian Winter,” from her latest album, All Bets Are Off (Kill Rock Stars). It’s a rollicking number, propulsively driven by bass and drums, with a few well-placed guitar and keyboard riffs from Aphek to dress it up, paired to a blast of colorful animation. It provides an explosive start to this taut and edgy album.

In general, the classic guitar/bass/drums power trio lineups have a stripped-down, leaner and meaner sound, which is certainly true of Aphek’s band, and, in this case nicely balanced out by her deadpan vocals. The sparse instrumentation of “Show Me Your Pretty Side” makes that statement sound more like a threat than a request. A rattling drum kicks off “Crossbow,” a stuttering bassline then adding to the building anxiety, with Aphek’s vocals floating coolly on top, oblivious to the discord percolating away underneath. It’s even better when Aphek adds guitar to the mix. “Beautiful Confusion” (a great title that perfectly describes the kind of harmonious dissonance you’ll find on this album), starts out as a slow crawl, with a hint of jazz flavor, before a raw blast of guitar comes in to shake things up.

The unexpected closer is a melancholy cover of “As Time Goes By” — though considering that this is an album of contrasts (harsh and soft, bracing and mellow), maybe that’s not such a surprise after all. It injects a note of nostalgia into this very modern work.

After establishing herself as a musician in her native Spain, Juana Everett relocated to Los Angeles in 2016. It’s a journey that’s very much a part of her new, self-released album, Move On (digital only, available on all streaming platforms), starting with the opening track, “Drifter of Love.” “I wasn’t sure of what I was chasing/but I carried on,” she sings, before urging her restless self to be patient. “Wind Whistle Blow” mines similar territory, a forthright, upbeat number about keeping your head up and forging ahead, no matter what: “When I hear the wind whistle blow/keep moving on.”

There’s a warm, welcoming feeling to this record. Everett has traded her previous punk rock leanings for a folkier, more intimate style, bringing to mind the confessional work of singer/songwriters from the heyday of LA’s Laurel Canyon music scene; Carole King, Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, et. al. (she clearly moved to the right place). The sound is crisp and clean, with moderate, soothing tempos. Sometimes there’s a delicacy, as in “Light Up a Fire,” a gentle song about recovering from a breakup and confronting depression. “Little Tragedies” is a deeply emotional number, a song whose rising hopes are illustrated by its fuzzy ascending guitar line. “Free As a Bird,” though initially somewhat pensive, ultimately looks ahead to redemption. Move On is an album about finding your way, and understanding the journey is just as important as the destination.

Lynn The Singer Breaks Up with the Worst Year Ever on new EP ‘2020sucked’

Like many women, Lynn the Singer had to make her way through countless roadblocks and gatekeepers on her journey to finding her sound. Playing harp and singing from a young age, Lynn remembers recording her first single – which she describes as “way ahead of its time” – only to have it deleted from existence by her then-boyfriend. After experiencing that loss, Lynn wasn’t sure she wanted to pursue music anymore. Luckily, the universe had other plans. “It kept following me around,” says Lynn. “I kept meeting these artists and being put in studios… 2015 was when I was like, ‘okay I’m gonna take this seriously.’”

Lynn went on to release her debut full length Endless Weekends in 2018, and recently followed it with a new EP, candidly titled 2020sucked – a brief but beautiful time capsule of a year that has gone down in history as universally awful. The all-too-relatable title is not only a nod at the collective misery the masses have felt as a result of pandemic and beyond, but also a glimpse into Lynn’s personal life. For Lynn, the EP was an opportunity to package up all the negativity, sadness and loss she experienced last year and send it into the ether. “2020sucked is about one person and… I’m over it now,” says Lynn. “That was my way of putting my feelings out there and being done with a situation.” 

Like many songwriters, Lynn describes her music as a way of communicating things that are too hard to put into words and a vehicle for letting those things go. Though the EP is deeply personal, it hits home for anyone experiencing the bittersweet feelings that come with moving on. In “Time Machine – Social Distancing,” Lynn sings, “If I could press rewind then I would, I don’t know if I should,” explaining the nostalgia that inevitably comes with a breakup and the power it has to lure us back to the person we left. Though the lyrics are melancholy, Lynn’s voice soars over 808’s and dreamy synth waves, coaxing the listener out of their rut and on to bigger, better things. 

Though most of the songs on 2020sucked deal with loss and heartbreak, Lynn is more of a social butterfly by default. “I love a good time and I love people who wanna have a good time. I’m down with trying to make the best of everything,” she says. “It’s kinda ironic that I really like sad songs. It’s like that meme that says ‘why do girls listen to sad music when they’re sad? It just makes them sadder’…because it kinda feels good!” And she’s right! There’s even science behind the reason that listening to sad songs can actually make us feel better. And whatever Lynn is doing, it’s working. 

Whether it’s the blatant relatability of it all, or the ability of Lynn’s serene voice to lull the listener into a trance, 2020sucked doesn’t feel like a self-indulgent pity-party but a triumphant stop on the road to independence – like, somehow, admitting that someone once had power over you makes them easier to let go of. In “Forget You out My Mind,” Lynn comes to terms with the fact that reconciling is not an option, but holds on to those dopamine-releasing memories that make the pain worthwhile. She opens with, “I don’t think you’ll ever forgive me/But darling I won’t forget all the times I let you get in my mind.”

All of the songs on the EP are short, bittersweet and straight to the point, just like an ideal breakup should be. But Lynn explains that 2020sucked is only a prequel to her next project Reckless, which will include extended versions of all of the songs. Until then, we have this gem of an eulogy to 2020 to remind us of all the bullshit we survived, and give us hope for whatever comes tomorrow. Lynn puts it best: “Being happy is the goal, having fun is the goal, finding the light in all things is the goal.”

Follow Lynn the Singer on Instagram for ongoing updates.