To sign to Exploding In Sound, you need to have a memorable one-word band name, like Jobber or Ovlov or Stuck. The great indie label's newest signees, Bimbo, fit the bill. Hailing from Marquette, MI, Bimbo describe themselves as "if the White Stripes were evil, couldn't write a song in 4/4, and were actually bother and sister." Today they're announcing their debut album The Bimbonacci Sequence.
Vocalist/guitarist Gretchen McKenzie and drummer Dawson McKenzie take influence from Metz, the Stooges, the Cramps, and Krill, and the lead single "Chewing Glass" is as wonderfully weird as you'd expect. Here's what Gretchen says about it:
"There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. I constantly torment myself by overthinking everything I consume. I am horrified by my impact on the earth. I want to yell about it. The line "every time I chew, I chew glass" came from a video I saw on instagram at like 2am of a super drunk guy who had face-planted through a windshield. I thought it was the most poetic thing I’d ever heard and was obsessed with that line for a month. I was basically pacing in circles and muttering it to myself. I can’t find this video anywhere, I’m not even sure it is real, but the words are."
Watch the puppet-themed music video for "Chewing Glass" directed by Mark Bennett below.
Krill, the formerly Boston-based trio making slightly askew indie rock, have reunited in Chicago with an updated lineup and are working on new music. The band—singer-bassist Jonah Furman, drummer Ian Becker, and new guitarist Andrew Clinkman—shared “Commemorative Plaque,” its first new song in a decade. Joining the trio on the single are Finom violinist Macie Stewart, Tredici Bacci, and Trigger saxophonist Will Greene. Give it a listen below.
In a statement on Instagram, Krill described “Commemorative Plaque” as an ode to Aretha Franklin’s 1970 hit “Call Me,” a staple of Furman’s childhood. “It’s maybe a companion song to ‘Oppressor,’ another song about coming home,” he wrote. “It’s about moving back to Chicago after many years away, thinking home would be too sad and sentimental from adolescence (‘all the teenage wanting and distance’) but finding something sweeter there, and home as a place and a person and an inside joke. It’s nostalgic and homesick, and Andrew’s guitar solo fucking rips, alongside Will Greene’s saxophone and Macie Stewart’s violin. Hope you enjoy.”
Formed in 2010, Krill released three albums over the course of their original five-year run. The trio broke up soon after relocating to New York City, but capped that period with 2016’s self-titled swan song EP. In 2020, Furman, Becker, original Krill guitarist Aaron Ratoff, and Joe DeManuelle-Hall formed Knot and recorded a self-titled LP, which has retroactively been renamed a Krill record across digital platforms. In 2022, Krill reissued their debut album, Alam No Hris, for its 10th anniversary.
Angular guitar riffs that stutter and shift and erupt in your earholes never go out of style. Of late, I’ve been high upon Artificial Go and now Cel Ray. Their final single before releasing Cel Rayzer next week is the perfect example of how to get it done right; it flirts with the proto-punk stomp for a moment, but then jettisons off into a frantic punk howl, ramping up the energy as Maddie Daviss riles up the audience with her vocal delivery. All that said, there’s also a fun playfulness to it, which is where a lot of joy is shared between audience and band and myself. Look for their new LP next week via Exploding in Sound.
Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz – one of the most prolific songwriters and critically lauded guitarists of her time – releases 1331 today, her first project in 5+ years under her electropop moniker and alter ego Sad13. 1331, a 13-track mixtape of “1 minute long-ish songs,” is out now via Exploding In Sound Records, the label that released Speedy Ortiz’s Sports EP in 2012.
Rooted in her home base of Philly, Dupuis made 1331 totally DIY, the sole performer and recording engineer on one of her projects for the first time in fifteen years. Most of 1331’s writing came in spring 2024, a patch Dupuis calls a “mini nervous breakdown.” Speedy Ortiz records are often personal-as-political, but 2023’s Rabbit Rabbit dealt with childhood abuse. Promoting it felt brutal, and she realized she needed further processing, distinct from songwriting. “Making music is magic, a hurts-so-bad-it’s-good potion,” she says. “But therapy is different, and I didn’t wanna mine it for more art.” She made it a goal to write daily songs around a minute long, a rewarding game to relieve challenges posed in counseling, and trained her lens and lyrical subject matter on her community in Philadelphia rather than her own biography. The Sad13 tracking process stalled, however, after a bicycle accident shattered Dupuis’ elbow in June 2024, requiring reconstructive surgeries and a year of rehab. After twenty-plus years of playing, Rolling Stone had recently included Dupuis in their Greatest Guitarists of All Time, and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame was displaying her guitar. Suddenly, doctors warned she might never play again. Grueling training put her back on tour three months later, but nerve damage kept her off the computer, postponing Sad13 recording. “My body didn’t have the juice,” she recalls. “But tracking in little bursts over more time gave me broader influences.”
The resulting and hard-won mixtape is 1331, which melds mindsets and melodies across time: whimsical fun amid noisy fury, sophisticated balance shaping wild catharsis. It’s concise, delightfully weird music, a catchy rush that’s distinctly Sad13.
To celebrate the mixtape’s release, Sad13 shares a video for the album’s focus track “Six Ways.” Dupuis plays villains, monstrifying ego with the fizzy bop “Six Ways,” and the video by Matthew John Lawrence (Uncle Peckerhead, Bloody Axe Wound) is out now.
Sadie Dupuis explains of the song and video: “My self-image is laughably dysmorphic, so on one hand, this song is a LARP at gifting myself appreciation I more easily conjure for others. But the song’s dual meaning pokes fun at the narcissism of obsessing over looks, whether you like what you see or not. I was ecstatic to team up with one of my favorite contemporary monster movie directors, Matthew John Lawrence, who I befriended after I moderated a panel for a Philly screening of his film Uncle Peckerhead. He and his crew make the best horror comedies with heart, and this creepy send-up of pop star-playing-pop star music videos (with makeup by my longtime collaborator and friend Paige Campbell) gave me a totally transformed understanding of "Six Ways." It’s a rare and exciting gift when a video can do that for a songwriter.”
Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz, one of the most prolific songwriters and critically lauded guitarists of her time, recently announced her first Sad13 project in 5+ years. 1331, a 13-track mixtape of “1 minute long-ish songs,” will be out on Friday, July 10th under Sadie’s electropop moniker and alter ego, Sad13. A few weeks ago she shared the album’s first three tracks, and today she shares two more ahead of release on Friday. Activists for housing and trans rights were deploying insects, admired on alt-R&B soundscape “Locust Releaser,” while Dupuis is lamenting leftist factionalism on shimmery “Mean, Vindictive, Arrogant.” Check out the songs, and the self-directed video for “Locust Releaser” now.
“I wrote ‘Locust Releaser’ at the start of the cicada double-brood emergence in 2024, considering biblical plagues and two individual cases of housing advocates releasing bees and cockroaches,” explains Dupuis. “In the years since, I’ve read stories of maggots, crickets, and other critters released to protest genocide, transphobes, and police. Bugs: innocent, but I admire the clarity of conviction needed to incite nuisance.”
1331 will be out this Friday, July 10th via Exploding In Sound Records, the label that released Speedy Ortiz’s Sports EP in 2012.
