Andy Jenkins new album 'Since Always' came from letting go—of self-perceptions, of expectations, of assumptions. Jenkins found space to trust himself as the guitarist for his own songs, and producer Nick Sanborn stepped into a new kind of production role, dreaming up ideas and filtering through them together. There was, in short, a very adult trust to it all, two fans working in tandem to make something; a record where the loss and love, compromise and gain of adulthood come into full view.

Both busy pieces of their respective but intertwined music scenes in Richmond and Durham, Jenkins and Sanborn had been fans of one another for years but had never formally collaborated. Jenkins had spent a few years gathering songs for the follow-up to his 2018 debut, 'Sweet Bunch'; the new ones were intricately rendered odes to the assorted assurances and anxieties that can come with finding some measure of contentment as you cross into yours 30s. Don’t send demos, Sanborn suggested; simply drive the two hours down, and live in the studio for two weeks while spring drifted into the South. As Jenkins rolled through his tracks, Sanborn listened and allowed his imagination to run wild and flooded Jenkins with ideas—rhythmic shifts, keyboard flourishes, vocal effects. There was double-time piano, a mistake dropped into 'Too Late' they both loved. There was the Vocoder selection during 'Emptiness Is', a choice that allowed the pair to hang so much of the song on bass and drums alone. There was the sequence that bubbles beneath 'Leaving Before', a mirror of the lyrical nervous heart.

When Amelia Meath and Flock of Dimes’ Jenn Wasner were palling around the studio, Sanborn asked if they would mind singing on a few tracks. That’s Meath on 'Blue Mind', sweetly trailing Jenkins’ lines about being under love’s spell like she’s offering an incantation, and Wasner rising through the static dawn of 'Lovesick'. “Andy wanted someone to make decisions he would never make,” remembers Sanborn. “It was this mining operation we got to do together.” As the songs steadily cohered, though, Jenkins insisted it was finally time to drop his guitars. “I have never been a particularly competent guitar player,” he says now with a little laugh, but Sanborn loved the idiosyncratic way his strums sat against his voice, so he stalled. They’d need to wait for Jenkins’ longtime collaborator, an ace named Alan Parker, to come down from Richmond and replace those parts. When Parker did, he heard the same thing as Sanborn—yes, he was more technically proficient, but his overdubs didn’t have the same personality, the same narrative truth. Jenkins relented, so his guitars stayed and anchor the album.

TRACK LISTING

1. Sunshine
2. Blue Mind
3. Leaving Before
4. I Walked Into The Wrong Place
5. Salt For Morning
6. Nobody Else
7. Waltz For Morning
8. Emptiness Is
9. Lovesick
10. Pale Green Tower
11. Too Late

After crucial stints in Silver Jews and Lambchop, William Tyler emerged with a string of inquisitive albums that paired his country rearing and classical enthusiasm with his ardor for experimentation and field recordings. His productive enclave of instrumental music has not only ushered in new sounds, but also critical new voices. No other solo American guitarist this century has impacted that fecund scene quite like him. And on the brilliant, bracing 'Time Indefinite', Tyler’s first solo album in five years, he steps at last into the widening gyre he helped create. The guitar is the starting point for an album that will make you reconsider not only Tyler but also the possibilities of an entire field. A vortex of noise and harmony, ghosts and dreams, anguish and hope, it is not just a great guitar record. It is a stunning record by a great guitarist, a masterpiece of our collectively anxious time.

In early 2020, as the world teetered at the edge of unrests still unimagined, Tyler left LA for Nashville, where he’d lived most of his life. Most of his gear and all of his records stayed, awaiting a presumed rapid return. It, of course, wasn’t. So as Tyler dealt with the depression, nerves, and questions of those endlessly tense times, he began recording ideas with his phone and a cassette deck, resigning himself to the distortion inherent in those devices. Tyler was talking with Kieran Hebden about making a record together, and some of these bits felt like test cases. As that collaboration crept in other directions Tyler magpied other sounds. He asked longtime friend, producer Jake Davis, to help stitch them together, opting to embrace the hiss and wobble and to unintentionally make a record that reflected those times and these—uneasy, damaged, honest.

A seesaw of struggle and survival defines these songs, a map of anguish and belief and the trails that link them. “This is a mental illness record,” Tyler will tell you without shame, as open in life and speech as he is on tape. “It’s music about losing your mind but not wanting to, about trying to come back.” He doesn’t need to tell you that; you can feel it, possibly recognize it from your own experience.

Tyler’s albums have been nests of non-musical influences, as he has pivoted between spirituality and philosophy and summoned the landscapes of the greater American imagination. Time Indefinite is no different, especially in the way it conjures the deeply personal films of Ross McElwee. In the mid-’80s, he began to make a movie about Sherman’s march through the South, but it spiraled into a tangled history about family, loss, and what we do when our best instincts surrender to the worst things we can imagine. The record is a nod to this idea, of time’s relentless push and our place in, beneath, and beside it. It is no great revelation that the lives we lead shape the work we make, whether or not we intend that to be the case. In these songs, you can hear Tyler wrestle with incoming demons out loud—addiction, middle age, loneliness, neurosis. All of our struggles are different, but we are united in having them. This is the soundtrack that Tyler’s create.

TRACK LISTING

1. Cabin Six
2. Concern
3. Star Of Hope
4. Howling At The Second Moon
5. A Dream, A Flood
6. Anima Hotel
7. Electric Lake
8. Hardest Land To Harvest
9. Held

Daughter of Swords is the solo project of North Carolina singer-songwriter Alex Sauser-Monnig (they/she), who has also released music with bands Mountain Man and The A’s. Their solo debut, 'Dawnbreaker', was a hushed folk record released in 2019; in the years since, Sauser-Monnig found a new understanding of self, personally and musically. Across the last several years, Daughter of Swords’ music has grown thornier, an unpredictable and knotty tangle of technicolor synths, heady guitar, bubbling rhythms, a sheen enveloping songs about raw human intensity writ large – crushes, desire, anger, alienation, the horrors of late-stage capitalism, the cascading paradigm shifts it seems we’re all hurtling toward.

Enter 'Alex', Daughter of Sword’s sinewy new record. Recorded at Betty’s (Sylvan Esso’s studio), 'Alex' was built out by Sauser-Monnig’s longtime friends/collaborators Amelia Meath (Sylvan Esso, Mountain Man, The A’s), Jenn Wasner (Wye Oak, Flock of Dimes), Nick Sanborn (Sylvan Esso, Made of Oak), TJ Maiani (Weyes Blood, Neneh Cherry), and Caleb Wright (Hippo Campus, Samia). There’s a sharp cerebral tension between the stories at the core of these songs and the electrifying, playful buoyancy of the sound, the wink with which Sauser-Monnig can deliver a withering observation.

Reckoning with pleasure-seeking, boundary-breaking, and their place in the world, 'Alex' heralds a fresh chapter of exploration and liberation for Sauser-Monnig, yielding the truest representation of their identity via song yet. A reassessment of inner systems, and relationships of all sorts — with art and creativity, with other humans, with gender – happened in tandem with Sauser-Monnig’s interrogation of the late-capitalist culture that makes life for working artists an inequitable grind. Forced out of their habitual ways of thinking and being, Sauser-Monnig found new energy in dissolving old limitations—be they about the music business or their concept of gender—and exploring in uncharted territory. Their priority became maximizing the mood of each track, borne out in Alex’s layers of synthetic textures and unorthodox flourishes.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Angular bursts of overdriven guitar and looped noises underpin the smoothly melodic vocals of Alex Sauser-Monnig, and result in something that's clearly influenced as much by art rock and folk as it is indie music. A hugely dynamic selection of wonderfully hummable oddities and soaring chorsues.

TRACK LISTING

1. Alone Together
2. Talk To You
3. Hard On
4. Morning In Madison
5. Money Hits
6. All I Want Is You
7. Willow
8. Dance
9. Strange
10. Vacation
11. Song
12. West Of West

In the Fall of 2022, Phil Cook found himself living alone in a small home at the edge of field and forest in North Carolina’s Piedmont. For most of Cook’s life he lived near the hearts of the towns he had called home, near the groan of traffic and hubbub of coffee shops. Such close quarters helped make the gregarious Cook a prolific collaborator, from co-founding Megafaun to working with The Blind Boys of Alabama, Bon Iver, Hiss Golden Messenger, and endless others. But Cook’s closest neighbor now was a trailhead, so he went and listened, enraptured first by the stillness and then by the manifold birds. He began leaving his windowsill slightly cracked each night, so that the dawn chorus greeted him. Cook began recording these tangled bird songs, and he slowly joined them. With the sun finally high, Cook would listen to the day’s recordings and improvise in real time on the instrument that remains the first and most steadfast love of his musical life, the piano.

When Cook left that cabin after a year, he moved into a home of his own in Durham, with plenty of space for his two boys to play and for something he’d never actually owned—a proper piano. Over the next several months, Cook spent untold hours drilling down on these pieces. During lessons with the Southern gospel great Chuckey Robinson, the pianist had challenged Cook to sustain fewer notes, to stop clouding and crowding his melodies by using the instrument’s pedals as crutches. His music suddenly had more clarity, with the sounds and the feelings they ferried given more room to function. Cook dug into the danger and delight, into the idea that we twist our bodies into knots trying to understand what is best for our hearts.

In April 2024 Cook returned to Wisconsin’s Chippewa Valley where he was raised. His lifelong friend and bandmate, Justin Vernon, had just finished an overhaul of April Base, the studio compound where Cook has worked on more than a dozen records during the last 15 years. Cook asked Vernon to produce Appalachia Borealis as simply as possible—merely to listen and offer feedback in two extended afternoon sessions, to talk about the right takes and make sure that they’d captured the heart. It, of course, got more complicated, as they experimented with the process. Vernon would add or subtract the bird songs to Cook’s headphones, seeing how they impacted his playing. Or they would route his notes through a massive reverb chamber, Cook responding in gossamer improvisations. Appalachia Borealis is a deeply poignant and personal set of 11 piano meditations, built with the emotional range of a full and open existence. Inspired by those windowsill improvisations, it reflects not only the turmoil and sadness of a fraught time for Cook but also the hope, light, and joy of looking for the other side. You can sometimes still hear the birds whose tune and time helped to inspire so many of these songs. Even when they’re not within earshot, their essence remains.

TRACK LISTING

1. Rise
2. Running
3. Two Hands In My Pocket
4. Wescott
5. Thrush Song
6. I Made A Lovers Prayer
7. Dawn Birds
8. Buffalo
9. Reliever
10. Ambassador Cathedral
11. Appalachia Borealis

On Hardcore, James Mapley-Brittle (GRRL) and Nick Sanborn (Made of Oak), meld their love of late-night club music to make mind-bending high-energy dance music. GRRL is one of the brightest emerging stars in the underground arts space and a regular collaborator with PC Music, NTS, and more; Sanborn is better known as one half of the Grammy-nominated electronic pop duo Sylvan Esso.

First sparked during DJ sets in North Carolina basements, the duo’s unique creative chemistry has grown exponentially since the 2022 release of their debut EP, Inertia. GRRL x Made of Oak’s glitched-out sounds have been featured on Adult Swim, Fortnite, and with their own sample pack on Splice. Finding new fans in the likes of Björk, Arca, AG Cook, Porter Robinson, Barker and DJs across the world, GRRL x Made of Oak is an exhilarating experience that will shake the speakers and get any after-hours dance floor moving.

TRACK LISTING

01 Hardcore
02 Power Station
03 Chord Thing
04 Juno

Tim Bernardes is a two-time Latin Grammy nominated singer, songwriter, musician, composer, and producer, who emerged as one of Brazil’s most profound musical talents of his generation as well as a global phenomenon. A contemporary artist with deep roots in Brazil’s verdant musical heritage, Bernardes has collaborated with the likes of Caetano Veloso, Maria Bethânia and the late great Gal Costa, as he blazes the trail for the new Brazilian scene, capturing the hearts of a worldwide audience.

Many discovered Tim Bernardes’s show-stopping voice and metaphysical lyrics through his breakout 2022 album, Mil Coisas Invisíveis, but it was on his standout debut, Recomeçar, that Bernardes welcomed listeners to his singular world of sound: warm, intimate, emotionally resonant, healing. The album was primarily written while touring with his acclaimed tropicalia-tinged indie rock group, O Terno and released in 2017. Now widely available for the first time, Recomeçar is a collection of intimate reflections on the nature of heartbreak and loss.

TRACK LISTING

Abertura (Recomeçar)
Talvez
Quis Mudar
Tanto Faz
Ela Não Vai Mais Voltar
Pouco A Pouco
Não
Era O Fim
Ela
Incalculável
Calma
As Histórias Do Cinema
Recomeçar

Hippo Campus’ singer Jake Luppen had been listening to the band’s work as they rolled around the country, trying to tease out how much work remained. All of it, he soon decided. Obfuscated by the need to sound sophisticated and the overwhelming ambition to make the best Hippo Campus LP ever, a deeper and more profound record that reflected how their lives were changing. But Luppen and all of Hippo Campus decided they didn’t actually like what they were making.

So they called an audible. They were going to start over. And three months later, the four-member core of Hippo Campus rendezvoused with longtime collaborator Caleb Wright and producer Brad Cook at Sonic Ranch, a playground-like studio complex on the Texas border. They gave themselves 10 days to cut the tracks they liked best, to make something to which they could commit at last. Less than two weeks later, they emerged with what they’d given themselves half a decade to make Flood, or the best album Hippo Campus has ever made.

The sentiments on Flood are raw, real, and unguarded, a testament to Hippo Campus dropping preconceptions of how they had to sound after so many failed attempts to re-record these songs. They wiped the slate clean, starting over without beliefs about what Hippo Campus or this record needed to be. Still, sophistication lurks in subtle key and tempo changes, in the almost innate shifts that a band of longtime best friends can tap after so much time spent helping to shape one another’s musical language. Flood doesn’t need to tell you it’s important or interesting; it simply is, just by virtue of how it’s written, built, and rendered, a map of what it’s like to feel everything at once. This rebirth is accompanied by a crucial career shift for Hippo Campus, too, as they exit the traditional label system to issue LP4 via Psychic Hotline, a truly independent imprint run by peers and pals. If you’re working to let go of expectations, why not jettison them all? There’s a bravery to that, and you can hear its revivifying spirit in every second of LP4.

Early into the endlessly propulsive “Paranoid,” where stunted acoustic strums undergird an inescapable jangle, Luppen asks an existential question: “Is there something waiting out there for us at the finish line?” For the next three minutes, the band cycles with him through his woes, from the title’s overwhelming worry to notions of dislocation and loneliness. (Also, is there any other refrain ever that manages to make the phrase “so god-damned fucking” sound so catchy and natural?) But in the final verse, with his voice breaking through a scrim of distortion, he stumbles upon a new credo: “Wait, I wanna give this life all that I have in me.” That is precisely what Hippo Campus have done with Flood after realizing it doesn’t take a Lifetime or, well, five years to do just that.

TRACK LISTING

Prayer Man
Paranoid
Fences
Everything At Once
Flood
Corduroy
Slipping Away
Brand New
Tooth Fairy
Madman
Forget It
Closer
I Got Time

Across the last 15 years, Ryan Gustafson of The Dead Tongues has emerged as one of modern folk’s most distinct voices. As idiosyncratic and spectral as the songs have sometimes been, Gustafson has always tied his visions and verses to the kinds of hooks you tuck away like talismans, pulled out in case of emergency. Dust, Unsung Passage, Desert: The Dead Tongues’ albums remain some of the more compelling and curious works in their field on this side of a century. The latest edition to The Dead Tongues’ catalog, the song-centric and magnetic Body of Light and the discursive and wonderfully elliptical I Am a Cloud, is 16 complete tunes split across interweaving and disparate albums.

The albums feature performances by Jenn Wasner (Wye Oak, Bon Iver), Mat Davidson (Twain), Matt Douglas (The Mountain Goats), Joe Westerlund (Califone, Megafaun), Jeff Ratner (Bing and Ruth), and more. Gustafson wanted to dedicate the studio time to not just recording songs but also making something new, with new improvisations.

The two albums, released digitally as distinct standalone releases, join together in the physical format as a beautiful, deluxe, double album. The 2LP package features a meticulously embossed cover, and gorgeous custom inner-sleeves for each album.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Tentative piano, slow slide guitars and swooning folky balladry, The Dead Tongues present a double whammy of two albums packaged together into the sonically beautiful, stunningly packaged duo of Body Of Light / I Am a Cloud.

TRACK LISTING

Body Of Light:
Body Of Light
Dirt For A Dying Sun
Dreamer
Fading Away
Daylily
Moonshadow
Wolves
Big Nothing
Hard Times, Sore Eyes

I Am A Cloud:
Lightning
I'm A Cloud Now
Formations
A Bridge
Where Love All Happened
Letters Of Returning
Even Here, Even Now

O Terno’s 2019 DIY masterpiece of modern Brazilian pop, , is now widely available on vinyl for the first time. The album (which features Devendra Banhart and Shintaro Sakamoto) had its first limited domestic vinyl pressing evaporate instantly, necessitating this essential Psychic Hotline pressing and an opportunity to introduce O Terno ("The Suit" - they both have three pieces, get it?) to a wider audience with their fourth and finest album.

At its core the band is made up of Tim Bernardes (lead singer, songwriter, guitarist and piano player), Guilherme “Peixe” D’Almeida (bass) and Gabriel “Biel” Basile (drums) though all three play a part in producing, with Bernardes stepping forward to mix this record as well as composing and arranging ’s orchestral elements.

A distinct departure from their previous albums - more sixties pop and less indie and psych rock - is the product of the band working in a familiar studio (RISCO) surrounded by a creative community. In the studio, they followed the open-source formula mapped out by The Beatles, The Kinks, Os Mutantes, Harry Nilson and others: write a good song (the hardest part), create a simple, yet elegant arrangement for bass, drums and guitar/piano, adorn the song with complementary instruments and melodies, and record it well, employing studio wizardry selectively and intentionally. As a result, the album sounds both retro in its analog texture and minimalist production, but contemporary in Bernardes’ songwriting and vocal style, which owes as much to Robin Pecknold (Fleet Foxes) and Grizzly Bear as to Milton Nascimento, Caetano Veloso or John Lennon.

TRACK LISTING

1. Tudo Que Eu Não Fiz
2. Pegando Leve
3. Eu Vou
4. Atrás / Além
5. Nada / Tudo
6. Pra Sempre Será
7. Volta E Meia
8. Bielzinho / Bielzinho
9. O Bilhete
10. Profundo / Superficial
11. Passado / Futuro
12. E No Final

Nathaniel Russell is a multi-disciplinary artist from Indiana who creates drawings, paintings, prints, murals, objects, videos, and music, often with friends and fellow artists. And in 2023, he packed up his car and drove from his home in Indiana all the way to North Carolina to record new music with his long-time friend Amelia Meath (Sylvan Esso, The A’s) at Betty’s, the wooded studio haven of Sylvan Esso, where recent releases from The Tallest Man on Earth, Caroline Rose, Wednesday, The A’s, The Mountain Goats, Flock of Dimes, Indigo de Souza, and many more have been born.

This record began with a funny and sad idea Russell had about a funeral. “I imagined a picture of a funeral with a merch table. It was an idea full of darkness and sweetness to me. Immediately I thought about what my merchandise would look like, what it would be. I began to think about what the record for sale at my funeral would sound like. I started to think about the songs I have made up and sung to and with my friends, family, and myself over the years. I noticed how the songs I had sung the longest seemed connected to others from a different time. I had changed some words and how I played them but they were all of me and my time on earth. I heard how these things fit together. Of course I now needed to see this project become a reality.”

Songs Of was produced by Meath, engineered by Alli Rogers, and features additional performances from Joe Westerlund (Megafaun, Califone) and Nick Sanborn (Sylvan Esso, Made of Oak).

TRACK LISTING

1. Wonderful To Be In Love
2. Silver
3. Nude Beach
4. Everybody Ever
5. Bloodsucker
6. Nightwalker
7. Wish I Was Born An Animal
8. Stop Let’s Listen
9. Sleeping Grass
10. Off On

In honor of the record’s ten year anniversary, North Carolina-based indie label Psychic Hotline will release a deluxe reissue, complete with previously unreleased material. Featuring essential singles "Coffee", "Hey Mami,” and "H.S.K.T.", the expanded edition also includes remixes from J Rocc, Rick Wade, Helado Negro, Dntel, and more. The deluxe 2LP package sports an all-over foil inversion of the original album’s iconic foil “SE” logo.

Recorded in a little bedroom studio out in Durham, North Carolina, Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn’s debut LP as Sylvan Esso arrived in 2014 at the juncture of pop and experimental. Even now, years later, the LP remains an urgent and fitting introduction to a push-and-pull that would go on to inform the duo’s sound – a thoughtful headiness that also wants you to get out on the dance floor. A blend of analog and digital, Meath and Sanborn were two unexpected puzzle pieces fitting together with singular ease, producing a ten-track LP that was both minimalist and shimmering, with dark undulations rippling beneath the synthy-surface and crystalline quality of Meath’s voice.

Before all of the international touring and festival headlining and critical acclaim and Grammy nominations, Sylvan Esso was just a shot-in-the dark of musical chemistry gone right. The original album bio for the self-titled presciently sets the stage for the thesis that has gone on to guide Meath and Sanborn’s writing since then: “a collection of vivid addictions concerning suffering and love, darkness and deliverance” arriving as “a necessary pop balm, an album stuffed with songs that don’t suffer the longstanding complications of that term.” And so, even as the band continues to evolve and becomes amorphous, there’s still that argument about what pop can be at its core. This is just the beginning of that conversation captured on tape.

TRACK LISTING

DISC ONE
01 Hey Mami
02 Dreamy Bruises
03 Could I Be
04 Wolf
05 Dress
06 H.S.K.T.
07 Coffee
08 Uncatena
09 Play It Right
10 Come Down

DISC TWO
11 Hey Mami (Rick Wade Remix)
12 H.S.K.T. (Dntel Remix)
13 Coffee (Helado Negro Remix)
14 Hey Mami (Charles Spearin Remix)
15 H.S.K.T. (Hercules And Love Affair Remix)
16 Coffee (J Rocc Remix)

With his new album Y’Y (pronounced “eey-eh, eey-eh”), Amaro Freitas steps into a new realm of musical creation. A realm rooted in magic and possibility, and tempered by a sense of stewardship for the earth’s bounties. Side A serves as an expression of connection to the earth and to the ancestors, paying homage to the forest and the rivers of Northern Brazil with both the music and the album title, Y’Y, a word written in the Sateré Mawé dialect, an ancestral indigenous code that means water or river. And by bringing to life lessons he learned in the Amazon about the incandescent power of enchanted spirits who intervene on behalf of the community in times of struggle. On Side B, Y’Y shows the connections between the global Black avant-jazz community. Bringing together multi-instrumentalist Shabaka Hutchings, harpist Brandee Younger, bassist Aniel Someillan, guitarist Jeff Parker and drummer Hamid Drake, the music creates an artful conversation by weaving together jazz traditions from across the world, while staying rooted in the unique sounds and rituals found in Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous cultures. Freitas continues to intwine ancestral knowledge into music on Y’Y by bringing his fresh, “decolonized” interpretation of Brazilian jazz and sharing music that may well shatter our preconceived notions of what jazz can be.

TRACK LISTING

1. Mapinguari (Encantado Da Mata}
2. Uiara (Encantada Da Agua) - Vida E Cura
3. Viva Nana
4. Dancga Dos Martelos
5. Sonho Ancestral
6. Y'Y
7. Mar De Cirandeiras
8. Gloriosa
9. Encantados

Malegria, Reyna Tropical’s long-anticipated debut full-length album, is at once a vibrant arrival and an electrifying bridge. The album is a contemporary celebration and continuation of wide-reaching cultural traditions from Congolese, Peruvian, and cumbia rhythms to revolutionary artists like lesbian Mexican guitarist-singer Chavela Vargas these influences meld and are remixed through the distinctive lens of trailblazing guitarist and songwriter Fabi Reyna.

Traversing themes including queer love, feminine sensuality, and the transformative power of intentional relations to the earth, Malegria spotlights narratives often pushed to the margins and offers them a sonic homeland. The portmanteau, born from a 1998 Manu Chao song by the same name, is akin to bittersweet and blends the Spanish “mal” which means “bad" and “alegria” which means “happiness.”

Malegria marks Reyna Tropical’s return to centering creative joy and movement through music. Whether enjoyed during listening parties or infectious live sets, the music will move listeners and irresistibly command a jump into action in protection of the land, into the arms of a crush, into your own power and fearlessness, into steady body rolls along to the beat. Malegria offers us all a chance to witness history in the making.

TRACK LISTING

01 Aqui Te Cuido
02 Radio Esperanza
03 Cartagena
04 Goosebumps
05 Lo Siento
06 Singing
07 Conocerla
08 Movimiento
09 Suavecito
10 Neke
11 LaMama
12 Malegria
13 Pajarito
14 Puerto Rico
15 Mestizaje
16 Cuaji
17 Queer Love & Afro-Mexico
18 Conexién Ancestral
19 Guitarra
20 Huttzilin

Audiobook, the new project from prolific multi-instrumentalist Sam Gendel and visual artist/filmmaker

Marcella Cytrynowicz, is comprised of 13 alphabetically-named tracks and corresponding illustrations that feel like dispatches from outer space, or unearthed ancient runes. At points melodic and cartoonish and at others glitching and somewhat unnerving, it’s a visual work and instrumental album rooted in a strange in-between, in a shadowy and vivid chasm between terrestrial and otherworldly. A puzzle that doesn’t ask to be completed, but invites you to play.

Cytrynowicz and Gendel have been consistent collaborators since 2020, with Cytrynowicz providing photography as well as music videos and visuals, including for Gendel’s DRM and their AE-30 documentary, and with Gendel contributing snippet scores to her own short-form video work.

AUDIOBOOK is the meeting of something distinctly analog weaving into a soundscape that could be at home in a 90s sci-fi soundtrack, the parallel play of a visual artist and prolific musician, abstract art and sound reaching out to touch. “It’s the sound of us just individually trusting ourselves, and then aligning the two together and letting them meet, and also trusting in that,” Gendel says. “I don’t think about it that directly, though – this isn't art inspired by art. I would say this is just a piece showing two people trusting in their subconscious and then trusting in that meeting point, wherever that is. And shepherding it along.”

TRACK LISTING

1. AB
2. CD
3. EF
4. GH
5. IJ
6. KL
7. MN
8. OP
9. QR
10. ST
11. UV
12. WX
13. YZ

The long-awaited reissue of The Dead Tongues' beloved third album, Unsung Passage, a profound reflection on the emotional architecture of love, loneliness, and life at large.

The Dead Tongues is songwriter Ryan Gustafson's long-evolving vehicle for a beautifully fractured vision of folk, country, blues, and cosmic American rock, and Unsung Passage is a first-person reckoning with the things Gustafson, a chronically peripatetic adventurer, has seen enough to sing about. The ten remarkable tracks of Unsung Passage are long-distance distillations of events lived and places seen and pondered and ultimately poured into reflective anthems for our harried times.

During "Like a Dream," a gentle gallop of grinning harmonica and trickling guitar, Gustafson explores the balance of existence from a hillside vantage. He sees the curveof the earth while pondering his need for a paycheck, a moment that eternally pits the banal against the beautiful. "The Broken Side of People Everywhere" is a gorgeous love song written with the wisdom of someone who knows that nothing is forever or perfect, that there's no real risk in a life where everything ends, anyway. There are meditations on mortality and devotion (the flute-laced dream "My Other"), on money and temporality (the banjo trot "The Giver"), and on impermanence and acceptance (the achingly gorgeous "Pale November Dew").

This isn't Gustafson's idle speculation about life and the world: these are the realizations of a restless mind, of a songwriter who sings "this old town ain't gonna watch m edie" and means it.

TRACK LISTING

1. Won't Be Long
2. Ebb And Flow
3. Pale November Dew
4. My Other
5. Like A Dream
6. Unsung Passage
7. The Broken Side Of People Everywhere
8. Thunder And Crash
9. TheGiver
10. Clip Your Wings

"Darkness Darkness" and “No Services” are songs by Kieran Hebden (Four Tet) and William Tyler.

The first song “Darkness, Darkness” contains samples from Gloria Loring's version of "Darkness, Darkness." The songs were produced by Kieran Hebden. The guitar was performed by William Tyler and recorded by Jake Davis at Huge Planet in Nashville.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Kieran Hebden returns to his real name moniker and the electro-acoustic, vivid pastoral elegance that made his early catalogue so infamous. "Darkness, Darkness" is a moving, emotional titan of live drum breaks and multi-layered instrumentation; rising to an incredible climax of soaring guitar feedback & distorted electronics.

TRACK LISTING

1. Darkness, Darkness
2. No Services

Tim Bernardes, a Latin Grammy nominated singer, songwriter, musician, composer, and producer from São Paulo, Brazil, has just announced the release of his forthcoming album Mil Coisas Invisíveis on Psychic Hotline. Bernardes has captivated global audiences with his delicate balance between sounds seeped in Brazilian tradition and contemporary indie and folk that is deeply warm, intimate, emotionally resonant and healing. He’s collaborated with the likes of Fleet Foxes, Tom Zé, David Byrne, Gal Costa, Devendra Banhart, Shintaro Sakamoto, and more. Mil Coisas Invisíveis is his second solo album, following his 2017 debut Recomeçar. The album was written primarily while touring with his acclaimed tropicalia-indie group O Terno, and heading into 2020, which is when he decided to step back from touring and focus on new songs. What emerged was an album that is generous and intimate- a series of meditations on metaphysical transformation in the face of grave uncertainty. The first single, ‘Nascer Vivier Morrer’ opens the album, tracing the journey of life from birth to death. One of the last songs written for the album, Tim feels that it connects the rest of the songs on the album- ‘I understand how the album looked from the outside and understand how it accentuated this conscious shift in me.’ The song says a lot in a few words, meditating on the magical experience of existence and presence. Joyful and introspective, the song is carried by simple instrumentation and layered vocals that render the song remarkably intimate. "This is a very short song that when I wrote I felt it fit as kind of an opening to the album. The songs in the album have some different vibes between them but I feel that this one connects them in a very synthetic way. Trying to say a lot with few words. About 'just being', about how magical the existence of existence is. About the presence of presence, and presence of absence in life. Like the song says, 'in the rare infinite moment, to live.” Says Tim about ‘Nascer Vivier Morrer’ 

Alexandra Sauser-Monnig and Amelia Meath have been yodeling together for upwards of fifteen years – in the backseat of a Prius while on their first cross-country tour, on back porches and backstages. It’s what led them to Fruit, their debut release as The A’s – a joyous ten-song collection spanning genre and decades, with interpretations of traditionals, lullabies, and an original song, it weaves between the weird and the wonderful. “Why I’m Grieving,” originally recorded by the DeZurik Sisters, was the inspiration for the A’s existence. The A’s reach into the past to hold hands with the DeZurik Sisters, two farm girls from rural Minnesota who taught themselves to yodel amongst all their animals, in a continuing celebration of the tradition of folk eccentricity and whimsy.

The A’s played their first show together in 2013 after Sauser-Monnig first moved to North Carolina, where Meath had been living at the time, but it wasn’t until summer 2021 that they thought seriously about making Fruit. They decamped to Sylvan Esso’s Chapel Hill studio, Betty’s, for two weeks in the midst of a balmy and blooming Carolinian summer. They rehearsed during the day, deconstructing yodeling parts phonetically and staring absurdly into each other’s eyes as they practiced tongue twisting harmonies - and recorded in the nighttime, candles lit, a flickering glow against the windows framing the violet twilight outside.

“There was a lot of giggling during the session,” Sauser-Monnig explains. “At one point I was getting a tangle out of my hair and was like, oh, my God, that sounds really cool – the sound of my hands in my hair. And then I thought, what if we recorded hair for a percussion track? And then it just sort of snowballed.” Across the record, the A’s employ a bizarre-o ghost orchestra of strange noises that are percussive and melodic. The credits include nylon shorts, string (singular), hair, shoes, ice chunk, gravel, frog sample, and shoelace, among other unexpected makeshift instrumentation. The backing band is built out by a more traditional group of players: saxophone from Sam Gendel on “Copper Kettle,” backing vocals from Jenn Wasner (Flock of Dimes, Wye Oak) on “When I Die,” string arrangements from Gabriel Kahane on “He Needs Me,” and more.

Fruit is made up simply of songs the A’s love to sing – there are lullabies and love songs; “He Needs Me,” written by Harry Nilsson and first released by Shelley Duvall in the 1980 Popeye film; traditional ballads like “Swing and Turn Jubilee,” “Copper Kettle” and closer “Buckeye Jim,” a multiplying song about frogs and nature. The sole original track to appear on the album is the penultimate “When I Die,” written by Meath. It contains both wishes and instructions for the celebration of her death, a low synth bubbling beneath Sauser-Monnig and Meath’s voices. It’s a collection of ten seemingly incongruous songs, but with the throughline of Sauser-Monnig and Meath’s vocals and sense of humor working in tandem, they fit together into a cosmic yodeling-folk masterpiece. Fruit feels like blowing the dust off a precious artifact of decades past, but also winking and modern. Sauser-Monnig sums up their ethos on the project succinctly: “If it doesn’t make you cackle or cry, it doesn’t belong.”

TRACK LISTING

01 He Needs Me
02 Swing And Turn Jubilee
03 Wedding Dress
04 Why I’m Grieving
05 When The Bloom Is On The Sage
06 My Poncho Pony
07 Go To Sleep My Darling Baby
08 Copper Kettle
09 When I Die
10 Buckeye Jim

Recorded in a little bedroom studio out in Durham, North Carolina, Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn's debut LP as Sylvan Esso arrived in 2014 at the juncture of pop and experimental. Even now, years later, the LP remains an urgent and fitting introduction to a push-and-pull that would go on to inform the duo's sound - a thoughtful headiness that also wants you to get out on the dance floor. A blend of analog and digital, Meath and Sanborn were two unexpected puzzle pieces fitting together with singular ease, producing a ten-track LP that was both minimalist and shimmering, with dark undulations rippling beneath the synthy-surface and crystalline quality of Meath's voice.

Before all of the international touring and festival headlining and critical acclaim, Sylvan Esso was just a shot-in-the dark of musical chemistry gone right. The original album bio for the self-titled presciently sets the stage for the thesis that has gone on to guide Meath and Sanborn's writing since then: "a collection of vivid addictions concerning suffering and love, darkness and deliverance" arriving as "a necessary pop balm, an album stuffed with songs that don't suffer the longstanding complications of that term." And so, even as the band continues to evolve and becomes amorphous, there's still that argument about what pop can be at its core. This is just the beginning of that conversation captured on tape.

TRACK LISTING

1.HeyMami
2. DreamyBruises
3. CouldIBe
4 .Wolf
5. Dress
6. H.S.K.T.
7. Coffee
8. Uncatena
9. PlayItRight
10. ComeDown