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| Photo - Rob Baker Ashton |
Saint Etienne have announced details of their 13th, and final LP, International. Co-produced with Tim Powell (formerly of Xenomania), the album will be released on Heavenly Recordings on Friday, September 5. They have also today released "Glad", the first single to be taken from the album. Co-written and produced with Tom Rowlands of the Chemical Brothers, "Glad" is a sparkling piece of uplifting pop, and incredibly catchy. The song also features Jez Williams from Doves on guitar.
Talking about "Glad", Sarah & Pete from Saint Etienne said: "We asked Tom if he had any songs in progress that might suit Saint Etienne and he sent a backing track that he’d been working on with Jez from Doves. We fell in love with it straight away and the top line melody and words for ‘Glad' came easy" - Sarah Cracknell
"The song is about taking pleasure in everyday things like nature and the outdoors when life is otherwise getting you down" - Pete Wiggs
The group aren’t splitting up as such - they still remain the best of friends after 35 years recording together – but they don’t feel like they want to go on forever and wanted to go out with a bang. International follows hot on the heels of The Night - released last November – a nocturnal, ambient record that garnered some of the best reviews of the group’s career.
Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs have known each other since childhood and started the group in 1990 with their classic cover of Neil Young’s "Only Love Can Break Your Heart". Sarah Cracknell joined for their third single "Nothing Can Stop Us" and the Foxbase Alpha album in 1991. Since then they have branched out into films, books and curation, and became artists in residence at the Southbank Centre. The group simply feels it is now time to draw a line under new recordings.
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Big Stir Records is proud to announce the return of Detroit indie pop duo Crossword Smiles with their second album, Consequences & Detours, out on Vinyl, CD and Streaming worldwide today May 23, 2025. Already teased by the hit single “Falling All Over Myself” (with the equally compelling “Counting By Fives” to follow in the coming weeks), it's the followup to their surprise hit 2022 debut Pressed & Ironed, delivering on the promise of that record's hooks, inspired lyrics and timeless arrangements while pushing their unique sound in exciting new directions.
Consequences & Detours reunites the musical minds behind Crossword Smiles – power pop veterans Tom Curless and Chip Saam – to continue exploring new sonic textures and lyrical landscapes, and applying them to the kind of perfect pop-rock song structures and melodies at which they excel. It's a winning combination of inspiration and songcraft that expands on the foundation of the first album and delivers a set of instantly memorable, richly detailed melodic gems that sound like nothing else coming out of the Midwest in 2025.
When they emerged three years back, Crossword Smiles drew immediate notice for presenting a new sound even for the the deeply respected Michigan-based guitar-pop stalwarts at its core. The band had been quietly formed a few years earlier by Curless, formerly of Your Gracious Host and currently enjoying solo success, and SAAM, best known as the bassist for The Hangabouts and Curless's backing band The 46% and the host of the indispensable Indie Pop Takeout show on Neighborhood Weekly Radio. The impulse behind the new collaboration? A pure and simple wish from a pair of like-minded music fans to hear something different.
The resulting and instantly-appealing sound suggests a blend of Crowded House and The Replacements with a bent toward sharp character studies in the Ray Davies tradition, but there are countless other guiding lights here. Spotting them is half of the fun: Chip and Tom share an encyclopedic grasp of pop-rock history in all its many flavors, and the CROSSWORD SMILES ethos lets them go deep-diving for inspiration. You could hear their mutual love for the too-often-overlooked likes of Joe Jackson, The Go-Betweens, Freedy Johnston and The Blue Nile all over the debut album, and on Consequences, they lean into those influences and add still more from the their eclectic array of personal favorites. Tinges of Michael Penn and Del Amitri can be heard in Tom's tender but sly vocal delivery – check out the pitch-perfect melancholy of “Once Or Twice” – and the band cites diverse inspirations from Madness (“Night Train”) to Guided By Voices (on the lead single “Falling All Over Myself”) to The Left Banke (“Girls Club”) when discussing the new tunes.
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Today singer-songwriter, renowned tv and film composer, and multi-instrumentalist KRAMON bursts onto the scene with new single “Crush”. Available on most streaming platforms today, the melancholic new single features the luscious vocals of Meredith Adelaide.
For a little over four minutes, allow yourself to be absolutely hypnotized by the new track from KRAMON, “Crush”. Meshing together Meredith Adelaide’s entrancing vocals with swelling string arrangements provided by Isaiah Gage, the end result is a mesmerizing dreamscape track that pulsates deep with emotion. Originally designed as a grungy, heavy-rock anthem, the track went through various phases of tweaking before it took its final form. It wasn’t until Meredith Adelaide’s intimate lyrics re-envisioned the song as a more delicate, dream pop track.
“Crush” is the first offering from the forthcoming album, Evolutions. Recorded over the course of three years between 2022 and 2025, the album was produced both in Josh Kramon’s home studio and at Shark Tank Studios in Atwater Village. With Kramon as the primary producer, various musicians leant their chops to the upcoming album, featuring a mirage of unique vocalists, emotional string arrangements, and gorgeous piano melodies laid down by Lee Pardini and Jordan Summers.
For all the hopeless romantics deeply into someone right now, “Crush” is bound to be your new anthem. What makes the upcoming album Evolutions unique is that it is entirely a collaborative effort between various musicians from different generations. Its main contributors are Hunter Hawkins and Meredith Adelaide, whose vocals and lyrical excellence spruce up each track, creating a refreshing vibe throughout. At the helm of the project is the incredibly talented Josh Kramon– who’s primarily known for composing the soundtracks behind some of television's most notable screenwriting (Veronica Mars, High Potential, iZombie, Lethal Weapon). Just recently on May 14th, Josh proudly accepted his second BMI Award for Film and Television, due to his aforementioned contributions.
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Ohio’s Lost Friend promise to carry the banner for moody indie pop forward in 2025 with The Promises You Don’t Keep EP, which sees release on May 23 via Poptek Records. The EP is packed with guilt, shame, and sensitivity, delivered by the enigmatic and sultry voice and mind of Christopher Palassis (who is also a guitarist in XL427, and formerly of Second Best and L’Albatros).
L'Albatros recorded then blew up before properly releasing anything. Then came Second Best, which was a great name but a duplicated name. Now to Lost Friend, the songs and voice of scientist and guitarist Christopher Palassis has been the core of each band. The new EP, "The Promises You Don't Keep", began years before last year's "Echo Lane" EP. But when Palassis' sister and bandmate, Irene Queen, began to lose her battle with cancer, it was necessary to get her beautiful voice out into the world.
After "Echo Lane", the duo of Palassis and XL427's Andy Ingram regrouped to finish the six songs of rock-n-roll melancholy, yearning, bitterness, and Greek shame that make up "The Promises You Don't Keep". As with most things Poptek, there are some amazing hooks and melodies.
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This was written a long time ago but only just now been recorded. It’s a raw acoustic guitar and vocals track. It’s about having a crush when they don’t feel the same way back and realising that you need to move on. As for the EP, it’s a collection of very differing songs.
Sally Crosby is a British singer-songwriter who grew up in rural Mid Wales. A ukulele, piano and acoustic guitar-based singer-songwriter, her songs are honest and raw, impassioned and emotive. She started out in music at the tender age of five years old learning the piano, a few years later and she'd taken up the violin and the clarinet.
Going on to study music and creative writing at university she found herself spreading her time between playing the violin in orchestras and with folk-rock band The Rambling Pilgrims, touring across the North Wales coast and Anglesey. Fresh out of graduation saw a new lease of life for Sally, who turned to writing for herself, mostly for piano and for acoustic guitar, an instrument she learnt as a teenager.
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