Category: indie rock

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Sunflower Bean Shares Shimmering “There’s a Part I Can’t Get Back”

Formed back in 2013, while they were still teenagers, New York-based trio Sunflower Bean — Julia Cumming (vocals, bass) Nick Kivlen (guitar, vocals) and Olive Faber (drums) — are arguably one of the New York metropolitan area’s most acclaimed and commercially successful, contemporary indie bands. Since their formation, the New York-based trio have released three critically acclaimed albums, 2016’s Human Ceremony, 2018’s Twentytwo in Blue and 2022’s Headful of Sugar, which featured several chart-topping singles. 

The band has supported those albums with sold-out tour dates as headliners and as openers for the Beck, The Strokes, Cage the Elephant, Interpol, Courtney Barnett, The Pixies, The Kills, DIIV, Wolf Alice and more. They’ve also made the rounds of the international festival circuit with stops at Glastonbury, Governor’s Ball, Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Reading Festival, Leeds Festival and others. And famously, they opened for Bernie Sanders during primary campaign rallies. 

Late last year, the band returned with the Shake EP. The self-produced and self-recorded effort featured some of the band’s heaviest, most immediate and loudest material they’ve written and recorded to date. Influenced by the doom-laden, riff-driven sound of Black Sabbath and others, the EP is an embrace of rock tropes and excess, while nodding to the band’s first two albums. 

“SHAKE was inspired by our first years as a DIY band, the spirit that birthed us and gave us the chance to have this enduring journey together,” the band says of the EP. “We wrote, recorded, engineered, and produced these songs so nothing was filtered through anyone else’s idea of us. We always felt like rock and roll was a feeling, not a sound. But sometimes there is no subverting it or explaining it. We’re now offering it exactly as it occurred to us.” 

The JOVM mainstays highly-anticipated fourth album Mortal Primetime is slated for a Friday release through Lucky Number. Three years have passed since the release of Headful of Sugar and in that time, the members of the band drifted from one another as they pursued new projects and confronted personal challenges, tragedies and transformations. The album reportedly finds the band with a deeply renewed sense of purpose after nearly losing everything they’ve built together. “You get to decide what your prime is, and you fight for it,” the band’s Julia Cumming says. “This is ours, and that can’t be taken away by circumstance. We can’t take it away from each other. This moment, where we are now, is what we’ve always fought for.”

Mortal Primetime‘s material was inspired by alternative rock and psychedelia and rooted in arena-sized ambition, which results in a sound that’s not just undeniably theirs, but also sees the band celebrating their history while boldly pushing into the future. 

Earlier this year, I wrote about “Champagne Taste” a song title that’s a nod to the band’s long-time alias when performing secret shows to test out new material. Anchored around scuzzy riffs, arena rock friendly, power chord-driven hooks and choruses paired with Cumming’s sultry, The Idiot-era Iggy Pop-styled croon, “Champagne Taste” sees the band simultaneously channeling a synthesis of 80s glam rock and 90s riot grrl alt rock and punk. But at its core, is a fierce, almost feral determination.

“This song came after a period that felt like rock bottom for the band. It is about feeling beaten down but still driving forward, to keep faith, to grow and to continue to create on our own terms, our Mortal Primetime,” the band explains.

Mortal Primetime‘s latest single “There’s a Part I Can’t Get Back” is a Laurel Canyon-like tune that nods a bit at Twentytwo in Blue while featuring chiming guitars and one of Cumming’s most beautiful and earnest vocal turns in some time. But at its core is the simmering anger of being mistreated and denied innocence; of having an inability to trust; of knowing that you’ll live with the impacts of that treatment for the rest of your days.

The song, which is about personal experiences with being groomed finds Cumming being “as intentional and direct as possible,” as she grapples with what she’s experienced — and how it has shaped her and her life.

“This song is about the lasting scars of grooming—the parts of yourself that are stolen and the anger you carry because of it,” Cumming explains. “It came to me in such a raw and direct way, there was no second-guessing or wondering how I felt. I didn’t want to write a song about being healed, I wanted to be angry about needing to heal at all. The line, ‘If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord lets me get even first,’ is important because it captures the intensity of these feelings and how they go beyond logic. I am confronting the pain and the questions that will never be answered.”

Directed by Harv Frost, the accompanying video for “There’s a Part I Can’t Get Back” visually exploring Mortal Primetime‘s central themes while seeing the trio supporting one another as they fight to regain their footing in gorgeous, almost painterly settings.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Yumi Zouma Shares Breakneck and Melodic “Bashville on the Sugar”

Formed back in 2013 in Christchurch, New Zealand, the multinational and multi-continental JOVM mainstays Yumi Zouma — Melbourne-based Christie Simpson (vocals, keys), New York-based Josh Burgess (guitar, bass, vocals, keys), London-based Charlie Ryder (guitar, bass, keys) and Wellington, New Zealand-based Olivia Campion (drums) — have had an acclaimed run that began with their shoegaze and dream pop-driven debut EP, the aptly-titled EP I and included their critically applauded albums, 2014’s Yoncalla, which saw the band dabbling with synth pop; 2017’s Willowbank, 2020’s Truth or Consequences and 2022’s Present Tense.

The JOVM mainstays have received praise from Pitchfork, Stereogum, Consequence, The FADER, SPIN, The Guardian while receiving airplay from SiriusXM and Australia’s Triple J. The multinational and multi-continental outfit have also developed a reputation as a mainstay on the global touring scene — first through opening slots for Air France, Jamie xx and Lower Dens, and then as a headlining act.

Recently, Yumi Zouma signed to Nettwerk Music Group, who will be releasing the band’s latest single “Bashville on the Sugar,” their first bit of new material in over 16 months or so. Beginning with a Foo Fighters-like “I’ll Stick Around“-like drum fill, the acclaimed outfit’s latest single may be the most downright breakneck tune they’ve released to date while continuing to showcase Simpson’s ethereal yet expressive delivery paired with cascading and chiming guitar work from Burgess and Ryder and MTA field recordings. Written in bursts across Mexico City, New York and New Zealand, “Bashville on the Sugar” captures the energetic pulse of commuting on public transportation in a large city, as well as the excitement and sense of infinite possibilities that could happen — right before that subway door closes.

“The first song on our forthcoming project that we really dug into, it’s an ode to the subway and public transport, New York’s in particular. The band has a deep affinity for it; its reliability and the access it provides are unlike anything we experienced in New Zealand,” the members of Yumi Zouma explain. “At the same time, its unpredictability—what you’ll see, who you’ll bump into—keeps each trip rooted in the present.”

Directed by the band, the accompanying video for “Bashville on the Sugar” features a blend of photo studio footage, Mini DV footage shots in New York and clips, and manages to capture the band’s sweet and goofy nature while evoking the endless motion at the heart of the song.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe Shares Dance Floor-Friendly “Somebody New”

Tunde Adebimpe, the frontman of the critically acclaimed Brooklyn-based band TV On The Radio will be releasing his long-awaited, highly-anticipated solo debut Thee Black Boltz Friday (!) through Sub Pop Records.

The Adebimpe and Wilder Zoby co-produced album features additional production and contributions from TV On The Radio’s Jaleel Bunton and Japhet Landis and more. The album’s material will not only showcase Adebimpe imitable voice and visionary soundscapes, but is a nod to his propensity to write and sing about the human condition — in all its form, under all its stressor, both big and small. 

Thee Black Boltz isn’t a TV On The Radio album. But for Adebimpe, in a lot of ways, the excitement of doing something on his own for the first time ignited a similar creative spark as during the early TVOTR days. The songwriting process is the same, he says, but with his bandmates, Adebimpe always knew that have didn’t have to complete his musical ideas. “I’ve been doing this thing with this group of people for so long, that I can just have a vague sketch of a concept and I know Jaleel or Kyp will have five brilliant ideas on where it can go,” he says. “But for Thee Black Boltz, I didn’t have that scaffolding to hang on. That was both terrifying and exhilarating.”

The album’s title is Adebimpe’s response to the macro unease of a post-pandemic world careening towards violent authoritarianism and the immense grief that has come from deeply personal losses, specifically the sudden passing of his younger sister while making it. In many ways, Thee Black Boltz is the TVOTR frontman’s desperate grasping of small moments of joy amidst the dissonance, chaos and sadness in any way he could. And understandably, the album was a way of processing everything in his life. “It was my way of building a rock or a platform for myself in the middle of this fucking ocean,” he says. 

As he writes in his notebook, “The sparks of inspiration/motivation / hope that flash up in the midst of (and sometimes as a result of) deep grief, depression or despair. Sort of like electrons building up in storm clouds clashing until they fire off lightning and illuminate a way out, if only for a second.”

“Also,” he adds. “it’s a good name for a cool metal band, and I think that most people would describe me as akin to a very cool metal band.” 

Earlier this year, I wrote about the Jahpet Landis-produced “Drop,” a meditative and deeply introspective song featuring looped beatboxing, shimmering and strummed bursts of guitar, whistling and skittering beats serving as a dreamy and subtly uneasy bed for Adebimpe’s plaintive delivery questioning the purpose of it all, when things seem so brutally nonsensical.

Thee Black Boltz‘s fourth and latest single “Somebody New” is a dance floor friendly synth-driven bop that recalls 80s synth pop — i.e., Nu Shooz “I Can’t Wait,” Depeche Mode‘s “I Can’t Get Enough,” Yaz‘s “Situation” and the like — but while rooted in modern thematic concerns.

The Adebimpe-directed video for “Somebody New” is a feverishly trippy and surreal bit of time travel back to the days of Soul Train and American Bandstand as we see the TVOR frontman performing the song in a crowded room of beautiful young people dancing — and a glammed out Gritty-styled puppet.

“I’m positive I fell asleep on a couch with the TV on sometime in 1982 and fever dreamt this exact thing,” Adebimpe says of the new video.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Slow Fiction Shares a Furious, Breakneck Ripper

Rising New York-based quintet Slow Fiction — Julia Vassallo (vocals), Paul Knepple (guitar), Joe Skimmons (guitar), Ryan Duffin (bass) and Akiva Henig (drums) — have received attention for a sound that inspired by Sonic Youth and The Jesus Chain and Mary Chain with elements of naughties-era guitar rock paired with contemporary angst.

Their latest single “When” is part of Speedy Wunderground‘s Speedy Singles series. It’s available on all DSPs right now — and will be available on 7″ vinyl with a dub remix B side by the label’s Dan Carey titled “Who Is the Dub.” You’ll be able to purchase the new single and the rest of the singles in the series here.

As for the new single “When” is an urgent, breakneck ripper that’s one-part Walkmen one-part The Jesus and Mary Chain while arguably being one of those most defiant and confrontational songs of their growing catalog while evoking desperate unease.

“I think everyone has had a moment where their expectation of the world, a relationship, the audience they are performing for falls short, and it sends you into a wild spiral downwards,” Slow Fiction’s Julia Vassallo explains. “Losing faith feels so desperate, like falling into a pit of snakes. And the snakes all have faces that seem familiar, and they’re talking, but the words are all garbled. I guess this was trying to get to the bottom of that pit of disillusionment, or maybe get out of it altogether.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Boston’s Paper Lady Shares Unhinged “Joe Modern”

Formed back in 2019, the Boston-based indie outfit Paper Lady — Alli Raina (vocals, rhythm guitar), Rowan Martin (lead guitar), Alex Castile (drums) and Taylor Morris (bass) — can trace their origins to their involvement in their Northeast DIY scene. Citing an eclectic array of influences that include Mazzy Star, Broadcast and Jefferson Airplane among others, the Boston-based quartet has crafted a sound that typically blends dreamy textures with grounded storytelling.

Last year, the band wrote and recorded their full-length debut, Idle Fate, during a retreat in a cabin in Upstate New York and at their shared home in Boston. Self-recorded and self-mixed, the album, which is slated for a May 9, 2025 release, explores themes of grief, love and fantastical existentialism while seeing the band push their sound into more experimental territory.

Idle Fate‘s third single “Joe Modern” is an angular and tightly wound up post punk anthem with dreamy shoegazer passages, anchored around angular and whirring blasts of guitar, a throbbing rhythm section paired with remarkably catchy hooks and enormous, bombastic choruses that simultaneously barely holds it together, while showcasing Raina’s feral and unhinged vocal performance.

A thematic outlier on the album, “Joe Modern” draws from real life absurdity: a scamming and scheming realtor. “We kept joking that we should write a song about this guy — and then Rowan brought this wild guitar riff to rehearsal, and the rest just fell into place,” the band’s Alli Raina explains. “The lyrics came to me instantly. It’s the most fun song to play live, and I think it helped us evolve our sound in a huge way.”

Directed by the band’s Rowan Martin, the accompanying video for “Joe Modern” is a blend of surreal, mundane and sinister, as it follows a sad-sad and haunted businessman type through the hallucinatory and dreamlike torments by his boss and a sleep paralysis demon.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Agora Sci-Fi Shares a “120 Minutes” MTV-Inspired Lament on Capitalism

Nathania Rubin is an Illinois-based singer/songwriter, visual artist and animator, who most recently designed the music video for Advance Base’s “The Tooth Fairy.” Her work has been featured in both museums and film festivals both nationally and internationally, including Seattle International Film Festival, DOK Leipzig, Cannes Video Art Festival AVIFF, Boston Underground, Brooklyn Film Festival, Oxford Film Festival, Fest Ança, Animaze, Animafest Zagreb and many others.

Rubin is also the creative mastermind and frontperson behind the lo-fi pop project Agora Sci-Fi. Agora Sci-Fi conceptually is centered around a fictional character, simply named Z.

As the story goes, Z was recently released from prison for unclear crimes against society. Her wealthy family poisons her with memory-obliterating treats that block out crucial events and plot points of her own life and history. For fun, Z swims in the East River at night. (As a native New Yorker, I’d just have to say — “whatever floats your boat, kid.”)

Sonically Agora Sci-Fi draws from lo-fi, indie rock and pop in the vein of Rilo Kiley, Stef Chura and others.

Agora Sci-Fi’s debut EP, Finding It Hard to Explain Something So Obvious is slated for a June 6, 2025 release. The EP’s second single “sloppy” is a 120 Minutes-era MTV bit of indie rock anchored around rousingly anthemic hooks and Rubin’s dreamy delivery. But at its core, are deeply relatable lyrics for all of us, who have to maneuver capitalism, jobs we find unsatisfying, dull, underpaid or just under appreciated. Throughout, the song’s narrator expresses the slow-burn doldrums of working life — and the desire to never have to do that again. We all sell our time for money because — well, everyone wants money.

“Weaving in the fictional narrative in ‘sloppy’ allowed me to really ramp up the stakes of the song,” Rubin explains. “I was picturing a singular sane person, in a world with completely maddening and inhumane mandates. I imagined it as two separate songs in one, two personalities of the same person too, that kind of smash into each other at the end. Like many songs on the EP, it speaks to a desire to escape social confines, and the fracturing of self that happens when playing different roles in various areas of your life. The person who doesn’t conform, gets gaslit from inside and out, and labeled something like sloppy.”

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Liverpool’s DBA! Shares a Twangy and Grungy Ripper

Over the past year, Liverpool-based outfit DBA! — Sam Warren (vocals, guitar), Jamie Lindberg (bass, backing vocals) and Josh Grant (lead guitar) — have quickly established a sound that draws influence from Eels, Beck and Elastica while receiving attention both locally and nationally. Their highly-anticipated debut EP skip! worried is slated for an April 29, 2025 and features two singles, “sinkorswim” and “Whiskey,” which have already received airplay from several BBC Radio 6 personalties including Huw Stephens, Craig Charles, Abbie McCarthy and Emily Pilbeam.

Adding to a growing profile, the rising trio have received coverage from Dork Magazine, So Young and Rough Trade among others. Building upon the buzz surrounding them, the trio’s latest single “D.P.D” is a twangy and grungy anthem that sounds as though it draws from Possum Kingdom-era Toadies, Get Born-era Jet while showcasing their penchant for catchy, raise-your-beer-in-their-air-and-shout-along worthy hooks.

“​’D.P.D.’ is a track I wrote whilst losing touch with reality…it’s a deep cut from the world slipping through my fingers, a song I’m not sure I understand but can’t help myself loving,” the band’s Sam Warren explains. “I hope people enjoy Josh’s slide guitar on this one as much as I do”.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Smut Shares Bombastic Ripper “Syd Sweeney”

After spending years in the Cincinnati DIY scene, Smut — currently Tay Roebuck (vocals), Andie Min (guitar), John Steiner (bass), Sam Ruschman (guitar) and Aidan O’Connor (drums) — caught the attention of Bayonet Records, who signed the band and released their sophomore album, 2022’s critically applauded How the Light Felt. The album brought the band to Chicago, a city with more room for their growing sound.

But despite their early successes, they still faced the struggles of the modern working musician: instability, financial precarity, objectification and more. The band channeled a period of touring, personnel changes and personal upheavals into their third album, Tomorrow Comes Crashing.

Slated for a June 27, 2025 release through Bayonet Records, Tomorrow Comes Crashing marks the band’s first album with O’Connor and Steiner and reportedly sees the band re-energized and trained on the limitless potential that comes with making music with people you love.

The members of the band focused on capturing the big emotions that come with falling in love with music for the first time. The result is ten of arguably their most intense, bombastic and focused songs to date.

The Chicago-based band recorded the album’s material “as live as they could,” alongside Momma‘s Aron Kobayashi Ritch in a Red Hook, Brooklyn-based studio over a breakneck 10-day session. Roebuck. Right before they went off to New York, Roebuck and Min got married, with the rest of the band by their side.

“We have so much energy right now,” Smut’s Roebuck says. The recording sessions were a true labor of love — driving from Chicago with all their equipment, returning from 12 hour studio days to sleep on friends’ couches and floors, Roebuck completely blowing her voice by the end. Fittingly, the album is culmination of the band’s long-held DIY spirit — with the band creating a record that encompasses the intensity, moodiness and emotions of their journey so far.

Tomorrow Comes Crashing‘s latest single “Syd Sweeney,” is inspired by the actor and is anchored around big, Siamese Dream-like power chords, rolling and propulsive drumming and enormous, beer-raised-high-in-the-air, shout-along worthy hooks and choruses paired with Roebuck’s rock goddess-like delivery before ending with a thrash metal-like coda that would make Billy Corgan smile.

The song is about how profoundly strange it can be to be a woman, to be misunderstood by people, who don’t even know you — and probably will never know you. Roebuck says: “Women in entertainment are exceptionally talented, smart and beautiful, because they have to be. Sometimes they want to explore sexuality and vulnerability in their work. Then the pitchforks come out, how dare they be amazing AND sexual? You can only be one or the other! Why is talent and hard work seemingly erased once you’ve seen a woman naked?”

“It makes sense then to interpret it as a horror film, where we have the dividing tropes of final girls and sexy bimbos who die first for being too damn sexy,” Roebuck continues. “We put the sexy woman in the movie so we can see her be sexy and then kill her for it. It’s a lose-lose. Being a woman in art is to be objectified one way or the other. Success is the monster chasing you, waiting for you to be a little too sexy, knife ready.”

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Bēdu Brāļi Teams Up with Múr on Dreamy “Kas Ir Mainījies?”

Riga, Latvia-based alt rock outfit Bēdu Brāļi — Oskars Tu (vocals, guitar), Jānis Liepiņš (bass) and Pēteris Ozols (drums) — spent their formative years in their homeland’s vibrant mid 00s punk and rock scenes. While the scene’s fiercely independent ethos and the use of Lativan lyrics rubbed off on them, they’ve managed to stand apart from their peers. 

The Riga-based outfit’s full-length debut, 2022’s Duende saw them crafting a sound that featured elements of shoegaze, psych rock, post-punk and more. Building upon a growing profile in their homeland, the trio’s highly-anticipated sophomore album Lauskas will be released April 8, 2025 through I Love You Records.

Deriving its title from the Latvian word for shards, the Riga-based outfit’s sophomore album reportedly sees the band further cementing their boundary pushing sound.

In the lead-up to the album’s release next week, I’ve written about three of the album’s previously released singles:

  • “Ikdienas-dzive,” a track anchored around glistening guitars, a chugging motorik groove and a woozy, shoegazer textured guitar solo paired with Tu’s punchily delivered vocal. While recalling Montréal‘s Atusko Chiba, “Ikdienas-dzive,” captures a nagging sense of vacillating self-doubt, bored and uneasy dread and frustration that should feel familiar to anyone who’s slaved away at a soul-sucking day job. 

  • “Pieskaries,” is a brooding, decidedly post punk affair featuring an angular and propulsive bass line, rolling drum pattern and bursts of slashing guitars serving as an uneasy bed for Oskars Tu’s desperate wails. While continuing a run of material that reminds me a bit of Atsuko Chiba, “Pieskaries” captures a modern sense of isolation and unease while being with others. 

  • “Drošākā vieta,” a tense and brooding song featuring an angular and propulsive bass line, swirling shoegazer textures guitars paired with Oskars Tu’s achingly plaintive delivery before ending with a noisy coda. Deriving its name for the Latvian phrase for “safe place,” “Drošākā vieta” captures the long for a safe place in a mad, mad world.

“Kas Ir Mainījies?,” Lauskas‘ fourth and latest single is a slow-burning song that’s one-part 90s alt rock and one-part dream pop, anchored around a classic grunge song structure featuring alternating quiet verses with shimmering guitars and big, power chord-driven choruses serving as a woozy bed for Bēdu Brāļi frontman Oskars Tu and Latvian-born, London-based vocalist Múr to trade dreamily delivered vocals on what may arguably be their most pop-leaning track to date.