Tag: indie rock

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Sleaford Mods Give RVG’s “Nothing Really Changes” a Dance Floor Friendly Remix Treatment

Acclaimed and rising Aussie outfit and JOVM mainstays  RVG — currently Romy Vager (vocals, guitar), Gregor’s and Hearing’s Reuben Bloxham (guitar), Rayon Moon‘s Marc Nolte (drums), and Isabelle Wallace (bass) — have released three critically applauded albums:

  • 2017’s A Quality of Mercy, which was recorded live off the floor at Melbourne’s iconic rock ‘n’ roll pub, The Tote Hotel. Initially released to little fanfare, the album, much to their surprise received critical acclaim both nationally and internationally, landing on a number of end-of-year Best of Lists. 

  • 2020’s Victor Van Vugt-produced Feral was released by Fire Records globally, excluding Australia and New Zealand, where it was released by Our Golden Friend. The album received breathless praise nationally and internationally, with Rolling Stone Australia calling the album “the record of a lifetime.”

  • Their third album Brain Worms, which was released earlier this year through Fire Records globally and Our Golden Friend in Australia and New Zealand.

In the lead up to the album’s release, I wrote about four of the album’s released singles:

  • “Nothing Really Changes,” an angular, 80s New Wave-inspired track rooted in enormous arena rock friendly riffage, paired with the Aussie outfit’s long-held penchant for anthemic hooks and choruses and Vager’s lived-in, heart-worn-on-sleeve lyricism: The song features a narrator desperately missing someone while confronting the lingering ghosts of their relationship — with frustration, despair, anger and a begrudging acceptance. As the band’s Vager explains, the song “started off as a songwriting experiment to write something catchy with an obnoxious riff, a cross between Divinyls and ‘Smoke on the Water.‘ It’s a song about missing someone but protecting yourself from being hurt.”

  • “Squid,” a rousing arena rock friendly anthem that brings Heaven Up Here-era Echo and the Bunnymen and Starfish-era The Church to mind: Swirling and shimmering guitar textures are paired with angular guitar attack, thunderous drumming, shout-along worthy hooks and choruses. But while rooted in an absurd, Kafkaesque-like nightmare in which the song’s narrator imagines what might happen if they were to go back in time, step on something and become a squid, Vager’s delivery is so desperately earnest and urgent that it feels very real.

  • “Midnight Sun,” an urgent, hurtling ripper built around Vager’s defiant, furious delivery, jangling guitars, and a thunderous and propulsive rhythms action paired with the band’s unerring knack for rousingly anthemic hooks and choruses Fittingly, the song deals with matters of disbelief, and what it feels like to live in a culture — and a world — that often prefers to argue about semantics rather than save the world from burning. If it hits close to home, it fucking should. It’s our current hellscape, where we constantly deal with a seemingly unending and pervasive, cynical, self-serving stupidity and myopia. 

  • “Common Ground,” a shimmering and anthemic ballad rooted in heart-worn-proudly-on-sleeve earnestness and lived-in personal experience. And at the center, Vager’s commanding presence, delivering the song’s lyrics with a mix of heartache, weariness, resignation, yearning, acceptance that can only come with the recognition of a relationship being irrevocably and irreparably over. “Common Ground” is in many ways about heartache and those moments of begrudging acceptance in our lives; but it’s also about the resolve to defiantly and proudly dust yourself off and figure out what’s next. If you’ve been there — and I have been many times in my life — the song speaks of the experience with a profound wisdom, unvarnished honesty and deep sense of hope.

As the acclaimed Aussie JOVM mainstays are in the middle of a headlining national tour, rising British duo Sleaford Mods give “Nothing Really Changes” the remix treatment. But before, I talk about the single, some much-needed background on the band. The British duo have become one of the UK’s cult bands of the moment, known for being unapologetic champions of working-class anger in a post-Brexit, austerity-era landscape. They’ve had three UK Top 10 albums in the last four years. And building upon a growing profile, they’ve collaborated with Leftfield and The Prodigy, while making Iggy Pop one of their highest profile fans.

With their remix, Sleaford Mods slow the tempo down a bit and turn the song into a funky dance floor friendly bop that transforms the original’s heartbreak and despair into something a bit more hopeful, upbeat — and dare I say, blissful. “This is a brilliant song. From a brilliant album. It’s been more than an honour to be associated with it in some way,” Sleaford Mods say.

The rising British outfit’s remix is the first single from the Nothing Really Changes (Remixes) EP slated for an October 20, 2023 release through Ivy League Records.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Toronto’s SWiiMS Shares Fuzzy and Swooning “All I Die For”

Toronto-based indie outfit SWiiMS — founding duo Mai Diaz Langou (vocals)and Colin Thompson (guitar) along with Cian O’Ruanaidh (bass) — can trace their origins back to 2018 when the band’s founding duo began writing songs together that blended Thompson’s fuzzy and jangling guitar swirl with Diaz Langou’s textured melodies and languid vocal. When O’Ruanaidh joined the band, he brought a unique blend of influences and hooky bass lines.

Sonically, the Canadian trio draw from a diverse spectrum of artists and elements including 80s New Wave, 90s Shoegaze, indie rock, Brit Pop and Dream Pop to create a sound that’s uniquely theirs.

SWiiMS’ debut EP, 2019’s Through Waves was released to critical praise and landed on the North American College and Community College (NACC) charts. Building upon a growing profile, the trio’s full-length debut, Into The Blue Night is slated for a November 10, 2023 release through Mint 400 Records.

Into The Blue Night‘s latest single, the swooning “All I Die For” sees the Toronto-based indie outfit firmly cementing their sound as fuzzy and swirling guitar textures are paired with glistening synth arpeggios, a propulsive rhythm section and languid vocal melodies to create a song that’s simultaneously dreamily uplifting and moody. While channelling 120 Minutes-era MTV alt rock, the song as the band explains is about “the beginning stages of a relationship, and how you try to make yourself more intriguing or impressive than you are in order to keep that person interested. It also describes the feeling of hopefulness, bliss and loss of control that the start of any new relationship brings.
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The accompanying stylishly shot video for “All I Die For” features the band in a local park with Diaz Langou brooding in a climbable structure and with her bandmates on a swing behind her, stylishly shot footage of the band playing the song and footage of Toronto at night.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Andrew Bishop is a grizzled Vancouver music scene vet, who over the past decade has contributed his talents as a guitarist and/or singer/songwriter to a number of local outfits including Alex Little & The Suspicious Minds, Twin River and his own country-infused solo project White Ash Falls.

The Vancouver-based artist’s latest project WAASH sees him merging his prolific songwriting skills with a passion for expansive shoegaze soundscapes, marking both a culmination of his musical career and a fresh start. Initially started as a solo recording project, WAASH has gradually evolved into a full-fledged live band.

WAASH’s self-titled debut Colin Stewart co-produced EP is slated for a November 20, 2023 release. The EP’s five meticulously crafted tracks showcase Bishop’s departure from his long-held, conventional songwriting process: Instead of relying on guitar, he explored beats and baselines as starting points. For him, this approach allowed him to delve into minute details, crafting lyric and melodies that intricately fit each song. The EP was recorded with Bishop’s Alex Little & The Suspicious Minds bandmates at Afterlife Studios and further refined at The Hive with Colin Stewart. Over in East Vancouver, Bishop added ethereal keyboards, harmonies from Louise Burns and perfected the EP’s reverb-soaked aesthetic.

The forthcoming EP’s latest single, “There’s Never Enough Voices” is built around glistening, reverb-soaked guitars, and a pitch tight, motorik groove pared with Bishop’s plaintive delivery and carefully crafted, anthemic hooks and choruses. But brooding despair, confusion, regret and unease swirl just underneath the sleek, arena rock friendly surface. As Bishop explains the song is about trying to come to an understanding about the intentions within your actions and the realization of your past mistakes.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Ryder Waite Shares Gorgeous, Atmospheric “Praying”

Ryder Waite is a female-fronted, genre-defying rock quintet born from the dust of the Mojave Desert. While little is currently known about them, the band describes their approach and sound as raw and unapologetic, and pairing naked lyricism with soul-moving solos.

Their latest single, the atmospheric “Praying” is built around a gorgeous and expressive vocal, paired with shimmering reverb-drenched guitars, dramatic drumming and an expressive guitar solo. Sonically speaking, “Praying” sees the mysterious quintet drawing from nu-metal, post rock, shoegaze and metal to create something familiar yet a little bit difficult to pigeonhole.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Reno’s Had To Shares “120 Minutes”-like “Lucid”

Formed a couple of years ago, Reno-based shoegazers Had To features some of that city’s grizzled music scene vets — with each of the members playing in a number of bands across different genres. But they bonded over a love of big guitar music from the 90s with their major influences being Oasis, Guided By Voices, Catherine Wheel and others. “We all come from similar backgrounds, all from the same area in Reno, Nevada. Not much rock music comes from our area, and we are excited to be one of the few bands like us to come out of there,” the band says.

As the band jokes, they just wanted to write something hat could be played on the Dumb and Dumber soundtrack. Thematically, their work focuses on
“how it’s weird feeling older, and who we are ending up being.”

The Reno-based indie outfit’s Philip Odom-produced sophomore album Is This Normal? was recently released through digital streaming platforms. The album’s lead single “Lucid” sounds as though it wouldn’t be out of place during the 120 Minutes‘ heyday: fuzzy power chords, rousingly anthemic, shout-along worthy hooks and choruses paired with thunderous drumming. For me it brought back found memories of Foo Fighters‘ self-titled debut, Catherine Wheel and others.

Directed by Nate Kahn, the accompanying video fittingly brings back memories of 120 Minutes-era MTV with the visual split between footage of the band driving around a sun-bleached desert in white shirts, slacks, ties and sunglasses. At one point, they brood by what appears to be Lake Tahoe. We also see the band playing a house party.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Acclaimed Los Angeles-based rock duo Deap Vally — Julie Edwards (drums, vocals) and Lindsey Troy (guitar, vocals) — can trace their origins to the duo’s chance meeting in a knitting class over a decade ago. The Los Angeles-based duo’s debut single, 2012’s “Gonna Make My Own Money,” was released through tiny British indie label Ark Recordings.

Since then, Edwards and Troy went on to release three albums of roaring, idiosyncratic maximalist minimalist rock — 2013’s SISTRONIX, 2016’s Nick Zinner-produced FEMEJISM and 2021’s MARRIAGE. They’ve shared stages with Blondie, Garbage, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Queens of the Stone Age and a lengthy list of renowned acts. Along with that, they participated in a series of groundbreaking collaborations with an eclectic array of artists including Peaches, KT Tunstall, Jamie Hince, Soko, and The Flaming Lips, with whom they recorded a joint album, 2020’s DEAP LIPS.

Although the band has been received critical applause and won fans across the globe, maneuvering the contemporary music industry has become increasingly difficult. And if you add the challenges of the pandemic and raising families, the duo increasingly found themselves struggling to fit into the recording, promotion and touring cycle. “That model isn’t compatible with our current lives,” Lindsey Troy says. “We found we just can’t function as a traditional band anymore,” Julie Edwards adds. “It’s time for both of us to explore motherhood and other avenues of our lives properly, rather than squeezing them into our artist’s hustle.”

“I’m so proud of all our records, and Julie and I have an uncanny creative relationship,” Troy says. “It’s hard to ever picture having that with someone else. After all that, ya never know what could happen! We need to find the balance where we can focus on the fun stuff, but have the freedom to make the music we love. We just felt it would be fitting to go out with a bang, not a whimper. I felt marking this occasion should be a cathartic process: healing deep wounds, reconnecting with old friends and collaborators – and falling in love with Deap Vally all over again.” 

So while Deap Vally is calling an end to their decade-plus long run together, they’ve decided to go out with a bang — and not with a whimper. They’re releasing a re-recorded version of their full-length debut, SISTRONIX 2.0, which is slated for a Spring 2024 release through their own Deap Vally Records. Pre-order vinyl, exclusive bundles and the digital LP here.  

They’ll be supporting SISTRONIX 2.0 with a final tour, which will see them celebrating SISTRONIX‘s 10th anniversary by playing SISTRONIX in its entirety. The tour begins with West Coast dates during November. And a Midwest and East Coast run in early 2024. The east coast run includes a February 17, 2024 stop at Le Poisson Rouge.

Ticket pre-sales begin on Thursday. General on-sale tickets will begin on Friday 10:00am local time. You can get more information here. L.A. Witch, JOVM mainstays Death Valley Girls, Sloppy Jane, and Spoon Benders will be opening for the band in select markets. Of course, more shows will be announced in the coming weeks and months. So be on the lookout.

But in the meantime, the duo have shared SISTRONIX 2.0‘s first single “Baby I Call Hell (Deap Vally’s Version).” Built around buzzing power chords, thunderous drumming and soulful vocals, “Baby I Call Hell (Deap Vally’s Version)” is a swaggering and towering ripper that captures the quintessential Deap Vally sound and energy but within a completely different and new context: The duo is a bit older and wiser. Kids are around — and that forces you to rethink everything about your life and career. But they do so lovingly and wistfully with a sense of admiration and awe as though the pair is saying to each other: “Holy shit! We did actually did THAT!”

“‘Baby I Call Hell’ is quintessential Deap Vally,” Lindsey Troy says. “It was the first song we ever wrote as a band, so it’s very meaningful to our story. Re-recording that song was a lot of fun, but also a lot of pressure because we wanted to make sure the recording captured the magic of the song again.” 

“SISTRIONIX is just classic Deap Vally. It’s so pure and raw,” Troy continues. “It really encapsulates an era — an era of dank, yeasty backstage rooms across the UK, of the endorphin rush of that first wave of success, of youthful drunken, wild nights, of the worldly adventures and the newness of it all.”  

“We’re just going to go to play as many places as we can and say farewell to everyone,” Julie Edwards says. “Though the band is playing live for the last time, the door is open to us to collaborate. Now we’re all about re-establishing a workflow and connection around our friendship, after all we’ve shared together along the way.” 

Tour Dates

11.10 – San Diego, CA @ The Casbah *
11.11 – Santa Ana, CA @ Observatory ^ *
11.15 – San Francisco, CA @ August Hall ^
11.17 – Portland, OR @ Star Theater ^ ~
11.18 – Vancouver, BC @ Wise Hall ^
11.19 – Seattle, WA @ Neptune Theatre ^ ~
02.08 – Atlanta, GA @ Terminal West # 
02.09 – Nashville, TN @ Basement East #
02.10 – Chicago, IL @ Thalia Hall # 
02.11 – St. Paul, MN @ Turf Club #
02.13 – Cleveland, OH @ Beachland Ballroom #
02.14 – Washington, D.C. @ Black Cat #
02.16 – Philadelphia, PA @ Underground Arts #
02.17 – New York, NY @ Le Poisson Rouge #
02.18 – Boston, MA @ Crystal Ballroom #
03.09 – Los Angeles, CA @ Teragram *
03.15 Las Vegas, NV @ Backstage Bar + Billiards *
03.16 Salt Lake City, UT @ Urban Lounge *
03.17 – Denver, CO @ Marquis *
03.18  – Santa Fe, NM @ Meow Wolf *
03.20 Austin, TX @ Mohawk *
04.18 Mexico City, MX @ Foro Indie Rocks!

support from ^ L.A. Witch 
* Death Valley Girls  
# Sloppy Jane  
~ Spoon Benders

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Chicago-based indie outfit Smut — Tay Roebuck (vocals), Andrew Min (guitar), Bell Cenower (bass, synth), Sam Ruschman (guitar, synth) and Aidan O’Connor (drums) — released their sophomore album How the Light Felt through  Bayonet Records.

While 2020’s Power Fantasy EP saw Smut dipping its toe into more experimental waters, How the Light Felt saw the band diving headfirst into their vast array of 80s and 90s influences, including Oasis, Cocteau Twins, Gorillaz, and Massive Attack — while pushing their sound in a new direction. 

How the Light Felt‘s material can be traced back to 2017: Following her sister’s death, Tay Roebuck turned to writing to help her navigate a labyrinth of grief and heartache. “This album is very much about the death of my little sister, who committed suicide a few weeks before her high school graduation in 2017,” Roebuck explains in press notes. ” “It was a moment in which my life was destroyed permanently, and it’s something you cannot prepare for.” 

Roebuck’s bandmates composed the song’s arrangements, excavating underutilized 90s guitar tones and drum beats to build an expansive sonic world for her lyrics. “A couple weeks after the funeral we played a show and I couldn’t keep it together,” Roebuck says, “but we just kept playing and started writing because it was truly all I felt I had, it was all I could do to feel any sense of purpose. For the past five years now I’ve been chipping my way through grief and loss and I think the album itself is just the story of a person working through living with a new weight on top of it all.”

While rooted in profound heartbreak and loss, the album’s material pairs nostalgic inducing guitar tones, lush yet unfussy production, lived-in lyricism, and earnest vocals in a way that turns pain into a bittersweet yet necessary catharsis. Certainly, if you’ve lost a loved one, the album will likely resonate with you on a deeper level than most. 

Just ahead of a handful of tour dates with Knifeplay and Citizen, the band and their label shared “18 Tons” and “Y Signal,” which were originally featured as bonus tracks on the Japanese CD edition of the band’s sophomore album.

Building on the building’s thematic exploration or grief and its impact on the surviving family members and friends, the two previously released bonus tracks continue the overall aesthetic of delving into their influences while pushing their sound in new directions.

Built around swirling synths, reverb-drenched guitars, and crackling, staccato drum samples and Roebuck’s tender delivery, “18 Tons” explores dark and dizzying feelings of bargaining with oneself and their feelings with a lived-in specificity before a cathartic final chorus.

Opening with glistening synths, “Y Signal” is a gentle, almost lullaby-like anthem for avoidant personality types with a narrator, who sprinkles in revenge fantasies, self-recrimination and blame in a mischievous and deceptively hopeful soundscape. Much like the preceding track, “Y Signal” is rooted in Roebuck’s incisive, lived-in lyricism.

Tour dates are below as usual.

Smut Tour Dates:
Sun. Oct. 1 – St. Paul, MN @ The Treasury *
Mon. Oct. 2 – Milwaukee, WI @ Cactus Club *
Tue. Oct. 3 – Chicago, IL @ Sleeping Village *
Wed. Oct. 18 – Indianapolis, IN @ Hi-Fi Annex +
 
* with Knifeplay
+ with Citizen

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: OMEARA Shares Sleek and Anthemic “Take It Back”

Montréal-born, German-based singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jasmin O’Meara can trace the origins of her music career to when she was a teenager: A 14-year old O’Meara removed a guitar off of her uncle’s wall and declared it her own.

The Canadian-born, German-based artist is an autodidact, who went on to join Montréal’s indie scene and collaborated with several different bands and experimenting with a multitude of genres. Taking a break from music to study design, a chance encounter in London led O’Meara back to music — and to playing bass in English bands Temposhark and Kill Electric.

Between 2008-2014, O’Meara played bass in synth pop outfit Zoot Woman. Writing and performing and under the moniker OMEARA, the Canadian-born, German-based artist stepped out into the spotlight as a solo artist with the release of her debut EP Desert Heart, which was released earlier this year. The EP sees O’Meara singing and performing all the vocal parts and almost all of the material’s instrumentation with the exception of harmonica on one song.

Thematically, Desert Heart examines the uneasy and harrowing quest of navigating love in the 21st Century, set to a richly layered and modern take on the music, which shaped her life — and is informed by her own professional experience in post punk, synth pop and indie rock bands.

Desert Heart‘s first single “Take It Back” is sleek post punk-inspired song featuring a relentless motorik-like groove, a supple bass line, gauzy guitar textures paired with rousingly anthemic hooks and choruses, a dance floor friendly bridge, and the Canadian-born, German-based artist’s punchy delivery. While sonically, “Take It Back” reminds me a bit of The Stills, The Killers and others, the song is rooted in deeply personal, lived-in experience — one that should feel familiar to anyone, who’s attempted to maneuver the awkwardness of human relationships.

“The song is about telling your lover that you never really loved them, that you felt pressured into saying ‘I love you’ back, and yet feeling no remorse about revealing this information,” O’Meara explains. But at its core, the song reveals a remarkably self-assured artist, with a penchant for crafting incredibly catchy, anthemic hooks.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Marshall Kilpatric, a.k.a. Der Baron M. Kilpatric has spent the past two-plus decades as a drummer for a number of different bands including Black Light Burns, The Esoteric, Seaspin, Kylesa, F-Minus, Today is the Day and others. 

Kilpatric stepped away from the music industry for several years to refocus and evolve in other areas of his life. But back in 2020, the grizzled music industry veteran began to step out into the limelight as a solo artist when he started his recording project The Behaviour, a representation of the sounds, harmonies and noises he has heard in his head and ringing in his ears for quite some time. 

The project’s full-length debut, A Sin Dance is slated for a September 15, 2023 release. While the project — and in turn, its full-length but — has been brought to life with a vision of artistic integrity, passion and substance informed by his decades of experience and intuition. The album’s material is meant to be a cathartic, a medicine for melancholy, a remedy for repressed emotion, an enlightenment for evolving senses, Kilpatric explains. 

Earlier this week, I wrote about album single “Burning of the Neon Dream,” a slithering and serpentine track that brought Queens of the Stone Age and Josh Homme‘s The Desert Sessions to mind with the song built around arena rock friendly power chords and enormous, remarkably catchy hooks.

A Sin Dance‘s second and latest single, the slow-burning and expansive “An Untouchable Relic” continues a run of material indebted to Queens of the Stone Age and Josh Homme‘s The Desert Sessions but with subtle elements of 80s metal and shoegaze paired with propulsive, building rhythm. As Kilpatrick explains, the song is “an ode to unrequited desires for something unattainable perhaps . . .”

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Minneapolis’ Wild Lyre Shares Anthemic “Shelter”

Minneapolis-based indie outfit Wild Lyre — Keith Wyman (vocals, guitar), Art Oxborough (lead guitar), Mike Vasich (keys), Dave Dorman (bass) and Dan Cordell (drums) — released their debut single “Shelter,” along with two other songs earlier this year.

“Shelter” is a deceptively anachronistic jam that sound as though it could have been released in 1967, 1973, 1977, 2017 or — well, earlier this year. Built around some remarkably catchy hooks, “Shelter” displays the band’s ability to pair attention to craft with earnest, lived-in lyricism and performances.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Golem Dance Cult Shares Brooding and Anthemic “21 Century Dogs”

Split between France and England, the emerging, self-described “industrial heavy rock dance” duo Golem Dance Cult features longtime friends and experienced musicians: producer, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Charles Why, who has played in Lotsa Noise, Nexus and L-Dopa and vocalist Laur, who has played in Sparkling Bombs, Kevin K Band, Vague Scare and Other-ed. The pair’s latest project can trace its origins back to when they were teenagers, playing in the first band together, a band in which Laur played drums.

During most of the band’s short run together, the pair have written and worked on material remotely, as a result of pandemic-related restrictions and distance. Their work in Golem Dance Cult is structured around a couple of simple, agreed-upon parameters:

  • They had to work spontaneously, with each member following their instincts.

  • Mistakes should be expanded upon.

The duo eventually settled on a rock-inspired approach with electronic production but without holding to the formal structure — or strictures — of either genre.

Now, if you’ve been frequenting this site over the past year or so, you might recall that the duo released their debut EP 2021’s Grotesque Radio, an effort that featured the Bauhaus-like “Nosferatu Waltz,” a goth/horror track with a playful nod to Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. 

The duo’s full-length debut, Legend of the Bleeding Heart was released earlier this year. The album’s latest single “21st Century Dogs” sounds like a glammy, Bowie-like take on Bauhaus built around their penchant for enormous, arena rock like hooks and hours. The song is written and sung from the perspective of a dog and fittingly both the song and video ifeautres references and allusions from Luis Buñuel’s Le Chien Andalou and George Cheesbro’s Wolf Blood: A Tale of the Forest. But by doing so, the song and video explores people’s darkest, most feral impulses and desires.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Berlin-based singer/songwriter, guitarist, photographer and JOVM mainstay Laura Carbone received rapturous critical praise for her first two albums 2016’s Sirens and 2018’s Empty Sea with both albums drawing comparisons to PJ Harvey, Shana Falana, Chelsea Wolfe, St. Vincent and others. 

Back in May 2020 Carbone and her band were scheduled to go into the studio to record what would be her highly-anticipated third album. But as a result of pandemic-related restrictions and lockdowns, Carbone’s plans were indefinitely shelved, much like everyone else at the time.

Now, as you may recall, while she was touring across the European Union to support her first tow albums, Carbone and her band appeared on the beloved, German live concert series Rockpalast. For Carbone, who grew up in a small, southwestern German town watching Rockpaalst, appearing on the show was the achievement of a lifelong dream: A who’s who list of artists and bands have appeared on the show including Siouxsie and The Banshees, Radiohead, Sonic Youth, Patti Smith, Sinead O’Connor, David Bowie, R.E.M., Echo and the Bunnymen, Screaming Trees, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Charles Bradley, and many, many more.

Inspired by the lockdowns, Carbone and her band came up with an idea: “What if Rockpalast would let us release that show as a live album?” Taken from her October 2019 Rockpalast set at Harmonie Bonn, Laura Carbone — Live at Rockpalast was a career-spanning set featuring material from her first two albums.

She went on to collaborate with The Underground Youth on 2021’s In Dreams EP, an effort that saw the collaborators tackling four Roy Orbison songs, which chart the age-old and universal narrative of falling in and out of love, and the deep yearning for romance and connection we all feel — even if we don’t want to always admit it. Featuring material built around sparse, atmospheric arrangements, the EP’s songs allow room for The Underground Youth’s Craig Dyer’s earthy baritone and Carbone’s ethereal and yearning delivery to connect, embrace and unravel with each song.

Carbone’s long-anticipated fourth album The Cycle is slated for release next year. The album is a concept album that explores the emotional turmoils, triumphs and transformative experiences that the album’s protagonist experiences through the seasons of a year. Keeping with the album’s concept, over the course of the next year, Carbone and her band will release a new single every season until the album’s release next spring. Each single represents an experience or inspiration associated with that particular season and the story of the album’s protagonist.

The Cycle‘s second and latest single “Horses” is a slow-burning, msong built around lush and shimmering acoustic guitar, Carbone’s expressive and yearning delivery, paired with a supple bass line and dramatic drumming. Sonically bringing PJ Harvey’s “You Said Something” to mind, the song is set in the fullness of summer. The song’s protagonist is experiencing the heat, humidity and passion of the season — when fields become gold and heatwaves and wildfires turn them into ash. But there’s a reminder that Mother Earth will restore and reclaim burnt ground in time.

“Blackened fields unfold up blackened hills, and border off in the distance up against blackened mountains,” the Berlin-based JOVM mainstay writes. “Ashes fall, the wipers on slow, smear the soot across the wet windshield, and the steam rising from burnt trees in the misty rain mixes with the fog rising from the burnt ground. The smell of yesterday’s smoke and today’s damp earth is pungent and thick, and somehow oddly comforting. A landscape of endless green and gold has been rendered monotone, like a 1950s TV, where all is now black except for the gray, cloudy sky. No signs of life here aside from the odd bird flying by, screeching as it comments from on high, ‘Don’t hold on.’ The horses, they knew this. They ran. From the first whiff of smoke, they knew there’s no point in holding onto something you can never control, you can’t negotiate with, something that’s lost. They’ll be back, in time. When the earth heals and life returns, so will they. But they’ll never stop running. They’re wild horses. That’s what they do”