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| Photo - Martin Sagadin |
The Bats return with their third single of 2025, ‘The Gown’. With their 11th album, 'Corner Coming Up' on the horizon, the legendary indie rock band are giving us another taste of what’s to come.
The Bats' music has been recently described as "a perfect blend of bittersweet beauty and deceptive simplicity, and the band has a phenomenal ability to create melodies that linger long after the record has stopped spinning."
'The Gown' is not typical Bats, but fits perfectly with the above description and Martin Sagadin’s beautiful video sympathetically represents the emotions and symphonic vibes expressed in the song. Martin's gorgeous new video was shot on location at Grubb Cottage in Ōhinehou, Ōtautahi Grubb, and features band members Paul Kean and Kaye Woodward, as well as film-makers and musicians Annabel Kean (Sports Team) and Callum Devlin (Sports Team, Hans Pucket).
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Dayton, Ohio’s feral art-punk heavyweights Abertooth Lincoln return with new single ‘Mother is God’, a haunting ballad of abandonment, delusion, and the wreckage cults leave behind. Available to stream now on all major platforms via Golden Robot Records.
‘Mother is God’ marks a bold evolution for Abertooth Lincoln. Their first true ballad, the song is a slow-burning meditation on cult leader Amy Carlson - told from the imagined perspective of the child she left behind. It wrestles with the devastating contradiction of a woman who claimed to love the world but couldn’t love her own kid.
Musically, the track stretches Abertooth’s dynamic range: down-tempo and restrained in moments but laced with dissonance and tension that builds to a gripping, cathartic conclusion.
Lyrically, it’s intimate and unflinching - capturing the pain of being cast aside while exposing the seductive, hollow nature of cults and the narcissists who lead them. Like many songs on Abertooth’s upcoming album, ‘Mother is God’ explores how self-styled prophets often cloak self-interest in spiritual rhetoric, leaving real damage in their wake.
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Indigo Syndicate’s newest single, “Moonstruck,” plunges into the mind of a schizophrenic narrator, spiraling through the darkness of the voices in their head. Weightlessly dancing between an airtight rhythm section reminiscent of Mark Ronson’s work with Amy Winehouse, the song charts the narrator’s progression from denial to bargaining before ultimately succumbing to the voices.
In the opening verse, the warning is clear: “You’ve been looking far and wide but you dug too deep now you’re lost in your mind / paid the price (paid the price) for looking in places I know I shouldn’t be but I’m lost anyway.” The inescapability deepens in the chorus: “You can’t run from it, you can’t hide from it / but you still gotta choose your poison / you can’t change the game you were made to play / and you can’t beat them, so join them.”
By the second verse, the narrator admits defeat: “But there’s nothing wrong with falling for the voices in your head / I can’t cut them off, so I’ll write these songs until they give the go-ahead.” One last refrain drives the point home: “You can’t beat them, so join them.”
Musically, “Moonstruck” fuses soul, pop, and blues-rock with a modern edge. Its combination of classic yet modern production and silky Bruno Major–like vocals creates a sound both timeless and fresh. It’s a track built for fans of Scary Pockets, The Revivalists, and Glass Animals.
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| Photo - Brian Andrews |
Kolton Moore & The Clever Few have shared their new single “Brave the Weather,” the latest preview of their upcoming sixth album A Place That I Call Home, out September 26. The introspective new song finds Moore exploring the importance of taking care of one’s mental health, especially during life’s more challenging moments.
Moore on the new song: “This song is about navigating through the hard times in life and realizing that you aren’t the only one who struggles with those hard times. ‘There’s nothing wrong with being scared of the storm, you just learn to brave the weather,’ as the song says. This is something I have to remind myself of often. No matter how tough something may seem, it’s okay to be intimidated, but if you push through it, there is always something better on the other side.”
“Brave the Weather” follows the tender “Strawberry Thief” and the anthemic “When We Were Young,” which have garnered praise from Holler, Whiskey Riff and Glide Magazine who praised the band’s “big-hearted twang and songwriting chops.” Produced by GRAMMY-winner Matt Ross-Spang (Jason Isbell, Margo Price), the Texas five-piece’s forthcoming album A Place That I Call Home finds them navigating adulthood while taking stock of hard-earned life lessons along the way. The end result is an album about redefining the meaning of home from a road-warrior band that used to play 250 shows a year when they debuted in 2012.
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