Tonight I Will Be Your Entertainment: The Ascendancy of saturdays at your place

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Photo by Ty Benson

“If [saturdays at your place] is what the future of emo looks like, we’re in safe hands.” That’s what Taylor Grimes concluded when he crowned always cloudy as one of the best releases of last year. The trio dropped their star-making EP at the onset of 2023 and have spent the following two years touring relentlessly, building a grassroots fandom on the back of a very small but promising body of work. From “tarot cards” hitting streaming highs to retrieving stolen gear from evidence lockers and selling out their first headlining tour, 2024 has been a banner year for saturdays at your place, and 2025 is looking even better as anticipation builds for their next move. We sat down with a few of the band’s recent tourmates to hear in their own words what makes saturdays special, but before that, a bit of a history lesson. 

The genre’s newest superstars are from Kalamazoo, Michigan, making them, yes, true Midwest Emo. The trio is comprised of Esden Stafne on bass, Gabe Wood on drums, and Mitch Gulish on guitar, with Stafne and Wood sharing vocals duties across their discography, lending the band a nice range as they bounce from one perspective to another. Their debut album, something worth celebrating, came out in 2021, and the group has seemingly been working nonstop ever since, touring everything from basement shows to Hot Mulligan concerts. Sonically, they lean more into the traditional side of second- and fourth-wave emo (if you believe in that sort of thing), taking cues from twinkly progenitors like Pictures of Vernon, Their/They’re/There, and Camping in Alaska while putting their own distinctly gaze-y tinge on the sound. Like all new emo bands at this point, they’ve received plenty of comparisons to groups like Modern Baseball and Remo Drive, but that just scratches the surface of s@ypdom. 


We're Getting Off to a Rough Start

saturdays at your place first hit my radar on some random winter weekday in 2023 the same way a lot of people found them—a joke about their pronunciation of the word “tarot.” The band’s breakthrough song is incredibly catchy, with an immediately recognizable intro, a thumping bassline, and play-by-play lyrics about a Classically Emo Scenario: having a weird time at a house party—great stuff with a very strong start. Around the one-minute mark, the gang vocals kick in and shout, “They’re pulling out the tarot cards!” like an announcement (or a warning) (or a threat) yelled over the music at the aforementioned party. 

The joke comes from the way “tarot” is said. While lots of people seem to say the word as if it rhymes with “arrow,” saturdays at your place hit the "ro" hard, kinda like how you would pronounce “throw.” My understanding is that it’s a regional accent, but emo music listeners are very online, so the song made pretty much immediate waves on TikTok, Discord, and Twitter (to this day) because that line stuck out in such a charming and memorable way. 

Author’s note: This is the part where I admit that there is nothing I hate more than when I’m at a party and everyone decides to start playing a game or doing a secondary activity. I like chatting with strangers over music and generally hanging out. I think starting a secondary thing usually kills the vibe. If any of my friends are reading this, I am not talking about you. I loved it when you pulled out a board game at your party and had a lot of fun learning the rules of Catan at 11 pm.

Two years and eight million Spotify streams later, it's easy to see “tarot cards” success in real-time at any show the band puts on. Even listening to the studio recording, you can almost feel the finger-pointing reaction of the crowd when Stafne reasons, “Well, your friends don’t like me / I don’t like me too.” It’s obvious that someone is going to crowdsurf over the bridge’s “and when the lights go down / I don’t want to leave this house.” In fact, former tourmates Riley! said it’s their favorite song to see saturdays perform live because it's a fan favorite, and the band can command the room with it. I really like the song, too; I think it’s perfectly shy and maybe even cute. I especially like the line at the end, “Well, will you stick around if I do? / I think I found a part of me beside you.” 

Okay, so it only makes sense here to try and describe why people care so much about always cloudy. I mean, the EP has only six songs, how much could the band realistically tear through in 18 minutes? I had the same question. Turns out the answer is it’s just really loud and cohesive and earnest.

Photo by Ty Benson

What’s good about “tarot cards” being a launchpad of sorts is that it's a song that really introduces the band. Even the notion of talking to some unnamed person makes the band name make more sense—is this stumbling partygoer the person whose place you’re at on Saturdays? It makes you double back to start the whole thing from the beginning. The rest of always cloudy follows this kind of crowded hallway feeling. It's sweaty, buzzing, frustrating, overwhelming, and a little overheated from trying to wear winter clothes in a packed house while half-buzzed off three warm Miller Lites.

“future” kicks the EP off on the miserable final thoughts of their first album (discussed later), with frustrated lyrics burying themselves under a particularly dancy beat that gives each member of the trio a chance to shine. The groove of “future” extends into “fetch,” which leads into “tarot cards.” To me, the following track, “hospital bed,” is the spiritual sequel of “tarot cards”—kind of like the next morning after a wrought party experience, all mixed with a vibe I can only describe as Carpoolian. After is “it’s always cloudy in kalamazoo,” a song that needs a crowd as much as the crowd needs it.

The EP ends with “eat me alive,” a four-minute closer that's constantly colliding into itself with two distinct halves: one slow and laced with self-inflicted cruelty and another that’s fast and turns the blame outwards. It’s also my favorite. The song starts with the fuzzy dirge before Wood’s drums come in, loud and miserable. The first two minutes feel almost like the waves in the album art are washing over you as Wood lets the more complicated parts of himself crash ashore. The song builds and builds before breaking entirely. Wood speeds up his drumming and spits out one of my favorite lyrics on the EP, a strangled accusation, “You prepare me for a meal / ‘cause your friends / eat me alive.” saturdays at your place is not a band about mending relationships or even necessarily apologizing, they look at a scene from all angles, and, as much as they critique themselves, they aren’t afraid to level blame at others as well. Amidst a pummeling build, Wood flips the cards and reveals, “Saturdays are the worst for me too / I'll do anything to get you out of my room.” Actually, this one contributor on Genius can probably explain it better than me:

 
 

The album concludes with the assurance that “In time, memories will fade / I promise everything in the future” before looping back into the first track and starting again. It is a perfect six-song collection about feeling bad, feeling good, going back to feeling evil, just hanging out, and trying to figure out what you mean to someone.


Well, Will You Stick Around If I Do?

It’s genuinely refreshing to see people so excited about something new again. It should be news to no one that emo has a real nostalgia problem. Whether it's as blatant as When We Were Young Fest or as underhanded as people insisting that whatever Foxing album they heard first is their best one, it’s an irritating bias. I think saturdays at your place managed to unintentionally fulfill a nostalgic niche and satisfy a craving the scene had for ultra-catchy Midwest Emo. I think about how when I first listened to always cloudy–the house show atmosphere of the songs immediately dragged me back to the days of Modern Baseball and their music videos for songs like “The Weekend” and “Your Graduation.” It was instantly familiar in a way that other contemporary emo songs can’t quite achieve. In other words, it’s clear that the members of saturdays came into their own during that particular era of music, but they aren’t stuck in nostalgia. In fact, they seem to be actively combating it by working with other new emo bands as they collaboratively construct a cohesive scene.

saturdays at your place just wrapped their third tour of the year, each outing sharing the stage with other rapidly growing emo acts. They started the year on the Wax Bodega Tour with a stacked lineup of Ben Quad, who is taking over the world; Carly Cosgrove, who is maybe one of the best live acts you can catch (I reviewed their latest album); and Arm’s Length, who is clearing a path for these upcoming legends. When we asked Ben Quad about this, they said, “That tour felt like we were doing something important for the genre.” We agree. A couple of months later, saturdays at your place headed back out on the road as support for Prince Daddy and the Hyena’s summer tour with tapping superstars Riley! and Carpool (I also reviewed their latest album). This fall, they toured with Carpool again, with the midwest emo-revivalists TRSH and Dudes Rock connoisseur Harrison Gordon in tow. It doesn’t even end there because Origami Angel announced they’re taking saturdays on tour with them to the UK in Winter 2025. Phew. That felt like constant name-dropping, but it’s their actual reality.

Photo by Emily Harrington


But If You Get to Know Me, I'll Get to Know You

Beyond their EP, saturdays at your place has released one album, something worth celebrating, and a three-way split with SHOPLIFTER and Summerbruise called That’s What Friends Are For. 

Author’s note: While you may know that Mitch Gulish joined Summerbruise last year, did you know he’s in the music video for “With Friends Like These, Who Needs Empathy?” Thank you Mike for bringing this to our attention.

I guess this is the part where I speak very frankly. For a very long time, I didn’t care about saturdays at your place very much. I don’t know if y’all remember the state of DIY emo during the pandemic and directly after when touring started again, but it was really rough. I love a lot of the projects that came out during the time, but they were standouts in a total cesspool. Many previously exciting artists had serious accusations leveled against them, there were tensions between bands and band members, and several musicians just gave up and left music entirely during the nightmarish era. I found it hard to truly get excited about anything new, so I didn’t. As a result, when saturdays at your place released their first album in late 2021, I just ignored it. 

It wasn’t until I saw that random “tarot cards” joke a couple of years later that I gave them any time of day. This was after some of the misery of 2020-22 diy emo spaces had subsided, and notably, for one of the first times in a minute, I had seen people thoroughly geeked about something new. 

Photo by Ty Benson

One thing made very clear moments into “first of all” is that Gulish is a very good guitarist. In fact, a lot of the band’s debut album seems to be built on how good of a guitarist he is, with a couple of songs being guitar-led instrumental tracks or featuring extended guitar solos with his constant, complex, twinkly riffing. Elsewhere, songs like “existential shred” pad the release with lyric-less riffing, and I find it genuinely cool that they added these to their debut album. (Author’s note: as I was writing this, the band posted this Tweet encouraging listeners to “just skip all of the instrumentals,” so they seem to disagree, but I like ‘em.) At the time, especially after the popularity of particularly wordy emo artists like Origami Angel, many emo bands felt the need to fill in that same space with lots of lyrics. They don't. This album is proof.

Two years later, saturdays’ first contribution to That’s What Friends Are For is “pourover,” which has legitimately gotten stuck in my head at least once every week since its release in late 2023 (and you should check out their acoustic version with Counter Intuitive Records). Then there’s “forever,” which is easily one of the band’s most experimental songs as they break away from the fairly rigid rules of Midwest Emo and deploy a robotic vocal distortion on Wood’s voice. It makes the song more melancholy and distant. I consider saturdays at your place a fairly upbeat band, but this is the lowest they’ve ever dived in their discography. It acts as the symbolic ending of the split, the emotional endpoint. I look forward to hearing more of this grim experimentation on future projects. 


Can We Change the Conversation?
Can We Make It About Me?

Obviously, with only 19-ish songs to their name, this is a relatively small discography, but that means it’s more accessible to new fans. saturdays seem to have gamified the streaming algorithms that be; their songs have wound up on major editorial playlists on services like Spotify, spreading their music even further than imagined. This is at least partially responsible for their about 200,000 monthly listeners on Spotify (for reference: heavy hitters in the scene like Prince Daddy and the Hyena or Oso Oso are tens of thousands of listeners under that). 

To get a sense of this whirlwind rise to emo fame saturdays is experiencing, we reached out to Ben Quad, an up-and-coming band from another niche music scene who blew up at a similar time and also sold out national tours. In one word, Ben Quad described the experience as “wild.” They referred to tangible things like busier inboxes and new management but focused specifically on the fandom side. “Our audience is definitely a lot broader now, too. There’s also a lot more die-hard fans at our shows, which is something foreign to us. We have multiple people a show flying across the country to see us, and that absolutely blows my mind.” This experience, going from small house gigs with friends to sold-out club shows with fans in just a couple of releases, seems to mirror the trajectory of saturdays at your place and leaves the future of emo music open and sprawling.

While I can’t speak from personal experience, from observation, gaining such a quick notoriety can either drive your project into super-popularity or doom your reputation, kind of like a false start. In the case of saturdays at your place, it seems to have done the first thing. From my perspective, the minuscule mispronunciation in a great song seems to have launched the band into emo stardom and resulted in an instant classic. The enthusiasm for this band is tangible. Don’t believe me? Let’s talk about their live shows.

Photo by Ty Benson

2024 started, as mentioned, with the Wax Bodega tour. My tour date was in a cramped new club, and for the first time ever in the venue, I was struggling to catch a glimpse of the stage – it was just so packed and rowdy. When we asked Ben Quad about that tour, they said, “There wasn’t ever really a sleepy show because saturdays were there to get the crowd riled up from the start.” While I had seen saturdays before, that was the first time I really experienced that frenetic energy in action, and all for the opener.

Over the summer, saturdays shared a stage with Riley! who has a similar rowdy fanbase. When we asked about that crowd, Riley! said, “If you could boil it down into one word, energetic doesn’t even begin to explain it.” Carpool was on that same tour, and Stoph Colasanto described the crowd as “ravenous” and detailed how the audience was climbing over itself to get closer and closer to the band, a sight I experienced myself.

Carpool just wrapped up the always cloudy tour with saturdays and witnessed firsthand the band’s shift from a support slot to a headliner. Colasanto said that as the headliner, saturdays went all out. “They brought out all the bells and whistles, and it was genuinely fun to watch every night.” Ultimately, the experience “was a literal party but the type of party that’s all-inclusive and for everyone. It was cathartic.”

Outside of the performances, the fervor around the band had started to change, which can be summed up in one of Colasanto’s observations – that every single day of the tour, fans were lined up outside the venues early to get front spots for the gig. As someone who has stuck around DIY emo corners for several years, I find it hard to picture this happening in such a small and, at times, insular genre, but it absolutely is. 

We interviewed a lot of bands for this article, and one thing became abundantly clear very quickly: this is all just so much fun. Mike Newman of Summerbruise recalled, “Their excitement about every single crunchy-ass aspect of touring really renewed my appreciation for what we get to do.” Riley! added to that sentiment and said that touring with saturdays this summer was a blast – “we truly could not have asked for better tourmates on that run.” Ben Quad continued that train of thought and said saturdays were “one of those bands we instantly connected with as soon as we met them.” From Colasanto’s perspective, “It’s really special to see something so real and organic continue to grow and to get bigger, and for it to happen to saturdays just makes my heart so happy because they deserve everything in this world and more.”

Photo by Ty Benson

So, it’s all gas, no brakes for saturdays at your place, both physically after this year spent as road dogs and emotionally as they connect with a bigger audience than ever before. When it comes to what’s next, saturdays at your place talked about working on their next album during their latest tour. This record will be one of the most highly anticipated releases of the year and the first since their split with SHOPLIFTER and Summerbruise in 2023. Coming up even sooner is their holiday show with Ben Quad, Worry Club, Summerbruise, and Palette Knife. We asked Summerbruise about the show, and Newman’s excitement was tangible: “My favorite shit as a kid was watching the bands I loved who were legit friends goofing off together on stage, and this lineup is stacked with some of my all-time favorite goofers.” 

Like I said earlier, emo has a nostalgia problem, and I pity people who sit out just because they assume the stuff they grew up on is superior for whatever reason. I am so excited, genuinely, that this generation of listeners have a band like saturdays to be a fan of, a buzzing genre to enjoy, and an exciting scene to be part of.

The larger impact of saturdays will be reverberating around the Emo World for years. People will pick up the guitar because they want to play like Mitch, or they’ll start singing in a garage band because of Esden and Gabe, and when asked about their inspirations, saturdays will be first on their lists. I also think about Kalamazoo and how exciting it is for a band from a small scene to get this big. I think about how their attention will translate into people discovering new bands and how Kalamazoo will be intrinsically tied to the emo music of this era. Stoph Colasanto put it best:

“They’re a true testament to what it means to be DIY and care about your scene, community, and hometown. That’s something that really resonates with me — talk to Esden about Kalamazoo, he fucking loves it. It's his favorite city in the world. That shit gets me so hyped up. To see a DIY band from a smaller city or town get national attention and to use that to lift up their hometown and their community means a lot. Even as an outsider, I just get so stoked for Kalamazoo and for what saturdays is doing for it.”

“Anyone who has ever been in the proximity of that band knows that they are the future.” That’s what Ben Quad said while replying to our first question about saturdays at your place, and I think they’re absolutely right. Since 2023, I have seen saturdays at your place four times, and while this essay is not a concert review, I can’t emphasize enough how good they are live and how fun their performances are. Whether saturdays is headlining or supporting, the whole crowd knows the words to every song, thrashes around to every guitar solo, and the crowd surfs through their entire set. People are excited, and I am too. So, like we said, if saturdays at your place is what the future of emo looks like, we’re in safe hands.

Caro Alt (she/her) is from New Orleans, Louisiana, and if she could be anyone in The Simpsons, she would be Milhouse.

Mount Eerie – Night Palace | Album Review

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P.W. Elverum & Sun

It’s been about a month since Night Palace dropped, and I barely have my arms around it. Over the course of 81 minutes, legendary singer-songwriter Phil Elverum covers a lot of sonic and thematic territory. Black metal, motherhood, loosey-goosey indie rock, songs based on poems, poems based on songs, and Marxist property theory are just a few of the topics Phil examines on his sprawling new album. There’s a 12-minute spoken word track, a 58-second lullaby for his daughter, and an autotuned song about talking to a fish. It’s a complex listen.

Night Palace’s multifaceted nature stems from Phil’s attempt to reconcile many different pieces of his psyche, the world that he inhabits, and his rich artistic history. Since The Microphones’ free-flowing cult classic The Glow Pt. 2 landed him at the top of Pitchfork’s Top Albums of 2001, his 25-year stint as one of indie’s preeminent singer-songwriters has been marked by pendulum swings. One project is quiet, literal, and sincere. The next? Noisy, distorted, and atmospheric. In his words, this album is about finding as much connection as possible between all these versions of himself and all the contradictions we inhabit. It’s about creating continuity between our collective past and the present. Between the domestic and the spectral. The analogical and the objective.

In his attempt to locate this elusive nexus, Phil crafts a collection of songs that play out like the album-to-album oscillations of his discography in miniature. The opening track, “Night Palace,” features a hefty dose of contemplative verse and the studio experimentation that defined the early Microphones stuff - an air organ run through heavy distortion that blankets the composition with a thick, staticky haze. “Huge Fire” loosens things up with an electric guitar and a warmer arrangement to complement Phil’s lyrics about the all-encompassing sensory act of building a giant bonfire. It’s also the first of several references on Night Palace to Phil’s favorite symbol over the years - the powerful, dynamic force of the wind. At age 23 on tracks like “I Want Wind to Blow,” the wind was a way out for Phil, an escape from the claustrophobia of modern urban life. Now, at 46, the wind is not something to pray for but rather a powerful, beautiful, and destructive inevitability. It’s not strictly any one of those things; it represents the confluence of all those things and more.

The wind and other environmental symbols that appear throughout Night Palace represent an easing of Elverum’s commitment to a hyper-realistic songwriting approach after the passing of his wife Genevieve and the release of his devastating (and best-selling) 2017 album, A Crow Looked At Me. “Broom of Wind” is a perfect example of Phil loosening those self-imposed restrictions by allowing the poetic to coexist with the realistic within the very same song. It’s a stroke of concise songwriting brilliance that harmonizes his early inclination towards the natural metaphor with his late-period literalism, referencing a zen poem of the same name and conjuring a homey, solemn image of Phil sweeping his kitchen every morning. “Sweeping with an old broom / whose straw keeps chunking off / for me to sweep up” is both a relatable domestic frustration and an iteration of Sisyphusian myth rolled up into one short and sweet verse. Night Palace is full of such instances - the ordinary made cosmic.

As the album stretches on, seemingly into infinity, Phil inhabits just about every pocket of his sound that he’s ever explored. “Blurred World” is one long, gorgeous verse about worsening vision and pissing outside that recalls the vocal choir heavily featured on his 2005 album Singers. On the hilarious and poignant “I Spoke With a Fish,” we get another taste of the autotuned wackiness of 2013’s Pre-Human Ideas. Phil’s frequently cited Stereolab influence has never been quite so clear, in both sound and subject, as it is on “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization” and “Co-Owner of Trees,” two krautrock jams about nativism and the strange concept of land ownership. Though many of these ideas are familiar, it’s not quite right to call them retreads; a couple decades of experience imbues these words and sounds with new life, and their unconventional sequencing accentuates just how unique each one is. Every time I listened, a new handful stood out, and I suspect the same thing will happen again and again as I revisit.

There’s an entire dissertation to write unpacking each of the verses and sonic vignettes in Night Palace’s 26 tracks. This record - possibly even more so than many of Phil’s works - should be treated as a primary source text rather than an airplane novel. It’s a snapshot in time that means something different to its author and audience today than it will in a year and a few years after that. It should be listened to, read, discussed, and relistened to again. In that way, it can be a nexus of temporal perspective for you in the same way that it was for our old friend Phil.

Parker White is a tech salesperson moonlighting as a music writer. When not attending local shows in Atlanta or digging for new tunes, he’s hosting movie nights, hiking/running, or hanging out with his beloved cat, Reba McEntire. You can find him on Twitter and Instagram @parkerdoubleyoo, and you can read other stuff he’s written over on his Substack.

A Place For Owls – how we dig in the earth | Album Review

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Broom of Destruction Records

A Place for Owls open up their stellar sophomore album, how we dig in the earth, with “go on,” an acoustic ballad that crescendos into strings, keys, and gang vocals. Lead singer Ben Sooy’s voice is gentle–but not weak–in conveying the general human problem of not being okay at all. This first track is perfectly indicative of the 45 minutes of humane intimacy and tenderness found throughout the record, the strengths that separate APFO from both their influences and their peers.

Once “go on” reaches its peak, “hourglass” roars in with thick, crunchy guitars, crashing cymbals, and Sooy’s beating, bleeding open heart. The song tells the story of his and his partner’s miscarriage presented in momentous, wall-of-sound emotional rock that is textured and carefully layered. It sounds like the color of a densely wooded forest during the first chill, with the warmth of a cabin just a few steps out of reach. It is here that I imagine myself feeling the love Sooy has for his partner, their unborn children, and the life they are building together. Every grain of sand in “hourglass” is the sound of love vying against the unexpected, harsh realities of life.

Without losing the established solemnity of the album, “broken open seed” is as much fun as it is a reflection on the endless nature of waiting for sunlight, the bloom and blossom of oneself.

A broken open seed, imagine me
Lying 'neath the ground all covered in leaves
The very voice of earth
That groans beneath the dirt
When everything's asleep
Everything's asleep
Everything but me

I’ve listened to enough emo music to have developed a keen ear for spotting the quiet-loud dynamic range utilized in many of the genre’s songs. It is a trope of emo that I love, but also one that is expertly subverted on “broken open seed.” One can easily imagine a version of this song that begins quietly, slowly watered with thunderous guitars, and blooms into a headbanging conclusion. Yet APFO go against my ear’s expectations and land in a quiet place to spread their message of love and support for one another. Being themselves is APFO’s superpower.

In contrast to the hooky synths of its predecessor, “huston lake” is another simple and direct ballad reminiscent of the first half of “go on.” Every time I’ve listened to this album, I tear up on this track. I can’t tell you if it’s because I’m a sucker for soft piano and haunting lap-steel guitar or if it is for how beautiful and cathartic it is for me to hear someone let go so enthusiastically when all I do is strive to maintain control in my own life. Perhaps I’m still processing whatever traumas I’ve faced, but I prefer to give grace to Sooy, Nick Webber, Daniel Perez, Ryan Day, Jesse Cowan, and co.: they inspire a release through sparse instrumentation that brings listeners closer to the divine.

At the center of how we dig in the earth lies the one-two punch of “a tattoo of a candle” and “desmond hume.” The former is full of sing-along melodies and the most optimistic lyric I’ve ever heard: “draw your breath in / hope is a weapon.” (I’m already considering a tattoo of that lyric, and the album is not even a month old.) If one follows the extended network of APFO and their Holy Fools, then it is no surprise that they are genuine people who ultimately believe in the beauty of life, community, and love. This authenticity shines through in “tattoo’s” chorus, using specific details to communicate universal feelings:

I'm smoking cigarettes with Daniel
A tattoo of a candle
A flicker and a fade
And everything has changed
I don't need another reason
It's just another season
The leaves will fall and fade
And everything's the same

As “a tattoo of a candle” winds down, “desmond hume” continues the band’s streak of Lost references and ends the A side of the album on an appropriately somber, contemplative note. Evoking the quietude of “go on” and “huston lake,” Webber plays piano and Sooy picks a guitar while reflecting on the death of a stepfather who never really understood him or his complex relationship with his mother. 

Along with the solemn devastation inherent in multiple levels of grief, what stays with me in “desmond hume” is the metaphor of spirits in Sooy’s backpack. At the onset of the song, he calls them American Spirits, identifying them as cigarettes. After processing some of his grief throughout the track, the second “Spirits” lyric becomes something else to me. Sure, they are his comfort in times of distress, but they are also the hauntings he carries with him, always just a light away from springing to life.

In “haunted,” Sooy becomes the spirit. Layers of acoustic and twinkly electric guitars accompanied by a lone trumpet isolate his vocal, emphasizing the loneliness he sings about. When Elliott Green and the full band join, APFO enter full-cathartic-anthem territory, foreshadowing the album’s closing track.

It’d be remiss of me not to discuss “help me let the right ones in.” As an avid Jimmy Eat World fan, Sooy knows the importance of the last song on an album. It is the final statement of the record as an artifact. What thoughts and feelings are left with the listener when all is said and done? Not just that, but the last song must put a ribbon on all that’s come before. Unsurprisingly, APFO stick the landing. “help me let the right ones in” is the call to action after an album of grief and gratitude through the lens of elevating tremolo-picked guitars, pounding drums, and a buoyant, thumping bass. If the beginning of how we dig in the earth is green in its earnest descent into catharsis, the end is a dandelion, Coldplay-colored yellow basking in the warmth and intimacy of love, friendship, family, and the acceptance of change.

Brooklyn native Joe Wasserman moonlights as an English teacher when he’s not playing bass in the LVP. Find more of his writing on Substack.

Haley Heynderickx – Seed of a Seed | Album Review

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Mama Bird Recording Co.

Did we take a wrong turn somewhere? This is something I’m sure everyone has thought at some point in their life, whether that’s in relation to a big life decision such as a move or career change, the direction of a relationship, or something as simple as a literal wrong turn while driving. As a person who grew up in the Information Age, with every global horror and consequence of full-throttle late-stage capitalism beamed directly into my brain, that question becomes haunting and so much bigger than myself. I know for a fact I’m not alone in that torment. If there’s one idea that much of my favorite art from 2024 explores, it would be that kind of existential dread: a cocktail of emptiness and anxiety that can only come from living day-to-day in a world that’s seemingly spiraling more and more out of our control. 

This year, I’ve heard everyone from Vince Staples to MJ Lenderman struggle to find meaning, let alone happiness, in modern times. On “Seed of a Seed,” the lead single and title track off of her long-awaited sophomore album, Haley Heynderickx is in the midst of this same search for contentment. “Cause we all need a sense of lore sometimes / Like I need a silent mind / In a consumer flood,” she sings in one of the verses, the swaying guitar pattern tracking the whole song, joined by a forlorn cello. She wonders if her parents and her “parents’ parents” knew any better before quickly concluding that they couldn’t have. Seed of a Seed is an album concerned with a great many things, but the thought that Heynderickx returns to over and over is this idea of cycles and history and how to reconnect with nature and serenity when we’re caught up in systems far outside of one person’s control. Maybe we took that wrong turn a long time ago…

For the unfamiliar, Haley Heynderickx is a Portland-based singer-songwriter whose debut album, I Need to Start a Garden, has netted her a devoted following in the six years since its release off the back of its enchanting take on indie folk. Where many of her peers blend folk with indie pop and rock influences from the 90s and 2000s, Heynderickx seems to draw from a much older well of inspiration, with mid-20th century folk and jazz chief among them. I remember catching her road test new material while opening for Lucy Dacus on her 2022 jaunt through the Northwest and feeling transported to the late 60s, wondering if this is what it felt like to stumble into a New York bar and watch Joni Mitchell hone now-classic songs.

It should come as no surprise to anyone who has had the opportunity to hear Haley Heynderickx perform in the past two years that Seed of a Seed finds her doubling down on her classic influences while bringing them into the 21st century. “Gemini” begins the album in a place of anxiety, with Heynderickx channeling Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” as she attempts to push down the part of herself railing against all the mundane anxieties of daily life. Nothing is spared, as everything from phone addiction and ignored messages to aimless spending and annoyed strangers get namechecked in a storm of distractions. Each repetition of the guitar motif is underscored by a rising tension until she finally relents to that voice and all the instrumentation joins in what may as well be the musical transcription of a deep breath. 

Regardless of how in vogue her influences are, the strength of Heynderickx’s songwriting is undeniable, as evidenced by “The Bug Collector” off of her debut eventually going viral on social media platforms like TikTok years after release. In that song, she gently removes insects from sight out of love for a panicked partner, but on Seed of a Seed, she has turned her attention to the bugs themselves. “Redwoods (Anxious God)” sees Heynderickx cutting through a forest of whimsical imagery straight out of a mythological fable, repeating a message she received from a pebble: “Humankind is getting lost / Not even little bugs want to talk with us.” The harmony between man and our neighbors is blocked by an impossibly high barricade centuries in the making. It’s a sentiment that risks coming off as hippie preaching, but the childlike wonder captured in both the imagery and plucky performances puts even someone as terminally online as myself right there with Heynderickx. With each infectious refrain, I imagine dancing among the eponymous redwoods and yearning to hear their wisdom, only for the final line to bring me crashing back to civilization. 

Elsewhere, “Mouth of a Flower” ponders the hierarchy of the world, tracing the life cycle from a hummingbird drinking a flower’s nectar to the various ways that humans have taken from the environment and each other. Once again, it’s easy to imagine this inducing some eye rolls in the hands of a less compelling writer, but Haley’s tone is never accusatory. There’s so much beauty in the give and take between man and nature, but also an underlying concern about how imbalanced these exchanges have become as our consumption continues to expand. Flourishes of cello and electric guitar inject extra moments of color into the song, but the former sours towards the end, its chugging rhythm twisting the core refrain, “And we take, and we take, and we take,” into something unnerving. 

These moments of tension may underscore the themes of overstimulation and imbalance, but it’s well worth noting that the experience of listening to Seed of a Seed is so far from either. I only stress them so heavily because it’s easy to get swept up in just how beautiful the vast majority of this record sounds and miss those hints of darkness. Haley Heynderickx pulls a kind of magic trick on the listener with this record. She and her band are able to conjure up their own archaic and grandeur sonic environment so casually that the appeal seems simple to anyone tuning in, but there is a meticulous craft behind it all. Their attention to detail is infectious. Every production choice, each slide of the trombone or pluck of a guitar string, sounds perfectly designed to make you appreciate the nearest patch of green in your vicinity. 

On “Gemini,” this manifests as her “pull[ing] the fuck over just to stare at purple clover off the highway,” kickstarting a series of interrogations into what really matters in her life. Seed of a Seed feels like it’s constantly trying to bottle that moment of realignment of the self and give it to the listener – a plea to value what is in front of us rather than striving for what isn’t. Nowhere is Haley more transparent about this endeavor than on “Sorry Fahey,” where she ponders the correlation between learning to appreciate the little things in life and the trials of adult life. It’s both achingly earnest and playful in a way that’s fast becoming a signature of Heynderickx’s music, full of musical twists and turns, as well as the songwriter lovingly admonishing her cat for being an asshole. 

Maybe to be an adult
To know your body keeps score
Is when you start to appreciate
Start to really appreciate

That you could call your Pa
Or a friend
And not bail on
The thing next Tuesday
Cause it’s a new day
It’s an offering
It’s a kettle
Making you tea
Ginger

It’s this that acts as the key to Haley’s outlook. Finding peace and purpose as an act of gentle protest is an idea that flows throughout the record. “Tell me truly, what is your dream? Tell me truly, is it the city life?” Heynderickx probes on the magnificent single “Foxglove,” asking the listener to reconsider what they need to be happy with in this life. The daydream may die, but that doesn’t mean fulfillment goes with it. That idea has followed me ever since I made my way through Northwest Portland alongside my partner one recent evening. As we walked by all the locally owned storefronts as they closed down for the night and the autumn wind blew through the trees, I felt her chilled hand in mine and was overwhelmed by an increasingly rare sense of contentment. My mind flickered back to the title track’s mantra: “If I get lucky / Maybe a glass of wine / If I get lucky /Maybe a hand next to mine.”

More than creature comforts or even the majesty of nature, Seed of a Seed imparts the importance of community to its listeners. After all, if people are responsible for the messes we find ourselves in, maybe it’s people who can help untangle that same bundle of stressors and fears. Viewed through this lens, that choice of title seems even more clever. We are all products of our environment and those who came before us and, by extension, their environments and the choices they’ve made. We are caught up in an impossibly sprawling tapestry of these people’s choices, which can be terrifying to think about. How can positive change ever be enacted with so many moving pieces out of our control and at odds with one another?

But there’s beauty in this idea, too. On the album’s unassuming closer, “Swoop,” Heynderickx directly reckons with her own family history and how she wound up in the station she finds herself in. She recounts her grandmother’s immigration from Hong Kong and the birth of her mother before visiting the former’s grave, settling into a sense of belonging at her place within this lineage. It’s a perfect punctuation after the wistful “Jerry’s Song” chronicles the shared experiences of a tried-and-true bond. In that song, she compares herself to clay and her subject to limestone amidst a flurry of memories, a different blurred image coming into focus with each listen. A cheeky line about splitting a sandwich in “divided America” feels prescient in hindsight, but it only highlights Haley’s belief in the power of little things. That tapestry already has so much conflict and innumerable clashing threads, so maybe the most anyone can do at the individual level is to be kind and generous to those immediately around them. It’s slow work, but if enough join in, something beautiful could be woven into the piece. 

I’ve had the privilege of seeing Haley Heynderickx again in the last month, almost two years since those opening slots, and with a full band this time around. It was a full circle moment to have songs I’d first heard in a live setting performed after becoming familiar with them for the purposes of this review, but more than any particular song they played, it’s an interaction with the crowd that keeps crossing my mind. In an interval between songs, an audience member asked if Haley had managed to start her garden, to which she ruefully admitted she hadn’t, citing limited living spaces and her touring schedule. Her trombonist, Denzel Mendoza, was quick to reaffirm by gesturing to the room and calling either the music, the moment, the audience, or a mix of all three “her garden.” It was a genuinely sweet exchange, and you could tell it meant a lot to the singer to think of it that way. Even if she hadn’t considered it before, Seed of a Seed is a product of that mindset: ten songs meant to sow the simple joys of nature and companionship into the brains of all who hear them. If we’re lucky, it will reap a bountiful harvest.

Wesley Cochran lives in Portland, OR where he works, writes, and enjoys keeping up with music of all kinds, with a particular fondness for indie rock. You can find him @ohcompassion on Twitter, via his email electricalmess@gmail.com, or at any Wilco show in the Pacific Northwest.

Bottom Bracket – I’m So Afraid of Where | Track-by-Track Review

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Count Your Lucky Stars

To be in the realm of music and bands is a tumultuous one. It is a space where every person is pining to create something that might reach beyond the confines of a singular human experience and resonate with a complete stranger. At the same time, it is an exhausting and unforgiving space in what it asks of its participants. Every week is another announcement of a band throwing in the towel due to the strains and pressures of running this gauntlet; every week, another band decides to weather on despite it all.

I'm So Afraid of Where, the second LP from Chicago, IL’s Bottom Bracket, is an unflinching exploration of personal fallout, strained friendships, and the search for belonging in unfamiliar surroundings. Across its ten tracks, Mario Cannamela (guitar, lead vocals), Tim Recio (bass, vocals), and Rob Diaz (drums, percussion, vocals) channel three years of labor and love into a record unafraid to hold a mirror up to the most difficult parts of what it means to grow as a person and as a band.

As we dive into each track on this immensely special record, I had the privilege of getting Cannamela’s perspective to inform us on some of the nuances in the lyrics and stories that helped craft these songs. Grab your water bottles and strap on your bike helmets. This is I'm So Afraid of Where.

1. A Condemnation

“A Condemnation” opens the album with the beautiful guitar work that comes standard in any Bottom Bracket song. Once the track is in full swing, Cannamela delivers the haunting line, “I’m so afraid of where / We’ll end up after this,” introducing the album’s title and central theme of drifting apart from friends and bandmates, as well as struggling with a sense of belonging. “I always do this to myself / Leaving friendships to collect dust on the shelf,” laments Cannamela at the end of the track. This song wrestles with the pain of unresolved tension, regret, and the weight of holding others accountable. The urgency in the guitars mirrors the emotional tumult, setting a gripping precedent for what's to come. 

“Courtney and I moved from Springfield, Illinois, to Chicago three years ago,” says Cannamela about the track. “It was a hard move to make, but I wanted more than what I was getting out of the Springfield scene, and Courtney, for a long time, struggled to find fulfillment there as well, despite both of us having grown up there.”

2. Great Lake Jumper

A dream of escape drives “Great Lake Jumper” and its anthemic hope and yearning. Inspired by Cannamela’s move to Chicago, the track opens with sprinting guitars that mimic the speed of biking through city streets. The tension between staying in the comfort of the known and leaping into the unknown finds itself soaring high as the entire band shouts, “I bet I could jump my bike over the lake / If I went fast enough.” Here is a song about the possibility the big city offers, as well as the anxiety of being swallowed into anonymity underneath the scope of Chicago and Lake Michigan.

“I often would stare at the lake in wonderment when I would come up here to visit before moving here,” says Cannamela. “I still do now that I’m here, to be honest.”

3. Spin Cycle

“Spin Cycle,” the final single released for the album, portrays a fracturing of friendship through the lens of awkward silences and simmering discontent. Growing detachment, fueled by miscommunication and unmet expectations — the metaphor of a relationship stuck in a “spin cycle” feels apt as Cannamela laments the repetitive patterns that erode connection. Punctuated by Diaz’s pinpoint work on the toms and Recio’s hypnotic bass lines, the instrumentation exemplifies how Bottom Bracket masterfully allows each member of the trio to take a central spot in the composition. One of the highest points of this track comes at the 1:30 mark when Cannamela says, “If your life’s a T-shirt,” the entire band emphatically answers with, “Then I must be the stain” before Recio and Diaz enter a couplet that will have everybody in the room grooving.

4. Rainbow in the Rear View

In the second single released for the album, Cannamela recalls his move to Chicago and the urging of his mother to stay behind due to unsavory weather. Sonically, the guitarwork jumps and patters around the fretboard, casting a twinkly rainscape of hammer-ons as Cannamela vacillates between the dream of making it out of his hometown and the laments of leaving home. “To me, this day was always coming,” sings Cannamela in the second verse, further compounding the predetermination of this journey against the anxieties of his mother, who worries of rain and hopes she can delay the inevitable by even just a day more.

To leave home, to be the one that’s left — both are heaving emotional battles to wage. Cannamela finds the perfect center of this axis in the chorus as he sings, “Rainbow in the rear view / I can see you.” And what a beautiful way to celebrate an exit, not by mulling on some rainbow in the future that may come when the clouds finally part, but to see all the colors and hues in the place you’re coming from. Whether it’s a mother, a hometown, or history, this song stands as a monument of how having the right things behind you serves as a means to push forward, even “when lightning cracks the sky.” (And for the record, if you’re not screaming that last line when they play this song live, I have questions for you.)

5. Camouflage

How do you balance the line between someone you count on versus the realization that you don’t see eye to eye with them on much of what they do? An ode to internalized frustration, the third single, “Camouflage,” opens with an uptempo rhythm to anchor us sonically in the tense landscape of bedroom conversation and close proximities. Exploring the discomfort of trying to appease another while sacrificing one’s boundaries, Cannamela reflects on the strain of such close confines in the lines:

But two steps into your bedroom
And I already want to leave
I don’t need another silly scheme
I need the end of this fucking lease

The song’s tight rhythms and layered guitars give way midway through to leave Cannamela and the guitars singularly exposed to deliver the tried and true “I hope you know it’s not you / No, it’s me” before the rest of the band crashes in with some of the heaviest moments ever seen in the Bottom Bracket catalog. For those wondering if Bottom Bracket can still surprise you even after the near perfection they have already delivered in this record, “Camouflage” dares you to take that bet.

6. Swivel

In “Swivel,” we find Cannamela and his guitar alone in the booth. The song, restrained and haunting, finds Cannamela asking, “Oh, how do I do better?” The repetition of the line echoes as a reminder that Cannamela and company are constantly aware of the necessity to grow and, furthermore, how their past has shaped their growth so far. As we move towards the end of the track, a chorus of voices sings, “My bottom bracket won’t stop me / From riding all the way to your house” as the track finds its close, a nod to the band's roots and song “Bottom Bracket” from their debut EP, Dreamland. 

7. Unsavory

“Unsavory” was the record’s first single and the introduction to this new era of Bottom Bracket. Listeners are instantly met with insanely bright guitars and drums and are then pushed right into one of the catchiest riffs in human history. The choice to have “Unsavory” as the lead single is a fitting one, given that it chronicles the inciting incident for many of the themes and lyrics found throughout the rest of the record.

“This song is about the day the final straw was reached,” recounts Cannamela. “I wish I had been more vocal when something seemed off, but the picture wasn’t always clear to me.” “Unsavory” is the perfect word to capture the feeling when someone close to you is revealed to be someone they are not. “How do we find a way past this?” Cannamela asks before lamenting, “All the warning signs, how could I ever have missed this? / How could I ever have missed this?” But the truth is, sometimes we’re so close to the people we love that we DO miss some of the darker moves they make. The question we are then faced with is, what do we do next? For Cannamela, he says, “That was the moment our friendship ended, at least from how things went down from that point on.”

8. IKYKWIM (I Know You Know What I Mean)

“IKYKWIM” leans into Bottom Bracket’s poppier sounds and bouncier chords, with Recio’s infectious bassline as the driving spine of the beat. Tongue-in-cheek, the track’s lighthearted energy serves as the perfect foil for Cannamela to hit the soft implications of “I know you know what I mean.” Filled with the tension of knowing something is wrong but being reassured otherwise, Cannamela calls out the absurdity of it all with levity in saying, “There’s a few holes forming / In your Swiss cheese of a story” to the track's subject. And again, the repeated line of the song’s namesake echoes the frustration of unspoken truths after Cannamela has already begun putting the pieces together. The track, punchy, quick, and packed with urgency, captures the unease of discovering cracks in the façade of a friendship, finding its standout two-thirds of the way through with one of the sauciest solos found on the record. 

9. Cellar Doors

“This whole song is a love letter to the house that we used to live in Springfield; we spent four years in this cruddy house, but we practiced in the basement, even ran a house venue out of it too,” says Cannamela about the penultimate track, “Cellar Door.” This love letter calls back to many moments in Bottom Bracket’s history, with references to “Phantom,” “Failures,” and “Sun Singer.” The line, "I spent so many nights alone," captures the juxtaposition between nostalgia and moving on, a recognition of isolation and growth. Our histories shape us in ways we cannot imagine sometimes and in ways we don’t always get to see while they happen. 

To be able to chronicle these moments is a privilege, but to keep them “delicate, preserved, like a memorial display” also comes at the price of immortalizing the pain that came with those times. “All of I Don’t Care Enough to Stay and A Figure In Armor were written in this house,” says Cannamela, as well as some of the songs on this record here. For a musician, the house they live in is often the epicenter of where so many stories are born. For Cannamela, this is no exception.

10. A Confrontation

Our final track is the result of “a bomb that just keeps ticking down time,” the guitars and drums frantically moving us through the song. As their finale, the trio brings this record to a gallop with “A Confrontation,” the oldest song on the record, according to Cannamela. “I don’t quite relate to the lyrics anymore, but it was [about] a particularly bad fight,” he says. “At the time, it weighed on me heavily… I’m sure I didn’t handle things well then, either.”

While plenty of external exploration occurs throughout this record, the band is unafraid to look internally. Throughout this track and all that came before, Cannamela displays apparent dissatisfaction and frustration with his place in these situations. Regardless, the only option is to lay it all out on paper like Bottom Bracket did throughout this album. With a sonic callback to “A Condemnation” in the form of the lead riff, Bottom Bracket ties the record to a close by saying that where we are is a snapshot of where we’ve been. 

Final Thoughts on I'm So Afraid of Where

I'm So Afraid of Where is Bottom Bracket at their most vulnerable, most raw, and most masterful. This is not just an album: it is a memorial of relationships we must let go of and a celebration of the community that keeps us whole. Recorded by Andrei Milosevic and Tyler Floyd, mixed and edited by Tyler Floyd, and mastered by Adam Cichocki, the love and care put into making this album is apparent. The result of all these efforts is a deeply affecting album that feels both personal and universal. The future, for anyone, is a terrifying unknown — for Bottom Bracket, I am not afraid of where they will be once this gift of an album is out in the world.

Nishat is a writer, Pokémon addict, Fortnite fiend, and lead singer of tenmonthsummer, a lakeshore emo band from Chicago. You can learn more about his writing and work at nishatahmed.com, catch him streaming on twitch.tv/thenishfish, and find him yapping on Twitter and IG for the band at twitter.com/tenmosummerband and instagram.com/tenmonthsummerband respectively.