The Artist Ren gives us the story so far... I’m Lauren Van Houten, and I make music as The Artist Ren. My songs live somewhere between indie pop, folk, and alt pop. I write my songs through storytelling, with atypical guitar tunings and subtle samples underneath that tie everything I release together. I’m a solo artist, fully independent, with no label or management behind me.
I wrote my first song during the pandemic, in 2020, mostly to get the stress out of my head. A teacher helped me get started, and after that I figured it out on my own. Music was always around me growing up, my dad has an eclectic ear, and I picked up his habit of falling in love with the songs nobody else has found yet. My family never made me choose between music and anything else, so I was able to pursue music with their help.
Almost everything I write starts as a story. My notes app is full of things I’ve overheard, read, watched, or imagined and the melody and lyrics get built around them. People sometimes assume my lyrics are personal stories, but I would say 95% of them are imagined or come from media I consume. I take a lot of inspiration from my favorite singers including Hozier, Phoebe Bridgers, Wave to Earth, and Lizzy McAlpine. I love Hozier and Phoebe Bridgers lyricism and strive to create lyrics as thought provoking as them. As for Wave to Earth and Lizzy McAlpine, I take inspiration from their instrumentals and melodies respectfully. Listening to them makes me try to choose more interesting melodies and harmonies during production.
Doin’ Fine!” came out September 18, 2026, and it’s my first release in more than a year. Part of that gap was a semester abroad in Seoul, South Korea! I study sports and entertainment management, and I graduate this spring. The song is the lead-in to a full album I’m finishing now, due within the next few months. These songs carry everything that changed between fifteen and nineteen, more confidence, more maturity, and just something that wasn’t written in my room during Covid-19. It isn’t a hard break from what I’ve made before it’s the same chapter, written by someone a bit more experienced. I’m sure though, in the future while I’m writing the next album, I’ll be thinking the same thing. Anyways, in the future all I hope is that people are still enjoying my music and I’m still enjoying making it.
============================================================================
Lily Konigsberg returns with a new song, “Free Byrd,” her first single in nearly 5 years. The product of time spent working with her longtime friend and collaborator Hugo Stanley (PALM, Frankie Cosmos), whom she enlisted as both a producer and instrumentalist, the song is a fitting introduction to a new creative era for Konigsberg.
It's an ode to the bittersweet nature of starting again and the sacrifices required, serving as both an empowering breakup anthem and a swan song for a tumultuous past life.
An infusion of Lily's signature earworm-generating pop sensibility and Hugo's punchy arrangements, "Free Byrd" makes a convincing last-second bid for song of the summer and serves as an immensely promising preview of things to come.
============================================================================
 |
| Photo - Billy Clark |
Nashville-based duo Louis York has shared their new single "The Ballad Of A Broken Man," the latest from their upcoming album The Heart of the Matter that releases November 6 on their label Weirdo Workshop. The heartbeat at the center of their new album, "The Ballad Of A Broken Man" details the pair's journey through grief, faith, resilience, and choosing optimism in the face of life's inevitable challenges.
Following the band's recent single "I Found A Home," which pays homage to their adopted hometown, "The Ballad Of A Broken Man" details Louis York's journey since landing in Nashville. The pair explains, "This is the heartbeat of the whole album. It’s the realization of all the bumps and bruises we’ve had to go through as men, and what it takes to survive. Love, community, sincerity. This song is reason we called the album 'the heart of the matter.'"
Originally from East St. Louis and New York City, Louis York didn't come to Tennessee chasing country music. They came chasing great storytelling and even better songs. What they found was an inspiring community that fueled their creativity. They launched an artistic collective called Weirdo Workshop, started the Tiny Book Club initiative, and interviewed their own musical heroes on the Emmy-nominated podcast We Sound Crazy. They also kept writing songs, and over the last decade The Heart of the Matter slowly took shape.
============================================================================
Experimental duo Allegories share “Pure Comedy,” an ethereal and emotionally volatile new single that moves restlessly between optimism and pessimism, intimacy and aggression, hope and resignation. Shifting through dream pop, indie rock, and electronic textures without settling comfortably into any of them, the track is perhaps the clearest distillation yet of the unpredictable world Adam Bentley and Jordan Mitchell have built on their upcoming album, By Accident, On Purpose, out October 16th, 2026.
“Pure Comedy” evolved alongside the album itself, with Allegories working on the song throughout the years-long writing and recording process. Rather than discarding each previous incarnation as the track changed shape, fragments survived, leaving different eras of the song embedded within the finished recording.
“This is the song that I think best represents our new album,” Adam explains. “There are elements from many different iterations of the song still in there, and sonically, it feels like it touches on the kaleidoscope of sounds and genres that the record eventually became.”
============================================================================
Montreal-based producer, songwriter and composer JoJo Worthington shares “Ever Ender Star Infinity,” a sweeping alt-folk anthem that turns romance into something celestial. Dark, dreamy and consumed by longing, destiny and connection, the track draws together spirituality, stardust, fantasy and the enormous persistence of desire to capture something relatively unfamiliar within her catalogue: a love song.
“‘Tu as une bonne étoile.’ You have a good star,” JoJo explains. “Meaning, you’ve been blessed and there is someone watching over you.” It’s the first single to be shared from JoJo’s upcoming EP, BAPTIZED II, set for release on November 6th, 2026.
That idea stretches back to conversations about space and spirituality, and the idea that everything is fundamentally connected. Fascinated by the fact that the atoms within our bodies are assembled from material that predates the Earth itself, JoJo began folding the language of stars, space and elemental matter into the song.
The song’s fantastical language also emerged from another passions – Magic: The Gathering. While opening a package of Dragon Shield card sleeves, JoJo came across the description “Emme: God of Ender & Ever.” The phrase immediately captured her imagination, recalling the duality of “Forever Evermore” from her 2022 BAPTIZED I EP and eventually helping shape “Ever Ender Star Infinity.” Other cards, including “Eirdu, Carrier of Dawn,” provided further fragments for its lyrical universe.
============================================================================
No comments:
Post a Comment