Cheekface are back with a new single called ‘The Fringe’. It follows the Los Angeles trio’s 2022 album Too Much to Ask, and you can check it out below.
Speaking about the origins of the song, singer Greg Katz explained in a statement: “Me and Mandy were trying to wrestle with the feeling that success in your career or field kind of feels like selling out, even if you don’t think you’re knowingly capitulating to the demands of later capitalism. Like, work, or art, or whatever, feels somehow more authentic, or just better, if other people don’t like it, or if you’re failing. And maybe it feels like a badge of honor to just reject success altogether, and because of that, there’s maybe an impulse to self-sabotage, like, to do things on purpose that you know will not succeed. Also this song has a nice guitar solo in my opinion, although I am biased, because I played it.”
Y La Bamba have announced that their new album, Lucha, will be released on April 28 via Tender Loving Empire. Lead single ‘Dibujos de Mi Alma’ is out today, and you can hear it below.
“This song was written for a romantic partner right before the shutdown in 2020,” Y La vocalist and producer Luz Elena Mendoza Ramos said of ‘Dibujos de Mi Alma’ in a press release. “It’s a song of longing for this person but at the same time trying to detach myself from the unhealthy parts of connection.”
“I’ve been wanting to let whatever feels natural—with rhythm and musical instruments like congas and singing – to just let it be, in the way that I’m trying to invoke in myself,” Mendoza Ramos added of Lucha, which reflects “the continuing process of learning how to exercise my producing skills. I have so many words, ideas to work with all the time, and the hardest part for me has been learning to trust my gut. And figuring out how I work best, and with who.”
Y La Bamba’s last LP was 2019’s Mujeres.
Lucha Cover Artwork:
Lucha Tracklist:
1. Eight
2. Dibujos de Mi Alma
3. La Lluvia de Guadalajara
4. Collapse
5. Hues [feat. Devendra Banhart]
6. Nunca
7. I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry
8. Ceniza
9. Damned
10. Manos
11. Walk Along
Jeff Tweedy shared his rendition of the labor anthem ‘Union Maid’, written by Woody Guthrie. It appears as a bonus track for the soundtrack to Jesse Eisenberg’s When You Finish Saving the World, the A24 coming-of-age drama starring Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard. Give it a listen below.
The When You Finish Saving the World soundtrack features original music by Finn Wolfhard and Jesse Eisenberg as well as a score by composer Emile Mosseri. In a statement, Eisenberg said: “Emile is a genius. The idea behind the score is that when Ziggy’s on the screen it’s almost a manifestation of his persona, so the instruments have this certain tonal feel like they’re emerging out of cheap equipment. Of course, Evelyn’s soundtrack is all classical because that’s all she listens to and is what’s in her head. What makes it fun is that these sounds compete with each other throughout the movie, depending on who is dominating a particular scene.”
Death Cab for Cutie have shared a cover of Low’s ‘The Plan’, from 1996’s The Curtain Hits the Cast, as a tribute to the late Mimi Parker. It appears on a just-announced acoustic reworking of their 2022 album Asphalt Meadows, which includes a new version of ‘Pepper’. Listen to both tracks blow.
“I first saw Low in 1994 opening for Sunny Day Real Estate at the OK Hotel in Seattle,” Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard said in a statement. “Since then, they’ve been one of the most influential and important bands of my life. It was the fulfillment of my teenage self’s indie rock dream when our bands became friends while on tour together in 2012. We were incredibly saddened by Mimi’s passing this past November. She was an incredible artist and an even better human being. We believe the best way to remember the musicians we lose is to play their songs. ‘The Plan’ has always been one of our favorite Low songs and is presented here in tribute to Mimi.”
Asphalt Meadows (Acoustic) is set for release on March 10. Death Cab for Cutie are currently touring in support of Asphalt Meadows, and later this year they’ll be co-headlining with Gibbard’s other band, the Postal Service.
Asphalt Meadows (Acoustic) Cover Artwork:
Asphalt Meadows (Acoustic) Tracklist:
1. I Don’t Know How I Survive (Acoustic)
2. Roman Candles (Acoustic)
3. Asphalt Meadows (Acoustic)
4. Rand McNally (Acoustic)
5. Here to Forever (Acoustic)
6. Foxglove Through The Clearcut (Acoustic)
7. Pepper (Acoustic)
8. I Miss Strangers (Acoustic)
9. Wheat Like Waves (Acoustic)
10. Fragments From the Decade (Acoustic)
11. I’ll Never Give Up On You (Acoustic)
12. The Plan
Frankie Rose has unveiled the new single ‘Sixteen Ways’, which will appear on her forthcoming LP Love As Projection. Following lead cut ‘Anything’, the track comes paired with a video created by Scott Kiernan. Check it out below.
Speaking about the new single, Rose said in a press release: “Counting the ways that things can unexpectedly fall apart on you before anything has even happened. It’s about getting your hopes up, but simultaneously making lists in your head about how it will never work out in your favour.”
She added: “I wanted to make a dance video choreographed by 80s Baby (Neil Shwartz) but with the ESPTV (Scott Kiernan) aesthetic. I trusted them completely and just let them create a world for me. The result is a video that feels like a fever dream in the black lodge complete with my very own machine elves.”
Geese have returned with a new single, ‘Cowboy Nudes’, the band’s first new music since their 2021 debut Projector. The track arrives with a video co-directed by Andy Swartz and frontman Cameron Winter. Watch and listen below.
Talking about ‘Cowboy Nudes’, Winter said in a statement: “The song is about life getting better, and more fun, after the end of the world. When we were doing overdubs I wanted to add something Eastern-sounding on the second verse, so I had our drummer Max bring over this busted up sitar we’d had lying around since high school. I went to buy some new strings at a world music store, and the guy told me one pack was $80. I thought he was kidding so I bought two. He was not; sitar strings aren’t cheap. I didn’t even end up fully restringing it, I just played the one not – broken string. So you better appreciate that goddamn sitar on the second verse. I’m also proud of the line about falling in love with a tumbleweed.”
Lael Neale has announced a new album called Star Eaters Delight, which will be out on April 21. It’s her second LP for Sub Pop, following 2021’s Acquainted With Night, and it finds the singer-songwriter continuing her collaboration with producer Guy Blakeslee. Check out a video for the lead single ‘I Am the River’ below, along with the album’s cover art and tracklist.
“Acquainted with Night (recorded in 2019, and released in 2021), was a focusing inward amidst the loud and bright Los Angeles surrounding me,” Neale explained in a statement. “It was an attempt to create spaciousness and quiet reverie within. When I moved back to the farm, I found that the unbroken silences compelled me to break them with sound. This album is more external. It is a reaching back out to the world, wanting to feel connected, to wake up, to come together again.”
1. I Am The River
2. If I Had No Wings
3. Faster Than The Medicine
4. In Verona
5. Must Be Tears
6. No Holds Barred
7. Return To Me Now
8. Lead Me Blind
Seoul-based collective Balming Tiger have released a new track, ‘Trust Yourself’. It was produced by Balming Tiger members bj wnjn and Unsinkable and features vocal turns from Omega Sapien, Mudd the student, and bj wnjn. The track comes with an accompanying Pennacky-directed video, which you can check out below.
‘Trust Yourself’ arrives ahead of the K-pop supergroup’s debut compilation album, which is due out in the first half of this year.
Alex Lahey has announced her new album, The Answer is Always Yes. The follow-up to 2019’s The Best of Luck Club is due out May 19 via Liberation. Lead single ‘Good Time’ was co-written and produced by Jacknife Lee, and it arrives with a video from director Jon Danovic. Check it out and see the album cover and tracklist below.
“Living in a world that wasn’t made for you makes you pretty strong and adaptive, and you find the fun in it,” Lahey said in a press release. “It also makes you realise how absurd everything is. With this record, I wanted to get weird because the world is weird, and it’s even weirder when you realise you don’t fit into it all the time.”
Of ‘Good Time’, she added: “This song was inspired by a night out I had at the pub with my friend soon after Melbourne came out of lengthy lockdowns. We were watching all these strangers around us have this ‘whatever it takes’ attitude towards making the most of the night (aka getting lit). It was a bit of a shock after being cooped up for so long, but also kind of invigorating.”
The Answer is Always Yes will include the previously released single ‘Congratulations’.
The Answer is Always Yes Cover Artwork:
The Answer is Always Yes Tracklist:
1. Good Time
2. Congratulations
3. Never Get Your Money Back
4. Sky is Melting
5. Way Down
6. Makes Me Sick
7. Shit Talkin’
8. Permanent
9. They Wouldn’t Let Me In
10. Answers Always Yes
Glen Rose, Texas-born songwriter Jana Horn has announced a new album, The Window Is the Dream, which is set for release on April 7 via No Quarter. It follows her self-released 2020 debut Optimism, which the label reissued last year. Check out the lead single ‘After All This Time’, which features a cello arrangement by Jared Samuel Elioseff, below.
“I wrote Optimism at a very transient time in my life, when I was in no place at once and everything was slipping through my hands like a wet fish,” Horn said in a statement. The Window Is The Dream, on the other hand, “was written in one room, essentially. When you have nowhere to go, you go into memory, and memories of dreams… I was in a different headspace.” She went on to elaborate:
The Window Is The Dream began as a failed poem. I wrote it as I was waking up… “the last thing I want in this breath of existence / is not to throw myself into it / as any bird might stop flying / when the window is the dream.” I think the original line was “toad breath.” My classmates were nice about it, even the teacher.
I was taking a class on esoteric lit, a fiction workshop, a poetry class. And while the poem wasn’t quite… a poem… a song did rise from it, like smoke from a fire put-out. The song is called ‘The Dream’, which maybe the album is pointing toward. These recurring lines which depict the image of a bird hitting a window, though not out of oblivion, but because the bird knows something we don’t.
I think of a line from a favorite story of mine, ‘Car Crash While Hitchhiking’, in which a man is observing someone badly hurt, and about to go: And therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth. I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.
I won’t bore you with more quotes… but perhaps my idea with this song, and album, was in part to help keep this broader, ongoing conversation in the air, like a beach ball.
I wrote these songs in the thick of a writing program. I was reading all the time, sometimes five-hundred pages a week or more, there was no music on, for years maybe; my record player broke, the stereo in my car, my laptop was on its last speaker and then it started twitching. The feeling of those days was holding on, as though centripetal force alone was keeping everything going. Songs spilled. Days go by / they don’t have time. Even the walks I took were circular, around the cemetery and back.
The Window Is the Dream Cover Artwork:
The Window Is the Dream Tracklist:
1. Leaving Him
2. After All This Time
3. Days Go By
4. The Dream
5. Love In Return
6. Old Friend
7. Song For Eve
8. In Between
9. Energy Go
10. The Way It Is
