For pop-Americana singer-songwriter Cf Watkins, 2020 has been a catalyst for big changes. She left New York, where she’d lived for nine years, to ride out the pandemic in her North Carolina hometown with her parents. Six months into...
George Floyd’s murder. A pandemic sweeping through the world. Fires burning out of control. Sometimes it can feel hard to catch one’s breath amid so much chaos and pain. Singer-songwriter Dani Darling felt herself pushing against her own anxiety,...
The ghosts of your past selves live in your hometown. They linger in the same old spots as memories, not frozen but reverberating in time. The public pool you learned to swim in. The spot on the corner where...
San Francisco-based alt-pop artist Floyd spent her childhood dressing up like Cyndi Lauper, bouncing around her bedroom with a hairbrush in hand daydreaming of her own flight into rock stardom. Her latest single “Sorry Sorry Boy” has the playful,...
Lasse Passage is currently spending his summer vacation with his 90 year old father in a fisherman’s village in Norway. On a daily basis, they climb aboard a boat and head out to sea, fishing for crabs and mackerel...
A full bottle when shaken never makes a sound. Torii Wolf isn’t sure if that’s the way the saying goes, or who exactly said it, but its meaning resonates with their latest single release “Wash Away,” as well as...
Returning to one’s home after a long time away can feel like jumping into cold water. Alie Renee, the singer-songwriter behind the music project Byland, had been away from Albuquerque, New Mexico for ten years. In that time, she...
Thirteen years ago, Canadian musician FOONYAP took a class in Chinese poetry. The themes discussed in those poems directly influenced her latest single “Free and Easy Wandering,” a song built around the exploration of self. The music is as...
It’s hot as hell in much of the United States, with temperatures rising as high as 128 degrees in Death Valley. Most of the country is in its fifth month of COVID-19 quarantine. Businesses are shuttering left and right,...
Every relationship hits a fork in the road, a moment in time when both parties actively choose to walk down a path together (or not). In 2019, singer-songwriter Chloe Jane, aka Neia Jane, found herself anxiety-ridden, hoping that her...
Egos uploading to an alien cloud server. Psychedelic dreams being analyzed by a droid. Don’t worry, it’s not a new 2020 news headline – these are the themes that populate the self-titled debut from Baron Minker, a trench coat...
Marihuzka Cornelius, aka MC, grew up in what many consider a rough part of Western Sydney, Australia. In the ’90s, you could find her dressed in regulation plaid, with Nirvana on blast in the background. It was her neighborhood’s...
Desert sun stretching over miles and miles of open space, not a soul in sight. With COVID-19 on the mind, it’s imagery that might conjure up thoughts of Mad Max or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. But when Australian-native, Brooklyn-based...
Names are a strange thing. As a musician, a band name can become a costume of sorts, something you put on, but ultimately disregard as a caricature of yourself. It can become something one fights with their label about,...
Asy and Chloe Saavedra enjoyed cutting the hair off their dolls as girls, cropping it short to match their idols: the feminist icons of Sleater-Kinney. Back then, the sisters were exploring jamming out on the upright piano in their...
America is having an identity crisis. As the talking heads on national news programs remind us daily: we’re in the midst of a pandemic that is calling into question the very foundation of our state. Releasing new music during...
It’s one of those days. The sun is bright, but the news is bad and everyone’s eyes are on the clouds, peering from the windows of our hermetically-sealed homes, perfectly composed as if to somehow stave off chaos. On...
Survivors of abuse are too often portrayed as victims: quiet, sullen, spoken for. But Nashville-based melodic metal duo Friendship Commanders seeks to rewrite that narrative with their latest EP Hold On To Yourself, in which the band confronts abuse,...
“Growing up in Vegas taught me how to throw a good party,” Stefan T says, and his new single “All Night” certainly has the swagger of the strip: lights, dirt, a sideways smile. From his upcoming album NightShift, due...
Post-punk darlings Parlor Walls weave a deadly spell in their latest music video for “Game.” The initial drone, followed by an unnerving pulse of a beep, reminiscent to a heartbeat on a hospital monitor, is almost as unnerving as...
Labeling yourself as a band is always a tricky situation, fraught with the peril of being compared and contrasted to many great bands (and many more terrible ones). Though Cannibal Kids’ Spotify bio cites “Japanese City Pop” and references...
“What kind of music was that?” my husband asked as we left The Regent on a Saturday night. We had just finished watching Magic City Hippies perform for the second time (the first at the That Tent during Bonnaroo...
Indie Pop duo Jonray and Barbara Higginbotham may be living the ultimate millennial dream: they live in Austin, Texas and are making sweet, synth-infused music together. Their latest EP Honeymoon is mellifluous without being saccharine, tonally reminiscent of early...
The Mojave is a rain-shadow desert, which means that the mountains block rain weather systems, casting a “shadow” behind them. In the arid heat, one can find the kind of solitude needed to write music, sheltered from the sun...