Annie Stokes - Blue Foundation - Sister Sadie - Daphne Blue Underworld

Annie Stokes - Ghostwriter (Album).

After hustling in the Washington, DC music scene for a decade, Annie Stokes arrived at the end of 2023 with a calm clarity: she was ready to write the type of album she’d always dreamed of. She and her husband and songwriting partner, Will Berger, holed themselves up in a cabin by the Shenandoah River for a weekend in December and sketched out the bones of what would become “Ghostwriter.” Built around themes of grief, belonging, and permanence, the album also visits topics of gender dymanics and double standards, the lingering ache for validation from past friends and lovers, reclaiming boundaries in the digital age, and the intense, alchemical friendship young women experience in their twenties.

“Ghostwriter” began to take form under the creative helm of producer and co-writer Austin Bello, who collaborated on 2023’s “Wild Rose” EP. Stokes leaned more on her banjo as a rhythm instrument, while Berger used the bass to push the melodic narrative of the songs. Marty Garfield, who joins Stokes on stage as part of her live line-up, added fiddle, alternating between highland-esque dirges and Appalachian licks. Before recording each song, the players loosely discussed the genre and sound they were attempting to create, while ultimately agreeing that the songs needed to take their own shape. The result is a collection of dark-hued, modern Americana music firmly rooted in folk songwriting tradition.

While recording this album in the spring and summer of 2024, Stokes also independently toured the East Coast, began hosting songwriter showcases in her hometown of Leesburg, VA, and parented her two young daughters. She loves that the grit and fatigue of being a working artist and millennial parent shine through in these songs. Americana and folk music is many things, but it’s ultimately defined by its connection to the earth and the everyday people who inhabit it. With “Ghostwriter”, Stokes hopes to crystallize and honor some of the sacred, ordinary experiences of everyday living.

============================================================================

Blue Foundation - Ecstacy In Space.

Blue Foundation are proud to announce the release of, ‘Ecstasy in Space’, the third single from their forthcoming new album ‘Close to the Knife’, which is set for release on April 18th. Recorded in 2024 and written by Tobias Wilner, this dreamy, shoegazey track takes listeners on a sonic journey through ethereal soundscapes and pulsating rhythms, capturing the essence of liberation and desire. The track also introduces a new member to the Blue Foundation lineup, Nina Dahlgaard Larsen, who provides vocals on this song.

‘Ecstasy in Space’ is a fuzzy and delicious snowball of pure dream pop that calls you to surrender to the moment. The track tells you to hold on tight and glide with grace and reminds you that true ecstasy comes from the freedom of choice and the strength to surrender. On the single, Tobias Wilner said, "I wanted to capture my feeling of floating high on feelings". His words echo in the refrain, "Wish you were mine".

The music video for "Ecstasy In Space" is a dreamy journey into the energy and emotion of a group of young people in Copenhagen. Shot with an artistic and cinematic aesthetic, the video follows them as they venture into the night on their way to an underground warehouse party. The music video, directed by Hannah Bertram, is a visual poem – hypnotic, raw and nostalgic.

Founded in 2000 by Danish singer, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Tobias Wilner, the group was inspired by Mark E. Smith's method of forming a band (The Fall), with Wilner recruiting a rotating lineup of traditional musicians over the years to fuel creativity. Since 2010, the core members of the band have been Tobias Wilner and Bo Rande, working between Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Copenhagen, Denmark.

============================================================================

Photo by Allister Ann.

Sister Sadie - Let the Circle Be Broken.

In a mostly male genre still known as much for its reticence about contemporary subjects as for its powerful harmonies and virtuosic picking, bluegrass music’s Sister Sadie have stood out ever since the all-female group’s founding more than a dozen years ago. 

Now, with the release of “Let The Circle Be Broken,” the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) award-winning, GRAMMY-nominated ensemble is breaking new ground with a somber yet uplifting exorcism of the generational trauma of domestic abuse.

“Dani Flowers, Erin Enderlin and myself wrote ‘Let the Circle Be Broken’ right after my Dad passed away,” says the group’s co-founder, fiddler Deanie Richardson. “He was an abusive man who verbally, emotionally and sexually abused me for most of my 18 years living at home with him. When I confronted him as an adult, he said that it had been done to him as a child. This song is about that generational trauma and abuse that keeps getting passed down. The continuing of that trauma and abuse stops with me. It doesn’t go any further.”

============================================================================

Photo Loren Ipsum

Daphne Blue Underworld - Fake It Make It.

"Fake It Make It" is the newest single from Boston-based alt-pop mad scientist Daphne Blue Underworld (aka. Loren Ipsum).

"Fake It Make It" is the second single from Daphne Blue Underworld's forthcoming album, Memory Palace. Trading the frantic electronic drive of previous single "Kicking and Screaming" for wistful guitar pop a la Camera Obscura or Belle and Sebastian, Daphne Blue Underworld’s "Fake It Make It" may sound gentle, but loses none of the potent lyrical venom of its predecessor.

The song’s chiming guitar chords and plaintive vocal melodies may evoke nostalgia, but serve as a spoonful of sugar for DBU principal Ipsum's bitter ruminations on integrity and authenticity. The music may harken back to a simpler time of homespun indie rock that lived and died by short-run 7” singles and self-Xeroxed zines, but the message is bang up to the minute and all-too-relevant in a world where reality is being obfuscated more than ever before.

The forthcoming Memory Palace is DBU’s forthcoming mid-fi masterpiece—an evocative collection of songs that take the form of aural daydreams bathed in a nostalgic VHS glow. Flipping stylistic channels between the guitar-dominated heyday of MTV’s 120 Minutes and the warm synthesized landscapes of PBS’s Nova, Memory Palace explores themes of personal authenticity, courage in the face of change, and the tenuous escapism of a complex inner life.

============================================================================

Frankie Rose - L.T.Leif - Annie Stokes

Frankie Rose - Sixteen Ways.

"Counting the ways that things can unexpectedly fall apart on you before anything has even happened yet! The song 'Sixteen Ways' is about anticipation and getting your hopes up while simultaneously making lists in your head about how it can’t possibly work in out in your favor” -Frankie Rose

"Sixteen Ways" (out today) is the second single from Frankie Rose's new LP Love as Projection, her fifth overall, due March 10.

After spending nearly two decades establishing herself across New York and Los Angeles independent music circles, Frankie Rose returns after six years with a fresh form, aesthetic, and ethos embodied in her new full-length album Love As Projection, out March 10 on Slumberland. Celebrated by countless critical and cultural outlets over the years for her expansive approach to songwriting, lush atmospherics, and transcendent vocal melodies and harmonies, Love As Projection is a reintroduction of her established style through the new lens of contemporary electronic pop.

Painstakingly written, recorded, and engineered through some of the most tumultuous times in history, this new collection of songs harnesses the power and propulsion of Frankie’s early DIY-centric punk days without losing sight of the immersive, dreamlike world-building she’s been known for in recent years. Her love of new wave hooks and post-punk drive remain omnipresent, elevated by her utilization of modern production and an improved, polished palate of state-of-the-art instrumentation.

It’s more than a rebirth, a refinement, a resurgence – it’s a culmination of influence, a newly-defined scope using the tools at her disposal, a long-form project that was heavily considered for half of a decade – resulting in the most personal and accessible collection of art-pop that Frankie has delivered yet, propelling her signature melodies and dense, ethereal harmonies into the future.

 

======================================================================

L.T.Leif - Gentle Moon.

Musician and artist L.T.Leif has shared "Gentle Moon" the opening track to the new LP, Come Back to Me, but Lightly, out now on Lost Map Records and OK Pal.

"Gentle Moon" is a long-distance love song, sung across lockdown and two seas. There is both an acceptance of distance, and a deep, unspoken longing for something different. It speaks to the push and pull of relationship, the elliptical and powerful movements of coming together and moving away again.

Ultimately, it's about getting thrown off of your own orbit by the needs or ideas of others, and that hard work of finding yourself again through your own body. Long treasured collaborator, Dallin Ursenbach, recorded this duet onto his cell phone while in isolation. I love how it touches on the spookiness of digital interactions, especially with someone known deeply, tangibly, and through your real life lived.

Come Back to Me, but Lightly is in large part inspired by the Northern sun, with references to celestial objects and the distances therein contained, from the perspective of a human here standing and thinking on the earth. I was drawn to these as both symbols of longing and warmth, and of shared experience or connection across the abstraction of distance.

======================================================================

Annie Stokes - Goldenrod.

Over the course of the pandemic, during Annie’s first pregnancy, she took an online course on medicinal herbalism and learned that the vast majority of what Western gardeners consider "weeds" are actually medicinal plants with physical and spiritual attributes. “At the time, my community was struggling with political and cultural differences that seemed destined to tear us apart,” shares Annie. “I started to think about what it would look and feel like to love the weeds in your yard, and the people in your life, without trying to curate or change them.”

“Goldenrod” comes from Annie’s upcoming EP, Wild Rose, out March 2023. Annie Stokes is a dark Americana songstress and folk lyricist from the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in northern Virginia. Raised on musical theater and her mom's oldies, she began writing poetry and short stories at a young age. When she picked up a guitar at age 20, everything clicked and she fulfilled her destiny of becoming an emotional millennial troubadour.

"I like a hook, and I like a song that dredges up specific memories and feelings, rather than generic rushes of serotonin," she says of her songwriting style. "From the beginning, I would get inspired by snippets of conversations I would hear, or certain smells, or little moments."

======================================================================