Stuart Dougan is a Glasgow-born and-based singer/songwriter, who is best known in his native Scotland for fronting French Wives and Smash Williams. Dougan steps out into the limelight as a solo artist, writing and recording every single part of music on his own terms with his latest project The Quilter.
Dougan’s The Quilter debut, Bolt The Door EP is a collection of bold, alt pop songs, som eo which were written and recorded before the pandemic with others written during the initial lockdown. Interestingly, the EP follows upon last year’s immersive and cinematic visual record Dark Cloud/Grey Area, which was equal parts documentary film, live concert and album.
Bolt The Door’s latest single “The Long Weekend,” is an anthemic bit of synth pop featuring shimmering synth arpeggios, a driving groove and a euphoria-inducing hooks and fueled by nostalgia for hook-driven New Order-like dance anthems and for the things we here in the States are slowly getting back — in particular, being in the company of other sweaty and joyful humans at a summer festival and for other mundane things we’ve been deprived of for the past 15 months or so.
“This song was in part inspired by a viral clip I saw from the set of Uncut Gems where the crew had finished filming and were all dancing to ‘I Feel It Coming’ by The Weeknd. It was just a short clip but I wanted to try and capture the palpable sense of joy that was clearly being felt at the time. It was written during lockdown and is basically a love letter to my friends and daydreaming about getting to hang out and have fun in a post pandemic world. I’m very aware that it’s bombastic and over the top in places but I wanted to purposely try and capture a sense of hopeful euphoria that one day, not too far from here, you’ll get to hug all your friends again.”
Sloan Stumble is the 20-something Aledo, TX-born, Austin, TX-based singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer and creative mastermind behind the critically applauded and rapidly rising indie rock/indie pop project Dayglow. The project can trace its origins to Struble’s teenaged years, growing up in a Fort Worth suburb that he has referred to as a “small football-crazed town,” where he felt irrevocably out of place. Aesthetically and thematically, the project finds Struble crafting material cen nloater red around a hard fought, hard won optimism.
Much like countless other hopelessly out of place young people across the globe, Struble turned to music as an escape from his surroundings. “I didn’t really feel connected to what everyone else in my school was into, so making music became an obsession for me, and sort of like therapy in a way,” Struble recalled in press notes. “I’d dream about it all day in class, and then come home and for on songs instead of doing homework. After a while I realized I’d made an album.”
Working completely on his own with a minuscule collection of gear that included his guitar, his computer and some secondhand keyboards he picked up at Goodwill, Struble worked on transforming his privately kept outpouring into a batch of songs — often grandiose in scale. “Usually artists will have demos they’ll bounce off other people to get some feedback, but nobody except for my parents down the hall really heard much of the album until I put it out,” Struble recalled. With the self-release of 2018’s Fuzzybrain, the Aledo-born, Austin-based singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer received widespread attention and an ardent online following — with countess listeners praising the material’s overwhelming positivity.
In 2019, Struble re-released a fully realized version of Fuzzybrain that featured Can I Call You Tonight,” a track that wound up being a smash-hit last year, as well as two previously unreleased singles “Nicknames” and “Listerine.” With the two new singles, the album further establishes Struble’s growing reputation for illuminating emotional pain in a way that not only deeply resonates with listeners but while managing to make that emotional pain feel lighter.
Continuing upon that momentum, Struble’s highly-anticipated Dayglow sophomore album Harmony House is slated for a May 21, 2021 release through his own Very Nice Records and AWAL. After Fuzzybrain‘s release, Struble had started to write material that was inspired by the 70s and 80s piano-driven soft rock that he had been drawn to — and around the time he had been watching a lot of Cheers. “At the very beginning, I was writing a soundtrack to a sitcom that doesn’t exist,” Struble recalls. And while actively attempting to generate nostalgia for something that hadn’t ever been real — as well as something most of his listeners had never really experienced — the album’s material thematically is about growing up and coping with change as an inevitable part of life.
“Balcony,” Harmony House‘s fourth and latest single may arguably be the most upbeat song on the entire album. Centered around shimmering guitars, bouncy synth arpeggios, four-on-the-floor drumming and an incredibly infectious hook, “Balcony” is a summery, feel good house party anthem that will get everyone jumping up and down and shouting along to the chorus. “I wrote ‘Balcony’ quite a while ago, but it’s been through tons of phases & revisions before landing on this final version,” Struble says of his latest single. “I wanted to make a song that felt like The Cure,BRONCHO, and the Mario Kart Soundtrack huddled up. Not sure why— it just feels nice 🙂 Hope you enjoy it and play it at a house party or something cause that’s definitely what it’s for/about”
The rising Texan artist also announced series of North American tour dates that we hope actually will happen. The tour includes an October 17, 2021 stop at Webster Hall. Check out the tour dates below.
North American Tour Dates:
09/09/21 – Dallas, TX @ House of Blues
09/10/21 – Austin, TX @ Stubb’s
09/11/21 – Houston, TX @ Warehouse Live
09/13/21 – Phoenix, AZ @ The Van Buren
09/15/21 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Fonda Theatre
09/16/21 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Fonda Theatre (SOLD OUT)
09/17/21 – San Diego, CA @ House of Blues
09/18/21 – Santa Ana, CA @ The Observatory
09/22/21 – San Francisco, CA @ The Regency Ballroom
09/23/21 – Portland, OR @ Roseland Theater
09/24/21 – Vancouver, BC @ Commodore Ballroom
09/26/21 – Seattle, WA @ Showbox
09/28/21 – Salt Lake City, UT @ The Depot
09/29/21 – Denver, CO @ Summit
10/05/21 – Indianapolis, IN @ Deluxe
10/06/21 – Nashville, TN @ Brooklyn Bowl
10/12/21 – Atlanta, GA @ Center Stage
10/13/21 – Charlotte, NC @ The Underground
10/15/21 – Philadelphia, PA @ Theatre of Living Arts
10/16/21 – Boston, MA @ Paradise Rock Club
10/17/21 – New York, NY @ Webster Hall
10/19/21 – Washington, D.C. @ 9:30 Club
10/21/21 – Columbus, OH @ Newport Music Hall
10/23/21 – Toronto, ON @ The Phoenix Concert Theatre
Toronto-based psych rock act Possum — Brandon Bak, Tobin Hopwood, Christopher Shannon, Patrick Lefler and Bradley Thibodeau — can trace their origins to their involvement and eventually meeting through their hometown’s psych rock and garage rock scenes. Bonding over a mutual love and appreciation of acts like CAN, Grateful Dead, Fela Kuti and Ty Segall, the act’s full-length debut Space Grade Assembly found the act crafting a hypnotic sound that fused elements of garage rock, krautrock, psych rock and ethio-jazz centered around expansive arrangements full of shifting time signature changes.
The Toronto-based psych quartet’s self-produced sophomore album Lunar Gardens is slated for a July 2, 2021 release through Ideé Fixe Records, and the album reportedly finds the band crafting material that meshes elements of jazz, komische/krautrock, funk and psych rock while pushing their songwriting into new, unchartered territory for them. Thematically, the album touches upon telepathy, ESP, thought transference, Ley line riding and the like; it’s a a psychic exploration of the collective cortex, the capture of cosmic energy and the alignment of astral flux. Trippy shit, indeed.
“While Space Grade Assembly dealt more with space in a cold literal sense, Lunar Gardens’ approach is more ‘space as metaphor for consciousness in all of its infinite expanding fractal forms’, a surrealist escapist space fantasy of impossible spaces — the type of place you might go when the things are too heavy here in 3D,” the Toronto-based quintet says of the differences between their debut and forthcoming sophomore album. “If we were talking movies, one might say Space Grade Assembly is 2001: A Space Odyssey and Lunar Gardens is The Holy Mountain.”
Last month, I wrote about album single “Gala at the Universe City,” a languorous and slow-burning song that brought Zappa and The Mothers of Invention and CAN to mind but centered a slithering and musty funkiness. Interestingly, the album’s second single, album opening “Clarified Budder” acts as a bridge between their debut and sophomore albums’ beginning with a languorous intro, the song explodes out of the gate, featuring rapid-fire drumming, a hypnotic motorik groove, wah-wah pedaled guitars and punchily delivered vocals. The end result is a song that evokes the feeling of floating away from your surroundings.
Last summer, Toronto-based psych rock duo Lammping — vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Mikhail Galkin and drummer Jay Anderson — released their critically applauded full-length debut Bad Boys of Comedy. Bad Boys of Comedy featured teh noise rock meets shoegazer rock “Greater Good,” a perfect example of their difficult to categorize take on psychedelia, inspired by Tropicalia, Turkish psych pop, old-school New York boom bap hip-hop and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.
Shortly after Bad Boys of Comedy‘s release, the Toronto-based psych duo started working on new material that found them pushing the boundaries of psych music in bold, new directions: while still rooted in Anderson’s thunderous drumming and Galkin’s melodic riffs, the duo have added sampling, drum machines and a variety of instrumentation to their sonic palette. The duo’s sophomore album Flashjacks is equally indebted to the likes of Stereolab, De La Soul, Kraftwerk, Black Sabbath, Blue Cheer and Sleep. The end result is material that finds the Canadian duo eschewing cliched stoner and psych rock tropes while pushing towards a new path in terms of creating heavy music.
Flashjack‘s latest single “Lammping” is a strutting mix of fuzzy 60s psych rock and 70s melodic AM rock paired with hi-hat driven boom bap-like drumming, enormous hooks and an expansive song structure. While seeming describing tripping on hallucinogens, the song is thematically a mission statement of sorts with the band continuing to push heavy music into a new and mischievous direction.
Flashjacks is slated for a summer release through Echodelick Records. Be on the lookout.
With the release of their Joshua Van Tassel-produced sophomore album, 2018’s Ms. Behave, the Canadian folk trio Rosie & the Riveters — Farideh (pronounced fair-i-day) Olsen, Allyson Reigh and Alexis Normand — achieved success on both sides of the border. The album was released to critical praise from the likes ofRolling Stone Country, No Depression, Parade Magazine and PopMatters. And the album was a commercial success: the album remained in the top 10 US folk music characters for 17 weeks and peaked at #3 on the CBC Radio 2 Top 20.
Despite their achievements, Rosie & the Riveters’ Farideh Olsen was burnt out and in desperate need of a significant change: the combination of long days of touring and sleepless nights caring for her then-infant daughter led to a decline in her physical and mental health. Additionally, she had developed an intense case of motion sickness, which made touring even more unbearable. As the story goes, as she was about to embark on a 10 week tour away from her daughter for the first time, she needed a hobby or something that would occupy her time — and not make her sick while passing the time. Olsen settled on meditation and became obsessed: fifteen minutes quickly grew to an hour, then to three hours.
When the tour ended and she returned home, Olsen continued meditating — often 3 hours a day — and started noticing big changes in her health, happiness and creativity. Interestingly, her interest in meditation eventually expanded into an obsession with quantum physics. After spending several months learning about theoretical physics and space, the observer effect and non-locality, Olsen started seeing the influence of meditation and quantum physics on the material she had been writing: Although she had been a folk musician for her entire career, she had begun experimenting with synth soundscapes and 808 beats. This led to Olsen’s latest solo project farideh — and the project’s debut single, the Timon Martin-produced “WaveForms.”
The slow-burning and swooning “WaveForms” is centered around atmospheric synths, tweeter and woofer rocking 808s and Olson’s sultry crooning. And while sounding as though it were inspired by Kate Bush and others, the track is a balance of free-flowing improvisation and craft: “I had mapped out the synths and some beats in my home studio. I didn’t have any lyrics yet. I hit record and the words channeled through my head and out my mouth. The song literally wrote itself,” the Canadian singer/songwriter recalls. She adds, “This song is an expression of the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, In all potentials and dimensions of time and space, my husband and I would always find each other.”
Jeen O’Brien is a Canadian singer/songwriter and guitarist, who has written songs for a lengthy list of recording artists, and as a solo artist, performing under the mononym Jeen, O’Brien has written songs used in ad campaigns for Google, Panasonic, Estée Lauder, Kraft, BlackBerry, KIA, Rogers, Mastercard and Molson, as well as TV shows like Republic of Doyle, Instant Star, Ruby Gloom, Degrassi, Hockey Wives, Killjoys, Workin’ Moms, Catfish, Are You the One and the major motion picture Cook Off. In addition to her solo work, O’Brien is a member of Cookie Duster with Broken Social Scene’s Brendan Canning.
O’Brien’s newest full-length album, the Ian Blurton co-produced Dog Bite is slated for an October 2021 release — and along with the album announcement, the Canadian singer/songwriter and producer released a double single, “Better Drugs”/”Fair to Move On.” Because of time considerations on my end, I’m choosing to write about one single: “Better Drugs,” a grungy bit of power pop centered around crunchy guitar lines, O’Brien’s Liz Phair-lke delivery and a rousingly anthemic hook. Although sonically bringing 90s alt rock and 120 Minutes-era MTV to mind, the song as the Canadian artist explains explores our desire to constantly seek something better while being directly influenced by the events of 2020 — both socially and personally: “I wrote ‘Better Drugs’ eight months after watching the world burn, with everything so exposed and gross. Like we had all lost too many pieces of ourselves to put back together or something…I wondered how fundamental it was, like how broken are we, you know? On top of that, I had a very sudden death in the family 48 hours before we went into the studio to record.
“This kind of raw disconnect leads to all the problems especially if you’ve lost connection with yourself…so with all that fell away last year, I found myself pathetically grateful for the few people I still had around me.”
Born Malik Izaak Taylor, the legendary and beloved Phife Dawg was a co-founder of the multi-Grammy Award nominated, multi-platinum selling, equally legendary and beloved hip-hop act A Tribe Called Quest. Along with his work with Tribe, Phife Dawg was a solo artist, who collaborated with lengthy lists of acts and artists including Fu-Schnickens, Diamond D, Chi-Ali, Black Sheep‘s Dres, De La Soul‘s Trugoy and countless others, eventually releasing his solo debut album, 2000’s Ventilation: Da LP.
If you’re a hip-hop head, you’d remember that the members of A Tribe Called Quest — Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, Jarobi White and Ali Shaheed Muhammad — reunited in 2006 to help Phife Dawg with mounting medical expenses as a result of complications with diabetes. They co-headlined that year’s Bumbershoot Festival and played a handful of sold-out across across the States, Canada and Japan, including making appearances at the 2K Sports Bounce Tour. According to Phife Dawg, the members of the beloved hip-hop had planned to release an album to finish-off their six-album contract with Jive Records.
In 2008, A Tribe Called Quest was the headlining act for that year’s Rock the Bells tour. Taylor, who had been dealing with complications from diabetes over the past decade, wound up receiving a kidney translate from his wife. At the end of the that year, Q-Tip released his long-awaited sophomore album The Renaissance, which he followed with the release of 2009’s Kamaal The Abstract, which had been shelved for over seven years.
Tribe co-headlined 2010’s Rock the Bells and that year, Taylor had planned to release his highly-anticipated sophomore album Songs in the Key of Phife: Volume 1 (Cheryl’s Big Son); however, continued health issues delayed the release of the album. In 2013, it was reported that Phife had went back to work on his sophomore album, which was re-titled MUTTYmorPHosis. During that same period, the tense relationship between the act’s co-founder was famously documented in Michael Rapaport’s 2011 documentary Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest.
In 2015, the members of A Tribe Called Quest reunited to perform on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the release of the act’s debut album People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm. In what would be the last few months of his life, Taylor had been incredibly busy: he had finished his long-anticipated sophomore album, now titled Forever, collaborating with a collection of trusted, All-Star producers and artists. Additionally, Tribe had secretly gone into the studio to work on what would be their sixth and final album We Got It From Here . . . Thank You 4 Your Service. Tragically, Taylor died as the entire group were finishing the album; the remaining members finished the album and posthumously released the album, as a tribute to their co-founder.
Taylor’s family and estate will be finally releasing Phife Dawg’s long-awaited sophomore album Forever later this year. “He worked really hard to complete his album before he transitioned, and he was ready to share an album that was near and dear to his heart with his fans,” Taylor’s family says of the album. “His fans meant the world to him.” So far, one single has been released from the album, “Nutshell, Part 2,” featuring Busta Rhymes and Redman — and as a taste of the album, it’s a classic New York hip-hop banger, in which three legendary emcees spit bars and trade zingers over a subtle DJ Rasta Root reworking of a J. Dilla production.
“French Kiss Deux,” Forever‘s second and latest single finds the beloved “Five Foot Assassin” teaming up with Vancouver-based production duo Potatohead People and J. Dilla’s younger brother Illa J on a tribute to one of my favorite cities, Montreal: Phife and Illa J trade verses about some of that city’s beautiful women and scenery over a warm and vibey neo-soul meets Golden Era hip-hop production centered around shimmering Rhodes, reverb drenched horns and twitter and woofer rocking beats. Simply put, it’s an infectious, feel good banger.
The four-time GRAMMY® Award-nominated multiplatinum New York-born MC and member of A Tribe Called Quest’s highly anticipated album, Forever, is slated to be released in 2021. Prior to Phife’s tragic 2016 passing, he spent time working on this album, partnering with trusted collaborators and assembling a catalog of songs representative of his art. Of the upcoming album’s release, Phife’s family stated that “He worked really hard to complete his album before he transitioned, and he was ready to share an album that was near and dear to his heart with his fans. His fans meant the world to him.”
With the release of “Hydrogen,” indie electro pop duo Darkroom Data — Irish vocalist Gillian Nova and Brazilian composer and producer Márcio Paz — quickly received attention across the blogosphere: the track landed on Hype Machine‘s most popular chart while receiving praise from outlets like Podcart, Obscure Sound, Son of Marketing,Indie Buddie and AnalogoueTrash for crafting moody and atmospheric soundscapes paired with melodic hooks and seductive rhythms. Interestingly, fellow critics have compared their sound to the likes of Chromatics, College, London Grammar, CHVRCHES and Niki & the Dove among others. Thematically, their material fittingly focuses on encounters with dark, fantastical characters and a yearning for lost, late-night spaces.
Building upon the attention that they earned with “Hydrogen,” the duo’s latest single, the Bob Lamb-produced “Groovatta” is a slow-burning and sultry take on synth pop, centered around a sample from 80s electro pop act The System, shimmering synth arpeggios, thumping beats, anthemic hooks and an atmospheric and brooding bridge. And although the band claims that they were inspired by the aesthetic of Chromatics, the song reminds me of Quiet Storm synth soul — in particular, the likes of Cherelle and others.
Deriving their name from a nickname that was given to its frontwoman while she was in college, and now seen as the band’s motto representing their approach to life and music, the emerging Los Angeles-based indie rock act Mihi Nihil (pronounced Mee-Kee, Nee-Keel) — Mihi Vox (vocals), Benjamin Montoya (guitar), Nick Sternberg (bass) and Adam Alt (drums) — currently feature a former New York-based opera singer and three self-taught rock musicians. Interestingly, the band can trace their origins to a free-flowing batch of sessions that the longtime friends jokingly called “Whiskey Rehearsals,” which helped to quickly establish a sound that draws from an electric array of influences including early Radiohead, The Clash, Ennio Morricone, Sixousie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, Neil Young and Pixies.
Eventually, those “Whiskey Rehearsals” between the four friends led to the material which would eventually comprise their Adam Lasus-produced full-length nine-song, self-titled debut album. Recorded and written by the band in one room, the album’s material captures their simpatico and collaborative working relationship.
In the lead-up to the album’s release, the band released four singles over the past few months: two of the singles have appeared in two major motion pictures, with all four appearing in a handful of media outlets across 15 countries, as well as on 45 playlists. Their self-titled album’s fifth and latest single “Gold” is a slow-burning desert rock-like dirge centered around Mihi Vox’s expressive vocals, rumbling bass lines and gently swirling guitars that slowly builds up until a rumbling roar with soaring hooks. And while possessing a patient, almost painterly quality, “Gold” evokes sand-swept blacktop that reminds me The Fire Tapes‘ Phantoms, PJ Harvey and Chelsea Wolfe among others.
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Veteran indie producer Adam Lasus (Yo La Tengo, Helium, Madder Rose) captured the band’s live energy to tape, revealing an album imbued with a timeless, lush and layered sound that’s meant to be savored and slowly ingested. Like colorful rock formations, the music encompasses a myriad of subtle tints and bold textures. Recorded without a click track, MIHI NIHIL naturally expands and contracts, pushes and pulls, moving with ease. Whether it’s the cinematic echo of Ennio Morricone in “Verberation” or the ominous yearning for connection in the more soporific electro “Space Invader,” MIHI NIHIL shifts tonal presentations effortlessly with maximum emotional thrust.
There are few artists I’ve witten about as much over the past 18-20 months than the frenetically prolific French electronic music producer, artist and JOVM mainstay LutchamaK. And during that same period, LutchamaK has released an increasingly eclectic array of material — through EPs, albums and standalone singles — that see him bouncing around endlessly between different electronic music styles, genres and sub-genres.
2021 may the the most productive and prolific year to date for the JOVM mainstay: he started this year with Pi, a full-length album written and recorded in a three month burst that may be among the darkest and heaviest he has released. He quickly followed that up with Quest EP, an effort that featured experimental but melodic material.
The JOVM mainstay continues on an insanely prolific period with yet another four-song EP, Rapscallion. Clocking in at a radio friendly 3:36, the EP’s first single “James Blitz 007” is a slickly produced synthesis of Radioactivity-era Kraftwerk, 90s house and techno and drum ‘n’ bass featuring tweeter and woofer rattling beats, chopped up vocal samples and euphoric hook that invites the listener to get up and dance.
