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| Photo - Zach Strum |
Asheville’s Alexa Rose has announced a new album ‘Atmosphere’ to be released October 31 on First City Artists. Once praised by NPR as “the soul child of Bob Dylan and Dolly Parton,” Rose returns with a stunning collection dwelling between the shimmering falsetto of Alison Krauss and the supernatural tone of Adrianne Lenker. The album lyrically attends to the symbiosis of joy and grief, terror and hope, heaviness and lightness in our daily lives.
Regarding Where The Magic Lives Alexa Rose explains, “Have you ever been in some situation you should be enjoying but somehow just can’t? It’s happened to me at the best concerts and under the starriest skies. This song is about fighting to find enchantment again, and making peace with the time that feels lost. I was thinking a lot about growing up in the early aughts, before I always had a phone in my pocket, and how I felt a curiosity about the world that couldn’t be answered with a quick Google search. Sometimes I think leaving a little mystery is what we need to be able to run towards those dreams, to let ourselves bask in a question before we know the answer.”
Alexa Rose recorded her new album at Betty’s, a studio created by Sylvan Esso nestled in the North Carolina woods. Shortly after the session, Hurricane Helene hit the western part of the state, washing away lives and landscapes in the hometowns of half the band. The storm’s wake, eerie and desolate and decisive, cast a new light upon the record. “I related to the music in a different way,” says Rose. “I had just moved into a new place after losing access to my house, and felt a little tossed around the way everyone did.
The experience deepened my love for my home and my belief in the resilience of the land and communities in Appalachia.” Rose spent the harsh winter to follow revisiting the album and re-recording certain songs in her cabin outside Asheville, replacing studio shimmer with intimate sparsity, a deliberate bareness to better express her feeling at the time. “Stripping the songs down felt truer: nothing to hide behind anymore, but believing the roots are strong enough to hold.”
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| Photo - Vivian Wang |
Last month, Bird Streets, the alter-ego and musical brainchild of Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist John Brodeur, announced the forthcoming release of his third LP, The Escape Artist, due October 17, 2025 on Plastic Dreams Records, and share the album’s catchy lead single “Mistaker,” and yesterday, the band came back with another taste of what’s to come, with the brilliant “It’s A Start,” alongside its accompanying music video directed by B.A. Miale.
The album was almost entirely performed by Brodeur and his longtime collaborator, producer Jason Falkner (Jellyfish, Beck, St. Vincent), with contributions from Gina Romantini (Wallflowers, Jayhawks), Zach Jones (Sting) and Oscar Albis Rodriguez (A Great Big World). The Escape Artist was recorded at Jason Falkner’s studio, Rhetoric, in Los Angeles, and additional tracking was completed at Studio G and Brodeur’s home studio in Brooklyn. Bird Streets has also detailed a run of upcoming shows throughout the east coast of the U.S.
Speaking on the song out this week, Brodeur says “This one came to me on a long walk in the California sun. The first verse was a complete thought, and I tried to model the rest of the song around that. It took a long time to get right–I forced myself to finish the lyrics so we could record it, then rewrote and re-recorded most of them a year later. (Sorry Jason!) The music is indebted to later-period Elliott Smith, his more psychedelic work. Figure 8 was a huge influence when I was making my first solo record, and it’s one I come back to a lot because of its range of sounds. My friend Gina Romantini plays violin on this. I love the suspense it creates in the track.
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| Photo - Melissa Payne |
Acclaimed JUNO and Polaris Prize-nominated Canadian singer-songwriter Terra Lightfoot has unveiled a haunting and heartfelt new single: a cover of “Red,” originally written and recorded by Canadian alt-rock band Treble Charger. Reimagined through a melancholic folk-rock lens, Lightfoot’s rendition of “Red” highlights her emotive vocal delivery, introspective tone, and a warm, rootsy arrangement that nods to classic country influences.
Lightfoot’s rendition of “Red” also features Treble Charger’s Bill Priddle, who penned the original. Their musical connection stretches back to their time playing together in the band Don Vail, and the idea for this collaboration came to life after a live show in Priddle’s hometown.
“I’ve loved this song since I was a kid, and became friends with Bill Priddle when we were both playing in the band Don Vail,” shares Lightfoot. “We’ve kept in touch and he came out to our show in Sault Ste. Marie last summer. I had the idea to cover this song with him then, and after we sang it together, it made so much sense to cut this one for this record.”
The song’s soft, country-tinged instrumentation was a collaborative effort shaped by Lightfoot and co-producer/husband Jon Auer, who suggested the genre twist and even played drums in a makeshift living room studio. The track also features Annie Lindsay on fiddle, giving the arrangement a tender, Dolly Parton-inspired charm.
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| Photo - Tom Gaiger |
Wyldest today announces her new album 'The Universe Is Loading' - out 14th November via Hand In Hive. Alongside the announcement, she releases haunting and euphoric new single 'After The Ending'. Following last month's delicate meditation on familial estrangement ('All It Would Take Is A Phone Call'), new single 'After The Ending' finds Wyldest confronting the fragility of the human body, and exploring love and bonds that transcend space and time, all amidst a haze of celestial indie-rock.
With its nods to simulation theory, ancient medicine, and the quiet terror of losing control, the song was written shortly after Wyldest received an endometriosis diagnosis. Opening with a reference to ‘trephining’ (an ancient practice of drilling holes in the skull to release evil spirits), it continues through sci-fi metaphors before arriving at its pivotal bridge refrain: “I’ll look for you, if you seek me out there too… / In our past lives… I’d wait for you / If the time was on our side, We’re passing tides for the moment…”
Speaking more on the release of the new single, Wyldest said: "'After the Ending' is a post-apocalyptic pop song, about sustaining love from one existence to the next; “The moment, we lost it / so I’ll find you, after the ending”. It was written with space and time in mind - a scenario whereby a relationship can’t exist in the present reality, perhaps due to life circumstances, timing, or something more extreme, like separation by death - and the promise of finding each other in a different existence where they can be there together.
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London-based singer-songwriter WILDES (Ella Walker) will release her second album 'All We Do Is Feel' on 12th September.
Today, she shares her new single 'Without a Heart'. She explains: "Of all the album tracks, this probably took the longest to reach its final form. It wasn’t an easy song to get out. I really struggled to nail the production on it and, in the end, I completely re-produced it, focusing on the intimacy and fragility of the verses and bringing in the vocoder choir to emulate that robotic coldness I was feeling when I originally wrote it. It’s mournful, inevitable, and has a finality to it for me. I knew once I’d written and produced it, a door would be closed on my heartache, and it was such a relief to finally finish it and feel free from that sort of pain. That makes it all worth it".
When moments slip through our fingers and no feeling is final, WILDES’ returning album is a monument to the love which remains. 'All We Do Is Feel' marks Ella’s reinvention: a kind of radiance that can only be earned when everything – your life and your art – is razed to the ground and built again in faith to a new vision. The story that unfolds across All We Do Is Feel is one which we all recognise: one of love, heartbreak and renewal. But when we are lost in the arctic-white of emotion, when everything is at its most bitter and unending, WILDES will take you by the hand and walk you out of the storm.
Co-produced with her best friend Elena Garcia (Tonguetied), the album was recorded in Garcia’s childhood home, and the music is completely unguarded and fearless in the face of experimentation.
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