Lael Neale has released a new single called ‘Electricity’. The track was produced and arranged by longtime collaborator Guy Blakeslee. Check out its self-directed video below.
“I wrote the song during an ice storm a couple of winters ago that caused a 5-day power outage while I was living on my family’s farm in Virginia,” Neale explained in a statement. “I experienced intense withdrawal from all these things we’ve come to depend on so heavily in our modern life – like lighting, heat, refrigeration, and entertainment. I felt a range of sensations from utter emptiness to complete liberation. I realized we’re essentially electrified beings now, but through unplugging entirely we have a chance to gain a new perspective and reset ourselves.”
Minneapolis trio Heart to Gold have announced a new album, Free Help, which will drop on November 15. The 10-track LP was recorded with Grammy-nominated producer Will Yip and will be released on his label, Memory Music. The new single ‘TNT’ arrives today along with a music video directed by Johnny Nguyen. Check it out and find the album cover and tracklist below.
Free Help Cover Artwork:
Free Help Tracklist:
1. Surrounded
2. TNT
3. Can’t Feel Me
4. Mother Falcon
5. Mostly
6. Belonging (Slow)
7. Get It Back
8. Pandora
9. Blow Up The Spot
10. F#
Trace Mountains, the project of LVL UP’s Dave Benton, has announced a new album, Into the Burning Blue, which drops September 27 via Lame-O. The follow-up to 2021’s HOUSE OF CONFUSION is led by the single ‘In a Dream’, which you can hear below.
Benton worked on the new album with Craig Hendrix (Japanese Breakfast). “From the start of the record-making process, Craig and I envisioned ‘In A Dream’ as the opening track,” he explained. “On an album that is largely auto-biographical and very personal in nature, it felt vital to begin in a place with a bit of worldview. Especially now, in an election year in the US, I think it’s meaningful to acknowledge the state-inflicted suffering and denial of life that happens here and all over the world. There are so many kinds of Dreams, some are nightmares, some are fantasies, some are very real hopes for one’s future. With “In A Dream” I wanted to explore the universal idea of Dreams – the ones that come at night and the day, what they mean, and who gets to have them.”
Into the Burning Blue Cover Artwork:
Into the Burning Blue Tracklist:
1. In A Dream
2. Hard to Accept
3. Friend
4. Ponies
5. Crawling Back To You
6. Gone & Done
7. Melt
8. Cry Cry Cry
9. Won’t Go Home
Kal Marks have announced a new album, Wasteland Baby, which lands September 13 on Exploding in Sound. Today’s announcement comes with the release of the lead single ‘Insects’. Check it out below, along with the album cover and tracklist.
“We really wanted the album to have a good flow so we treated it like a movie,” the band’s Carl Shane explained in press materials. “I would storyboard everything and find common threads in the words. I always kept notebooks on me to write lyrics, notes on the production, and just my overall feelings. Some days were really fruitful, some were filled with writer’s block and sleepless nights. Some of the songs I kind of hallucinated. I don’t know how to fully explain it, but it felt surreal. At times I even felt I was losing my mind and hearing voices.”
“‘Insects’ was an excruciating song to get right,” Shane commented on the new single. “We were listening to a lot more danceable music at the time. Anything from Depeche Mode, Giorgio Moroder, ‘Rhythm Nation’ by Janet Jackson, Cerone and DAF. We wanted to make something danceable and poppy but have it make sense in our world. We also loved the duality a lot of this music had with dark lyrical themes with upbeat propulsive rhythms. It’s a grim tune to tap your feet to. A lot of frustration in it.”
Of the accompanying video, director William Hart added:
I listened to the song probably 420 times while walking my dog and then I would come home and would put on The X Files and then some old reruns of Cops. I have this hatred for authority and oppression that the lyrics easily brought out of me. My friend Alex Purifoy listened to me ramble about an idea and helped give me some ideas which turned into this 12 Monkeys/Delicatessen/industrial surreal monster chase scene.
Theres was originally a whole bank heist and car chase story we scaled back but the characters exist in a world under a bridge in a polluted terrorzone.
Wasteland Baby Cover Artwork:
Wasteland Baby Tracklist:
1. Wasteland Baby (Intro)
2. Insects
3. Hard Work Will Get You Nowhere (Motorin)
4. A Functional Earth
5. Any Way It Goes
6. You Are Found
7. Whatever The News
8. Motherfuckers
9. All God’s Children
10. Midnight
11. Wasteland Baby
Coco & Clair Clair have released a new song, ‘Kate Spade’, from their forthcoming album Girl – out August 30. It arrives on the heels of lead single ‘Aggy’. Check it out below.
“‘Kate Spade’ was one of the first songs we finished for the album after a night out in Amsterdam,” the duo explained in a press statement. “It’s a little naughty and a little catty, but overall it’s meant to be uplifting. Big up yourself vibes because there’s always gonna be someone out there who wants what you have.”
Brooklyn’s Oceanator has put out a new single, ‘Drift Away’, which features additional backing vocals from NNAMDÏ. It’s taken from the upcoming LP Everything Is Love and Death, which is out August 30 and includes the already-released ‘Get Out’. Check out a video for it below.
“I had listened to Dopesmoker the night before and was in a sludge-y kind of mood,” Elise Okusami explained in a statement. “The bass was the first thing to come for the song and the whole thing was built around that. Some of the lyrics came right away, too, but the rest was worked out during demo-ing and in the studio. I kind of see this song as like the anchor song of the record, not necessarily in terms of tone but in terms of vibe. The video was all shot when we went to do the album cover photo shoot, and I wanted it to just be a kind of drifting, unsure, nebulous sort of thing. The leapt from a sinking ship to a crumbling pier line was in there early on and kind of sums up the feeling of leaving one unsure and tenuous situation for another. Since I wanted to do kind of just like a talking drone-y thing for myself the whole time, I thought it would be cool to have a guest vocalist on there. NNAMDÏ absolutely killed it. I am so pleased with what he did on the track and I think it really brings it into an even spookier world.”
In the interest of creating wonderful timepieces, Mr Jones Watches added another lovely design to their vast collection of quirky and fun timepieces that entertain us. Focusing on the well-known English idiom ‘a game of cat and mouse’, Mispoes! delivers a precious design that embraces warm hues with lovely illustrations of an orange cat and a tiny mouse, running locked in an endless pursuit around the dial.
Designed by Kaat Deceuninck, the watch comes in a universal size that is suited for all, no matter your wrist size. It includes a reliable Swiss quartz movement and a hard-wearing sapphire glass, making it suitable for daily wear in the office or the park.
Priced at a reasonable £225, the Mispoes! The watch is a unique and affordable timepiece that is not to be missed. It’s captivating, cute, and a typically cool piece by Mr Jones Watches.
“This was one of those songs that arrived in my head fully formed, kind of like it was delivered to me by someone else, and as its conduit I banged around on guitar trying to find where the chords were,” Bollinger said of ‘What’s This About (La La La La)’ in a press release. “It’s sort of an ode to Of Montreal’s Cherry Peel and Apples in Stereo’s Tone Soul Evolution.”
Songs From a Thousand Frames of Mind arrives September 27 via Ghostly International.
The Softies have shared ‘Tiny Flame’, the latest single from their first album in 24 years, The Bed I Made. It follows the previously unveiled ‘California Highway 99’ and ‘I Said What I Said’. “Sometimes the same heat that can set a heart aflame can also burn some shit to the ground,” the duo’s Rose Melberg said of the track in a statement. Listen below.
Canadian indie rockers Nap Eyes have announced a new album called The Neon Gate. The follow-up to 2020’s Snapshot of a Beginner is slated to arrive on October 18 through Paradise of Bachelors and Paper Bag Records. It includes the early singles ‘Feline Race Wave’, ‘Ice Grass Underpass’, and ‘Demons’, and a new track, ‘Passageway’, is out today. Check it out below.
Speaking about ‘Passageway’, bandleader Nigel Chapman said: “I had the last verse of this song written for a long time, along with a bunch of earlier verses that I didn’t like as much that I eventually discarded. One quiet day when I was not doing too much of anything, I started to come up with the lyrics of the earlier verses — just in my head without an instrument or speaking them out loud, which is unusual for me. So the song was generated by this out-of-the-ordinary writing method, but I think this resulted in a song that is pretty different from anything else I’ve written to date.”
The Neon Gate Cover Artwork:
The Neon Gate Tracklist:
1. Eight Tired Starlings
2. Dark Mystery Enigma Bird
3. Demons
4. Feline Wave Race
5. Tangent Dissolve
6. Ice Grass Underpass
7. Passageway
8. I See Phantoms of Hatred and the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness
9. Isolation
