Magdalena Bay are bringing back the heady concept album. Much of contemporary pop music is concerned with past trauma, astrological signs, and capital-V Vulnerability, and it feels like ridiculously conceptual pop music has fallen to the wayside in lieu of self-mythologization and not-so-subtle autobiography. On the other hand, the pop duo comprising Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin made a record about a character named True, whose body rejects a “disk upgrade” forced into their forehead by aliens, designed to bridge the speculative connections between humans and apes. Or something like that.

When John Davis penned the cocky yet humbling line “Look at me, I can write a melody/ But I can’t expect a soul to care” back in the mid-’90s, he never imagined that the tune in which it appeared would become a song that a lot of people care about.

Twangy indie rock is in full swing this year. Waxahatchee returned with her new album Tigers Blood in March; next month sees the release of Allegra Krieger’s Art Of The Unseen Infinity Machine and MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks. Enter Merce Lemon, a Pittsburgh native whose third LP Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild also arrives in September. The sweeping second single “Backyard Lover” is a grief-stricken yet sunlit sprawl bursting with charged guitars and melancholy pedal steel, and lucky for us, the rest of the record is just as compelling.

I’ve always thought of Horse Jumper Of Love songs as charms. To the average person, they appear pretty but mundane; to someone who notices their hidden magic, they’re cosmic and one-of-a-kind. Since their beloved 2016 self-titled debut, the Boston group — made up of vocalist and guitarist Dimitri Giannopoulos, bassist John Margaris, and drummer James Doran — has been a reliable source of enchanting, idiosyncratic slowcore that’s distorted enough to be considered shoegaze. In the past few years, they’ve remained unstoppable; 2022 saw the release of their third studio album Natural Part, 2023 had the mini-album Heartbreak Rules, and now another album titled Disaster Trick is on its way.

Flower Face is more than just a musician. Montreal’s Ruby McKinnon has been building up the mythology around her upcoming album with Polaroids, drink recipes, a loveline, and poems. Girl Prometheus, the follow-up to her 2022 breakthrough The Shark In Your Water, is as intense and magical as its name suggests, containing 10 dynamic songs that explore the extremes of heartbreak and desire.

Beatrice Laus, or Beabadoobee, started out as an indie-rock wunderkind. She was a 17-year-old Pavement and Elliott Smith superfan when her debut single “Coffee” got her signed to Dirty Hit, the label run by the 1975 manager Jamie Oborne; by the time she released her debut album Fake It Flowers two years later in 2020, she was nominated for a Brit Award and had done heavy touring across Europe and North America. The slightly more experimental follow-up Beatopia in 2022 firmed her place in the upper echelons of singer-songwriter pop; most recently, you may have seen her as one of the handpicked openers for Taylor Swift’s US Eras Tour.

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

Jeff Rosenstock never seems to stop moving. I don’t mean that he’s fidgety or distractable. In fact, he’s overwhelmingly present when you speak to him. He never gets sidetracked or checks his phone. He’s sincerely nice; the word undersells how welcoming his presence is, but it’s the right word.

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

Every artist has a set of recurring tropes, and for ML Buch it’s a few very specific images: a body falling apart then coming back together again; light bouncing from a reflective surface (particularly glints of sun on the sea). They are regular fixtures across her work, and possibly always will be. “It’s nice to have these eternally, some elements or props or fragments that keep being relevant to me,” she told me recently at a Cuban café in Los Angeles, though she has “no interest in understanding” why she keeps gravitating towards them. It’s been 10 months since she released Suntub, her masterpiece, and she has no interest in understanding that either. “I was singing about the ‘film of sky’, whatever that is,” she said.

French philosopher Georges Bataille wrote in his 1949 essay The Cruel Practice Of Art that art “puts us on the path of complete destruction and suspends us there for a time, [offering] us ravishment without death.” Each song on Martha Skye Murphy’s new album Um inches closer and closer to obliteration. Not only does the London singer-songwriter elude genre, but her music sounds as if it’s echoing from another realm.

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

“Jesus Christ, I’m 26,” Dan Campbell screamed on the Wonder Years’ “Passing Through A Screen Door,” perhaps the earliest onset of midlife crisis ever captured in pop music. Dedicating one’s life to any kind of band certainly magnifies a sense of arrested development when friends are getting married, having kids, and owning homes, exponentially so when that band plays pop-punk. With COVID and social media accelerationism irrevocably warping our relationship with the passage of time, it’s unsurprising that someone in 2024 can feel like their life is already over by their junior year of college. Having spent nearly half his 20 years immersed in the depths of Wikipedia and Discogs, Holden Wolf admits, “I straight up don’t know how to be normal.” And that panic is the main driver of Combat’s Stay Golden, a classically bombastic pop-punk opus about the futility of existence.

While Aaron Maine talks about the new Porches album Shirt over Zoom, the audio lags, his digitized voice disembodied and misaligned with his video as he lies in bed. It feels like a perfect metaphor for the off-kilter aura of the songs, the glitchy discomfort that makes them alluring. Shirt doesn’t arrive until September, but the compelling singles “Rag,” “Joker,” and “Itch” are enough to prove this thrillingly strange atmosphere. It’s a big leap from his previous material — his strongest stuff yet.

When I’m Called is Jake Xerxes Fussell’s fifth album, but it exists in a stream of musical consciousness that began practically with his birth. Raised by folklorist parents in Columbus, Georgia, the singer and guitarist was inculcated in a social circle that included luminaries like George Mitchell and Art Rosenbaum, the latter of whom took a young Fussell under his wing. Traditional music, folk art, field recording, local history — all were a routine part of his upbringing, as ordinary as little-league baseball or summer camp. “My parents never forced any of that stuff on me,” Fussell is quick to note. “I was just exposed to it.”

Ben Seretan can’t just go around calling Allora his “insane Italy record” without elaborating on both the “insane” and “Italy” part. “It’s kind of a long story,” he sighs – not the “it’s kind of a long story” used as a deflection when the teller knows both they and the listener will be bored out of their minds if recall lasts more than 15 seconds. The earliest iteration of Allora’s electrifying krautrock freakout “New Air” dates back to 2012, when Seretan was just one of many “DIY idiots living in Bushwick” trying to make the scene at 285 Kent and Glasslands. In the time since, there has been unexpected indie fame in the Alpine region of Europe, scammy booking agents, life-altering breakups, devastating deaths, 24-hour ambient albums, a rousing breakthrough released into the gaping maw of early COVID, demolition derbies, dairy farm drag parties, outdoor raves and naked barn dances. Fittingly enough, the story ends in a place called Climax, New York.

In Cormac McCarthy’s 2017 essay “The Kekulé Problem,” the late novelist defines the subconscious as “a machine for operating an animal.” He goes into detail about the German organic chemist August Kekulé, who was puzzled over the molecular structure for benzene until Kekulé’s dreams solved it for him. In his sleep, a visual representation materialized: an ouroboros, a snake perpetually feeding on its own tail. According to McCarthy, the scientist awoke with a start, saying to himself: “It’s a ring. The molecule is in the form of a ring.” It leads the author to wonder, “Why is the unconscious so loath to speak to us?” Broken down to its core components, the subconscious is pure impulse with no potential hindrances. It’s instinct. A pure gut feeling.

Eliza McLamb’s face on the cover of her debut album Going Through It is a bit blurry under a layer of water and a cluster of bubbles rippling outward across the surface of the pond. It’s unclear whether she’s going under or coming up for air — an ambiguity that parallels the two tracks that bookend the record. There’s the wide-eyed, childlike curiosity of “Before,” which acts as a sort of prologue to McLamb’s bildungsroman arc, and the half-asleep haze of closer “To Wake Up,” which finds peace and clarity in “unremarkable days” in the wake of a stormy coming-of-age journey.

When we last heard from Peel Dream Magazine, Joe Stevens had basically soft rebooted the project. During the group’s New York years, Peel Dream had been Stevens’ vehicle for exploring a host of moodier psychedelic traditions, from krautrock to shoegaze. During the pandemic, he decamped to Los Angeles, and in 2022 he re-emerged with Pad — a concept album about him getting kicked out of his own band, now set to jazz- and country-tinged baroque-pop fixated on ’60s harmonies and Beach Boys melodies. Now, another two years down the road, Stevens is set to return with Rose Main Reading Room. It’s his first release for Topshelf Records, and, once more, it’s a whole new Peel Dream Magazine.

“Could you ever live anywhere but New York?” I am sometimes asked, by people who know that I have spent more than three decades in the city that may occasionally sleep but which never gets less expensive. My response is usually, “Probably, but I could live without a limb or two as well.” Being here is that important to me. I am a sucker for songs and videos that evoke the place: Interpol’s eternal “NYC” – “The subway is a porno, the pavements they are a mess” — or Vampire Weekend’s lyric video for “Step,” with its images of Astor Place and Washington Square Park, my college-days stomping grounds.

Solid Sound is not like other festivals. It’s at an art museum: the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, in North Adams, MA. It’s relatively small, with a capacity of about 8,000 people per day. And it’s entirely centered around Wilco – not just as the headliners, but as hosts and curators. It’s a festival as a sonic dinner party, with the band giving its fans not just its own music but other artists its members want to share with everyone. This year that includes Jason Isbell And The 400 Unit as the second headliner, as well as such bands as Dry Cleaning, Nick Lowe and Los Straitjackets, Ratboys, Iris Dement and Water From Your Eyes.

To borrow a tired refrain from the early COVID era, we’re now living through ~unprecedented times~. A former US president was convicted of 34 felonies. AI is ruining the internet. And a one-man slam-metal band influenced by avant-garde classical and free jazz, whose War On Terror-themed music has no lyrics and is sung by a drummer strapped with a headset microphone, are now the hottest new band in hardcore.

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

Water From Your Eyes look fried. Anyone who has been on tour knows this moment: Outfits become an array of whatever is vaguely clean, the van somehow looks increasingly like one of those old “battle-damaged” action figures, and time becomes both more tangible and completely meaningless, as your life is scheduled down to the minute but every day and every city bleed into one another. This is more or less the state I find Rachel Brown and Nate Amos in when we meet on a corner in Salt Lake City, on a bright Sunday following some long festival nights. By the end of our conversation I’ll ask them if we missed anything. Brown will drawl a joking reply: “If I said anything stupid I’d rather have it reflect on my lack of sleep than my intelligence.”

Baltimore’s hardcore scene, once the precocious little sibling of the one in DC, has become the spiritual capital of the genre in America. Maybe it’s just that punks will always chase cheaper rents, but the Maryland city just north of Minor Threat’s birthplace has produced a disproportionate number of the 21st century’s essential hardcore bands. The boom that arguably started with the founding of Trapped Under Ice in 2007 has continued unabated ever since, through feminist firebrands War On Women, TUI spinoffs Turnstile and Angel Du$t, and younger upstarts like End It, Jivebomb, and Sinister Feeling. The latest addition to that proud lineage is Doubt, whose first proper EP, Held In Contempt, is announced today alongside the release of “The Hard Way.” Like so many of their scenemates, they’re a band of Baltimore transplants who found themselves intoxicated by the energy of their adopted hometown.

salvia palth is back.

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

When most 20-year-old kids start making music, they do something that all young men can justifiably understand: They play girls their new songs. Some do it to impress; some do it because they are eager to get a woman’s read on things. The Alabama rapper Yhapojj does it because he is in love with someone. He calls her his baby mama, even though they have no children together. And, if you’re wondering, she seems to love Yhapojj’s stuff as much as the underground does. “She damn near always listening to it,” Yhapojj says, smiling. “Everything about her makes me fall in love. It’s the connection. We’re like twins.”

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

Tyler Jordan learned a lot of hard lessons from 15 mostly futile years trying to make a go of this indie rock thing, but few were more valuable than “say what you actually mean.” “If I’m writing a song to someone or about someone, I’d like them to know that,” he explains. And as excited as we are about Lived Here For A While, I can think of a few people who would not call Good Looks’ sophomore album “highly anticipated” – Christian fundamentalists, Jordan’s ex-girlfriend, his ex-bandmate, and even his own mother are all put on notice, often by name. Yet, when we speak about a month prior to the album’s release — it’s out this Friday via Keeled Scales — Jordan only regrets his words towards his least sympathetic targets: the joggers and farmers market merchants and tech developers who turned Austin into a place he had to leave after spending nearly half of his 37 years there.

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

To echo one of the most contentiously discussed articles on this website, GIFT are a band. But that wasn’t as apparent on the New York outfit’s 2022 record, Momentary Presence, a solid debut that more or less functioned as a solo project for vocalist-guitarist TJ Freda. Not that Freda necessarily wanted to isolate himself to make that album, but it was more so born out of, to put it euphemistically, extenuating circumstances.

It’s not uncommon for musicians to use something — beers, booze, drug binges — to take the edge off before a performance. Those vices are well and good for Couch Slut’s Megan Osztrosits, but she prefers the all-encompassing numbness that only self-inflicted head trauma can provide. For her, this usually takes the form of repeatedly bashing herself in the skull with her microphone until blood drips down her face. “From the first note, I’m blacking out and going somewhere else,” she explained during our conversation at Roadburn, an annual festival celebrating heavy music in Tilburg, a Dutch city best known for its university and a beautifully weird Brothers Grimm-based amusement park. “It’s out of body.”

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

“Never knew a different life/ Because no one was there to show her,” rapped North Carolina’s Rapsody with real purpose on the underrated 2012 song “In The Town.”

For someone renowned for delivering raps in a crackly purr, it feels kind of strange to hear Hempstead, Long Island’s Roc Marciano even slightly raise his voice.

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.