Real excited to see this one crop up today! Magic Fig’s debut EP was a constant companion around here last year and it’s nice to see them follow it up. The West Coast collective brings together members from a wide array of RSTB faves, The Umbrellas, Healing Potpourri, Almond Joy, Whitney’s Playland, and Blades of Joy. The band breaks with many of their other projects, though, tumbling headlong over the Eiderdown, plucking from the verdant psych-pop gardens of the past. The band stretches from the ‘60s scents of Michelangelo, Wendy & Bonnie, and Kangaroo, to more modern touchstones like Broadcast. This week they announce a debut LP, leading off with the whimsical wonders of “Valerian Tea.” The ode to family remedies and home comforts spins through baroque touches, letting strums spar with sonorous keys and Inna Showalter’s entrancing vocals. The title track sits nicely on the new record, Valerian Tea, out November 21st from Exploding In Sound.
Next week Prewn, aka LA-based Izzy Hagerup, is releasing her new album System, and we’re properly stoked about it. If you’ve heard advance tracks “System” and “Dirty Dog,” maybe you feel the same way. Now, in accordance with the customs and rhythms of the Independent Music Album Rollout, we get one more Prewn song to whet our appetites for the full-length project.
“My Side” is a slow-build haunted by some nasty, ominous guitar work. Hagerup calls it “a song about living in a country where the systems in place are bloated with abundance, yet we’re more isolated from community and connection to environment and each other than ever. Through this epidemic of over-consumption we lose our peace along with our compassion.” Listen below.
Cusp are sharing their bright, snappy new single “Oh Man,” the second from their forthcoming new album What I Want Doesn’t Want Me Back, out October 17th via Exploding In Sound Records. The song follows lead single “Follow Along”–which saw press support from Pitchfork (‘Selects’), Stereogum, Brooklyn Vegan, and more–and arrives alongside a playful video created by the band’s own Jen Bender (vocals, guitar) and Gaelen Bates (guitar).
“Like ‘Follow Along,’ ‘Oh Man’ is a caricature of my (very) late 20s. It captures a heightened and nagging need to be ‘accomplished,’ to pursue the Dream, and to be taken just seriously enough,” explains Jen Bender. “The video is a snapshot of all of us at this time of life: playing music together, enjoying each others’ company, and speeding along into the unknown. There is also a miraculous third and final act.”
What I Want Doesn’t Want Me Back is now available for pre-order, and the band have announced a hometown Chicago record release show at Lincoln Hall on October 25th with Pictoria Vark and Tenci.
Lawn will release their fourth LP, God Made The Highway, this Friday, September 19th via Exploding In Sound Records. A New Orleans band that revolves around the creative partnership of co-lead singers and songwriters Mac Folger and Rui De Magalhaes, the album has so far seen the release of three singles, with praise from outlets like Pitchfork, Stereogum, FADER, BrooklynVegan, Paste and a host of others.
Today, the band are sharing a final preview of the LP, a power-pop gem entitled "Barroom Wonder."
Folger says of the track:
Barroom Wonder came together as a series of one-line thoughts, all vaguely based on the increasingly common cultural exchange between residents of major coastal cities and mid-sized cities in the southeast. As the music and culture of the south has piqued the interest of a wider, more metropolitan audience-and cosplay of blue collar and cowboy aesthetics has become increasingly accessible - the places and practices that defined these under-recognized communities have become more hollowed out and commodified.
The song personifies this phenomenon as a fictional character, attempting to define themselves based on an adopted culture. A corporate lifestyle by day funds his collection of cowboy boots, and tailored wranglers. He has delusions of authenticity, lamenting his former life in the big city before he found “real culture”
Last month, Lawn announced their fourth LP, God Made The Highway, which is due out September 19th via Exploding In Sound Records. A New Orleans band that revolves around the creative partnership of co-lead singers and songwriters Mac Folger and Rui De Magalhaes, Lawn have seamlessly blended their distinct sensibilities — Folger’s songs are breezy, jangly, and personal while De Magalhaes’ are biting and propulsive post-punk—over three unassailable indie rock full-lengths. It's an idiosyncratic catalog that sets them apart from their contemporaries in both jangle pop and post-punk circles and has made them a fixture in a thriving New Orleans scene, leading to them sharing stages with artists like Momma, Hovvdy and Omni.
The band announced the album with the Folger-led crystalline power pop gem "Davie," and today Lawn are sharing a second preview of the album, a propulsive post-punk track with lead vocals from De Magalhaes called "Pressure."
When De Magalhaes lived in Chicago (he moved back to New Orleans this year), it marked the first time he had been states away from Folger since they formed the band in 2016. “I didn't know how writing new music was going to work out, because Mac and I couldn't practice with the distance between us,” says De Magalhaes. “I put out my solo record as Rui Gabriel and playing guitar was weird because I didn't have Mac as a reference anymore. I leaned on writing very bass-heavy riffs and adding drum machines.” Two ideas required help from Lawn’s drummer Mark Edlin (Hovvdy), and the two hit the studio with engineer Greg Obis (Stuck). When Folger received the demos, he decided to write parts over them. “Rui would text me the voice memo, and I would go into the studio and plug my phone into the PA so it felt like we were in the practice space together,” Folger says. “From there, we just started sending each other voice memos of different song ideas.”
One of those early ideas eventually became single “Pressure,” a tightly-wound dose of nervy riffs anchored by a wobbling bassline. Guitars zigzag around De Magalhaes as he shouts, “Or yet another closing-morning / Turning down a better offer / Just to live on your own petty terms.” It’s kinetic and scathing. “This was the first song where I'd blast the voice memo on the PA and write the guitar parts like that,” says Folger. “I wanted to write with that level of in-the-room energy. I knew if I was going to practice just along to my phone, I wasn't gonna go for the things I normally would.”
De Magalhaes adds:
I wrote the lyrics and bassline to “Pressure” in kind of a drunken stupor back in 2018. I ran into a person whom I went to high school with, who made a condescending comment about the way I was living my life after graduating college: working at a pizza restaurant, playing music, maybe partying a bit much. It really wasn’t that scolding of a statement, but it really stuck in my craw; I spent that night thinking, “who the fuck is this moron in Hokas telling me how to better myself?”. I was seething with a lot of anger at the time, and the song dispatches some of that energy. I find it amusing now, considering that I am now 31, don’t drink, work a pretty vanilla 9-5, have a family, and have been to Cancun at least once. I still don’t think anyone like that is in a position to give advice to people living differently from their idyllic version of a productive life, but I’ve spent enough time with my thoughts to know that songs like these are less about people I dislike and more about my insecurities.
The video is directed by Daniel Lynch / Company Businesses Inc™. He makes these crazy models with Google maps and action figurines and then adds random CGI faces and does facial tracking so the lips sort of move.
