On her first trip to a local Costco, Merida Richards spotted a massive cake in the bakery section and was suddenly preoccupied with the desire to buy it, sequester herself in a hotel room, and consume the entire thing....
Listening to Margaret Sohn’s virtuosic, inventive guitarwork and incisive lyrics, it’s hard to believe she’s ever doubted her talents. But Imposter, her second EP under the moniker Miss Grit, explores those pervasive feelings of inadequacy as a means of...
With Valentine’s Day fast-approaching, love is in the air… or is it? Austin-based quintet Sasha and the Valentines want you to consider those feelings as carefully as they have on their debut LP, So You Think You Found Love?...
It feels almost like a cruel fate for anyone who cares deeply about music: we tend to build entire relationships with like-minded individuals around the songs we bond over. From attending concerts with loved ones to sharing mixtapes that...
Car ran out of gas. Bicycle got a flat tire. We’ve heard all the excuses – and some of us have even made them. In her first-ever music video, Kaiti Jones investigates the reasons we keep putting things off:...
Many of us have spent pandemic isolation diving into books, movies and music; for Denton, Texas musician Dominik Kozacek, a survey of anime and manga classics inspired their latest batch of songs, while stir-craziness led to the formation of...
In a year that’s been like no other for the music industry, it feels a bit weird to make a best of 2020 list – there have been no tours, venues and clubs across the globe are in danger...
There’s no question that one of the best things to come out of this absolute shitshow of a year has been Bandcamp Fridays; the first Friday of every month, the music streaming platform waives its revenue share to provide...
When Emily Edrosa moved to Los Angeles 2016, she left a lot behind in New Zealand: a partner in a committed relationship; the early acclaim she’d enjoyed with Street Chant, a band she’d started as a teenager; government-subsidised healthcare....
“The best way to break a habit is to call it what it is,” says Chicago-based singer-songwriter Elizabeth Moen. Over the last several months, she’s taken some time to examine her own holding patterns – especially those that have...
In the late 2000s, Stockholm-born contemporary artist Klara Lidén began work on her Poster Paintings series; collecting colorful adverts discarded in the streets of Berlin, she glued layers of them together until they were inches thick, then pasted a...
On her debut single “Starry Eyed,” ZZZAHARA (a.k.a. Zahara Jaime of The Simps and Eyedress) proclaims, almost proudly, “I’m already on my way/One foot out, and one foot in the grave.” This morbid hokey pokey isn’t mere ambivalence; it’s...
With the release of Indistinct Conversations at the end of July, Land of Talk – and its driving force and sole constant member, Lizzie Powell – gained a lot of clarity (despite the soft-focus implications of the album’s title)....
The Mercury Brothers had just played a set at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, and the audience was clamoring for more. It was still a few minutes ’til midnight that hot summer evening, but the sound guy brought...
There’s a carefree demeanor to the latest Eyedress LP, Let’s Skip to the Wedding, that belies the intense life changes its creator, Filipino musician Idris Vicuña, experienced while making it. Born in the Philippines and raised in the US...
When Jess Cornelius upended her former musical project Teeth & Tongue and moved from Melbourne to Los Angeles, she had decided her life was going to be a certain way – but, as it so often does, life had...
One of Sweden’s biggest exports, in music at least, is smartly written electropop, with heavyweights like Robyn, Tove Lo, Lykke Li and Icona Pop effortlessly churning out gems with an uncanny ability to permeate the zeitgeist. Assuming her place...
Ashley Wright was playing a festival when she heard about Rita for the first time. Rita wasn’t another performer on the bill or a mutual friend, but an alter-ego that had been emerging from Wright’s blackout drunkenness for years...
René Kladzyk says she’s always been drawn to melodrama – but some of the songs she found herself writing were almost “too embarrassing” to record, at least for her more esoteric, conceptually-driven musical project Ziemba. As she developed a...
Recently, Grace Cooper officially became a children’s book author – by accident. For the physical release of her fifth solo album (and first recorded in a studio) as Grace Sings Sludge, Cooper illustrated a 32-page booklet, which, she explains,...
Life is a balancing act – sometimes, it feels like we’re living in the moment, and other times, it feels like we’re looking at our lives from outside in. This is the feeling Jessica Hottman wanted to capture on...
Don’t Let The Ink Dry, the lush, haunting debut album from British singer-songwriter Eve Owen, is a testament to how far young women can go when they feel supported. Struggling with loss and alienation at school, Owen spent her...
When Johanna Warren was twelve or thirteen, she recalls thinking that if she wanted to be a true artist, she would have to fuck up her life. Her musical idols – Elliott Smith, Kurt Cobain, Nick Drake – all...
Ali Thibodeau had a moment of clarity the day of her grandmother’s funeral. She and her brother Michael had been drinking margaritas all day to cope with the loss. On top of everything, Ali was still reeling from the...