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| Photo - Carina Simoes |
Last month Lisbon-born, London-based songwriter Maripool (moniker of songwriter Natacha Simões) announced the release of her debut album Rotten Luck, an introspective body of work that captures the complexity of identity, memory, and return. Blending shoegaze and alt. indie, the record sees Simões pushing beyond the boundaries of previous EPs into something more expansive, collaborative, and emotionally direct.
This week, Maripool has shared ‘Favourite’, the second cut to be taken from the album. The single captures “the quiet unraveling of a relationship and the way the mind begins to drift elsewhere before things have fully ended. Finding distractions as a form of escapism and of softening the inevitable.”
Rotten Luck was written during a month-long residency in Lisbon in January 2025, and shaped by isolation as much as reconnection. Set within a decaying fisherman’s building across the river - a sparse room with a broken window, dripping ceilings, and no Wi-Fi - the environment forced a stillness that defined Simões’ writing process. Days were often spent in silence, watching the river or writing in bursts, while evenings brought a return to the city and a reconnection with a past life.
This duality sits at its heart. Across the album, Maripool explores displacement, migration, and the tension between past and present. Having left Lisbon as a teenager, returning to the city became a confrontation with identity - not just who she had become, but who she had once tried to leave behind. As she puts it, the album reflects “the process of reconnecting with a part of myself that never fully left… confronting who I am when everything external falls apart.” The album’s title, taken from one of the songs written during the residency, encapsulates this emotional landscape; a quiet reckoning with past missteps and the search for self that followed.
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| Photo - Layde Jane Vickers |
Raleigh-based songwriter Canon Pence, records as Twilark. This week he is sharing the third single from his forthcoming LP, "Tired to Sleep" a hangover anthem that balances darkness, humor, and heart. Erin Rae and Dominic Billett's hopeful harmonies bring a welcome sense of light to the morning after, while Pence's voice carries a warm, wistful ache. There's a gentle, conversational quality to his delivery that recalls Ben Gibbard at his most understated—intimate, melodic, and quietly devastating without ever feeling overworked.
Quote from Twilark: "Perhaps unsurprisingly, this song was written while wallowing in a hangover, the lyrics reflecting this with darkness, humor, and self-awareness. Drink some water and go back to sleep." North Carolina has long produced artists who balance experimentation with emotional immediacy. Twilark fits naturally within that continuum while carving out a voice that feels intimate, textured, and distinctly his own.
The light touch of Pence’s voice establishes the spirit of this music, his meticulous storytelling and fine-tuned sense of the melancholic and ruminative. And it’s all shot through with a sense of gallows humor and a commitment to spontaneity and authenticity rather than perfection or self-seriousness. These values are even reflected in the album art which was created using a printing press and real book cloth; tactile and playful, touched by human hands.
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| Photo - Natalie Nguyen |
Hamilton, ON-born singer-songwriter Ariana Fig shares “I Hope You Love Me,” a fast-moving, emotionally candid pop-folk single lifted from her upcoming debut album, So Long, Sinnerstate! (out August 14th). Written at the edge of a new relationship, the track captures the fragile, electric moment where excitement and fear collide: when falling in love feels like both a leap forward and a quiet plea for acceptance.
“I wrote the song the day before I went on my first date with my partner,” Fig explains. “It’s all about acknowledging how scary yet exciting new love can be, and hoping that someone new can learn to love you and your flaws.”
That emotional tension distills into the song’s title, which serves as both mantra and confession. For Fig, it reflects the internal dialogue of early love and the repetition of hope, uncertainty, and self-awareness that accompanies opening yourself up to someone new. “I would repeat it to myself during the early days of my relationship,” she says.
Written in collaboration with Emma Whale at Catherine North Studios in Hamilton, ON, the track began as a conversation about fear and the specific hesitation that comes from watching relationships around you fall apart. Instead of leaning into that anxiety, the pair shifted toward optimism, reframing vulnerability as possibility. “We wrote about the exciting possibility of finding yourself in someone else, and learning to love yourself while being with someone,” Fig shares.
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| Photo - José Nava |
Singer-violinist-producer Annie Leeth constructs vivid and intriguing electro art-pop full of ache and hope, this week announcing Saturn Return and sharing the first single Effexor.
Drawing listeners into introspective anger and acceptance, singer-musician-producer Annie Leeth's Saturn Return is an exploration in loss, self-love, and acceptance. Blending live percussion, layered strings and driving synths, the record captures the feeling of being alone and safe to process emotions after a long day; or a long year.
Saturn Return rides the line between experimental pop and electronica. Featuring percussion by Mason Davis and synth by Erik Olson, each track invites listeners into the vulnerability of youth's twilight, painful realization that the world one thought one was living in doesn’t exist. Drawing inspiration from fellow violinst-producer Laurie Anderson, as well as artists like Aphex Twin and Radiohead, Leeth’s experimental production is enveloping, sometimes otherworldly, but her measured hand allows breathing room for the lyrics to activate the foreground, raw and honest and full of acceptance that a clear, right answer is not worth waiting for.
Ultimately, Saturn Return is about the trauma of rejection emotional equilibrium. It is a cohesive set of songs that, Leeth hopes, can act to remind listeners that they are not alone, and that feelings pass as long as they are acknowledged, as long as we continue to grow, learn, and be open to the experience.
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Run Remedy returns with Not at the Table out September 11th, a strikingly intimate and conceptually ambitious EP that blurs the line between indie pop, lo-fi experimentation and alternative storytelling. Written in solitude and brought to life in a shipping container studio in Manchester, the project captures something raw and immediate: a body of work built on instinct, trust, and an unfiltered emotional core. Today she shares 'Dissent' as another preview for the EP.
The EP moves through a sequence of physical and emotional spaces, unfolding like a 24-hour cycle. Each track occupies its own sonic landscape, shifting from hushed, acoustic vulnerability to cinematic swells and fractured, experimental textures, all tied together by Run Remedy’s precise, confessional lyricism.
Sonically, Not at the Table pushes further into genre-bending territory than ever before. Drawing on influences ranging from Elliott Smith and The Smiths to Mitski, Adrianne Lenker and St. Vincent, the EP balances delicate folk intimacy with art-pop edge, post-rock builds and moments of off-kilter humour. There’s a constant interplay between sincerity and theatricality - a refusal to settle into one tone for too long.
“The title came first: a house, a dinner table, and the idea of everything that can’t be said in that shared space. The artwork, painted by artist Lili Holland-Fricke, shows that house, with different tensions playing out in each room. Each section zooms in on a different part of what’s happening inside, almost like moving through the house and getting closer to the different conversations (or non-conversations) happening in it.”
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| Photo - Jen Dessinger |
Ziemba has not released a record in nearly six years and she's back this October with this absolute stunner. At times contemplative and earthy but more often truly baroque and stellar, The Braid is meticulously crafted and full of art rock / sophisti-pop gems. Gorgeous album cover, extraordinary songwriting and execution, this record is totally arresting. The first single, "The Pleasure Seekers" is out today.
"The Pleasure Seekers" is both true story and allegory: a "not-wise-man" at a bar in Montana really did tell Ziemba’s René Kladzyk the lessons he learned during a mushroom trip about bad angels on a pleasure cruise to earth, and she latched onto the idea. “At that time, I was struggling with my own tendency toward escapism, excess and addiction,” Kladzyk said. “The fantasy that, maybe this is what I was brought here to do, maybe all my excesses have a celestial justification – it held a real allure for me, delusional as it was.” The song is a fitting introduction to a record that carefully maps the boundaries between hope and fantasy, escape and home, aiming for somewhere between transcendence and acceptance.
Buzzing with ferocious intensity, “The Pleasure Seekers” is the sonic version of sprinting through the pouring rain with utter abandon, tits out. “Running like a faucet, full blast.” Production marries “Sandanista!”-era The Clash, “White Chalk”-era PJ Harvey, and ABBA-esque choral pop. It just gets bigger and bigger. This song is horny for Life and all its marrow, while every so often catching glimpses of what it is we’re running from, chasing rapture.
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