Hecojeni contacted us directly with their current single 'Riding The Merry Go' which immediately grabbed our attention for all the right reasons. There is a freshness to their indie rock styling, it's energised and yet melodically engaging which might be a prolonged way of saying it's catchy, but worth the extra words in our opinion. The background - Hecojeni is an indie rock duo from Greenville, South Carolina creating melody-first songs that move between alt-folk balladry and groove-forward indie rock, with reviewers drawing comparisons to The Breeders, Talking Heads, and David Bowie. Heath Cobb writing, playing and vocals, Jeff Niebuhr writing, playing, and producing. The catalog moves easily between alt-folk balladry and groove-forward indie rock.
The story behind the band is unusual. In April 2022, Jeff and Heath tracked a single song together on a portable rig in Port Royal, South Carolina — Catch Me When I Fall. The session ended, and Heath disappeared. Not figuratively. He moved onto a boat a mile off the South Carolina coast and stayed there for two years, kayaking in once a week for supplies, running five to twelve miles a day on the mainland with no headphones, no infrastructure, no audience.
Jeff finished the song anyway. He released it in November 2023 — less a debut single than a flare into open space. Heath surfaced in April 2024. What followed wasn't a comeback. It was an eruption. Fragments Jeff had been carrying for years collided with songs Heath was bringing back fully formed, and what had been a band-in-progress turned into a catalog: Catch Me When I Fall, Christmas Lost Today, Human Race, Only in My Mind, Summer's Calling, Riding the Merry Go, with more in the pipeline.
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Amidst the defiant stomp of new album New Ways to Lose, out this Friday, June 26th via Losing Side Records, American Aquarium band leader BJ Barham finds a moment to joyously celebrate a love so strong it could last lifetimes on “Twin Flames.” Over an E Street-style, horn-drenched shuffle, Barham sings an emphatic ode to his wife, declaring “and it felt like we knew each other for the last couple centuries.” Barham has never sounded so happy, and who can blame him.
“In Plato’s The Symposium, he suggests that human beings spend their entire life seeking their ‘other half’ to complete themselves and this song is my take on that idea,” explains Barham. “Roaming through this realm in search of the kind of love that feels like a missing part of yourself. The kind of love that feels like you’ve known that person forever. The kind of love that leaves you feeling empty and broken when you think of a life removed from them. The kind of love that I think we all yearn for.”
On American Aquarium’s new album New Ways to Lose, Barham and his band of road warriors turn two decades of survival into a driving, deeply-felt rock & roll statement — one built on resilience, reinvention, and the hard-earned clarity that only comes with time. Produced once again by multi-time Grammy winner Shooter Jennings, the album was recorded in Los Angeles over a 10-day session that captured the band at their most immediate and alive. Much of the record was tracked live, with Jennings encouraging spontaneity and instinct over perfection, while a round of overdubs offered the opportunity to add three-part harmonies and horn arrangements to the songs. The result is a muscular, cinematic record that embraces both sides of American Aquarium's identity: the bruised confessionals of a songwriter who's already spent decades sharpening his craft, and the full-throttle release of an anthemic, amplified rock & roll band.
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Salt Lake City-based singer-songwriter Josaleigh Pollett issues the "Like a River" single ahead of their fourth full-length album, ‘If I Let It Quiet, and West Coast tour. Produced by long-time collaborator Jordan Watko (Crowd Shy), the new record will be released July 24th via Audio Antihero. The work of Pollett and Watko has received a slow burn of recognition over the years. Following Pollett’s warm and rootsy solo debut 'Strangers,' the duo initially found acclaim together in 2020 with the Indie Rock crunch of their ‘No Woman Is the Sea’ album. They reached a broader audience still with 2023’s electronics-infused ‘In the Garden, By the Weeds,’ thanks to support from notable outlets, including awards and end-of-year lists.
Although the continuation of Pollett and Watko's collaboration was never in question, the new album's creation faced new challenges due to Watko's relocation to Japan. Despite this separation, the pair opted to make their first cross-continent collaboration more ambitious and exploratory than what had come before.
“Like a River is about an attempt at quieting the noise of my own thoughts and of a chaotic world around me in order to try to be more resilient. A too-late-coffee-fueled yellow-light-lit silent moment - having arrived at myself just in time to feel my pulse speed up and the news of the day sweep me away into frothing rapids. Hoping for the peace of a quiet river bank, only to remember that a river is swift, chaotic, and ever-changing the earth beneath it. Inspired by Paul Simon's Peace Like a River- a song I've always held in my heart as a beautiful protest song." – Josaleigh Pollett.
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Tony Fox describes "Rising" as: "A song about rising above darkness and difficulty. It’s about shining even when times are hard, inspiring people to rise, inspiring people to shine, and reminding them that they are beautiful." Tony Fox is a female-fronted 3-piece band from Cornwall, creating pagan-punk rock & roll, psych-poetry music. The songs and performance blend raw energy with passion & spirit.
Tony Fox is an enigma - an androgynous, mysterious character and the musical alias of Jessica Cox. Jess grew up in the depths of West Cornwall, where post-industrial economic deprivation meets the seaside holiday village, where alternative thinkers and artists came to seek solitude from materialistic society, meeting farmers and fishermen. The band’s music portrays this landscape, with tones of punk through powerful, poetry-led lyrics about the life's hardships.
Currently working as a three-piece Tony Fox drives performance with costume, mixing pagan masks with big dresses, adding guitar feedback and crowd dancing to connect with the audience. The band met through a love of surfing and music; things that keep young people alive in Cornwall. They wanted to create a sound of their own, a step away from over-engineered bands and technical perfection. This music is about heart. It's about taking rock & roll back to where it began. The project is a DIY collaboration that has been helped along through friends and favours, and for the most part self-funded by Jess (a single mother who experienced a period of homelessness with her daughter during the making of the album). The grit and determination of her story – economically and emotionally – are present in the album which fizzes with soul and heart.
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