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| Photo - Anna Rhody |
Thin Lear, begetter of elegant melancholia, opens his sophomore album (out April 24th) with a bridge falling and a brother’s death. What’s the reason for me seeing? / What’s the reason for anything? / Tell me angel, if you will / Do you think of me still? This tossing of hands to the sky, a dizzied surrender to the absurdity of existence, drives every song that follows. On album standout “A Cherished Man,” that loneliness manifests in three, distinctly curious characters. Andy drinks himself into public humiliation on a nightly basis; Annie pokes strangers with pins on crowded urban buses; Charlie consumes gargantuan sums of corks, stones, and live animals for performance. It’s a work of masterful poetry, and a poignant testament to the lengths humans will go in pursuit of connection. “I see myself in all of them,” Longo confesses. “They’re looking for love, they’re just not sure how to broker it.” With a delicate wail of despair—almost as though pricked—he sings: They say, you’re only whole / You’re only true / Long as someone dreams of you / And if you’re just set up to fall / You find a way to feel at all. It’s heartrending and conciliatory at once; Longo goes to the freak show, and sees only humans.
Longo grew up writing short stories; that narrative instinct pervades his music. He tends towards tragedies—some true, some imagined, and some stuck in between. “I’ve always gravitated to bizarre tales to access my own grief and pain,” says Longo. From “The Mothman” event of 1960s West Virginia which inspired “Silver Bridge,” to the “Mad Gasser” mass hysteria of 1940s Illinois that backdrops “Mattoon,” Longo collects peculiar lore and studies it for insights into humanity.
He pairs odd plots with placating melodies, his voice as pure and holy as a bell. The effect is uncanny—lyrics like a nightmare delivered through a lullaby. “I need something supernatural to wrestle with, just to understand my own earthly troubles,” he says. “I write to access a feeling and get past it.” Longo may summon the ghosts to dispel them, but Thin Lear’s music remains vibrantly haunted, full of eerie figures loping along, human or otherwise, hoping to heal. Influenced on a fundamental level by the likes of David Bowie and Karen Dalton, Longo builds a kind of sonic bridge between the two—his emotive folk pop aches and articulates from a strange, starry place.
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The highly anticipated debut album from Carly King (Loving You Is Easy), has been recorded at Cloverdale Records with Shane Travis (Evan Honer), and is due out May 1 on First City Artists (Alexa Rose, Coco).
Born in New Jersey, King lost her father at age 4 to the terrorist attacks of September 11th. Her family moved to Wyoming shortly after, where King grew up with a vivid sense of life's uncertainty and a profound desire to find its purpose. Now based in Nashville, she brings her insights on loss, love, and living freely to her first full-length. In her stark, sandy voice, King sings of dusty floors, school buses, and cowboy boots with the sparkling pop sensibility of Kacey Musgraves, the full hearted howl of Sierra Ferrell: Loving you is easy / It's the world that's hard.
With singles and EPs alone, King has independently amassed more than 20K monthly listeners, been named an American Songwriter Song Contest finalist, landed sponsorship from Gibson guitars, and conducted a merch campaign successful enough to fund her first full-length. King's fans aren't passive listeners but fervent, supportive members of a grassroots community, one she's built with warm and retable, folk country earworms.
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Orlando soul-rock powerhouse The Sh-Booms return with the striking new music video for “This Is A Test,” the cinematic title track from their recently released EP This Is a Test, available now on all digital platforms.
Directed by John Taylor, the video expands the song’s cosmic narrative into a vivid, otherworldly visual experience — one that blends performance with a surreal journey through time, space, and survival.
“The concept kind of dances through themes of time and space travel, unexpected journeys that lead to discovery, strength in survival and love, all woven through a dynamic performance,” Taylor explains. “I envisioned an emergency evacuation back to Earth, perhaps at a different time or in an alternate universe of possibilities.”
Drawing inspiration from classic New Wave-era visuals — including the stylized performance energy of artists like INXS — as well as Taylor’s own upbringing during the final chapter of the space program in Cocoa Beach, Florida, the video captures both nostalgia and forward motion. The result is a visually immersive companion to one of the band’s most ambitious songs to date.
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| Photo - Eric Johanson |
Ghalia Volt - Ride.
Ghalia Volt doesn’t waste time easing in. On “Ride,” the first single and video from her upcoming album Burn The House Down, due May 15th (Ruf Records,) she delivers a fierce, groove-heavy blast of blues-soaked rock & roll — gritty, immediate and unforgettable.
With Burn The House Down, produced by JD Simo and recorded in Nashville, Volt pushes that sound even further — capturing the immediacy of her live performances while expanding her sonic reach. Her first single “Ride,” is fierce, gritty and hip-shaking, a blast of blues-soaked rock & roll swagger that sets the tone for the album.
Recently featured on 60 Minutes alongside Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, Volt was recognized as part of a new generation carrying blues music forward. It’s a role she’s grown into over the past decade, shaped in part by her move from Belgium to New Orleans in 2016 — a turning point that immersed her fully in American roots traditions while sharpening her raw, instinct-driven approach.
That same year, she released Have You Seen My Woman (2016), a breakthrough that introduced her stripped-down, streetwise sound. She followed with Let the Demons Out (2017), and Not long after, Volt embraced a fiercely independent path, developing her one-woman band setup — singing, playing guitar, and working percussion simultaneously — a format that became central to both her recordings and her reputation as a live performer.
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Soft Loft is a Switzerland-based collective fronted by singer/lyricist Jorina Stamm. From day one, their mission has been to create a space where vulnerability is like oxygen and connecting with another is summer breeze. Their sound is a sticky mixture of ecstasy and melancholy.
After a breakthrough year of headline tours, major festivals & tastemaker praise from BBC 6 to KEXP, Swiss indie collective Soft Loft return with Caught, a high-voltage anthem for twenty-somethings confronting the moment they played it safe instead of fearless.
Suspended between nostalgia and “what if”, the track builds from introspection into a remarkable scream of release. Written & produced by the band, mixed by Grammy-winner Craig Silvey, it launches the road to an outstanding new album.
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Pairing timely songwriting with his distinctive instrumental banjo work, When I Am a Fossil is the bold forthcoming album release (due June 5) from New York native Benny Bleu. Ten years in the making and informed by the artist’s prior decade working as a geologist, the project reflects a sustained exploration of humanity’s relationship with the Earth, expressed through original songs, carefully chosen covers, and meditative banjo instrumentals. Both a deeply personal statement and a collaborative studio achievement, When I Am a Fossil pushes at the boundaries of old time music and its intersections with jazz and global rhythms, bridging old time traditions with contemporary sonic exploration.
At its core, When I Am a Fossil is a concept album that draws on geological time. Framed through the lens of a train-traveling, smartphone-rejecting modern-day luddite contemplating reality in 2026, the record offers multiple perspectives on a singular theme: what it means to live on—and within—a changing planet. Geologic ages are defined by their fossils—the preserved evidence of life—and often marked by mass extinctions. Looking ahead, future geologists examining the Anthropocene—the present age defined by human impact—will likely identify another mass extinction event, one humanity both caused (“When I am A Fossil”) and endured (“I’ve Endured”). The album meditates on this paradox while offering shimmers of hope and wonderment in the wistful “Serenity Song” and “All I Want to Be.”
Ultimately, the record suggests that while economies are human inventions sustained by belief, climate change will march on whether we believe in it or not (“March of the Mollusk”). As environmental pressures intensify, future generations may be compelled to live simpler lives with less consumption and greater locality. In that simpler, more grounded world, the album proposes, folk music will not only persist—it will belong.
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