When Sean Cimino and Isom Innis were getting ready to work on what would become Acid Star, the full-length debut of their syrupy electronic rock group Peel, they started by tapping into the music that they liked as kids - That is, the music they gravitated toward before they had "any taste or judgment," as Innis puts it - The results are an album that swirls dancemusic paint onto a rock canvas - Inspired in part by genre-bending Creation Records bands like Primal Scream and Madchester groups like Happy Mondays, Acid Star gives a modern spin on a classic formula.

TRACK LISTING

Y2J
Climax
Manic World
In The Sedentary
OMG
Acid Star
Pavement
Cycle
Mall Goth
The Cloak

For the last 15 years, Allah-Las have alchemically melded surf rock washes with folk rock jangle and rock, building up their lauded music podcast, Reverberation Radio, and record label, Calico Discos, in the process - But a lot has changed since Matthew Correia (drums/vocals), Spencer Dunham (bass, guitar, vocals), Miles Michaud (guitar, organ, vocals), and Pedrum Siadatian (guitar, synth, vocals) first bonded over psych rock vinyl in the back room at Amoeba Records in the late ‘aughts.

Zuma 85 signals the start of a new era for Allah-Las, and finds the band reinventing itself in defiance of the algorithmic categorization and robotic sterility. Recorded in the midst of the shift from the Old World to whatever branch of reality we're on now, it's a return, too: The album will be released October 13th on their own label, Calico Discos, in partnership with Innovative Leisure, which released early defining statements like Allah-Las (2012) and Worship The Sun (2014).

TRACK LISTING

The Stuff
Jelly
Right On Time
GB BB
Hadal Zone
Fontaine
Pattern
Sky Club
La Rue
Dust
Zuma 85
Smog Cutter
The Fall

L.A.’s De Lux are a post-disco, dance-punk DIY duo that sound like they could have come out of 1979 or 1982 just as easily as the present.

"Love Is Hard Work" is a continuous 29 minute recording and something that Sean Guering from De Lux has been wanting to make for a while…'Before De Lux, I used to write long songs, but never really finish them. Written and recorded in mid-2021 for two months, it felt like a breeze to make "Love Is Hard Work" because I had been thinking and talking about it for so long. Influenced by a lot of artists from '79-'82, like Peter Gordon, Electric Mind, Evans Pyramid or Dizzy K, the track is intended to feel like a continuous flow of dance music. Instead of a stream of consciousness in lyricism, this is more of a stream of consciousness in instrumentation and song writing; where ideas flow from one to the other without too much thought.'

Unapoletically joyous and bountiful throughout, it ventures through electro-disco, boogie and synth-pop moods with an assured optimism and radiance. Sunny melodies, yearnful vox, powerful drums - it's got everything you need to keep you powered up whehter listening in the car, at home or in the club. An adventerous prospect executed with a sincere love for all forms of dance music. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Love Is Hard Work 

The Fooler is both a clue and a red herring. The Fooler is the observed and the observer, narrator and subject, truth and lie. The Fooler is the shadow and reflection of a city the artist knows sufficiently well to wander with his eyes closed, and a place which very possibly never even existed. The Fooler is not so much an unreliable narrator as a constantly shifting perspective. The Fooler is the new album by Nick Waterhouse, and it's a lot. Recorded by Mark Neill (Black Keys; Los Straightjackets; Dave Cobb) in Valdosta, Georgia, it's a song-cycle of sorts, the arc of the album telling a tale of a city and its denizens.

The result is a record that offers up new riches and fresh perspectives with every spin. From the hidden corners of 'Hide & Seek' and the roadhouse soul of 'Play To Win' to the primitive, attitudinal, chugging two-chord thrill of 'Late In The Garden', it builds inexorably to the drama of the title track and pulsing roll-and-rock of the final pay off, 'Unreal, Immaterial'. Play it once and it sounds immediately like a collection of great songs. Play it again - and you will - and it feels like a novel or film slowly unveiling its secrets, kaleidoscopic in its narrative complexity. "Especially during this record, I started just becoming what Allen Ginsberg called a pure breath,\" says the artist. "I was becoming pure breath with my ideas."

TRACK LISTING

1. Looking For A Place 
2. Hide And Seek 
3. (No) Commitment 
4. Play To Win 
5. Was It You 
6. Late In The Garden 
7. The Problem With A Street 
8. Plan For Leaving 
9. Are You Hurting 
10. Was The Style 
11. The Fooler 
12. Unreal, Immaterial

Nick Waterhouse takes the colour blue as his hue of choice on Promenade Blue. In Nick’s musical and lyrical world, blue is a refraction of his life and memories — evoking the endless tours, marathon recording sessions, and highs and lows of success he’s experienced in his decade-long career; conjuring romances that were doomed, loves that lingered, and hope for future days of parity and partnership; summoning spirits of people who have gone but permeate his mind forever. That’s the world of Promenade Blue — one that is vivid and magnetic, buoyed by both light and density due to Nick’s newfound collaboration with producer Paul Butler (Michael Kiwanuka, The Bees, St. Paul and the Broken Bones). It’s not Gatsby’s New York in the 1920s, it’s Waterhouse’s California in the 2020s... but as anyone who’s ever listened to a Waterhouse record knows: time, though clearly pegged to the dawn of this new decade, is a more malleable concept. In no uncertain terms, Promenade Blue represents Waterhouse’s finest hour as a writer and bandleader — leveraging the musical partnerships he has built over many years to put something forth that is so fully realized and felt that it sparkles beatifically, reverberating with energy, heart, creativity, and vibe from start to finish.

For fans of: Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, Leon Bridges, Nathaniel Rateliff, Jon Batiste, Charles Bradley, Lee Fields, JD McPherson, Van Morrison, Ty Segall, Allah-Las, Michael Kiwanuka, St. Paul and the Broken Bones

TRACK LISTING

1. Place Names
2. The Spanish Look
3. Vincentine
4. Medicine
5. Very Blue
6. Silver Bracelet
7. Proméne Bleu
8. Fugitive Lover
9. Minor Time
10. B. Santa Ana, 1986
11. To Tell

A decade ago, journalists, fans, critics, and audiophiles alike were wont to compare Nick Waterhouse to his predecessors. And it was a convenient way to categorize an artist that has since proved uncategorizable—he had a voice that balanced somewhere between Van Morrison and Ray Charles, an aesthetic that caught the attention of style reporters at GQ, an ambitious production vision that stood out among the lo-fi rock and alternative bands of the zeitgeist. He was also disarmingly earnest in his own influences—citing artists like Mose Allison and Them as early inspiration. But now, coming off of his searching, intimate, self-titled album of 2019 and bringing us “Nick Waterhouse Live at Pappy & Harriet’s; In Person from the High Desert” it’s clear that comparisons, of any kind, no longer suffice in 2020.

TRACK LISTING

1. Some Place
2. Straight Love Affair
3. It's Time
4. LA Turnaround
5. Black Glass
6. Don't You Forget It
7. Raina
8. El Viv
9. Say I Wanna Know
10. Wreck The Rod
11. Katchi
12. I Feel An Urge Coming On
13. Dead Room
14. Pushin' Too Hard
15. Sleeping Pills
16. (If You Want) Trouble
17. This Is A Game
18. Some Place (Reprise)

Meet Jonah Yano, the Toronto based singer, songwriter, whose journey into music began with recording music using his cellphone in 2016. Having played piano and guitar as a child, it wasn’t until Yano moved from Vancouver to Toronto in 2016 that he began putting his songs online, catching the eyes of Toronto’s thriving local music scene. Spending the next couple of years obsessively songwriting and practicing vocals, and learning technical skills, he collaborated with Toronto duo MONEYPHONE on the 2018 song “On Lock” which became an underground success. Shortly after, Yano released his first solo single “Rolex, the Ocean'' with producer Joseph L'etranger. Once he began writing his full EP, he was introduced to frequent collaborators BADBADNOTGOOD, who are featured on the EP’s title track, “nervous.”

Yano’s work has garnered praise in major music publications like The Fader, Billboard, Complex, and Exclaim and the attention of Virgil Abloh and Gilles Peterson along with millions of streams on Spotify and Apple Music. Most recently, Yano released a highly praised cover of the Majestic’s “Key to Love (Is Understanding)” also with BADBADNOTGOOD, finding himself in the natural position of writing the feature length album, 2020’s souvenir. Following a highly acclaimed 2019 which included the release of an EP nervous, collaborations with BADBADNOTGOOD, MONEYPHONE, and Nono; industry praise from The Fader, Billboard, High Snobiety, NME, KCRW and Exclaim — it’s not a stretch to say Jonah Yano’s highly anticipated debut feature album souvenir took a lifetime to make. Yano’s souvenir, mixes his soulful, genre blurring vocals with searing, personal lyrics. With collaborations from talents like BADBADNOTGOOD, Monsune and Jacques Greene, souvenir touches on themes of family separation, healing, and reconciling with the past.

With each track delving into Yano’s personal history, the album tells the story of his parents separation and absence of his father from his life through the perspective of each of his family members. Following the separation of his parents in 1998 in Hiroshima and subsequent move to Vancouver, Yano spent years with very little connection to his father beyond occasional calls and birthday presents. Having not seen each other in 15 years, Yano visited his father in Nagato in the fall of 2019 with the goal of making sense of their complicated relationship through music. Both being avid musicians, Yano then incorporated some of his father’s earlier recordings into his own, while making peace with their past. The result — the album’s final track, “shoes,” featuring his father Tatsuya Muraoka and written by him about a pair of shoes he purchased for Yano as a child. Most of the track was recorded live at some point in the 1990’s in Hiroshima, with Yano’s own vocals filling gaps between his father’s vocals. Recording the album in Tokyo’s Red Bull studios, a log cabin in Nagato, Toronto’s Studio 69, and his own home — the intensely personal album incorporates Yano’s unique sound with a deeply relatable concept, making it the natural follow-up to an already impressive catalogue.

TRACK LISTING

DISC 1
1. Poor Me
2. Anywhere
3. Delicate
4. Congratulations, You're In First Place
5. Monarch
6. Stones (tokyo)
7. Echo
8. Strawberry!
9. What I Can Do To Help
10. Shimonoseki Interlude
11. Shoes (feat. Tatsuya Muraoka)

Hanni El Khatib, the definitive purveyor of visceral, blues-wracked, punk-spiked, soulwarped, knife-fight rock n’ roll who artfully blends serrated guitars with his love for hiphop, releases his fifth album FLIGHT, produced by and recorded with long-time friend Leon Michels (El Michels Affair, Lana Del Rey, Rick Ross, Travis Scott, A$AP Rocky, and Eminem).

From 2010 until 2017, when he released his previous albums, there was the usual cycle that consumes most working musicians: make an album, tour it, return home, rinse and repeat. And with it came the predictable pitfalls that ensnare too many artists - It is a dream until that one night when it isn’t any longer, and despite his gratitude for his fans, El Khatib found himself wracked by depression and anxiety. It became readily apparent that if he didn’t make drastic changes to his lifestyle, there might not be a life to speak of. So he quit drinking, stopped touring, and took an indefinite hiatus from the studio. But eventually, the desire to create songs slowly returned.

What would eventually become El Khatib’s fifth studio album, the virtuosic but characteristically raw FLIGHT, began as spontaneous experimentation. The finished result is a rollicking sampledelic opus that recalls the beautiful chaos that the Dust Brothers created on Paul’s Boutique and Odelay. It’s the type of thing that Dilla and Madlib would’ve created if they had come up on The Cramps.

TRACK LISTING

1. CARRY
2. GLASSY
3. ALIVE
4. COLORS
5. STRESSY
6. ROOM
7. LEADER
8. GEM
9. HARLOW
10. DUMB
11. HOW
12. DETROIT
13. PEACE

Before settling in to make Jazzhound, their most extravagant, ambitious, and fully realized album to date, the Buttertones had to face the hounds of real life. Prior to a headlining summer tour in support of Midnight in a Moonless Dream, a fiery blast of an album capturing the band at their purest distillation, drummer/multi-instrumentalist Modesto had a sudden and serious medical scare involving his eye, requiring emergency surgery. He lost half his vision (it will hopefully return with a future operation), and the tour had to be cancelled. Music took a backseat for the time being gave us some perspective on our health says bassist Sean Redman,the fact that we have to look after ourselves and one another first, or else the music just cant happen Cobin, Redman, and vocalist/guitarist Richard Araiza have been playing together for seven years now, having first come together for a self-titled debut in 2013; along with London Guzman on sax and keys, they’ve come to establish themselves as one of L.As tightest groups, conquering stages from Coachella to Tropicalia. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Phantom Eyes
2. Denial You Win Again
3. Rise And Shine
4. Fade Away Gently
5. Dirty Apartment
6. Bebop
7. Blind Passenger
8. Velour
9. Infinite Tenderness
10. Jazzhound

Nick Waterhouse returns with a new self-titled album: a true powerhouse of a record filled with his distinct California surf-rock infused swaggering soul. The songs are personal, intimate, and direct. Brisk, self-contained and catchy as hell, producer Paul Butler (Michael Kiwanuka, Devendra Banhart) has helped to distill the ‘Waterhouse Sound’ to deliver a rich, raw, brawny, muscular album that’s heavier and more confrontational than anything Nick has made before, yet malleable enough for listeners to suffuse their own life stories into the mix.

TRACK LISTING

1. By Heart
2. Song For Winners
3. I Feel An Urge Coming On
4. Undedicated
5. Black Glass
6. Wreck The Rod
7. Which Was Writ
8. Man Leaves Town
9. Thought & Act
10. El Viv
11. Wherever She Goes (She Is Wanted)

Hanni El Khatib’s first idea for his Savage Times project was to do something he’d never done before. Instead, he ended up doing …well, everything he’d never done before. He’d be playing new instruments, writing in unfamiliar new ways, opening himself up to an unrelenting stream of ideas and dedicating himself totally to pure musical instinct. And the result? 19 best-of-the-sessions songs, as well as the kind of creative revelations that only happen when you quit looking around and start looking ahead.

Originally, he’d hoped to explode the lingering idea that he was simply a blues-rock guitar player, but that’s why Savage Times touches on everything from garage rock to punk to disco, hip-hop and even some unexpected solo-guitar self-portraiture. But on the way, he also exploded his own idea of what he could do—even maybe who he was, or would be. Savage Times was an experiment as well as an experience, that touched on some of the most personal, social & political elements to date.

TRACK LISTING

1. Baby's OK
2. Gonna Die Alone
3. Born Brown
4. Paralyzed
5. Miracle
6. Mangos & Rice
7. Come Down
8. No Way
9. Mondo And His Makeup
10. Gun Clap Hero
11. Black Constellation
12. So Dusty
13. Till Your Rose Comes Home
14. Hold Me Back
15. Savage Times
16. 1AM
17. Peep Show
18. This I Know
19. Freak Freely

Gossamer is Evan Reiner, the LA based producer, guitarist, synth musician and field recorder whose debut full-length 'Automaton' is released on cult independent label Innovative Leisure.

Influenced by hip hop, hardcore and jazz guitar, he developed an interest in electronic music while a student at the Berklee School of Music. He began to study movie sound and foley artistry. Pouring sand across cymbals or using spent shells from a gun range for percussion gave him a whole new vocabulary, and he found further inspiration in artists from Ai Weiwei to Maya Duren to Stanley Kubrick to Delia Derbyshire. 

For 'Automaton' Reiner began making field recordings in the tunnels under Pasadena’s Devil’s Gate Dam, on a trip in Japan, under a bridge in downtown LA or to California’s Ansel Adams Wilderness area. At home he would “make accidents happen” with recorders, samplers, guitar and analogue synthesizers.

'Automaton' is a precise and gentle dreamscape with an ambient atmosphere that recalls Gas, Boards of Canada, Vangelis, and Brian Eno and Jon Hassell’s album 'Fourth World'. For fans of Caribou, Four Tet, Boards Of Canada, Burial.

TRACK LISTING

1. Thoughtform
2. Print
3. 3d Relief
4. Okuma
5. J Cruise
6. Off World
7. Truax
8. For Sleep

John Barrett returns with his second full length for LA label Innovative Leisure as Bass Drum of Death. Elevating Bass Drum of Death from the scrapheap of garage rock challengers fighting for attention, 'Rip This' is BDoD’s most impressive record yet, combining the best elements of the American rock underground with a raw approach that’s original and exciting.

Bass Drum of Death’s appeal has always transcended the band’s roots in the local Oxford, Mississippi touring circuit where John Barrett first cut his teeth. Since his debut 7-inch on Fat Possum back in 2008, he’s realised this potential again and again, most notably with his genre-bending collaboration with Odd Future’s Mellowhype and a slot on the infamous Vinewood Boulevard radio station on the GTA V videogame. But it’s with 'Rip This' that Barrett has really hit his stride.

The process has been markedly different throughout. For previous albums 'Bass Drum of Death' (Innovative Leisure, 2013) and 'GB City' (Inflated Records, 2011), Barrett wrote all the material himself at home and recorded it on a basic GarageBand setup. This time around, he enlisted drummer Len Clark as a fulltime member and collaborator and UMO bassist Jacob Portrait as producer. Over a two-week stint at Prairie Sun Studios in Sonoma County, California the trio created the first BDoD studio album.

TRACK LISTING

1: Electric
2: Left For Dead
3: For Blood
4: Everything's The Same
5: Sin Is In 10
6: Black Don't Glow
7: Burns My Eye
8: Lose My Mind
9: Better Days
10: Route 69 (Yeah)

Crystal Antlers have returned to their roots as an agile power trio of singer/bassist Johnny Bell, drummer Kevin Stuart and guitarist Andrew King and signed with high-powered L.A. independent Innovative Leisure to release their new album Nothing Is Real.

The band have accrued plenty of stories in a short space of time: their debut 7” was funded by a friend who also happened to be a bank robber; they completed the FYF Fest tour in a veggie-oil powered school bus, which got them on the front page of the Los Angeles Times.

Nothing Is Real is Crystal Antlers going beyond the beyond, with songs that rattle and ricochet from desolation to delirium. Opener “Pray” sounds like what would have happened if Black Flag’s Greg Ginn had produced the first Psychedelic Furs single; “Persephone” and “Anywhere But Here” match the desperate, relentless rhythm of the Wipers with the inside-out guitar melodies of the Pixies, “Licorice Pizza” recalls lost cult-punk heroes like the Flesh Eaters or the Embarrassment. On Nothing Is Real, you’ll feel as much as hear echoes of bands like Wire, Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr., especially on the bleak closer “Prisoner Song”— bands who knew beauty and noise could be the same thing. And for the first time ever on a Crystal Antlers recording there are also drum machines, synths and even 4/4 drum beats.

“Crystal Antlers aren’t really about making some shit we’ve heard before, but they do take notice of some important touchstones: powerful organ runs, ragged vocals and an ability to turn even relatively short songs into something that sounds beyond epic.” THE FADER

“Merging psych, garage, lo-fi, prog, and countless other influences, the group easily maintains consistency despite a complete inability to be pinned to any specific movement or trend.” PITCHFORK

TRACK LISTING

1. Pray
2. Rattlesnake
3. Licorice Pizza
4. We All Gotta Die
5. Paper Thin
6. Persephone
7. Anywhere But Here
8. Don't Think Of The Stone
9. Wrong Side
10. Better Things
11. Prisoner Song