February 14, 2024

Wednesday and Hotline TNT: Indie Rock's Newest Mega Powers

February 14, 2024/ David Williams

In the late 80s, the World Wrestling Federation was looking for global domination, so they dreamed big and made a team-up for the ages. Like a child playing with action figures, the WWF took their two biggest attractions, Hulk Hogan and Macho Man Randy Savage, and paired them together, forming a colossal duo known as the Mega Powers. Fast forward to today, and a new mega powers has launched, but instead of parading down the aisle lathered up in baby oil only dressed in the tightest of skivvies, these mega powers take the stage in flannels, vintage rugby shirts, and distressed clothing. On tour, two of the hottest indie rock bands, Wednesday and Hotline TNT, went scorched earth all over the greater United States for a triumphant seventeen tour dates.

Both bands were coming off landmark 2023 releases, making this tour feel like an extended victory lap. Wednesday, best described as the sonic intersection of The Smashing Pumpkins and Drive-By Truckers, released their fifth studio album, Rat Saw God back in April. Together, the ten tracks on Rat made for a swampy countrygaze record that wound up near the top of pretty much every publication’s end-of-the-year list. Then, in November, Hotline TNT offered up shoegaze with a pop perspective on their ground-shattering sophomore record, Cartwheel, released on Third Man Records and packed to the brim with crushing riffs and catchy hooks. I knew I had to see these songs for myself, so I took the pilgrimage from Chicago down to Miami to witness the spectacle of distorted, blown-out guitars and lap steel with my own two eyes. It was a windy mid-60-degree February night where most of the country would dream of weather like this, but for a city as warm and vibrant as Miami, looking around at the locals, you thought you might have been teleported to the North Pole.

The stage was set for good old-fashioned rock n roll, only with a tropical twist. The background of the stage was lined with fish scales in all kinds of neon greens, oranges, and yellows, with tiki hut straw coming down from the top of the ceiling. Essentially, it's as if the concert was set in the movie Cocktail; I wouldn't have been shocked if I had seen a Tom Cruise wearing a Hawaiian shirt while slinging ice-cold Mojitos to over-served patrons at the bar.

We’re lucky to live at a moment in time where people can witness face-melting performances in an intimate setting by bands who feel destined for superstardom. In a perfect world, Wednesday's Rat Saw God should have been nominated for Rock Album of the Year at the Grammys, and Hotline TNT's Cartwheel should have got the band nominated for Best New Artist. Karly Hartzman, frontwoman of Wednesday, known for turning the dredge of everyday living into veering country rock anthems, is a star in the making. Will Anderson, the brains and brawn behind Hotline TNT, crashes with a tidal of distorted guitars that plummet down on you in waves.

Anderson is a towering presence on stage, standing at 6 foot 5, sporting bleached blonde hair with a green spider web design as if he was caught in the crossfire while Peter Parker was fighting a supervillain. He brought out a small militia of guitarists with him that continuously pummeled the audience in droves of catchy riffs. At one point in the show, Anderson, a consummate showman, peers into the crowd to say, “The first person that does a cartwheel gets 15% at the merch table.” What a guy! After a few failed attempts from fans, one kid finally hit the cartwheel with grace and balance, like something you would have seen in the Summer Olympics. Sure enough, a man of his word, Anderson points to the merch booth and nods his head in approval. The kid got his discount.

One of Anderson's best qualities is creating music that needs to be played at brute-force volume. Think Macaulay Culkin from Michael Jackson's "Black Or White" video blasting his dad into orbit. The live experience only enhances each song, where you can feel the fury of distorted guitars almost lifting you off your feet. Hotline TNT opens the set with “Protocol,” which teases you for a good minute of lead in guitars before kicking into high gear with drowned-out riffs. By their third song, the pop-influenced 90s alt-rock hit “I Thought You’d Change,” you’d never want the show to end.

From there, Wednesday tags in with a vicious rendition of "Hot Rotten Grass Smell," Hartzman comes out in a checkered picnic pattern dress with black lipstick and Doc Martens. The outfit looks as if Laura Ingalls Wilder had a goth phase. She carries a bright and bubbly demeanor on stage. Her personality is paired with a refined coolness, generating an IT- Factor that not too many artists have today. Guitarist MJ Lenderman, who has a rapidly ascending solo career of his own with his 2022 alt-country classic Boat Songs, has also begun to reach a cult-like status. I spoke to an older gentleman with a long white Duck Dynasty-length beard who drove 2 hours from West Palm Beach just to see Lenderman play guitar. That just goes to show you the cross-generational talent potential this band possesses.

While Hotline TNT's emotional core lies in the overpowering guitars, Wednesday's heart lies within Hartzman's songwriting. She has a knack for making the ordinary feel downright transcendent. The vivid pictures she paints with her lyrics are so clear it feels like we have known the characters within these songs for years. The fans feel a special connection with her as she turns everyday life into rock anthems. She can make the most mundane objects like candy bars on Halloween or blasting bottle rockets enthralling. So by the time the last verse in "Quarry" hits, the whole crowd sings along to Mandy and her boyfriend getting arrested when cops discover cocaine in the drywall. The set ends with the grungy 8-minute-long "Bull Believer," which sees Karly reaching down deep to belt out blood-curdling screams, seemingly letting loose of the pain she accumulated throughout her life. The audience is more than happy to reciprocate by going bat-shit crazy themselves letting loose guttural wails until the entire crowd becomes a teaming mass of noise. It was a cathartic experience.

One thing I noticed throughout the night was the pure camaraderie among the bands. When Hotline TNT was performing, Karly Hartzman was off to the side, hooting and hollering to every song. She looked like a proud soccer mom watching her kids score the winning goal. During their set, Anderson kept glancing over, motioning for her to come on stage until, at last, his persistence paid off. Worlds collide for the Hotline TNT’s closer as Hartzman struts on stage to assist in singing a masterclass in shoegaze rock, "Had 2 Try." At one point, while Anderson was hammering on the whammy bar and testing the limits of his guitar’s strength, Hartzman leaned down to untie one of his New Balance 550s. It's refreshing to see such absolute fun being had on stage while you can also feel the joy and passion of the performance. This tour feels like a triumphant moment shared by two of America's most captivating indie rock bands. The night ended up being a championship-level victory, and they didn't even need to hit someone over the head with a steel chair.

David is a content mercenary based in Chicago. He's also a freelance writer specializing in music, movies, and culture. His hidden talents are his mid-range jump shot and the ability to always be able to tell when someone is uncomfortable at a party. You can find him scrolling away on Instagram @davidmwill89, Twitter @Cobretti24, or Medium @davidmwms.

December 27, 2023

Swim Into The Sound's 10 Favorite Albums of 2023

December 27, 2023/ Taylor Grimes

2023 was a year of long-simmering change for me and, I imagine, many other people. This year, I moved across the country, turned 30, moved again, fell deeper in love, made noticeable strides in my physical and mental health, met a ton of new friends, and listened to a ton of new music. Now that I find myself at the tail end of the year, I can genuinely say that I changed and re-shaped my life more than I ever thought possible in a 365-day window. Not only that, but I find myself excited for whatever comes next.

I’m a creature of habit, so this is all very frightening to be so unmoored yet so fulfilled. Ultimately, habits are just coping mechanisms: little things we do to make our lives easier or simpler or faster. So, while it’s been a little scary to feel disconnected from so many routines I’ve built up over the course of three decades, sometimes what you really need is to wipe the slate clean and build something new from scratch. While I still consider myself a creature of habit, I’m also a creature of tradition, which is far more fun.

This has long been my favorite time of the year, a season full of traditions big and small. Of celebrations inside and out there. Of gifts and gestures both for strangers and the ones you love. As a big, dumb music nerd, one of my favorite long-standing traditions is the concept of “list season.”

Sure, I’ve complained about it in previous years, but there’s something so fun and celebratory about reaching the end of the year and seeing everyone share Topsters and notes app lists and last.fm charts and little blurbs about albums they liked this year. Even though these things are often numbered or ordered in some way, I find it to be a meaningful practice that’s less about competition and more about community.

This is the season when we all look back, reflect, and elevate the art that connected with us most throughout the year, all in hopes that it might connect with someone else. “Here are the things that I loved. What did you love?” It’s an exchange in the best way possible because everyone involved wins. We get to bond over this mutual appreciation for art, you can turn people onto your favorite releases, discover new music yourself, and support artists, all in the same month-long celebration.

I’ve already written about my favorite songs of the year, a list that also exists in both condensed and chronological playlist forms. Additionally, our staff shared their favorite albums of the year in an expansive round-up that also touches on the growth the blog has seen this year. Swim Into The Sound has never had a year as consistently great as 2023, and if you’re reading this, you’re to thank for that. Thanks for caring, thanks for exploring, and thanks for supporting in any way you can.

You probably don’t need me to tell you, but 2023 was also a year of mass instability. It’s a frustrating, helpless, and scary time to be alive, but in the best moments, everything feels worth it. Being here with all of you, at the same time as all of this art, even just for a little while, is an absolute blessing. What follows are ten of my favorite albums of the year, I hope you find something to love in them the way I have.

10 | Slow Pulp – Yard

In many ways, Yard is Slow Pulp’s actual debut album. After a string of awesome EPs and one-off singles, 2020’s Moveys was tragically kneecapped by the pandemic. While some (like myself) still found the time to love that record, it couldn’t have released at a worse time for a young band on the brink of a promising ascent. That’s why it felt so good to see Yard roll out to exponential praise and hype, earning the band the kind of accolades, tours, and acknowledgments they deserved all along. Beginning with a string of absolutely knockout singles (hard-charging “Cramps,” the semi-charmed singalong “Doubt,” and the scintillating summer anthem “Slugs”) one by one, the band introduced themselves to the masses and gave people a reason to care about what they were building towards. The whole collection of songs is just as phenomenal: 30 minutes of ultra-catchy indie rock perfection, where each cut stands alone as a triumphant declaration. Yard is proof that perseverance pays off.

9 | Horse Rider – Real Melody

There are a ton of bands I could compare Horse Rider to: waveform, Alex G, Soccer Mommy, hell, even fellow horse band Horse Jumper of Love. While I make all those comparisons positively, at the end of the day, they do a disservice to just how awesome, original, and downright catchy Horse Rider’s music is. Sure, hints and suggestions of those bands can be heard wafting through the group’s style of slicked-back slacker rock, but throw a dart at any song off Real Melody, and you’re guaranteed to hear a would-be radio rock hit in a more just alternate dimension. The opener, “Goldeen,” sparkles to life while adding an essential contribution to the longstanding tradition of Pokémo. A couple of tracks later, the band presents “Hollow,” where they rock back and forth on the song’s title as lead singer Lamberth Carsey sings, “When you’re hollow,” and repeats it until the phrase burrows itself into your brain. The whole record is full of short, simplistic turns of phrase swaddled in immaculate melodies and killer riffs, making for an intoxicating blend of emo, nu-gaze, slowcore, and 90s worship. Bonus points for having what’s probably the single coolest album cover of the year.

8 | Superviolet – Infinite Spring

Infinite Spring is a cosmic reset of epic proportions. For one thing, it’s Steve Ciolek’s first album following the dissolution of his previous band, The Sidekicks, but within the music too, we hear tales of people who are either coping with or actively embracing change. The record begins with angels falling to Earth and ends with a sort of cataclysmic leveling. The jaw-dropping closing track starts with acoustic fingerpicking but gradually builds to pounding drums, a soaring guitar solo, a big sing-along group chant, and wordless autotuned vocalizations. Everything that happens in between those points is just life. Long-distance relationships, fake people, real emotions, and what it feels like to lose someone forever. It’s heartbreaking, catchy, and all incredibly written. Even with a new band and a new name, Steve Ciolek excels in portraying these slice-of-life stories about people who have always been there and will always be there, shining through like a spring day that never ends.

7 | saturdays at your place – always cloudy

Some people are militant about what can go on an album of the year list. Common sense would dictate that “album of the year” means shorter-form releases like EPs and splits are excluded, but is that how anyone listens to music? Do you separate your love for a 20-minute collection of music and hold it differently than you would a 40-minute collection of music? Can you not enjoy one more than the other for entirely different reasons? Enough leading questions. always cloudy may be an EP on paper, but it contains the arc, heft, and impact of any other “full-length” collection of songs released this year, and it does so in just 19 minutes.

The EP kicks off with “future,” a time-traveling introduction that quickly builds into an explosive little dance instrumental. From there, “fetch” gallops directly into “tarot cards,” the band’s biggest hit and one of my favorite songs of the year. The back half of the EP continues to explore different moods and tempos within the band’s style, all mounting to “eat me alive,” the leave-it-all-on-the-floor closer that feels like the band wringing out every last ounce of energy they have into their performance. It leaves you breathless, almost as if you’re watching the band from the pit, covered in sweat and beer under the multi-colored lights. As an EP that was dropped in January, I feel lucky to have spent all year with these songs, and November’s split with Shoplifter and Summerbruise was just the cherry on top. If this is what the future of emo looks like, we’re in safe hands.

6 | Bully – Lucky for You

Another artist with a pandemic redemption story, Bully’s 2020 release, SUGAREGG, was yet another case of an excellent record that was unfairly swallowed up by the time suck of global catastrophe. That album was a fun, refreshing pump-up full of brash pop-punk, but this year’s Lucky For You takes everything to the next level. Alicia Bognanno has been honing her brand of Nashville-born punk rock for a decade, and on her fourth LP, she manages to reach the absolute pinnacle. Lucky For You is a whirlwind of life, loss, and love. As I’ve talked about before, the whole thing has strong last-day-of-school energy, springing to action with a brash and carefree energy. That’s a relief since the album deals with some pretty heavy topics. Primarily inspired by the loss of Bognanno’s beloved dog Mezzi, the album centers around the idea of companionship and navigating a world where change is often thrust upon you.

From the scream-along singles like “Days Move Slow” and “Hard to Love” to the Soccer Mommy-assisted “Lose You,” these songs are a reminder that sometimes the best way to roll with the punches is my leaning into them with a stiff upper lip and breezy optimism. Kill ‘em with a smile, right? Alternatively, the closing one-two punch of “Ms. America” and “All This Noise” lay the spectrum out in full, touching on women’s rights, climate change, and our media’s endless cycle of disaster. The world is a harsh, unfair place with systems in place designed specifically to grind us down and keep us there, but with Bognanno shouting in my ear, I feel like we might actually have a fighting chance.

5 | Ratboys – The Window

2023 was the year of the rat. Okay, technically it wasn’t, but it definitely was the year of the Ratboys. The Chicago rockers have been kicking up dust and serving up twang for over a decade, coming to perfect a style of music that has only recently seemed to gain traction with a wider audience. This boon is primarily due to the TikTok-fueled popularity of bands like Pinegrove and Slaughter Beach Dog, combined with the coolness of heavier/artsier counterparts like Wednesday and Squirrel Flower. All the while, Ratboys have been painting their own distinct corner of this landscape with broad, vibrant strokes. On The Window, Ratboys come together for the first time as a four-piece to explore every possible speed, style, and variation of their Chigagoan spin on wagon wheel rock. First, the band loosens up their limbs and makes some noise, then proceeds to vault from joyous exclamations (“It’s Alive!”) to heartfelt declarations of love (“The Window” and “I Want You”), all performed and sequenced to flow like a stream. It’s so beautiful and natural you don’t even question it. These explorations are tethered by crystal clear production courtesy of Chris Walla. The Window is a capital-R record, an LP meant to be held, listened to attentively, and taken in deeply. Ratboys are masters of their domain, and we’re lucky to reside within it.

4 | Phony – Heater

Is it on the nose to name your 21-minute pop-punk record “Heater”? It’s bold at the very least, but thankfully, Neil Berthier has the songs to back it up. I talk about it much more extensively in my review, but the sheer velocity of this record can’t be understated. It’s non-stop forward momentum cut in half by one solitary interlude. The LP rockets forward with the kind of self-assured coolness found on Bleed American or Nothing Feels Good, evoking a sort of emo/pop-punk hybrid that feels anything but derivative. Perhaps it’s Berthier’s voice, which can hit a throat-shredding bark or recoil into a sheepish emo whine, depending on what the song calls for. Maybe it’s the instrumentals which spring forward and shoot by like flashes from another life. Blink at any point during your listen, and you might miss one of the incredible riffs or Neil’s disaffected (but astute) observations. With each song hovering around the two-minute mark, it’s easy to find yourself on the album’s extraordinary Weezer-esque closing track thinking, “It’s over already?” The brilliance of Heater comes not just from the brevity, but from how much Berthier is able to pack into these tracks. There’s not a wasted word, strum, or beat in these songs, and the result is a chemically perfect pop-punk record.

3 | Hotline TNT – Cartwheel

The sophomore album from Hotline TNT has a lot going for it: a string of excellent EPs and records preceding it, an iconic, memeable album cover, a Wednesday co-sign, and the backing of Jack White’s Third Man Records. Perhaps most importantly, this album has songs. Here’s the recipe for the ideal Cartwheel listening experience: First, make sure you have half an hour to yourself, then start the album from the top, and play it LOUD as you can possibly stomach. From its first moments, Cartwheel casts a shoegaze spell on the listener with jangly guitar strums that evoke the 90s dreaminess of Lush and the playful innovation of TAGABOW in equal measure. The band settles into a series of songs that morph and change from one to the next, but all fit together seamlessly. In a way, I’ve found it hard to write anything articulate or insightful about Cartwheel beyond just some variation of “it rocks” over and over again. It is truly an album that is best experienced, loud, live, and in one shot. There’s been much to do over the state of shoegaze in 2023, and as a fan of the genre, even I’ll admit a lot of these modern bands sound like AI-generated heaviness created by the most swaggless posers of all time, but Hotline TNT are the real deal, and the proof is right here.

2 | Wednesday – Rat Saw God

If you were to ask me to imagine an album at the intersection of country music and shoegaze, Rat Saw God is how I hope it would sound. The fifth album from Wednesday is a near-perfect melding of these two genres that actually have more in common than one might initially think. Turns out that the dejected heaviness of shoegaze and the forlorn nature of country make for great bedfellows.

Back in 2021, Twin Plagues knocked me on my ass, simultaneously comforting me and telling me to toughen up at a time when I desperately needed both of those things. The record captivated me and beckoned me deeper into Wednesday’s universe of southern fried shoegaze. Through this journey, I discovered MJ Lenderman, Drop of Sun Studios, Alex Farrar, and the band’s impressive scene of peers/touring partners. So, with a couple years of hardcore nerding out under my belt, it’s safe to say that Rat Saw God was my most anticipated record of the year, and it almost unilaterally lived up to the hype.

The seeds of Rat were first planted in 2022 with “Bull Believer,” the album’s titanic 8-minute lead single, which should only be described with words like “scorching,” “seismic,” and “apocalyptic.” Already a classic within the band’s catalog, “Bull Believer” has become a staple closer of the band’s live sets and is the type of song only Wednesday could make. It was smart to let fans sit with that 8-minute behemoth for a few months because once 2023 started, the Wednesday train was approaching full speed.

One by one, the band dropped one fantastic single after another, all leading up to the album’s April release date. “Chosen to Deserve” brought the poppy singalong side of the band’s sound to life while the lyrics painted a picture of a semi-reformed dirtbag southern girl, an under-represented audience in music, to say the least. “Bath County” packs biblical imagery, a drug overdose, a trip to Dollywood, and a Drive-By Truckers namedrop in between a bit of clever sloganeering as bandleader Karly Hartzman bemoans, “Every daughter of God has a little bad luck sometimes.” The singles continued with “Quarry” and “TV in the Gas Pump,” each paired with inventive music videos that further fleshed out the visual side of Wednesday’s homespun world.

This all happened alongside handmade merch, a worldwide tour, monthly video dairies, contributions to compilations, and a 30-minute documentary by the band’s friend, Zach Romeo. Suffice it to say there was no shortage of Wednesday-related entertainment to keep fans satisfied, and I was here for all of it. Not only was Rat Saw God a knockout album from a band I already adored, but it was finally netting this band the kind of support and adoration they’d long deserved.

As I mentioned in the intro, I moved twice this year, and in a sort of cosmic coincidence, one of those moves brought me to North Carolina, a state I’d never once considered living in until this year. Back in 2018, I made a similar life-altering move to Detroit, and as funny as it sounds, the music of Sufjan Stevens was there, convincing me that was where I was meant to be. Now, a similar thing has happened to me with Wednesday. To find myself in this unfamiliar part of the country with my longstanding love for this artist as my sole touchpoint. It felt like something was always pulling me out there, and Wednesday’s music was just the tip of the iceberg.

Earlier this year, I was reading John Darnielle’s excellent Devil House, and at one point, he penned the phrase “Freeway detritus eternal,” which I couldn’t get out of my head. If I were to boil down the essence of Wednesday to three words, it might be those. On this record, we hear salt of the earth tales of people living life the best way they know how. The highways stretch on for miles and pass by burnt-out fast food restaurants, dilapidated roadside attractions, and commercial parking lots all the same. There’s no value judgment passed on these places or their inhabitants, merely an attempt to portray them in an accurate and empathetic light in order to share their stories with a wider audience. All you have to do is hit play on the album, inhale the stench of hot, rotten grass, grab another beer from the cooler, and kick back as the fuzzy riffs roll over you.

1 | Talking Kind – It Did Bring Me Down

There are only about 27 minutes of music on the debut record from Talking Kind. That’s a grand total of 1,634 seconds, and I love every single one of them. I’ve spent the last four months absolutely absorbed in It Did Bring Me Down. I’ve sung along to the chorus of “Damn Shame” while making a hearty Sunday breakfast. I’ve ruminated on spaghetti and death while memorizing every detail of “Pretty Flowers.” I’ve shared a clandestine smoke with my girlfriend on her balcony while blasting “Trader,” only to rock out a moment later headbanging along to “My Truck.” These are just a few glimpses into the beautiful moments I’ve experienced with this album. These tracks have embedded themselves deep in my psyche, offering the perfect balance of funny witticisms, harsh realities, and impeccable memories. Let’s wind it back just a half step.

Talking Kind is the (mostly) solo project of Pat Graham. You might know him from his work in the fourth-wave underdogs Spraynard or Lame-O y'allternative band Big Nothing, but neither project is required homework for Talking Kind. The way I’ve been explaining this album to friends, colleagues, or really anyone who will listen is to imagine a cross between MJ Lenderman, Slaughter Beach Dog, and Barenaked Ladies. A friend of mine suggested I add The Weakerthans to that mix, but to me, that triad of artists offers the perfect indication of what kind of music you’re going to get with It Did Bring Me Down.

Just take the album’s opening track, where Graham utilizes a guest feature from Radiator Hospital and The Goodbye Party to explain the band's name. Or take “Never Bored,” a cautionary tale about what can happen when the dirtbag lifestyle catches up with you. There’s power-pop perfection on songs like “Brand New Face,” which is followed by one of the year's best love songs, then a crushingly sad lo-fi cover of a Radioactivity song. Elsewhere you have an unforgettable, star-making melody on “Damn Shame” and a track that name-checks fellow Philly musician Greg Mendez for a funny little closer to the year’s best album.

There’s no grand narrative, complicated lore, or months-long music-video-based rollout to keep track of with this record, just a collection of eleven stellar songs that all speak for themselves. It’s felt like literal magic to have been making memories to these songs for the last four months, and I can’t wait to see what other moments they go on to soundtrack in the future. It Did Bring Me Down is plainspoken, clever, empathetic, freewheeling, and kindhearted, all things I hope to be. What better thing to have as my humanistic North Star than my favorite album of the year?

December 06, 2023

Swim Into The Sound's 12 Favorite Songs of 2023

December 06, 2023/ Taylor Grimes

Our inevitable 2023 Album of the Year list is slow going, so as a writing exercise, I’m going to do some short little write-ups on a bunch of my favorite songs that came out this year. Believe it or not, in all my years running this blog, I’ve actually never done a roundup like this. I suppose I’ve always been daunted by other publications that can publish massive, genre-spanning 100-count lists of songs because they have an actual staff, but I am just one man. Instead, you get a hyper-biased recounting of my year through a dozen songs. I hope you love them as much as I do.

1 | Militarie Gun - “Do It Faster”

It’s hard to believe that “Do It Faster” has only been in my life for ten months. From the now-iconic “OOH OOH” to the rockin’ guitar riff and unforgettable chorus, everything about this song feels like it was created in a lab to appeal to me specifically. Aside from single-handedly revitalizing the word “stooge,” this song is a wonderful little encapsulation of where this style of hardcore sits in a post-GLOW ON world. “Do It Faster” is a poppy rock song with an instantly transferable energy tailor-made for windows-down scream-alongs, your dumbest thrashy dance moves, and the strongest finger-point you have.

2 | Talking Kind - “Damn Shame”

“It’s such a damn shame I wasn’t / damn shame I wasn’t listenin’.” Not only is that one of the best choruses of the year, it’s also what you will be saying to yourself in a few years time if you sleep on this Talking Kind record. The solo outing of Pat Graham (of Spaynard and Big Nothing), it’s easy to see why “Damn Shame” was the lead single for his new project. It only takes a couple of listens before you find yourself effortlessly singing along to these words. Only Graham can make regret sound so catchy.

3 | Bully - “Days Move Slow”

It’s been said before, but “Days Move Slow” sounds like it should be scoring the opening scene of a movie. In my head, I see Clockstoppers or Max Keeble's Big Move, the type of early 2000s kids comedy movie that could have only been made in the lead-up to the Iraq War. I see bleach blonde hair spiked to the heavens and a table full of breakfast food before our hero says something like, “Sorry Mom, I gotta jet, can’t miss the last day of school!” before grabbing his skateboard and running off to catch the bus. This song invigorates me in a way that very few ever have, and I’m more than content to live in that three-decade-old Nickelodeon-approved timewarp for two minutes and forty seconds with Alicia Bognanno as my guide.

4 | Wednesday - “Quarry”

As a certified Wednesday freak, picking my favorite song off Rat Saw God proved to be a challenge. The obvious choice might be the titanic eight-minute “Bull Believer” or the lap-steel-led “Formula One.” There’s also the ultra-singable “Bath County” or the all-too-relatable “Chosen to Deserve,” and while I adore all those songs, “Quarry” eventually revealed itself to me as the song off the Asheville denizens fifth full-length LP. This track really has it all: depressed small-town imagery and hyper-specific personal details, plus it all builds to a joyous, swaying shoegaze riff. “Quarry” also has a vehicle-filled music video that, much like everything else in the Wednesday Universe, showcases the band’s penchant for cute, creative, and endearing art. Wednesday forever.

5 | Greg Mendez - “Maria”

In less than two minutes, Greg Mendez managed to convert practically everyone from a curious listener into a ravenous fan. The second single to Mendez’s excellent self-titled record, “Maria,” offers a harrowing tale of drug use and self-destruction, but wraps it in a melody that somehow feels timeless, as if it’s always been here. The instrumental is modest, just a guitar and drums, allowing Mendez’s voice to take center stage, presenting him as the heir to both Elliot Smith and Alex G’s throne. A cautionary tale turned into an immaculate bit of songwriting and artistry.

6 | Ratboys - “It’s Alive!”

Channeling equal parts Rocky Mountain hiker and evil scientist, “It’s Alive!” is one of the most joyous songs of the year, a track that never fails to fill me up to the brim with optimism, hope, and light. Like the first warm day of spring, listening to the emphatic “It’s Alive!” is like stepping outside, feeling the sun's rays across your skin, looking up to a clear blue sky, and filling your lungs with a big puff of crisp air. In a way, this song channels a similar sense of naturalistic wonder as Ratboys’ own 2021 megahit, “Go Outside,” but swaps that song’s post-COVID anxiety with boundless optimism and happiness. A powerful feeling to have at the click of a button.

7 | Superviolet - “Overrater”

While I was late to the party with The Sidekicks, I was right on time for Steve Ciolek’s new project, Superviolet. As the lead single, “Overrater” had a lot on its shoulders: introduce the new band to mourning Sidekicks fans, get people geared up for the full record, and maybe even convert a few new fans in the process. As living proof of the third one, I can point to “Overrater” as the precise entry point for my fandom. The song begins with a pace-setting electronic beat but soon explodes to life in a fun-loving blast that feels like the music equivalent of breaking into a full sprint. Even as bullies surround us and insults fly, persistence prevails, allowing the listener to stride out the door with a fresh outlook and indomitable spirit.

8 | saturdays at your place - “tarot cards”

At the beginning of the year, I had no idea who saturdays at your place were. Despite living in Detroit for a couple of years and digging deep into the emo scene, I was unaware of the talent amassing across the state in Kalamazoo. saturdays materialized over the course of the pandemic, emerging with a nine-song record in 2021 and segued that release into a No Sleep signing as well as an impressively realized EP, which they dropped at the top of the year. Having since amassed over 2.5M plays on Spotify, “tarot cards” is an undeniable emo song, boasting a god-tier riff, cathartic group chant, and tried-and-true lyrics of being awkward at a party. No wonder why this track has been subject to TikTok trends and dumb memes alike; it has the sauce to become a generational Midwest Emo song like “Two Beers,” “Death Cup,” or “Cinco De Mayo Shit Show.” Before I get too ahead of myself with hyperbole, I’ll slow down and look forward to screaming along to “tarot cards” for many more concerts to come.

9 | Slow Pulp - “Cramps”

Yet another record that was hard to pick any one song from, the sophomore outing from Slow Pulp is chock-full of throwback indie rock that shines and shimmers like the light bouncing off a lake. While Yard was preceded by four absolutely immaculate singles, “Cramps” was the first out the gate and set an immediate high bar that signaled a level-up from 2020’s Moveys. Beginning with a powerful burst of drums, the band quickly locks into a shoegazy sway as lead vocalist Emily Massey sets the scene with snarling lyrics about wanting it all. The whole thing rockets forward for a sensible three minutes, complete with crunchy guitars, spry drumming, and a nifty little drop-out at the end to ease us down from the high-energy state.

10 | Caroline Polachek, Charli XCX, George Daniel - “Welcome To My Island (Remix)”

While you might be surprised to see a remix on this list, it only takes one listen to understand why I love this pumped-up, electrified version of a Caroline Polachek classic. Sure, I liked Desire a fair bit, but throw some spicy Charli XCX verses in the mix and put it all over a club-ready beat? I’m IN. I’ll also cop to having the biggest crush on Charli XCX, so hearing her spit one of the horniest verses of her entire career always gets my heart rate up just a little. Barring my personal affinity for curly-haired party girls, it’s also cute to hear Charli write these lines of wanting a “white dress, countryside, house, and kids” over an instrumental that her (now) fiancée has made. That’s true power couple shit, and I love it for both of them. Throw all of that on top of Caroline Polachek’s anthemic opener, and you have a recipe for success that will soundtrack car rides, gym visits, and amped-up pre-game playlists from now until the end of time.

11 | MJ Lenderman - “Rudolph”

Four drum hits and we’re off to the races. MJ Lenderman’s “Rudolph” kicks off like a celebratory firecracker with a swampy twang beat and the perfect amount of pedal steel. The first line goes on to confirm that, yes, this is indeed the Rudolph you’re thinking of. Lenderman bellows over his bandmates and his own fuzzed-out guitar, screaming of Lightning Mcqueen and making a self-referential call-back just a line or two later. Of course, there’s a sick guitar solo, and then they hit us with one more chorus because they’re professionals. They also give us that bouncy little four-note countdown one last time, and let me tell you, I can’t wait to break out my freakiest dance moves to that next time I see it live. “Rudolph” is a perfect between-album entry to the MJ Lenderman canon, ending up feeling like a victory lap for both Boat Songs and a celebration of his signing to Anti- Records. The only thing I love more than seeing dudes rock is seeing dudes win.

12 | Talking Kind - “Pretty Flowers”

First off, yeah, I know what you’re thinking, ‘another Talking Kind song on this list??’ To which I say YES, believe it, It Did Bring Me Down is that good. On the mid-album cut “Pretty Flowers,” the stakes are set immediately in plainspoken words: “I bought some pretty flowers / I was going to drive to your grave after work / Instead, I pulled over and cried and cried and cried.” Basically everything is on the table from the outset, all wrapped in a melody anyone could hum along to. The rest of the song grapples with mortality and loss as Pat Graham belts an MJ-like chorus of “I'm still working it out. Yeah, baaaaaby, I'm still just working it out.” A minute later, our hero still hasn’t found a compromise as Graham sings, “I don't think I'm ready / I don't think I care if I'm ever ready,” then interrupting his own rhyme as he sings “spaghetti” and holds the last note like a piece of putty. It’s an absurd, hilarious, and endearing little non-sequitur to end the verse on, which was, up to that point, a pretty forthright meditation on death. He hits us with one more chorus, allowing the listener to either laugh at his joke or croon along, making for a fun little musical choose-your-own-adventure. It’s a heartwarming moment packed into the exact middle of this 3-minute gem that makes me appreciate the craft of songwriting more than I ever have before.

Listen to a playlist of all these songs (plus some outtakes) above. Alternatively, if you want even more and would like to see all my favorite songs of the year in chronological order, check out this playlist.

June 30, 2023

The Best of Q2 2023

June 30, 2023/ Taylor Grimes

Even though we’re halfway through, 2023 has been a hard year to define. As news cycles speed up, discourse spins out, and “content” mounts faster than anyone can realistically engage with it, staying up-to-date on new music can feel overwhelming. That’s where we come in.

Our team of passionate freaks writers are the types of people to comb through new releases every Friday in search of their next obsession. We have playlists and last.fm charts and Topsters and rankings. We have albums we love that we want you to love too, and that’s what this article is for. Just as we did back in April, we will round up our favorite albums and EPs of the last few months so you can see what we’ve been obsessing over lately. Hope you find something new to obsess over.

billy woods, Kenny Segal - Maps

To describe billy woods’s quasi-concept album as “all over the place” might initially come off as an insult, but I mean it in the most complimentary and, on some levels, literal way possible. Part-travel diary, part-anthropological exploration, Maps just might be woods’s most accessible yet ambitious work to date. “No Reservations, walked in like Bourdain,” he boasts on “The Layover,” shouting out the late celebrity chef and documentarian and nodding to how both Bourdain and woods himself view travel as an immersive practice. In the same track, woods’ trip to California isn’t a vacation– it’s a chance to convene with the past, complete with lyrical dues paid to both LL Cool J and the Black Panther Party. “Babylon By Bus” rolls out personal and world history on one long, non-linear timeline, deftly hopping from the 2011 NBA Championship to the Russian Revolution to 9/11 to the passing of woods’ grandmother. “Year Zero” pulls back the spatial and temporal lens even further, chronicling the dawn of man to the decay of the present in just a few bars (“Apes stood and walked into the future / March of progress end hunchbacked in front the computer / Sooner or later it’s gon’ be two unrelated active shooters / Same place, same time, great minds”). While the vastness of woods’ pen game on Maps is pretty sublime, some of his most striking moments are when he gets down to the small-scale specificities, particularly on the record’s back half– “NYC Tapwater” is the bittersweet comedown from life on tour, the comforts of his home city are inextricable from the past traumas it bears witness to and constantly under the threat of being paved over by the continuous march of gentrification; on “As The Crow Flies,” the homecoming narrative concludes with a scene of woods and his son, a reckoning with the responsibilities of fatherhood and the tandem joys and fears that come with it (“I’m at the park with the baby on the swings / When it hits me crazy, anything at all could happen to him”). billy woods can fit a whole world into a record, and it’s a blessing that we get to watch it spin.

– Grace Robins-Somerville

Bully – Lucky For You

Based solely on 2020’s SUGAREGG, I already knew I’d love whatever Bully did next. What I didn’t expect was a raucous half-hour of pitch-perfect 2000s alt-rock featuring some of the most energetic hooks I’ve heard all year. First, she reeled me in with a Soccer Mommy-assisted lead single, then she hit us with the sunny “Days Move Slow” and followed that with the fuckup anthem “Hard to Love.” One by one, each single surpassed the previous, all culminating in Lucky For You, an album that captures the boundless exuberance of the last day of school. Much like Momma, PONY, or Charly Bliss, Bully’s Alicia Bognanno doesn’t shy away from a realistic portrayal of herself. She’s kind of a loser, she has fucked up, and she owns all that. Turns out putting that kind of honesty to fuzzy power chords and raspy choruses makes them feel all the more triumphant.

– Taylor Grimes

Clearbody – Bend Into a Blur

If you were to distill my love for shoegaze into just a handful of styles, you’d likely wind up with the collection of five songs that make up Bend Into a Blur. You’ve got clear love for giants of the genre like Hum and Nothing alongside screamy doom shit and high-energy bops, all of which work into the genre from different angles for a release that’s succinct and singular. Tracks like “This Can’t Leave Us” sink their hooks into you by building up to their title in the most anguishing but beautiful ways; meanwhile, “Cordelia” feels tailor-made for windows-down summer drives and late-nite smoke sessions alike. For a genre that can so easily feel stale and repetitious, Clearbody manage to make the “gaze” suffix feel exciting, diverse, and exploratory.

– Taylor Grimes

Read our review of “Cordelia” here.

Cory Hanson – Western Cum

Let’s get it out of the way up top: Western Cum is a very funny name. The title for Cory Hanson’s third album is a signal flare that he doesn’t take this too seriously, but the music tells a different story. Hanson’s latest record follows a similar format to 2021’s Pale Horse Rider (one of our favorites of that year), featuring a batch of a half-dozen barn burners and one 10-minute psychedelic expedition placed at the penultimate spot on the tracklist. Western Cum also sees Hanson cranking up the Zeppelin worship tenfold for classic rock songs that range in scale from that of a housefly to a haunted ghost ship. As these desert mirages materialize and pass by the listener, it’s hard not to get swept up in the majesty of it all.

– Taylor Grimes

Easy Beach – Easy Beach

*We’re Trying Records & Sleepy Clown Records*

To some degree, people are right to groan about emo music. You’re right to roll your eyes at silly song titles, formulaic tapping, and uninspired singing, but at the same time, you gotta hand it to ‘em when people in this genre do something right, and Easy Beach’s self-titled record is emo done right. For an album that dropped on 4/20 and has song titles like “Elliott Spliff” and “Everbong,” it might seem easy to assume Easy Beach is “weedmo,” but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Easy Beach may be an emo band, and they may even smoke weed, but their music is actually closer to groups like Ovlov, LVL UP, or Truth Club than Mom Jeans and Prince Daddy. In just 23 minutes, this band constructs a thrashy style of punk rock that pummels you like a brick to the face… if being pummelled by a brick to the face was somehow catchy. There’s still a little bit of emo guitar tapping, but overall, this band seems much more concerned with making shreddy punk music fit for diving headfirst into the pit. Easy Beach is jam-packed with rambunctious energy and shout-along bangers with a well-placed interlude or two to help you catch your breath. If sweat isn’t dripping from your pores by the time the rapturous horns of “Sleep” roll around, then you’re listening wrong.

– Taylor Grimes

EXIT ELECTRONICS – BELIEVE ANYTHING, BELIEVE EVERYTHING

Okay, so teeeeechnically, this album was released about a week before our Q1 list went up. But I didn’t hear it until the beginning of June, so I’m including it here. I wanted to give a full-length review on the new Godflesh album PURGE (which rips), but the time didn’t work in my favor. Instead, I’m here to shout out the new EXIT ELECTRONICS album, one of the many monikers and side projects of Godflesh mastermind Justin K. Broadrick. BELIEVE ANYTHING is 45 minutes of obnoxious, distorted, bass-heavy music that is so in my lane, it’s surprising I didn’t hear it until after I recorded my last album of similar material. Broadrick has been an electronic and industrial maestro since the late ‘80s between Godflesh, Techno Animal, and Jesu, just to name a few. This is easily some of the most advanced and intense music he’s ever done; it’s like a burned CD of 128kbps Limewire MP3s skipping in the player of a 2003 Pontiac Sunfire. I assure you that’s a compliment.

— Logan Archer Mounts

Feeble Little Horse – Girl with Fish

The first time I listened to Girl with Fish was idyllic… not necessarily befitting to the music, but memorable nonetheless. It had been a bright summer day here in Portland, but by the evening, a batch of clouds had rolled in, making for a broody, overcast mood that marked the end to a weeks-long period of perfectly sunny weather. It was about 8:30 and still bright out despite the grey clouds now populating the sky. I decided to go for a walk to expend the rest of my energy and enjoy the last little bit of light we had left. By the time I had reached a nearby park, the clouds had started to spit ever so lightly, raining just enough to feel a cooling droplet every few seconds but not enough to need a jacket or an umbrella. I looked at my phone and realized it was just past 9 pm, meaning all the Friday new releases were now available to listen to here on the west coast. I navigated straight to Feeble Little Horse’s artist page and pressed play on their sophomore LP, which I had been anticipating for the better part of the year. As I walked around this park and nearby neighborhoods soundtracked by the off-kilter rock tunes, I inhaled deeply, taking in the smell of rain on hot pavement, a sense I hadn’t experienced much in my previous home of Denver. As the freaky, horny, warbly songs played out, I found myself firmly in the present. I didn’t know what was coming next in this album or my life, and for 26 minutes and 6 seconds, I found that incredibly freeing.

– Taylor Grimes

Frog Legs – It’s Been a Hard Year

I’ve been listening to punk rock for a really, really, really long time. So long, in fact, that I have kind of a complex relationship to it– although punk is great, I often can’t find myself reaching for my Misfits records when it comes time to kick back with a beer and decompress. It’s just too… one-note these days. The novelty of sonic rebellion has long worn off, and only the truly time-tested punk music can make it through to my daily rotation of knotty emo-core, crusty d-beat and hardcore, stripped-back folk music, densely arranged power pop, and soaring jam-band indebted indie rock. All that changed two years ago when I was introduced to Frog Legs, a band of folk-punk rookies with bright eyes and big attitudes led by singer/bassist/songwriter Nano Siegert-Wilkinson.

Their first EP was straight-up folk punk in the best way– sugary sweet punk rippers played with acoustic instruments at blistering tempos. On It’s Been a Hard Year, though, her ambitions spread beyond the realm of traditional folk-punk and bloom into enormous Springsteen singalong C-sections (“Motorcycle!”), lackadaisical power pop jams (“The Worst McDonalds Ever (Pts. 1 & 2)”), propulsive and neurotic rock (“Fear and Loathing in South Oakland”), and even tender bluegrass ballads (“Livestock” and “Moth Song”). Despite these musical departures from the raspy acoustic punk we’ve all come to know and meme, it’s impossible to forget that this is a Folk Punk Album. Every song oozes directionless rage and exhaustion via grisly and misanthropic metaphor (“It will bleed me til I'm dry / make a leather coach bag out of my hide”) or an unflinching, almost impolite directness (“Sometimes bad things happen just because”). It’s an emotionally arresting piece of art that will define the genre for years and might even succeed at Siegert-Wilkinson’s oft-stated goal of “bringing folk punk back to Pittsburgh, baby.”

– Mikey Montoni

Frozen Soul – Glacial Domination

Remember that one time Texas got too cold? Fort Worth’s iciest band, Frozen Soul, makes sure you’ll never forget. Glacial Domination is an avalanche-caliber crushing death metal LP that stays frozen on repeat. With features from Dying Fetus’ John Gallagher, Trivium’s Matt Heafy, and electro-metal duo GosT, the band delivers one anthemic, bicep-flexing, frost-biting track after another. This group may as well have called themselves something like Cold Thrower or Snowbituary.

— Logan Archer Mounts

Greg Mendez – Greg Mendez

For about a month, I listened to Greg Mendez’s self-titled record and couldn’t shake the phrase “Diet Alex G.” That’s a misnomer for a couple of reasons, sure Mendez’s voice sounds shockingly similar at times, but “diet” implies that it’s somehow lesser. In reality, Greg Mendez is a precious and careful folk album that weaves together nine deeply intricate tales into a compact 23-minute package. Standing shoulder to shoulder with the new albums from Ther and Infinity Crush, Mendez has created an honest and truly beautiful album that has rightfully placed him at the forefront of an already bustling Philadelphia music scene. With songs as brilliant as “Maria” in his holster, it’s only a matter of time before he ascends the rungs of the indie rock world into a strata all his own.

– Taylor Grimes

HMLTD – The Worm

England hits another post-punk home run with the latest album from HMLTD (fka Happy Meal Ltd., ceased and desisted for obvious reasons). The Worm is an experimental, imperialistic, sci-fi concept record that begs one question: “Would you still love me if I was a worm?” At least, in this case, the worm is taking over an apocalyptic London like the plague, and the album tells the story of the townspeople’s experiences. It’s a danceable, oddball record that showcases the band at their strongest. Fans of Black Country New Road, King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard, or Squid should be sure to take note of this one. And not just because lizards and squids are in the worm family (follow-up: I do not know this to be true).

— Logan Archer Mounts

Home Is Where – the whaler

There are a ton of dumb, memey ways one could talk about the whaler. From the 9/11 song to the Neutral Milk Hotel worship and possible Weezer homage, this record sometimes feels tailor-made to set up RYM weirdos to craft their most pithy one-liners, and yet… the whaler persists. The sophomore album from fifth-wave emo’s resident folk punk freaks is wildly inventive, sprawling, and probing in a way that makes it impossible to summarize in a single paragraph. Essentially a loose concept album about “getting used to things getting worse,” each song flows into the next while still retaining a circular life of its own. Each song is staggeringly diverse in instrumentation and inspiration, seamlessly incorporating sounds from midwest emo and folk to alt-country and post-hardcore. The lyrics are both urgent and poetic, begging the listener not just to scream along, but to really listen and understand. Even as things get worse, we can thank Home Is Where for being here and creating art that makes things just a little better.

– Taylor Grimes

Hot Mulligan – Why Would I Watch

Yes, Hot Mulligan are yelpy, yes, they’re emo as fuck, and yes, they have songs with names like “Cock Party 2 (Better Than The First).” It’s almost like they’re challenging you not to take them seriously. Despite the seemingly infinite number of marks against them, the Michigan-based Post-Emo band makes music that exceeds any surface-level turn-offs. Following an excellent 2020 release that deflated like so many of the albums from that year, they kept the momentum (and spirits) up with a series of acoustic releases, EPs, covers, and one-off singles, but Why Would I Watch is the first proper full-length from the band in three years, and it’s a front-to-back ripper. I’ll save you any more song titles, but the band’s fourth LP is song after song of frantic outpourings, complete with intricate guitar work, group singalongs, and relatable lamentations.

– Taylor Grimes

Indigo De Souza – All of This Will End

Indigo De Souza is a force of nature. The Asheville-based singer-songwriter is a confluence of immensely relatable sentiments, catchy choruses, and feelings that sweep through each song like a hurricane. Whether she’s reinforcing the importance of nature, venting about a shitty partner, or reflecting on the knowledge that comes with age, Indigo De Souza manages to make it all fit seamlessly within her vibrant, technicolor umbrella. There are crunchy shoegaze riffs, boppy dance numbers, and touches of twang that make each song feel distinct from the others surrounding it. One of those albums where any track feels like it could have served as a single, and I’m left to marvel at how many great ideas can be packed into one LP.

– Taylor Grimes

Read our review of All of This Will End here.

Innerlove. – Roscoe

While everyone else was listening to, thinking about, commentating on, and participating in the “Pinegrove Shuffle,” I was listening to Roscoe. Much like Quinn Cicala and Ground Swell, Innerlove is a band directly descended from the Emo Kid to Alt-Country Pipeline. Underneath the twang and scent of alcohol, There’s an apparent reverence for the lineage of country music built atop a sturdy understanding of indie rock fundamentals. Every once in a while, a little bit of emo sensibility peeks through, and in that way, it’s a beautiful intersection of where I find my tastes midway through 2023.

– Taylor Grimes

Jess Williamson – Time Ain’t Accidental

If you’ve ever been to Far West Texas, you’ll get why Time Ain’t Accidental is Marfa-coded: steel guitar and highway motifs scream “Wild West,” while Williamson’s coy voice and eclectic percussion choices keep these songs distinctly artsy. However, unlike many Angelenos who descend upon the quintessential artsy Wild West town, Williamson is originally from Texas, and she successfully cashes in on that authenticity in her most country-tinged offering to date. In Time Ain’t Accidental, she documents her extensive time living and loving in Marfa, telling the concurrent stories of an old love (like in “Stampede”) and a new one (like in the title track). Alongside thrilling tales of a poolside rendezvous and driving through a desert storm, she lays lyrical flowers on the grave of a former longtime love. It’s quite the feat, paying tribute to both relationships without one discrediting the other, but Williamson accomplishes it with grace. She reckons with the ruthless fallout of modern dating without ever losing her grip on love’s timeless potential, wide as the Texas sky. Out in Marfa, everything—the brutal and the beautiful—comes to light if you linger long enough.

– Katie Wojciechowski

Kara Jackson – Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love?

Kara Jackson may or may not be the singer-songwriter that the world asked for in the year of our Lord 2023, but there’s no doubt she’s the one we need. Her earthy contralto voice weaves a spell over meandering chords until all of a sudden, the whole thing is basically jazz, and you’d hardly noticed—like the album’s second track, “no fun/party.” While I’d never say her music “sounds like” Joni Mitchell, Mitchell is the only fair, clear comparison I can think to make in terms of a jazz influence on what are essentially folk songs. Why Does The Earth… doesn’t waste a note, from the spare, unnerving “curtains” to the orchestral, heartbreaking title track that wrestles with the impossible question of loss. Some of Jackson’s songs, like “dickhead blues,” move a little slow, but stay with them; every track on this album offers unexpected gems in the form of vocal feats, twisting melodies, and razor-sharp wit. I honestly cannot believe this is her debut album!

– Katie Wojciechowski

Kerosene Heights – Southeast of Somewhere

On paper, there’s nothing extravagant about the debut album from Kerosene Heights; there’s no deep theme, intricate concept, or overarching message. Instead, what you get is a collection of 11 rippers that gnash, gnarl, and shred through waves of emo insecurities with a propulsive pop-punk energy. The record starts off with a half-speed crabcore bob, but ignites when lead singer Chance Smith barks, “1, 2, 3, GO!” in a moment that’s sure to summon a pit at every Kerosene Heights show until the end of time. Over the course of the record’s 35-minute runtime, we come to learn that Smith is their own worst enemy as they recount previous instances where they jumped too fast into romance, ruined someone’s birthday, or generally acted like a selfish dick. As the lyrics so eloquently put it on the second song, “I am the worst thing to happen to me.” While that all might sound like a bummer, what’s remarkable is how catchy Kerosene Heights manages to make these confessionals sound. The band’s peppy instrumentals keep the energy level from ever dipping below that of a sugar-free Red Bull. A fast, fun, and boisterous release that I keep coming back to like a bowl of candy.

– Taylor Grimes

Lana Del Rey - Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd?

Lana Del Rey seemingly has no interest in normalcy, subtlety, or doing anything in a way that isn’t larger-than-life. Because of that, artists like her are a dying breed (as she puts it herself on “Sweet”: “I’m a different kind of woman / if you want some basic bitch, go to the Beverly Center and find her”). The sprawl, the filler tracks, the seemingly out-of-place lyrics that already feel dated by the time the record comes out– these are all things that you come to expect with each Lana album release cycle (and that’s not even mentioning the decade-plus fixation on her controversial career arc that has a nasty habit of overshadowing coverage of her actual music). Sometimes she’ll swing and miss, but the swings are always big. On Ocean Blvd., she’s knocked it out of the park. It’s her best work since 2019’s Normal Fucking Rockwell!, perhaps her best work, period. “A&W” alone feels like a monumental feat, an artist staring herself down and confronting her persona and the woman behind it– Where do tragic rock stars go when (thankfully) the 27 Club won’t have them? What happens to the Lolitas who get to live past thirty? Musically, “A&W” feels like the lovechild of “Hard Feelings/Loveless” by Lorde, “Nights” by Frank Ocean, and “Poor Places” by Wilco. Over its six-minute runtime, the slow-building piano ballad that time-lapses through the Three Faces of Eve culminates in a beat switch that transforms the track into a trap banger with a bratty, double-dutch hook and a mic drop-worthy kiss-off: “Your mom called, I told her you’re fucking up big time.” Grand, communal singalongs like “The Grants,” “Let The Light In,” and “Margaret” invite those nearest and dearest to Lana to sing about love in all its forms– romantic, platonic, familial –while whispery, introspective cuts like “Candy Necklace,” “Kintsugi,” and “Fishtail” show her at her most vulnerable and intimate. My personal pick for song of the summer, “Peppers,” is a stock “the sun is out, my man and I are hot as fuck, and we can’t keep our hands off each other” Lana song, and the way it seamlessly merges a trip-hoppy Tommy Genesis hook into a sample from “Wipeout” (over fourth-wall-breaking studio chatter that introduces said sample) is a stroke of genius. In short: the bitch is back and better than ever.

– Grace Robins-Somerville

Militarie Gun – Life Under the Gun

Ooh ooh! (There’s no other way I could have started this write-up.) I am so happy Life Under the Gun clocks in at just over 27 minutes; I was able to listen to the album on repeat enough times to identify it as one of my favorite releases of 2023 so far. Ian Shelton (of Regional Justice Center and the podcast I Don’t Care If This Ruins My Life with Drug Church’s/Self-Defense Family’s Patrick Kindlon) grazes hardcore like a poorly aimed bullet knicks the skin. Despite Life Under the Gun’s sonic lightness, its heavy themes of honesty, lethargy, and pressure are explored through the lens of hook-ridden guitar pop. After a few mix EPs (and the perennial banger “Pressure Cooker” with co-conspirator DAZY) under the Militarie Gun moniker, Shelton reveals his knack for songwriting extends to crafting a tight album that contains depth beyond catchy songs.

– Joe Wasserman

Miya Folick – ROACH

I fell in love with Folick’s songwriting a couple of years ago when I first paid close attention to her lyrics on the 2015 track “Talking With Strangers” in reference to a potential friendship:

And half of my brain was totally afraid
That she’d hate me, never want to see me again
And half of my brain was equally afraid
That she’d like me, wanna be my friend

It felt, and still feels, so resonant with my own experience of trying to figure out myself and other people. Her introspections on ROACH pull at the same old threads of identity, meaning, and love, but now we find her an even more whole, interesting human with almost a decade more life experience backing her musings. On most of the album’s songs, Folick’s delicate, yearning voice takes center stage in layered harmonies over feather-light beats and eclectic synths. On “Get Out of My House” and “Shortstop,” she explores the optimistic side of leaving love that no longer serves her, while “Nothing To See” and “Cockroach” alchemize angst into catharsis. My favorite moments, though, are still the ones where she tackles something big. My two favorite tracks, “Oh God” and “Cartoon Clouds,” seem diametrically opposed, but I see them as a bit of a call-and-response—the former asking, only semi-ironically, if perhaps God could provide the meaning her chaotic life needs. The latter answers that same inner void with the simple, grounded conclusion, “Doesn’t it feel good to feel good?”

– Katie Wojciechowski

Nourished by Time – Erotic Probiotic 2

Did you hear? Disco is back, regarded more highly than ever. Unfortunately, it’s also been sanded down at the edges, a mere shell of its former bombast. Elsewhere, shards of the most recalcitrant strands of tasteless late-aughts radio rock are being fashioned into a Frankenstein’s monster of futuristic pop (your mileage may vary). The re-evaluation will not be televised; it will be served up on your Discover Weekly or your For You page. For those seeking a third way, a retro-futurist middle ground between the mawkishly tasteful and pure abrasion, look no further than Erotic Probiotic 2, a sleek dance-pop album with the melodic sensibility of Houston rap’s warbling hooks at the turn of the century. “Daddy” is a winking inversion of heartbreak and “grindset” mentality, while “Rain Water Promise” marries vaporous synths and skittering 80s drums. This is club music for the introverts, emo for the club kids. It’s vulnerable, funky, lush, and, above all, too weird to fade entirely into the background.

– Jason Sloan

Superviolet – Infinite Spring

Confession time: I was never a Sidekicks Guy. Maybe I was just a few years too young, maybe if I’d listened to more Iron Chic in high school I would have gotten there, but regardless, I showed up late to the party. Luckily through a string of excellent singles, Lame-O co-sign, and persistent Orgcore gf, I found myself eagerly anticipating Steve Ciolek’s new project Superviolet. Slightly folksier, a little prettier, and much more mature, Infinite Spring feels like a best-case scenario for what happens when you age out of a certain music scene. These songs are loving and naturalistic, concerned with memories, feelings, and human connection above all else. Songs like “Overrater” and “Blue Bower” bring the power pop energy, while tracks like “Good Ghost” and “Wave Back” manage to be some of the most touching and life-affirming pieces of music I’ve heard all year. A beautiful album that showcases an effortless artistic evolution into something entirely its own.

— Taylor Grimes

ther – a horrid whisper echoes in a palace of endless joy

A quietly familiar feeling bubbles up after spending just under 30 minutes listening to a horrid whisper echoes in a palace of endless joy, the second album from Philadelphia’s Heather Jones, a.k.a. ther. Perhaps an emboldened hope, a bit of dread, mixed in with the terrifying wonder of each passing day. Jones writes elegantly and broadly about the mundane, the personal, and the ethereal, shaping into an approximation of life itself. Album opener “1 kid” sets the stage for the diorama of memories and music that ensues. A lyric like “How strange to be born in a time like now / When everybody’s freaking out” grasps at a perpetual absurdity, stretched over every decade and sinking in whenever you find yourself listening. Jones’ questioning lies unanswered; silence is left to speak. There’s no way to wrap your head around the strangeness — it simply always is. a horrid whisper is reminiscent of the various works of Phil Elverum while approaching similar themes in wholly distinct ways. “big papi lassos the moon” sifts through the uncertainty of passing days and the relentless forward motion of time. It starts with David Ortiz and lands on the ambient hope of finding peace within the cosmic complications of life. Pedal steel, cello, and baritone saxophone swirl around pensive guitar melodies yet never swallow the central focus on Jones’ vocals and lyrics. ther has found a place of spectral, overwhelming beauty on a horrid whisper; a place that can’t be understood but still feels like home.

– Wes Muilenburg

Water Damage - 2 Songs

Water Damage kind of feels like the perfect name for a band that employs a lot of warped and warbly sounds in their recordings. Austin’s self-proclaimed “drone supergroup” returns for their second album, 2 Songs, and it’s not just a clever name. We’re given two album-side-length bangers that sit between kraut-, noise-, and psych-rock in their near-20-minute runtimes. Comprised of members from Black Eyes, Shit And Shine, and Swans, the band’s lo-fi journeys are as hypnotic as they are haunting, immersive as they are antagonistic, with the two “reels” being titled ‘Fuck This’ and ‘Fuck That.’ Easily one of the most exciting newer bands I’ve discovered this year.

— Logan Archer Mounts

Wednesday – Rat Saw God

Part of me feels like I barely need to sing the praises of Wednesday. The North Carolina band has spent the past few years rapidly climbing the ranks of indie rock with increasingly prolific interviews, reviews, and sold-out shows, gaining an army of fans along the way. Part of me also feels like I already said my piece on this band’s body of work with my massive Countrygaze essay from last November. Despite how much has been written about this band and their latest album, Rat Saw God is a five-star knockout of shoegaze epics, dirtbag love songs, and deep south morality tales that all coalesce into a hot and hazy collection of songs that sound unlike any other band.

– Taylor Grimes

Worry Club – All Frogs Go To Heaven

For the longest time, I kept spinning All Frogs Go To Heaven just trying to figure out how I would even define this music. Emo? Dance? Surf? There’s a little bit of screaming on some songs, while others lean into a boppy HUNNY style of music that would have popped off on Tumblr in 2017. No matter the case, this release grabs you right out of the gate with a two-note riff that gets you in the groove and keeps you (willingly) suspended there for the remaining five tracks. Eventually, I realized the closest thing I could compare Worry Club to is Oso Oso: sunny and lightweight indie rock songs with the occasional drop of emo. Where Worry Club differs is how quickly they rev up to a full-speed throttle and how well they pair a melody with the rapid, robotic guitarwork. Ultimately, Worry Club are in a lane all their own where allowing yourself to be emotional is just as important as dancing through the pain.

– Taylor Grimes

November 16, 2022

The Countrygaze Manifesto

November 16, 2022/ Taylor Grimes

One time in 2009, I was sick as a dog. I was a sophomore in high school, and this was still a period before widespread smartphones or apps. The only sources of entertainment I had were my trusty iPod and a tiny little netbook laptop. It was a sunny spring afternoon in Oregon, and I was experiencing that delirious kind of sickness where your brain can barely function. I was bored as hell, but even in my stupor knew I had seen all that MySpace had to offer. Eventually, I found myself surfing Wikipedia, aimlessly clicking around various band pages in no particular direction.

I wound up on the page for Saves The Day, a band I had recently become enamored with, thanks to a particularly impactful Vagrant Records sampler. Wow, browsing the Wikipedia page for a band at 1 pm on a weekday, say what you will about me, but I have always been the same type of music nerd. I’m also the type of music nerd who just enjoys reading about a band, taking in as much history as possible in order to better understand them. Out of all the information on Save The Day’s page, the one thing that stuck out to me most was a pair of words in the band’s “genres” section: pop-punk.

I was in an exploratory mood, so I clicked on the link and what I found blew my mind. It sounds silly to admit, but it wasn’t until I was face to face with that Wikipedia article at the big old age of 15 that I realized my favorite type of music had a name. Pop-punk.

At this point, I was truly beginning to expand my musical taste; post-hardcore, grunge, indie, and metal were all seeping in around my strong foundation of classic rock adoration and Guitar Hero soundtracks. Underneath all of this was pop-punk. Seriously. Some of my first CDs were Sum 41, Good Charlotte, Simple Plan, and Green Day. I had spent my entire life listening to this subgenre, and I didn’t even know it.

I was too young and musically dumb to see the bigger landscape of what music was. I grew up hearing “Who Let The Dogs Out” in every movie trailer and listening to “Drops of Jupiter” on the radio. To me, “In Too Deep” was the fastest and coolest thing I had ever heard. I didn’t know what genres were, much less something as specific as pop-punk. This was also before Twitter, Reddit, and message boards leveled the playing field on musical knowledge. Some of that stuff existed, but I didn’t know where to find it. I knew what I liked when I heard it, but I hadn’t realized that things like subgenres could lead me to other bands and scenes I would enjoy in the same way.

Editor’s Note: Both “Who Let The Dogs” Out and “Drops of Jupiter” are undeniable bangers. I’m only using them here as examples to provide context to my understanding of music at the time growing up and becoming musically conscious in the late 90s/early 2000s.

Fast forward another 13 or so years, and I am still the biggest music nerd you can imagine. I run multiple music blogs, have a Twitter feed clogged with hundreds of esoteric bands, and my iTunes library boasts an unwieldy 70k songs. This blog is a years-long testament to my musical obsessions, large and small. I’ve fallen in love with countless bands and embedded myself in more subgenres and scenes than I care to count. Over the past year, one of my most powerful obsessions has been with a semi-invented genre called Countrygaze.

Countrygaze is exactly what it sounds like; a little bit of country, a little bit of shoegaze. This is best exemplified by groups like Wednesday and MJ Lenderman, also known as indie music’s favorite power couple. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that Wednesday specifically are the countrygaze blueprint, and Twin Plagues is a textbook example of what the genre stands for. Sure, other bands have played at this intersection before, but nobody has owned it or honed it quite like Wednesday.

On the Bandcamp page for Twin Plagues, underneath the cute video for “Handsome Man” and the excellent essay by Hanif Abdurraqib you’ll find a basic but telling section; the tags. This is tucked all the way at the bottom, beneath the credits and the legal. In this section, Twin Plagues is self-labeled by the band as “rock, country-gaze, indie, lo-fi, shoegaze, and Asheville.” Spoiler alert, the full-circle moment in this article comes here because I felt the same way reading “country-gaze” as I did when I first read pop-punk. Are you kidding me, there’s a name for this specific thing I’ve been obsessed with for the past year? Thank fucking god.

2022 ins: countrygaze
— yassified doug marstch (@_freav) January 3, 2022

If you’re unfamiliar with shoegaze, this might be a good spot for a brief crash course. The genre was first popularized in the 90s by artists like My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive. Depending on who you ask, the term shoegaze could apply to everything from the more biting grunge of artists like Hum to the dreamier soundscapes of artists like Cocteau Twins. The usual signifier of shoegaze is the heavy use of effects pedals to create distorted riffs cranked out at an all-consuming volume that often overshadows the band’s own vocals.

Over the past two decades, the shoegaze genre has maintained modest popularity, mostly in niche subcultures and heavy-adjacent music scenes. Bands have been making great records in this realm for as long as people have been making oversized pedalboard jokes.

Here’s where Countrygaze builds off of this foundation in a novel way. Wednesday’s lead singer Karly Hartzman never gets too dreamy on the vocals, but she also isn’t afraid to distort or modulate her voice. To me, that's an essential part of this fake subgenre. Many of the songs in Wednesday’s discography have shoegaze textures but keep the vocals a little more upfront. Lyrically, these songs could easily be mistaken for country on paper; they hinge on simple observations but ladder up to bigger topics like heartbreak, death, and other forms of loss. The band telegraphed this connection pretty heavily on their covers album from earlier this year which puts the likes of Gary Stewart and The Drive-By Truckers shoulder to shoulder with bands like Smashing Pumpkins and DIY shoegazers Hotline TNT. Take these influences, and you can see how a band would internalize them, then output an album like Twin Plagues or 2020’s I Was Trying to Describe You To Someone.

Look no further than any of Wednesday’s music videos to understand what countrygaze looks like. In these videos, Wednesday play their songs in fields of dead leaves or empty K-Mart parking lots. Home videos exist alongside footage of tour life and cozy North Carolina living rooms. Nature is present and abundant but is often dotted with litter and dirty patches of snow connected by colorless gray highways. These videos are all beautifully shot, using earnest POV footage, and edited in a way that matches the songs perfectly. Heavy as the music and some of the themes are, most of these videos are also humorous and endearing, whether it’s clown metal face paint, Ring Pop props, or simply the sight of the members rocking out to their own riffage in the back of the van, they show a band loving the art they’re creating. If you want to know what countrygaze is, simply throw on a playlist of Wednesday music videos, and let it roll for an hour.

As I sank deep into a Twin Plagues rabbit hole by the end of 2021, I started to put together a playlist of songs that fit this hyper-specific criteria. Fuzzy shoegaze riffs, a little bit of twang, and super simple lyrics. That’s the formula. Many songs out there have one or two of these things, but very few artists put all three together. Even Wednesday themselves sometimes drop the fuzz for classic country balladry like on “How Can You Live If You Don’t Love How Can You If You Do.” Other times, they drop the riffs for hypnotic lo-fi abstraction on tracks like the closing cover song “Ghost of a Dog.”

On the flip side, you have songs on Twin Plagues that read as complete and utter embodiments of Countrygaze. The shreddy, seesaw riff on “Handsome Man” paired with lyrics of overpasses, broken glass, and trashy family photos. One song later, the sight of a dilapidated fast-food restaurant forces Hartzman into an existential crisis. A woozy lap steel guitar soundtracks this internal struggle, eventually giving way to a torrential shoegaze riff that towers above everything that came before it. Choices like this give the songs a grungy loud/quiet/loud dynamic that encourages the listener to lean in only to be bowled over moments later by an overwhelming crush of noise. This shift also contextualizes the song’s lyrics, making them feel big or small depending on what Hartzman and company decide to prop them up against. Speaking of which, there’s a lyric on “Cliff” about putting a loved one’s ashes in a Dallas Cowboy urn, and honestly? If I were to distill this semi-fake subgenre down to a single line, it might be that one.

In almost every case, these songs are small in theory but big in practice. The worlds are lived-in, often populated by modest people who are trying their best despite circumstances that are not always in their control. There’s truthfulness and relatability in how the band depicts these southern mundanities, making it feel as if you’ve lived the memories yourself in a dream or a past life. There are specific details and nouns that stick out, but there’s also a hot and oppressive southern haze that ties the whole thing together. That’s why I think Twin Plagues is the foundational record for this genre, because it wrote the playbook. This record is the canvas, and other bands are now beginning to play within it.

Wednesday-Pilled pic.twitter.com/sW3cflADSs
— taylor (@GeorgeTaylorG) March 10, 2022

By the beginning of the year, I had declared myself fully “Wednesday-Pilled.” I had purchased all the band’s albums off Bandcamp, was taking excited selfies holding their vinyl, and slowly stitching together the tapestry of this wider countrygaze sound. I realized some of the more mellow stuff from Greet Death fit this category. I was talking to friends on Twitter about the novelty of this sound and discovering new artists in the process. Then-just released songs like “Kerrytown” by Big Vic, “Doubts” by Cloakroom, and “Q Degraw” by Wild Pink proved that this was an ongoing phenomenon and affirmed that this genre was something worth chasing down.

I threw together a silly little Spotify playlist, and then the weather got warmer. By the time spring had rolled around, the term “Countrygaze” had largely slipped my mind. The weather was warming up, and I needed upbeat music to match the tempo. I was also at the beginning of an exciting new relationship, deeply in love, and happy with my life for the first time in a long time. I was ready to leave the all-consuming crush of countrygaze in a sadder section of my Spotify library. Then MJ Lenderman released Boat Songs.

I had heard Knockin’ and Ghost of Your Guitar Solo the year before, but nothing had really connected with me outside of the latter’s titular instrumental. But something clicked with Boat Songs, and the record ended up soundtracking my summer. Maybe it was just something about that dumb hat or the charming thrill of hearing a man sing “Harris Teeter,” but the record delighted me. It also blew the doors open on Countrygaze by providing a distinct counterpoint to Wednesday’s particular brand of art school shoegaze.

While Wednesday songs are often sweeping and poetic, MJ Lenderman's songs are folksy and goofy. They recount sports esoterica and romanticize wrestling. They hold sportstar Dan Marino and Disney's Toontown in equal regard. MJ Lenderman dares his audience to imagine a scenario in which they’ve bought a boat or tool around town in an SUV. He’s talking directly to the kind of audience who both relates with and wouldn’t mind belting along the lyrics, “I love drinkin’ too, yeah, I love drinkin’ too.” It’s basically the ultimate “Dudes Rock” music, but there’s also something deeper going on under the hood.

In contrast to the examples listed above, MJ also offers up a surprisingly deep philosophical probe on “Tastes Just Like It Costs” and stares down the loneliness of the universe on “Six Flags.” He also has a knack for writing lyrics that sound like they’re already colloquialisms. “Tastes Just Like It Costs” isn’t just a great chorus; it’s good advice and a cautionary tale. You get out what you put in; you pay for shit, ya get shit back; tastes just like it costs.

At one point, near the tail end of Boat Songs, MJ takes a stab at articulating the feeling of love on “You Are Every Girl To Me.” In this song, love can be found in the vibrant colors of a community swimming pool and the simplicity of a birdfeeder. Love can also be found in small, heartfelt gestures like homemade dinners or buying someone a silly shirt. Ultimately, no lyric could be MJ Gospel more than the one found at the end of the second chorus when Lenderman sings, “Jackass is funny / Like the Earth is round.” Yes. We need more love songs about Jackass.

Another exemplary MJ Lenderman cut is “Someone Get The Grill Out Of The Rain” off Guitar Solo. The track is only a minute and 13 seconds long and doesn’t venture much beyond the conflict stated in its title. Someone left the grill out in the rain. MJ is gonna write about it. Halfway through the song, Lenderman lifts the veil and reveals what the song is really about.

“It'd be such a bust
That grill should rust
Precious memories are the ones
That suck
Just can't get enough”

At one point, my girlfriend and I were talking about MJ Lenderman’s lyrics, and we arrived at the conclusion that he’s adept at writing “a song about nothing that’s actually kinda about something.” Just look at that quote above from “Grill.” Sure it’s a song about a BBQ being left out to the destructive whim of mother nature; it’s also about a whole lot more. Similarly, a track like “I Ate Too Much At The Fair” is exactly what it sounds like. Again, the lyrics barely venture beyond the ones that make up its title but are presented in such a way that gives them an inherent deeper meaning. You can project a lot onto a song like “Fair,” but you could also just take it at face value as a song about eating too many elephant ears and feeling a little sick. That’s the beauty.

Through a detailed patchwork of originals and covers, Wednesday and MJ tackle things as commonplace as billboards, TV dinners, and trash fires. They take these everyday occurances and shift the listener’s perspective until those same concepts become holy. Together, Wednesday and MJ Lenderman offer two sides of the same Countrygaze coin. One brings big, towering riffs, and the other provides shorter, smaller slices. Both circle around the complex realities of life; they’re just approaching it from different angles. They are also dating, which makes this extra cute. They are the Countrygaze Couple we all wish we could be.

Most recently, bands of all shapes, sizes, and locations have been fleshing out their own corners of countrygaze. Wild Pink packed a wallop into their new album with the one-two punch of “See You Better Now” and “Sucking On The Birdshot.” Greet Death cooned “Your Love is Alcohol,” and no booze-based metaphor has ever hit the same quite since. Bands like Dialup Ghost have taken the lyrics in a radical political direction. In contrast, others like Spirit Was have leaned further into abstraction, melding equivalent but equally disparate genres like folk and blackgaze. Even albums from a couple of years ago, like Moveys and Empty Country, could now fall under this Countrygaze category retroactively.

Exciting new groups like Big Vic and A Country Western have been adding their own artistic flare to these sounds, pushing the genre in artsy new directions that retain the distortion and the occasional hint of twang. Even Wednesday themselves show no sign of stopping; back in September, the band dropped an eight-and-a-half-minute bruiser called “Bull Believer,” and it’s already one of my favorite tracks from the project. That single (along with a signing to Dead Oceans) signaled a fruitful new page for the fake little genre that could.

The cherry that came on top of this avalanche of highly-specific tunes came when I found myself bored clicking around the Wednesday Bandcamp page a few days ago. I was reminded of the term ‘countrygaze’ and decided to Google it just to see what would come up.

The top search result was the page for the Bandcamp tag, of which Wednesday’s discography sits prominently at the top. There are also a few artists underneath the core three Wednesday albums, including scoutmaster and Nash To Stoudemire (two Wednesday side projects) and one from an LA group called Grave Saddles. This group has released an EP, a single, and most recently, a 2022 Tour Tape proudly tagged with the “country-gaze” moniker.

I gave the three-track release a listen, and much to my surprise, I found myself really enjoying it. Most of all, I couldn’t shake how perfectly all three songs fit within the “countrygaze” label. I love this little tape, and it’s got me excited to follow this band to see what they do next. And this is how Countrygaze becomes a real thing.

Wednesday still feel completely out of reach for me (plus, nothing I write could ever stack up to this profile in Oxford American), but I recently became mutuals with Grave Saddles on Twitter and decided to take that connection as an opportunity to ask them about this genre. Based on the group’s releases, it seemed like they had been active since 2019, but it wasn’t until 2021 that they began using the “Countrygaze” tag on Bandcamp. I asked guitarist Chris Broyles what he thought of that descriptor, how the band arrived at it, and whether or not it was influenced by Wednesday.

Broyles explained that they threw the Countrygaze tag on that release because it seemed to be the most widely agreed-upon term for whatever this scene is. They had a band before this one that often got relegated to the umbrella “shoegaze” descriptor. The band admitted they “100% lifted the tag from Wednesday” but also view that subgenre as one part of a larger movement called post-country. In the band’s own words, post-country is “essentially country songs or the essence of country songs that forego established conventions or instrumentation.”

The band traces their interpretation of this term back to Arthur Miles’ “Lonely Cowboy” in 1929, a song they jokingly called “proto-post-country” and view as an outlier in the country music canon. They say this scene begins contemporaneously with Acetone and their catalog, observing that “if there seems to be one common thread across a lot of these countrygaze bands, it’s that we’re all big Acetone fans.”

Conversely, I asked Big Vic’s lead singer and guitarist Victoria Rinaldi what she thought about the “countrygaze” label. She feels like, if anything, the term fits Girl, Buried, but only retroactively. While Rinaldi is a fan of Wednesday and Lenderman, she says that Big Vic recorded the bulk of their record before Twin Plagues had come out, so Wednesday didn’t have much of a direct influence on the album. She also says the Americana tinge present on “Kerrytown” specifically came from her love for Wilco and Silver Jews.

As captured in playlists by two of the movement’s figureheads, you can see everything from Acetone and Vic Chesnutt alongside droney shit like Earth and Sparklehorse as well as grungy 90s rock staples like Sunny Day Real Estate and Dinosaur Jr. Looking at that list of influences, it’s hard not to be excited by the promise of this genre. It feels like we’re on the precipice of something fresh, exciting, and truly unique. Wednesday and MJ have been setting the speed and the tone for what Countrygaze could be, but groups like Grave Saddles are running with it full force.

Most of all, I’m excited to see where Countrygaze goes next. If the internet has proven anything, it’s that it has the power to make genres like this into legitimate scenes of interconnected artists all collaborating and building off each other. We’re coming off a banner year from the Wednesday/MJ Camp, with both artists having released fantastic full-length albums to increasing coverage and acclaim. With Wednesday poised to drop another record in the next year (on the same label as Phoebe Bridgers, Japanese Breakfast, and Mitski, no less), it feels like we’re only at the beginning. The future of Countrygaze is as wide and open as the rolling landscape of a classic country song. Strapping in and watching this scenery pass by has already been one of the most thrilling discoveries of my music-listening career. Where things go next is anyone’s guess.

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10 | Slow Pulp – Yard

9 | Horse Rider – Real Melody

8 | Superviolet – Infinite Spring

7 | saturdays at your place – always cloudy

6 | Bully – Lucky for You

5 | Ratboys – The Window

4 | Phony – Heater

3 | Hotline TNT – Cartwheel

2 | Wednesday – Rat Saw God

1 | Talking Kind – It Did Bring Me Down

1 | Militarie Gun - “Do It Faster”

2 | Talking Kind - “Damn Shame”

3 | Bully - “Days Move Slow”

4 | Wednesday - “Quarry”

5 | Greg Mendez - “Maria”

6 | Ratboys - “It’s Alive!”

7 | Superviolet - “Overrater”

8 | saturdays at your place - “tarot cards”

9 | Slow Pulp - “Cramps”

10 | Caroline Polachek, Charli XCX, George Daniel - “Welcome To My Island (Remix)”

11 | MJ Lenderman - “Rudolph”

12 | Talking Kind - “Pretty Flowers”

billy woods, Kenny Segal - Maps

Bully – Lucky For You

Clearbody – Bend Into a Blur

Cory Hanson – Western Cum

Easy Beach – Easy Beach

EXIT ELECTRONICS – BELIEVE ANYTHING, BELIEVE EVERYTHING

Feeble Little Horse – Girl with Fish

Frog Legs – It’s Been a Hard Year

Frozen Soul – Glacial Domination

Greg Mendez – Greg Mendez

HMLTD – The Worm

Home Is Where – the whaler

Hot Mulligan – Why Would I Watch

Indigo De Souza – All of This Will End

Innerlove. – Roscoe

Jess Williamson – Time Ain’t Accidental

Kara Jackson – Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love?

Kerosene Heights – ​​Southeast of Somewhere

Lana Del Rey - Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd?

Militarie Gun – Life Under the Gun

Miya Folick – ROACH

Nourished by Time – Erotic Probiotic 2

Superviolet – Infinite Spring

ther – a horrid whisper echoes in a palace of endless joy

Water Damage - 2 Songs

Wednesday – Rat Saw God

Worry Club – All Frogs Go To Heaven

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