Search Results for:

SUICIDE SQUEEZE

Chastity Belt

Live Laugh Love

    In their decade-plus together, the four-piece Julia Shapiro (guitar, vocals), Lydia Lund (guitar, vocals), Gretchen Grimm (drums, vocals), and Annie Truscott (bass, vocals)—have created a resonant body of work. Live Laugh Love is a natural continuation. Against the bizarre backdrop of the past few years, Chastity Belt remained a supportive space for the members to grow and experiment, drawing on the ingredients most essential to their process since the beginning: authenticity and levity. Recorded over three sessions in as many years (January 2020, November 2021 and 2022), the focus became more about enjoying their time together in the studio than making it feel like work. Their ease and familiarity with engineer Samur Khouja in LA, who also recorded their last album, made for a particularly enjoyable process. Once completed, they returned to renowned engineer Heba Kadry who mastered the album.

    Album opener “Hollow” sets the tone with a gently driving rhythm while guitar layers stream like sun rays through an open car window. A warmth radiates through Shapiro’s voice, even while grappling with feeling lost and stuck. “The older I get,” Shapiro says of the lyrics, “the more I realize that I might just always feel this way, and it’s more about sitting with the feeling and accepting it, rather than trying to fight it.” That wisdom seems to anchor Live Laugh Love. Chastity Belt has never shied from navigating the spectrum of difficult emotions, and an existential thread weaves throughout the subject matter. And yet the songs feel more grounded than ever; there’s a sense of quiet confidence and self-assurance that comes with being less numb and more present. Facing discomfort takes more fortitude, after all.

    Live Laugh Love finds the members in their prime as musicians. Their parts trace intricate patterns over one another, but there’s room to breathe between the layers. Everyone contributes to the writing, sometimes switching instruments, and for the first time, all four members sing a song. It’s never been more apparent that they are creative siblings, cut from the same belt. “We’ve been playing music with each other for over a decade,” says Shapiro, “so it really does feel like we’re all fluent in the same language, and a lot of it just happens naturally.”

    “Laugh” seeks in the balm of friendship, aware of the anticipatory nostalgia that hits during a good time that you’re already missing before it’s gone; the heavier guitar tones on “Chemtrails” streak ominous chord progressions over Grimm’s precision timekeeping, lamenting memories that won’t fade easily. During a transitional time, Truscott came across a note in their phone that read, “it's not hard all day, just sometimes,” which inspired a poignant line in the chorus of “Kool-Aid,” their first song as lead vocalist on a Chastity Belt recording. Another standout, “I-90 Bridge” shines with a silvery melody that soars as Lund belts one of the most resounding moments on the album: “Tell your girlfriend she’s got nothing to fear/I’m set in my head/My body’s a different story.” The track “Blue” saunters nonchalantly with a wink; you can almost hear Shapiro’s smile as she sings “Faking it big time/So I can hit my stride/Man, it feels good to be alive,” channeling early Chastity Belt channeling early ’90s before channeling the late Elliott Smith in a spiral of distortion and insight: “Don’t get upset about it/It’s gonna pass/Tell all your friends about it/They’re gonna laugh.” “We have such a strong sense of each other’s musical inclinations” says Lund. “I think this allows for a lot of playfulness…we can kinda surprise each other, like a good punchline would.”

    STAFF COMMENTS

    Barry says: Jangling indie guitars float beautifully around airy vocal melodies, crafting a beautifully honed noise that lands somewhere between shoegaze, folk and art-rock. Brilliantly inventive throughout, but never shy a melody or two. Lovely stuff.

    TRACK LISTING

    Hollow
    Funny
    Clumsy
    It’s Cool
    Kool-Aid
    Chemtrails
    Blue
    Tethered
    1-90 Bridge
    Laugh
    Like That

    Holy Wave

    Five Of Cups

      Five of Cups opens with the title track, establishing the album’s auditory and thematic modus operandi from the get-go. Holy Wave’s lysergic textural palette is immediately apparent in the song’s woozy synth lead and anti-gravity guitar jangle, but the atypical chord progressions and vocal melody steers the music away from anodyne escapism into a pensive grappling between self-determination and defeatism. Holy Wave continue to ride the wistful and phantasmic train on “Bog Song,” where the members vacillate between swells of austere minor chords and layered electric orchestration. From there, the previously released digital single “Chaparral” plays with the band’s own sense of nostalgia, weaving references of their El Paso past into a tapestry of transcendental triumph.

      Like so much classic album-oriented rock music, the real magic begins to unfold in the latter half of Five of Cups. On “The Darkest Timeline,” Holy Wave recruits their friends Lorena Quintanilla and Alberto Gonzalez from the Baja California, Mexico psych duo Lorelle Meets the Obsolete to add additional ethereal layers to their intoxicating after-mid[1]night grooves. “Nothing in the Dark” functions on a similar principle, using a steady propulsive drum pattern as the bedrock to tape-warbled synths, arpeggiated guitar chords, jet streams of fuzz, and serene vocals. Five of Cups’ ruminations on combating defeat and disappointment are directly confronted on album closer “Happier.” Once again straddling the melodic line between melancholy and breezy sophistication, Holy Wave examines the synthetic construct of happiness in our modern age and how so often the attainment of comfort lacks any true sense of joy. Yet this isn’t some nihilistic dirge. Rather, it translates as a buoyant reminder that the bandwidth of human experience inherently requires peaks and valleys, and that euphoria is often found in the search outside of the familiar.

      STAFF COMMENTS

      Liam says: New one from Holy Wave, 'Five Of Cups' is here to scratch that insatiable indie-psych itch with plenty of woozy synths and trippy guitar passages - top draw!

      TRACK LISTING

      1. Five Of Cups
      2. Bog Song
      3. Chaparral
      4. Path Of Least Resistance
      5. Nothing Is Real
      6. Hypervigilance
      7. The Darkest Timeline
      8. Nothing In The Dark
      9. Happier

      Julia, Julia

      Derealization

        Debut Solo Album From Julia Kugel (The Coathangers).

        If you can’t trust yourself, who can you trust?

        This is the crucial question at the core of Julia, Julia, the moniker for Julia Kugel, founding member of garage punk icons The Coathangers and the dream pop duo Soft Palms. On her first solo full-length album Derealization, Kugel shifts her focus from collaboration and band dynamics towards a singular artistic vision and private self-discovery. Steeped in the beguiling pop elements of her past work, Derealization is a meditative deep dive into the mind of a person struggling to understand a crumbling internal and external world. The album traverses a landscape of ethereal folk, atmospheric deconstructed pop, and dubbed-out country ballads, all centered around straight forward and direct lyrics. This juxtaposition of nebulousness and lucidity gives the album a sense of clarity emerging from the haze, an apt refection of Kugel's personal growth and journey toward self-acceptance.

        Derealization is based on weaving the unreal, unsaid, and unknown into an undulating sonic fabric. Vocal layering and abstract instrumentation convey a blurred desperation to connect to an emotional and psychological focal point. Moody, dark, and sumptuous, the record is a flow chart of Julia Kugel coming into herself as an artist and songwriter. The album finds Julia playing almost all the instruments and taking her first stab at engineering at COMA, her and her husband's home recording studio in Long Beach, CA.

        “You know how touring musicians often speak of whether home is real or tour is real? Well, it can lead you to lose grasp on ‘reality,’ especially when touring is taken away and you are left to wonder if anything was ever real, including yourself. Like you we're just playing a character,” Kugel says of her headspace leading up to the creation of Derealization. “Honestly, I kinda lost it, and through making this record I made peace with it and reconciled myself as a real person. I forgave myself and in turn forgave those around me. The song ‘Forgive Me’ is the apology I wanted to say and to hear. I wrote every song from that place and gained the confidence I was pretending to possess.”

        This raw and personal approach to the lyrics is present throughout Derealization. On the opening track "I Want You," Kugel creates a woozy sense of space with reverb-soaked drums and spaghetti western guitars while she lists off her desires for a mysterious “you.” Is she actually listing off her desires for herself? For the people around her? As she repeats "do you feel it?" in the song’s chorus, it feels as if she’s conjuring a magical thread by which we are all connected, showing us how our desires are all the same. On "Fever In My Heart" the listener is treated to a lush, acoustic techno track detailing the exhilarating madness of an emotional breakdown. Simple truths percolate to the surface on "Words Don't Mean Much,” as if clearing away the murk of platitudes and empty gestures. The journey continues on the detached and conflicted "Do It Or Don't,” an alluring walk through the winding road of lonely choices.

        The name for the project Julia, Julia is a look in the mirror, a refection of what is hidden and unanswered, of what is real and what is transient. The experience of living life not as you planned it but as it unfolded, and the mysterious, magical pain that creates meaning.

        TRACK LISTING

        1. I Want You
        2. Forgive Me
        3. Impromptu
        4. Fever In My Heart
        5. Words Don’t Mean Much
        6. Do It Or Don't
        7. No Hard Feelings
        8. Big Talkin'
        9. Paper Cutout
        10. Where Did You Go
        11. Corner Town

        The Coathangers

        Suck My Shirt - 2022 Reissue

          Suck My Shirt is the fourth studio album by the Atlanta-based all-female punk rock band The Coathangers. It was released in 2014. Mark Deming of AllMusic writes, 'their approach to songcraft has matured and tightened up quite a bit, and the departure of keyboard player Candice Jones has turned this group into a leaner and meaner three piece. "It's a balance between overthinking and just going for it," guitarist Crook Kid (Julia Kugel) says of their songwriting strategy. It's a duality immediately apparent with the album opener "Follow Me." It's a classic Coathangers tune with Stephanie Luke's raspy vocals belted out over their signature ragged garage-rock. . But the chorus opens into one of the most accessible hooks in the band's canon, just before segueing into the next verse with a squall of violent dissonant guitar.

          TRACK LISTING

          1. Follow Me
          2 Shut Up
          3. Springfield Cannonball
          4. Merry Go Round
          5. Love Em And Leave Em
          6. Zombie
          7. Smother
          8. Dead Battery
          9. Adderall
          10. Derek's Song
          11. I Wait
          12. Drive

          These Arms Are Snakes

          Duct Tape & Shivering Crows

            Over the course of their seven-year run back in the ‘00s, These Arms Are Snakes covered a lot of territory, both in terms of actual miles spent on the road and in terms of their creative bandwidth. Though the band was often mistaken for a typical non sequitur-named screamo out­t or another “animal” indie band, the Seattle group quickly de­ed expectations and garnered a reputation for subverting the popular underground sounds of time. The group cultivated a small but fervent fanbase across multiple continents with their signature combination of synth-infused noise rock, bad-trip psychedelia, ‑amboyant proto-metal boogie, and unhinged basement-show hardcore before imploding at the end of 2009.

            And while These Arms Are Snakes’ full-length albums remain ­tting testaments to the band’s frantic urgency and stylistic ‑uidity, there is a treasure trove of deep cuts buried on b-sides and split releases that further reinforce their position as one of the weirdest and wildest acts of the decade. For the fi­rst time, those rarities and one-offs have been compiled into a cohesive overview of These Arms Are Snakes’ lifespan on the double LP Duct Tape & Shivering Crows.

            STAFF COMMENTS

            Barry says: The inimitable TAAS return for a final outing of lesser-publicised extras and b-sides. With every bit of the grinding groove of their earlier full-length LP's, this collection shows what an incendiary and unique musical force they were, and shows off some of the tragically overlooked gems from their oeuvre.

            TRACK LISTING

            1. Meet Your Mayor
            2. Camera Shy
            3. Trix
            4. Energy Drink And The Long Walk Home
            5. Heart Shaped Box
            6. Washburn
            7. Old Paradise
            8. Payday Loans
            9. Hook On This
            10. Riding The Grape Dragon
            11. Run It Through The Dog
            12. Diggers Of Ditches Everywhere
            13. The Blue Rose

            Ty Segall

            Sentimental Goblin EP

              It’s tough to keep up with garage rock’s wunderkind Ty Segall. Between his steady release schedule of LPs, raucous side projects like Fuzz and GØGGS, and collaborations with fellow songwriters Mikal Cronin and Tim Presley, it’s as if a season can’t pass without Segall dropping a new record. And that’s not even taking his cassettes, splits, and EPs into consideration. Fortunately, Segall’s bottomless well of creativity, production savvy, and boundless fascination with the various niches of the rock world makes every new release an occasion to celebrate. Suicide Squeeze Records is proud to offer the latest entry in Ty’s impressive canon with the Sentimental Goblin 7”. Side A features “Pan”, a fuzz-soaked proto-metal jam that links Beatles’ pioneering guitar dirge “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” to later lurch classics by Sir Lord Baltimore and Pentagram. In true Segall fashion, he switches gears on side B and conjures the erudite pop appeal of T. Rex and Bowie with the lush glam rocker “Black Magick”. Suicide Squeeze Records is proud to release Sentimental Goblin to the world on March 17, 2017. 

              The Coathangers

              The Devil You Know

                In their early years, Atlanta trio The Coathangers were very much of the classic punk ethos—the band was a live entity, and the records were a document of the charisma and chaos projected from stage. But after 12 years of relentlessly touring on a steady flow of EPs and LPs, The Coathangers finally took a moment to recalibrate before diving into the creation of their sixth studio album The Devil You Know. The band regrouped to make an album that captures all the vitality of their early years while honing their individual strengths into new communal achievements. It’s a record that takes their established takes on vitriolic punk, playful house-party anthems, and heartworn ballads and melds them into a new sound that retains all their former live show glories while revealing a new level of songwriting and nuance. “The writing process was done with an open heart,” says guitarist/vocalist Julia Kugel. “Everything that came before had to go away. And we started there, at ground zero.” With each album, you could hear the individual songwriters honing their style. But with The Devil You Know, it feels like we’re hearing the first Coathangers record written as a true unit.

                TRACK LISTING

                1. Bimbo
                2. 5 Farms
                3. Crimson Telephone
                4. Hey Buddy
                5. Step Back
                6. Stranger Danger
                7. F The NRA
                8. Memories
                9. Last Call
                10. Stasher
                11. Lithium

                L.A. Witch

                Play With Fire

                  Where L.A. Witch's self-titled album oozed with vibe and atmosphere, with the whole mix draped in reverb, sonically placing the band in some distant realm, broadcast across some unknown chasm of time, Play With Fire comes crashing out of the gate with a bold, brash, in-your-face rocker “Fire Starter.” The authoritative opener is a deliberate mission statement.

                  “Play With Fire is a suggestion to make things happen,” says Sanchez. “Don’t fear mistakes or the future. Take a chance. Say and do what you really feel, even if nobody agrees with your ideas. These are feelings that have stopped me in the past. I want to inspire others to be freethinkers even if it causes a little burn.” And by that line of reasoning, “Fire Starter” becomes a call to action, an anthem against apathy. From there, the album segues into the similarly bodacious rocker “Motorcycle Boy” a feisty love song inspired by classic cinema outlaws like Mickey Rourke, Marlon Brando, and Steve McQueen. At track three, we hear L.A. Witch expand into new territories as “Dark Horse” unfurls a mixture of dustbowl folk, psychedelic breakdowns, and fire-and-brimstone organ lines. And from there, the band only gets more adventurous.

                  Play With Fire is a bold new journey that retains L.A. Witch’s siren-song mystique, nostalgic spirit, and contemporary cool. Despite the stylistic breadth of the record, there is a unifying timbre across the album’s nine tracks, as if the trio of young musicians is bound together as a collective of old souls tapping into the sounds of their previous youth.

                  TRACK LISTING

                  1. Fire Starter
                  2. Motorcycle Boy
                  3. Dark Horse
                  4. I Wanna Lose
                  5. Gen-Z
                  6. Sexorexia
                  7. Maybe The Weather
                  8. True Believers
                  9. Starred

                  The Paranoyds

                  Carnage Bargain

                    “Mega model Staz Lindes’ buzzy four-piece is creating the L.A. DIY scene’s most richly layered punk sounds of the moment.” - i-D // “Their take no-prisoners fury and snarky sing-song choruses have quickly made them local favorites in the DIY and indie scene.” – Noisey // Los Angeles punk quartet The Paranoyds channel revelry and revulsion into their debut album Carnage Bargain - a raucous blend of garage rock grit, new wave swagger, horror film soundtrack campiness, and a myriad of other influences. The Paranoyds' beginnings can be traced back to a friendship forged between Staz Lindes and Laila Hashemi in their teens. With the additions of Lexi Funston and David Ruiz, the band found the personnel for their sonic balance of jubilant energy and foreboding undercurrents. Carnage Bargain captures this chemistry through guitar-and-keyboard, genre-mashing weirdness on "Laundry," the fever-dream kitsch of B-52s on "Ratboy," krautrock's motorik groove on "Hungry Sam", and Blondie on the sweet-and-salty highlight "Courtney." Title track "Carnage Bargain" is a perfect example of the band delivering scathing lyrical observations under the guise of a quirky pop hook. The notion of rejecting the status quo and creating your own destiny is evident on the lead single "Girlfriend Degree," which the band calls an ode to "being a badass woman who's taking time to make sure she's doing things for herself." The band may be paranoid, but they offer a solution to our modern ills through the act of being an inspiring, independent, and unflappable force. 

                    TRACK LISTING

                    1. Face First
                    2. Carnage Bargain
                    3. Girlfriend Degree
                    4. Egg Salad
                    5. Bear
                    6. Hungry Sam
                    7. Courtney
                    8. Laundry
                    9. Heather Doubtfire
                    10. Ratboy

                    SadGirl

                    Water

                      With their new album Water, Los Angeles trio SadGirl taps into the romantic and nostalgic spirit of their native city while exuding a time-tested authenticity suggesting they’ve had a peek behind the curtain of the glitzy boulevards and relentless sunshine. It’s a collection of breezy pop songs captured with the timbre of old-time recording techniques. Songs like “Little Queenie” touch upon the yesteryear reverberations and longing of a Ken Boothe ballad. Similarly, a tormented love song like “Miss Me” transports the listener back to slow dances at a previous generation’s sock hop, only to be subverted by a chorus of “miss me with that bullshit.”

                      It’s as if guitarist/vocalist Misha Lindes, drummer David Ruiz, and bassist Dakota Peterson want to conjure an idealized past only to remind us of innocence lost. “If you want to learn about water, go to the desert.” It’s a piece of wisdom that made an impact on Lindes. “Here we are in Los Angeles, a desert, ping-ponging between drought and El Niño. This record is an attempt to share a small portion of my experience growing up and living here,” said Lindes. “It’s basically about the fluidity of water and its power and importance.” “L.A.’s SadGirl make slow and hazy pop perfect for your summer soundtrack” 

                      TRACK LISTING

                      1. The Ocean
                      2. Chlorine
                      3. Hazelnut Coffee
                      4. Miss Me
                      5. Breakfast For 2
                      6. Little Queenie
                      7. Mulholland
                      8. Strange Love
                      9. Avalon
                      10. Water

                      Guantanamo Baywatch

                      Desert Center

                      Guantanamo Baywatch’s new album ‘Desert Center’ opens with ‘Conquistador’, an instrumental track displaying enough fretboard savvy and fiery twang to make The Challengers proud. However, any notion that Guantanamo Baywatch are strictly adhering to one facet of rock ‘n’ roll’s classic era is dispelled by the soulful swagger and unabashed pop of ‘Neglect’.

                      It’s an inadvertent juxtaposition maintained through the entirety of ‘Desert Center’, with blazing instrumental nuggets like ‘The Scavenger’ alternating with the proto-grunge and golden oldies mash-up of a track like ‘Blame Myself’.

                      Like their 2015 album ‘Darling… It’s Too Late’, ‘Desert Center’ was primarily tracked in Atlanta at Living Room Recording with Justin McNeight and Ed Rawls, with Jason Powell doing the bulk of the guitar tracks on his own at Jungle Muscle Studios.

                      While Guantanamo Baywatch initially made a name for themselves with their early blown-out recordings, ‘Desert Center’ retains the raw aesthetics of a Hasil Adkins single but has the added heft and thump afforded by a modern studio. This balance is perhaps best captured on ‘Video’, where bassist Chevelle Wiseman drives the tune with a thick, throbbing riff while drummer Chris Scott ruthlessly pounds his kit with a crashing clarity guaranteed to please even the most snobby analogue audiophile.

                      TRACK LISTING

                      Conquistador
                      Neglect
                      The Scavenger
                      Mesa, AZ
                      Interlude #1
                      Witch Stomp
                      Blame Myself
                      Area 69
                      Video
                      Interlude #2
                      The Australian

                      ‘Gift Of Life’, the first proper full length by VHS, follows in the footsteps of their previous EPs, with the band self-recording their amalgam of Lost Sounds’ trashy discontent, early Big Black’s trebly guitar stabs and ‘Only Theatre Of Pain’-era Christian Death’s black reverberations. These are brash and bitter territories to occupy but the band sees no other choice for their musical direction, citing the daily grind as the impetus behind their music.

                      The harsh reality of frontman Josh Hageman’s day-today existence working on the periphery of the medical field played a direct role in the overall theme of the album. Those fatalistic views and medical themes are on full display on ‘Wheelchair’, where a punk pulse underscores Hageman’s harrowing description of a life lived in chronic pain with drugs serving as the only escape.

                      The album continues on to ‘Hospital Room’, where wiry guitar leads and ominous chords provide the soundtrack to a scene of misery and tragedy within the sanitized walls of Western medicine.

                      Elsewhere, the themes of addiction and exposure take on more universal themes, such as on the culturegorging lament of ‘Binge Everything’ or the panopticon-paranoia of ‘Public Act’.

                      TRACK LISTING

                      Fully Realized
                      Wheelchair
                      Hospital Room
                      Public Act
                      Crooked Echo
                      Binge Everything
                      Art Decay
                      Constant Hiss

                      On ‘Visits’, Tammar pulls off a pretty incredible trick with each and every one of its post-punk anthems. They mine the classic sounds of paranoia, malaise and misanthropy (Joy Division, The Velvet Underground, The Fall and early 90s alt-rock) and fill it all with so much exuberance and joy of playing that each song becomes a triumph over anxiety and ennui.

                      TRACK LISTING

                      1. Heavy Tonight
                      2. Summer Fun
                      3. The Last Line
                      4. Deep Witness
                      5. Arrows Underwater
                      6. Yung Jun
                      7. Frost Meter

                      The Magic Musicians

                      The Magic Musicians

                        This Seattle band features John Atkins (764-Hero) and Joe Plummer (Black Heart Procession) and are recommended if you like Quasi, the Replacements, 764-Hero and the Blues Explosion. They reach to stretch the elastic of modern indie-pop music while adding an appreciative nod to the SST-era of punk rock when Husker Du and the Minutemen were kings. Aggressive where it needs to be, loose when it should be, the Magicians second self-titled album matures and furthers what was started on 2001's "Girls" and shows that the band's got plenty more to offer.


                        Latest Pre-Sales

                        158 NEW ITEMS

                        E-newsletter —
                        Sign up
                        Back to top